"
demanded
Belacqua "or is it open?
Samuel Beckett
The one deplorable feature of her get up, as apprehended by Belacqua in his hasty survey, was the footwear—the cruel strait outsizes of the suffragette or welfare worker.
But he did not doubt for a moment that they had been a
gift, or picked up in the pop for a song. She was of more than average height and well in flesh. She might be past middle-age. But her face, ah her face, was what Belacqua had rather refer to as her countenance, it was so full of light. This she lifted up upon him and no error. Brimful of light and serene, serenissime, it bore no trace of suffering, and in this alone it might be said to be a notable face. Yet like tormented faces that he had seen, like the face in the National Gallery in Merrion Square by the Master of Tired Eyes, it seemed to have come a long way and subtend an
infinitely narrow angle of affliction, as eyes focus a star. The features were null, only luminous, impassive and secure, petrified in radiance, or words to that effect, for the reader is requested to take notice that this sweet style is Belacqua's. An act of expression, he said, a wreathing or wrinkling, could only have had the effect of a dimmer on a headlight. The implications of this triumphant figure, the
just and the unjust, etc. , are better forgone.
At long last she addressed herself to Belacqua.
"Seats in heaven" she said in a white voice "tuppence
apiece, four fer a tanner. "
"No" said Belacqua. It was the first syllable to come to
his lips. It had not been his intention to deny her.
"The best of seats" she said "again I'm sold out. Tup-
pence apiece the best of seats, four fer a tanner. "
This was unforeseen with a vengeance, if not exactly vaudeville. Belacqua was embarrassed in the last degree, but transported also. He felt the sweat coming in the small
of his back, above his Montrouge belt.
"Have you got them on you? " he mumbled.
"Heaven goes round" she said, whirling her arm, "and
round and round and round and round and round. " "Yes" said Belacqua "round and round. "
"Rowan" she said, dropping the d's and getting more of
a spin into the slogan, "rowan an' rowan an' rowan. " Belacqua scarcely knew where to look. Unable to blush he came out in this beastly sweat. Nothing of the kind had ever happened to him before. He was altogether disarmed, unsaddled and miserable. The eyes of them all, the dockers, the railwaymen and, most terrible of all, the joxers, were upon him. His tail drooped. This female dog
of a pixy with her tiresome Ptolemy, he was at her mercy. "No" he said "no thank you, no not this evening thank
you. "
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"Again I'm sold out" she said "an buked out, four fer a tanner. "
"On whose authority Scholar.
. .
. " began Belacqua, like a
"For yer frien' " she said "yer da, yer ma an' yer motte, four fer a tanner. " The voice ceased, but the face did not abate.
"How do I know" piped Belacqua "you're not sellin' me a pup? "
"Heaven goes rowan an' rowan
. "
"Rot you" said Belacqua "I'll take two. How much is that? "
"Four dee" she said.
Belacqua gave her a sixpence.
"Gobbless yer honour" she said, in the same white voice
from which she had not departed. She made to go. "Here" cried Belacqua "you owe me twopence. " He had
not even the good grace to say tuppence.
"Arragowan" she said "make it four cantcher, yer frien',
yer da, yer ma an' yer motte. "
Belacqua could not bicker. He had not the strength of
mind for that. He turned away.
"Jesus" she said distinctly "and his sweet mother pre-
serve yer honour. "
"Amen" said Belacqua, into his dead porter.
Now the woman went away and her countenance
lighted her to her room in Townsend Street.
But Belacqua tarried a little to listen to the music. Then
he also departed, but for Railway Street, beyond the river.
. .
A Wet Night
JlTark, it is the season of festivity and goodwill. Shop- ping is in full swing, the streets are thronged with revel- lers, the Corporation has offered a prize for the best- dressed window, Hyam's trousers are down again.
Mistinguett would do away with chalets of necessity. She does not think them necessary. Not so Belacqua. Emerging happy body from the hot bowels of Mc- Louglin's he looked up and admired the fitness of Moore's bull neck, not a whit too short, with all due respect to the critics. Bright and cheery above the strom of the Green, as though coached by the Star of Bethlehem, the Bovril sign danced and danced through its seven phases.
The lemon of faith jaundiced, annunciating the series, was in a fungus of hopeless green reduced to shingles and abolished. Whereupon the light went out, in homage to the slain. A sly ooze of gules, carmine of solicitation, lift- ing the skirts of green that the prophecy might be fulfilled, shocking Gabriel into cherry, flooded the sign. But the long skirts came rattling down, darkness covered their shame, the cycle was at an end. Da capo.
Bovril into Salome, thought Belacqua, and Tommy Moore there with his head on his shoulders. Doubt, Des- pair and Scrounging, shall I hitch my bath-chair to the greatest of these? Across the way, beneath the arcade, the blind paralytic was in position, he was well tucked up in
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his coverings, he was lashing into his dinner like any proletarian. Soon his man would come and wheel him home. No one had ever seen him come or go, he was there one minute and gone the next. He went and returned. When you scrounge you must go and return, that was the first great article of Christian scrounging. No man could settle down to scrounge properly in a foreign land. The Wanderjahre were a sleep and a forgetting, the proud dead point. You came back wise and staked your beat in some sheltered place, pennies trickled in, you were looked up to in a tenement.
Belacqua had been proffered a sign, Bovril had made him a sign.
Whither next? To what licensed premises? To where the porter was well up, first; and the solitary shawly like a cloud of latter rain in a waste of poets and politicians, second; and he neither knew nor was known, third. A lowly house dear to shawlies where the porter was up and he could keep himself to himself on a high stool with a high round and feign to be immersed in the Moscow notes of the Twilight Herald. These were very piquant.
Of the two houses that appealed spontaneously to these exigencies the one, situate in Merrion Row, was a home from home for jarveys. As some folk from hens, so Belac- qua shrank from jarveys. Rough, gritty, almost verminous men. From Moore to Merrion Row, moreover, was a peril- ous way, beset at this hour with poets and peasants and politicians. The other lay in Lincoln Place, he might go gently by Pearse Street, there was nothing to stop him. Long straight Pearse Street, it permitted of a simple can- tilena in his mind, its footway peopled with the tranquil and detached in fatigue, its highway dehumanised in a tumult of buses. Trams were monsters, moaning along be- neath the wild gesture of the trolley. But buses were
pleasant, tires and glass and clash and no more. Then to pass by the Queens, home of tragedy, was charming at that hour, to pass between the old theatre and the long line of the poor and lowly queued up for thruppence worth of pictures. For there Florence would slip into the song, the Piazza della Signoria and the No 1 tram and the Feast of St John, when they lit the torches of resin on the towers and the children, while the rockets at nightfall above the Cascine were still flagrant in their memory, opened the little cages to the glutted cicadae after their long confinement and stayed out with their young parents long after their usual bedtime. Then slowly in his mind down the sinister Uffizi to the parapets of Arno, and so on and so forth. This pleasure was dispensed by the Fire Station opposite which seemed to have been copied here and there from the Palazzo Vecchio. In deference to Sa- vonarola? Ha! Ha! At all events it was as good a way as any other to consume the Homer hour, darkness filling the streets and so on, and a better than most in virtue of his great thirst towards the lowly house that would snatch him in off the street through the door of its grocery de- partment if by good fortune that were still open.
Painfully then under the College ramparts, past the smart taxis, he set off, clearing his mind for its song. The Fire Station worked without a hitch and all was going as well as could be expected considering what the evening held in pickle for him when the blow fell. He was run plump into by one Chas, a highbrow bromide of French nationality with a diabolical countenance compound of Skeat's and Paganini's and a mind like a tattered concord- ance. It was Chas who would not or could not leave well alone, Belacqua being rapt in his burning feet and the line of the song in his head.
"Halte-la" piped the pirate, "whither so gay? "
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In the lee of the Monumental Showroom Belacqua was obliged to pause and face this machine. It carried butter and eggs from the Hibernian Dairy. Belacqua however was not to be drawn.
"Ramble" he said vaguely "in the twilight. "
"Just a song" said Chas "at twilight. No? "
Belacqua tormented his hands in the gloom. Had he
been blocked on his way and violated in the murmur of his mind to listen to this clockwork Bartlett? Apparently.
"How's the world" he said nevertheless, in spite of everything, "and what's the news of the great world? "
"Fair" said Chas, cautiously, "fair to meedling. The poem moves, eppure. "
If he mentions ars longa, Belacqua made this covenant with himself, he will have occasion to regret it.
"Limae labor' said Chas "et mora! '
"Well" said Belacqua, casting off with clean hands, "see you again. "
"But shortly, I thrrust" cried Chas, "casa Frica, dis col- lied night. No? "
"Alas" said Belacqua, well adrift.
Behold the Frica, she visits talent in the Service Flats. In she lands, singing Havelock Ellis in a deep voice, frankly itching to work that which is not seemly. Open upon her concave breast as on a lectern lies Portigliotti's Penombre Claustrali, bound in tawed caul. In her talons earnestly she grasps Sade's 120 Days and the Ante- rotica of Aliosha G. Brignole-Sale, unopened, bound in shagreened caul. A septic pudding hoodwinks her, a stodgy turban of pain it laps her horse face. The eyehole is clogged with the bulbus, the round pale globe goggles exposed. Solitary meditation has furnished her with nos- trils of generous bore. The mouth champs an invisible bit, foam gathers at the bitter commissures. The crateriform
brisket, lipped with sills of paunch, cowers ironically be- hind a maternity tunic. Keyholes have wrung the un- friendly withers, the osseous rump screams behind the hobble-skirt. Wastes of woad worsted advertise the pas- terns. Aie!
This in its absinthe whinny had bidden Belacqua and, what is more, the Alba, to backstairs, claret cup and the intelligentsia. The Alba, Belacqua's current one and only, had much pleasure in accepting for her scarlet gown and broad pale bored face. The belle of the ball. Aie!
But seldom one without two and scarcely had Chas been shed than lo from out the Grosvenor sprang the homespun Poet wiping his mouth and a little saprophile of an anonymous politico-ploughboy setting him off. The Poet sucked his teeth over this unexpected pleasure. The golden eastern lay of his bullet head was muted by no covering. Beneath the Wally Whitmaneen of his Donegal tweeds a body was to be presumed. He gave the impres- sion of having lost a harrow and found a figure of speech. Belacqua was numbed.
"Drink" decreed the Poet in a voice of thunder.
Belacqua slunk at his heels into the Grosvenor, the gim- let eyes of the saprophile probed his loins.
"Now" exulted the Poet, as though he had just brought an army across the Beresina, "give it a name and knock it back. "
"Pardon me" stuttered Belacqua "just a moment, will you be so kind. " He waddled out of the bar and into the street and up it at all speed and into the lowly public through the groceries door like a bit of dirt into a Hoover. This was a rude thing to do. When intimidated he was rude beyond measure, not timidly insolent like Stendhal's Comte de Thaler, but finally rude on the sly. Timidly in- solent when, as by Chas, exasperated; finally rude on the
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sly when intimidated, outrageously rude behind the back of his oppressor. This was one of his little peculiarities.
He bought a paper of a charming little sloven, no but a truly exquisite little page, a freelance clearly, he would not menace him, he skipped in on his miry bare feet with only three or four under his oxter for sale. Belacqua gave him a thruppenny bit and a cigarette picture. He sat to himself on a stool in the central leaf of the main triptych, his feet on a round so high that his knees topped the curb of the counter (admirable posture for man with weak bladder and tendency to ptosis of viscera), drank despondent porter(buthedarednotbudge) anddevouredthepaper.
"A woman" he read with a thrill "is either: a short- below-the-waist, a big-hip, a sway-back, a big-abdomen or an average. If the bust be too cogently controlled, then shall fat roll from scapula to scapula. If it be made pass- able and slight, then shall the diaphragm bulge and be un- sightly. Why not therefore invest chez a reputable corset- builder in the brassiere-cum-corset decollete, made from the finest Broches, Coutils and Elastics, centuple stitched in wearing parts, fitted with immovable spiral steels? It bestows stupendous diaphragm and hip support, it en-
. "
be classified. Not to be corseted. Not woman of flesh.
The face on the curate faded away and Grock's ap-
peared in its stead.
"Say that again" said the red gash in the white putty. Belacqua said it all and much more.
"Nisscht mddddoodglich" moaned Grock, and was gone. Now Belacqua began to worry lest the worst should
come to the worst and the scarlet gown be backless after
hances the sleeveless backless neckless evening gown
O Love! O Fire! but would the scarlet gown lack all these parts? Was she a short-below or a sway-back? She had no waist, nor did she deign to sway. She was not to
. .
all. Not that he had any doubts as to the back thus bared being a sight for sore eyes. The omoplates would be well defined, they would have a fine free ball-and-socket mo- tion. In repose they would be the blades of an anchor, the delicate furrow of the spine its stem. His mind pored over this back that inspired him with awe. He saw it as a flower-de-luce, a spatulate leaf with segments angled back, like the wings of a butterfly sucking a blossom, from their common hinge. Then, fetching from further afield, as an obelisk, a cross-potent, pain and death, still death, a bird crucified on a wall. This flesh and bones swathed in scar- let, this heart of washed flesh draped in scarlet. . . .
Unable to bear any longer his doubt as to the rig of the gown he passed through the counter and got her house on the telephone.
"Dressing" said the maid, the Venerilla, his friend and bawd to be, "and spitting blood. "
No, she could not be got down, she had been up in her room cursing and swearing for the past hour.
'Tm afeared of me gizzard" said the voice "to go near her. "
"Is it closed at the back?
" demanded Belacqua "or is it open? "
"Is what? "
"The gown" cried Belacqua, "what else? Is it closed? " The Venerilla requested him to hold on while she called
it to the eye of the mind. The objurgations of this ineffable member were clearly audible.
"Would it be the red one? " she said, after countless ages.
"The scarlet bloody gown of course" he cried out of his torment, "do you not know? "
. "
"Hold on now. . . . It buttons
"Buttons? What buttons? "
"It buttons ups behind, sir, with the help of God. "
. .
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"Say it again" implored Belacqua, "over and over again. "
"Amn't I after saying" groaned the Venerilla "it buttons ups on her. "
"Praise be to God" said Belacqua "and his blissful Mother. "
Calm now and sullen the Alba, dressed insidiously up to the nines, bides her time in the sunken kitchen, paying no heed to her fool and foil who has made bold to lay open Belacqua's distress. She is in pain, her brandy is at hand, mulling in the big glass on the range. Behind her frontage abandoned in elegance, sagging in its elegance and clouded in its native sorrow, a more anxious rite than sumptuous meditation is in progress. For her mind is at prayer-stool before a perhaps futile purpose, she is loading the spring of her mind for a perhaps unimportant under-
taking. Letting her outside rip pro tern she is screwing herself up and up, she is winding up the weights of her mind, to being the belle of the ball, banquet or party. Any less beautiful girl would have contemned such tactics and considered this class of absorption at the service of so simple an occasion unwarranted and, what was worse, a sad give away. Here am I, a less bountiful one would have argued, the belle, and there is the ball; let these two items be brought together and the thing is done. Are we then to insinuate, with such a simplist, that the Alba ques- tioned the virtue of her appearance. Indeed and indeed we are not. She had merely to unleash her eyes, she had merely to unhood them, as well she knew, and she might have mercy on whom she would. There was no difficulty about that. But what she did question, balefully, as though she knew the answer in advance, was the fitness of a dis-
tinction hers for the asking, of a palm that she had merely to open her eyes and assume. That the simplicity of the
gest turned her in the first place against it, relegating it among the multitude of things that were not her genre, is indisputable. But this was only a minute aspect of her po- sition. It is with the disparagement attaching in the thought of Belacqua, and in hers tending to, to the quality of the exploit that she now wrestles. It is with its no doubt unworthiness that she now has to do. Sullen and still, aware of the brandy at hand but not thirsting for it, she cranks herself up to a reality of preference, slowly but surely she gilds her option, she exalts it into realms of choice. She will do this thing, she will be belle of the ball, gladly, gravely and carefully, humiliter, fideliter, simplici- ter, and not merely because she might just as well. Is she, she a woman of the world, she who knows, to halt be- tween two opinions, founder in a strait of two wills, hang in suspense and be the more killed? She who knows? So far from such nonsense she will soon chafe to be off. And now she dare, until it be time, the clock strike, delegate a portion of her attention with instructions to reorganise her features, hands, shoulders, back, outside in a word, the in-
side having been spiked. At once she thirsts for the Hen- nessy. She sings to herself, for her own pleasure, stressing all the words that cry for stress, like Dan the first to warble without fear or favour:
No me jodas en el suelo Como si fuera una perra, Que con esos cojonazos Me echas en el cono tierra.
The Polar Bear, a big old brilliant lecher, was already on his way, speeding along the dark dripping country roads in a crass honest slob of a clangorous bus, engaging with the effervescent distinction of a Renaissance cardinal
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in rather languid tongue-play an acquaintance of long standing, a Jesuit with little or no nonsense about him.
"The Lebensbahn" he was saying, for he never used the English word when the foreign pleased him better, "of the Galilean is the tragi-comedy of the solipsism that will not capitulate. The humilities and retro mes and quaffs of sir- reverence are on a par with the hey presto's, arrogance and egoism. He is the first great self-contained playboy. The cryptic abasement before the woman taken red-handed is as great a piece of megalomaniacal impertinence as his interference in the affairs of his boy-friend Lazarus. He opens the series of slick suicides, as opposed to the serious Empedoclean variety. He has to answer for the wretched Nemo and his corates, bleeding in paroxysms of depit on an unimpressed public. "
He coughed up a plump cud of mucus, spun it round the avid bowl of his palate and stowed it away for future degustation.
The S. J. with little or no nonsense had just enough strength to voice his fatigue.
"If you knew" he said "how you bore me with your twice two is four. "
The P. B. failed to get him.
"You bore me" drawled the S. J. "worse than an infant prodigy. " He paused to recruit his energies. "In his hairless voice" he proceeded "preferring the druggist Borodin to Mozart. "
"Bv all accounts" retorted the P. B. "your sweet Mozart was a Hexenmeister in the pilch. "
That was a nasty one, let him make what he liked of that one.
"Our Lord
"
"Speak for yourself" said the P. B. , nettled beyond en- durance.
"Our Lord was not. "
"You forget" said the P. B. , "he got it all over at procrea- tion. "
"When you grow up to be a big boy" said the Jesuit "and can understand the humility that is beyond masoch- ism, come and talk to me again. Not cis-, ultra-masochistic. Beyond pain and service. "
"But precisely" exclaimed the P. B. , "he did not serve, the late lamented. What else am I saying? A valet does not have big ideas. He let down the central agency. "
"The humility" murmured the janizary "of a love too great for skivvying and too real to need the tonic of urtica- tion. "
The infant prodigy sneered at this comfortable variety.
"You make things pleasant for yourselves" he sneered, "I must say. "
"The best reason" said the S. J. "that can be given for believing is that it is more amusing. Disbelief" said the soldier of Christ, making ready to arise "is a bore. We do not count our change. We simply cannot bear to be bored. "
"Say that from the pulpit" said the P. B. "and you'll be drummed into the wilderness. "
The S. J. laughed profusely. Was it possible to conceive a more artless impostor of a mathematician than this fel- low!
"Would you" he begged, putting his greatcoat on, "would you, my dear good fellow, have the kindness to bear in mind that I am not a Parish Priest. "
"I won't forget" said the P. B. "that you don't scavenge. Your love is too great for the slops. "
"Egg-sactly" said the S. J. "But they are excellent men. A shade on the assiduous side, a shade too anxious to strike
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. " He rose. "Observe" he said, "I desire
a rate. Otherwise
to get down. I pull this cord and the bus stops and lets me down. "
The P. B. observed.
"In just such a Gehenna of links" said this remarkable man, with one foot on the pavement, "I forged my voca- tion. "
With which words he was gone and the burden of his fare had fallen on the P. B.
Chas's girl was a Shetland Shawly. He had promised to pick her up on his way to Casa Frica and now, cinched beyond reproach in his double-breasted smoking, he sub- dued his impatience to catch a tram in order to explain the world to a group of students.
"
"The difference, if I may say so
"Oh" cried the students, una voce, "oh please! "
"The difference, then, I say, between Bergson and Ein-
stein, the essential difference, is as between philosopher and sociolog. "
"Oh! " cried the students.
"Yes" said Chas, casting up what was the longest divul- gation he could place before the tram, which had hove into view, would draw abreast.
"And if it is the smart thing now to speak of Bergson as —
acod"—heedgedaway "itisthatwemovefromtheOb- —
ject"—he made a plunge for the tram "and the Idea to Sense"—he cried from the step "and Reason. "
"Sense" echoed the students "and reason! "
The difficulty was to know what exactly he meant by sense.
"He must mean senses'* said a first, "smell, don't you know, and so on. "
"Nay" said a second, "he must mean common sense. "
. .
"I think" said a third "he must mean instinct, intuition, don't you know, and that kind of thing. "
A fourth longed to know what Object there was in Bergson, a fifth what a sociolog was, a sixth what either had to do with the world.
"We must ask him" said a seventh, "that is all. We must not confuse ourselves with inexpert speculation. Then we shall see who is right. "
"We must ask him" cried the students, "then we shall see. . . .
On which understanding, that the first to see him again would be sure and ask him, they went their not so very different ways.
The hair of the homespun Poet, so closely was it cropped, did not lend itself kindly to any striking effects of dressing. Here again, in his plumping for the austerity of a rat's back, he proclaimed himself in reaction to the nineties. But the little that there was to do he had done, with a lotion that he had he had given alertness to the stubble. Also he had changed his tie and turned his collar. And now, though alone and unobserved, he paced up and down. He was making up his piece, d'occasion perhaps in both senses, whose main features he had recently estab- lished riding home on his bike from the Yellow House. He would deliver it when his hostess came with her petition, he would not hum and haw like an amateur pianist nor yet as good as spit in her eye like a professional one. No he would arise and say, not declaim, state gravely, with the penetrating Middle West gravity that is like an ogleful of tears:
Calvary by Night the waste of water
the water
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in the womb of water an pansy leaps.
rocket of bloom flare flower of night wilt for me
on the breasts of the water it has closed it has made an act of floral presence on the water
the tranquil act of its cycle on the waste
from the spouting forth
to the re-enwombing
untroubled bow of petaline sweet-smellingness kingfisher abated
drowned for me
lamb of insustenance mine
till the clamour of a blue bloom beat on the walls of the womb of the waste of
the water
Resolved to put across this strong composition and cause something of a flutter he was anxious that there should be no flaw in the mode of presentation adopted by him as most worthy of his aquatic manner. In fact he had to have it pat in order not to have to say it pat, in order to give the impression that in the travail of its exteriorisa- tion he was being torn asunder. Taking his cue from the equilibrist, who encaptures us by failing once, twice, three times, and then, in a regular lather of volition, bringing it off, he deemed that this little turn, if it were to conquer the salon, required stress to be laid not so much on the content of the performance as on the spiritual evisceration of the performer. Hence he paced to and fro, making a habit of the words and effects of Calvary by Night.
The Frica combed her hair, back and back she raked her purple tresses till to close her eyes became a problem. The effect was throttled gazelle, more appropriate to evening wear than her workaday foal at foot. Belacqua's Ruby, in her earlier campaigns, had favoured the same taut Sabine coiffure, till Mrs Tough, by dint of protesting that it made her little bird-face look like a sucked lozenge, had induced her to fluff things a bit and crimp them. Un- availingly alas! for nimbed she was altogether too big dolly that opens and shuts its eyes. Nor indeed was lozenge, sucked or buck, by any means the most ignoble office that face of woman might discharge. For here at hand, saving us our fare to Derbyshire, we have the Frica, looking something horrid.
Throttled gazelle gives no idea. Her features, as though the hand of an unattractive ravisher were knotted in her chevelure, were set at half-cock and locked in a rictus. She had frowned to pencil her eyebrows, so now she had four. The dazzled iris was domed in a white agony of entreaty, the upper lip writhed back in a snarl to the untented nos- trils. Would she bite her tongue off, that was the interest- ing question. The nutcracker chin betrayed a patent clot of thyroid gristle. It was impossible to set aside the awful suspicion that her flattened mammae, in sympathy with this tormented eructation of countenance, had put forth cutwaters and were rowelling her corsage. But the face was beyond appeal, a flagrant seat of injury. She had merely to arrange her hands so that the palm and fingers of the one touched the palm and fingers of the other and hold them thus joined before the breast with a slight up- ward inclination to look like a briefless martyress in rut.
Nevertheless the arty Countess of Parabimbi, backing through the press, would dangle into the mauve presence
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of the crone-mother, Caleken Frica's holiest thing alive, and
"My dear" she would positively be obliged to ejaculate, "never have I seen your Caleken quite so striking! Simply Sistine! "
What would her Ladyship be pleased to mean? The Cumaean Sibyl on a bearing-rein, sniffing the breeze for the Grimm Brothers? Oh, her Ladyship did not care to be so infernal finical and nice, that would be like working out how many pebbles in Tom Thumb's pocket. It was just a vague impression, it was merely that she looked, with that strange limy hobnailed texture of complexion, so frescosa, from the waist up, my dear, with that distempered cobalt modesty-piece, a positive gem of ravished Quattrocento, a positive jewel, my dear, of sweaty Big Tom. Whereupon the vidual virgin, well aware after these many years that all things in heaven, the earth and the waters were as they were taken, would vow to cherish as long as she was spared the learned praise of such an expert.
"Maaaccche! " bleats the Parabimbi.
This may be premature. We have set it down too soon, perhaps. Still, let it bloody well stand.
To return to the Frica, there is the bell at long last, pealing down her Fallopian pipettes, galvanising her away from the mirror as though her navel had been pressed in annunciation.
The Student, whose name we shall never know, was the first to arrive. A foul little brute he was, with a brow.
"Oh Lawdee! " he gushed, his big brown eyes looking della Robbia babies at the Frica, "don't tell me I'm the first! "
"Don't distress yourself" said Caleken, who could smell a poet against the wind, "only by a short gaffe. "
Hard on the heels of the Poet came a gaggle of non- descripts, then a public botanist, then a Galway Gael, then the Shetland Shawly with her Chas. Him the Student, mindful of his pledge, accosted.
"In what sense"—he would have it out of him or perish
—
"He said that? " exclaimed the botanist.
"Chas" said Caleken, as though she were announcing the name of a winner.
"Adsum" admitted Chas.
A plum of phlegm burst in the vestibule.
"What I want to know" complained the Student, "what
we all want to know, is in what sense he was using sense
when he said
The Gael, in the heart of a cabbage of nondescripts, was
bungling Duke Street's thought for the day to the crone.
"Owen
mus, anxious to come into the picture as early on in the proceedings as possible, said rashly:
"What Owen? "
"Good evening" squalled the Polar Bear, "good evening good evening.
gift, or picked up in the pop for a song. She was of more than average height and well in flesh. She might be past middle-age. But her face, ah her face, was what Belacqua had rather refer to as her countenance, it was so full of light. This she lifted up upon him and no error. Brimful of light and serene, serenissime, it bore no trace of suffering, and in this alone it might be said to be a notable face. Yet like tormented faces that he had seen, like the face in the National Gallery in Merrion Square by the Master of Tired Eyes, it seemed to have come a long way and subtend an
infinitely narrow angle of affliction, as eyes focus a star. The features were null, only luminous, impassive and secure, petrified in radiance, or words to that effect, for the reader is requested to take notice that this sweet style is Belacqua's. An act of expression, he said, a wreathing or wrinkling, could only have had the effect of a dimmer on a headlight. The implications of this triumphant figure, the
just and the unjust, etc. , are better forgone.
At long last she addressed herself to Belacqua.
"Seats in heaven" she said in a white voice "tuppence
apiece, four fer a tanner. "
"No" said Belacqua. It was the first syllable to come to
his lips. It had not been his intention to deny her.
"The best of seats" she said "again I'm sold out. Tup-
pence apiece the best of seats, four fer a tanner. "
This was unforeseen with a vengeance, if not exactly vaudeville. Belacqua was embarrassed in the last degree, but transported also. He felt the sweat coming in the small
of his back, above his Montrouge belt.
"Have you got them on you? " he mumbled.
"Heaven goes round" she said, whirling her arm, "and
round and round and round and round and round. " "Yes" said Belacqua "round and round. "
"Rowan" she said, dropping the d's and getting more of
a spin into the slogan, "rowan an' rowan an' rowan. " Belacqua scarcely knew where to look. Unable to blush he came out in this beastly sweat. Nothing of the kind had ever happened to him before. He was altogether disarmed, unsaddled and miserable. The eyes of them all, the dockers, the railwaymen and, most terrible of all, the joxers, were upon him. His tail drooped. This female dog
of a pixy with her tiresome Ptolemy, he was at her mercy. "No" he said "no thank you, no not this evening thank
you. "
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"Again I'm sold out" she said "an buked out, four fer a tanner. "
"On whose authority Scholar.
. .
. " began Belacqua, like a
"For yer frien' " she said "yer da, yer ma an' yer motte, four fer a tanner. " The voice ceased, but the face did not abate.
"How do I know" piped Belacqua "you're not sellin' me a pup? "
"Heaven goes rowan an' rowan
. "
"Rot you" said Belacqua "I'll take two. How much is that? "
"Four dee" she said.
Belacqua gave her a sixpence.
"Gobbless yer honour" she said, in the same white voice
from which she had not departed. She made to go. "Here" cried Belacqua "you owe me twopence. " He had
not even the good grace to say tuppence.
"Arragowan" she said "make it four cantcher, yer frien',
yer da, yer ma an' yer motte. "
Belacqua could not bicker. He had not the strength of
mind for that. He turned away.
"Jesus" she said distinctly "and his sweet mother pre-
serve yer honour. "
"Amen" said Belacqua, into his dead porter.
Now the woman went away and her countenance
lighted her to her room in Townsend Street.
But Belacqua tarried a little to listen to the music. Then
he also departed, but for Railway Street, beyond the river.
. .
A Wet Night
JlTark, it is the season of festivity and goodwill. Shop- ping is in full swing, the streets are thronged with revel- lers, the Corporation has offered a prize for the best- dressed window, Hyam's trousers are down again.
Mistinguett would do away with chalets of necessity. She does not think them necessary. Not so Belacqua. Emerging happy body from the hot bowels of Mc- Louglin's he looked up and admired the fitness of Moore's bull neck, not a whit too short, with all due respect to the critics. Bright and cheery above the strom of the Green, as though coached by the Star of Bethlehem, the Bovril sign danced and danced through its seven phases.
The lemon of faith jaundiced, annunciating the series, was in a fungus of hopeless green reduced to shingles and abolished. Whereupon the light went out, in homage to the slain. A sly ooze of gules, carmine of solicitation, lift- ing the skirts of green that the prophecy might be fulfilled, shocking Gabriel into cherry, flooded the sign. But the long skirts came rattling down, darkness covered their shame, the cycle was at an end. Da capo.
Bovril into Salome, thought Belacqua, and Tommy Moore there with his head on his shoulders. Doubt, Des- pair and Scrounging, shall I hitch my bath-chair to the greatest of these? Across the way, beneath the arcade, the blind paralytic was in position, he was well tucked up in
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his coverings, he was lashing into his dinner like any proletarian. Soon his man would come and wheel him home. No one had ever seen him come or go, he was there one minute and gone the next. He went and returned. When you scrounge you must go and return, that was the first great article of Christian scrounging. No man could settle down to scrounge properly in a foreign land. The Wanderjahre were a sleep and a forgetting, the proud dead point. You came back wise and staked your beat in some sheltered place, pennies trickled in, you were looked up to in a tenement.
Belacqua had been proffered a sign, Bovril had made him a sign.
Whither next? To what licensed premises? To where the porter was well up, first; and the solitary shawly like a cloud of latter rain in a waste of poets and politicians, second; and he neither knew nor was known, third. A lowly house dear to shawlies where the porter was up and he could keep himself to himself on a high stool with a high round and feign to be immersed in the Moscow notes of the Twilight Herald. These were very piquant.
Of the two houses that appealed spontaneously to these exigencies the one, situate in Merrion Row, was a home from home for jarveys. As some folk from hens, so Belac- qua shrank from jarveys. Rough, gritty, almost verminous men. From Moore to Merrion Row, moreover, was a peril- ous way, beset at this hour with poets and peasants and politicians. The other lay in Lincoln Place, he might go gently by Pearse Street, there was nothing to stop him. Long straight Pearse Street, it permitted of a simple can- tilena in his mind, its footway peopled with the tranquil and detached in fatigue, its highway dehumanised in a tumult of buses. Trams were monsters, moaning along be- neath the wild gesture of the trolley. But buses were
pleasant, tires and glass and clash and no more. Then to pass by the Queens, home of tragedy, was charming at that hour, to pass between the old theatre and the long line of the poor and lowly queued up for thruppence worth of pictures. For there Florence would slip into the song, the Piazza della Signoria and the No 1 tram and the Feast of St John, when they lit the torches of resin on the towers and the children, while the rockets at nightfall above the Cascine were still flagrant in their memory, opened the little cages to the glutted cicadae after their long confinement and stayed out with their young parents long after their usual bedtime. Then slowly in his mind down the sinister Uffizi to the parapets of Arno, and so on and so forth. This pleasure was dispensed by the Fire Station opposite which seemed to have been copied here and there from the Palazzo Vecchio. In deference to Sa- vonarola? Ha! Ha! At all events it was as good a way as any other to consume the Homer hour, darkness filling the streets and so on, and a better than most in virtue of his great thirst towards the lowly house that would snatch him in off the street through the door of its grocery de- partment if by good fortune that were still open.
Painfully then under the College ramparts, past the smart taxis, he set off, clearing his mind for its song. The Fire Station worked without a hitch and all was going as well as could be expected considering what the evening held in pickle for him when the blow fell. He was run plump into by one Chas, a highbrow bromide of French nationality with a diabolical countenance compound of Skeat's and Paganini's and a mind like a tattered concord- ance. It was Chas who would not or could not leave well alone, Belacqua being rapt in his burning feet and the line of the song in his head.
"Halte-la" piped the pirate, "whither so gay? "
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In the lee of the Monumental Showroom Belacqua was obliged to pause and face this machine. It carried butter and eggs from the Hibernian Dairy. Belacqua however was not to be drawn.
"Ramble" he said vaguely "in the twilight. "
"Just a song" said Chas "at twilight. No? "
Belacqua tormented his hands in the gloom. Had he
been blocked on his way and violated in the murmur of his mind to listen to this clockwork Bartlett? Apparently.
"How's the world" he said nevertheless, in spite of everything, "and what's the news of the great world? "
"Fair" said Chas, cautiously, "fair to meedling. The poem moves, eppure. "
If he mentions ars longa, Belacqua made this covenant with himself, he will have occasion to regret it.
"Limae labor' said Chas "et mora! '
"Well" said Belacqua, casting off with clean hands, "see you again. "
"But shortly, I thrrust" cried Chas, "casa Frica, dis col- lied night. No? "
"Alas" said Belacqua, well adrift.
Behold the Frica, she visits talent in the Service Flats. In she lands, singing Havelock Ellis in a deep voice, frankly itching to work that which is not seemly. Open upon her concave breast as on a lectern lies Portigliotti's Penombre Claustrali, bound in tawed caul. In her talons earnestly she grasps Sade's 120 Days and the Ante- rotica of Aliosha G. Brignole-Sale, unopened, bound in shagreened caul. A septic pudding hoodwinks her, a stodgy turban of pain it laps her horse face. The eyehole is clogged with the bulbus, the round pale globe goggles exposed. Solitary meditation has furnished her with nos- trils of generous bore. The mouth champs an invisible bit, foam gathers at the bitter commissures. The crateriform
brisket, lipped with sills of paunch, cowers ironically be- hind a maternity tunic. Keyholes have wrung the un- friendly withers, the osseous rump screams behind the hobble-skirt. Wastes of woad worsted advertise the pas- terns. Aie!
This in its absinthe whinny had bidden Belacqua and, what is more, the Alba, to backstairs, claret cup and the intelligentsia. The Alba, Belacqua's current one and only, had much pleasure in accepting for her scarlet gown and broad pale bored face. The belle of the ball. Aie!
But seldom one without two and scarcely had Chas been shed than lo from out the Grosvenor sprang the homespun Poet wiping his mouth and a little saprophile of an anonymous politico-ploughboy setting him off. The Poet sucked his teeth over this unexpected pleasure. The golden eastern lay of his bullet head was muted by no covering. Beneath the Wally Whitmaneen of his Donegal tweeds a body was to be presumed. He gave the impres- sion of having lost a harrow and found a figure of speech. Belacqua was numbed.
"Drink" decreed the Poet in a voice of thunder.
Belacqua slunk at his heels into the Grosvenor, the gim- let eyes of the saprophile probed his loins.
"Now" exulted the Poet, as though he had just brought an army across the Beresina, "give it a name and knock it back. "
"Pardon me" stuttered Belacqua "just a moment, will you be so kind. " He waddled out of the bar and into the street and up it at all speed and into the lowly public through the groceries door like a bit of dirt into a Hoover. This was a rude thing to do. When intimidated he was rude beyond measure, not timidly insolent like Stendhal's Comte de Thaler, but finally rude on the sly. Timidly in- solent when, as by Chas, exasperated; finally rude on the
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sly when intimidated, outrageously rude behind the back of his oppressor. This was one of his little peculiarities.
He bought a paper of a charming little sloven, no but a truly exquisite little page, a freelance clearly, he would not menace him, he skipped in on his miry bare feet with only three or four under his oxter for sale. Belacqua gave him a thruppenny bit and a cigarette picture. He sat to himself on a stool in the central leaf of the main triptych, his feet on a round so high that his knees topped the curb of the counter (admirable posture for man with weak bladder and tendency to ptosis of viscera), drank despondent porter(buthedarednotbudge) anddevouredthepaper.
"A woman" he read with a thrill "is either: a short- below-the-waist, a big-hip, a sway-back, a big-abdomen or an average. If the bust be too cogently controlled, then shall fat roll from scapula to scapula. If it be made pass- able and slight, then shall the diaphragm bulge and be un- sightly. Why not therefore invest chez a reputable corset- builder in the brassiere-cum-corset decollete, made from the finest Broches, Coutils and Elastics, centuple stitched in wearing parts, fitted with immovable spiral steels? It bestows stupendous diaphragm and hip support, it en-
. "
be classified. Not to be corseted. Not woman of flesh.
The face on the curate faded away and Grock's ap-
peared in its stead.
"Say that again" said the red gash in the white putty. Belacqua said it all and much more.
"Nisscht mddddoodglich" moaned Grock, and was gone. Now Belacqua began to worry lest the worst should
come to the worst and the scarlet gown be backless after
hances the sleeveless backless neckless evening gown
O Love! O Fire! but would the scarlet gown lack all these parts? Was she a short-below or a sway-back? She had no waist, nor did she deign to sway. She was not to
. .
all. Not that he had any doubts as to the back thus bared being a sight for sore eyes. The omoplates would be well defined, they would have a fine free ball-and-socket mo- tion. In repose they would be the blades of an anchor, the delicate furrow of the spine its stem. His mind pored over this back that inspired him with awe. He saw it as a flower-de-luce, a spatulate leaf with segments angled back, like the wings of a butterfly sucking a blossom, from their common hinge. Then, fetching from further afield, as an obelisk, a cross-potent, pain and death, still death, a bird crucified on a wall. This flesh and bones swathed in scar- let, this heart of washed flesh draped in scarlet. . . .
Unable to bear any longer his doubt as to the rig of the gown he passed through the counter and got her house on the telephone.
"Dressing" said the maid, the Venerilla, his friend and bawd to be, "and spitting blood. "
No, she could not be got down, she had been up in her room cursing and swearing for the past hour.
'Tm afeared of me gizzard" said the voice "to go near her. "
"Is it closed at the back?
" demanded Belacqua "or is it open? "
"Is what? "
"The gown" cried Belacqua, "what else? Is it closed? " The Venerilla requested him to hold on while she called
it to the eye of the mind. The objurgations of this ineffable member were clearly audible.
"Would it be the red one? " she said, after countless ages.
"The scarlet bloody gown of course" he cried out of his torment, "do you not know? "
. "
"Hold on now. . . . It buttons
"Buttons? What buttons? "
"It buttons ups behind, sir, with the help of God. "
. .
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"Say it again" implored Belacqua, "over and over again. "
"Amn't I after saying" groaned the Venerilla "it buttons ups on her. "
"Praise be to God" said Belacqua "and his blissful Mother. "
Calm now and sullen the Alba, dressed insidiously up to the nines, bides her time in the sunken kitchen, paying no heed to her fool and foil who has made bold to lay open Belacqua's distress. She is in pain, her brandy is at hand, mulling in the big glass on the range. Behind her frontage abandoned in elegance, sagging in its elegance and clouded in its native sorrow, a more anxious rite than sumptuous meditation is in progress. For her mind is at prayer-stool before a perhaps futile purpose, she is loading the spring of her mind for a perhaps unimportant under-
taking. Letting her outside rip pro tern she is screwing herself up and up, she is winding up the weights of her mind, to being the belle of the ball, banquet or party. Any less beautiful girl would have contemned such tactics and considered this class of absorption at the service of so simple an occasion unwarranted and, what was worse, a sad give away. Here am I, a less bountiful one would have argued, the belle, and there is the ball; let these two items be brought together and the thing is done. Are we then to insinuate, with such a simplist, that the Alba ques- tioned the virtue of her appearance. Indeed and indeed we are not. She had merely to unleash her eyes, she had merely to unhood them, as well she knew, and she might have mercy on whom she would. There was no difficulty about that. But what she did question, balefully, as though she knew the answer in advance, was the fitness of a dis-
tinction hers for the asking, of a palm that she had merely to open her eyes and assume. That the simplicity of the
gest turned her in the first place against it, relegating it among the multitude of things that were not her genre, is indisputable. But this was only a minute aspect of her po- sition. It is with the disparagement attaching in the thought of Belacqua, and in hers tending to, to the quality of the exploit that she now wrestles. It is with its no doubt unworthiness that she now has to do. Sullen and still, aware of the brandy at hand but not thirsting for it, she cranks herself up to a reality of preference, slowly but surely she gilds her option, she exalts it into realms of choice. She will do this thing, she will be belle of the ball, gladly, gravely and carefully, humiliter, fideliter, simplici- ter, and not merely because she might just as well. Is she, she a woman of the world, she who knows, to halt be- tween two opinions, founder in a strait of two wills, hang in suspense and be the more killed? She who knows? So far from such nonsense she will soon chafe to be off. And now she dare, until it be time, the clock strike, delegate a portion of her attention with instructions to reorganise her features, hands, shoulders, back, outside in a word, the in-
side having been spiked. At once she thirsts for the Hen- nessy. She sings to herself, for her own pleasure, stressing all the words that cry for stress, like Dan the first to warble without fear or favour:
No me jodas en el suelo Como si fuera una perra, Que con esos cojonazos Me echas en el cono tierra.
The Polar Bear, a big old brilliant lecher, was already on his way, speeding along the dark dripping country roads in a crass honest slob of a clangorous bus, engaging with the effervescent distinction of a Renaissance cardinal
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in rather languid tongue-play an acquaintance of long standing, a Jesuit with little or no nonsense about him.
"The Lebensbahn" he was saying, for he never used the English word when the foreign pleased him better, "of the Galilean is the tragi-comedy of the solipsism that will not capitulate. The humilities and retro mes and quaffs of sir- reverence are on a par with the hey presto's, arrogance and egoism. He is the first great self-contained playboy. The cryptic abasement before the woman taken red-handed is as great a piece of megalomaniacal impertinence as his interference in the affairs of his boy-friend Lazarus. He opens the series of slick suicides, as opposed to the serious Empedoclean variety. He has to answer for the wretched Nemo and his corates, bleeding in paroxysms of depit on an unimpressed public. "
He coughed up a plump cud of mucus, spun it round the avid bowl of his palate and stowed it away for future degustation.
The S. J. with little or no nonsense had just enough strength to voice his fatigue.
"If you knew" he said "how you bore me with your twice two is four. "
The P. B. failed to get him.
"You bore me" drawled the S. J. "worse than an infant prodigy. " He paused to recruit his energies. "In his hairless voice" he proceeded "preferring the druggist Borodin to Mozart. "
"Bv all accounts" retorted the P. B. "your sweet Mozart was a Hexenmeister in the pilch. "
That was a nasty one, let him make what he liked of that one.
"Our Lord
"
"Speak for yourself" said the P. B. , nettled beyond en- durance.
"Our Lord was not. "
"You forget" said the P. B. , "he got it all over at procrea- tion. "
"When you grow up to be a big boy" said the Jesuit "and can understand the humility that is beyond masoch- ism, come and talk to me again. Not cis-, ultra-masochistic. Beyond pain and service. "
"But precisely" exclaimed the P. B. , "he did not serve, the late lamented. What else am I saying? A valet does not have big ideas. He let down the central agency. "
"The humility" murmured the janizary "of a love too great for skivvying and too real to need the tonic of urtica- tion. "
The infant prodigy sneered at this comfortable variety.
"You make things pleasant for yourselves" he sneered, "I must say. "
"The best reason" said the S. J. "that can be given for believing is that it is more amusing. Disbelief" said the soldier of Christ, making ready to arise "is a bore. We do not count our change. We simply cannot bear to be bored. "
"Say that from the pulpit" said the P. B. "and you'll be drummed into the wilderness. "
The S. J. laughed profusely. Was it possible to conceive a more artless impostor of a mathematician than this fel- low!
"Would you" he begged, putting his greatcoat on, "would you, my dear good fellow, have the kindness to bear in mind that I am not a Parish Priest. "
"I won't forget" said the P. B. "that you don't scavenge. Your love is too great for the slops. "
"Egg-sactly" said the S. J. "But they are excellent men. A shade on the assiduous side, a shade too anxious to strike
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. " He rose. "Observe" he said, "I desire
a rate. Otherwise
to get down. I pull this cord and the bus stops and lets me down. "
The P. B. observed.
"In just such a Gehenna of links" said this remarkable man, with one foot on the pavement, "I forged my voca- tion. "
With which words he was gone and the burden of his fare had fallen on the P. B.
Chas's girl was a Shetland Shawly. He had promised to pick her up on his way to Casa Frica and now, cinched beyond reproach in his double-breasted smoking, he sub- dued his impatience to catch a tram in order to explain the world to a group of students.
"
"The difference, if I may say so
"Oh" cried the students, una voce, "oh please! "
"The difference, then, I say, between Bergson and Ein-
stein, the essential difference, is as between philosopher and sociolog. "
"Oh! " cried the students.
"Yes" said Chas, casting up what was the longest divul- gation he could place before the tram, which had hove into view, would draw abreast.
"And if it is the smart thing now to speak of Bergson as —
acod"—heedgedaway "itisthatwemovefromtheOb- —
ject"—he made a plunge for the tram "and the Idea to Sense"—he cried from the step "and Reason. "
"Sense" echoed the students "and reason! "
The difficulty was to know what exactly he meant by sense.
"He must mean senses'* said a first, "smell, don't you know, and so on. "
"Nay" said a second, "he must mean common sense. "
. .
"I think" said a third "he must mean instinct, intuition, don't you know, and that kind of thing. "
A fourth longed to know what Object there was in Bergson, a fifth what a sociolog was, a sixth what either had to do with the world.
"We must ask him" said a seventh, "that is all. We must not confuse ourselves with inexpert speculation. Then we shall see who is right. "
"We must ask him" cried the students, "then we shall see. . . .
On which understanding, that the first to see him again would be sure and ask him, they went their not so very different ways.
The hair of the homespun Poet, so closely was it cropped, did not lend itself kindly to any striking effects of dressing. Here again, in his plumping for the austerity of a rat's back, he proclaimed himself in reaction to the nineties. But the little that there was to do he had done, with a lotion that he had he had given alertness to the stubble. Also he had changed his tie and turned his collar. And now, though alone and unobserved, he paced up and down. He was making up his piece, d'occasion perhaps in both senses, whose main features he had recently estab- lished riding home on his bike from the Yellow House. He would deliver it when his hostess came with her petition, he would not hum and haw like an amateur pianist nor yet as good as spit in her eye like a professional one. No he would arise and say, not declaim, state gravely, with the penetrating Middle West gravity that is like an ogleful of tears:
Calvary by Night the waste of water
the water
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in the womb of water an pansy leaps.
rocket of bloom flare flower of night wilt for me
on the breasts of the water it has closed it has made an act of floral presence on the water
the tranquil act of its cycle on the waste
from the spouting forth
to the re-enwombing
untroubled bow of petaline sweet-smellingness kingfisher abated
drowned for me
lamb of insustenance mine
till the clamour of a blue bloom beat on the walls of the womb of the waste of
the water
Resolved to put across this strong composition and cause something of a flutter he was anxious that there should be no flaw in the mode of presentation adopted by him as most worthy of his aquatic manner. In fact he had to have it pat in order not to have to say it pat, in order to give the impression that in the travail of its exteriorisa- tion he was being torn asunder. Taking his cue from the equilibrist, who encaptures us by failing once, twice, three times, and then, in a regular lather of volition, bringing it off, he deemed that this little turn, if it were to conquer the salon, required stress to be laid not so much on the content of the performance as on the spiritual evisceration of the performer. Hence he paced to and fro, making a habit of the words and effects of Calvary by Night.
The Frica combed her hair, back and back she raked her purple tresses till to close her eyes became a problem. The effect was throttled gazelle, more appropriate to evening wear than her workaday foal at foot. Belacqua's Ruby, in her earlier campaigns, had favoured the same taut Sabine coiffure, till Mrs Tough, by dint of protesting that it made her little bird-face look like a sucked lozenge, had induced her to fluff things a bit and crimp them. Un- availingly alas! for nimbed she was altogether too big dolly that opens and shuts its eyes. Nor indeed was lozenge, sucked or buck, by any means the most ignoble office that face of woman might discharge. For here at hand, saving us our fare to Derbyshire, we have the Frica, looking something horrid.
Throttled gazelle gives no idea. Her features, as though the hand of an unattractive ravisher were knotted in her chevelure, were set at half-cock and locked in a rictus. She had frowned to pencil her eyebrows, so now she had four. The dazzled iris was domed in a white agony of entreaty, the upper lip writhed back in a snarl to the untented nos- trils. Would she bite her tongue off, that was the interest- ing question. The nutcracker chin betrayed a patent clot of thyroid gristle. It was impossible to set aside the awful suspicion that her flattened mammae, in sympathy with this tormented eructation of countenance, had put forth cutwaters and were rowelling her corsage. But the face was beyond appeal, a flagrant seat of injury. She had merely to arrange her hands so that the palm and fingers of the one touched the palm and fingers of the other and hold them thus joined before the breast with a slight up- ward inclination to look like a briefless martyress in rut.
Nevertheless the arty Countess of Parabimbi, backing through the press, would dangle into the mauve presence
A WET NIGHT 61
62 MORE PRICKS THAN KICKS
of the crone-mother, Caleken Frica's holiest thing alive, and
"My dear" she would positively be obliged to ejaculate, "never have I seen your Caleken quite so striking! Simply Sistine! "
What would her Ladyship be pleased to mean? The Cumaean Sibyl on a bearing-rein, sniffing the breeze for the Grimm Brothers? Oh, her Ladyship did not care to be so infernal finical and nice, that would be like working out how many pebbles in Tom Thumb's pocket. It was just a vague impression, it was merely that she looked, with that strange limy hobnailed texture of complexion, so frescosa, from the waist up, my dear, with that distempered cobalt modesty-piece, a positive gem of ravished Quattrocento, a positive jewel, my dear, of sweaty Big Tom. Whereupon the vidual virgin, well aware after these many years that all things in heaven, the earth and the waters were as they were taken, would vow to cherish as long as she was spared the learned praise of such an expert.
"Maaaccche! " bleats the Parabimbi.
This may be premature. We have set it down too soon, perhaps. Still, let it bloody well stand.
To return to the Frica, there is the bell at long last, pealing down her Fallopian pipettes, galvanising her away from the mirror as though her navel had been pressed in annunciation.
The Student, whose name we shall never know, was the first to arrive. A foul little brute he was, with a brow.
"Oh Lawdee! " he gushed, his big brown eyes looking della Robbia babies at the Frica, "don't tell me I'm the first! "
"Don't distress yourself" said Caleken, who could smell a poet against the wind, "only by a short gaffe. "
Hard on the heels of the Poet came a gaggle of non- descripts, then a public botanist, then a Galway Gael, then the Shetland Shawly with her Chas. Him the Student, mindful of his pledge, accosted.
"In what sense"—he would have it out of him or perish
—
"He said that? " exclaimed the botanist.
"Chas" said Caleken, as though she were announcing the name of a winner.
"Adsum" admitted Chas.
A plum of phlegm burst in the vestibule.
"What I want to know" complained the Student, "what
we all want to know, is in what sense he was using sense
when he said
The Gael, in the heart of a cabbage of nondescripts, was
bungling Duke Street's thought for the day to the crone.
"Owen
mus, anxious to come into the picture as early on in the proceedings as possible, said rashly:
"What Owen? "
"Good evening" squalled the Polar Bear, "good evening good evening.
