Kersh The Thousand Deaths of Mr Small

Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-30459-2
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 412 Seiten

'The Thousand Deaths Of Mr Small is the best novel that Gerald Kersh has yet written... Charles Small, successful advertising expert and miserable man, turns over in his mind the 'stinking, sour, stagnant, untransmitted mass' which is his life... This book has a rich, warm quality; long and full of detail, it teems with humour, satire, incident, character; in a word, with life.' Yorkshire Post 'It see-saws from side-splitting dialogue to such catalogues of loathing and revulsion as have rarely been seen in print, from outrageous farce to sudden compassion for the Smalls of this world, who find Hell enough in 'the eternal contemplation of themselves as they made themselves.'' New York Herald Tribune 'With brilliant descriptive power and an emetic vocabulary, [Kersh] has produced a tormented and forceful work.' Commonweal

Gerald Kersh was born in Teddington on August 26 1911. He quit schooling early, and took a succession of jobs while developing his ambition to write. In 1934 he published a roman a clef, Jews without Jehovah, immediately suppressed by members of his family who took exception to its contents. Following the outbreak of war Kersh joined the Coldstream Guards in 1940. The following year he drew on his Guardsman experience to write the bestselling They Die with their Boots Clean, a classic fictional account of basic training. A sequel followed, The Nine Lives of Bill Nelson, and the pair would be re-published together as Sergeant Nelson of the Guards. Thereafter Kersh was hugely productive: a writer not merely of novels(such as The Song Of The Flea in 1948 and The Thousand Deaths Of Mr Small in 1950) but also stories, journalism, sketches and columns, radio and documentary film scripts. His stories are collected in volumes including The Horrible Dummy and Other Stories and The Best of Gerald Kersh. His success was tempered by troubles over money, health and personal affairs, but through this turmoil he wrote some of his best novels: Fowler's End (1958), The Implacable Hunter (1961) and The Angel and the Cuckoo (1966). He died in New York on 5th November 1968, aged 57.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Kersh, Gerald

Leseproben

CHAPTER II

THIS 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:

Drinking, drinking, drinking …

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 neighbourhood’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...