The Song of the Flea (21 page)

“I’ve only been working there a few days,” said Joanna Bowman, “and I don’t know anything much about them. But you seem to know them all and dislike them pretty thoroughly. And still you’re on the best of terms with them. How’s that?”

After an embarrassed silence, Pym said: “Proudfoot has been a good friend to me.”

They had arrived at the
George
and
Dragon,
where they found a quiet table. Pym ordered drinks and food, and hoped that in making her laugh at his whimsical commentary on the
misspelling
of an item on the menu he had changed the subject of conversation.

But while they were eating the main dish she asked: “In what way has Proudfoot been a good friend to you?”

Pym left a piece of bread half-broken and said: “That’s a long story.”

“I don’t believe it, you know. None of these stories ever
are very long—not
as
stories. One makes them long to make excuses. The stories are short. Only the explanations are long.”

“I don’t agree with you,” said Pym. “Explanations are short and stories are long. Proudfoot helped me when I couldn’t help myself. I couldn’t help myself because I didn’t know how. I got into trouble because I compounded a felony. I
compounded
a felony because I was sorry for the wrong people at the wrong time. (Proudfoot calls me ‘Sorry Pym’ because I’m sorry for people.) I’m grateful to Proudfoot because I can’t help being grateful; because I see ingratitude as a piggish sort of vice—and I hate it. Ingratitude is the Mark of the Beast.
There
are explanations; but where’s the story?”

“I daresay you’ve done a good turn or two in your time?”

“I suppose so.”

“Did you expect gratitude?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Then you expected to find your Mark of the Beast on your friends?”

“I hoped not to.”

“You didn’t look for gratitude. You were ready for
in
gratitude. You just said so.

“I suppose so—yes.”

“And yet you regard gratitude as a good thing.”

“Yes, a good thing—a necessary thing. Even dogs——”

“—And
you
were always grateful?”

“Only too grateful, always.”

“In other words, you make a virtue of it. You say it’s a necessity, yet you make a fuss about it. You believe a man to be a crook, but because he did some little thing for you at a given moment, you are prepared to follow him into crookery. Is that how it is?”

“No, indeed! That is
not
how it is,” said Pym.

“If it isn’t, what are you doing where you don’t want to be, talking about your friend Proudfoot when his back is turned? What are you doing with his five-pound note in your pocket? Don’t imagine I didn’t recognise your voice when you spoke on the phone before. What were you doing? Chewing a pencil?”

“No,” said Pym.

“You may ask me what I’m doing here. I’ll tell you exactly. I’m a shorthand-typist earning my living. I’ve been working at this job about three days. If I find it in any way offensive, I shall get to hell out of it. That’s where we differ, you and I: I get to hell out of things, you get to hell into things. Now, before I got myself involved with a cheap crook, I’d cut my throat.”

“Without paying your debts?” said Pym.

She said: “What debts? How do you pay the sort of debts you’re talking about? If I had to lie down in the gutter so as to be on the same level as someone before I could pay a debt, I’d think of myself as belonging to that gutter. In any case, I don’t have debts. I’d put my head in a gas-oven before I had debts like that. It’s the old business of losing the whole world rather than your own soul. If these people are what you say they are, why do you think they’re kind? They put a pound’s worth of kindness on an idiot like you as an idiot like you might put ten shillings on a horse—gambling on something to come. Only in your case, there isn’t any gamble—you are a dead cert. A horse can break its leg, but you won’t let them down. Oh no, I know you! You’ll stand up for your crooks, or whatever they are, to the bitter end. You’ll give away all you have. And why?—Because you like to see yourself like something you read about in a book somewhere. I don’t think it’s a good thing to do. I’m tired of this kind of faking. I don’t like it. Don’t do it any more!”

Pym said nothing. The waitress had brought the bill, which amounted to four-and-eightpence. He left five shillings and fourpence.

She said: “All the same, you know and I know that you’ve got Proudfoot’s fiver in your pocket.”

“I have,” said Pym. “My idea was that I wanted to offer you a good meal and a bottle of wine.”

“Did you imagine that would make an impression on me?”

“I wasn’t thinking of making an impression on you,” said Pym. “Make an impression—in clothes like these! Try and fool you with a lunch! My dear lady, a number of things you’ve
said about me are pretty near the truth, but don’t let that kid you into believing that you’re right all the time. If I offer
anything
I like it to be good. If I play at being host, I do my best to have a satisfied guest. When I asked you to lunch I was under the impression that I had more money in my pocket than I really had. Since you insist on dragging the matter on to the dirty tablecloth, I thought I had a pound note, but I’d forgotten that I’d paid my rent. I didn’t want to cancel the date, and I wasn’t going to humiliate myself. So I borrowed from Proudfoot. And now you know.”

He was angry and uncomfortable now.

She said gently: “Forgive me if I hurt you. I’m the last woman on earth to sit down with at a little friendly lunch. I’m a rotten guest.” And she reached out and squeezed one of Pym’s wrists for a second in a strong cool hand; it was an asexual gesture expressive of friendly sympathy. “I didn’t come rushing out to lunch with you after a two-minutes’ chat because I wanted a free meal, you know.”

“I didn’t imagine for one moment that you did,” said Pym.

“Why, as a matter of curiosity, did you think I did?” she asked.

“Ah-ha! Here we go again!
You
don’t imagine that I invited you to lunch after two minutes’ conversation with a view to making passes at you and luring you to my divan, do you?”

“I don’t know. It wouldn’t be very extraordinary if that were the case, would it? … No, don’t get angry. That has been known to happen before, hasn’t it?”

“I don’t doubt it, Miss Bowman; but a woman of your
high-velocity
nickel-plated sharp-nosed-bullet penetration—a woman who has seen so much of people and life in general—a woman like you, ought to have as much common savvy as it takes to tell the difference between a man like me and a gutter-crawling skirt-chaser. Your big bright eyes, lady, ought by now to have informed your big bright brain of the difference between me and the man who makes the date with the waitress or waits outside the Carreras factory when the girls are coming out; or seduces servant girls; or toys with typists.”

“Is there really so much difference?” she asked.

Before Pym had cleared his throat of suffocating indignation, she went on: “No, I don’t think that you’re fundamentally so very much different. Don’t fly off the handle yet! All this is just talk—silly talk. No … I should think you asked me out to lunch for the same reason as I accepted your invitation. I should say you rather liked the look of me and thought that it might be a nice thing to sit down and talk to me—you being a solitary sort of person.”

“I admit I liked the look of you, and I can’t deny that I thought it
would
be nice to sit down and eat something with you and talk to you,” said Pym; “but I was thinking in terms of a restaurant, not a police court—conversation, not
cross-examination
.”

“I know: you’d like me better if we chattered about, admiring each other and being polite. But just think of all the bother and all the waste one saves by a few words of straight talk. Ten minutes of straight talk cuts out weeks and weeks of lies and shame and creeping into corners. Didn’t
your
big bright brain tell you that if you’d said: ‘Come out to lunch; I’ve only got a shilling; let’s have a bit of bread and a cup of coffee’ I’m the sort of person who would have admired you for it? But no, you change your voice over the telephone—you are a very bad actor, by the way—and hide in doorways, and go in for all sorts of unnecessary diplomacy. And it’s so much more comfortable to go directly to the point, as the crow flies. And that’s why I said all that I said about weakness and faking and being crooked.”

Pym could only say: “Remarkable woman!”

“I suppose I am. I try to be an honest woman; but I’ve got so sick of littleness in people that I’ve got brutal in my way of speaking. But I hate to hurt, you know; I’m not cruel by nature.”

“Tell me about yourself.”

“There isn’t time now. I have work to do.”

“I seem to remember your saying that stories are short and only excuses are long,” said Pym.

“I don’t want to talk about myself now. I’ll talk about myself next time we meet.”

“Soon?” asked Pym.

“Yes.”

“To-night? To-morrow?”

“I’m not certain until a week-end. Ring me at the office—or would you rather I rung you?”

“I haven’t a telephone. I live …”—Pym swallowed a high stomachful of pride—“I live, as a matter of fact, in Busto’s Apartments, Routledge Street, W.C. It’s a hole, a dump. Where do you live?”

“I live at 9, William and Mary Square, Victoria. I haven’t a telephone, either, so ring me at the office.”

Before they parted, Pym said: “I’m very glad I met you, Joanna.”

“You’d better call me Jo.”

“Your friends call you Jo? Mine usually call me Johnny.”

“No, I just prefer Jo. I don’t like Johnny—I don’t like these tenderised names. What’s the matter with John?”

“Nothing; but if you’re on friendly terms with a man it’s as hard to call him John or Charles or Richard as it is to talk plain English to a baby.”

“The more’s the pity, John. See you soon. Thank you for the lunch—that was a nice lunch.”

When Pym went back to the
Sunday
Special
to collect Dr. Weissensee’s typescript, the porter said: “You back a winner, or what?”

“Winner? What winner?”

“You look as if you just won the Irish Sweep.”

Pym laughed and said: “I just want to nip upstairs and pick up something I left behind this morning.”

The porter said: “That’s all right.” He was an ex-
sergeant-major
and was notorious for his dour inflexibility; but he knew something of men, and he knew that a happy man is a man to be trusted. “You go on up,” he said to Pym.

A
S
he opened the door of the big room in which the Features Editor used to sit at a littered desk while he kept an eye upon his department, Pym heard strange noises. A man was crying
“Whooo!”
in a high falsetto; a woman was screaming, and another man was laughing. Only one typewriter was ticking, and Pym knew without looking that at this typewriter sat Hoffer Blake, a worried old man who wrote and edited a column entitled
Give
Youth
A
Chance.
Hoffer Blake was typing from morning to night: he was a hack of the old school who had the stunned look of a punch-drunk boxer. He arrived at ten o’clock in the morning, hopping first on his left foot and then on his right; threw himself into his chair, and worked like a madman until seven o’clock, when he went out, drooping in such a manner that one expected to see him pause in the doorway to spit out a tooth and wipe the blood from his nose. Then he went to the
Star
and
Garter
for sausages and mashed potatoes and a pint of beer; and it was said that if you rang a glass in his ear he would sit up with a start, remembering the bell that rings when a typewriter platen jerks to the end of a line, and plunge his gnarled fingers into his plate.

Hoffer Blake was hard at work, as usual, but the others had made a group at the Features Editor’s desk. The Woman’s Page Editor, Jennie Tully, was saying: “Well, who would have thought it?”

“Talk about dirt!” cried the Assistant Features Editor.

The Leader Writer, with a grave expression, said: “I have had occasion in the course of my work to read erotica. Yes, as a man whose duty it is to be informed, to know just a little of everything. I am pretty well acquainted with filth; but of all——”

Catching sight of Pym, the Assistant Features Editor said: “Hey, Pym! Come and look at this bit.”

Pym went to the desk and there he saw a thumbed pile of
onion-skin paper, closely covered with violet typewriting, lying upon an open manilla file.

“What the hell are you doing with that? I left that here this morning. I came back to collect it. What the hell do you think you’re doing, fiddling about with other people’s papers?”

“You don’t mean to say you wrote this?” said Jennie Tully, with wide-open eyes.

“
You?”
said the Leader Writer, with horror.

“It isn’t mine,” said Pym. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I haven’t even looked at the stuff yet. It’s supposed to be part of a book by Dr. Weissensee. They want me to rewrite it. Why, what’s the matter with it?”

“Come and look at this bit,” said the Assistant Features Editor.

Pym read twenty lines, and his face was red as he looked toward Jennie Tully and said: “Good God!”

The Assistant Features Editor slapped his thigh. “What a man! ‘Good God!’ he says. Go on the stage, Pym; go on the stage!”

“This isn’t mine,” said Pym, taking hold of the typescript, jostling the Leader Writer aside and covering it in the folder. “It has nothing to do with me. I swear I haven’t even looked at it—if I had, do you think I’d leave it lying around?”

“Who’s Dr. Weissensee?” asked the Assistant Features Editor.

“I don’t know,” said Pym. “I don’t know anything at all about her or it.”

“Her?”
said the Leader Writer.

“A Viennese, a woman: that’s all I know.”

“A woman! A woman wrote
that?”
said the Leader Writer.
“A
woman?”

“Name and address, name and address!” said the Assistant Features Editor; while Jennie Tully shook her head and whistled.

Pym said: “I just came in to collect this. I’m sorry, I’ve got to go.”

The Leader Writer said: “I see that you are interested in erotica. I have a friend, a Doctor of Medicine, who has one of
the finest collections in England. He corresponded with Havelock Ellis. If I might borrow——”

“It’s not mine to lend, word of honour it isn’t,” said Pym.

“Then if I might copy a few pages …?”

“How can I let you copy pages of someone else’s work?”

“Work!” said Jennie Tully.

“Damned hard work,” said the Assistant Features Editor, “if you ask me!”

“No, please—you must excuse me,” said Pym.

Gripping the manilla file between his elbow and his ribs, he left the office and went out. In the passage he met Steeple, who had been eating and drinking with a general because there was talk of war. Steeple clapped Pym on the shoulder and said: “Come on, come on, come on now! No more Prose Poems, eh? No more Little Gems of Prose, eh? No more Little Flowers of Saint Pym—all right? More story, less adjectives—okay?”

“Whatever you say,” said Pym, bitterly. “No adjectives at all, if you like. No adverbs, either. All nouns and verbs, none of them to exceed two syllables.”

“That’s the spirit! That’s the spirit! Buckle down to it, my boy.” Steeple went to his office in a rosy mist of Chambertin and new ideas, and Pym went home.

*

There was a Puritan hiding under Pym’s bed. In his brain there were certain raw spots—live wires scraped bright and dangerous which, when touched, gave him shocks.

Turning over the pages of Dr. Weissensee’s typescript he remembered a hot afternoon at the seaside, eighteen years ago, when he was in his eleventh year. Sand castles, much as he liked to build them, were undignified. It was unbecoming for a man of his years to play kids’ games, squatting on his haunches and moulding turrets in a tin pail, and cutting out battlements with a wooden spade. He lingered with secret yearning at the edge of a group of nine-year-olds who were building a vast walled edifice with a moat and a drawbridge, wanting to give them a few useful hints. But he turned scornfully, with a sardonic laugh, and went for a walk on the pier, where the slot machines
were. He had ninepence. One penny he squandered on the fortune-telling machine: a black-browed wax gipsy with a
fly-blown
face passed a dusty wax hand from side to side; there was a grinding and grating inside the green cast-iron case, and a rusty slot poked out a pink oblong of cardboard on which was printed these words:
You
are
brave
and
generous,
far
too
generous.
Take
care
of
your
health.
If
you
work
a
little
harder
you
will
be
rich
and
happy.

He put the card in a secret pocket, along with a lucky pebble with a hole in it.

There was a machine which invited him to guess his weight: if he guessed his weight he would get his penny back. He knew that he weighed five stone thirteen pounds, because his mother had had him weighed in a chemist’s shop the day before; so he turned the indicator to
5st.
13lbs,
stood on the platform and put in his penny, cupping his hand under the slot marked
Returned
Pennies
Here.
Something clanked and the lying finger on the false dial pointed to
5st.
8lbs,
He kicked the machine—forgetting that he was wearing white canvas shoes—and hurt his foot.

Scowling at the sea, he imagined that he was the captain of a rakish ship flying the black flag: he boarded the pier, put everybody to the sword, smashed the weighing machine to pieces, took out all the pennies, and sailed away to the Dry Tortugas with a “Yo, heave ho! and a bottle of rum”.

Cheered by this fantasy, he went to what he called the Cat Machine. There were five grotesque cats on a wall, and a silver pistol: you inserted your penny and pulled a lever, and the pistol loaded itself with five steel balls. All you had to do was hit the cats between the eyes and they fell down and back came the penny. It was virtually free entertainment. He took careful aim at the first cat’s forehead and missed it clean. The second shot hit it in the belly. He singled out another cat and winged it in the left shoulder. His fourth shot bounced off the middle cat’s nose. He was angry. There was only one shot left. The hot sun scorched his neck. He was Captain Crouch in Major Charles Gilson’s story, who carried no luggage but a pound tin of Bulldog Shag, a big revolver and a box of bullets: who had a
cork foot and did great deeds up the Kasai River … The rhinoceros was charging, it was twenty yards away, ten yards away, five yards away—he could feel its burning breath on his forehead … Then—
bing!—
right between the eyes!

One cat fell down. Pym was content: he had something for his penny. There was another shooting-machine with a revolving mechanical hare. This iron animal had a white spot painted behind its shoulder. You put your penny in the slot and the hare ran round and round. The directions said that if you hit it on the white spot it would utter a lifelike shriek and you would get your penny back. But there was only one shot.

Alan Quartermaine Pym, dying of starvation in the mountains, threw his last cartridge into the breach and, raising himself on his skinny old elbows, drew a bead on the bounding impala.
Crash!
The hare stopped dead and the penny did not come back: he had missed.

Before he lay down to die in the eternal snows he looked about him and saw a disconsolate little boy of about his own age, picking his nose and moping, as if he contemplated suicide, against the rail of the pier. Pym still had fivepence. “What’s your name?” he asked.

The other boy, moving his forefinger and thumb like an expert testing the shape of an invisible pearl, said: “Augustus.”

“My name is John.”

“That’s a common name.”

“Do you want to play football?”

“What with?”

“I mean that football over there. We each put a penny in the slots and a ball comes out. Then you wiggle the handles and all the little men kick. The one that scores the first goal gets his penny back.”

Augustus looked at him contemptuously and said: “Ain’t got a penny.”

“I’ll lend you one,” said Pym.

Augustus (young Pym was reminded of his mother, hastily recorking a bottle of Scrubb’s cloudy ammonia) put his finger back into its proper nostril and said: “If you like. I don’t mind.”

“If you pick your nose you get worms,” said Pym.

“I like worms.”

“My mother says it’s a dirty habit.”

“I thought you said we was gonna play football. You promised faithfully we was gonna play football. Why did you ask me to play football if you didn’t mean it?”

“All right, come on, then, I’m ready—let’s play football,” said Pym, without enthusiasm.

Augustus said: “I’m Aston Villa. You’re the Wolves.”

“I
want to be Aston Villa,” said Pym; “I’m lending
you
the penny.”

“Mingy!” said Augustus. “Mingy, stingy, mean!”

“Oh, all right, then—you be Aston Villa. You know how to play? I’ll put the pennies in, and then the ball comes out. If
you
knock the ball into
my
goal you get
your
penny back. If
I
knock the ball into
your
goal,
I
get my penny back. Are you ready?”

Augustus grunted a grudging assent and Pym put two pennies into the slots and pressed the lever that released the ball, which rolled towards Augustus, who instantly caused all his players to kick; whereupon the ball flew into the goal on Pym’s side and one of the pennies came tinking down. Augustus put it in his pocket.

Pym was indignant. “You cheated,” he said; “you’re a fouler. You didn’t give me a chance!”

“I done what you said and I won.”

“I’m not going to play with you any more. Give me back my penny.”

“I won it.”

“I only lent it to you.”

“I won.”

“I lent it to you to
play
with.”

“I won it. I won it off of you, playing for keeps.”

“I lent it to you!” shouted little Pym, nearly crying. “You’re a thief!”

“I’m a what?”

“You’re a thief!” Pym came close to Augustus and, pale with anger, said: “You give me back that penny.”

Augustus, who had been investigating one of his ears,
scrutinised the operative finger, put it back again, looked at Pym and then screamed:
“Oh
Mum!
Mum!”

A big woman in black said: “What is it, Gus?”

“’E called me a thief!”

She said to Pym: “You go away and leave people alone, you little liberty-taker! You run away, or I’ll give you something to cry
for!”

Then Pym realised that he was crying and he was ashamed; but he said: “He had no right to steal my penny.”

“Gussie,
did
you
steal
that
little
boy’s
penny?”

“God’s honour, Mum, I never stole nothink.”

Before he could explain, Pym found himself alone and
disconsolate
by the football machine with only threepence left of his ninepence. He had intended to spend at least twopence on ice cream, but now he had no appetite for ice cream. The enchantment had died out of the day, and he was very sad. Remembering the weighing machine he went back to it, set the indicator at
5st.
13lbs,
and put in another penny. The same machine could not lie twice. Yet it did: his penny went down and away for ever.

Misery took possession of the soul of the ten-year-old Pym on the pier. He went away, sat on one of the free seats and wept. While he was weeping he dreamed evil day-dreams of revenge … penny for penny, eye for eye, injustice for injustice, tooth for tooth, insult for insult, trickery for trickery. Soon someone said: “What’s the matter, little boy? What are you crying for? Britons mustn’t cry. What’s the matter? Are you lost? There now, wipe your eyes and tell me all about it.”

A fine linen handkerchief, delicately perfumed, fell on to Pym’s lap: it was too beautiful to blow into, so he dabbed at his eyes with it and, raising his head to say ‘Thank you’, saw a
magnificent
military-looking gentleman standing over him. He was wearing a blue flannel blazer with golden buttons and his breast pocket was covered by an enormous badge in the shape of a shield, heavy with gold thread. His trousers were of perfectly white flannel, sharply creased, and Pym wondered how he had managed to keep his white buckskin shoes so clean. The gentleman’s face was as fresh and pleasant as his clothes.
He had brilliant blue eyes, wide open and disconcertingly candid; a healthy red skin, unwrinkled like the skin of an apple; and a half-moon of silky white moustache. His hair was white, too, and he held himself erect. The hand with which he took back his handkerchief was square and strong, with manicured nails, and a gold ring set with a round yellow stone in which was cut a coat-of-arms. In his other hand he held a panama hat and a gold-headed malacca cane. He said: “Come on now, my boy. Speak up.” His manner was brusque, but his eyes were kind. “Speak up now, little fellow—what are you crying for?”