The Song of the Flea Read Free Page B

looked in. He saw the old familiar wash-stand with the blue basin and soap-dish, and the red-and-yellow jug. In the mauve-and-green pail below stood the inevitable scummed grey washing water. There was an awful stillness on the face of this water. Busto went into the room, looked about him sharply, and cried out in anguish. The bed—a secondhand wooden bed sawn down to look like a divan—was disordered and cold. Mr. Pym was gone. Busto cursed himself for his carelessness. Pym must have crept out before dawn: a certain warmth lingered between the blankets. Snarling like a dog, Busto went to the wardrobe and jerked open the door. There was nothing inside but a musty smell. Under the bed he found a pair of shoes, the uppers of which had been carefully polished. Mr. Pym had tried to keep up appearances. The soles were worn through, and he had tried to repair them with a sixpenny tube of the stuff called “Liquid Leather”, but the fibrous sediment that it left behind had fallen away, leaving a sort of high-water-mark or fuzz somewhere near the instep. After that Mr. Pym had drawn outlines of his feet on the covers of a calf-bound “ Life of Alexander the Great ”,cutting them out with an old razor blade and smearing them with Vaseline to make them waterproof before fitting them into his shoes. But they had worn through. Pym had tried, with his inexpert hand, to screw on a pair of cheap rubber heels. He had no idea of the proper technique. In the heel of the left shoe there was a little jagged hole; in the right was embedded the head of a screw. Busto could see that this undesirable tenant had made experiments :a sixpenny rubber belt had been cut into two-inch lengths and subjected to the action of fire. Pym had imagined, no doubt, that he could make these strips of rubber stick so as to cover the holes in his shoes if he applied them while they were still hot and bubbling. It had not worked. He had given up, and gone out in his last pair of presentable shoes—the thin-soled ones with the down-trodden heels. Busto had the eye of a detective: he did not fail to notice certain strands of muddy wool on the floor. These, he knew, had been cut with the same old safety-razor blade from the cuffs of Pym’s trousers. Pym had been making himself beautiful.
    Busto gnashed his teeth. “My own father!” he said. He meant that after this he would not give his own father three days’ grace if he had a father. But then he noticed that the table was covered with little stacks of paper. One of these was nearly two inches thick, grey-and-blue, with typewritten lines and scribbled corrections. Another, much smaller, was black with microscopic handwriting. The rest was blank paper, flimsy porous stuff sold at tenpence a ream. Busto’s fists, which he had raised above his head in anguish and hate, came slowly down. He knew that hope was not lost, because Pym was trying to write a book. Certain people came back: mechanics for their tools; actors for their shirts; and writers for their bits of paper.
    Busto padlocked the door and went downstairs. He was not really worrying: he was merely cursing himself for his stupidity. Last rent-day Mr. Pym had gone out with his little typewriter and returned, affluent, without it. “I ought to have known,” said Busto.
    He went back to his room and listened. There was a gentleman on the second floor front who owned a musical instrument, a portable gramophone and a big case of records, whose rent was due at noon: a man from the North of England, who had played the trumpet in a colliery band but had come South hoping to get a job with Ambrose. Busto could tell by the creaking of the stairs whether a man was carrying weight. He sat still, listening. He could identify you by the click and scrape of your key in the lock. Instinct told Busto that sooner or later Mr. Pym would come back.

CHAPTER TWO
    P YM will never forget how he went downstairs that morning. The whole house was squealing Awake! Awake! Awake!