The Thousand Deaths of Mr Small

by Gerald Kersh

  The lion analogy pleases him. He can imagine the old man as a kind of nebbisch among lions, roaring to wake the dead, shaking his mane, baring terrible teeth, bounding out purposefully—and coming home to the den with a mouse, while the lioness (more dangerous than the male) snarled and snapped and clawed at him, saying that if only she didn’t have a pain in her Inside, she would show him what was what, and demanding: “Do you call yourself a lion?”—while the cubs mewed, and were consequently knocked about and roared at until they became sullenly and secretively silent. It is an engaging thought … Srul the lion, making a thunderous noise like Grrbleddyargh! goes out again with an injured air, and is lucky enough to find the remains of an eland which a bolder lion has killed. His whiskers bristling, he roars so that the hyenas, the jackals, and the vultures slink and flap away. Then he swaggers back to the cave with a gnawed haunch and some guts; throws them down, says Gneeargh!—and purrs. A good provider. The cubs, of course, grow up, and want to leave the cave. Then the whole veldt resounds to the uproar. The old lion, worn out by catching mice and—when he has had a good day—rabbits, complains of feebleness. The old lioness has a Pain. Did she not drop them when they were pups? Was she not therefore entitled to Respect? So the little tyrannised lions stay close to the cave. They dream of mighty night attacks upon the great beasts—the ponderous eland, the mighty buffalo, the blesbok. But no, it is too brghleddy dangerous. The male cub goes out and kills a tiny klipspringer, and dutifully brings it home. His mother licks him all over! He is working his way up. Maybe one day, when he is a full-grown lion, he will bring home a springbok. Meanwhile she whines: four of her tits, the tits from which he sucked life, are sore … and somewhere near her tail she has a nagging pain. The old lion, replete, makes reminiscence, lying horribly about the time when he drove seven vultures away from the half-eaten carcass of a badger, and pulled down a six-month-old buck with a broken leg…. He thunders dramatically of bad old times when they lived on grasshoppers, and shows the scars of the wounds he got when he sat down on a porcupine, and repeats what he said to the porcupine, which was so terrified that it curled itself into a ball, and serve it bleddy-well right….

  No, no, no! It is funny, but it flies in the face of Nature. The fledgelings must leave the nest, the cubs must leave the den and the lair. The merest kitten must become an independent individual, fending for itself, as soon as it has got the taste of maternal milk out of its mouth and feels its claws. Charles Small has a respect for dogs and cats. With them it is: “I bore you because I wanted to; I fed and protected you because that was the least I could do; you are old enough to look after yourself—get the hell out, for I am no longer interested in you.” —and: “That suits me, Mama. I sucked your milk. That’s what it was for. What else would you have done with it? Had it framed? You don’t need me to relieve you of your milk (incidentally, I have come to prefer fish) and so, prrooey and tchah to you! Before departing for the ringing battlefields on the tiles, where tomcat fights tomcat for the warm embraces of the slim tabbies of the back alleys until the fur flies, and the garbage cans offer me their open mouths—I spit at you.”

  Now Priscilla, she was the cat that walked by herself. Like a cat, she was self-sufficient, and almost indestructible. When angry, she went straight for the eyes, just like a cat, in attack; but in defence she was quick and yielding—a galvanised mass of lithe muscle, bristling with sharp claws, became, suddenly, a cuddly ball of fur, gently purring, rubbing itself against you, licking your hands, not out of affection but because the cat needed salt. You could not keep Priscilla where she did not choose to stay: bolts and bars could not hold her then. Some mysterious instinct guided her, wherever she was, to where she wanted to go—the most comfortable place available. She was patient and impenetrable, sensuous and selfish, quick and lazy, hypersensitive yet insensitive. There was a fold of loose skin behind her head by which one might pick her up without hurting her, and she could in a split second turn the velvet of a little paw into something like a handful of fish-hooks. If she fell out of a third-storey window she would have landed on her feet. Man had been created to serve her. As a cat watches and catches a mouse, so was Priscilla with a man: your sleek cat has no desire to eat the mouse—she torments it and kills it for sport, letting it think it has escaped, hooking it back with one quick paw, destroying it at last out of boredom, leaving the limp body, stretching herself and going back to the saucer of fish—fish excellently prepared by Millie Small—salmon, soles, and plaice, and herrings (“lives of men”, as they used to call them) hauled in by the North Sea drifters, and highly palatable in the form of kippers.

  Priscilla loved food. She would eat anything, with anyone, anywhere. Charles Small remembers an occasion when, commissioned by his mother to buy a pound of butter beans, some dried peas, four pickled cucumbers, and two salt herrings from a grocer called Ashkenazi, young Priscilla so vamped and captivated the shopkeeper that he gave her the run of the place. She ate broad beans and butter beans raw, unwashed salt anchovies out of the barrel, a roll, a fruit pie, seven pickled onions, a piece of cheese-cake, a bar of chocolate, and Heaven knows what besides—enough to feed two full-grown men, and give them indigestion into the bargain. Then she went home, and, half an hour later, sat down to dinner, complaining that she was starving. Yet she remained slender—which worried Millie, as everything else worried Millie. Priscilla was outgrowing her strength, not eating enough, eating too much. A crony suggested that she might have Worms, so Priscilla was wormed; they fed her some kind of rending and blasting medicine disguised as a confection, which she ate with relish. There were no worms: only the usual thing. Priscilla’s lungs were examined, because she had a good complexion. The doctor said that he would give five years of his life for such a pair of lungs. There was not enough the matter with the girl; that was the trouble. It was a cause for worry. All children must be ill. When Charles had measles the uninfected Priscilla was put into bed with him so that she might catch measles at the same time, and two birds killed with one stone, this being one of the ideas Millie had picked up from her cronies; it being believed that a child may have measles only once. Charles came out in spots until he looked like a strawberry; Priscilla remained uninfected. It was the same with whooping-cough and chicken-pox and mumps. Charles caught them all: Priscilla caught nothing; only she devoured most of the dainties at the sickbed. Her failure to contract infantile diseases was a source of great anxiety to her parents.

  At last Millie Small said: “Thank goodness she doesn’t take after me. She’s unnatural.”

  At this, I. Small went up in the air. He swelled, he inflated like a balloon, and became red as a sunset. He shouted so loud that (it may have been a coincidence) all the electric lights went out in the house; and since the old man could not touch even an insulated wire without collapsing in a shower of bleddies in a blinding flash, the Company had to be called to put in two inches of fuse-wire. For the rest of the evening I. Small talked in a whisper, not audible beyond fifteen yards. “Who then does she take after? Bleddy-well knock it out of her!” he hissed

  Millie consulted her sisters. Nathan, the Photographer, shook his head. Even he could not talk the child into having measles. Priscilla was quietly obstinate, the cat! Her parents didn’t know what to do with her. There was, in fact, nothing to be done. Millie Small, moaning with a real or imaginary pain and rocking herself to and fro, might say: “You’ll be sorry when I’m gone!” Priscilla would reply in a tone of polite interest: “Will I? Why?”

  One day she referred to her mother as “she”. Priscilla meant no disrespect; she did not care one way or another. I. Small, that formidable figure of a man, plastered with cobblers’ wax, with a bit of bootlace hanging on his moustache as if he had been eating the stuff, rushed into the sitting-room and, whispering like a foghorn with laryngitis, asked: “Prissie, where is your Mummy?”

  “Oh, her? She’s asleep,” said Priscilla.

  Now in the society in which Millie Small moved, one never re
ferred to a respectable female as “she”; only as Mother or Auntie. “She” and “her” were disrespectful, even opprobrious. I. Small let off steam like a farting rhinoceros. The poor old man was worried, because Millie was really sick, and in pain. He cried “Her, her? She, she? Her own bleddy mother she calls She!” He picked up a pair of heavy fire-tongs of massive brass, and shouted: “Eat them words! Say ‘Mummy’ or over goes this shovel on the wrong side of your bleddy head!”

  “It isn’t a shovel, it’s tongs,” said Priscilla.

  Disconcerted, as usual, I. Small bellowed: “Then bleddy-well be quiet, let your Mummy rest!”—and put the tongs back in the fireplace, knocking over about fifty pounds’ weight of sounding brass. Then, putting a finger to his lips, he said: “Sha!” and, tiptoeing back to the workshop, fell downstairs with a crash and a howl that froze the blood in the veins of everyone who heard it—of everyone but Priscilla. She danced on the landing, shamelessly kicking empty air, showing her legs, and laughing at the top of her voice.

  The old man slunk away. He was afraid of that girl. Over everyone else, too, she exercised a sort of fascination. She was nonchalant, she was fearless, she did not give a good God damn whether you lived or died. When, after old Mr. Moss, her grandfather, breathed his last, her aged grandmother cried: “Take me with him, take me with!” Priscilla smiled.

  And she was beautiful. Even when she was very young, men liked to cuddle her. Even Nathan, the Photographer, dandled her on his knee and bought her boxes of chocolates costing half a crown. She was not so popular with women. Lily summed up the reason why:

  “She gets her own way.”

  Yes, thinks Charles Small, swallowing bitter green bile and feeling as if Gene Krupa is beating a masterly trap-drum roll on his tight-stretched diaphragm and shaking a maraca where his heart ought to be and clashing dazzling, shuddering brass cymbals behind his eyes while he thumps the big drum at the back of his head with an impatient, insistent foot—yes, Priscilla got her own way. How and why? Simply: she had a calm, dispassionate, amoral disregard for everyone but herself, and everything but her own convenience. A cat, a nihilistic cat; warm on the outside, cold on the inside … a prize cat, a dangerous cat. She would go, unerringly, wherever the carpet was softest and the cream was thickest. Stroke her, and she rewarded you with a purr. Aim a blow at her, and you slapped empty air. Corner her, and she ran up a wall to sit, impregnable and immaculate, delicately licking herself clean, sixty feet out of reach, serene and triumphant in the leaden gutter at the edge of the root You loved and cherished her because she was so beautiful. But to her, you (poor fool) were just like anyone else, a provider of the creature comforts—fish and milk—caviare and cream—fun and games. Threats could not move her, tears could not melt her. She was a law unto herself; exasperating in her imperturbability, appealing in her superficial warmth, maddening in her capacity to withdraw strategically and unemotionally into herself. You feared to lose her, because she was so pretty; but she knew that, whoever lost her, some other infatuated cat-lover would find her … and there would always be milk, fish, a warm fire, caresses, and a soft bed.

  No doubt about it: to Priscilla, the strange, tortuous gorges and caverns of this weary world were so many mouse-holes out of which, under the cover of the dark, timorous little scuttling grey creatures emerged for her amusement, if not her nourishment.

  Good luck to her, thinks Charles Small.

  *

  Swollen-headed as he was, on account of his promotion and subsequent rapid and lucky rise in the House of Schwartz, Charles Small could not get the Theatre out of his system. He joined the local Dramatic Society, of which he became a leading light. He always played the leads. He made a smash hit as Macbeth—brought the house down in laughter—because his beard fell off at a critical moment. As Othello (he squirms at the recollection) he threw himself into such a sweat over the death scene that his make-up ran, and he looked like a zebra; whereupon, flustered, he really smote himself in the midriff with the dummy dagger and had a fit of coughing. As Romeo he fell down the ladder and sprained his ankle, but courageously went up again, hopping—the show had to go on. The Dramatic Society put on King Lear, and Charles was in his glory, and everything would have been perfect if a rival amateur, who wanted to play Lear but was relegated to the part of Edgar, had not played a dirty trick on him. Edgar’s rôle is by no means to be sneezed at, said Charles, patronisingly. Still Edgar (his name was Moggs) wanted to be the King. “Sneezed at” gave him an idea. He went to one of those novelty shops where they sell stink-bombs, little farting concertinas to put under cushions, itching powder, etcetera, and bought a sixpenny packet of an irritant dust called Sneezo. A little of this powder, blown through a keyhole, was guaranteed to set the whole company sneezing and weeping—presumably to the amusement and instruction of all bystanders. So, just when Charles was getting his stride as the demented monarch on the blasted heath, Moggs let loose a shower of the stuff, and Charles Small convulsed his audience by shouting:

  “… Die for ATISHOO? She shall not RASH-HO …

  The ASHOO goes ATISHOO …

  And the little gilded fly does ISHAH in my ATISHOO

  Let AHOOSH-HO thrive, for I lack ATISHOO …”

  —and had to blow his nose into his white beard.

  He was so outraged on that occasion that he challenged Moggs to a fight; but when Moggs said: “All right, come on then,” he backed out. But he was always addicted to false beards, false man that he was. In The Tempest he insisted on the part of Prospero, mainly because the Magician had to wear a beard eighteen inches llong.

  Here, Priscilla came in. She had insinuated herself into the good graces of everyone in the Dramatic Society and, when she asked if she could have a go at Ariel, she was received with enthusiasm by everyone but Charles Small. He knew in his heart that she would steal the show. And so she did. When she sang the song that ends:

  “… Merrily, merrily shall I live now

  Under the blossom that hangs on the bough …”

  her voice was so silvery, and she had such an air of having put on the incorruptible, and drifted so like gossamer, that there was a burst of applause. And when Charles, stroking his beard in the region of his navel, said:

  “… Why, that’s my dainty Ariel! I shall miss thee;

  But yet thou shalt have freedom: so, so, so …”

  he sounded just like the old man. All he needed was the Jewish Chronicle, rolled-up, to swat this fairy. When he called her his “tricky spirit”, he made a noise like I. Small after a bad bargain: he nearly called her a bleddy tricky spirit. And when he said: “Now my charms are all o’erthrown,” he meant it. It was the only decent line he delivered in the play. Moggs played Caliban, walking on all fours and dressed in coconut matting. An aged man (he was not a day under thirty) played the drunken Stephano. He was, in fact, blind drunk, and was loudly applauded. His name was Gooch, and he was the stage-struck son of a notoriously wealthy ironmonger of the district. He had a car, a Renault; a pocketful of pound-notes, and a dissipated air: Priscilla took to him like a duck to water. And water he was. She paddled delicately upon the rippling surface of him, dived to the depths of him to spoon up his basic content, and left him disconsolate and disturbed with nothing but the memory of a waggling wet tail that sprinkled him with rejected drops of himself, making more ripples—ripples that did not soon leave the surface of him.

  Charles Small remembers that it was Priscilla, the little bitch (would to God he had had only a few feet of her guts!), who brought Ivy Narwall into his miserably frustrated life.

  Here, again, was where Solly Schwartz came in. Love and admiration aside, how deeply Charles Small wishes that the hunchback had never been born! For Solly Schwartz smashed Narwall, who came to London with his family. His wife could not face the sneers of Slupworth—the sneers of the people she despised, who had good cause to hate her. She went south with her head high, giving the porter sixpence for carrying six heavy trunks. The Narwalls travelled f
irst class—she took it out of the housekeeping later on—and established themselves in London. They were still well-to-do, but they were now mere retailers; they manufactured nothing. They held no tradesmen by the short hair. Public demand compelled them, indeed, to lay in considerable stocks of American canned products through Schwartz, who had the agency. Mrs. Narwall had nothing to do, no one to intrigue against, only Ivy to dominate, because the elder daughter, Sybil, got married.

  And there again, God have mercy on the old cow, there again was dust and ashes! Sybil took after her mother. She had a hard head and a hard face. She had been engaged to be married to a decent young fellow from the Midlands, an engineer with prospects. His name was Dunkerton. One day Dunkerton got his left leg caught in some machinery. They stopped the machine when the teeth of the cogs had chewed him up to the thigh, so that his leg had to come off, and he was a sad-looking creature with his skinny white face and his crutches. Sybil, beautiful and proud, told Dunkerton that she could never marry a cripple. (In Slupworth, old jokes were resuscitated; e.g., She heard he had a wooden leg and so she broke it off.) Then Sybil married a motor-car salesman who turned out to be a rotter, and led her the devil of a life. His name was Glass; he gave her a black eye; but she stayed by him, out of vanity rather than affection, until he took her to South Africa with their child, who, curiously enough, had one leg shorter than the other, or longer than the other.

  Old Narwall ran about from shop to shop, making everyone’s life a burden. Lumpitt was so delighted at Narwall’s discomfiture that he got drunk, and was sacked. He called on Solly Schwartz in a contrite mood and asked for a job, and was given a five-pound note and told to go and take a flying leap at himself and never to show his face again. Mrs. Narwall, having nothing else to do, took to drink. She decanted her gin into medicine bottles and took it out of a tablespoon. Old Narwall, although he sometimes raised his eyebrows at the grocery bills, had not the courage to protest. He took it out on Ivy. So did the old woman. Between them, they bewildered and bedevilled the girl until, one night, she swallowed five aspirin tablets, hoping that she might die. She had heard that aspirin was bad for the heart. It didn’t work—in fact she felt somewhat better afterwards.