The Thousand Deaths of Mr Small
Page 49
“I won’t allow you to talk like that about my mother, Charles. I never heard such language!” She was fumbling with the catch of her bag.
Charles Small was eloquent. He knew, now, all about the Irony of Fate. “You and your darling daughters!” and he declaimed:
“… Knowest thou the time when the wild goats of the rock bring forth? Or canst thou mark when the hinds do calve? Canst thou number the months that they fulfil? Or knowest thou the time when they bring forth? They bow themselves; they bring forth their young ones, they cast out their sorrows. Their young ones are in good liking, they grow up with corn; they go forth and return not unto them….”
“Charles Small, I’m glad I found you out in time.” Ivy had her bag open and was rummaging with a gloved hand. “I wouldn’t have you if you were the last man in the world. You’re disgusting. I don’t like you any more. I never want to see your face again, never!” She threw down the bracelet he had given her—it fell into his untasted coffee—and walked firmly out of the refreshment room.
How did Charles Small feel then? He does not quite remember. He knows that he suddenly felt dry and hollow, like a mildewed nut, horribly stale. But somewhere, in one of the ventricles of his heart, there was a little light fluttering which might have been relief.
He fished the diamond bracelet out of the undrinkable coffee with a teaspoon, and went home. In the taxi, starting out of a meaningless reverie, he thought that he had had an unspeakable accident; but it was only the little tube of yellow eye ointment. He had sat on it.
He hurried home to get at that letter and burn it. Having done this he had a bath, changed his ointment-plastered clothes, and went to the office, curiously calm. He walked, enjoying the fine morning. He arrived just when Solly Schwartz was limping out of his cream-coloured Rolls-Royce.
“What, trottel?” said the hunchback, laughing. “I thought you were in South America already.” He hit Charles Small smartly on the backside with a gold-headed stick of tuyia wood. “Go on, schlemazzel, back to work. I told you you didn’t have the nerve to run away. Come on, trottel!”
And the great glass doors closed behind him.
*
He is exhausted, now, but calm. He does not know what to make of it all, and he is tired of trying to get any sense out of it. He remembers what an African traveller told him about the scorpions that live in the cracked, sunbaked rocks. The females eat their husbands even in the act of copulation. When the young hatch out, they hop on to their mother’s back and sustain themselves by eating her alive, to get the strength to repeat the process over and over again. There is neither rhyme nor reason in it … there is family life for you! … Poor parents, poor children, thinks Charles Small, dropping tears of pity for his father, his mother, his sister, his wife, his children, himself, and everyone else’s children.
… At the same time he decides that if, within five minutes, Laura and Jules do not stop playing with that clattering clockwork train, he will go downstairs and beat the Bejesus out of them with a rolled-up copy of Child Psychology.
THE END
Barbados–New York City, 1950.
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This ebook edition first published in 2013
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© The Estate of Gerald Kersh, 1951
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ISBN 978–0–571–30459–2