The Song of the Flea Read Free

the small hours over twopennyworth of coffee, passed the time exchanging reminiscences of Busto’s apartment house. They said that he was not a man but a ghost, too mean to give you a fright; that he smoked his tenants’ cigarette ends, used the ash for snuff and was slowly dying of a broken heart because he could not find a use for the puffs of smoke he reluctantlv let go;that he washed, dried, and re-used toilet paper, which he stole from the public conveniences. They said that he never ate: he lived on the air in the house, of which you could cut yourself a slice. They believed that he had never taken off his clothes: that he sewed them on and slept in them until they flaked away. His morning-coat gave rise to macabre speculation. The sheets on his beds inspired unprintable legends. Busto, who knew that space was money, had put partitions across his larger rooms, so that he could accommodate two tenants at twelve-and-sixpenoe a week instead of one tenant at eighteen shillings. These partitions were made of beaver-board: you could make a spy-hole with a nail file. The things men claimed to have seen through these spy-holes are unrepeatable and best forgotten. Many years will pass before they stop repeating, with embellishments , the incident of the consumptive night-club hostess. Busto threw her out for non-payment of rent, and kept her last warm garment—a dilapidated teddy-bear overcoat. The girl disappeared, but the fable-mongers say that she collapsed in the street, was picked up by a duchess, and is now Lady Something-or-Other … and when Busto heard of this he went along to the Castle with her clothes in a bundle, demanded five- and-sixpence for arrears of rent, and was bought off for £10,000.
    There used to be a dying idiot who went up and down the stairs with a worn-out brush and a tin dustpan, brushing and brushing and brushing. Nobody ever knew who he was, where he came from, or how he ended; but everyone says that this was Busto’s father, and that Busto sent him to the workhouse one dark night after he had ascertained that the old man had out-lived his usefulness.
    If Busto had been a little less avaricious they would have hated him. But he had become a Character. In a way, they were proud of him. If he had ever been detected in an act of mercy, they would have despised him. But Busto remained Busto—intransigent, uncompromising in his pitilessness, greedy as a quicksand, inhospitable as the east wind, untouchable as a broken-toothed old wolf. And therefore they forgave him. They almost liked him. He was one in a million. A Busto was not born every day. There were some who admired him becausehe had made good—that is to say, made money. His house provided something more than four walls and a roof. Having stayed there, if only for a couple of weeks, you had something in common with many other men and women—something to talk about; grounds for intimacy.
    For example: you could talk about Busto’s Art Gallery. People like to put pictures on their walls, but when they run away without paying their rent the pictures are always left. Busto’s house was hung with the pictorial detritus of forty years. Sometimes someone left a picture in a frame; in which case, the picture not having been worth five shillings of any fool’s money, Busto sold the frame and hung the canvas on a wall. In general his tenants satisfied themselves with plates torn out of illustrated magazines. So you might have seen half a dozen September Morns, caricatures of chimpanzees by Starr Wood, cartoons by Spy and Ape. There were several First Kisses, Love-Me- Love-My -Dogs, a score of cavaliers kissing chambermaids, a representative handful of the drawings of Phil May, a quantity of nudes, and a surprising number of nostalgic Old English tavern scenes. Many of Busto’s tenants liked to look at big clean interiors in cosy firelight, where jovial red-faced men lounged in red coats, cutting mighty rounds of red beef and drinking deep