by Gerald Kersh
Not that all this is worth a blown-out egg; only somehow it is comforting; it smells like philosophy, of which, God knows, Charles Small has desperate need … anything, anything, so long as he can get his false teeth into it!
… Millie Small died of cancer of the womb and much as everyone pitied her in her agony it was impossible not to be bored by her. Alive or dying, she had a nuisance-value. (Why are Charles Small’s eyes wet?) Dying did her good. It made her mind her manners. She stopped saying: “So that’s what he is,” and “So now we know what you are,” and feebly stroked Charles’s hand. She remembered a thousand delinquencies which everyone else had forgotten because they were not worth remembering. Her face was almost exactly the colour of her hair, which was grey as ashes; her eyes were wide with agony, and her hands were shrivelled so that they looked like the claws of a fowl. She made a sort of Confession: “… I didn’t tell the truth about your ribbon at the time of the Jubilee … I was jealous, I hid it, I was in the wrong … I’ll buy you some more ribbon, and I want to give you my fur coat. Srul, give Ruth my fur coat. I can’t take it with me….”
“Oh Millie, Millie, Millie!” the old man said, crying like a child. “What is this talk?”
“Srul, I’m going home.” She never liked the word Die. “I’m going home, Srul. If I haven’t been good to you, don’t bear a grudge against me—I never meant harm….”
“Millie! Millie!”
“Anything I said in a temper, Srul, don’t remember it against me. I didn’t mean a word I said. You were always a good husband … Becky makes good kreplach—she’ll look after you … I don’t want you should marry again, I wouldn’t rest easy, I couldn’t rest. Promise!”
“May I bled——” said I. Small, and stopped, gulping, “I should drop deddy-well bled if——”
“… Honest, Srul, I was always true to you.” (She had got that out of some novel, probably written by Marie Corelli.) “… Give Sarah Mother’s watch, the one with the gold pin. I meant her no harm when I gave her a good smacking that time when … when … I forget. Where’s Priscilla? Has Prissie come home yet? At least, whatever she is, she might come home to say ‘Good-night’ to her Mummy … after all I’ve been through for her.”
Priscilla had broken her parents’ hearts by running off, at the age of eighteen, with an American millionaire, with whom she was prosperously living in sin, caring not a damn for her own flesh and blood. (Clever girl, thinks Charles Small, with envy.)
“Yes, Millie, yes, any minute, any minute,” moans I. Small, temporising and lying now as ever.
“Where’s Charley?”
He was there, somewhat dazed, juggling with pity and disgust and tears and laughter—hysterical laughter, theatrical tears, histrionic pity, and genuine disgust. “Here I am, Mum,” he said. It was impossible not to weep in sympathy with the affliction of the old man whose blood he had licked off the plate that night so many years ago; and it was hard not to forgive the Boy’s Best Friend in her last agony. “I’m here, Mummy, here I am, Mum, can’t you see me?”
“I’m going home, Charley … I’m done for … I’m going home….”
“Oh, Millie, Millie,” cried I. Small, falling on his knees at the bedside.
Millie Small said, dreamily—she was full of morphine—“Charley, marry Hettie … to please me…. You’ve only got one mother…. Marry Hettie, Charley, to please me…. I’m sorry I didn’t give you the water-pistol I promised you, but it was dangerous—you could knock somebody’s eye out … but you marry Hettie, and … marry Hettie….” She remembered the circulating library, and the works of Marie Corelli. “Call your daughter Thelma,” she said, “but to please me, marry Hettie….”
Then she began to make a noise in her throat like snoring. “Millie, Millie!” the old man cried. But suddenly, for the first time in her life, she became calm: Millie Small was dead.
Charles went out into the echoing corridor, for he could not bear to see his father kneeling and wringing his hands in his great grief, or hear him whispering, for once: “Millie, Millie, come back, come back….”
A gaggle of uncles and aunts were assembled in a waiting-room, silent. It was Nathan, the Photographer, who asked: “Well?”—as if he didn’t know.
Charles Small could not speak; he made a dramatic gesture, drawing a finger across his throat. Millie’s sisters, who hated her—not without cause—burst into tears. Nathan, the Photographer, said: “That is Life.” The old man came out of the ward, blind with tears, stumbling, and, gripping Charles’s wrists, stammered: “Charley—your Mama—you haven’t got no …”—and let loose a salty rain from his eyes.
“We must live with the living,” said Nathan, the Photographer.
“Living … schmiving …” snivelled I. Small, “Oh Millie, Millie!”
So Charles Small married Hettie.
CHAPTER XXVIII
“IT’S your Mother’s wish,” said L Small; and Charles swallowed it, hook, line and sinker, little stinker that he was. He married Hettie, that sloppy, floppy poultice of a woman, with her absurd nose that was bent in the middle, and her submissive, whimpering voice and—even at twenty-four—her tendency to a double chin. She had five thousand pounds; she was a Jewish girl. Some of Charles Small’s best friends are Jewish people, but he knows where they can stick their Yiddishkeit and their pounds. It was Millie Small’s wish that he should marry Hettie, and the agony of that idiotic I. Small was intolerable. Charles Small hits himself in the bosom; he takes himself by the right ear and twists it, kicking himself in the ankle with his heel. He punches himself in the jaw, inadvertently biting his tongue, so that he lets out a yelp of pain not unmixed with self-satisfaction.
So he married Hettie, who had five thousand pounds. What the hell did he want with Hettie? He wanted Ivy. And what the devil had he to do with five thousand lousy pounds? He was making a thousand a year, and his tastes were simple … a packet of cigarettes, a warm meal, and Ivy. He already had a considerable sum of money in the bank. He wanted Ivy, nothing and nobody but Ivy; and I. Small and Millie Small and the Narwalls had taken her away from him.
Accursed parenthood! And damnable childhood! Dear God, damn and blast both parents and children, because, each to each they add up to dust and ashes, grey ruin.
The memories of fourteen years of marriage run through Charles Small’s head like shit through a goose. His wife loved him. He had not the slightest regard for his wife. She had borne him two children, but Laura and Jules had not been begotten on Hettie, but on the ghosts of Clara Bow, Dolores del Rio, Gloria Swanson, Greta Garbo, and Lya de Putti. Not Ivy—he never thought of her like that. Certainly not Hettie; he could not stand her. He could tolerate her only in the dark, and only then if she kept her mouth shut and did not interfere with his imagination.
He remembers a horrid joke: A wife petulantly tells her husband to hurry up because she is sleepy. The husband replies: “I’m sorry, I can’t think of anyone.”
Yet, somehow or other, he has begotten a couple of brats. Would to God they had been syringed away to limbo!
Ah, well … Hettie and he became friends—that is to say, out of pity he became polite to her. And then there were the children. He was determined that Laura and Jules should not grow up tied in knots as he had grown up, so he gave them psychology, which made them so rude that they became intolerable; whereupon he was compelled to beat the boy for spitting in his mother’s face and calling her a Bleeding Bastard. He laid on hard, and with gusto; not with a rolled-up copy of the Sunday Express, but with the palm of his hand. That knocked the psychology out of the little sods! It put the fear of God into them, the fear of God, their Father—for they were dirty little cowards, just like the father and the mother that brought them into the world.
Charles Small remembers—oh, how he remembers!—the old man died (“passed away” as the family would have it) without too much fuss. He did not kick up a row because he was unconscious. His last words were: “Millie, Millie!” Then he grasped an i
maginary copy of the News of the World, struck a ghostly blow, and earned the gratitude of his son by getting out of the way and holding his tongue for ever.
And still Charles Small wept, because some kindnesses are hard to forget, and in his ham-handed way the old man was kind, and loved his boychik. So did Millie, no doubt.
Well, the worms had stripped them to the bone, that pretty pair, and here he lay with years and years of life behind and before him, wishing that his too, too solid flesh would melt … Shakespeare again … working himself silly for the wherewithal to pay the Inland Revenue, and support a couple of brash little loafers whom he wishes he had never fathered and a lumpy, snivelling blonde who gives him the creeps when she touches him. Poor Hettie; she cannot have had too gaudy a time of it, and he feels guilty about this. Wham!—he is off again, pitying, pitying, pitying—torturing himself, exacerbating his hateful desire to inflict pain upon those whom he is pledged to cherish. He used to be a gentle fellow, once upon a time. Now, he would walk a mile to find a hair to put in the soup, just to have something to shout about, and would buy the children trumpets and drums to make a pretext for a headache and take the toys away. Oh, what a … a … a Thingumybob and coward Whatsisname is he! … He is forgetting even Shakespeare, now….
His abhorred wife, Hettie, comes up to the bathroom. She sounds like a giraffe; and when she uses the toilet it is as if someone is turning a faucet at a considerable height—kwiss, kwiss, kwiss, splatter!—and when she pulls the plug, whoosh goes Niagara Falls, and clunk goes the seat, and plonk goes the lid of the seat and oink, oink, oink go the stairs; and clickety-click goes a door on the floor below as it opens, letting out music from the radio, carefully kept low. Charles Small wants to dash downstairs and kick the guts out of that infernal wiry contraption; but he knows that if he goes downstairs he will stay to listen, and he will see himself buggered before he will give them—he nearly called them bleddy beggars—the satisfaction. Father is resting. Hell, what bribing and lying and coaxing, and vague promising must be going on downstairs! The very thought of it gives Charles Small a bellyache just below the belt-line, so that he has to go to the bathroom. Water is still tinkling in the cistern. He is glad of this, because he knows that he is going to make a noise. He imagines that the seat is still warm, and although it cannot be, the very idea turns colic into constipation. So he sits, playing with a bit of toilet paper, an American product, widely advertised. Solly Schwartz has the account. The sales-talk is as follows: Mrs. Ex runs weeping to her mother-in-law, Mrs. Wise, complaining that her husband has a stinking temper. The old girl says something to this effect: “Have you ever considered the importance of a non-irritant toilet tissue?” The little woman dries her eyes, runs out and buys Somebody-or-Other’s toilet paper, and husband and wife are in accord at last. Hettie tried even that, the poor girl. Charles Small tiptoes back to the bedroom. There is something like an electric fan spinning in his head, and he touches things including himself as in anticipation of a blue spark and an electric shock. No matter how carefully the kids mute the radio, Duke Ellington shakes the house and blares into his ears—particularly his left ear—and a saxophonist blows a great white blast into his left eye and thence, through his neck, into the back of his shoulder, while the drummer makes him waggle his feet in spite of himself, to his intense annoyance.
*
God is just. Charles Small’s heart beats slower and the turbulence of his stomach subsides when he remembers the awful, the inevitable justice of God.
A dozen years after he was married, he had a frightful quarrel with Hettie. It happened one night after the children had been put to bed. Charles was in an expansive mood, in a mood for recitation. He talked his head off and, one thing leading to another, quoted:
“… Then fly. What, from myself? Great reason why:
Lest I revenge. What, myself upon myself?
Alack, I love myself. Wherefore? For any good
That I myself have done unto myself?
O, no! Alas, I rather hate myself
For hateful deeds committed by myself!
I am a villain …”
And so on and on to:
“… I shall despair. There is no creature loves me;
And if I die, no soul will pity me:
Nay, wherefore should they, since that I myself
Find in myself no pity to myself? …”
He looked at Hettie for appreciation and saw that she had fallen asleep. He struck her over the head—not with a piddling evening paper, but with a good solid magazine. Hettie begged pardon, and wept. Charles Small wished that he could crack himself between two finger-nails like a louse … squeeze himself out of the face of things like a blackhead, pull himself out like a rotten tooth. Hettie went to bed in tears. She looked at him plaintively next morning, waiting for him to say a kind word, but there was a taste of rusty iron in his mouth, and something like cold iron pincers on his tongue, despite his remorse and his heartache.
He left the house without a word. But at eleven o’clock he left his office and went to Goldschmidt’s in Bond Street, where he bought a bracelet for three hundred and seventy-five pounds. This would make Hettie happy again; not the gift, as a gift, but the thought behind it. While he was writing the cheque he saw, reflected in a mirror at the back of the counter, a familiar face. It was the face of a woman, dark and sweet. She was dressed very elegantly, and wrapped in mink. He made a kind of double-take, and said: “Ivy?”
“Charles?”
“Ivy!”’
“I was having my watch mended, Charley. How are you, after all these years? You haven’t changed much.”
“You haven’t changed a bit, Ivy. Will you come and have a drink, a cocktail?”
“I don’t, I never did. Coffee, perhaps.”
They went to Gunter’s.
There, they sat and looked at each other, not knowing what to say. At last Charles Small, playing with a coffee-spoon and looking at the egg-shaped reflection of himself in the back of it, said: “Ivy … about that time in the station.”
“Let’s not think about it,” she said.
“I … I lost my head. Ivy, I’ve never stopped thinking of it, or of you. You know I always loved you, Ivy, on my honour, and I can give you my word, Ivy, that I paid very dearly for what I did to you. I’ve been punished. If you bear a grievance against me, set your mind at rest. I’ve paid, and paid, and paid! I’d give my soul for what I’ve thrown away. Believe me, please believe me, Ivy, I’ve always loved you with all my heart, and always will.”
Ivy’s lips quivered so that she had to put a cigarette between them to steady them, and Charles Small’s hand shook so that the flame from his gold lighter flickered perilously close to her chin. Neither of them could drink their coffee; their hands were too unsteady. “I always loved you, too, Charles,” she said.
“You did? After what I did to you? After what happened? It’s not possible!”
“Don’t think of that now, Charles. What’s done is done, gone and forgotten…. Well, not quite forgotten, perhaps, because I never could forget you. Forgiven, finished.”
Incredulously, Charles Small asked: “Do you mean to say that you don’t hold it against me?”
“Not a bit. You couldn’t help it. I would have run away myself, only I …”
“Only you were relying on me to come back and stand by you.”
“Please don’t let’s talk about it now. It’s so nice seeing you. I thought we should never meet again. But this morning I had a funny feeling, and when I came out to get this”—she pointed to her wrist-watch, which said that it was noon—“I felt … you know, the way some people feel when there’s a cat in the room. Excuse me, Charles, I can’t think of any other way of putting it. Tell me about yourself. Have you been well and happy? Prosperous? Did you go on the stage after all? I didn’t think you did, or I’d have heard of you. We went to all the plays, and I always looked out for you. I always expected, somehow, to see your name on the programme, somewh
ere. But …”
