Free The Thousand Deaths of Mr Small by Gerald Kersh

would have married anything that wore trousers. But as soon as she had said what she said Millie wept again.
    Then the tobacconist shouted: “Whose nails are they? Do I ask you for nails? Do I bite your nails? If it isn’t one thing it’s another. Now it’s nails! What d’you want me to bite, screws? Mind your own business! I’ll bite what I bloomingwell like! Leave me alone!”
    Ruth shrieked at her husband: “You let a creature like that talk to me like that? And you call yourself a man?”
    The estate agent, half-heartedly, said: “Talk like a gentleman!”
    The tobacconist cried: “First teach your wife to talk like a lady.”
    “So now I’m not a lady,” said Ruth, in tears. “If I was a man I’d tear him to pieces.”
    Then the estate agent rose abruptly, knocking over his chair, and said: “I didn’t come here to be insulted. I wish you good-night .” He started to leave the room, but his wife clung to his coat-tails, sobbing:
    “Stay, stay!”
    “Stay to be insulted?”
    “To please me —for my sake!”
    “Let us be quiet,” said the photographer.
    “You see what you’ve done?” said Millie to her fiancé, “do you see? Now do you see what you’ve done?”
    I. Small, taking himself by the ears and shaking himself, shouted: “I didn’t done nothing, I didn’t said a word! Let it be a boot and shoe shop, a shmoot and boo shop—for the sake of peace, anything!”
    So at last it was decided that I. Small was to become a retailer of footwear. There were passionate arguments about suitable premises. The photographer suggested one of the expanding north-western suburbs. Millie took this as a slight. Having listened, nodding in agreement, until the photographer was gone, she foamed at the mouth with resentment….
    So! Now she knew. She knew it all now. He was jealous already, that twopenny-halfpenny photographer—he wanted the West End of London all to himself, the glutton! So that was the kind of man he was: thank God she had found out at last! She tore a handkerchief and cried. So that was the idea, was it? To get them out of the way. Just because he talked good English, he was ashamed of his future brother-in-law. So that was it, was it? Who was he to be stuck up just because he was a photographer—all he had to do was put a bit of black cloth over his head and say: “Smile please,” or “Look at the dicky bird.” Him and his dicky birds—he looked down on her Intended because he was a high-class shoemaker, did he? What was the matter with a shoemaker, anyway? A high-class shoemaker was as good as a photographer any day, in fact twenty times better than certain photographers she could mention. In any case, I. Small was not a shoemaker—he was in ladies’ and gentlemen’s shoes…. But everybody wanted to get them out into the suburbs, that was it…. Millie carried on in this vein until her father drove his clenched fist into a soup tureen full of hot borsch and screamed like a maddened horse in a burning stable, saying: “I want you should be calm!”
    In the end she set her heart on business premises with an upper part in a side street off Oxford Street. (The place the photographer had suggested was in Golders Green. He bought it himself, freehold, for £300 and sold it twenty years later for£7,350—which made Millie’s blood boil again.) But at present, at least, she could say that her husband was in the ladies’ and gentlemen’s boot and shoe business in the heart of the West End. Mayfair! From Oxford Circus you turned westward, walked three hundred and fifty yards, turned left, walked four hundred yards, crossed the street, took the turning by the antique shop, and there was I. Small’s establishment, in Mayfair—a five minutes’ walk from Park Lane.
    Charles Small, who has inherited a tendency to sit on tacks to give himself something to cry over, walked one evening to look at that shop in Noblett Street, W.1. Of all the streets in London this was the least