The Thousand Deaths of Mr Small

by Gerald Kersh

  Mrs. Narwall and her husband took to following each other up and down the house, spying, peeping, turning off the gas, counting match-sticks and sheets of toilet-paper. Mrs. Narwall was mad with pride—she dressed opulently always—and Narwall was mad with fear, fear of poverty. Both of them were eaten up with avarice, although, at that time, they must have been making more than three thousand pounds a year—which was a great deal of money in those days.

  One day old Narwall said to Ivy: “Ivy, there is no room in this world for idle hands. You must go to Harrison’s Business College, and learn short-hand and typewriting. You must put your nose to the grindstone.”

  “Yes, Father,” said Ivy.

  A week later I. Small suggested—poor fool—that Priscilla ought to go into the millinery business; he had a customer who was a milliner. Then it was Millie Small’s turn to speak, and by Christ she spoke! … Oh, so that’s what he was, was it? Milliners, already! He was only waiting for her to die, so that he could fiddle about with milliners. It was quite all right. As long as she knew. Milliners! But while she lived, the girl should be a florist. What were milliners? Nothing!

  In the end there was a conference with Nathan, the Photographer. He, putting fingertip to fingertip, said: “Millinery is millinery.”

  No one denied this.

  He continued: “What is millinery? Hats. There are milliners in Paris who make hats for eight, ten pounds a time. But is this Paris? No. You’ve got to be a person of … of reputation to make money out of millinery. You must have talent. You must have … khine—taste!”

  I. Small said: “Milliner, schmilliner—you see, Millie?”

  Nathan, the Photographer, continued: “Then again, florists …”

  “… Schmorists,” said I. Small.

  “Florists. Now the florists’ business is, is—precarious. How long does a flower last? I ask you. Ask yourself.”

  “Like a bleddy firework,” said I. Small.

  “Exactly,” said Nathan, the Photographer. “Flowers, they come up, they pass away. It takes push, it takes drive, above all it takes capital to be a florist. You buy tulips. Tulips, all right. So-much a dozen to-day. To-morrow? Where are your tulips? Or say roses. A bud to-day and gone to-morrow. So much money down the drain. Let her learn short-hand—that’ll do her more good.”

  I. Small nodded. Priscilla said: “I’m going to be a dancer.”

  “Bleddy-well short-hand,” said I. Small.

  So Priscilla went to Harrison’s Business College, saying over her shoulder: “All the same, I’m going to be a dancer.”

  As a pupil she did not amount to much, but at Harrison’s she met Ivy Narwall, who adored her, and whom she dragged to the Dramatic Society, where Charles Small fell in love with her.

  *

  Pondering these matters, Charles Small, whose empty stomach is trying to digest itself, undergoes such convulsions of disgust at the sour taste of himself that he vomits into the chamber-pot; but out of his empty self nothing emerges but pale green foam. He can’t even vomit properly—even in this he is frustrated, poor sod. It is not merely the memory of his disgraceful behaviour at the railway station, when he ran away and left Ivy at the mercy of her terrible mother. There are other things with which he must reproach himself; other cowardices, unforgivable weaknesses galore.

  He remembers, with agony, what Ivy told him when they met again many years later. Mrs. Narwall had dragged her home ignominiously through the smoky streets, so impatient to get her hands on the girl that she actually spent sixpence for tram-fare instead of walking to her suburb as she would normally have done. Having pushed Ivy into her bedroom and shut the door, she threw her face-down on the bed, pulled down her drawers (durable, respectable blue serge drawers with a detachable cotton lining) and beat her on the bottom with a heavy clothes brush until her arm was tired. And Mrs. Narwall had an arm like a stevedore, a good fourteen inches round the biceps. Having got her breath, she let loose a torrent of vituperation such as Ivy had never heard before. Probably Mrs. Narwall had picked it up from her grandfather, a drunken tackier, a murderous brute from whom she had inherited her mighty arms. Slut, streetwalker, fly-by-night, common prostitute, whore, and Jezebel were among the milder of her epithets. Then, her arm being rested, she went to work again with the clothes brush, until Ivy’s tender bottom was purple with bruises, and bleeding in two places. Even then she would not have desisted, only the girl’s shrieks grew so loud and vibrated with such pain that neighbours called a policeman. Ivy fainted. Mrs. Narwall locked her in her room, where she was incarcerated for a week. She was beaten every day, she told Charles, with the clothes brush, a hair brush, and a cane, and fed on bread and water, until even Mr. Narwall was moved to say: “For goodness’ sake, woman, enough!”

  Then Ivy tossed for a week in a high fever, so that a doctor had to be called in—another five shillings down the drain. He was a drunken old failure with a frayed collar, dirty cuffs and grubby hands, reeking of whisky and shag tobacco. He prescribed what he called a Cooling Medicine. Then—this was worst of all—Mrs. Narwall made him examine Ivy to ascertain that she was still a virgin. She was, of course: Charles Small, that milky little man, was far too timorous for that kind of thing. When Ivy was healed and, red-eyed with weeping, began to creep about the house again, her spirit—such as it was—forever broken, Mrs. Narwall said: “Let that be a lesson to you, you bad girl! Running off like a prostitute with a dirty Jew!” She could not forget Solly Schwartz, who had been the ruin of the Narwalls in Slupworth. “A nasty little Jew-boy. Thank your lucky stars, my girl, that you’ve a mother that knows what’s good for you. He jewed you all right—ran like a rabbit and left you standing. Now, my girl, you’ll do as you’re bid. You shall marry Jack Squire.”

  “Yes, Mother,” said Ivy.

  “And until you do, you don’t set foot out of this house if I have to kill you, you little prostitute, and thank your lucky stars for your mother who takes care of you, because if it wasn’t for her you’d be ruined by now. Say ‘Thank you, Mother.’”

  “Thank you, Mother,” said Ivy.

  “You’ll marry Jack Squire then.”

  Ivy fished up one last chewed-out fibre of courage, and, bursting into tears, said: “But please, please, Mother—I don’t like him!”

  “You will marry Jack Squire, my girl, if I have to kill you first. I’ll make a respectable woman of you, whether you like it or lump it. There!” She picked up a rolling-pin.

  Ivy cringed and said: “Yes, Mother, yes, I’ll marry Jack Squire; I’ll do anything you tell me to do, only please don’t beat me any more because I can’t bear it.”

  “Right!” said Mrs. Narwall, and went back to her task of rolling pastry. She was making a steak-and-kidney pie, with precious little steak in it.

  This Jack Squire was persona grata with the Narwall family. Ivy loathed him; he set her teeth on edge. She did not like the way he looked at her; she shuddered at the lustfulness of his eyes and the looseness of his constantly-licked lips that belied the unctuous piety of his conversation. He was well known and highly respected among the Congregationalists; dressed in black; was inclined, at forty, to a certain rotundity, a chubbiness which Ivy found revolting. He made an excellent living as agent for a great Lancashire cotton manufacturer and, having worked his way up from the position of junior salesman, had acquired a habit of jocularity—very proper jocularity—what he called “rational enjoyment”. He neither drank nor smoked. He contended that if God had intended him to smoke He would have put a chimney-pot on top of his head. This was his idea of a joke. There was that about him which made Ivy’s blood run cold. Whenever he came to the house he shook hands with her, and his hand-clasp lingered—it seemed to last for hours—it was like taking hold of a squid. He lost no opportunity of brushing against her or touching her, for he was, as the saying goes, “sweet” on her. Ivy told Charles, when they met again, that the very sight of him made her physically sick. But her detestation of Jack Squire, deep-rooted as it
was, was not so powerful as her deadly, ineradicable fear of her mother and her father. So, pliable little thing that she was, she married Jack Squire. She cried at the wedding, thinking (the irony of it!) of the lean, lively, passionate Romeo that was Charles Small; of the noble Othello that was Charles Small; of the powerful and sinister Macbeth that was Charles Small. On her wedding night she locked herself in a cupboard, but had to come out for lack of air. Jack Squire was waiting….

  The memory of all this is about as much as Charles can bear. His mind grows confused. Suddenly he finds himself laughing quietly and singing:

  “… A boy’s best friend is his mother.

  Then cherish her with care

  And smooth her silvery hair;

  When gone you will never get another,

  And wherever we may turn

  A lesson we will learn:

  A boy’s best friend is his mother …”

  At this he laughs outright. It is too damned funny for words. A boy’s worst enemy is his mother. First of all, impelled by an uncontrollable compulsion to couple with her ally, his father, she squeezes him out into the world, and, blast her, makes a virtue of necessity. It is possible to forgive a woman for having borne you, but not for having ruined you. Best Friend, my arse, thinks Charles Small; My worst enemies should have such Best Friends! The child is the victim of its begetters, trained with blows, bamboozled with threats, cajoled with promises, bitched and bewildered with lies, poisoned with pity. Oh, parents, parents, parents—how he hates them, fools that they are, saboteurs! That which they produce, they smash, the wreckers! … In this head, he thinks, were all the glories that were Greece, the grandeurs that were Rome, the nobility that was England, and all the capacity to marvel, to dream, and to act that drove fine men to charm magic casements opening upon the foam of perilous seas…. It is madness, nothing but madness, this craze of Man to make Man in his own image—this God-intoxication—this desire of hairy babies to coax, gouge, and pound flesh and blood into fanciful shapes as a child plays with plasticine! Mothers and Fathers be buggered! Oh, filthy, mother-dominated Earth! A Boy’s Best Friend is His Mother, indeed. Having had the boy dragged out of her belly, with loud outcries and a hell of a to-do, she devotes the rest of her life to a campaign calculated to stuff him back into stifling darkness … Mothers! What is a mother? Millie Small. And what is a father? The old man. And what is he, Charles Small? Their droppings, involuntarily egested like dung.

  Now, again, Charles Small questions himself. Who is he, silly little man, to make recrimination? Solly Schwartz, born twisted, crooked, and deformed, found his own strength and made his own life. Schwartz’s parents were sick at the sight of him, and got rid of him as soon as possible, and that, perhaps, was the making of Solly Schwartz … Or was it? Charles Small cannot make up his mind. He is angry and confused. Was every repulsively deformed hunchback ironfoot, kicked out into the street or left on the steps of a Foundling Hospital, a Solly Schwartz? No. Why not?

  This brings him back to contemplation of the immortal soul, the unconquerable soul, the soul a man carries with him from God—the Pure, the Intangible, the Incorruptible, that makes a man a man, and takes him out of that stinking, blood-and-watery darkness into the daylight and up to the stars.

  Yes, just as there are bodies and bodies, so there are souls and souls. An object of derision, cruelly abused, out on the streets, utterly alone in the world, Solly Schwartz might have been selling matches, whining on a street corner. Instead, he was a master of men and of money … Priscilla, who had been born in the same bed as Charles, was as calm and unconquerable as her brother was tremulous and abject. She was brass. He was mud. How come? They had both come out of the same uncertain loins and the same frightened womb…. It occurs to Charles Small, as it has often occurred to him at one time or another, that he alone is to blame. If he had stood up to these hysterical bullies … if, if, if! But it wasn’t in him to do so, coward slave that he was…. Coward slave—there he was, the actor manqué, on Shakespeare again.

  If he were half a man he should have punched the old cow Narwall right on the nose, gone off with Ivy, chucked up his job with Solly Schwartz, and followed his destiny as he saw it—“dree’d his weird”—and to hell with everyone.

  But it was to hell with Charles Small—to the Last Circle of Ice, where the traitors go—for he betrayed both Ivy and himself.

  “Damme!” he shouts, and, half-falling out of bed, puts his foot in the piss-pot, where it jams, to his further discomfiture; so that for a quarter of a minute, shaking himself loose, he hobbles, clanking, just like the hunchback. Only Solly Schwartz’s hampered foot is firmly planted on ringing steel, while his slithers in his own vomit.

  *

  Solly Schwartz kept his eye on Charles, because that idea of his involving the race for the million sixpences had brought in vast revenues. It became apparent that it pays to advertise. Huge accounts came in. Solly Schwartz proved that go-getters to whom minutes were precious and a spruce appearance essential could get a quicker, cleaner shave by using a messy preparation of lanolin which he called Suave. It was pronounced “Swave”, and the slogan cried “SHAVE WITH SUAVE!” He could prove that a perfectly ordinary kind of liquid glue, attractively packed, somehow stuck faster than any other glue, and sent out plaster figurines of Hercules straining every muscle to tear the leg off a chair and saying: “IT MUST HAVE STUCK WITH STICKO!” … that kind of thing. He was especially strong on cigarettes that could not make you cough, coffee that could not keep you awake, and patent medicines in general. He made a small fortune advertising a Universal Remedy which he called Panacea. It was supposed to be good for everything from catarrh to cancer. He paid a disbarred doctor to write an impressive book about it, which he gave away at cost price. Gullible hypochondriacs all over the world kept this book next to their Bibles at their bed-heads—it was translated into six languages. Panacea was popular because of its almost intolerably vile taste. A medicine that tasted as bad as all that had to do you good, or what was the purpose of a bad taste? Unsolicited testimonials came in by the thousands. Bed-ridden women who had lain on their backs for fifteen years wrote saying that after three doses they got up and did everything but dance the Irish jig. Bona fide doctors confirmed their patients’ accounts of miraculous cures. An old man with cancer of the stomach took only one bottle, arose, and ate a beefsteak; it was not mentioned in the advertisement that he dropped dead half an hour later, screaming like a stuck pig. Panacea was a sensation.

  Then it crashed overnight. Solly Schwartz had decided to take full front pages in twelve consecutive issues of a famous daily paper, at fifteen hundred pounds a page. When the contract arrived, he saw that the Daily Special had put their rates up to two thousand pounds a page and so he had a row with the advertising manager of the newspaper. This unscrupulous fellow went away in a huff. Two days later, on Page Two, the Daily Special printed a sensational exposure of Panacea. A public analyst had examined it carefully and certified that the half-crown bottle contained nothing but a pennyworth of paraldehyde diluted with tap-water, and a trace of blue aniline dye. The stuff was, in fact, likely to prove harmful if taken regularly, and certainly could do no good. It was coloured water made to taste awful, quite simply. Invalids all over the world relapsed and perished miserably. A few people like Millie Small insisted that it did them the world of good, and kept on buying it. But in general, there was a howl of execration from London to the Antipodes and from Norway to the Black Sea, and the manufacturer of Panacea went into liquidation, and there was no more advertising account for Solly Schwartz.

  Then Schwartz became mad with rage. The Press, the Press, the dirty, stinking, corrupt, mercenary Press! He would show the Press what was what. No more advertising in the Daily Special, he swore. But this was a decision which might have had grave consequences, for the Daily Special was at that time the most widely circulated daily newspaper in the country, and the big advertisers liked to see their products advertised in its pages. So Soll
y Schwartz made one of his Napoleonic resolutions, a formidably dramatic one.

  The Daily Special was the biggest of all the English daily papers, and its sister paper, the Sunday Specials, was also powerful. The smallest, dullest newspaper in England was the London Inquirer—a most unpalatable, gloomy sheet, that circulated among clergymen, maiden ladies, church-goers, and retired officers of the Indian Army, and was stumbling and mumbling on its way to Carey Street. Solly Schwartz went to the proprietor and bought the London Inquirer lock, stock and barrel, for £200,000. He went about it with his old frenetic energy. He hurt the feelings of the seventy-year-old editor and the rest of the staff by giving them the sack at a minute’s notice, and then turned his predatory nose towards Fleet Street. There, satanically persuasive, he got hold of the keenest reporters, the most sensational feature writers, the best cartoonists, the most outrageously vituperative leader writers; and seduced them. He offered them double wages, three-year contracts, and their names in large type on the by-lines. He swore he would make them great. He offered them bonuses, unheard-of rewards. He chose for editor a young man named Tom Paradise, features editor of the Daily Special—a daring little fellow, restless, impatient, itching with ambition as with prickly-heat, desirous of new and startling things, and straining at the leash.

  At vast expense he had made a new type-face, something to catch the eye. He poured all that he had into the Inquirer, and more, for his credit was good all over England. He plastered the hoardings with glaring posters, ominously worded: