The Thousand Deaths of Mr Small (3 page)

Up jumped I. Small the big shot, keen as mustard; watchful, cautious, cunning, ready to out-Machiavelli Machiavelli. The pasty man, lifting the box with difficulty—it must have weighed between thirty and forty pounds—put it on the counter, knocked down several clip-locks, and opened one of the first portable phonographs that was ever made.

The lid of this fantastic box contained something like a
nickel-plated
wash-basin into which was clipped a tone-arm as big and heavy as a footballer’s leg, at the end of which hung a mica
sound-box
of a peculiarly club-footed shape. The basic half of this contraption was heavy with machinery. There was a turntable to which was glued a disc hacked out of one of those green plush tablecloths that used to be fringed with pom-poms.

Old man Small, his hands locked behind him, watched Napoleonically, rocking to and fro on his heels. The pasty man unclipped a crank-handle that terminated in a sort of trephine, which he cunningly inserted into a hole in the case, and turned. There was a stink of oil. The cogs of the machine alternately begged for mercy and gnashed their teeth. The pasty man put on to the turntable a phonograph record a quarter of an inch thick. He pulled a big lever, and the disc began to spin. Then he
dislodged
the arm with a blow of his fist, put the needle on the record (which was rocking like a see-saw) and out came the
Zampa
Overture.

Shouting to make himself heard above the din he said that this was a most remarkable invention. Take your ordinary gramophone—it was a heavy affair, unwieldy. It had a great tin horn on it, so that you could not take it anywhere. But this remarkable device—this was portable. The metal bowl
constituted
a horn. Everything clipped into place, so that all you had to do was close it … like that … snap home the clasps—so—pick it up by the handle (he almost dislocated his shoulder trying to do it) and walk off with it. Could Mr. Small not see what an acquisition this was? No? Ah, but say one called on friends. Well, one said hullo, and how are you, and how is so-
and-so
, and how’s business … and then there was nothing else to talk about. There one was, twiddling one’s thumbs with a whole evening to get through. But if one happened to be lucky enough
to possess such a machine as this, one opened it, and said: “Let’s have a little music!” Amid cries of astonishment, one became a social success. It was a genuine American machine, and had cost twelve pounds when it was new. But he, the pasty man, was prepared to part with it for four guineas.

Charles Small knows that his father was not interested in music, and was terrified of machinery of every description: he could not wind a watch without holding his breath, and had sternly forbidden his son to play with his most beloved
birthday-present
, an ingeniously-contrived German clockwork frog that jumped with a clatter while a key in its belly turned anti-
clockwise
to a standstill—I. Small had locked it up in a cupboard, asserting that it was dangerous.

But if a salesman showed him something, he did not know how not to buy it. He had no arguments. Shamefully conscious of his ignorance, he nodded and muttered, stroking his chin, cleared his throat, and said that he understood. In any case he was hopelessly vulnerable to a direct attack.

When the pasty man said “four guineas”, he said: “I wouldn’t give you more than thirty shillings for a thing like that”—hoping, of course, that the pasty man would shake his head, pick up his machine, and walk out of the shop.

But he replied: “All right then, I’ll let you have it for thirty shillings.” He would gratefully have accepted ten. He threw in twenty-four assorted records, somewhat the worse for wear, but when he was gone Charles Small’s father looked at the machine with hate. The infant Charles, hopping with excitement, said: “Daddy, can we play it?”

Now the old man was strong and authoritative. He shouted: “You? What are you doing here, what? Didn’t I told you you should keep out from the shop?”

He loomed large, dark, and dangerous. Charles lied: “I just came in … Daddy, can I play it?”

“Play it?
Play
it? Play what? Play it! What do you mean, play it? That’s all I’ve got to
do,
play? Get out from the
shop!
”

His father put the portable phonograph behind the counter. His mother did not see it until she stumbled over it two days later.

“What’s this?” she asked.

“What’s what? What do you mean, what’s this? … Oh that, that! A novelty—a gremophone.”

“Gramophones!
Gramophones!
That’s all he’s short of—
gramophones! Gramophones, now! A new madness—
gramophones
!”

“A poor devil came in, so he’s got this gremophone. So his wife, she’s being confined. It was a
mitzvah.
What’s five shillings?”

“Five shillings he’s got to throw away, the millionaire!
Gramophones
,
gramophones
he wants!” But she let him show her how it worked, and was nearly placated. Little Charles, luckily for him, forgot to correct his father and say: “You made a mistake, Daddy, it wasn’t five shillings, it was thirty shillings” —he was so passionately interested in the machine.

He shudders when he thinks of what might have happened if he had impulsively blurted out the truth at that moment. He would have been completely undone. He would have been slapped on several counts: (1) For contradicting his father. (2) For having lied when he said that he had only just come into the shop. (3) For having told the truth when his father chose to lie. (4) For upsetting his mother. She would have been dreadfully upset. “Thirty shillings he’s got to throw away on such rubbish! For
this
he’s got to go out and borrow! What’ve I done to deserve it? What’ve I done, what’ve I done?”

With a sidelong look of bitter hatred at little Charles the old man would have shouted: “Millie, I swear by my life and yours too, I should fall down dead on the spot where I stand, I didn’t give more than five shillings for this here gremaphone!”

Charles Small can see it all….

“By your mother’s life?”

The old man’s eyes grow wet as he says: “She’s dead and gone, God bless her, she should rest in peace! Leave her alone. My mother, God rest her soul, she’s got nothing to do with
gremaphones
.”

“Swear by your child’s life!”

“By my child’s life, I didn’t give a farden more than five shillings for this bleddy gremaphone!” I. Small is violently excited, now, and full of strong words: “So sure should I do good, and you too! May I bleddy well beg in the streets like a bleddy bugger——”

“
Beggar!
”

“Beggar,
schmegger!
That child should drop where he stands!”

At this Charles Small’s mother snatches her son to her bosom and sprinkles him with tears, while the gramophone runs down
with a reluctant squeak, and the old man, shouting down the crescendo of the
Zampa
Overture, howls: “May I be paralysed and you too! May I die! When I say five shillings, it’s five
shillings!
Five bleddy shillings! Or may I be buried alive!”

There is a pause for breath. The old man—he will never learn—becomes calm, so that he sighs with relief. His puny rage is exhausted, now that he believes that he has sworn his lie out of existence. Then, with a slow ominous nod, she says: “So, that’s what you are, eh? As long as I know. All right, as long as I know. Thirty shillings he rushes out and spends on rubbishing gramophones. I’m ashamed to look the family in the face. I should go and borrow money from Father, so this one can go and buy gramophones for thirty shillings like a millionaire. All right—now I know what you are. As long as I know. It’s all right.”

The old man shouts again: “By your life and mine and the bleddy child’s! Five shillings! Didn’t I told you?”

“Didn’t I
tell
you. You’re in England now—talk English…. Thirty shillings! Well, go on—play. Play gramophones. Put it on a pram, and go into the streets, and play—hold out a hat for pennies—that’s all you’re fit for! Go on, what are you waiting for? Musician! Myeh!”

Then, day after day and night after night little Charles hears nothing but gramophone, gramophone, gramophone. If his deservedly unhappy father, depressed and discouraged, sits down without appetite, fiddling with his knife and fork and staring blankly at his plate, it is: “What’s the matter now? What do you want to do with it? Put it on the gramophone?” When luck sends him a few pounds and he rushes feverishly to the bank, one jump ahead of an uttered cheque, he is admonished: “Don’t come back with a grand piano, you and your gramophones.” If he suggests that it might be useful to have a telephone installed, there is an outcry: “If it’s not gramophones, it’s telephones. Musician!”

T
HIS
is what would inevitably have happened if Charles Small had blurted out the truth on that occasion. But he had already learned not only to lie, but to deal in lies. Hating himself for a sickening little sycophant he remembers that when his father said “five shillings” his mother looked at him quickly for
confirmation
, and he repeated: “Only five shillings.” She liked music: it was genteel. They played that horrible phonograph every day. He squirms when he thinks of it. The records were worn out, the clockwork was old and tired, and although one was specifically instructed to use a needle once only the old man, thunderously didactic and portentously informative, bellowed: “Once!
Once!
Fools believe it—so that’s how they sell needles, and make fortunes! Take no notice!” This old fool who couldn’t find his bottom if he wanted to wipe it, this gull of the world, this mark, this fore-damned victim of the clumsiest rogues in town, was prudent when it came to pins and profoundly wise in the matter of gramophone needles at a shilling a hundred. The shop shut and the supper table cleared, he became great; he called for music. Charles Small remembers, all too clearly, how the rickety turntable rocked and swayed, and how sometimes, in the middle of some scratching, indeterminate ecstasy, something in the guts of the black box went
prrut!
—and the glory slid in a slow glissando until working hard on the handle and driving home the blunted serrations of the trephine he made the disc spin fast enough to wind the music back.

One evening his parents went out to talk to someone about some business premises that were to let, leaving Charles alone in the house with the servant, Mollie. Creeping down from the attic, or tiptoeing up from the basement (he forgets which), she said: “What about a bit of music?” Charles dragged out the phonograph, although he was under oath not to touch it, and put on a husky record of a bass-baritone singing
In
Cellar
Cool.
He will never forget that dreadful evening. In the middle of the line:

there was a quick, thick snap, and the needle snarled and sneered in the worn grooves of the record which spun slower and slower until it stopped. He turned the handle in a frenzy of terror, but it swung loose. His most furious efforts elicited nothing but a tired squeak from the inside of the black box beyond the chafed hole where the crank-shaft went in. The worn mainspring had snapped. “Now you’ve been and done it,” said Mollie.

Pale with fright but stiff with resolution, Charles got a
screwdriver
and took out the top of the phonograph: he believed that he could put the machine right by tightening a screw, loosening a screw, or banging something. The only tools in the house (the old man could not knock a nail into a bit of wood without smashing his fingers) were a screwdriver, a hammer, a pair of pincers, and a mushroom-shaped cold chisel which some workman had left behind. With these tools young Charles prepared to go to work.

The interior of the old phonograph bewildered and scared him. It did not take him long to learn what happened when one wound it up: a great flat cylinder set upon a cogged wheel four inches in diameter turned, controlled by a stubborn bit of blue steel that clicked doggedly into its teeth. These teeth met and locked with the teeth of another cogged wheel. The whole machine was made up of toothy steel wheels, sticky and stinking with oil and black with graphite. Somewhere to one side of it there was a “centrifugal governor”—a vertical bar crowned with three lead balls on little hinged rods, that whirled in a blue-grey blur if you touched something. The trouble, Charles divined, was in the cylindrical box; so he unscrewed the screw, prised with the screwdriver, levered the lid off, and discovered a coiled oily spring. The innermost part of this spring had been attached by a screw through a cut slot to a steel bar. The slotted portion of the spring was still screwed down, but a quarter of an inch beyond the slot there was a hideous gap. In his innocence Charles Small said to himself:
All
I
have
to
do
is,
take
out
that
bit
of
spring,
make
another
hole
in
the
broken
end,
screw
it
all
down
again,
and
there
we
are.
How he pities himself when he thinks of it! Confident that he could cut through the blue steel with the sixpenny hammer and the eightpenny screwdriver, he went to work on the coiled spring. It stuck. There was no use trying to loosen it from the periphery, so he went to work from the centre, where he could get leverage. The clock struck nine. It was necessary
to get everything done in half an hour. He threw his weight on the handle of the screwdriver, and then, with a triumphant scream that he will hear to the last day he lives, the spring sprang free. It shot up into the air, spattering the ceiling with black oil and came down shivering, as it seemed, in delight at its liberation.

“Mollie, Mollie, Mollie!” he cried. Then he and Mollie tried to re-coil the spring and put it back, but it was as slippery and strong as an Indian wrestler in a pit of mud. Mollie with her strong, stupid red hands and Charles with his soft and sensitive white fingers struggled like the very devil, sweating and straining, forcing the spring inch by inch into its box, working from the circumference to the centre. God knows how long they worked. Charles Small knows that after twelve or fifteen attempts they got the spring half-way back, when familiar footsteps sounded in the street. There was no mistaking his mother’s brisk, busy trot—she always sounded as if she had six legs, and was hurrying to call a doctor in a matter of life and death. (Thinking of her, Charles Small thinks of an ant wearing boots.) His father, though, walked portentously, like a policeman pounding a beat. Hearing him coming round a corner you stood aside, expecting to see some big-booted brute as heavy as Hackenschmidt. You were astonished when you saw a man of average size and nondescript shape, wearing respectable shoes, size eight. Their voices were audible, too. A foreigner, trying to understand what they were saying by the way they were saying it, would have clutched at his heart and turned pale. She might have been saying:
Police!
Fire
engines!
A
doctor!
An
escaped
madman
has
broken
in,
set
fire
to
the
house,
and
slashed
us
with
a
butcher’s
knife!
My
baby’s
head
is
hanging
by
a
thread
and
I
am
burning
and
bleeding
to
death!
Help!
And the old man might have been saying, in his voice of thunder:
Call
out
the
Guards
—
every
man
to
his
post!
One
hundred
and
twenty
rounds
of
ammunition
for
every
man.
Fix
bayonets!
Stand
back
to
back,
in
the
name
of
God
and
the
King,
my
lads,
and
fight
it
out
to
the
bitter
end.

But his mother was saying: “… Yes, it’s in a good position, but look at the neighbourhood!”

“What’s the matter with the neighbourhood? Piccadilly, you want?”

“I’m not used to such neighbourhoods.”

“The neighbourhood’s good enough for Woolworth’s, the
neighbourhood’s good enough for Thomas Lipton’s, the
neigh
bourhood’
s good enough for Lyons’s—so for you the
neighbourhood
’s not good enough!”

“—And the kitchen—a hole! Pitch-dark——!”

The key had rattled angrily and the door was closed. They were coming upstairs, and now their voices were turned on full….

“… Kitchens she wants! All right. So I’ll take the, the Savoy Hotel with the Ritz, so she should have chicken!”

“—
Kitchens!
”

“Kitchens,
schmitchens!
”

“I’d be ashamed to ask anybody to a place like that!”

“You want I should get a place to
ask
people to? I’ll take Park Lane. Buckingham Palace I’ll take. The Tower from London I’ll take, so you can
ask
people. The British Museum I’ll take——”

—Charles and Mollie threw all their strength into one last effort; whereupon the spring leapt up again with a thin shivering shriek, and Mr. and Mrs. Small opened the door of the
sitting-room
and saw them standing, grey with sweat, white with fear, and black with dirty oil, over the wreckage of the gutted
phonograph
on the table.

For two or three seconds his father was silent, paralysed with wrath; but his mother was triumphantly calm. She nodded gravely, compressing her lips. It was quite all right. She had known it all along. Everything was exactly as it should be. She said: “You see? What did I tell you? Go on, run round the corner and buy a few more gramophones. Go on, what are you waiting for—run out, buy!”

The old man found his voice. It came out in an ululation: “Bleddy murderer! Snotty-nose! Stinker! Robber! Bleddy pig!”—and struck Charles with a rolled-up evening newspaper.

“Not on the head!” screamed Mrs. Small, “for God’s sake, not on the head!”

The newspaper—it was the
Star
—came down again. The old man’s teeth were bared, his cheeks were crimson, and his eyes were full of blood, sweat and tears. Yet, striking out with all his strength, while he shouted: “Beggar his bleddy head!” he could not hit hard enough to bend the evening paper.

Charles Small, frightened by the gramophone rather than by the impotent rage of his father, and not a bit hurt, burst into
tears; whereupon his mother, squealing like a bleeding sow, snatched him up, tore the newspaper out of her husband’s hand, and cried: “Madman! Stop it, or I’ll jump out of the window and call for the police!”

Then Mollie said: “Oh, it’s all right—I done it. Didn’t I, Charley?”

Charles Small hammers at his skull with his knuckles as he remembers that he did not say
no
, but shrugged his shoulders, and snivelled, wiping his nose with his right forefinger. Why the devil couldn’t he simply have said: “No you didn’t do it. I did it!” and take the consequences—a breathy admonition, a windy threat, and a slap that would not have knocked the skin off a rice pudding?

But he was silent, God forgive him, and no cock crowed, while Mollie said: “I’ll pay for it, don’t worry. I’ll get it mended.”

Mollie was as good as her word. There was a sturdy young mechanic who worked for the plumber in the next street—a fine young fellow named Lygo who could turn his hand to anything. He did the job for five-and-sixpence, the bare cost of a new mainspring, and put the entire machine into perfect order. When she brought it back to the house, old man Small shouted: “Take it away! I want you should never show me it again!”

“What d’you want me to do with it?” she asked, roughly. (In spite of his menacing expression and his tinpot thunderings, the old man never managed to get a respectful word out of
anybody
—even the skivvyish Mollie, illegitimate offspring of a
gas-fitter
’s mate and a kitchen maid, conceived in the shadows of a broom cupboard and born in Marylebone Workhouse—even she couldn’t take him seriously.)

“Keep it!” he cried. “Let me not see it again!”

“Coo, ta very much, Mr. Small!” she said, and took him at his word for once, On her next day off she carried it back to young Lygo, who, as luck would have it, knew an old lady who was looking for a phonograph of that sort, and whom he coaxed into buying it for three pounds, not a penny of which he kept for himself, although he was entitled to a little commission. Mollie went shopping and came home in a black straw hat wreathed in blue and yellow roses, a violet plush dress cut rather low at the neck, and high-heeled black-and-white boots; all picked up for next to nothing in a Ladies’ Wardrobe shop—a sinister
establishment
near Praed Street, where Paddington tarts, down on their
luck, used to sell their spare finery. To make matters worse, she had got a soiled white umbrella with an ivorine handle and an astonishing necklace of huge orange-coloured beads which hung on her like a marigold garland on a sacred cow, and she had crammed her massive fists into white gloves striped with black over the knuckles. From her stiffly-bent left arm dangled one of those silly little things called a “Dorothy Bag”. There is no fun in being well dressed unless you can show yourself to people who appreciate nice things. Mollie showed herself to young Lygo, who at once invited her to go with him, at her earliest convenience, to a music hall. Then she let herself be seen by Mrs. Small.

… Now, Charles Small starts telling himself that
fundamentally
his mother was of a sweet nature … twisted, like
barley-sugar
, but positively sweet. But on reflection he curses himself for a fool, for a lying fool, a foolish crook with a bit of grit in his conscience, trying to high-pressure himself into believing his own lies…. Sweet! Is this a recommendation? Of course she was sweet—sweet like sugar cane. Strip her, peel her, crush her, smash her between irresistible iron rollers, and from out of the splintered husk oozed sweetness, if you like—dirty, muddy, pulpy, sticky sweetness that spoiled your appetite for solid things—sweetness that rotted your teeth so that you writhed in torment until they were pulled out; when you fell back, a suckling babe again, limp and defenceless—to hell with such sweetness! Such sugar is symptomatic of disease, a pathognomonic sign pointing to coma and death. True sweetness, healthy sugar, is transmuted into energy and strength. This happens only when it does not stay sweet.