The Thousand Deaths of Mr Small

by Gerald Kersh

  Here was a great, roaring city. And even in this tremendous jungle of stone the Narwalls could not escape from Slupworth, because here, always, was Lumpitt, secretly smiling at their discomfiture.

  Not long after it was necessary for Mrs. Narwall to demonstrate to Ivy certain facts and procedures that are generally communicable only between mothers and daughters, Mr. Narwall said: “No idle hands. To work. She must go to Business College. Yes, upon my word, Ivy must typewrite, she must short-hand, she must earn her bread!”

  “Yes, Father,” said Ivy. So she went to a Business College, that flimsy little fool, that weak drink of milk….

  Milk, milk, milk! You humpy bastard, you, you ruined my life! Why in the name of God did you have to do what you did with the Narwalls? Charles Small silently screams. Then, talking to a cloud in his mind, he says—still silently—Ivy, Ivy, where are you now, Ivy, my one and only love?

  Where is she now? God knows. God knows? Idiot, idiot—she is in the telephone directory. She is living in state near Regent’s Park, bloated with money, blonde with chemicals, slender with careful starvation, flashing with jewels, dressed by Schiaparelli and Hartnell, and—he hopes and believes—bitterly unhappy.

  There is more hate in Charles Small’s stomach than it can encompass. He is violently sick. The convulsion of his inside is such that he feels he is about to throw up something like a sack of potatoes. He retches, he strains, he bursts asunder … and out comes nothing but a mouthful of sour froth.

  God is just. Froth. You cannot give more than you have … froth, froth … more loss, more dead loss!

  CHAPTER XIX

  … CHARLES SMALL sits up, looking for something to destroy, and all he can see is the eiderdown overlay, which he kicks as hard as he can. It curls up and coldly slaps him in the face. Then, pushing and kicking it away, he looks down into the china vessel that has received the contents of himself—bubbles, frothy bubbles, acrimonious acidulous water—sour emptiness. He knows perfectly well that downstairs his wife—oh, how he hates the shape of her nose, and how he has through the years yearned to change that shape with a quick blow!—his wife, who loves him and whom he hates, is exercising dictatorial influence on the children. Daddy is ill. And so, looking at the tablespoonful of pale froth which was all he had to offer to the chamber-pot, swallowing bile, Charles Small thinks of his wife and children and knows that even in his sickness and his silence he, the unhappy victim of a most dreadful tyranny, has himself become a dirty little tyrant … that his children will hate and despise him, pity him, avoid him, and ultimately be only too glad to bury him.

  Swallowing the nausea that comes when he thinks of himself in relation to his wife and children—he who is all that he ever detested—he, the tyrant who abhors tyranny—Charles Small thinks with unutterable longing (that is to say, a longing he has never dared openly to utter) of Ivy Narwall, and he considers himself with such abhorrence that he wishes he had two faces so that he might spit in one.

  He sees himself as the abject victim of sloppy wet pity, a sneaking Judas who sold true love for thirty easy tears … furtive Peter who denied the Christ at the moan of a dove—not even at the stern crow of a cock.

  Oh, corruption upon corruption! Who is there in this world whom he does not hate? Above all, he hates Charles Small; and looking at himself, and spitting out some of the vile taste of himself—more froth, pities himself. Pitying himself now, he begins to be sorry for everyone. He does not exactly want to die. He wishes that he were young and of strong will.

  Given strong will he might have been happy, and by virtue of his strong will many other men and women might have found happiness. But he was weak, and out of his weakness has come interminable pain. Pain upon pain! Pain for himself, pain for his wife, and so for his children and his children’s children, unless God sends them enlightenment … pain for Ivy, and her husband and her children, and their children’s children … pain, pain! He sees himself now as the only begetter of woe and anguish, the poisoner of innumerable babes unborn. And he wishes that he was so constructed that he might kick himself in the arse for a fool.

  *

  Oh, how Charles Small reproaches himself, realising that by the pronunciation of one syllable—NO!—he might have altered the course of several lives in his generation and God knows how many beyond it. But he never learned how to say No, the little man—he never even learned how to say Yes. Here again come the misery and the hate. His mother and his father, whom he loves and detests, befuddled truth between them, blew hot and cold with the same breath. Liars and cowards, they brought into being this coward, this liar, this sour-gutted wretch on his well-deserved bed of pain, this frustrated fool, Charles Small, so angry with himself that he would destroy himself, if only he had the nerve, which he hasn’t.

  He thinks of Tristan and Isolde, of Heloise and Abelard, of Palamon and Arcite, who gave everything for love. They fell in love, by Heaven—they pursued their love—they fought with bare steel for love, and they died for love. Rightly so. What was love? Everything. And death? Nothing … Aie, aie, aie—for the days of the strong man with the strong sword! … And oh, woe, woe betide this despicable generation of grocers, canners, accountants, advertisers, and other liars that won greatness through lies and deception … bought themselves brides with lies and illusions … woe, woe, utter black woe to this generation of paid liars, of which Charles Small, to his sour shame, is one!

  *

  How much in love is he, now, with dreamful death, this nostalgic idiot, who touched happiness with the silly tips of his timid fingers, the dirty coward, and had not the strength to close his hand and pick it up! When he thinks how happy he might have been with Ivy Narwall, Charles Small curses himself as few men have cursed themselves before, from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet—he loathes himself with a bitter, terrible loathing. He sees himself blindfold and bound, strapped to a chair in a prison yard in a rainy dawn, while the firing squad falls into line to blast out of this world this wretch who has so abjectly betrayed himself, this utterly despicable recipient of 30 pieces of Nothing. And he wishes that he were of the firing squad … he derives a certain satisfaction from the fantasy of himself as he sees himself between the V of the back-sight and the bead of the fore-sight, taking aim at his own chicken-heart. No one in the world can be so repulsive to anyone in the world as Charles Small is to himself. Other men have given all for love, which, again, is everything; and he has given all for nothing, nothing. Now, since he lacks I. Small’s knack of talking himself into great expectations, having more objectivity in his little finger than that old fool had in his body, he knows himself for what he is—a sort of bifurcated turd, a dropping cursed with consciousness, afflicted with sentience so that he can smell himself, worse luck; dropped with strain and pain out of one bloody hole to go in shame and pain into another, into the dirt, where lies his grubby little destiny.

  Now, he has a wild longing for Ivy, and a mad impulse to rush out and find her. In fact, he puts one foot on the floor, but then, in despair, he remembers that downstairs, tremulously listening to his every movement, lurk his fat, fair, slushy, lachrymose poultice of a wife and, bribed into silence, his nasty little children … dictators, tyrants, jailers, enemies!

  So he gets back on to the bed. And here, God damn him, he will lie, and here, God blast him, he will die—soon, oh God, soon!—and from here he will be tucked up, hauled away, screwed into an unnecessarily expensive bit of joinery, and given to the worms. Declaiming inwardly under the reverberating dome of his echoing skull, Charles Small tells himself that a coward dies a thousand times before his death; a brave man never tastes of death but once. How many times, God help him, has he died? How many thousands of times, miserable coward, has he hurled his soul into the hole in the ground while his puny, cringing body withheld itself from the good, clean, white maggots!

  Take what you want, said God—and pay for it. Nonsense, utter nonsense! Charles Small is squirming in his little cell in hell because h
e did not take what he wanted, because he took what he did not want, because he took that which was thrust upon him … so that here he lies, remembering and remembering….

  So, you lose your reason. There is nothing like the critical contemplation of yourself to scatter your wits to the thirty-two points of the compass, God help your muddled little head! Thus, conscience doth make cowards of us all, says Charles Small to himself, glancing at his reflection in the pier-glass. He is revolted at the sight of himself—young yet old; handsome, but falsely so, for he appears haughty and proud, but is nothing of the sort. He scowls at himself and sees nothing but a ham actor’s presentation of himself—and he throws something. It is a large cut-glass bottle of rose-water, which hits his reflection full in the face and, shattering itself, smashes the mirror into jagged shards. Now, at least, he has got rid of the need to look at himself. The noise, of course, is considerable. Charles Small found a certain satisfaction in chucking the cut-glass bottle at the plate-glass mirror … but then, with a certain trepidation, he hears the muffled clumping of stupid feet on the carpeted stairs. That idiot is trying to walk quietly again. He locks the door, and, when he hears her say: “Are you all right?” answers: “Leave me alone!”

  Then, looking at the fragments of the broken mirror scattered on the floor, he sees all kinds of shifting, disconnected, fragmentary reflections of himself that he cannot put together to make one decent picture.

  The dirty light dances on the splintered looking-glass, on the shadows of the room come to grips with the shadows of the encroaching night, against which the fading light fights to the death until the dark, at last, gets its thumbs in his eyes, and just before all goes black, he sees himself in the fragments of the broken mirror, like pieces of a child’s puzzle … scattered, incomplete.

  Now the darkness is encompassing him, and Charles Small, in his trivial misery, assuages his poor little pain and tries to still his uneasy conscience by the memory of truly dreadful, black, unforgivable, unforgettable cowardice and treachery.

  If he lives a thousand years—and, knowing that he is hoping in vain, hoping that he will not live out the night—he will never forget the unspeakable business in the railway station.

  *

  … That was when he went crazy, and forgot that his mother had borne him. That was when he behaved like a wild beast, and like the dirtiest little coward in the world, who should have been dealt with as dung—shovelled away with other filth and tossed out to feed nice clean green grass to feed comparatively courageous sheep.

  He is thinking, naturally, of his passionate love for Ivy Narwall, and how he lost it in circumstances so revolting that if his best-beloved child, the girl, slipped in the street and fell in front of an approaching steam-roller, and Charles Small saw Ivy crossing the road, he would feel an impulse to run the other way and bucket up a side turning. And it would not surprise him in the least if he obeyed that impulse.

  *

  Oh, how he aches, how he aches, with his fever in every one of the 365 bones of his body! How he throbs through every reticulation of his innumerable nerves! What pain, what maddening pain, crawls around and around the endless convolutions of his brain—the brain which, if he were a man and had a gun should be like porridge on the floor, with a bit of bone and a splash of lead behind it…. Guns, so now he needs guns—as if he’d have the nerve to thumb back a hammer and press a trigger, the cheap little liar to himself! If you want to die, die, God damn you! says Charles Small to himself. But he has no instantaneous poison, no prussic acid, no quick, clean pistol—if he had the knowledge to use a pistol and had the guts to press a trigger, neither of which he has.

  All this comes out of the Great Romance, the Narwall-Small Idyll, the great mad passion of Charles for Ivy, the wild self-abnegatory passion of Ivy for Charles. He cannot for the moment be bothered with what led up to the unthinkable filthy end of the matter—he can only think around and about that filthy end, on the platform at Sealford, with the little train shuddering and gasping, and a porter wearing a red tie trundling a wobbling tropical trunk, while a goods train that seemed to have no end rolled and rolled, grumbling and muttering, away and away for ever on the other line. Would God never send that last flash of light, the last dazzling flash that, burning through the jammed shutter of his memory, might burn into decent darkness the clean-cut images of that moment?

  There lies the station in the dying daylight. There rolls the trolley, trundled by the disconsolate porter with the red tie. There rolls away the goods train, interminable, laden largely with coal, to make black smoke God knows where … and the wheels of the porter’s trolley go clickety-click while the porter’s heels, which are downtrodden, thump behind, and the Sealford train seems to be swelling itself with steam as a deep-sea diver fills himself with air before plunging into unknown darkness. Darkness indeed! Soon, night must fall. Oh, if only to God it had already fallen—if only he, Charles Small, could have scuttled into his mouse-hole under the cover of the dark at the approach of the Cat or if only he had been born a mouse, and Mrs. Narwall had really been a cat with a licence to kill him! … If only he and Ivy had been the pair of mice that they were—but alone—how gleefully, whisker-to-whisker and paw-in-paw, would they have darted into the darkness of the tunnel, nimbly skipping the metals, fearfully yet triumphantly flattening themselves against the sooty sleepers while the rolling-stock went past, too big to hurt them, so that they could pipe their little triumph over Juggernaut!

  *

  Here, thinks Charles Small, must be the most abject end to the most pitiful love story in the history of fear-haunted passion … miserable, mousey passion. Of the preliminaries he cannot bring himself at present to think: there is bile enough in his blood and self-digesting acid enough in his guts without that. And over it all, of course, hangs the sickening tang of sour maternal milk, so that he has half a mind to go downstairs and hit his wife in the face for the simple reason that she is the mother of two children.

  It is not difficult for him to shove the beginning and the middle of the love story out of his mind, but the end, the end—that hangs over.

  With the love story and its permutations and combinations he will torment himself later. At present, he is stuffed with self-reproach, and haunted by the memory of the railway platform at Sealford.

  He and Ivy Narwall fell in love. (They would have made a pretty pair.) They fell in love and, after all kinds of machinations, decided to run away together, to Sealford first of all, where they would get married. After that they intended to leave the country and go to South Africa, where they might make a new life, a brand-new life.

  Why Sealford? Because it was, and is, the unlikeliest place in Sussex to which an eloping couple might flee—a silted fishing port, somnolescent, populated by old men in blue jerseys who had nothing to talk about but their memories of dead fish. Who the devil would go to Sealford? Who in the world could follow them there?

  Who in the world but Mrs. Narwall, of whom he was afraid? The Cat had her cold green eyes on her mice and in her silent way she went after them.

  Charles remembers how—after the preliminaries he is determined to forget but which, he knows, will come back to gnaw at his heart a little later on—he and Ivy made their secret, mad tryst one dirty day in Victoria Station. He had been most manly and business-like about it. They were to travel light, and therefore fast. One suitcase apiece, no more, and travelling expenses in paper money in the right-hand inside breast-pocket. One, two, three—go! It was to be as simple as all that.

  Thus, Charles Small and Ivy Narwall met at Victoria under conditions of the utmost secrecy, to catch the train for Sealford. He went first, and found a first-class compartment in one of the carriages up in front near the engine. He remembers that he bought copies of Tit Bits and of the Strand Magazine, and some sweets—sugared almonds. Then, nervously smoking some fancy kind of aromatic cigarette, he looked out of the window. Time was ticking away. The engine was hissing. But where was Ivy? Oh God, where?
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  When all seemed lost, she came, carrying a Gladstone bag, and he leaped out and ran towards her, taking her bag from her, and whispering (as if that were necessary in the clamour of that station with its thunder of shunting, and its clash of buffers, and its screaming of whistles, and its leopard-like hoarse roaring of steam)—he whispered, timorous creature that he was: “Ivy, darling, hurry up, quick!

  They almost ran to the compartment he had chosen, and there exchanged tears and kisses in an exhilaration begotten by Love upon the old hag, Fear. Now Charles Small was overcome by a dread. It seemed to him that somehow Mrs. Narwall was after them. The tumultuous, steamy station smelled of cats, and when the signal lights turned green his heart rattled in his breast like a flipped marble, for there were the cat’s eyes…. And an incoming train from Brighton, braking to a standstill, gave out a caterwauling that scratched at his dry throat. Ivy and he exchanged a long look. He wished that the train would leave—but now the clock stood still. He gave Ivy the Tit Bits, the Strand Magazine and the sweets, and went out to try in his uncertain voice to call a porter to lock the carriage door so that he and Ivy might be alone. But even as he stepped out, an old gentleman in a billycock hat brushed past him and stepped in, and his agonised eyes, flickering up and down the platform, came to rest upon a hideously familiar figure at the barrier.

  It was Mrs. Narwall. There was no mistaking her: the head of Tiberius upon the body of Juno, all draped in black, indomitability in every line of her, implacable purpose in every stride. In her left hand she grasped a black bag; in her right, an umbrella with an ivory handle, ponderous enough to crack a skull. She paused to argue with the ticket-collector, while the whistle hooted. Oh God, let her miss the train, prayed Charles Small. But the green cat’s eyes grew brighter, and the smell of cats grew stronger, and just as the train jerked into motion Mrs. Narwall caught it. She leaped into a third-class compartment at the back, near the luggage van.