The Song of the Flea (19 page)

B
Y
ten o’clock next morning Pym had finished another article in which he described with feverish gusto the Caledonian Market, that clearing-house of the junk of the world. He was dazzled by his own brilliance. Reading and re-reading the descriptive passages, Pym was convinced that no one in his right mind could fail to be impressed; for here was the real stuff, the honest-to-God dope—one could almost taste the rusty iron, the green brass, and the twelfth-hand plated cutlery. One could smell the derelict beds, sofas, and stuffed chairs and feel the dull edges of the unwanted notched sabres and tulwars on the stalls. At least, Pym could smell and see and feel these things, and hear their tinkling and grinding and clanking and creaking as he read aloud to himself what he had written about them. So he was in a good humour. He had paid another week’s rent and still had a few shillings in his pocket. Something—some instinct—told him that the Features Editor would fall on his neck and take him out to lunch. In the Café Royal the Features Editor would say that the time had come to stop fiddling about with piddling little articles here and articles there, and get down to something regular—one story a week for certain, twelve guineas and expenses. Pym felt lucky this morning. He knew that the worst was over.

In the passage he looked at the dusty baize-covered board, criss-crossed with pinned down lengths of dirty tape into which Busto stuck his tenants’ letters, if they had any. This board had been bare for the past three months, except for a little buff “Final Notice” from the Income Tax collector addressed to Thomas Dobkin, Esq., who was in prison for stealing books in Charing Cross Road. He, poor fellow, had believed that he had evolved a new technique. He would walk about with a book of his own under his arm and pretend to browse around the shelves, with what he fondly imagined to be the abstracted look of a scholar and a gentleman. In due course when he thought no one was looking he would put the most
expensive-looking
book he could find under his arm next to the volume he was so ostentatiously carrying. Then, blinking owlishly like the absent-minded professor of fiction, he shambled out, vaguely nodding to everyone and talking to himself under his breath. But Dobkin had been watched: his was a discovery, not an invention. His trick was older than Charing Cross Road. They caught him creeping out of the medical department, absent-mindedly hugging two enormous volumes on gynæcology, which not even a strong man could have picked up without premeditation, for they weighed fifteen pounds. The other volume, his stock-in-trade, was a Greek lexicon. Since he had previously been found guilty of absent-mindedly exploring the overcoats in a cloakroom, and forgetfully keeping the contents of the pockets, he got three months. But he was proud of his Income Tax Demand, and left it there for all the world to see.

This morning there was a clean new envelope on the board. Pym was surprised when he saw that it was addressed to him. It was a heavy, long envelope cut in the American style. His name and address were beautifully typewritten in green. In the top left-hand corner was the name of a company: T
HURTELL
H
UNT
, M
AYERLING
& C
O
. L
TD
., Publishers, 302, A
DAM
S
TREET
, A
DELPHI
. This was die-stamped on expensive paper, pale-green paper.

Pym’s heart beat itself against his ribs like a mouse in a wire trap. He tore open the envelope—it was a pity to spoil it, but it had to be done—and took out a large sheet of beautiful
pale-green
paper that crackled like a new banknote. No jobbing printer had worked on this letter-heading: it was tasteful, costly, magnificent. You could read it like Braille by running your fingers over it, it was printed in such rich relief. There again was the name and the address, with a colophon ingeniously composed of an eye inside an ear. There was a telephone number. On the left there was a list of directors:

“Oh! Oh!” said Pym, reading the beautiful green typescript. It said:

Pym felt a cold breath on his neck. Busto was peering over his shoulder.

“Am I in your light?” asked Pym. “Would you like me to strike a match or something? I’m glad private correspondence interests you.”

“I can’t read,” said Busto. “But you don’t wipe your behind with that stuff.” He jerked his thumb at the letter. Then Pym saw big black smudges on the envelope where Busto had been feeling it. Busto, who had an instinct for the cost of things, was impressed by the costliness of the paper.

“Ah-ha!” said Pym mysteriously, putting the letter in his pocket. “Ah-ha!”

It was as well to be respected by Busto. Who could say when it might be necessary to bluff him into staking another couple of days of grace before he called you? Busto shrugged and Pym went out, whistling through his teeth. He was at once excited and depressed, elated and nervous; as a man is, sometimes, when he feels that something tremendous is going to happen. Soldiers feel like that on the eve of a battle; young brides feel like that when the key clicks in the chamber door and the groom’s embarrassed fingers twist the link button of his hired cutaway coat.

He was confident that the
Sunday
Special
weekly feature was as good as settled. On his way downstairs Pym had intended to go directly to the Features Editor and settle the matter. But now he told himself that it would look better if he appeared nonchalant, or at least not over-anxious. He went to a
telephone-booth
and made an appointment to meet Proudfoot in his office in half an hour.

The offices of Thurtell Hunt, Mayerling & Co. Ltd., General Publishers, were on the ground floor of a gracious old house near the river. There was a blue-and-white plaque on the wall which said:

*

Thurston Bidpond,

Man of Letters,

1799–1829,
lived
here
.

The publishers’ nameplate was not of staring brass, but of some darker alloy; and it was large and massive—the plate of a firm founded on a rock; substantial; calculated to last for ever. The outer office smelt strongly of paint. A dreamy-eyed, anxious boy took Pym’s name, blushed, said: “Just a minute,” and, after an absence of fifteen or twenty seconds returned, his face glowing like a Neon sign and asked him to step in.

A young lady said, in cool, measured tones: “Oh, Mr. Pym. How do you do? Mr. Proudfoot is expecting you, but he’s detained for two or three minutes, so won’t you sit down?”

“May I smoke?”

“Please do. Mr. Proudfoot won’t keep you long, I’m sure.”

“I’m probably too early. I’m always too early,” said Pym.

“Not more than five or ten minutes,” the lady said. There were papers, neatly arranged in an ingenious nest of wire baskets to the left of a brand new typewriter on her desk. Her telephone was new; the directories were new; the inkwells were clean, the pen nibs were bright, and the pencils were all of equal length. There was a little new vase of new flowers on the desk.

“New here?” said Pym.

“We’ve only recently moved in, yes.”

“Would it be indiscreet, Miss …?”

“Bowman.”

“—Bowman. Would it be indiscreet, Miss Bowman, to ask just what kind of set-up this is?”

“Not at all, Mr. Pym. This is simply a publishing company. I believe it’s connected with a firm called Mayerling, of Vienna.”

“I can’t say I know anything about Mayerling of Vienna. Do you?”

“I’m told they were one of the most important publishing firms in Austria, Mr. Pym. I don’t know any more than that. I’m new here myself, you see.”

“Practically everything looks new here,” said Pym, sniffing at the fresh paint. “Tell me, Miss Bowman, what do you do here? Secretary?”

“I’m Mr. Sherwood’s secretary, and I make myself useful in general. You’re a writer, I believe?”

“After a style, yes.
I
am
an
apprentice.”
Suddenly he wanted to talk about himself. “I write a bit here and a bit there. You couldn’t possibly have heard of me. Most of what I write, I write anonymously: ashamed to put my name to it.”

Miss Bowman said: “If I found myself doing anything I was ashamed of I’d stop it like a shot.”

“But——” said Pym.

Then the door opened and Proudfoot came into Miss Bowman’s office, with a melodramatic gesture, and gripped Pym by the shoulders. “Johnny!” he said, “the one man on the the face of the earth I really want to see! You have met Miss Bowman? Joanna, you’ve met John Pym? Good! good! Come in, Johnny, come in and meet Sherwood! Come in, come in!”

Proudfoot opened a mahogany door and followed Pym into Sherwood’s room.

*

The keen-eyed elderly man was turning over some papers. He was dressed, now, in an old gingery tweed suit with leather patches on the elbows: a flannel shirt and a woollen tie; and still he looked well-dressed. There was something like a pinch of salt on his upper lip—he was growing a moustache. “Ah-ha!” he cried, “my dear colleague! Brother in exile! Come in and
sit down and tell me—how does the world use you? We have met before, Mr. Pym, when we were both the victims of judicial misunderstanding, I believe. When I quoted that poetry to you … those lines—have you forgotten? You said they were good. I quoted a line or two and he said they were good, Proudfoot old friend!”

“Oh yes, I remember distinctly,” said Pym.

“One of the greatest books in the English language,” said Sherwood, laughing heartily as he took a bottle, syphon, and three glasses out of a cupboard in his walnut and red-leather desk, “one of the very greatest books in the English language—which I have had the opportunity to learn by heart—is Roget’s
Thesaurus.
The lines I quoted on that occasion, to which we need not refer, Mr. Pym, are made up of words repeated in their proper order out of Roget’s
Thesaurus
—Number 954:
Intem
perance
.
There is a work! There is a work indeed! There is pure poetry. Read your Roget, Mr. Pym; read your Roget:

Enough of this nonsense. A drink, Mr. Pym. I’m delighted to meet you, delighted and relieved—and this is another reason why I have occasion to be indebted to our common friend Proudfoot. And I hope, Mr. Pym, that you, too, will feel that you owe Proudfoot a thank-you for this meeting … you, as a writer, a man of letters. I am nothing but Barbabas. Barbabas was a publisher, eh? Ha-ha-ha! Hated by those he loves—willing to wound—and yet afraid to strike, eh? So well-bred lap dogs civilly delight in mumbling of the prey they dare not bite—what? Drink up! drink up!”

Proudfoot said: “Johnny, we are friends, I hope?”

“Yes, we are. Do you need to ask, Proudfoot?”

“This, Tom,” said Proudfoot to Sherwood, “is a real writer. I don’t like to ask him to do what I want him to do but I have an idea—a crazy idea, if you like, that out of friendship he might accommodate us … Look Johnny, this is nothing but a hack job. I proposed you as the writer because you can write it the way it needs to be written, and also because there really
is some money in it … Sherwood, my dear fellow, I’ve explained that Johnny Pym is a very fine writer indeed, who is going to establish himself. Only—we are among friends now, Johnny, and you mustn’t mind my talking like this—Johnny needs a little money, Sherwood, my dear fellow, in order to afford to sit down and write what he wanted to write. Johnny—this is a hack job and nothing more: a piece of nonsense as far as you are concerned, but of great importance to my friend Sherwood and to me. It is, in fact, a rewrite job.”

“Proudfoot, anything I can do for you I will, as you very well know.”

“Thanks! Thanks! Now, tell me—have you heard of Dr. Weissensee?”

Sherwood said: “The author of
Geschlechtliche
Verirrungen
in
Verhaeltnis
zur
Kunst
im
Lauf der
Zeit
Einschliesslich
Spezial
Faelle
in
der
Zeit
Zwischen
1675
und
1935
mit
einer
Bemerkung
Ueber
Auto-Erotik.
Dr. Weissensee has the approval of three of the greatest psychiatrists in the world. We want to publish Weissensee here, but we have the work only in a scrappy form in English and in—to be frank—a sensationalised French translation. It is,” said Sherwood, looking grave and drumming his fingers on the blotting-pad, “a purely scientific work of the first order. It is, in fact, a necessary work, and we propose to circulate it very widely in England and America. In order to do this we must put it into clear, vivid English. The Personal Case Histories alone need the touch of a first-rate writer. You are a first-rate writer, Mr. Pym. I have read only a few of your pieces in the
Sunday
Special
—I have myself had certain dealings with that excellent paper——”