The Song of the Flea (9 page)

Here wavered stale, pale simulacra—worn-out carbon copies of men: uncorrected proofs and childishly-daubed miniatures of sinners. In one corner a methylated-spirit drinker with a
green-and
-mauve face crouched shivering: his mouth was a yellow perforation like a worm-hole in a plum—perfectly round. He was trying to blow spit-bubbles. One of the aristocrats of the place, a young man who had already served three months in prison and was to be charged with stealing an overcoat, looked down with amused disdain. Near-by a concatenation of little frail malefactors whispered mouth-to-ear, while a young man in a horribly-stained best suit wrung his poor little hands a yard away, as he explained to the missionary that he didn’t know what to tell his mother. A costermonger in an Anthony Eden hat was saying: “A b—— woman’s got to b——well do what ’er b—— old man b——well tells ’er to b——bloody do. You’re a man o’ the world, eh?” A youth of eighteen who had been taken in the act of dragging a rug out of the window of a parked car said: “Ah—you’ve got something there!” Pushing his Anthony Eden hat to the back of his head, the costermonger said, in a bewildered voice: “I chastised ’er.
I
didn’t know she was going to fall spark into the fire. I mean to say!”

“You got something there!”

“All I done: I ’it ’er across the mouf. I never told ’er to catch ’er ’air alight. I mean to say! They can’t take my living away—I got six boxes o’ ’zanths.”

“’Zanths?”

“Chrysanthemums.”

“Will she charge you?”

“She bloody better not. I’ll do ’er if she do.”

“You got something there.”

The missionary glanced from face to face, saw Pym’s
compressed
mouth and terrified eyes and said: “What brings
you
here?”

“Drunk,” said Pym.

“Feel pretty sick and sorry for yourself?”

“Yes.”

“Well, try not to be so silly another time, will you?”

“Yes.”

“That’s right, that’s right. Is it worth it?”

“No, no—
no!
”

The missionary said: “Um …” and went to another man—a thickset, broken-faced young assaulter, who said: “Yer—’
ere
again, that’s right,
’ere
again. Mind your own business. Lea’ me alone. Scram!”

An untidy, insinuating man who might have weighed a hundred pounds took the missionary by the sleeve and cried: “Your Reverence—a lady give me a bag to ’old, a crocodile bag. ‘’Old it for me—you got a honest face,’ she says——”

“You again, Thomas. The same old story?”

“Well…”

At Pym’s shoulder a voice of light music said:

“Base,
sinister,
scurvy,
foul,
gross
and
felonious
—

Flagitious,
atrocious,
incarnate,
accursed!”

Pym turned and looked into the eyes of a stout grey man in a decent dark-brown suit: a keen-eyed elderly man with a
bloodhound
face and cropped white hair.

“Malevolent,
heartless
and
lost
in
iniquity

Indefensible,
culpable,
past
praying
for
…

Ah! Thank God for poetry. Thank God for it!…

Looseness
of
morals,
obliquity,
infamy,

Hardness
of
heart
and
corruption
—
depravity
——

Fleshly
infirmity,
sink
of
iniquity,

Take
the
wrong
course,
son,
and
sow
your
wild
oats!

Does that convey anything to you?”

“That really is very good indeed. Who is the author?” said Pym.

“Oh,
our
vices,
wrong-doing,
iniquity,
wickedness,

Laxity,
scandal,
offending
old
Adam
——”

The stout man declaimed these lines in a heroic baritone, but he watched Pym in a sly, sidelong way. Pym saw that he had beautiful little tapering hands—like the hands of the Mona Lisa in Busto’s lithograph, astonishingly clean in spite of everything. Indeed, although the stout man must have spent the night in a cell, he had the crisp, brisk, contented air of a gentleman with a clear conscience who has bathed and dressed at his leisure after a refreshing sleep.

“Perhaps it strikes you as familiar?” he said.

“Yes, it does. Who wrote it?”

“Ah!” the stout man said, with a delighted chuckle. “It has a certain something? It rolls off the tongue? It has resonance, eh? One dabbles, one dabbles. I knew that you were a literary man the moment I set eyes on you.”

Pym expressed astonishment and said, with considerable bitterness: “Literary man! A fine literary man! Look at me!” He had lost his hat, and his trousers, freshly torn, were covered with mud. The grazed knuckles of his left hand were dark with dried blood and he had to tilt his head like an apoplectic in order to see out of his blackened eye. His tongue was dry sackcloth in a mouth full of ashes. “A literary man!” he repeated with a cindery cough.

“Why not? Why not?” said the stout man; and now he used his voice as a masseur uses aromatic ointment to take away a pain in the neck. “Why
not
a literary man? It was perfectly obvious to me at a glance that you weren’t one of these…” His left hand described a smooth figure-of-eight. “It is not necessary for a literary man to maintain a conventional
appearance
. A literary man, my dear fellow, is the freest creature on
earth, and whatever he does is right. He may strut in a laced coat like Oliver Goldsmith, wallow in snuff like Dr. Johnson, or array himself like a perfect gentleman in the manner of Lord Macaulay. He is not bound by the chains of convention that fetter us businessmen. I am a businessman, although I try to dabble in higher things. Don’t look at yourself so disparagingly. It happens to us all. One escapes, so to speak, from the bitter realities of life for one indiscreet little evening. I know—you writers are so sensitive: you feel too much and too deeply. I take it,” he said, exploring Pym’s face with his bright, quick eyes, “that this is your first visit to this place, and that last night you fell among … friends?”

“Yes. And you?”

“Oh, me? Allow me, by the way, to introduce myself. My name is Thomas Paine Sherwood. How do you do?”

“John Pym. How do you do?”

Mr. Sherwood laughed heartily. “My father, as you may have guessed, was a Freethinker and a believer in the Rights of Man, Mr. Pym. I was named after his hero.”

“I hope you’re not here for anything serious,” said Pym.

Mr. Sherwood laughed heartily and said: “Indeed I am not. It’s so absurd that it’s scarcely worth mentioning. Quite simply—there’s nothing to conceal—I arrived in Town yesterday from the Continent and went to the Hotel Masefield. It’s a quiet hotel, as I daresay you know—nothing lavish, but solid and good. Full of stuffy old dowagers and apoplectic admirals, but thoroughly reliable and comfortable. But, of course, you know the place—the Masefield, St. James’s. I am known there—or I should say now that I
used
to be known there. The hotel changed hands three or four years ago. Marcantonio, the manager, seems to have been susperseded by another man—some Swiss or other—and even the head porter is new. To put it in a nutshell—because I rather fancy your call is coming soon—I assumed that I was well enough known there not to need to reserve a room. So I went straight to the Masefield and told the people at the station to have my luggage sent on, so that I arrived empty-handed, asked for Marcantonio, was told he’d left, asked for a room, was asked to wait, and waited. They kept
me waiting more than twenty minutes. I had all sorts of things to think of, so I didn’t mind that for the first ten minutes or so. I checked over a list of commitments in an engagement book, and made things clear for myself in the next forty-eight hours—in short, I was thoroughly preoccupied. Now this will strike you as utterly ridiculous. When I travel on the Continent I have the habit of keeping with me at all times a pigskin dressing-case with silver fittings. Over there they are not anything like as reliable as they are here. Once, for instance, in Barcelona, I found myself without the raw material for a civilised toilet for more than three days. That was in 1928. Ever since then I have made a practice of keeping my dressing-case with me. On this occasion—feeling that I was at home—I left my dressing-case to be sent on. Everybody concerned swore that all my luggage would be at the Masefield within the hour. But, as I was saying, I lost patience after a quarter of an hour or so, told the
receptionist
what I thought of the new order of things in the Hotel Masefield and walked out.

“And this is the ridiculous part of it!—Without thinking, I picked up a pigskin-and-silver dressing-case, out of sheer force of habit, since I had been accustomed to the feel of a
pigskin-and
-silver dressing-case in my hand for so long. Incidentally, my pigskin-and-silver dressing-case was expecially made with a compartment for papers. Well, to cut it short, I was stopped while I was stamping indignantly out of the Masefield and, as God is my Judge,
given
in
charge
for
trying
to
make
off
—
of
all
things
—
with
a
pigskin-and-silver
dressing-case
(
a
damned
inferior
one
)
the
property
of
Major-General
Hoskins,
whoever
he
may
be!

“And it’s all my fault. Yes, it is. Because it has since occurred to me that I must have misdirected my own luggage. I have a sprawling, loose, hurried way of writing, and ought to have written the name of the hotel in block letters. But I wrote it in longhand, and I will wager any sum within reason that they sent my luggage to the Hotel
Hirschfield
instead of the
Masefield.
There you have the whole story of my crime. And speaking of hotels, Mr. Pym, where do you live?”

“Care of the
Sunday
Special
will always get me … Ah-ah!—this is it!”

Pym felt that his bladder had risen into his throat, and that his uvula was beating upon it like a stick on a wet drum. He went into Court and was charged with being drunk and incapable.

“
Were
you drunk?” they asked him.

“Well …”

“Were you
drunk?”

“I am afraid I was.”

“Has he any money?”

“Thirty-nine shillings in silver and one shilling and
twopence-halfpenny
in bronze, sir.”

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself. Fined ten shillings. Next.”

Pym walked out like a somnambulist. “You mean, I simply pay ten shillings and then I can go away?” he asked,
incredulously
.

A colossal unhelmeted policeman said: “Unless you want to come and live with us.”

Another policeman in the doorway, looking stolidly to his front, flicked Pym a knowing wink with one eyelash. A raddled woman from whose face dried paint and powder were falling in little flakes, smiled at him, uncovering teeth like mildewed fragments of cheese.

Pym ran away. In Long Acre he found a taxi and—muddy and bruised, bloody and tattered, sore and humiliated—returned to Busto’s.

Busto focused his deadly old eyes upon him and said: “Aha! Aha! Youra girl friend. On danger list. Horsapidle says you go if you wanna go any time you like. Okay?”

“Danger list? Girl friend? What girl friend? Do you mean Miss Joyce?”

“No—Mrs. Greensleeve, what caught alight,” said Busto. “She been, she gone, she done it! Foolish woman.”

“Why pick on me?” said Pym.

“I dunno, I don’t care, I dowanna know,” said Busto. “She ask for you: they send. None of my business.”

“When did the message come?”

“Just now. Oh yes, I forgot—they bringa this for you,” said Busto, fishing an envelope from under the tails of his coat.

Ten minutes of contact with Busto were enough to make the envelope look and smell as if he had been wearing it next to his skin for six weeks. Pym took out a little sheet of notepaper with the letter-heading of the Lazarus Infirmary. He recognised Mrs. Greensleeve’s handwriting: the cramped, spikey writing of an impoverished gentlewoman to whom paper is money; who makes a pen-nib last a long time, and has to think twice before spending twopence on a bottle of ink. He read:

She had tried to sign her name with a flourish, but the flourish had gone awry so that it reminded Pym of the distorted lower lip of a crying child.

“Hah!”
said Busto, and shuffled away into his musty darkness below stairs.

Pym went to his room to wash, but when he saw himself in his sixpenny shaving-mirror he cried: “Christ!” again and shut his eyes. Then he examined himself as well as he could, fitting eyeful to eyeful of oblong reflection, and threw the mirror into the fireplace. It broke. “Another seven years’ bad luck,” he said.

He took his hoarded twenty-five pounds from between pages 385 and 386 of his typescript, and went out again.

Y
OU
must dress before you can be dressed. Who dares to come, in filthy rags, into the presence of a tailor? First, Pym went to a barber’s shop—the dirtiest he could find, since he hated to be conspicuous. Then—ragged, but smelling of brilliantine—he bought a white shirt for seven-and-sixpence and a pair of green socks for eighteenpence: one cannot try on even a fifty-shilling suit in a dirty shirt, and who is so lost to decency that he will uncover the nakedness of his toes to a salesman in a shoe shop?

Pym put on his new shirt and socks in a public lavatory, leaving the old ones in a neat bundle on top of the cistern. Now he felt better; he could even thank God for his hungry leanness, that made of his shoulders a hanger which any coat might fit.

Intoxicated by the caress of clean linen, he walked past the fifty-shilling place and confidently confronted a pushing
individual
who hung his shop window with autographed portraits of celebrities. The smell of new clothes stung Pym’s nostrils like spice: for one mad moment he lusted after a sportsmanlike double-breasted dog-tooth red-and-grey check suit as worn by the Lightweight Champion. He tickled the padded shoulder of a white tweed sports-coat, and stroked the back of a jacket which, the shopkeeper assured him, was as worn by Lord Lonsdale. There was a zigzag pattern in three distinct shades of brown that caught his eye; another fascinated him because it was like the Fire-and-Smoke-of-Navarino that Chichikov bought after he swindled Kholobuev. In the end he decided on something discreetly grey, calculated not to show the dirt. The shopkeeper assured him that his was a favourite colour of Sir Edward Marshall Hall.

“Where shall I send it, sir?” he asked, as if he did not know.

“I’ll wear it now.”

“And the other suit, sir?”

“Keep it until I call for it.”

After that, unashamed, almost arrogant, Pym put his stockinged foot on a stool in a shoe shop and paid seventeen shillings for a pair of black shoes.

Then he bought two ninepenny handkerchiefs for himself, ten-shillingsworth of black grapes for Mrs. Greensleeve, and went to the Lazarus Infirmary in a taxi.

The road was bad. The jolting of the taxi reminded Pym that his head ached and that there was a bad taste in his mouth. The infirmary was built of the French-mustard-coloured bricks that they used in the ’80’s for workhouses and barracks. It was blackened by the smoke of a railway junction—grim,
disheartening
, expressionless, cold as charity. The taxi paused, trembling, at the main entrance. The driver looked sourly at his fare, knocked up his flag with a vicious upper-cut and drove away.
Pym pushed open two great glass doors. The smell of the lobby made him gulp, while his memory threw up the image of a cruel little widow who had been his nurse twenty-five years ago: she shone with cleanness and washed her hands with carbolic soap ten times a day as if she was aware of a bad smell that she wanted to conceal. He hated her: she frightened him with her furtive glancings and scourings. What guilt was she scrubbing from her fingers, this Lady Macbeth of the Lavatory?

“I have come to see Mrs. Greensleeve, the lady who was brought here yesterday—the lady who burnt herself,” said Pym.

“Billing’s Ward.”

*

In Billing’s Ward Mrs. Greensleeve lay perfectly still. She was bandaged so that she resembled a mummy, partly
unwrapped
. A chin and a sticky-looking blue eye were visible, stained with bright yellow. An undamaged hand—a skein of blue-black veins and a ladylike débris of sucked chicken-bone in a cracked membrane—rested on a cushion. They had given her something to keep her quiet. The drug was working. As the needle had gone into her arm the pain had gone away in big ripples, so that she was full of a sweet, pleasantly-throbbing calm. Through that hollow needle the gentleman in the white coat had squirted grateful peace … she had felt it creeping up the big vein like mercury in a thermometer as the warmth soaked in. It settled in a placid pool somewhere near her heart, and sent easy-going tributaries away from there into her head.

Now Mrs. Greensleeve, who knew that she was going to die, thought of death in the same way as a nightbound wanderer in the rain looks forward to a soft bed.

When Pym put the grapes on the table by the bed she beat a feeble tatto with her undamaged hand. She had been drowsing on the edge of a wonderful sleep. Mrs. Greensleeve still suffered: she was not dead yet. She could even talk. Following her beckoning finger, Pym stooped until his ear was a few inches from where her mouth was hidden under lint and bandages. Green screens enclosed the bed. Beyond the screen a woman
was calling for a nurse. From another bed came a curiously melodious moaning. Brisk heels rang and reverberated in the corridor. An interminable goods train rattled and gasped out of the junction and in the distance an engine blew its whistle three times, very deliberately, as an owl hoots. From the street came a melancholy concert of horns: a taxi-driver, punching a rubber bulb, set up a lugubrious honking that made Pym think of wild geese over a desolate fen; a klaxon sounded and an effeminate little horn, with four distinct notes, cried plaintively.
Now!
the taxi-driver’s horn seemed to say; and then they all honked and cried and roared together. A man shouted. A motor-cycle stopped, impatiently thudding.

Mrs. Greensleeve’s whisper found its way through the
bandages
, and under the noise, as fog finds its way through the crack under a door.

She said: “Thank you for coming. I am so ashamed. Can you hear me?”

“Perfectly. I brought you some grapes, Mrs. Greensleeve. You must eat them all up and you’ll be better soon.”

“How kind of you. I haven’t had a grape for six years. I’m afraid I shan’t be able to eat them. No, no more grapes. I’m afraid I’m a dead woman, Mr. Pym.”

“Oh no, don’t say that, Mrs. Greensleeve! Should you talk? Oughtn’t you to rest?”

“As Carlyle said … ‘shall I not have all eternity to rest in?’ Excuse me. A foolish old woman—a selfish old woman. I have no right to do it—to take you away from your work.” She whispered the word “work” with reverence, giving it a whole breath. “I often sat listening to you at your typewriter. I am a writer myself … that is why I appealed to you. There is a freemasonry in the Craft. The Craft … the Craft….

“… I never was a crafty woman. I was not crafty enough. Couldn’t I have deceived Greensleeve? But did I? I did not, I did not. ‘You, Mary, the wife of a man in my position—you of all women to give way to this blind infatuation! … Love, you say? Do you
dare
to say so? Your love is for your husband—your children! This is lust—filthy lust! You will end in the gutter, diseased, and be buried in a pauper’s grave …’” Her
lint-muffled ghost of a whisper sounded different as she said this: she managed to inflate the shadow of a voice and made it round and bulky. She went on dreamily: “Fool! Fool! Canonical fool! If Harold Nero wasn’t love … if I had been nothing but a little lustful woman … Stronger than honour, stronger than my children. Lust? True love, true love, true love! ‘Oh, how beautiful you are!’ … How beautifully he said it! Lust! To say that of me! Not lust enough, dear God, not enough lust! … Poor Nero … dear Nero, so patient until … Poor him; poor me … poor Greensleeve.
Sometimes
an Anglican canon is given the gift of prophecy.
Pauper’s
grave!
…”

Pym’s neck was aching. He said: “You must relax, Mrs. Greensleeve, and take things easy.”

“What was I saying? I forget what I was saying,” she whispered. “Have I been talking? If I have, please pay no attention. There’s something. I am not asking a favour. One thing I don’t want. I don’t want to be … I was insured, but the policy lapsed. I couldn’t keep it up. What are you to do? Say you need shoelaces, or a box of matches to light the gas, or a penny for the fire. You need a needle and thread, a pencil, soap. My money was in rubber when it crashed—rubber and Mexican Eagles … Also, if you’ve got a pencil you want a rubber … I kept up the payments as long as I could. Believe me—believe me! I am told that they built their big building with the money they got from policies like mine. I simply had to have pen and ink and paper. Faith in my work. To get it typed cost pounds … If you will promise me something I swear that I will make you rich, very rich. Will you promise?”

“Yes,” said Pym.

“Promise not to let them bury me in a pauper’s grave.”

“No, no, they won’t.”

“I have nothing. Forgive me. Greensleeve was not far wrong. I did sink low, after everything was lost. Oh, dear me, dear me, that place in Paddington … and then those hostels. ‘A poor man is full of tears, and imagines himself despised by all mankind,’ said Menander. How much poorer is a poor old woman? So much poorer than a man? Oh, Poverty and
Pride—Poverty and Pride! They make a secret, and the secret begets a lie, and the lie begets a fear, and the fear multiplies itself—oh dear, the poor, the poor, poor proud, how frightened they always are, always hiding! Now listen. Go to No. 8 Damascus Terrace and ask for Mrs. Lincoln. Lincoln—remember it; Damascus Terrace. Give her forty-eight shillings—a month’s rent I owe—and ask her for Mrs. Greensleeve’s box of papers. I want to give it to you. It will make you rich. Will you do that?”

“Word of honour. You must rest now.”

“‘A poor man has no honour,’ as Dr. Johnson said. Mrs. Lincoln thought my box was full of valuables. She let me go on for a month before she locked me out … Valuables, yes—but not her sort. I want you to have them. Write on a piece of paper:

‘The bearer of this is authorised to claim my property.’ As quickly as you can, please, so that I can sign it.”

Pym wrote the words on a sheet of hospital notepaper and gave her the pencil. She signed her name firmly, without looking.

“I want to do something for you,” she said; “and in return all I ask is that you won’t let me be buried in a pauper’s grave. Promise?”

“Of course.”

“I believe you. God bless you. Will you sit with me just for a little while?”

“Yes,” said Pym.

A few minutes later Mrs. Greensleeve said: “Art is long and life is short … but how can I sharpen a pencil with a
fish-knife
? … And with what else am I to sharpen my pencil?” She was almost asleep. “…. Designer infinite! Must thou then char the wood ere thou canst limn with it?”

*

Several hours later Pym handed the late Mrs. Greensleeve’s note to Mrs. Lincoln, at No. 8 Damascus Terrace. She was a tight-mouthed, tight-eyed, shrewish little woman; brisk, voluble, businesslike. “Greensleeve?” she said. “Ah! She was a cunning one.”

“She said that I was to give you forty-eight shillings and take her box,” said Pym.

“I don’t know how people can
be
like that! If you ask me, she’s no better than a common thief. Her and her box! She talked me over nicely, I don’t mind telling you. The trouble with me is I am too kind-hearted. ‘I’ll pay next week’. And after that it’s ‘positively next week’, and then it’s ‘the week after next’. She’s expecting a remittance. Remittance! Then she wants five shillings for stamps, and I, like a fool, give it to her out of my own pocket. Out of my own pocket! ‘There’s always my box as security.’ Her box—security! An old trunk full of dirty paper. That was her security. If you want my opinion, your Mrs. Greensleeve is no better than a common swindler. Wait till I get hold of her—I’ll tell her what I think of her if it was in front of King George himself!”

“That isn’t very likely, I’m afraid,” said Pym, “because the lady died to-day.”

“Oh. I see. And she gave you the money to pay me what she owed me, is that it?”

“Yes, that’s it. Forty-eight shillings.”

“Of course, she forgot five shillings lent out of my own pocket for stamps,” said Mrs. Lincoln with bitterness. ‘She always did have one of those convenient memories.”

“She didn’t mention five shillings for stamps—only a month’s rent. But if you tell me that the lady owed you five shillings extra, I’ll pay it.”

“Of course she forgot to mention meals and cups of tea! Oh well, never mind, I suppose I’ll have to let it go.
Forty-eight
, and five out of my own pocket, that makes fifty-three. Two pounds thirteen. Pay me that and you can have her rubbishing old box. Box! I treated her like one of my own, and all I got was aggravation. I’d have
boxed
her!”

Mrs. Lincoln dragged a dusty little wicker-work trunk out of a cupboard under the stairs and pushed it towards Pym. Having counted the money she softened a little and said: “She talked like a lady. She seemed to have been about a bit. This much I
will
say: she kept herself clean and her room was a picture to look at. I’m not a hard woman, but it stands to
reason I’ve got to live. I try to be fair, but I’m a widow. Just a minute, and I’ll get some of the dust off of that. One thing I can’t stand and won’t stand is dirt. Nobody is ever going to say that I was
dirty.
Anybody could go into any of my rooms at any hour of the day or night. If ever you want a clean room——”

“—I shan’t fail to let you know,” said Pym.

On the way home, cross-examining himself in the
hate-inspired
manner of a prosecuting counsel, Pym forced himself to admit that he despised himself:

Mrs.
Greensleeve
was
your
neighbour,
is
that
so?
asked Reason.

“Yes, that is so,” said the shamefaced Pym.

You
know
her
well?

“Why, no. In fact, not at all.”

Not
at
all.
You
had,
however,
exchanged
conversation
with
Mrs.
Greensleeve?

“Well, no—no, I’d never conversed with her, unless….”

Unless
what?

“Unless you call borrowing a tin-opener conversation. I had a visitor,” said Pym, hurriedly excusing himself: “I wanted to open a tin of strawberries.”

You
had
a
visitor
in
your
bedroom
?