The Song of the Flea (23 page)

“Keep the box, if you like,” said Pym.

M’Gurk did so; but two days later he sent Pym a brand-new box of matches in an envelope, with an invitation to “Come and take wine” with his family. It was only a bottle of pale ale, provocative of urine rather than conviviality, but Pym was attracted by the M’Gurks. Mr. M’Gurk had a funereal face and a bacchanalian soul: Pym relished the contrast; and he liked Nina M’Gurk for her uninhibited laughter and her coarse, kind, shameless talk. He saw her as an honest woman, and he loved honesty.

“No intrusion, Mr. M’Gurk,” he said. “What’s up?”

“Nina, Boysie and I would like to say good-bye to you.”

“What? Are you thinking of leaving?”

“We are on our way.”

“Where are you off to?” asked Pym.

“We are going from Hither to Thither,” said M’Gurk. “Come and say farewell to the Little Woman.”

“Ten minutes,” said Pym. Having shaved and dressed he went downstairs with his rewritten article in his pocket. Nina M’Gurk greeted him with a wet, noisy kiss and shouted:

“Here we go again, Mr. Pym—off again! Off on our travels again! Here to-day and gone to-morrow! That’s life for you. Come along in, dear, just to say good-bye.”

Pym saw then that Mr. M’Gurk’s cadaverous face was more lank and rigid than usual. The boy, Boysie, was tying up an insecure suitcase with a length of cord.

“Is anything wrong?” asked Pym.

Boysie answered him; he said: “The usual.”

“Usual?”

“On our way again,” said Nina, laughing. But she sucked her laughter in—she did not let it out. “On our way again, thank God! Don’t you pity the poor beggars that get stuck in steady jobs? Payments on the house, payments on the furniture, endowment policy, burial society? Burial society!—I ask you.” She choked on a big, fat laugh.
“Burial
society!”

“Nina,” said Mr. M’Gurk; and his macabre face came alive and became sad. “Neens, darling!”

She could not stop laughing. “But I ask you—
burial
society!” she gasped. “Can you imagine
me?”

Boysie rose with a sigh, threw down the cord, dipped a sticky tumbler into the jug on the washstand and threw water into her face. She stopped laughing and began to cry. Boysie went back to work.

“The little woman,” said Mr. M’Gurk, tenderly wiping her face with a coloured handkerchief, “is fed up and I, for one, can’t blame her.”

“I’ve never had anything,” said Nina M’Gurk; and she turned and hid her face in a pillow. Her husband made an apologetic gesture.

“It’s the old, old story,” said Boysie. “We flopped again—Acton Hippodrome. Nearest we ever got to the West End, wasn’t it, Pop?”

“Willesden,” said Mr. M’Gurk in his sepulchral croak, “that was the nearest.”

“And so here we are again,” said Boysie.

“I’m sorry,” said Nina, sitting up. “I’ve never behaved like this before.”

“Oh, no,” muttered Boysie.

“—But I get tired. Twenty years I’ve had to put up with it. Boysie was born in the Intake Infirmary. I was on the stage until . . the labour pains started before I finished my act … but I went on. Didn’t I?”

“Neens, love!” said Mr. M’Gurk.

Boysie said: “If you want to know, the act’s corny. It stinks—that’s what it does—pooh!” He held his nose and pulled an imaginary lavatory chain.

“I’ve never had a house or any place of my own; I’ve never had any furniture of my own; I’ve never had any credit—I’ve never had anything,” said Nina. “And this is the thirty-first time we’ve been kicked out into the street for not paying our rent. One pound a week, and we haven’t even got that! And I
can’t
pawn the instruments again! I can’t do it! How did I get them out last time?”

“Stop talking,” said Mr. M’Gurk.

“Why don’t you change your act?” said Pym.

Nina went on: “Do you know how I got his trombone out last time? I——”

“Listen,” said Pym, dreading what he expected to hear, “listen. I have an idea, only you must listen. Will you listen?”

“Listen to Mr. Pym,” said Mr. M’Gurk.

Pym thought hard and fast. “You’ve had setbacks—troubles,” he said; “why not make capital out of them?”

“How?” asked Mr. M’Gurk.

“Well, you say your act flops: you say its ‘corny’.”

While his father hesitated the little boy said: “Did I say ‘corny’? It’s a twenty-two-carat bastard and a three-star stinkeroo. The trouble with the old man is he’s too conservative. And the trouble with the old woman is she’s got no ideas, except when it comes to talking about her troubles.”

“Have more respect for your parents,” said Mr. M’Gurk.

The boy replied: “Why should I? What have you done that I should have any respect for you? I’m fed up to the back teeth with the two or you, and if you want to know I’m only waiting till I’m a bit older and then I’ll scram out of it so fast you won’t see my arse for dust. So put that in your pipe and smoke it.”

“We’ve done the best we can for you, you wicked boy,” said Nina, beginning to cry again.

“Oh, shut up, for Christ’s sake, or I’ll chuck some more water over you!”

Pym said: “If this precocious little ape will allow me to get a word in edgeways, I’ll give you an idea for a new act.”

“I’d give everything I’ve got for a suitable idea,” said M’Gurk; at which the boy laughed sardonically.

“This one might work,” said Pym. “Here are the bare bones of the thing—it would need any amount of elaboration, of course. You know how other people’s troubles, when they get to a certain point, become comical? Well, that’s the basis of the idea. I’m reminded of the story about the man who got into the railway carriage with two little boys, calling them all the dirty names he could think of. He gave one of them a smack in the face and knocked him into one corner saying: ‘Sit there, you dirty little bastard’; and he smacked the other one into another corner and said: ‘Not another word from you, you rotten little clod.’ Gentleman in carriage says: ‘How dare you treat those poor children like that? Do you realise that if I made a complaint I could get you into trouble?’ And the man said: ‘You could get me into trouble. You could get me into trouble! My old woman’s in the luggage van blind drunk, being sick into the portmanteau; my daughter’s in the carriage be’ind, in the fambly way and won’t tell us ’oo the bloke is; that little rat’s wet ’isself, and the other one’s swallowed the bloody tickets. Go on, get me into trouble.’ You see what I mean: trouble is very funny indeed when it happens to
somebody
else. Now, why don’t you make an act out of your troubles? You, M’Gurk, you get yourself up like an English nobleman of the 1890’s, with a long miserable gingery moustache, miserable droopy ginger side-whiskers, miserable black
frock-coat
down to your ankles and a ridiculous little bowler hat.
And—yes, so help me God!—little Caligula over there could be the dog. You dress him up to look like an extra melancholy bloodhound on yards and yards of chain, looking miserable as sin. Mrs. M’Gurk, also, looks like the wrath of God in very heavy widow’s weeds and red eyes and red nose. She keeps crying all the time and blowing her nose with a trumpety noise, and every time she does so she takes out a fresh black-edged handkerchief. Something of that sort. Get it? The scene is a pub. She’s the barmaid, if you like, and you’re the customer. You come in, making the most of that graveyard voice of yours, and ask for a drink of water and an arrowroot biscuit for the dog. You’re muffled up to the chin in a sort of old school scarf and you talk like Lord Dundreary. Your voice, M’Gurk, dragged out into a Piccadilly Johnny drawl—well, you try it and see. Say: ‘Gwoss cawicatuah—no fellah evah saw such a fellah!’”

M’Gurk said it, and the effect was indeed ineffably comical. Even the little boy smiled.

“Go on, darling,” said Nina.

“Now the detail has to be worked out later,” said Pym. “But it goes something like this. The old Johnny with the dog is chock full of the most preposterous troubles. Anything you like—you can’t lay it on too thick. No need to elaborate now, but it has to be outrageous—his ninety-year-old grandmother has died in childbirth, but the baby lived to inherit the family fortune—that kind of rubbish. But Mrs. M’Gurk, also, is bubbling over with her own misfortunes. (Incidentally, the dog, also, is always in trouble, choking himself on his chain, wanting to pee, getting trodden on, and whatnot.) Well, you interrupt each other with a list of absolutely shocking catastrophes, getting drunker and drunker all the time; until at last M’Gurk, gulping his last drink with a hollow croak, says something so awful that you say. ‘If I were you, deary, I’d cut my froat.’ And M’Gurk says: ‘I
have
.’
Exeunt, pursued by a cat.”

Nina M’Gurk cried: “Why, I like that!”

Her husband said: “So do I; but what about the wardrobe?”

The boy said: “This man’s got more brains in his little toe than you’ve got in both your heads put together, you couple of
washouts. What do you mean—‘What about the wardrobe? Sell the trombone, sell that soppy little fife and the silly old bull-fiddle. We can get a good price for the trombone. Go to Isaacson; give him something on account, and tell him George Black gave us a sub. We don’t want much. The most important thing is the dog-suit.”

Pym looked at the boy with respect: here was the real master of the house. “Little Caligula will go far,” he said. “In fact, he may even go too far.”

“We need to sketch out the act, weigh up the gags, and rehearse the routine,” said M’Gurk.

“This man will write us a piece,” said the boy.

Pym said: “Well, I don’t mind roughing the thing out for you, if that would be helpful.”

“—Sell the instruments! Sell every damn thing,” said Nina. “Mr. Pym, you’re a darling. I don’t know how to thank you.”

“It’s nothing,” said Pym.

M’Gurk grasped him by the hand in a painful, uncomfortably wet grip and said: “I’m a fatalist; I always was. I knew—a little voice whispered—I
knew
this house would bring us luck. Didn’t I say so, Neens?”

“You’re a clever old darling,” said Nina.

The boy said to Pym: “Look; do you think you could manage to let us have something to work on in a day or so? … What a change it is to meet a
really
clever man! You see what I have to put up with, with these two. I
do
want to get somewhere and be somebody, and I’m
so
grateful to you.” Then he did
something
embarrassing: he kissed Pym’s hand.

“All right, all right,” said Pym. “I’ll see what I can do.”

As he left the room he heard Mr. M’Gurk saying: “Well, I’ll go and flog these instruments. As a matter of fact they never brought us any luck.”

The boy said: “We’ll go to Roseneck. You carry them, and I’ll go in. You wait outside and I’ll do the talking.”

Visualising himself as a dealer in musical instruments, Pym imagined that he was standing behind a counter, fitting a new reed into an old clarinet when the little wizened boy came in
carrying a double bass and a trombone, with a piccolo sticking out of his breast pocket. Give him a good price? Roseneck would probably give him the shop.

Pym left his article with the porter at the
Sunday
Special
and walked towards Adam Street. But he remembered then that he had left Dr. Weissensee’s typescript in the wardrobe. He was not sorry: he feared the inevitable unanswered argument, the ratiocination and the cajoling of Proudfoot. So he telephoned the office. Joanna Bowman said: “Thurtell Hunt, Mayerling?”

“John Pym here. How are you?”

“Oh, hullo; how are you?”

“Look, will you tell Proudfoot I can’t get along to-day and I’ll ring him to-morrow morning?”

“You can’t get along to-day and will ring Mr. Proudfoot to-morrow morning.”

“When do we meet?”

“To-night, if you like.”

“Where?”

“Anywhere you like, within reason. Come up to my place, if you like.”

“I will, if I may.”

“Make it about eight o’clock, then.”

“I was hoping to take you to dinner or something.”

“I don’t feel much like going out in the evenings these days. I’ll make an omelette. Good-bye.”

As he left the telephone booth Pym could feel his heart beating. He wished that he was better dressed. Now say—merely for the sake of talking—just say something impossible came to pass and circumstances arose in which it became necessary to take off his clothes in Joanna Bowman’s presence. His underpants were torn and frayed and there was a hole in his left sock … Thinking about embracing Joanna, Pym realised that there was nothing in the whole world that would give him deeper pleasure—always excepting the production of a great and famous novel. That went without saying. He knew that there was not the remotest possibility of his making love with Joanna at such short notice: that she had invited him to her flat in order to hammer home the point that a woman is as good
as a man. She was a pricker of masculine vanity. He could almost hear her coolly incurious voice saying:
I
suppose
you
imagine
I
invited
you
to
my
place
to
make
love
to
you?
Well
…

Still, it was a nice thing to dream about—a pleasant little Bank Holiday for the imagination—and he really was uneasy, remembering his shabby underpants and the hole in his sock. There was something peculiarly sordid about a hole in a man’s sock.

P
YM
knew the name, although he had never seen the face, of a man who was also thinking about clothes, in a near-by barber’s shop—the foolish, crooked-souled little man who was proud to be known as American Henry. This poor frustrated fellow had spent most of the money he had ever got, on smart clothes. Most of his dreams had been of clothes. He had plunged into dirty water and dived to the bottom of the world in search of slick suits and bright shirts. Most of his eighty-nine hundred hours of wakefulness in prison had been filled with anxiety for the clothes they had taken from him before locking him up for twenty months; and when they released him and let him dress up again he was choked with happiness, because he was free—free to wear fine clothes.

He had gnawed his fingernails in anguish because, having spent his share of the swag in buying the things he loved, the police had not given him time to soil the cuffs of the pale blue silk shirt with the Barrymore Roll Collar, or crumple the
burgundy
pure silk tie as worn by Adolphe Menjou. The pale blue New Yorker athletic singlet and shorts patterned with poinsettia blossoms were almost as good as new; he had never had a chance to display them to a lady friend; he had not even had the pleasure of admiring himself in them, because the police had picked him up two hours after he left the American shop in Shaftesbury Avenue. There, too, were the shoes, bright yellow under the instep and scarcely soiled at the soles: he had found
courage, after a drink or two, to strut into an ancient
establishment
in St. James’s that made boots for crowned heads and ask a gentleman in a high collar if there was anything they happened to have that might fit him. As it happened, they had one pair of wild boar-skin shoes in an exceptionally small size, into which he squeezed his feet. That pair of shoes cost him ten guineas—two guineas more than the suit, which was the best that money could buy at short notice ready-made. It was a powder-blue double-breasted suit draped (as the salesman had assured him) in the American style. He remembered that, putting out his little narrow foot, he had pulled up his
trouser-leg
and made the most of his socks for which he had paid fifteen shillings. What had the nobility and gentry got that he had not? The shoes were a little too tight then. The gentleman in the high collar said so, but he had replied: “They’ll give. They’ll give all right. I sort of got kind of stranded, if you understand what I mean. You know how it is with these
goddamn
railways. God knows what they do with your god-damn luggage. I’ll make do with these for a bit.”

“Will you wear them now, sir?”

“Well, yes, I think I will.”

“And these … sir?”

“Oh, sort of chuck ’em in the garbage can.”

“Yes, sir. With pleasure.”

“When I’ve got time I want to come back and order a dozen, maybe two dozen pairs of your shoes.”

Having paid, he went out. In the window of an antique shop in Jermyn Street he saw something that made him stop: a
tie-pin
set with a large pearl. This pearl, which was shaped like an onion, seemed to be blown out of the bowl of a tiny gold bubble-pipe. He went in, asked the price, paid thirty-three pounds twelve shillings, and walked out, strutting and kicking out his feet. His sharp, protruding chin came between him and his pearl, so he paused to look in the window of a book shop; saw himself from head to knees, and walked away. He was in Jermyn Street, a man about town, wearing a silk shirt with the Barrymore Roll, shoes by Belgrave, and a museum-piece of a
tie-pin
with a pearl as big as his little fingernail stuck in Adolphe
Menjou’s tie of burgundy silk. Near Piccadilly Circus he bought a walking stick with an ivory knob; looked for a long time at his own reflection in a silversmiths’ window, and went away to buy a genuine Vicuna-hair overcoat for sixteen guineas. It made him look twice his size. After this his gloves appeared inadequate. He took them off, stuffed them into his pockets and bought another pair, obviously hand-sewn.

Then, well-dressed, his pockets full of money, he went to show himself about town. He strolled to the Pimlico Bar in Rupert Street, sauntered in, manipulating his ivory-knobbed stick. Two of the boys and three of the girls were there. He shrugged and hitched the belted coat into position, advanced a pace or two, felt a gentle pressure on the upper half of his left arm and turned with a sudden sinking of the heart to confront a big man in a fifty-shilling overcoat. This man had a pale face like a pudding, colourless eyes, and short hair. A quiet voice, calm and full of scorn and pity, said: “Hullo, do you mind if I have a word with you?”

“What about?”

“Would you mind if we discussed that outside?”

He saw then that there was another man standing just behind him; a dark, heavy-jawed man wearing ungentlemanly boots and a mackintosh. This man took him persuasively by the elbow and urged him out of the public house while the man in the fifty-shilling coat opened one of the swinging doors with an ironical bow.

“Say, what the hell is all this?”

“All right, Harry. You know.
You
know!”

“I don’t know what the god-damn hell you mean!”

The first man said: “I’ve got a warrant here for your arrest, Harry, and it’s my duty to tell you that anything you say will be taken down and may be used as evidence against you.”

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

“Nobody ever does, Harry. Come along and don’t waste my time.”

There was a discreet car waiting. In half an hour he had been charged and locked up, accused of having helped a crook called Three-Fingers Laylock to get away with a safe. Three-Fingers
and three other men were also under arrest—all of them more or less skilled craftsmen. One of them, Australian Toddy, was a first-rate engineer, an ex-armourer, a deserter from the Navy. Another, whose real name was Gabriel, but who was called Pulley, was an expert finder of points of balance—a man who could take a grand piano downstairs without scratching its surface. Three-Fingers had been a motor mechanic. The fourth, nicknamed Keyster, a bull-headed dog-faced man with hands like skinned rabbits, knew all about locks: at the tip of every finger he had something as sensitive as a dog’s nose.

They borrowed a one-ton van which they plastered with advertising matter; went to their destination, dressed as
workmen
; got out, shouting and laying down planks; went in, in broad daylight, carried out the safe, and drove away with it. Three-Fingers organised the affair. American Henry drove the van; he got off lightly.

When he was sentenced he muttered: “God damn it, I never did have any luck ever since Zoe turned me in, that cow!” He had served a short sentence a little while before, for living on the earnings of a prostitute named Maria Puccini, otherwise known as Zoe. She had disappeared: someone had said that she had married a man from Hull, but no one really knew.

*

Now American Henry saw, with relief, that his light hair, of which he was inordinately proud, was growing long again, so that the waves were coming back. After a haircut, shave, friction, and face massage, he felt better, but still he was worried. He needed money; he needed clothes; and he did not know where to turn. His expensive shoes were still elegant, but his hat was no longer new. There was a spot of grease on one of the lapels of his coat. He was uneasy.

Having paid the barber he went to Briquette’s Café in Soho and ordered a ham sandwich and a cup of white coffee, knowing that after he had paid his bill he would have only ten shillings left. While he bit his way through the four triangles of the sandwich he watched himself in one of the spotted mirrors. The austerity of life in prison had refined him. He considered himself
with approval. His was a clear-cut face, and if the skin happened to have crept a little nearer to the bone, there was no harm done.

But he needed money.

He had finished his coffee and all but the crusts of his
sandwich
, when a big man came into the café and nodded at him. He went to the counter and took a handful of large chocolates wrapped in silver paper—the ones they used to call
Cioccolato
Baci
that have little amorous mottoes printed on slips inside. Then he walked slowly to American Henry’s table, sat down, ate a chocolate, and—without moving his lips—said: “Well, Harry? How’s the Big Shot?”

“Fiddling along.”

“How long since?”

“Since what?”

“Since you know what. Nobody told me you were around.”

“A few weeks.

Something had happened to the big man’s face: his nose and mouth were horribly scarred. The lobe of his left ear was missing and on the left-hand side of his jaw there was a ragged white cicatrice. And yet this man had the air of a businessman; a decent, sociable, prosperous man of affairs, honourably injured in an honourable war. He was dressed like a good bourgeois in blue serge, and wore a heavy old-fashioned
watch-chain
on his comfortable convex stomach. His thick hairy hands were half covered by honest linen cuffs, and his hat was a severe, unindented grey homburg. American Henry, who would not have been seen dead in such a hat, was ill at ease in the presence of this middle-aged man. He said:

“Well, Leo, how’s every little thing?”

Leo smiled and said: “Harry, don’t be surprised when you find out that Three-Fingers is looking for you.”

The little man’s face became white and glossy as
candle-grease
, but he said: “Ah, my old pal. Glad to see him. Jesus, four or five years from now, maybe! I wish to God it was four or five minutes.”

“I shouldn’t be surprised. And I shouldn’t be surprised if the Keyster wanted to say how-do-you-do to you, too, Harry. And the Australian. And Pulley too, sonny-boy.”

He said this in such a way that American Henry had to moisten his lips before he replied: “Good pals. Glad to see ’em, drunk or sober, any hour of the day or night.”

“You’d better make it day, not night, Harry,” said Leo, offering him a cigarette. “What’s the matter, Harry? What are you so shaky about? A thick night?”

“I’ll say I had a thick night!” said American Henry, laughing a little too loud. “No, but honest to God, Leo—what do you mean, Three-Fingers’ll be glad to see me? I don’t get it.”

“You’ll get it all right. Oh yes, you’ll get it. Good and proper, little man.”

“What do you mean? Get what?”

“
It
,” said Leo, smiling.

“What
for?
”

Still smiling with his torn lips, but speaking with menace, Leo said: “You wouldn’t happen to know who shot off his mouth, would you, Harry?”

“By Christ, I’d murder the bastard if I knew!”

“That’d be suicide, Harry. There’s a law against it.”

“I’d like to see the son of a bitch that called me a nark! Jesus Christ Almighty, I’d murder the bastard who called me a pigeon!”

“Well, Harry, you’d better get ready to murder
Three-Fingers
, Pulley, the Australian, and Keyster.”

“Harry Fabian never squeals—I never said a word.”

“I never said you did, Harry. Only a little bird told
Three-Fingers
. I know what liars little birds are, but there it is. A friendly word of warning, that’s all; just a friendly word.”

American Henry Fabian bit his lips and muttered: “Another frame-up. I swear on my mother’s grave I never opened my mouth. Christ knows I’m no squealer. Me, a pigeon!
Me!
Didn’t I go up with the others?”

“Have I said you didn’t, Harry? Only not for anything like as long, you know. And that little bird I told you about….”

“I can prove——”

“—Go on, go ahead and prove.”

Fabian was silent until the waitress had brought more coffee, and then he said: “Leo. Listen. As a matter of fact the trouble is I
can’t
prove.”

“I know you can’t, Harry.”

“I’m as innocent as that ash-tray, I swear on my mother’s grave!”

“Don’t be silly, Harry. Your mother never had a grave.”

Swallowing this insult Harry Fabian said: “Look, Leo, what I want to do is, get myself a bit of dough and scram out of the country. There’s nothing doing in this country any more. It’s dead. There’s no money about.”

“Speaking of not talking,” said Leo, carefully sifting sugar into his coffee, “what’s that I hear about a lady friend of yours who got a carpet for a typewriter?”

Fabian sweated. “Jesus, Leo!” he said, “ask yourself the question! There am I, fresh out. So this dame gives me this typewriter to hock, and she says it was given to her by some steamer. So I hock it for her. Just put yourself in my position, Leo. What would you have done in my place? Got another lagging? All I said was, the machine wasn’t mine—nothing more, I swear it on my father’s soul.”

“You never had a father, and he never had a soul, Harry.”

“I’ve been a good friend to you, Leo,” said Fabian, “I’ve put thousands in your pocket. You got no right to talk to me like that, Leo. God Almighty, Leo, even if you believe those god-damn dirty lies—Christ above, even if you believe I could be such a god-damn rat as to squeal—who gains by it?
You
gain by it, Leo.
If
it was true. Just
say
it was true. There was another thousand to come. Okay. Three-Fingers is away for a bit, and so are the others. Anything might happen. They’ll never get that thousand. By rights I’ve got a hundred and fifty quid to come. Jesus God, Leo, you ought to thank me on your bended knees instead of insulting me. Look,” he said, inspired, “let me have a hundred.”

He might have been telling an exceptionally funny story: Leo put down his cup and shook with laughter. He coughed, beat his breast and rolled in his chair, gasping and coughing.

“I’ve got a proposition,” said Harry Fabian.

“Go on?”

“I need a stake. I got a proposition, I swear on my—I give you my oath, I got a proposition.”

“You always did have prospositions, Harry. What have you got this time?”

“It’s a proposition. I can’t tell you more. You just got to trust me.”