The Thousand Deaths of Mr Small

by Gerald Kersh

  They stopped at a big building in the front of which hung a great painted sign that said: SCHW ARTZ, LTD. A doorman held open the outer door of the building while the old man, bothered by his gloves and embarrassed by his walking-stick, overtipped the taxi driver. “Yes, sir?” asked the doorman.

  “I want to see Mr. Schwartz, sir,” said I. Small.

  “Your name, please, sir?”

  “I. Small, sir.”

  “One moment, please,” said the doorman.

  “Much obliged to you, sir,” said I. Small, trying to pick his nose with a gloved finger, complacently leaning on his stick, confident in his belief that he was doing the right thing

  The doorman led him to an ante-room, where a tall lady who might have been moulded of gold and ice asked: “Have you an appointment with Mr. Schwartz, Mr. Small?”

  “Tell ’im sis Small, sir.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Small, Mr. Schwartz is engaged; he is in a conference.”

  Conference!—that shook I. Small. So now it was conferences, already! He felt the expectant eyes of his son upon him, and became desperate. He started to say “Bleddy——” but managed to turn it into a brouhaha of coughing. “Say Mr. Small is here,” he said.

  “Have you an appointment, Mr. Small? I’m afraid——”

  “Bled——”

  Then there was a stomping, a clanking, and a thudding of the ferrule of a heavy stick, and Solly Schwartz came out in a hurry, dressed for the street in an overcoat by Simpson and London in Grosvenor Street, shoes by Lobb of St. James’s, a hat by Lock, a shirt by Sulka, a tie by Budd; with such an air of importance and of elegance that I. Small broke wind so forcibly that he stirred the tails of his coat.

  “Shloimele!” cried I. Small.

  The hunchback looked up angrily, and then said: “What’s that? … What, is it you, trottel? How are you? Good to see you again.”

  “Like a weiss!” said I. Small, after they had shaken hands, “always a grip like a weiss. Solly, a minute, please?”

  Solly Schwartz said to the lady: “Miss Persimmon, tell Halfacre to wait five minutes.” The beautiful lady of ice and gold became slush and tinsel. “Come upstairs, trottel. Not much time, but nice to see you again.”

  It was like something out of a dream. They walked behind Solly Schwartz through an office that ticked and clicked and vibrated with twenty typewriters (the noise grew louder when Solly Schwartz appeared) and were led into a room furnished in morocco leather and luxuriously carpeted. I. Small fumbled for his ninepenny cigars. They came out in small pieces—he had broken them in his emotional convulsion—and fell to the floor in flakes. Schwartz, meanwhile, had opened an elaborate box, which he pushed across the desk. It was full of great fat Corona-Coronas. “Help yourself,” he said, “have a cigar, old trottel—grab a handful, put ’em in your pocket. God almighty, you’re getting fat as a pig!’

  “It’s the cooking, God bless her,” said I. Small. “You don’t change, Shloimele … Oi! How times change, no? … Typewriters —offices—my little Solly!” I. Small was stirred; he had to wipe his eyes.

  Solly Schwartz was not unchanged. His face, now, was no longer mobile. It was fixed between the jutting chin and the great hooked nose; the wide mouth was sucked inwards until it was nothing but a dry slit in his sallow face, while his eyes, which had been restlessly busy as black ants, were steady now. His hands, however, were never still; they fidgeted with an ivory paper-knife, ran like spiders to lift and let fall the silver lids of a pair of crystal ink-pots, riffled a Whitaker’s Almanack, and measured a ruler inch by inch.

  “Well, what d’you want?” he asked.

  I. Small saw him reaching for a pen and a cheque-book. “No, no, for God’s sake!” he said, “for God’s sake, Solly, what do you take me for, what for?”

  He was confused; he did not know what to say. But he managed to stammer: “Solly … the boy … Charley, this one … a little something to do, a job … steady with prospects, could be?”

  Solly Schwartz looked at Charles Small and shrugged his misshapen shoulders. Charles Small will never forget how, looking from the old man to him, the hunchback’s expression changed from warm pity to cold contempt. He put down the cheque-book and the pen and said: “All right, I’ll give him a job. He’s a nebbisch—I remember when I took him to the toy shop—I’d rather have his sister. But all right, Srul, I’ll give him a job…. Come in to-morrow at nine o’clock in the morning—but not in those trousers. Don’t come dressed up like a pox-doctor’s clerk. Come dressed like a human being. Time enough to get yourself up like a poppy-show. Anything you want, Srul?”

  “Solly, I’m more than grateful,” said the old man, using his handkerchief.

  “Small,” said Solly Schwartz to Charles, “nine o’clock tomorrow morning. No flowers in your buttonhole.” Then he scooped up the contents of the cigar box in one of his disproportionately large hands, stuffed twenty Corona-Coronas into I. Small’s pocket, and genially beat him towards the door, slapping him on the back as one slaps a cherished old dog.

  In the street the old man lit a cigar. He could not bring himself to throw away a wide red-and-gold band; let people see that he was smoking a Corona-Corona! He was happy. “What did I told you, Charley?” he said. “D’you see? You’re a made man. You heard what Mr. Schwartz said? Nine to-morrow morning, and no flowers in no bleddy buttonholes. Now, what about a smoked selmon sandwich and a cup coffee?” He remembered one of Lizzard’s expressions when, at noon, the old cobbler went out for bread-and-cheese and beer. It was always on the first stroke of twelve—Lizzard would leave a nail half driven, because he knew his Rights: “An army marches on its bleddy stomach.”

  They went to Appenrodt’s and ate ham and potato salad, and drank lager beer. “Smoked selmon,” said the old man significantly. The bill paid, they hurried home to break the good news. Poor I. Small knew that the boy was unhappy. On the way out he put an arm about Charles’s shoulders and said: “Sis Life, Charley. You got to make your living. Cheer up. Make a living. Sis Life.”

  Charles Small looked like Hamlet in the graveyard scene, but he remembers that he was not as unhappy as he looked, because there was something about Solly Schwartz that excited him.

  *

  Solly Schwartz’s nervous energy wore everyone else’s nerves to shreds and tatters. He was the Schwartz Advertising Company; he was—the irony of ironies!—Schwartz for Beauty. Now, bursting with money and bloated with credit, universally acclaimed and deferred to as a sound young prodigy, he was throwing himself into the fulfilment of an old desire. There was a little itch in him which he was determined to scratch out, if he tore himself to pieces in the process—the memory of Monopol, who, by this time, had shops all over London, selling high-class gentlemen’s clothing at 45 shillings a suit, and not a bad suit of clothes at that. He was out to compete with Monopol, to put him out of business, to smash Monopol into jelly, and melt him, and pour him into the gutter. At the same time, he wanted—that the Prophecy might be fulfilled—to do something for old Cohen, and for the other old man (he had already forgotten his name) who had been kind to him in the sweat-shop; but they were certainly dead. Old Monopol was alive, and Solly Schwartz was resolved to break him and have the last laugh.

  He went about the business feverishly. He was in and out of earnest conferences with dry-cleaned American salesmen of ingenious machinery, and with estate agents from the thirty-two points of the compass, and with Abel Abelard, who was now earning thirty pounds a Week, and, his mighty canvas abandoned, his cheerful mistress dismissed, and his belly somewhat round, was respectably married, and head of Schwartz’s Art Department. Wool salesmen came with samples from Yorkshire. Urgently-pushing cotton salesmen from Lancashire barged in, rubbing elbows with designers of Gents’ Styles, and builders and decorators waving estimates concerning fascias, counters, windows, fitting-rooms, show-cases. The office seethed, bubbled, and sputtered like a pan of fish—a pan of small-fry in deep boiling oil. Staff came and went. Sol
ly Schwartz, that devourer of little fried fishes, scooped out the cooked ones, chucked in the fresh ones, and scoured the markets for more. He was going to crush Monopol. The time had come. The time having come, Schwartz would not waste one second of it.

  In spite of himself, Charles Small was fascinated. He was, in the Schwartz organisation, a sort of office-boy—he rushed from department to department, carrying papers. One day—it was at Easter—eating a hot-cross bun and drinking a cup of tea in an Express Dairy near the office during a fifteen-minute interval at four o’clock, it occurred to him that in the past week he must have made the journey from the Counting House to the Head Office several hundred times. That was why his legs ached. Nevertheless, he Was exhilarated, because these mad oscillations seemed to be waggling to a certain point. He felt like a needle in an electrometer.

  Then, dreamily drinking the dregs of his tea, he had his first great idea. It was an inspiration. He swallowed, with difficulty, his last mouthful of bun, and ran back to the office. Ibbertson, who was now Office Manager—stern and sedate—gave him some papers, saying: “Small, take these to Mr. Schwartz’s office, at the double.”

  Charles Small desired nothing better. He walked—oh, his beating heart!—right into Solly Schwartz’s presence, put the papers on the great desk, and waited, scratching his ear.

  “What d’you want?” asked Solly Schwartz.

  Charles Small dug into his tiny reservoir of courage, and managed to say: “I have an idea, sir.”

  “An idea? What, you?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Spit it out, and look sharp about it.”

  Mysteriously confident, bold with inspiration, Charles Small said: “I was thinking, Mr. Schwartz——”

  “Think quick or get about your business.”

  “Yes sir. I was thinking: I run up and down from the Counting House to here a hundred times a day.”

  “That’s what you’re paid for. Well?”

  “You see, Mr. Schwartz, it gave me a sort of idea.”

  “Out with it.”

  “It’s about these new shops you’re starting,” said Charles Small. Now, the idea was carrying him away; his face glowed. “An advertising idea, Mr. Schwartz.”

  “Oh, yes?”

  Charles Small continued: “You see, sir, I bring papers from the Counting House to you ever so many times a day, and it makes my legs ache, you see? Well, say instead of a paper it was a pound-note. Just say, Mr. Schwartz, that I had a thousand pound-notes to bring you, one at a time, in such-and-such a time … a sort of race, you see, and the winner gets the thousand pounds. You see? Isn’t that a good idea for advertising?”

  Solly Schwartz blinked, smiled, thought a while, and said: “Not bad. Get to work now. I’ll talk to you later.”

  Before the office closed, the hunchback sent for Charles Small and said: “Charley, that was not a bad idea of yours, about the race for the pound notes. But I’ve got a better one. All the same, you gave me the idea, and I give you credit for it. Here’s twenty-five pounds for you. To-morrow morning report to Mr. Tillip on the Advertising side. Start there again, at two-pounds-ten a week. All right, go. Give my regards to the trottel, your old man. Think of a few more ideas like that, and you won’t go hungry.”

  Charles Small strutted, intolerably jubilant. When he brought home the twenty-five pounds and the good news, the old man cried: “My boychik!” and kissed him on the cheek. Before he had time to rub the kiss away, his mother burst into tears and kissed him on the other cheek. One of her tears ran into his mouth. He had licked away many of his own tears in his time, but this tear, on top of his emotion, tasted so horrible that he felt sick at the stomach and almost vomited. He went to the lavatory and spat several times into the pan, and gargled with a disinfectant solution. Even then his stomach was delicate, and easily upset by maternal tears. It was bad enough to look at this eye-water, let alone drink the filthy stuff.

  But while, on the following day, Millie Small rushed from member to member of the family bragging of her son’s promotion, Solly Schwartz went intently to work. Charles’s was a good idea but, as he had said, Solly Schwartz had an idea worth two of that—an idea at once audacious, revolutionary, and dead safe. The Main Branch of his clothing enterprise was about to open in the Strand—a large shop, vividly decorated with a thirty-foot plate-glass window. Solly Schwartz put all of Abelard’s available staff on to the job of drafting an advertisement that was destined to shake the country, and, when it was drafted to his satisfaction, he spent thousands of pounds buying space in the newspapers. His idea was intrepid, cruel, and irresistible. It was as follows:

  Before the opening of the Strand Branch, the great window was to be a transparent screen between the public and an extraordinary spectacle—perhaps the most breath-taking contest the world had ever seen, free of charge. At one end of the shop window he placed an immense trough, specially constructed, into which bank-messengers poured 1,000,000 silver sixpences—£25,000. At the other end he put a similar trough, empty. The terms, or rules, of the competition he devised were simple. If any man, of any age, transferred the contents of the full trough to the empty one, seven paces away, carrying one sixpence at a time, in seven days—that man should carry away the £25,000 unconditionally, and be rich for life.

  The country went mad. It was like an outbreak of war. From north, south, east and west, athletes entrained for London. They all believed that they could do it. Statisticians, mathematicians, physicists, and doctors wrote to the Press proving, unquestionably, that it was absurd, impossible. A man would have to walk 112,000,000 paces in a week. This could not be. It was crazy. But the prospect of £25,000 to be got simply by picking the money up and carrying it drove everyone crazy. Besides, as Solly Schwartz shrewdly guessed, very few people appreciated the magnitude of a million: it was an abstract term; it meant nothing.

  Thus he launched the publicity drive that started the remarkable upheavals in the Strand. Crowds blocked the road in front of Schwartz’s window, while a famous athlete named Walker, the Walker, of Yorkshire—a long, wiry man whose legs were so long that they seemed to be a little tight under the arms—paced back and forth, seemingly inexhaustible. Hundreds of pounds changed hands in bets. He lasted four days, nine hours, fifteen minutes, and forty-five seconds. Then he dropped like a poleaxed ox, still clutching a thin sixpence, which was gently taken from between his fingers and put back into the trough. It began to occur to some of the punters that a million was the devil of a lot. The newspapers were full of the affair, so that Schwartz Suits got at least £50,000 worth of publicity—free of charge, photographs included. A lithe matron, who had twice won the pram-race from London to Brighton, was the next to attempt the impossible. She lasted five days, one hour, and one minute, ending in raging hysterics. One More Week To Go! Mounted police were called out to disperse the mob. Solly Schwartz was in luck; the next contestant, a professional footballer, fell dead on the second day, and the newspapers brimmed over with the subject. Clergymen protested. The statisticians reiterated their protests. Old ladies tried to picket the Schwartz shop, carrying banners. Nobody won the £25,000, because no human being could. Then Solly Schwartz made a great show of presenting two hundred pounds in sixpences to each of the disconsolate contestants—the footballer’s widow drew the money and was gypped out of it in due course by a Cockney gigolo named Hix.

  Then the shop opened. The crowds were reluctant to clear off. They loitered about for weeks, watching the window, expecting something to happen. Rumour had it that the wax dummies were not dummies at all, but walkers asleep in their tracks. Idiots came from beyond the Border, just to look. They came to look, and they stayed to buy. Schwartz did a roaring trade in the Strand Branch. And then he went after Monopol with a vengeance. Money was no object. Wherever there was a Monopol shop, a Schwartz shop opened a few doors away, cutting prices, giving away free shirts, socks, shoes, hats, and loud ties for bonuses; selling at cost price and even under cost. Monopol’s tried to fight,
but the hunchback was on their neck like a wildcat. Before eighteen months passed, Monopol’s went into voluntary liquidation. When the news of this broke, Charles Small hoped to see Solly Schwartz dancing with glee. Instead, he saw him biting his lips and growling over the ruin of an ebony cigar-box which he had smashed with his fists in an outburst of anger.

  Old Monopol had dropped dead two days before. Schwartz had merely ruined his widow.

  ‘The little I ask of life!” cried Solly Schwartz.

  CHAPTER XXVI

  Honour thy father and thy mother, says the Commandment, that thy days may be long in the land, etcetera, etcetera … “Tripe! Bilge! Crap! Eyewash!” Charles Small cries aloud, remembering things. Honour thy father and thy mother, forsooth! All right, honour them. But have they no obligation to conduct themselves so that they are honourably worthy of honour? Does a little respectable, shame-faced, half-disgusted fumbling in the marriage bed, and the forced feedings and washings and dressings and beatings of the protesting wretches they have brought into the world—does this entitle them to Honour? Oh, that he had been born a beast in the wilds, a lion cub, protected until he was weaned, and then free to hunt and to mate for himself!