The Song of the Flea Read Online Free PDF Page B

paper-weight—look, shake it and it makes a snowstorm—and a pair of flannel trousers. There’s a magnifying glass in a real morocco case. Perhaps you wouldn’t mind letting me have a couple of pounds on this till Friday.”
    The pawnbroker’s clerk looked at him and spread out the suit. Pym had prepared it carefully, rubbing out spots with an old handkerchief and a pennyworth of petrol But when the clerk laid his hands on the cloth all the old stains came back. A disparaging forefinger brought up something like a fringe under a sleeve. At the touch of an accusing thumb a buttonhole disintegrated. A quick hand stroked from left to right, and the lining of the waistcoat became grey and greasy. With supernatural cunning the clerk turned back the cuffs and uncovered a split lining.
    “That’s very extraordinary,” said Pym.
    The clerk looked at the shoes and threw them aside; shook the paper-weight and grunted. He looked through the magnifying glass at a thumbnail, sighed, and said: “Let you have ten bob, if you like.”
    “You must be crazy,” said Pym, desperately; “that’s an eight-guinea suit.”
    “Ten bob.”
    “No, but listen——”
    “I can’t let you have more than ten bob. And I don’t want the paper-weight.”
    “Damn it all, man—till Friday!”
    “Say you fell dead on Thursday?”
    “I won’t fall dead on Thursday, I give you my——”
    “Ten bob.”
    Pym hesitated. Then he hitched up his shoulders in what he believed to be a nonchalant shrug and said: “Oh, all right; take it.”
    “Have you got twopence for the ticket?”
    “Take it out of that. I shall want some small change. Damn it all!” said Pym, “couldn’t you make it a little more than that?”
    “Got a cellar full of stuff like this—more than I know what to do with.”
    Pym took the money and the ticket and went into the street, too depressed even for resentment. He had nine shillings and elevenpence. No sum of money in the world is more irritatingly useless than nine shillings and elevenpence when you need two pounds. The odd pennies make it loose and untidy. His mind had gone blank again. He put the silver carefully into his fob-pocket and took the fivepence into a teashop, where he squandered it on weak tea and penny buns. There, again, he chose a corner seat: it was appropriate to his mood of quiet desperation, for he felt now like a boxer fighting for his supper, who has struggled like a madman for nine rounds and sits with a sinking heart in a heaving breast waiting for the gong, the knock-out, and the limping journey home in humiliation through the rainwashed streets.
    For want of something better to do, Pym took out the little worn wallet in which he kept his private papers. These were mostly pawn-tickets. Pym put the new one with the old ones, shuffled them, and fanned them open warily like an anxious gambler after a desperate draw in a poker game. He contemplated this melancholy hand and arranged it carefully, instinctively smiling brightly and pretending to be pleasantly surprised—pathetically bluffing, like an unlucky player; deceiving nobody. He put the typewriter next to the cigarette-case, fitted in the winter overcoat and the summer suit, and then started in real astonishment. There was a ticket he had forgotten.
    The ticket said Silver Snuff-box … 7/6. It was a handsomely engraved snuff-box, two hundred years old. Pym had got it from his father, and used to carry it for luck. Sometimes, in order to make an impression, he had put a little snuff in it and offered it with a flourish to startled acquaintances. Now, remembering it, he sat upright and put the other tickets away. In as little time as it took to snap his fingers, Pym became happy. His heart beat harder and faster. Trapped hope had found a hole in the net, a loose bar in the cage. In five seconds he had a plan, complex, bold and exciting.
    He would redeem the snuff-box; go to Szisco’s, near Holborn, and sell it. Szisco bought and sold