The Song of the Flea (11 page)

“Pah!” said Pym. “If people would only leave me alone! I only want to be left alone to get on with my work. I can’t help doing such silly things—I can’t help feeling sorry for people.
I ask you, what would
you
do if an old man came to you and said—Oh, but what the devil
is
the use of talking? What’s the use?”

“I daresay you can establish the fact that you didn’t mean to do it, can’t you? I mean to say, you accepted payment from the old man, and signed papers to prove it, didn’t you?”

“It serves me right for being sorry for people. If they’d just leave me alone! Oh, you don’t know how tired I am of people! I’m so
tired.
I really am
so
tired! As if
I’d
accept payment for withdrawing a charge!”

“The old gentleman’s showed us the document and the receipt, you know.”

“Oh, all
right!
Hang, draw and quarter me.”

“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,” said the detective.

S
O
there came a sombre threatening night when Pym was
overtaken
by madness in an empty street.

He was being hunted down. Stealthy footsteps were following him. He wanted to run, but was ashamed. At last, when he dared to turn and look back, his heart contracted like a squeezed sponge.

A dim, squat, froglike thing was crouching at his heels.

He shrieked, and the echoing street shrieked back. Then Reason, badly battered, staggered out of its whispering corner and Pym knew that the footsteps that had followed him were only echoes of his own, and the squatting thing was his shadow thrown down by the light of the street lamp under which he had instinctively stopped. Pym walked on, but his heart was cold and desperate, leaping and falling like a salmon in a stream, and his blood was water. A white thing slid past his face. He leapt sideways. The white thing was only a puff of smoke from Pym’s cigarette—he had forgotten that he was smoking.

“God help me! Don’t leave me alone in the dark!” he cried. Then he stopped and listened again. Not far from where he
stood someone was weeping desperately—some poor beaten whore perhaps whom a word might comfort. Pym could not bear the noise of weeping—anyone with sound tear-ducts and a strong diaphragm to sob with could put out his anger as water quenches fire, or make him boil like quicklime. He began to say: “Who’s that? Where are you?”

Who
—
hoo!
-hoo!
-hoo!
was what he said.

It was he who was weeping.

The shock of this discovery gagged him for a few seconds, and then he knew that something terrible had happened to him. The night was a dark cupboard into which he had been cruelly thrust and locked away and forgotten, like an ill-treated child, and there he would remain for ever, heartbroken and lonely. Hearing his own sobs Pym thought of a narrow-necked bottle emptying itself, gulp by gulp—and this thought made him laugh so loudly that he had to push his handkerchief into his mouth to muffle the noise.

At the back of his head a voice said, coldly and clearly: “You are going mad.” Pym stopped laughing, and cried again. The street was closing in. On a roof a cat wailed
O,
wo-wo-wo!
—but the voice of the cat was full of mockery. He took hold of himself and then he shook like a man who has been tricked into gripping the handles of a shocking-coil—he was shaking himself to pieces, but he could not let go.

Presently he started and listened again. The short hairs on the back of his neck stirred and prickled. He could hear heavy, deliberate footsteps—not his own—a policeman was coming. Pym glanced from left to right. There was no escape. This was the end. He would fight to the death. The policeman came near, looked at him incuriously, and passed.

“I am
not
afraid of policemen,” said Pym. “I am
not
afraid of the dark … I do
not
cry like a baby!” Nevertheless he was crying again. He wanted to lie down in a doorway and let the gulping narrow-necked bottle empty itself, so that in the morning they would find nothing but a skin. “I haven’t got a friend in the world—not one friend in all the world. I am the loneliest man on earth,” Pym said to himself.

But Reason, punch-drunk and almost blind with blood, came
back again to close with the Shadow, while the bell of a church struck
one,
like a gong.

“Snap out of it! What about Proudfoot? Go to Proudfoot.”

Pym writhed out of the narrow street like a dog struggling through a hole in a wall and found himself in the Strand. The road glistened in the lamplight by the dark and dreadful gates of the Tivoli. A swollen sky sagged under an infinite weight of water: everything was stretched tight, shining with tension—in one moment the road would burst like a black bladder and the sky would split like a sail and darkness and wind and rain and light would rush together in seething chaos.

A taxi, coming out of Bedford Street, swung eastward. Pym ran towards it, shouting.

“Where d’you want to go?” the driver asked.

Something grey and woolly was packed between Pym and what he wanted to say. He found a couple of syllables, hard and sharp, like seeds in raw cotton, and said: “
Proudfoot.
”

“Never heard of it.”

Pym’s groping fist caught hold of a cold metal lever. “God give me strength,” he prayed and put out all his force, because upon the turning of this lever the fate of the world depended. Something clicked and the lever was down—but it was nothing but the handle of the taxi door.

“Emerson Square—yes, Emerson Square,” said Pym.

He threw himself back on the ice-cold leather cushions. Grey streets, blotched and stippled with yellow light, curled and swirled away.

“Number?”

Pym’s rattling brain bounced and spun like a marble on a roulette wheel and came to rest. “Ten,” he said, holding his breath like a gambler who has staked all he has upon one single number.

The taxi stopped.

Pym pressed his thumb on a bell-push and held it there. A window opened and a woman said something in an angry voice. Slippered feet slapped and shuffled in the passage. A man’s voice, curiously tense and alert even at that small hour of the morning, said: “Who’s that?”

“Oh, Proudfoot, Proudfoot, it’s me—John Pym! Please let me in, quickly—Oh, please let me in!”

The door opened.

“Come in quickly. Don’t stand there crying. Quick—I’m cold. Come in, come in. What the devil do you want at this time of night?”

“I don’t know … I don’t know. I’m sorry … I don’t know. I don’t know what I want—I don’t know what to do. I don’t know! Don’t you understand?—I
don’t
know!”

“Oh, I see. I think I understand. Come in and sit down.”

“I knew you’d understand, Proudfoot. I knew you would. You understand everything,” said Pym.

“Come in and shut the door.”

*

In his day Proudfoot had been worshipped and feared by an obsequious rabble of pickpockets, pimps, whores,
card-sharpers
, abortionists and burglars. They called him The Mouthpiece. He was supposed to be the most brilliant criminal lawyer on this side of the Atlantic. He could prove that black was white, hypnotise juries, and in cross-examination make such fools of witnesses that they did not know where to hide their heads. He had been notorious for his unscrupulousness and his terrifying audacity. When a case seemed hopeless Proudfoot The Mouthpiece thundered down upon the prosecution like a wounded buffalo, and smashed through; or he could weep like an innocent child; or be silent until he pounced like a cat. He was bold, shameless, irresistibly seductive. Someone drew a caricature of Proudfoot, repulsively ugly, lifting the skirts of blind Justice upon a sofa, with the caption:
What
does
she
see
in
him
?

His daring was phenomenal. For example: he whisked the infamous Silver Jack Stutz away from the gallows by reciting a formidable list of the man’s previous convictions, and thus managed to convince the jury that they were prejudiced against him. Proudfoot had gigantically magnified and coloured a microscopic speck of doubt in the evidence—having buzzed about the heads of the witnesses like a cloud of mosquitoes,
harassing them to the edge of madness. Silver Jack, who had split his mistress from head to waist with a butcher’s cleaver, was acquitted.

After that Proudfoot might have grown very great. But he was not strong enough. He could hold up the falling sky over the head of a bandit or wrestle with Death for the body of a murderer, but he could not carry the weight of success. The card-sharpers, share-pushers and con-men caught Proudfoot in the end—they flattered and adored him into over-estimating his might. They sold him a gold brick—a belief in his infallibility. Yes, in a little while they talked him into staking everything he had on one throw. For Proudfoot had become a god, and a god must be what his worshippers want him to be. The god of vengeance must drip blood; the god of love must be gentle and loving; the god of thieves must laugh at the law, especially if he is a lawyer. Proudfoot embezzled money and bribed a witness. (He could get away with anything.) By then he had taken to heavy drinking; and since women loved him for his success, and a god may do anything he likes except disappoint his
worshippers
, Proudfoot worked all day and played all night.

On the day of reckoning the virtue went out of Proudfoot. He was defending himself against Dekker. The court was crowded. The public held its breath in anticipation of an historic rapier-and-dagger duel. They were disappointed. Proudfoot went down squirming and gasping, and there was the end of him. When he came out of prison only a column-inch or two in the newspapers announced the fact, and no one was interested, although headlines on the front pages had announced his going in. He loitered about Fleet Street on his way down along the gutters. Sometimes he was seen in the crypt of the Law Courts, lead-grey and heavy, noticeably aged. He had strutted like a bantam cock in his heyday: now he waddled like an old duck, all belly and backside. Sometimes he staggered a little: this meant that he had got hold of a pound or two. He contrived to live, in one shady way or another.

How otherwise can a disbarred barrister live? If he decides to go straight, having found that crime, detected, does not pay, he can do little jobs of clerking in a practising lawyer’s office—
provided he can find an unbroken lawyer who will trust him or pity him enough. But that kind of honest bread is gritty to bite and bitter to swallow. He can try his hand at salesmanship, dragging a case of samples from door to door. But he has not the knack of selling things. There is no law that compels a shopkeeper to listen to him; no judge to say: “You must not interrupt.”

At last the broken barrister has a go at journalism, and so he finds himself in the company of many other professional gentlemen rather the worse for wear—ex-doctors whose pockets bulge with rejected articles on health and first-aid; ex-
accountants
who have committed to paper astonishing facts about income tax, which every editor in England has seen before; unfrocked clergymen bulging with essays on Resignation, or Christmas poems; struck-off solicitors with dog-eared analyses of the laws pertaining to Compensation; ex-actors who want to write about the Drama. In this wistful, well-spoken,
confident-voiced
, worried-eyed, important-chested, shiny-trousered
half-world
he meets, also, ex-burglars who are prepared to spill the beans; ex-bucket-shopkeepers willing to tell inside stories; old lags from Dartmoor and ex-prisoners from Devil’s Island who have hair-raising tales of incarceration. This is the ex-World of simple equations: of familiar symbols posing as unknown quantities.

Sometimes the disbarred barrister has some brushing lip-
to-ear
contact with a questionable private-detective agency in one of the back-doubles near Holborn. Sometimes he acts as
freelance
consultant to worried, whispering women and pale, secretive men in the drinking clubs of Lisle Street and Gerrard Street and the coffee shops off the Charing Cross Road.
Sometimes
he may be seen urgently talking behind his hand to another ex-professional man near the Mansion House. Again, he may be in conference with white-handed members of the
lumpen-proletariat
in a bar near Bow Street. He survives. And every week or so, sure as fate, he squeezes his wine-red or lead-grey face into the pigeon-hole of the porter’s box in a newspaper office and asks to see “someone in authority on a matter of
considerable
importance”. (He has had another inspiration—
probably something to do with your legal position if you trip over a bucket of dirty water and cut your knee.) Each time he appears a shade greyer, or redder; a little more seedy about the cuffs, and a little less firm-handed when he fills in the form that required him to state his name and his business.

One muddy morning, or sweltering afternoon, the porter as good as tells him to go away and stay away. He goes. He is
EX
——.

X =
O.

Proudfoot described himself now as a Journalist: his name was not quite forgotten in Fleet Street. After his crash the
Sunday
Special
had published Proudfoot’s life-story:
Master
Mouthpiece!
Once in a blue moon they printed a few of his paragraphs. He was a ruined man—a damp firework,
spasmodically
promising brilliant things; emitting nothing but pungent smoke and rocking to a disappointing standstill. Yet within the sodden coils of the man something smouldered until it touched a dry patch. Then Proudfoot blazed with coloured sparks and twirled again—for two seconds, after which he rocked suggestively in a cloud of promise, and was dead again. He was drunkenly spinning but still sparkling when Pym first said: “How d’you do?” to him in the lower waiting-room of the
Sunday
Special
building. Pym, also, had sold an article. They exchanged courtesies, drinks, expressions of esteem; and became friends.

*

Pym sat in Proudfoot’s broken-bottomed easy-chair by the gas-fire, sniffing up the beginnings of explanations, sighing out the hiccup-broken fragments of apologies, and trying to swallow his shame.

“You can stop that,” said Proudfoot.

“I … I ha-beg …”

“I said you can stop that! Come on, now; take a sip of water, Pym. Or will you have it in your face? Sip it, I said—sip, sip! Not gulp—sip, man! Sip it slowly and swallow the water, not the air. You must do as I say.”

“I will, Proudfoot, I will.”

When Proudfoot smiled his mouth looked like the sticky imprint of a gross kiss on a pewter tankard. He smiled now, remembering old times: the days of his godhead when people wept before him in the big soundproof office near Jockey’s Fields. “Lord, what shall we do to be saved?” they had asked; and he had always stood as he was standing now, with his hands clasped behind him smiling moistly with loose-mouthed scorn.