The Thousand Deaths of Mr Small

by Gerald Kersh

  And he screamed with laughter at the grotesqueries of T. E. Dunville. A trick cyclist got up to look like a tramp, who rode on only one wheel, sent him into convulsions. So did an intoxicated-looking lady who sang a song called “I’m One of the Ruins That Cromwell Knocked About a Bit”. Charles Small may be getting things a little mixed up, but he thinks he remembers seeing the mighty Cinquevalli supporting on his broad back a platform upon which a little man sat at a piano, while he juggled three cannon-balls…. Or was it the great Rastelli, who balanced a screw of tissue-paper on his nose, simultaneously juggling a match-box and a match so that at a certain moment the match caught fire, when he set light to the tissue-paper and, when it burned down to the tip of his nose, miraculously balanced the ash? It was an enchanted evening. The memory of it is somewhat blurred, so that he cannot quite remember whether it was on that occasion or another that he heard Leo Dryden singing “Don’t Go Down the Mine, Daddy,” or Harry Champion going off like a machine-gun with “Any Old Iron” … or was it Maidie Scott singing “The Naughty Little Bird on Mary’s Hat”? … or J. Laurier, coming out with “I Do Like a Nice Mince Pie”? …

  Whatever it was, he was enchanted. Then Nathan, the Photographer, proceeded to disenchant him. (Nathan, by the way, had been having the time of his life.) But after the show was over he became solemn, ominous. “These are successful theatrical people,” he said. “And how many of them are there? Ten? Twenty? Thirty? And how many unsuccessful ones do you think there are? I’ll tell you: Hundreds of Thousands. How many T. E. Dunvilles are there, making a hundred pounds a week? And how many comedians who are lucky enough to earn a hundred pounds a year? How many Harry Champions are there? How many Albert Chevaliers? How many names do you see printed in big letters on top of the bill, in the West End, worth a hundred pounds a week? And how many do you see in little tiny letters, lucky to be engaged at all in the West End for a dirty fiver, and only for a week at that? Work out the chances, Charley, work it out. The Stage is like—painting pictures, like book writing—you have to be one in a million. One in a million gets his name in big letters. The other nine hundred ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine don’t know where their next bit of bread is coming from. And then again, Charley, these big pots—how long do they last? You saw them. They’re middle-aged men. For twenty, thirty years they lived like dogs in dog kennels to get where they are now. And now they’ve got where they are, they’re old. Three, four, five, six more years, and they’ll be in the gutter again. And they,” said Nathan, tapping Charles’s shoulder, “they are the cream of the Profession, geniuses! See where they end—look!”

  It happened that at this moment a horribly dilapidated old man shuffled on broken boots up to a queue that was lining up for the next show and, filling his lungs, wheezed: “Ladies and Gentlemen—impersonations of characters out of Charles Dickens!”

  “There, do you see?” said Nathan, the Photographer.

  The old busker was a deplorable spectacle. He was stamped indelibly with the marks of the doss-house, where you could get a lousy bed for fourpence a night, the ante-rooms of the Abyss. What remained of his overcoat was fastened with safety-pins, one of which had come loose, so that it was obvious that this was his only garment, apart from his trousers and his ruined boots. He wore a cracked old billycock hat which he must have begged at somebody’s back door because it was so much too large for him that it pressed down his ears. He looked like a starved, sickly spaniel that has made its way out of a pond into which some compassionate man had thrown it to put it out of its misery. He had been clean-shaven, once upon a time.

  Having attracted the attention of the queue, he said: “Ladies and Gentlemen, Uriah Heep!”—and proceeded to wring his hands, and leer, and cringe, and whine: “… My ’umble abode, Master Copperfield …” until at last he went up and down the line holding out his hat. He collected about sixpence-halfpenny. Charles Small gave him twopence. Nathan gave him nothing, but, leading the boy away, went on talking.

  “You see, Charley? The people you saw to-night, they are one in a million. They are geniuses. Even so, they’ve got to have influence, luck, something special. The average, the ordinary ones, they end up like that—and him an educated man; you could tell by the way he talked…. Now, Charley, there’s nothing in it. A good steady job, a good steady job. If you want acting, there’s plenty of Dramatic Societies. Then, with a good steady job, and a home of your own, and a pound in your pocket, you can act to your heart’s content. Do you follow me?”

  Loathing himself, Charles Small remembers that he followed Nathan, the Photographer. That poor old tramp with his well-trained husky voice, shivering in the cold of the night and cringing for pennies, impressed him profoundly.

  He gulped, and nodded at Nathan, the Photographer: oh yes, he followed him all right.

  *

  Lord, Lord, Lord—how sour these memories can get! Charles Small remembers one summer when, Millie Small being pregnant, and hysterical, he was taken with Priscilla into the country. There was, as usual, quite a to-do about it. Millie Small knew only one place out of London and that was Brighton. There was a conference. The family was divided against itself. Nathan, the Photographer, suggested Scotland, the farther away the better, he thought, no doubt. But Pearl’s husband knew a man who had a friend who owned a farm in Essex, near a place named St. Osyth, where Millie and the two children could stay for next to nothing, and where the air was healthy.

  Charles Small remembers it as one of the greyest places on God’s green earth. It was surrounded by grey mud-flats and muddy grey water, over which grey gulls flapped perpetually, squawking. Sometimes a gaggle of grey wild geese passed in V-formation, disconsolately honking. The farm-house was grey, the farmer was grey—and incidentally his name was Gray. But old Gray was not a bad fellow, and Charles took to him. He knew little, but what he knew he knew that he knew. I. Small, who visited his family every week-end, felt superior to old Gray, with his outlandish accent and unkempt moustache; he patronised him, and gave him a fivepenny cigar, which the farmer crammed into an old pipe. The old man and Millie did not like the smell of Gray’s farm—the scents of wood-smoke and horse dung were distasteful to them. Good enough for goyim—they preferred petrol, and the cones of incense you burned in a bedroom after the invalid has used a bedpan!

  I. Small, prompted by his wife, made the children look in the opposite direction while a cow defecated, calling it a “bleddy, uncivilised beast”—presumably because it did not wipe itself and pull a chain. He and Millie observed the mating of a boar and a sow—thank God the children were not there to have ideas put into their bleddy heads—and the old man snorted: “Khazza! Pig! You see, Millie? A khazza isn’t called a khazza for nothing.” Also—trust I. Small—he achieved what few men have achieved in a ridiculous way: he was bitten by a lamb. He was captivated by the little bounding bundle of wool, and tried to play with it. Farmer Gray was weaning it from its mother. He dragged the lamb up to a pan of milk, dipped his finger into the milk, and poked it into the lamb’s mouth, the idea being that the lamb should learn to lap, and hence to eat rather than suck. I. Small had a go. And the lamb bit his finger. The farmer was vastly amused. He said: “Never ye mind, Mister, you come and look at this”—and led him to a dark, odoriferous place with a half-door.

  I. Small, already unnerved by the thought of lamb-poisoning, could see nothing but pitch darkness. “So what is?” he asked.

  “Come in,” said the farmer.

  He drew I. Small after him, and prodded the darkness with his stick, whereupon with an angry bellow there appeared a huge black bull with blood-shot eyes, petulantly chewing his cud and showing two neat rows of white teeth. I. Small tripped over his feet and fell backwards into the muck, bellowing: “Take him away, bleddy beggary!”—so that the bull was frightened. He also fought a losing battle with a gander. He thought, no doubt, that geese were merely birds, and offered the great white gander a piece of chewing-gum. The bird rushed at him, hissing l
ike a snake, and pecked him in the knee. I. Small called it a murderer and ran away, but not before the angry gander had got in a shrewd blow on the right cheek of his bottom. After that he was suspicious of domestic animals. When Priscilla dropped into his lap a newly-hatched chick, he fell into the fire and singed his hair.

  Mrs. Small, although she was afraid of cows, sheep, pigs, seagulls, live chickens, and practically everything else, had the courage to confront an egg, from a respectable distance. She watched the incubator. The children watched too. One day a brown egg gave out a tapping noise; the shell broke outwards, and a ridiculously bedraggled little head appeared, followed by a bundle of stuck-down yellow fluff. She was inspired to say: “See? That’s how they’re born. No more questions.”

  Priscilla said nothing. If that was how she was born, why was Mama not thrown away like an empty shell? But she nosed her way about the farm; saw the bull serving the cows, and was soon in a position to tell her mother the Facts of Life.

  Brooding over his cowardice, the old man screwed up his courage for his third week-end and tried to caress a fowl. Trust the old man again—he picked on a fighting cock, which flew at him and wounded him in the hand. Only a man with no heart could restrain his tears at the discomfiture of this poor silly fellow chased by a chicken, plaintively protesting that he meant it no harm—and only a man with no soul could help laughing until he cried.

  Recollecting the incident, Charles Small decides that on the whole he had better cry.

  But this is beside the point. He remembers, most vividly, the Muck Heap.

  He and Priscilla used to follow Farmer Gray around, while Mrs. Small was having morning sickness. (No matter what she had eaten, she seemed invariably to bring up tomatoes.) It seemed to Charles Small that this old farmer was morbidly preoccupied with stuff that, by rights, should have been flushed away in lavatories or carted away by dustmen—dung, garbage, and the urine of cattle. I. Small muttered something about Farmer Gray being a “bleddy uncivilised beast”, and forbade the children, on pain of chastisement with the Essex Advertiser, ever to go near the stalls, the pens, and the stables. Charles obeyed, at first. Priscilla did not, and her brother followed her. Fascinated, they watched the farmer and a labourer shovelling up barrow-loads of straw, sodden with cow-shit—dealing with the stuff quite reverently. The sanitation of the farm-house was primitive. Every day a labourer carried from a little out-house a brimming, malodorous bucket. One day Priscilla asked the farmer what was the idea, the purpose in all that. Sucking at a foul pipe and smiling under his ungentlemanly moustache, the old farmer said: “Come here, then,” and beckoned them towards a place where one of the labourers was making a kind of layer-cake or mille feuilles of polluted straw, the excrement of pigs, men, horses, women, and cows, that stank to high Heaven. Rotten vegetables went into it, and spoiled fruits. It was something like the Borbonessa Tart, immortalised by Rabelais. Old Gray and the labourer covered it carefully with straw. “She isn’t pretty, is she? She don’t smell sweet, eh?” said Gray. “But now come here.”

  He took them to another heap, the straw crust of which was discoloured, dried up. While the children watched, aghast, he thrust his hand into the heart of this heap and withdrew it full of something light and flaky, which he held under their noses, saying: “Smell it.”

  Its odour was pleasant, reminiscent of ripe walnuts; it had a wonderfully clean and healthy smell.

  “This,” said Farmer Gray, jerking a thumb in the direction of the new heap, “this is that, d’ye see? After three years, don’t ye see? This is compost. Ye give it time, my chicks, and it’ll get sweet. Ye give it time, and it’ll give ye time. Don’t you see? What ye take out of the ground ye’ve got to put back, one way or another. This good stuff lightens my soil, and grows the crops. The roses don’t stink, do they now? So now ye know: that’s the way to get rich—puttin’ back into the ground, one way or another, what ye take out of it. To grass we will return—it says so in the Bible. Flesh is grass, grass is flesh … look at they Jersey cows, for instance. There’s flesh and blood and cream! All out of grass, m’dears, all out of grass; and back to grass they’ll go in God’s good time.”

  As the children went away Priscilla heard him mutter—they were not supposed to hear—“Shit is money, money is shit, flesh is grass.” Then he bellowed: “You there, Harlow, spread that straw even!”

  Remembering this, and he remembers it most vividly, Charles Small wishes to God that he had a compost heap in place of a brain—something that Time might purify and make sweet and life-giving, instead of this stinking, sour, stagnant untransmuted mass of human, animal, mineral, and vegetable detritus that is himself. It occurs to him that a man, properly considered in the light of a higher wisdom, patiently cherished, might in time achieve sweetness and the dignity of … dung.

  *

  Oh well, thinks Charles Small, such was not my destiny. No clean compost, he; but something foul, a filthy sodden chaos of blurred words—a kind of old-fashioned water-closet, out of order, stuffed with used newsprint. No, no, he has not the dignity of dung—the self-purifying power of that which makes the roses sweet and the wheat grow tall. He is by way of being a constipated cow, doomed to carry in his congested belly the weight of his own muck.

  He despises himself. He let them defeat him. I gave in to them, he says to himself—as an embittered mouse, frozen with terror, might talk to a trap. Wee, timorous, cow’ring beastie! He could not, he dared not gnaw his way through the dark tunnels of the night to the light—he was afraid of the dark. He wanted the little bit of cheese dangling, tantalising, on a little hook; and he nibbled at it, and—snap! There he was, caught in a little cage. And it was a fair cop, and there was no one but himself whom Charles Small could honestly blame.

  He remembers, belching acidulous laughter, his last miserable protest to the old man, when, after an appalling scene in the course of which I. Small smashed a fly with a rolled-up copy of a circular advertising the Jewish Encyclopædia, Millie Small, who had internal trouble, begged him to go into business. “For my sake, Charley—for MY sake!”

  She really had been far from well, since the miscarriage of the child she had been carrying in Essex. (The child was still-born at seven months. The old man, confident that it would be a boy, had already decided to name it after his grandfather, Nehemiah. Millie insisted that Nehemiah was all right for Cracow. Neil was the name. Naturally, it came out a girl, and stone dead at that. They couldn’t do anything right.)

  After that, Millie Small became a chronic invalid, and in her misery she became irresistibly pitiable. She could not eat, she could not sleep, she could not walk, sit, bend, stretch, stand, or lie down without suffering; and her occasional outcries were of such a nature that the old man, tearing his moustache, galloped out of earshot, bleddying to frighten the very cockroaches. Priscilla was unimpressed. Charles, the softie, was twisted like a wet dishrag. For MY sake! Who, having read his Shakespeare, could resist? But Charles Small shed a few tears after his mother had gone to bed, and the old man tried to comfort him, clumsily caressing him with an uncertain hand, which Charles nudged away while he toyed with his untasted supper.

  “Charley, boychik, what is it? What do you want I should do? What do you want? What do you want from my life?”

  Charles said, in the manner of Brutus: “I want to be free, free!”

  “What do you mean, free? From what do you want to be free?’

  “From you, from everything,” said Charles.

  The old man—now he was a nice old man—tried to push a strawberry into his son’s mouth, and spoke gently, saying: “So, boychik, so you want to be free from me, yes?”

  Charles Small nodded, spitting out the strawberry. I. Small sighed and said: “Me, also, I wanted to be free. Free, schmee—sis a lot of eyewash, freedom! No such thing. From mine father, God rest his soul, I wanted I should be free. From Cracow I wanted I should be free. And from … well, free … From what free? Free for what? Why should you want you shoul
d be free from your Mama what you owe your life to? Why should you want to be free from your Dad what works his fingers to the bone for you? Believe me, Khatzkele, I mean Charley, boychik, when I was young and foolish I wanted to be Free. I couldn’t rest. I wanted to go away. I knew where from I wanted to go away. But where to? Still I don’t know. Still I’m a schusterkopf. I might have stayed at home.” The old man was unaccountably moved by what he was saying. “… Only here is schooling, education. You can shake hands miv the King of England … miv Society. I know from what I wanted to be free. For what I know—for you, boychik! … And your mother, bless her, is not a well woman….”

  I. Small shed tears. Charles Small said heavily: “All right, Dad, I’ll do what you say.”

  Making a noise like a gannet between his nose and a pocket handkerchief, I. Small snuffled: “Good boy. Come with me to Mr. Solly Schwartz. He’ll make a man of you.” He lighted a twopenny cheroot with a flourish, adding in an awful whisper: “I made him what he is to-day.”

  Charles Small, curiously purged of anger, went to bed with a secreted orange. But before he had time to peel it he was asleep, and before twenty-four hours had passed he was in the hands of the terrible Solly Schwartz.

  *

  I. Small, although he knew that Solly Schwartz had made his way up in the world, had an idea that he had simply to rap a door with the head of his stick, and Solly would come out, hobbling and clanking with his iron foot. He dressed himself in his best. By this time he had given up cut-away coats, and, reluctantly obedient to the general trend, wore a jacket-suit of blue-grey; but no persuasion could induce him to put off his two-inch single collar with little wings and the necktie with a knot half as big as his fist, riveted with an imitation pearl tiepin not much smaller than a grape. Say what you like about the old man, he knew how to turn himself out like a gentleman. Even at the bench, he frequently wore starched cuffs, and his shoes were immaculate. For the occasion he laid in a couple of Havana cigars at ninepence apiece. A few days before, an impecunious Swiss had come into the shop, offering for sale a contraption about the size of a very large match-box. He pressed a knob, and, with a loud click a lid sprang back and a flame leaped up. I. Small, captivated, bought it for ten shillings. All you had to do was, fill it with benzene, and there you were—in forty years it would save its cost in matches. He put this, also, in a waistcoat pocket. Charles, too, was dressed to kill in a black coat, dark trousers, and a stiff collar. The old man made him wear a bowler hat—a Boiler, he called it—and a red rose in his buttonhole. I. Small, for this occasion, wore kid gloves and cuffs of the first magnitude, and carried the stick Solly Schwartz had given him in the old days. They went to Oxford Circus by bus, but rode the last half-mile in a taxi. The old man had an idea that if he turned up in a taxi it would make a favourable impression.