The Thousand Deaths of Mr Small

by Gerald Kersh

  But he was there to make sales, and they bought.

  He would say, furthermore: “Here, look: here’s a showcard for you! Did you ever in your life see a card like this? Look at it—it makes your mouth water. Well?”

  The buyers bought. Then Solly Schwartz bought advertising space in the newspapers. Mr. Narwall protested, but Schwartz bought front-page space in the Daily Special. He took the whole front page, three months running, and Abel Abelard drew remarkable pictures. Money poured out; but money poured in. After two years with Narwall Solly Schwartz found that he had a hundred thousand pounds in the bank.

  He was about to buy a house in the country, a walled house not far from Woking, quite near the river—a place to which anyone might invite guests—when Mr. Fourose came from America with bad news.

  Now Mr. Fourose was a lonely, sinister character who procured information and sold it for ready money to whom it might concern. He was, in effect, a spy, a commercial spy. There are such people. While some men insinuate themselves into war departments and sell their finds to Governments, others insinuate and bribe and corrupt themselves into factories; their information is often more valuable.

  Mr. Fourose was a man of medium height and indefinable colour. He had the air of a craftsman; but he had also a certain watchfulness such as one seldom sees in the eyes of a man who is accustomed to watching his tools rather than his men. He said to Solly Schwartz: “Mr. Schwartz, I have some information. Sound information. It will cost you a thousand pounds.

  “Do me a favour, don’t make me laugh—I’ve got a cracked lip. What do you mean, a thousand pounds?”

  “A thousand pounds,” said Mr. Fourose. “In advance.”

  “What for?”

  “A few words. A thousand pounds. You know me, Mr. Schwartz. I don’t swindle you. I’m an honest man. Put down a thousand pounds and I give you my word of honour that I’ll put down something worth it. If you don’t, I’ll go elsewhere.”

  Solly Schwartz wrote a cheque for five hundred pounds and, putting it across the desk, said: “Don’t touch it, it’s wet. It’s five hundred pounds. I’ll give you the other five hundred pounds when you talk. What is it?”

  Fourose, waving the cheque in the air, waited till it was dry before he put it in his pocket, when he said: “Mr. Schwartz, there’s a firm called Paisley in Philadelphia. They’ve got a new can. It makes yours look silly.”

  “Show me.”

  “Look. See. Yours is too complicated. This works like … like that! Now do you see what I mean?”

  Solly Schwartz wrote another cheque. “There’s your thousand pounds,” he said, “and no argument.”

  The men shook hands. Fourose hurried to the bank. Solly Schwartz said to his secretary: “Get me a ticket, quick, for Slupworth. Make me a telephone call to Mr. Narwall, tell him I want to see him quick! Above all, hurry; hurry up! I’m in a hurry!”

  So, Mr. Fourose went his way and Solly Schwartz went his own, which was to Slupworth; where he changed, that day, the course of several lives.

  He arrived early in the evening when Narwall was eating his tea—home-made bread and butter, ham and tongue—what they called a “meat tea”. Five bob a day and a good meat tea … and we’re getting forrader and forrader. Mrs. Narwall asked him to sit down, and served him lavishly, but Schwartz ate angrily, almost in silence until, his appetite satisfied, he pushed away his plate and said: “Mr. Narwall, now look!”

  “Go to bed,” said Mrs. Narwall to the children, and they left the room.

  “Now look here,” said Solly Schwartz, “I’ve had just about quite enough. I can’t work like this. Every bloody damn thing I do you question——”

  “No profanity, please!” said Mr. Narwall.

  “Bugger your bloody profanity! Are you listening or are you not? Every damn bloody thing you query! You make me look like a tuppeny-ha’penny bloody bleeding bastard, do you hear?”

  “Please, Mr. Schwartz, not in front of my wife.”

  Solly Schwartz told Mr. Narwall what he could go and do to his wife, expressing a doubt concerning his capacity to do it. Narwall’s face became lead-coloured with rage. Mrs. Narwall, however, smiled a little secretive smile; whereupon Mr. Narwall asked her to leave the room, and she told him not to be silly.

  “What have you to complain of, Mr. Schwartz?” she asked.

  “I’ve got plenty of bloody God-damn blasted things to complain of!” shouted Schwartz.

  “Let us discuss this without profanity,” said Mr. Narwall. Solly Schwartz, telling him exactly what he could do with his profanity, slipped into unprintable obscenity, at which the manufacturer stopped his ears. Mrs. Narwall remained calm, and said: “But what is in your mind, Mr. Schwartz?”

  “I can’t work like this!” said Solly Schwartz. “What the devil of a kind of way, God strike me dead, is this, to run a bloody business? Eh? Every bloody bleeding blasted penny I lay out, so you damn well query it. What sort of system is this, by Christ? What louse-bound stinking bloody rotten system, eh? … Oh, ‘ladies present’ you say. You can——your ladies! Or can you? I’ve had enough of you. Enough is enough. I can’t work with you and I won’t. Is that clear?”

  Mr. Narwall said: “Wait a minute, Mr. Schwartz, please—do not be too impetuous.”

  Solly Schwartz said: “Impetuous. Impetuous be bloody well buggered for a lark!”

  He saw Mrs. Narwall kick her husband under the table as she said, in a voice which she thought was deceptively sweet:

  “But, dear! If Mr. Schwartz doesn’t want to stay with us——”

  “—You’re bloody well right I don’t!” cried Solly Schwartz. “I should work with stingy cows like you two!”

  “Are you trying to insult me?” asked Mrs. Narwall.

  Solly Schwartz replied: “Yes. Cows. Pigs, I should have said.”

  Rising, Mr. Narwall said: “Mr. Schwartz, get out!”

  Solly Schwartz uttered a word which it is not customary to print, and added: “Let’s break it up. How can I work with a stinkpot like you? You creeping bastard, you crawler! Break it, for God’s sake, break it!”

  “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain,” said Mr. Narwall.

  “Never mind the name of the Lord your God in vain!” said Solly Schwartz.

  Then Mrs. Narwall put her hand upon his pigeon-chest and pushed and he fell down.

  He limped down the stairs, grinning like a little devil. As soon as the front door had closed behind him, Mr. Narwall said:

  “My dear, are you crazy? Are you out of your mind? Schwartz is worth a million pounds.”

  “Don’t be a fool. What is he? A salesman, a man handling advertising—a man. You employ him, you pay him, you give him a share of everything you earn. What for? A Can. Is that clear? It is clear, is it? How much have you made this last couple of years? A hundred and fifty thousand? Well then … consider it. You made him lose his temper, don’t you see? He has got the Can—don’t you remember? Buy him out, buy him out, buy him out!”

  So it happened that on the following day Solly Schwartz, who afterwards in Mr. Narwall’s mind was to be symbolic of the Evil One, sold his interest in the Narwall Cannery, and in the patent can, for £100,000. They parted, reconciled, on good terms. Mrs. Narwall, the schemer, smiled at him like a cat. Mr. Narwall said: “It has been a profitable association, Mr. Schwartz, and I am sorry that we have had to part company. God bless you.”

  Solly Schwartz said, with the air of a man who has done the wrong thing: “Look here … It could be I was a bit hasty….”

  He appeared uneasy. Mrs. Narwall said, in her firm voice, with her soft smile: “All signed and sealed now, Mr. Schwartz. Good-bye!”

  Solly Schwartz then went away, looking disconsolate—while the Narwalls exchanged sly glances—and caught the express to London, where he cashed the cheque.

  Mrs. Narwall, meanwhile, said to her husband: “Come on now—now is the time to go into production. Buy the cannery, buy the plant—buy fruit, ever
ything, and take with both hands!”

  Her husband replied: “I think, my dear, that you are right.”

  “I know I’m right. Buy in, quick!”

  So they did. They bought in the cannery, and everything else their money could buy. Within fourteen days the Philadelphia firm attacked the English market with a lower-priced product packed in a better can, wrapped in a better label, and the firm of Narwall crashed. It went down in sections, as one might say—inevitably—like a mill-chimney. And there were the Narwalls with two or three grocery shops in the south of England, and nothing more. They had always lived frugally, but their morale was eaten away. They had lost their accumulated capital. Their hearts were broken—at least Mr. Narwall’s heart was broken. He was a common tradesman again. Mr. Lumpitt got drunk out of sheer joy at the crash of this bloody tyrant. Solly Schwartz, having £200,000 in the bank, executed a gleeful hop-skip-and-jump, and went to Swaine and Adeney and bought a boxwood walking-stick that weighed about three pounds, curiously carved to represent clasped hands. The knob was a crude turquoise.

  So it came to pass that Narwall moved southward and that, in making this move necessary, Solly Schwartz made rack and ruin of Charles Small’s life.

  Try and tell him, go and try and explain! He did what he wanted to do. He spoiled my life. He spoiled my life! Good luck to him! cries Charles Small on his bed of pain—Good luck to him for spoiling my life, because, by God, he had a great soul!

  *

  Yes, he made and he broke people, that strange little man whom everyone considered as broken and improperly made. Shortly after the Narwall affair he went to Abel Abelard. Abelard was wrapped in a stained dressing-gown. The girl was wearing a camisole, as they used to call them. Solly Schwartz said to him: “Listen. The business is over and done with. But I’m going to tell you something. How much are you getting a week now?”

  “Eh? How much? Nine pounds, I think.”

  “You had a job. You haven’t got one. How do you like that?” asked Solly Schwartz.

  Abel Abelard said: “Oh well, I don’t know, I don’t see that it makes such a great difference—do you?”

  Nodding approvingly, Solly Schwartz said: “Quite right. Good attitude.” Then he looked at this tousled young man in his filthy, paint-bespattered studio, pinching the bottom of his slatternly mistress, and a kind of wonder came upon him. Solly Schwartz, the man of iron, was awe-struck by this man of straw. He looked at them again. They were caressing each other affectionately; he with his left hand on her knee, while he applied strokes of white to his great panel of the Burning of the Library at Alexandria.

  How, wondered Solly Schwartz—he who had always lived and always would live in hidden dumps and furnished places … in any case, in furnished places—how was it possible to live like this? It may be, at that moment, that he was bitten by a nostalgia, an envy. He had intended to say to Abel Abelard: Look here. It’s all over. I can’t use you any more. Anyway, I can’t pay you nine pounds a week any more because the business is, so to speak, liquidated, in a manner of speaking. If you want to stay on for a retainer of a fiver, all right.

  Instead, he said: “Look here, Abelard. I’m going to tell you something. How much are you getting now? About nine quid? Well, I’m going to make it ten. We are going into a new business. Advertising. I’m going to start you off at ten pounds a week, do you hear? And if, by Christ, you’ve got sense enough to find your arse to wipe it—excuse me, Madam—you’ll make thirty, forty, fifty! Do you hear?”

  The girl said: “If he can find his arse to wipe it.”

  Solly Schwartz blushed; he did not like to hear such words from the lips of ladies.

  Abel Abelard said: “I don’t quite see what you mean, Mr. Schwartz. You have closed up your business, and raised my wages. Excuse me, but this doesn’t make sense to me.”

  Solly Schwartz snapped: “Schmerel! You bloody fool—excuse me, Madam—what do you think I close a business for? Fun? I close one business, schlemihl. I close one business to open another business. What else for? Now, comes a new business. Stop messing about with your dirty paints and listen a minute, will you? Listen …” said Solly Schwartz, lowering his voice and balancing his great stick on his knees.

  “Glass of beer, Mr. Schwartz?”

  “No. Be quiet with your beer. Listen. You know what you’ve been doing with me the last year, two years? Making labels, posters?”

  “I remember,” said Abel Abelard.

  “Keep on,” said Solly Schwartz. “Keep on, Abel, as long as … able.” It occurred to him that he had made a joke. Abelard smiled politely; the girl screamed with laughter. Solly Schwartz went on dreamily: “Listen. You know me. I can eat you and your father’s father. Do you want to change grips with me? … No, no, no—I don’t want to damage your hand. Listen to me. I’m making a new business. Do you know what? I’ll tell you. Advertising. Do you know what that means?”

  Abelard said: “Well, not exactly, but I should say that it was trying to induce people to buy things they didn’t really want.”

  “Right!” said Solly Schwartz.

  Teasing out his beard, and patting the girl’s bottom, Abel Abelard said: “You know, it might be fun.”

  Solly Schwartz looked at him with fierce, astonished eyes, and said: “Fun? Fun? What do you mean, fun? What the bloody hell do you think I’m running—Comic Cuts? Ally Sloper’s Half-Holiday? Weary Willie and Tired Tim? Fun? Listen, you bloody fool. Have your fun here. With me, no fun. With me, no fun. Abelard, work! You’re an artist. Artist, fartist—have bloody fun. Have fun with your women, but with me you have no fun. You work like a dog and you get paid like a lord. Out of my office have fun. In my office, if you do your job, you get the money to have fun. Is it clear? Is it agreed?”

  His vehemence frightened them as much as his offer of ten pounds a week had impressed them. The girl looked at Abelard, nudged him, and nodded; and Abelard said: “Very well.”

  When he was gone, Abel Abelard and his girl sighed, because the air felt lighter. Then, impelled by a sudden impulse, they made love together, before Solly Schwartz, resolutely limping, beating the paving stones with his heavy stick, disdaining cabs, reached the corner of the street. Giving the girl one of the ten-pound notes, Abelard said: “For God’s sake, slut, go and buy a dress and some underclothes!”

  “Well,” she said, taking the money, “I could do with a dress, old thing, but underclothes … if you don’t mind, I’m not used to them, and you know it. What’s the matter with you? Just because you’re going into business you want me to wear underclothes? All your fine-feathered friends aren’t going to look up my skirts, I hope?”

  “To the devil with your drawers, my darling! Amuse yourself, have fun.”

  “I wonder why he was so angry just now when you talked about Fun.”

  Abel Abelard said: “No idea, my dear, but … well, it might be that the little fellow is not having fun, or that his idea of fun isn’t mine. We’re rich. Wash your filthy face, and comb your hair, and I’ll take you, by God, to eat lunch at the Café Royal!”

  *

  So there came into being the Schwartz Advertising Agency, and Solly Schwartz was happy, because now he dealt in what he believed to be the most impermanent commodities—words and visual impressions—print, paper, illusion. It is remarkable that, considering the success of John Bunny and Bill Hart, he did not turn his keen mind to the cinema, to the selling of images, perpetually replaceable shadows. Considering the fabulous perspicuity of the man, one wonders why he did not hook his strong hands into Marconi, and make trade in air and sound. No, considering the matter, Schwartz chose the most appropriate trade; here to-day, gone to-morrow, persuading the world to buy goods which other men had produced … employing artists to draw memorable pictures of lamps; hiring writers to put out prose descriptive of tables and chairs … lying cynically, and with a fistful of money persuading poor would-be-honest craftsmen to lie, and lie, and lie about toothpaste, cigarettes, soap, five-shilling watches,
artificial silk stockings—all that was immediately consumable and, having been consumed, essentially replaceable.

  Thus, Solly Schwartz, the cripple, a mighty man to help his friends, scratching his itch for power, became the father and begetter of liars and of lies.

  *

  So, through the years—not many years, only a few—Schwartz became a name, and Narwall became a mockery. The Narwalls came south partly because most of their shops were in the south of England, but mainly on account of the pride they had inspired in themselves, the hate they had inspired in everyone else, and the shame that came with the cracking of their pride. They dreaded the silent laughter and the unseen interchange of winks and nudges; they could not face the false smiles they knew so well—the smirking sympathy—the bland eyebrows which they had in their time so often opposed to ruined tradesmen in Slupworth.

  It was not that they were ruined; only they had lost face and, knowing how much they were hated, hurried away out of earshot of the laughter, for they were Pride nicely fallen … especially Mrs. Narwall, the bitch, the beauty, the creature of ice. She would have stayed in Slupworth and braved it out if it had been murder. But Narwall, the mean weakling, the under-dog, found himself for the first time in his life in the right, and he made the most of it. He made it clear that she, his wife, was responsible for his crash. Confronted with what was, in fact, a bitter truth, she nodded—not bowed, but nodded—her proud head. So Mr. and Mrs. Narwall with their family, together with the faithful old servant, went to London.

  To hear the lounging proletariat of Slupworth talk as they crossed and uncrossed their languid legs, leaning against the railings of the Library, you might have thought that the so-bitterly-hated Narwalls were tramping the roads of England with a barrel-organ, a monkey and a tin cup.

  In point of fact, they owned four moderately prosperous shops in sound positions around Westminster. Occupying the upper part of a house over one of their shops—the very one which Mr. Lumpitt managed—they lived as well as, if not better than, they had lived before, although London was not Slupworth where they had been big fishes in a little pool.