The Song of the Flea (22 page)

“I wasn’t crying.”

“It’s not manly to tell lies, my boy. You know you were crying. What were you crying for?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“Anybody been ill-treating you? Anybody been ill-using you? Who was it? Tell me.”

“No, sir; nobody.”

“You must learn to keep a stiff upper lip. Come on now, smile. That’s the style,” said the gentleman, as Pym forced the corners of his mouth upwards, licking a tear from his upper lip; “that’s the style. Smile, boy; that’s the style. What’s the use of worrying? It never was worth while. ‘So pack up your troubles in your old kitbag and smile, smile, smile.’ Do you like ice cream?”

Pym nodded.

“Strawberry? Vanilla? I know what you like—you like fruit-and-nut sundæ, that’s what you like, don’t you, my boy?”

“Yes, sir,” said Pym.

“Could you manage a fruit-and-nut sundæ? Be frank now: tell me honestly,” said the gentleman looking straight at Pym with his brilliant blue eyes; “look me straight in the face and tell me: could you manage a fruit-and-nut sundæ?”

“I think so, sir,” said Pym.

“You think so? Don’t you
know?
You only
think
so?
Come now, speak up. Say yes or no.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then come along with me.”

They went to Mufti’s, and the gentleman bought Pym a fabulous confection of coloured ice cream, cherries, chopped walnuts, tinned peaches and chocolate sauce. Drinking a small cup of black coffee, he nodded benevolently while Pym ate. “How old are you?” he asked.

“I shall be eleven in nine months,” said Pym.

“Ten years and three months. Tell the truth and shame the devil, my boy. Do you live here?”

“No, sir; I’m here with my mother for holiday. We live in London.”

“And what do you want to be when you grow up?”

There was something encouraging about this gentleman. Pym said: “I want to be an explorer.”

“And quite right, too. A very healthy ambition. Fresh fields and pastures new, that’s the style. An explorer, eh? And what do you want to explore?”

“Africa.”

“Africa, by Jove! Africa, eh? Why, I know Africa better than I know the palm of my hand. Where do you want to go? Rhodesia? Basutoland? Damaraland? Nyasaland? Ask me: I can tell you all about it—Mashonaland, Tanganyika, anything you like.”

“Zululand.”

“Zululand, eh? Ah! You’ve been reading Rider Haggard.”

“Yes, sir,” said Pym, blushing.

“Good healthy reading, too. The very thing for a boy. Read him myself—everything he wrote. Which of his books have you read?”

“King
Solomon’s
Mines,
Marie
—
A
Tale
of
the
Great
Trek
and
Alan
Quatermain.”

“Jolly good books! Thundering good books, by Jove! But haven’t you read
The
Ivory
Kloof,
by Guy Russell? There’s a story for you! You’ve heard, no doubt, what they say about elephants?”

“No, sir, I haven’t.”

“Why, nobody’s ever seen a dead elephant that died of natural causes. I’ve shot many in my time, but I’ve never seen an elephant dead of old age or sickness. D’ye see? And the
story goes that when an elephant feels death coming on, he goes away to a secret place known only to the elephants—because, as you must have heard, elephants know a great deal.”

Pym gazed at him with round eyes, too fascinated to speak.

The gentleman went on: “Well, when an elephant knows that he is going to die he goes to a certain places and dies there. He might travel five hundred miles through the jungle, but he’ll get to that place somehow, and there he will die. And for hundreds of years men have been trying to find this place where the elephants lie down and die, because there must be millions and millions of pounds’ worth of ivory there. D’ye see?”

Pym had never been more delighted in his life. He was smiling, and his eyes were shining as he nodded without speaking.

“Think you could manage another ice? No? You mean yes, I think. Hey, waitress, bring my young friend another of these things … Yes, as I was saying: if any man could find the place where the elephants go to die he’d be a very rich man indeed, on account of the ivory. And this fellow Guy Russell wrote a story called
The
Ivory
Kloof
in
which a fellow called Jim—about your age—goes off with his father on a hunting expedition and befriends an old Xorsa”—the gentleman pronounced it with a peculiar click of the tongue—“an old Xorsa witch-doctor, who tells him the secret. A rattling good yarn. You must read it. I’ll give it to you.”

“Will you really?”

“Yes, I will. I daresay you’re interested in hunting?”

To the most charming man he had ever met, Pym said: “Oh, yes!”

“I have hunted practically every known species of wild beast on the face of the earth—including the Hun, ha-ha! including the Hun! Buffalo—now, there’s a dangerous fellow, if you like! When you go out for buffalo, you kill that buffalo or that buffalo kills you—the African buffalo, I mean, of course; most dangerous animal in the world with the possible exception of a really angry grizzly bear. I’ll tell you what: eat up your ice and I’ll show you a few heads—lion, tiger, buffalo and whatnot.
Oh yes, and I’ll give you that book. And if you like, I’ll show you my guns.”

Pym swallowed a quarter of a pound of fruit-and-nut sundæ in five mad gulps.

“Never wolf your food. Worst thing in the world for the stomach. I always chew each mouthful thirty-two times, once for every tooth. You should do likewise. Can’t chew ice cream, of course—but let it melt on the tongue. Eh?”

“Yes, sir.”

They went to the gentleman’s house, a pleasant little villa in a well-kept garden. A manservant opened the door and the gentleman took Pym into a drawing-room in which there were carefully-arranged trophies and strange weapons and many bright cushions. The place had an odd smell which reminded little Pym of the small cone-shaped pastilles his mother used to burn on certain occasions in his bedroom when he had
chicken-pox
. “First of all, the book,” said the gentleman, and gave him a brown cloth-bound volume, which Pym clasped to his breast. He was dumb with gratitude. “Now. Would you like some milk, or tea, or something? I know what you’d like:
you’d
like a peach. Have a peach. Don’t eat it with the peel on: give you diarrhœa. Always peel peaches … Oh, yes, guns and whatnot. Come upstairs.”

Overwhelmed with joy and full of ice cream, Pym could not eat the peach, so he put it carefully on the mantelpiece before he followed the gentleman upstairs; but he still clutched the book,
The
Ivory
Kloof.
While they were going up, the
gentleman
said: “You go to school, I suppose?”

“Yes, sir.”

“They teach you a whole lot of things, I suppose—science, art, and that sort of stuff, eh?”

“Yes, sir,” said Pym, thinking of lions and tigers and rifles.

“But do they teach you anything about Life my boy?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

The gentleman said: “You don’t know? But you must know! What’s the use of education if you don’t learn anything about Life? Do you know who you are, what you are, how you are, why you are?”

“I don’t think so, sir.”

The gentleman was indignant. He said: “There you are, you see! Education, education, education! What for?
O
tempore,
O
mores!
I daresay you don’t even know how you came into this world of ours, do you?”

Pym had been told by a schoolmate that babies were born through the navel; but he said nothing.

The room in which he found himself was furnished with nothing but a cupboard, a divan covered with a leopard skin, and several racks full of guns.

The gentleman now was very angry. He said: “Scandalous! Scandalous, by Jove! Outrageous, by God!—That was a slip of the tongue, my boy: never take the name of the Lord thy God in vain, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who taketh His name in vain.”

Pym stroked the blue barrel of a short, heavy gun, feeling vaguely uneasy. The gentleman said impatiently: “That’s a Theodore Philip 44–70. The one next to it is a Mannlicher … But that can wait. Education, eh? God bless my soul, boy, don’t you know what you are and where you came from?” He opened the cupboard and took out an album. “Not innocence, but ignorance,” he said, “crass ignorance. You pick up all kinds of filthy dirtiness from your chums at school, I daresay, eh? And you imagine you were found in a cabbage, do you?”

“No, sir.”

“Or the stork brought you—is that it?”

“No, sir.”

“Then how d’you think you got here, eh?”

The gentleman opened the album. He was breathing heavily. “Look here,” he said, pointing with a finger that was no longer steady; “does this convey anything to you? Look …
this
is your father and
that’s
your mother … And
that’s
your mother—the fellow with his back turned is your father. Do you take me? Now,” said the gentleman, watching Pym closely as he turned a page, this is your father and mother again——”

“No!”
cried Pym, stepping back as the gentleman reached out to hold him.
No!”
He ran out of the room and fell
downstairs
. As he found his feet he caught a glimpse of the
manservant
,
who was wringing his hands and saying: “Oh, dzear! Have you hurtz yourtself, my dzear?” Pym pushed him aside, and opened the street door and ran. A quarter of an hour later, sobbing for breath on the promenade, he felt something hard in his armpit. It was
The
Ivory
Kloof.
He threw the book from him with all his strength: it fell on the beach, close to a woman in a red bathing costume. “Hi!” she cried; but Pym was running again.

That evening he disconcerted his mother by saying: “You
didn’t! …
You
didn’t! You
never
did, did you?”

“What didn’t I, Johnny?”

He burst into tears and would not let her comfort him.

Reading the work of Dr. Weissensee he remembered the gentleman in the blue blazer and the album in the gun-room—which he did not want to remember.

“Not on any account,” said Pym. “Oh no!” He put the typescript back in its folder and threw the folder into the empty, musty-smelling wardrobe.

*

Then he went back to work. The meaning of the language was lost—he was like a feverish man with sticky fingers, playing a game of skill with paper patterns. Sky fitted flesh; water fell into place with grass—everything meant nothing. There was mutiny in the alphabet; King Lud on the keyboard of the
typewriter
—syntactic anarchy, verbal nihilism, grammatical delirium; heat without fire, flame without direction, high temperature with a chill.

All the same, he rewrote the article about Covent Garden Market.

Someone knocked at the door and said: “Do you mind? After all, I mean to say—quarter to one in the morning, after all! People want to get a bit of shut-eye, if you don’t mind. Do you mind?”

“So sorry; I didn’t realise it was so late,” said Pym. “I beg pardon.”

The man at the door, made bold by Pym’s humility, said: “All right, then; that’s all right. But you just have a little
consideration for others in future. Remember—you been told once.”

“Why, you snotty-nosed bastard!” said Pym, opening the door. “You lousy mouse!”

A small fat man, recoiling, with out-thrust hands, said: “Now, now—no violence. None of that, now!”

“Go to hell!” said Pym.

“Legitimate complaint,” said the other man. “Banging away all night long. I know my rights.”

“Stick your rights——”

“No foul language, now!”

“One last word: go away quick,” said Pym; and the small fat man ran downstairs.

After this Pym wanted a cigarette; but his packet was empty. It was lying on the floor with twenty or thirty crumpled and discarded sheets of paper.

He tore open and teased out four cold cigarette-butts, rolled the damp, stale tobacco again in an oblong of tissue-paper torn from the inner wrapper of the packet, and smoked.

He would have gone out to buy a fresh packet but he had only elevenpence-halfpenny. Proudfoot had said that five-pound note was something on account, something on the firm.
Therefore
Pym could not touch it. He had elevenpence-halfpenny. “Thank God I’m so tired!” he said, lying down and looking at the ceiling. It was as well for him that the paper was coarse and the tobacco damp. he fell asleep with the cigarette between his fingers. It became black and extinguished itself ten seconds after he stopped sucking it.

The pennies in the meter spent themselves, the electric light turned itself off, and Pym slept peacefully in the stuffy darkness of his squalid room.

H
E
was awaked by an insistent tapping at his door.

“Who is it?”

A heavy voice, harsh and sad as a death-rattle, said: “Me.”

“Mr. M’Gurk?”

“In person, Mr. Pym.”

“What d’you want at this hour of the night?”

“It’s ten o’clock in the morning.”

“Good God! … One moment.” Pym had no
dressing-gown
, so he pulled on his trousers before he opened the door. “So sorry,” he said, “I didn’t realise it was so late.”

“Pray pardon the intrusion,” said Mr. M’Gurk. He was a long, lank, suicidal man who appeared to have resigned himself to some ineluctable woe. In the profession he was known as ‘Miserable M’Gurk’—he was an entertainer:
M’Gurk 
&
M’Gurk
had been printed in blunt blue letters in the lower corners of numerous double-crown bills pasted on boards
outside
provincial theatres and suburban ‘Empires’. He played a trombone, with comical grimaces, while his wife—a buxom giantess—burlesqued arias from the most dramatic operas. Her name was Nina; she played the piccolo and danced with amazing agility considering her vast bulk. The piccolo, in her hands, looked like a pencil: that was why she played it. They had a fifteen-year-old son—a ghastly, wizened, undersized boy, who was learning to play the double-bass fiddle. The
incongruity
was funny: Babe M’Gurk had to stand on a step-ladder when he played. The three of them had been living in Busto’s second-floor room for two months. Three weeks before, Mr. M’Gurk had asked Pym for the loan of a match.