The Song of the Flea (42 page)

“I promise faithfully.”

“Do you promise not to steal? Do you promise not to kill? Do you promise not to covet your neighbour’s house, wife, ox,
ass, or anything that is your neighbour’s? Do you promise not to commit adultery? Yes or no?”

“Yes.”

“What is that? No? Then I shall smite you, smite you, smite you—smite you as I smote the Cities of the Plain—smite as I smote Sodom and Gomorrah when I sent My fires down from My Heaven. See!”

The office boy Thomas was rolling the burning log over the smouldering carpet towards the fireplace. Proudfoot stopped him with a ferocious gesture. The carpet sizzled and smoked.

Proudfoot shrieked: “Even as I destroyed the Cities of the Plain, so shall I destroy you, Sodomite, Gomorrhite, ravisher of angels!” And he plunged his hands into the glowing fire, scooped out coals, and hurled them about the room. Sherwood looked on with terror, ducking his head as the embers flew past and burst in showers of sparks against the wall behind him. The boy looked on with startled interest. Proudfoot continued: “Even as I destroyed the world, so will I destroy you, O ye of little faith!” He grasped Sherwood in a dreadful grip and forced him to sit in the brass coal scuttle, which was fashioned in the shape of a fireman’s helmet, and went on: “To your Ark, righteous man! Into your Ark, Noah! Perish all ye unrighteous! The heavens are opening!”

Then Proudfoot clambered on to his great chair, and urinated on the desk; and Miss Home came in with two policemen.

Anxiously apologetic, she said to one of the policemen: “I assure you that if I had known he was going to behave like this I’d never have come to work here.”

The policeman, watchful but half amused, said: “Well, Miss, I don’t suppose it’s what you might call exactly businesslike behaviour. Definitely not.” Then, coming closer to Proudfoot as he talked, he went on: “Now, come on, sir, come on now! That’s no way for a gentleman to behave. I ask you, is it now?”

Proudfoot shouted: “The waters are rising! The valley of the Euphrates is flooded. Full fathom five lies the Tower of Babel and the unrighteous float, prey to the eye-pecking gulls. Ah-ha! A dove! My wrath is appeased. The flood subsides.”

“That’s right, sir. Now you button yourself up like a
gentleman
and let’s talk it over.” The policeman who had been talking was close to Proudfoot, now, and the other policeman, a younger man, obedient to certain signs, had come up on the other side. But Proudfoot was calm now. He noticed Sherwood and said: “Give me a cigarette.”

Sherwood gave him a cigarette and Proudfoot said: “This is My Body.
Hoc
est
corpus
meum.
Give me a drink.”

Sherwood filled a tumbler with whisky. Proudfoot drank two-thirds of it at a gulp, gave the rest to Sherwood, and said: “Drink. This is My Blood.”

Then they heard the bell of the ambulance. Holding up his cigarette, Proudfoot said: “Ah-ha! The Bells, the Bells, the tintinnabulation of the Bells, Bells, Bells! The moaning and the groaning of the Bells. Ring out, wild Bells to the wild sky, for the Son of God is born to-night. But first of all …
Let
there
be
light!
”

Sherwood struck a match and Proudfoot, taking a light for his cigarette, said, with a satisfied smile: “And there
was
light! … I am a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. I will lead you … across the Red Sea. The waters will divide, and there shall be dry land …” He kicked at certain patches of moisture on the carpet.

Then someone said to him: “This way to the Promised Land. We’d better get moving now, you know.”

Proudfoot picked up a T-square by the thin end, and the older policeman put out a large red hand and wrenched it away.

“Thank you, My son,” said Proudfoot, raising two fingers in benediction, “you are a strong man, and you may carry My cross.” On the way out he turned to Miss Home and said, in a beautiful, resonant voice—the voice that once he had saved for perorations in closing speeches for the defence: “Woman, behold thy son!”

Then they hustled him out to the ambulance.

Sherwood sent Miss Home and Thomas away for the day, locked the outer door, went to his office, made a pillow of his right arm and wept into it, saying: “Oh Lord, what a terrible
thing to happen to a man like that; oh, what a terrible thing to happen, especially to a man like that!”

Thomas went and told his mother, who smacked his head. Miss Home carried away a woollen cardigan, a bag of apples, and a special soft rubber eraser—her personal property—and never returned. But Proudfoot, having expressed a desire to overthrow the Nelson Column in Trafalgar Square where (he said) traders profitably sold pigeons for sacrifice in the Temple, was calm and happy. He, too, had achieved his heart’s desire. He had become God.

*

Joanna Bowman said to Pym: “What’s this I hear? Am I to understand that you’ve been paying for this room for me?”

“You’re supposed to keep quiet,” said Pym. “You’re not supposed to start jumping and flapping about. The more you rest, the sooner you’ll be out. Keep calm, Jo, and let nature take its course.”

“I won’t keep quiet unless you give me a straight answer to a plain question: are you paying for this room I’m in?”

“Well, yes. I am paying for this room you’re in. What of it?”

She said: “You had no right to do it—no right, without consulting me. I didn’t know. I didn’t realise. You shouldn’t have done it. It isn’t fair. I’m going to tell them to move me back to the ward.”

“Why? Isn’t it more comfortable here?”

“That’s not the point. You had no right to do it. You have no right at all to impose this on me.”

“To impose what?”

“Gifts, obligations. I was perfectly happy to be in a ward, the same as everybody else. If I’d wanted to be in a private room I’d have said so myself. I’m not a pauper—I could have paid for it myself. And I will pay for it myself! Who are you to put me here, and put me there, without permission? Are you under the impression that, just because we’ve been in and out of bed together you have the right to move me about like … like a card in a pack that you paid ninepence for? I won’t let you.”

“You idiot,” said Pym, “why must you be more stupid than God made you? What do I care if you heal up in a ward or a private room? I had you brought down here for my own selfish pleasure. I wanted to be able to come and see you at any hour of the day, and that’s why I took the liberty of having you shifted. Who, in God’s name, are you, that you should come between me and my harmless pleasure?”

She said nothing for several minutes, but riffled the pages of a magazine. Pym had smoked half a cigarette before she said:

“I don’t like it.”

“What don’t you like? And why don’t you like it?”

“Your paying for me here. I don’t like that. But if you want to know, what I like even less is that somehow or other I don’t mind your paying for me. That’s what I like least of all. I don’t like it. I never let any man pay for me before. With you, I don’t seem to mind. I don’t like that. It means there’s something strange going on. Lots of people have tried to give me things, buy me things. I always made a point—if I accepted—of paying them back in one way or another. But what I don’t like about this is that with you I get
soft and lax … I don’t mind taking things from you. Lots of men have given me flowers. I just stuck them in a jug or something, and liked them purely and simply as flowers.
You
bring me flowers, and I like the flowers for your sake. I smell them. I don’t feel I have to give back value for goods received, in your case. That’s what I don’t like. And again, I don’t like the way I have to keep on thinking about you. I’m getting involved with you, and that is a thing I swore I’d never do with any man … I think it’s probably all because of the Boy Scout knife that poor man stuck into me a little while ago.”

“As you say: poor man.”

“What happened to him, Pym?”

Pym said: “Why, he just ran away, and he ran into a truck.”

“Was he hurt?”

“He was killed,” said Pym.

There was a silence, after which Joanna said: “Poor boy! But what could I do?”

“Nothing, Jo. Nothing at all.’

“But did it hurt him?”

“No, not a bit.”

For the first time Pym saw Joanna Bowman weeping. “What
was
there that
I
could do?” she said.

“Nothing, my sweet. And as things are, it’s better this way.”

“I never wanted to hurt him. It wasn’t my fault, Pym … it wasn’t my fault. I didn’t do anything. I didn’t do anything. It wasn’t my fault if I didn’t want to live with him, Pym. Why should I be forced to live with him if I couldn’t live with him? Just because he wanted to live with me … is it my fault that I didn’t want to live with him? I never wanted to hurt him or anybody, Pym! I only wanted to be left alone! I said to him a thousand times: ‘Why must I do what you want me to do simply because you think you love me?’ But no; it was useless, it was no use at all. And I won’t be a slave! I won’t be a victim! I hate myself for crying like this … but I won’t have it! What right have they to do this to me? What right?”

“Better be calm, Jo.”

“Oh God, how I hate the world!”

“I love you, you know.”

“I don’t see why,” she said, while Pym dried her eyes with his handkerchief.

“I don’t know. I have fallen in love with you—don’t be alarmed, I’m not going to burst into tears or fall on my knees—I happen to have fallen in love with you, and I want to be with you, that’s all.”

“I wonder what would happen then.”

“I don’t know. All kinds of things might happen if we were together. There are places to go; there are things to see. If you saw what you saw, and I saw what I saw, and we were together, what we saw together might be twice as good; if we happened to be together. There’s no end to what might happen, if you and I were together. Didn’t anybody ever tell you, when you were in school, that the world is twenty-five thousand miles round? And didn’t you learn that a sphere has an infinite number of circumferences? Good Lord, Jo, if you loved me and I loved you, and we were together, there would be no end to what might
happen to you and me around and around the world. If you accept me, and I accept you, and we blend—make one new thing between the old two of us, good Lord, we might even have a child together!”

“I wonder what sort of monstrosity that would turn out to be,” said Joanna.

“Oh, I don’t know. The probability is that it would be either a son or a daughter. So long as it had a pair of arms and a pair of legs, and only one head, what would be the difference? Between the two of us we’d probably make a tolerably happy creature of it, even if it had warts and a hump like Quasimodo. Only I fancy that you’d have to love me first, and I don’t think you do.”

“One of the things that makes me so angry with myself is that I’m half inclined to believe that I do love you,” said Joanna Bowman. “I’m just about half inclined to believe that I do love you, as much as I could ever love anyone.”

Then a nurse came in, followed by a doctor in a white coat. They looked at Pym, who was kissing Joanna Bowman on the forehead. She said: “I believe they’ve come to dress my wound, or something. Will you come again soon?”

“To-morrow,” said Pym.

“I’m sorry I was so emotional, Pym.”

“I’m not, Jo.”

*

Pym was not unhappy now; he was not even angry. When he went to collect his typewriter, stationery, groceries and clothes from his flat in Battersea, he was aware of a certain lightness, a sense of relief. He had learned to hate that place, that
loud-mouthed
, lying bitch of a place. He hated the bed from head to foot and in every spring; hated the delicate-stomached
hand-basin
, the coy bathtub, and the hunger-striking water closet that had to be forcibly fed. He was shocked by the vile
deceitfulness
of the sitting-room table that had looked so good and behaved so badly. He wanted to go a long way away from that place. He despised the false pretences of its kitchen, with its greasy black slut of a gas stove and its snotty, bronchitic sink.
He wanted to spit on the abominable rugs, and tear the sneaking curtains from their sly, slippery runners. It would have given him pleasure to take the treacherous chairs limb from limb, and draw and quarter the mean, treasonable sofa. No doubt the sly slippery landlord of that unsavoury furnished flat was ready to go to law and perjure himself to the seventh circle of hell for the sake of sixpence, Pym thought; otherwise he would have put his right fist straight through the perversely lying face that leered at him in the mirror, the leprous mirror, of the bathroom cabinet. It would have given him pleasure to go through the apartment with a blazing torch and leave it a heap of smoking ashes. He felt swindled, mocked and betrayed. Above all, he hated his typewriter. There was another sleek, slinking
gold-digger
. She seemed to have everything, and gave it all to you with voluptuous abandon … until you asked her just a little more than she found it comfortable to give. Then, self-seeking harlot that she was, she pretended to be indisposed. She was delicate, in spite of her hearty, robust, accommodating manner. She had periodic cramps in some mysterious part of her inside. She was capricious. She demanded constant attention. If she was not sufficiently petted, her letter
E
jammed; and if you used ever such a little force, her shift lock refused to do down. She seemed not to like her ribbon: she could not do anything with it. And all the time, she smiled and sighed, and gave you to
understand
that it was not her fault, that she was made that way, that she did
so
want to please you, but since she could not, well … you could go to hell.

Pym was sick with loathing for this beautiful new typewriter. He wanted to get a screwdriver and take her apart, key by key and gadget by gadget, and drop her piece by piece into the river.

But she squatted, imperturbable.
You
need
me,
she seemed to say,
get
rid
of
me
if
you
dare.
I
don’t
care.
There
are
many
more
fools
in
the
world.