No More Learning

"What about Ena Nash? " said Thelma.
"Impossible" said Una. "She reeks. "
"Then the McGillycuddy woman" said Otto Olaf.
Mrs bboggs sat up.
"I know of no McGillycuddy woman" said Una.
"Mother, do you know of any McGillycuddy woman? " No, Mrs bboggs was completely in the dark. She and
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Una therefore began to wait indignantly for an explana- tion.
"Sorry" said Otto Olaf, "no offence. "
"But who is the woman? " cried mother and daughter together.
"I spoke without thinking" said Otto Olaf.
Mrs bboggs was utterly nonplussed. How was it possible to name a woman without thinking? The thing was psy- chologically impossible. With mouth ajar and nostrils dilated she goggled psychological impossibilities at the offender.
"Hell roast the pair of you" he said in a sudden pet, "I was only joking. "
Mrs bboggs, though still entirely at a loss, made up her mind in a flash to accept this explanation. Una was not in the least amused. In fact she was sorely tempted to wash her hands of the whole affair.
"I propose Alba Perdue" she said. It was really more a nomination than a proposal.
"That is her last word" observed Otto Olaf.
Alba Perdue, it may be remembered, was the nice little girl in A Wet Night. Thelma, whom Belacqua had favored with his version of that half-remembered love, could hardly dissemble her great satisfaction. When the
turmoil of her blood had sufficiently abated she pro- nounced, in a voice just loud enough to be heard, this most depreciative hyperbole.
"I second that. "
Now it was Otto Olafs turn to make inquiries.
"I understand" said Una who, unlike her father, could
give a plain answer to a plain question, "correct me, Thelma, if I am wrong, an old flame of the groom. "
"Then she won't act" said the simple Otto Olaf.
Even Mrs bboggs could not refrain from joining in the
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outburst of merriment that greeted this fatuity. Una in particular seemed certain to do herself an injury. She trembled and perspired in a most fearful manner.
"Oh my God! " she panted, "won't act! "
But Nature takes care of her own and a loud rending noise was heard. Una stopped laughing and remained perfectly still. Her bodice had laid down its life to save hers.
Belacqua was so quiescent during the fortnight that preceded the ceremony that it almost seemed as though he were to suffer a complete metamorphosis. He had left all the arrangements to the discretion of Capper Quin, saying: "Here is the money, do the best you can. "
But before being overtaken by this inertia, which pro- ceeded partly from fatigue and partly no doubt from the need for self-purification, he had been kept busy in a num- ber of ways: finding a usurer, redeeming the ring, and searching among the hags for two to tally with Mr and Mrs bboggs in the interest of the nuptial jamboree. In the prosecution of this last duty Belacqua was called upon to sustain every kind of abusive denial and suffer Lucy's posthumous temperature to be thrown in his face, as though she were a bottle of white Burgundy. Until finally a female cousin, so remote as to be scarcely credible, and a kind of moot Struldbrug, to whom Belacqua's father had used to refer as "dear old Jimmy the Duck," agreed to rise to the occasion. Hermione Nautzsche and James Skyrm were the names of these two deadbeats. Belacqua had not laid eyes on either of them since he was an infant prodigy.
Except for a short daily visit from Thelma, swallowed as being all in the game. Belacqua's retreat was undis- turbed. The wedding gifts flowed in, not upon him, for
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he was friendless, but upon her, and she encouraged him day by day with the bulletin of their development.
She arrived one afternoon in a state of some excitement. Belacqua raised himself in the bed to be kissed, which he was with such unexpected voracity that he went weak before the end. Poor fellow, he had not been giving due attention to his meals.
"Your present is got" she said.
To Belacqua, who had been setting aside a portion of each day for polyglot splendours, this phrase came as a great shock. Perhaps the present would make him amends.
"It came this morning" she said.
"At what time exactly? " said Belacqua, easing his nerves in the usual sneer. "That is most important. "
"What devil" said Thelma, her gaiety all gone, "makes you so beastly? "
Ah, if he only knew.
"But it so happens" she said "that I can tell you. " Belacqua thought for a bit and then plumped for saying
nothing.
"Because" she proceeded "the first thing I did was to
set it. "
The hideous truth dawned on his mind.
"Not a clock" he implored, "don't say a grandfather
clock. "
"The grandfather and mother" she did say "of a period
clock. "
He turned his face to the wall. He who of late years
and with the approval of Lucy would not tolerate a chronometer of any kind in the house, for whom the local publication of the hours was six of the best on the brain every hour, and even the sun's shadow a torment, now to have this time-fuse deafen the rest of his days. It was enough to make him break off the engagement.
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Long after she had gone he tossed and turned until the thought, like God appearing to a soul in hell, that he could always spike the monster's escapement and turn its death's-head to the wall, came in the morning with the canticle of the ring-doves. Then he slept.
What time Capper Quin was here, there and every- where, attending to the interests of his principal. Con- scious of his own shortcomings in a matter so far removed from the integrities of self-expression, he engaged, on the basis of a modest inverted commission, to aid him in his work, one Sproule, a lately axed jobber to a firm in the City, whose winning manner and familiarity with the shopping centres north of the river were beyond rubies. Bright and early on the fateful Saturday they met to buy the bouquets, the big one for the bride and the seven nosegays.
"Mrs bboggs" said Hairy, "ought we? " "Ought we what? " said Sproule.
"I thought maybe a bloom" said Hairy. "Superfoetation" said Sproule.
He led the way to a florist's off Mary Street. The proprietress, having just discovered among her stock an antirrhinum with the rudiment of a fifth stamen, was highly delighted.
"Oh, Mr Sproule sir" she exclaimed, "would you be-
. "
lieve it . .
"Good morning" said Sproule. "One large orchid and
seven of your best ox-eyes. "
Now Capper Quin, however unsuited to strike a bar-
gain, was endowed with a sense of fitness, and one so ex- quisite indeed that he could make himself clear in its defence.
"On behalf of my client" he said "I must insist on two orchids. "
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"By all means" said Sproule. "Make it three, make it a dozen. "
"Two" repeated Hairy.
"Two large orchids" said Sproule "and seven of your best ox-eyes. "
As though by magic wand the nine blooms appeared in her hand.
"Four lots" said Sproule, "one, two, three and one with orchids. " Rapidly he equated addresses and consignments on a sheet of paper. "So" he said, "first thing. "
She now mentioned a sum that caused the buyer great amusement. He appealed to Hairy.
"Mr Quin" he said, "do I wake or sleep? "
She not merely made good her figures but mentioned that she had to live. Sproule could not see the connexion. He pinched his cheek to make sure he was not in Nassau Street.
"My dear madam" he said, "we do not have to live in Nassau Street. "
This thrust so weakened his adversary that she suffered him to place specie in her hand.
"Take this" he said, in a eucharistic voice, "or leave it. "
The cold alloy in her hot palm, conjoined with the de- pression and the urge to live, determined the issue in Sproule's favour. Upon which the combatants shook hands with great heartiness. How could there be any question of rancour when both were fully satisfied of having ob- tained the victory?
Sproule, his duties at an end, received his commission in the Oval bar, where nothing would do him but that Hairy should toast his employer in gin and peppermint.
"Happy dawg" said Sproule. He had come unscathed through the Great War.
The hyperaesthesia of Hairy was so great that the mere
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fact of standing on licensed ground, without the least reference to its liberties, was of force sufficient to ex- hilarate him. Now therefore, under the influence of his situation, he dilated with splendid incoherence on the contradiction involved in the idea of a happy Belacqua and on the impertinence of desiring that he should dero- gate into such an anomaly.
"Fornication" he vociferated "before the Shekinah. "
This observation was accompanied and graced by a spasm of such passionate repugnance that it was no less an act of charity on the part of the ex-jobber, who was familiar with Boy Scouts and their ways and knew that he might never pass that way again, to substitute his empty glass for the bumper of his agitated companion.
In the bright street a bitter-sweet sorrow entered into Sproule, sweet at parting, bitter at the knowledge that his services were no longer required.
"Farewell" he said, flinging out his dreadful hand, "may luck rise with you on the way. "
But Hairy was too full, too overcome by the fumes of his position, to shake, let alone reply. He stepped, as upon an Underground escalator, into the stream of pedestrians and was gone. Sproule raised his sad eyes to the sky and saw the day, its outstanding hours that could not be numbered, in the form of a beautiful Girl Guide galante, reclining among the clouds. She beckoned to him with her second finger, like one preparing a certificate in piano- forte, Junior Grade, at the Leinster School of Music. Closing his mind softly on this delicious vision, feeling it in his mind like a sponge of toilet vinegar on a fever, he advanced into the Oval towards it.
Whom should Hairy meet on the crest of the Metal Bridge but Walter Draffin, fresh from his effeminate ablutions and as spruce and keen as a new-ground hatchet
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in his miniature tails and stripes. The sun shone bright upon him, his languorous poll, for he carried his topper crown downward in his hand. The two gentlemen were on speaking terms.
"This is where I stand" said the little creature, with a sigh that made Hairy look nervously round for prisons and palaces, "and watch the Liffey swim. "
"Blue-eyed cats" quoted the colossal Capper, for no other reason than that the phrase had been running in his mind and now here was a chance to discharge it on a wit, "are always deaf. "
Walter smiled, he felt greatly pleased, he held up his little face to the kindly sun like a child to be kissed.
"The burrowing tucutucu" he answered "is occasionally blind, but the mole is never sober. "
The mole is never sober. A profound mot. Hairy, having tried all he knew to say as much, hung his head, a gallant loser, consoled by the certitude that Walter would take the will for the deed. Poor Hairy, there was a great deal he understood, but he could not make this known in the absence of a battery of writing materials.
"That unspeakable invite" exclaimed Walter, "of all things to be destitute of enjambment! "
He was confirmed in his initial misgiving by Hairy's having clearly no idea what he was talking about. There was nothing for it but to put it into his book. Walter's book was a long time in coming out because he refused to regard it as anything more than a mere dump for what- ever he could not get off his chest in the ordinary way.
"So off you go" he said "to attend your happy client, and I to buy myself a buttonhole. "
This, ensuing so soon upon mole and enjambment, brought Hairy's brain to the boil, and out of his mouth came the one word "rose" like a big bubble.
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"Blood-red and newly born" said Walter "to aromatic pain. Eh? "
Hairy, with a sudden feeling that he was wasting his client's time and his own precarious energies on a kind of rubber Stalin, took his departure with a more than boorish abruptness, leaving Walter to enjoy the great central agency and hang out as it were his cowlick to air or dry. A passing humorist dropped a penny into the empty hat, it fell on the rich wadding without a sound, and so the joke was lost.
In Parliament Street a funeral passed and Hairy did not uncover. Many of the chief mourners, consoling them- selves in no small measure with the reverence expressed by every section of the community, noticed with rage in their hearts that he did not, though to be sure they made no allusion to it at the time. Let this be a lesson to young men, strangers perhaps to sorrow, to uncover when- ever a funeral passes, less in act of respect towards the de- funct than in sympathetic acknowledgment of the sur- vivors. One of these fine days Hairy will observe, from where he sits bearing up bravely behind the hearse in a family knot, a labourer let go of his pick with one hand, or gay dandy snatch both his out of his pockets, in a ges- ture of more value and comfort than a ton of lilies. Take the case of Belacqua, who ever since the commitment of his Lucy wears a hat, contrary to his inclination, on the off chance of his encountering a cortege.
The best man had received instructions to collect in Molesworth Street the Morgan, fast but noisy, lent for the period of the high time journey by a friend of the bboggses. Needless to say some eejit had parked it so far up towards the arty end that luckless Hairy, coming from the west upon the stand after the usual Duke Street com-
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plications, hastening along the shady southern pavement because he felt there was not a moment to lose, was almost in despair of ever finding the solitary hind-wheel that he had been advised to look out for. He was much relieved to espy it at last, last but one or two in the row, but embarrassed also to remark a group made up of small boys, loafers and the official stand attendant gathered round and passing judgment on the strange machine's design and performance. He kept his head none the less and examined the car, as he had been strictly enjoined to do, for any hymeneal insignia that might have been annexed, doubtless with the very best intentions, to its body, such as a boot, an inscription or other shameful badge. Satisfied that there were none, he hoisted his vast frame on board the light weight which thereupon reduced
the expert comment of the bystanders, if we except the attendant who was most grave and attentive, to jeers and laughter, by rocking like a cockle-shell. Hairy, wondering what on earth to do next, sat blushing and hopeless at the controls. The general provisions for starting a motor engine were familiar to him, and these in every imagi- nable combination he fruitlessly applied to that, excep- tional presumably, fitted to the Morgan. The boys were most anxious to push, the loafers to give a tow, while the at- tendant could not be deterred from flooding the car- burettor and swinging the engine, which started most perversely and unexpectedly with a backfire that broke the obliging fellow's arm. Hairy was so pressed for time that he hardened his heart to the consistence of an Ueber- mensch's, roared his engine and found himself abruptly, in a paroxysm of plunges and saccades, cutting the corner of Kildare Street under the prow of a bus, which happily did no more than remove the back number-plate and thus
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provide, not merely a neat instance of poetic justice, but the winged attendant with the nucleus of compensation.
All these little encounters and contretemps take place in a Dublin flooded with sunshine.
Belacqua had passed an excellent night, as he always did when he condescended to assign precise value to the content of his mind, no matter whether that were joy or sorrow, and did not awake when Hairy stalled the ma- chine beneath his window on the cruel stroke of midday. Much liquor in secret the previous evening may have contributed to this torpor, but scarcely if at all, for many and many a time when footless, and simply because the forces in his mind would not resolve, he had tossed and turned like the Florence of Sordello, and found all pos- tures painful.
He opened his burning eyes on Hairy, rose, bathed, shaved and decked himself out, all in silence and without the least assistance. They plunged the packed bag in the well of the Morgan. Belacqua stood before the pier-glass.
"It's a small thing, Hairy" he said, and his voice, after so long silence, grated on his ear, "separates lovers. "
"Not mountain chain" said Hairy.
"No, nor city ramparts" said Belacqua.
Hairy made a lunge of condolence at his companion,
he simply could not help it, and was repulsed.
"Am I all right behind? " asked Belacqua.
"You know what it is" said Hairy, asserting thus and
with a clarity quite unusual in him his independence and intolerance of all posterior aspects, "you perish in your own plenty. "
Belacqua pressed apart his lips with his forefinger.
"If what I love" he said "were only in Australia. " Capper the faithful companion simply faded away, at
least for the purposes of conversation.
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"Whereas what I am on the look out for" said Belacqua, pursuing it would almost seem his train of thought, "is nowhere as far as I can see. "
"Vobiscum" whispered Capper. "Am I right? "
A cloud obscured the sun, the room grew dark, the light ebbed from the pier-glass and Belacqua, feeling his eyes moist, turned away from the blurred image of himself.
"Remember" he said, "true of me now who have ceased to Charleston: Dum vivit aut bibit aut minxit. Take a note of it now. "
The Quaker's get!
Then driving through the City it occurred to him that an empty buttonhole would be the haporth of tar and no error. So he entered a flower-shop and came out with a purple tassel of veronica, fixed in the wrong lapel. Hairy stared. What startled him was not so much the breach of etiquette as the foolhardiness of getting married in a turned suit.
A pestilential hotel was their next stop. Hairy changed his clothes and looked more mangy king of beasts than ever. Belacqua lunched frugally on stout and scallions, scarcely the meal, one would have thought, for a man about to be married for the second time. However.
At the Church of Saint Tamar, pointed almost to the point of indecency, the maids, attired in glove-tight gos- samer and sporting the awful ox-eyes, having just been joined by Mrs bboggs, who had chosen gauze and a bunch of omphalodes in her bosom, and Walter, very shaky and exalted, were massed in the porch when Morgante and Morgutte, to adopt the venomous reference of Una, not arm in arm but in single file, came forward. All but Walter were taken quite aback by the bridegroom's breath. Mrs bboggs buried her face (poor little Thelma! ) in the omphalodes, the Cleggs turned scarlet in unison, the
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Purefoys crowded into a shade, while Una was only re- strained by her hatred of anything in the nature of sacri- lege from spitting it out. Miss Perdue found the smell rather refreshing. The cad and his faithful companion advanced to the chancel and took up their stand beside the gate, the latter to the right and a little to the rear, holding a hat in each hand.
The south pews were plentifully furnished with mem- bers and adherents of the bboggs clan, while those to the north were empty save for two grotesques, seated far apart: Jimmy the Duck Skyrm, an aged cretin, outrageous in pepper and salt, Lavalliere and pull-over, gnashing his teeth without ceasing at invisible spaghetti; and Hermione Nautzsche, a powerfully built nymphomaniac panting in black and mauve between shipped crutches. Her missing sexual hemisphere, despite a keen look out all her life long, had somehow never entered her orbit, and now, bursting as she was with chalk at every joint, she had no great hopes of being rounded off in that interesting sense. Little does she dream what a flurry she has set up in the spirits of Skyrm, as he gobbles and mumbles the air at
the precise remove of enchantment behind her.
"Ecce" hissed Hairy, according to plan, and Belacqua's heart made a hopeless dash against the wall of its box, the church suddenly cruciform cage, the bulldogs of heaven holding the chancel, the procession about to give tongue in the porch, the transepts culs-de-sac.
The organist darted into his loft like an assassin and set in motion the various forces that could be relied on to mature in
a merry peal all in good time. Thelma, looking very strik- ing and illegitimate in grey and green pieds de poule, split skirt and pique insertions of negress pink, swept up the aisle on the right arm of Otto Olaf, in whose head
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since leaving 55 a snatch had been churning and did not now desert him:
Drink little at a time,
Put water in your wine,
Miss your glass when you can, And go off the first man.
Wise old Otto Olaf! He died in the end of clot and left his cellar to the cuckoo.
The maids, terminating in the curious deltoid forma- tion of the Alba, Mrs bboggs and Walter, took their speed from the bride and their demeanour from the head-maid, with the result that their advance was at once rapid and sullen, for Una had become aware of an uncontrollable and ill-placed dehiscence in the stuff of her gossamer. The dread lest this should come to a head as she braced her- self to receive her foul little sister's gloves and bouquet, over and above an habitual misanthropy aggravated by the occasion, had made her, and hence her team of maids, appear as cross as two sticks. Always excepting the Alba who, bating the old pain in the core of her vitals that seemed to be a permanent part of her existence, could scarcely have been more diverted had she been the bride herself instead of the odd maid out. Also with Walter so close on her heels she was kept busy.
Without going so far as to say that Belacqua felt God or Thelma the sum of the Apostolic series, still there was in some indeterminate way communicated to the solem- nisation a kind or sort of mystical radiance that Joseph Smith would have found touching. Belacqua passed the ring like a mouse belling the cat, with a quick prayer all his own that the marriage knuckle of his love might so
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swell against the token and pledge as to spare her the pain of ever reading, inscribed on its inner periphery: Mens mea Lucia lucescit luce tua. His state of mind was so tense and complex at this stage (not to be wondered at when we consider all that he had gone through: the bereavement, obliging him to wear a hat at all seasons; the sweet and fierce pain of his passion for Miss bboggs; the long retreat in bed that had landed him in a nice marasmus; the stout and scallions; and now the sense of being cauterized with an outward and visible sign) that it might be likened to that of his dear departed Lucy listening pale and agog for the second incidence of
in the first movement of the Unbuttoned Symphony. Say what you will, you can't keep a dead mind down.
Talking of cats, Thelma remained throughout the serv- ice feline and inscrutable and was not at all incommoded by the famous viticultural passage which so abashed, or perhaps better angered, Belacqua that his platter face went from its native dingy to scarlet and back again throughlivid. Shouldhethenavailhimselfofthefirst . . . opportunity to sulphurate his bride and thus make sure? No, that would be doing the dirty on man's innocency. And make sure of what? Olives? The absurdity of the figure and all its harmonics like muscae volitantes pro- voked him to a copious scoff that would have put the kibosh on the sacrament altogether had it not been for the coolness and skill of the priest who covered as with a hand this coarseness with a collect.
Talking of hands, Thelma's right, as it danced through the find-the-lady sleights recommended in the liturgy, had quite bewitched the chancel. The curate swore he had
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never seen anything like it outside the Musee Rodin, it reminded the clerk of a Diirer cartoon and the priest of his incumbency, and it indicted Belacqua, tempest of stifled groans at having to produce anti-clockwise eyes and ges- tures for so long at a stretch, with Maupassant's scorching phrase: phylloxera of the spirit.
At length they had consented together beyond all pos- sibility of cavil, the dearly beloved had for ever after held their peace and then let their cry come with a rush, and Otto Olaf's rendering of:
Be present, awful Father! To give away this bride
had so moved the Sidneian heart of Skyrm that he trans- ferred himself, for better for worse, into the pew where Hermione sat as on a thwart, and there, under cover of a kinsman's seasonable emotion, rooted and snuffled his way into her affections with a suilline avidity that can only have seemed horrible to any decent person not con- versant with the phenomenon of crystallisation. The vestry was over, its signatures, duties and busses, and Mrs bboggs was back in 55, whipping the muslin off the Delikatessen, almost before the organist had regained control of his instrument. The Alba went with Walter in a taxi, Otto Olaf and Morgutte took a tram, the two grotesques never knew how they got there, while as for the maids, all but Una who wisely huddled on a cloak and cadged a lift, why they just floated on foot like brownies through the garish thoroughfares.
These are the little things that are so important.
To say that the drawing-room was thronged would be to put it mildly. It was stiff with guests. Otto Olaf found himself in that most painful of all possible positions, con-
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strained to see his furniture, his loved ones, suffer and know himself helpless to relieve them.
There was something so bright and meaty about the assembly, something so whorled in its disposition with the procession loosely coiled in the midst waiting to move off, that Walter was slowly but surely put in mind of a Benozzo fresco and said so in his high-smelling voice to the Alba.
"Ass and all" she replied, with indescribable bitterness.
Una stamped her foot like a sheep and like sheep all present turned scared faces towards her. She had some- how contrived to consolidate and shore up her gossamer, but now she had fresh grounds for complaint, namely, that the newly married couple, who should have been first home and in position for congratulations, had actually not yet turned up. Thus the action was brought to a dead halt. In its present headless condition the procession could not uncoil itself out through the door as arranged, and it was obvious that until the procession uncoiled itself there could be no relief for the congestion of casual ladies and gentlemen of which it was, so to speak, the mainspring. But let the truant pair appear and take their station and lo the press, as though by magic, would tick off merrily to its stand-up lunch. In the meantime, what a waste of good saliva!
"Raise me up Mr Quin" cried Una, in her anger throw- ing caution to the winds.
Hairy looked wildly at the bust of his partner, for so she was in pursuance of the regulations, they together forming —to vary the figure slightly—the fourth link of this nup- tial hawser, in the immediate rear, that is, of Mrs bboggs and Skyrm, who in their turn surveyed the massive flitches of Hermione, sagging and flagging in her crutches as in a quicksand, and poor Otto Olaf, trembling in every limb
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—looked wildly at it for a point of purchase at once effec- tive and respectful, some form of nelson that would not be too familiar, though for what purpose she desired to be raised he did not pause to inquire.
But before he could begin to make a mess of it in his flushing blushing panting ponderous way a great pertur- bation, dominated by the voice of Belacqua raised in abuse, made itself heard in the vestibule. This was they at last, but escorted by a pukkah Civic Guard of the highest rank compatible with duty and the stricken car- park attendant, as pale as a stone and clutching in his whole hand the damning number-plate.
Otto Olaf inserted his elbow in the eye of Hermione's crutch and released a dig. Having thus gained her atten- tion he said, in a ruined whisper: "My right lung is very weak. "
Hermione let a little pipe of terror.
"But my left lung" he vociferated "is as sound as a bell. "
"I suppose" said Mrs bboggs to James Skyrm, whose facial paddles had begun to churn the air so fiercely that she feared lest he were meditating some gallant act on behalf of his kinswoman, "I presume and I take it that Mr bboggs may do and say what he likes in his own home. "
James, on the matter being presented to him in this light, toed the line at once.
The tilted kepi of the attendant, its green band and gilt harp, and the clang beneath in black and white of his riotous hair and brow, so ravished Walter that he merely had to close his eyes to be back in Pisa. The powers of evocation of this Italianate Irishman were simply im- mense, and if his Dream of Fair to Middling Women, held up in the limae labor stage for the past ten or fifteen years,
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ever reaches the public, and Walter says it is bound to, we ought all be sure to get it and have a look at it any- way.
Belacqua reviled his captor and accuser with the utmost ferocity. Otto Olaf, then Capper, broke their ranks, the former to make a peace at all hazard, the latter, with bursting heart, a clean breast. The attendant was very soon browbeaten into admission that his injury had re- sulted, not from the ordinary exercise of his functions, not yet from any act of solicited assistance, but purely and simply from his own excessive zeal, rooted beyond a shadow of a doubt in greed.
A whip-round was made, and a small sum, on no ac- count to be regarded as anything in the nature of an indemnity, subscribed charitably for his relief. This closed the incident.
"My heart bleeds for him" said Walter.
"Not at all" said the Alba, "is he not insured? "
She had a sudden idea.
"See me home" she said to Walter.
Walter explained how he had been let in for a health,
upon which, if the offer were still open, he would be more than happy to see her home. They would go one of the long ways round that he adored.
"I make no promises" said the Alba.
The lunch was a great disappointment to all and sundry —a few firkins of molasses and husks off the ice. Belacqua closed his eyes and saw, clearer than ever before, a beer- engine. The sweets were doled out and then Thelma refused to cut the cake. She was a very strange girl. Pressed hard by Una and Bridie she appealed to her husband. Her husband! His advice to her, quite frankly, when after great difficulty he discovered what she was
"
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talking about, was that it might be rather more gracious to cut the brute since all seemed so set on her doing so. Warming to his subject he urged her to hold out just a little longer, soon it would be all over. What had begun as a hurried and rather furtive aside now developed into a regular tete-a-tete, and when at length Thelma turned to do the gracious thing she found the cake in bits. It had been dressed with orange blossoms. What few of these had escaped the onivomaniacs she gathered up and hid in her bosom. These she would lock up in the furthest recesses of a casket and cherish as long as she drew breath, these and her own two orchids and Belacqua's veronica, which spire of passionate devotion she had resolved to secure against all comers, vogue la galere! Time might pulverise these mementoes but at least their elements would belong to her for ever. She was a most strange girl.
Walter wiped his boots on the Aubusson of Otto Olafs Empire ottoman, beat on his glass of Golden Guinea with his fizz-whisk for silence to fall and paid out his discourse, in a pawl-and-ratchet monotone than could never be un- said, as follows:
"It is on record that a lady member of the Lower House, and feme covert what is more, rose to her feet, those feet—for she was of Dublin stock—that Swift, re- buking the women of this country for their disregard of Shank's mare, described as being fit for nothing better than to be laid aside, and declared: 1 would rather com- mit adultery than suffer one drop of intoxicating liquor to pass my lips/ To which a gross baker, returned in the Labour interest, retorted: Wouldn't we all rather do that, Maam? '
This opening passage was rather too densely packed
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to gain the general suffrage. On Otto Olaf it took effect some five minutes later, causing him to laugh in a helpless and hysterical manner. The sight of Walter, ranging to and fro on his fantastic upholstery as though he were caged or contesting an election, had capsized his whole nervous system and his heart was filling up rapidly with evil and madness.
" 7Z faut marcher avec son temps' said a Deputy of the extreme Right. 'Cela depend' answered Briand in his sepulchral sneer 'dans quoi il marche! So do not heckle me, Herrschaften, because that would about finish me. "
He dropped his head, like a pelican after a long journey, pricked up the ears of his fearful moustache and shuffled and shifted his feet like one surprised in a dishonourable course of action. "He is out of his head" said the chief of the ill-intentioned ladies. Otto Olaf sidled up to the dumb- waiter. Una sat down with great ostentation on a pouf. "Let me know when he starts" she said. Thelma's eyes were darting this way and that in search of orange-blos- som, Belacqua was watching Thelma and the Alba was watching him. James and Hermione, emboldened by the molasses, were trying themselves on before a Regence trumeau. Mrs bboggs was manoeuvering for a vantage- ground that would bring both husband and lover into her field of vision. The usual precautionary plain-clothes man, standing head and shoulders out of the ruck, was reading his paper. Two splendid mixers found themselves ad- jacent. "Drunk" said the first, "well lit" agreed the second, and they exchanged a long look of intelligence.
In fairness to Walter it must be said that he was far from being penetrate with this hangdog facade, behind which all was mercy-seat al fresco and Shekinah and him- self, in the smartest mail, having his wounds dressed by the Alba-Morgen and looking through the orchards at the
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sun setting awkwardly in the blue shallows. Coming to with a start, shedding his cloak of dejection, he spoke the first words that he came across in his head:
"Semper ibi juvenis cum virgine, nulla senectus . "
Nullaque vis morbi, nullus dolor.
. .
Mrs bboggs, having already trembled to hear the be- lated chuckling of Otto Olaf and to observe his stealthy movements as he called in all the castle puddings on the dumb-waiter, was hardly surprised when he now opened rapid fire on his enemy with these. But Walter was able to block such trivial missiles, even caught one and ate it, while the old man's strength, and with it his rage, was soon spent. His arteries began to fray, with the fatal result as aforesaid, from this moment.
"I raise this glass" said Walter, extending it low down and a little to the left before him like a buckler, "this glori- ous bumper, on behalf of those present and the many pre- vented by age, sickness, infirmity or previous engagement from being with us, to you, dearest Thelma, whom we all love, and to you, Mr Shuah, whom Thelma loving and being loved of her we all love too I feel sure, now on the threshold of your bliss, and to such and so many consum- mations, earthy and other, as you have in mind. "
He plied the whisk, dealt himself a slow uppercut with the glass, and drank.
"I close these eyes" he proceeded, fixing them on Mrs bboggs and returning the glass to its base, "and I see them in that memorable island, Avalon, Atlantis, Hesperides, Ui Breasail, I don't insist, lapped in the Siamese haecceity of puffect love, revelling in the most delightful natural surroundings. Oh may that star, that radiant radical of their desire, not of mine, my friends, nor yet of yours, for
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no two stars, as Saint Paul tells us, are on a par in the matter of glory, delight them without ceasing with legiti- mate inflexions! " He unleashed what was left of the glori- ous bumper. "To Hymen's gracious mussy and protection we commit them, now, henceforth and for evermore. Slainte. "
This was the end of Walter's speech, and a very good end for such a bad speech every one felt it to be, but as he remained upright on the ottoman in a rapt and sus- pended pose, drinking in the plaudits, Belacqua assumed that there was some yet to come and so was startled to hear the voice of Una, whom the least semblance of pro- crastination invariably threw into the most dreadful pas- sion, calling on him petulantly to do the needful: "Now Mr Shuah, now then Mr Shuah, we're waiting on yer Mr Shuah. " This sordid hitch caused his acknowledgment to be rather less cordial than he had intended. He made it from where he stood, in the white voice of which he was a master:
"I have to thank: Miss bboggs, who henceforward may be so addressed without the least ambiguity, for her as always timely reminder; Mr. Draffin, for his kind torrents of meiosis; Mr and Mrs small double bee, for their Bounty; the Maids, with special reference to Belle-Belle their leader, for their finely calculated offices this day, some- thing more than merely buttress and less than vis a tergo; the Skyrm and Nautzsche, who I am glad to see have not yet done rising to the occasion; my faithful friend and best of men, Tiny Hairy Capper Quin, tipping the scale, day in day out, for me and for many, whose spiritual body is by now I feel confident a fait accompli; the entire Church staff; the Abbe Gabriel; as many, in fine, as have found the time to witness and acclaim, in how small a way soever, this instant of the whirligig. Eleleu. Jou Jou. "
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A student of Plutarch found himself rubbing shoulders with a physicist of the modern school.
,, "There you have him" said the first "in a nutshell.
"This bivalve world" said the other.
Their eyes met and filled with tears.
Whatever small chance these words of Belacqua might
have had of giving satisfaction was more than cancelled by his having been observed, in a dumbshow portmanteau of Selah and sigh of relief, to check off on his fingers each acknowledgment as it was made. Thelma marched to the door in an atmosphere of silence and shock, opened it and closed it behind her, which expression of independence rather cut the ground away from under Una, who had planned to sit down with a bang on the pouf, just at the moment when her services were obviously most needed, and thus put an open slight on the bride.
Hairy on the other hand, faithful to the last to his com- mission, reported smartly for duty.
"Slip out quick" said Belacqua "and run her behind into the lane off Denmark Street. "
The guests were now adjourning stiffly to the drawing- room, Walter and Otto Olaf polarised in bitter tig about the person of the Alba, Otto Olaf being it, while Her- mione and James, he propelling her in a tomb-deep arm- chair on casters, closed the recession. This grotesque equipage was brought to a standstill in the passage in consequence of the passenger's putting her feet to the ground, whether from coquetry or fatigue we leave it to the reader to determine.
"My crutches Jim" she said.
Jim went back for the crutches, Walter took sanctuary with Hermione, the Alba sent Otto Olaf flying, Jim came back with the sweeps, Hermione got them under her somehow, Walter rejoined the Alba. They remained all
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four quietly where they were, in the passage, discussing ways and means, severally first, then, when their interests were overheard to coincide, together. Four heads are better than two, eight than four, and so on.
After a fairly decent interval Belacqua excused himself just for a moment (as he did, it may be remembered, to the Poet in the Grosvenor), left the room, sprang up the stairs, caught up his bride like a Cossack and conveyed her by clandestine ways down to the garden that lay be- hind the house. He opened the wicket into the lane with the key that his love had fondly hoped would facilitate his suit in its early stages, and in another moment they had been clear of the abhorred premises when the sound of a broken-winded hue in the garden caused him to turn back. This proceeded from that irrepressible quartet, Her- mione, the Alba, Walter and James, perspiring, suppliant, making their getaway.
Belacqua stood like a stock at gaze, with an overwhelm- ing sense that all this would happen to him again, in a dream or subsequent existence. Then he stepped to the one side, Thelma to the other, of the wicket, Caudine exit, saying to himself, as he watched the fugitives storm the postern like women boarding a tram: "It is right that they who are loved should live. " It was from this moment that he used to date in after years his crucial loss of interest in himself, as in a grape beyond his grasp.
But the alarm had been given, faces sprang up in the windows, Una began to scream havoc fit to burst, the mixers and the plain-clothes man came plunging up the garden in the van of pursuit. Belacqua threw them a tub in the form of Hairy, locked the wicket on the outside and committed himself and his wife to the Morgan, fast but noisy.
As for the other four, they did not feel safe until they
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reached the Cappella Lane, superb cenotheca, in Charle- mont House. Nobody would ever think of looking for them there.
Lucy was atra cura in the dicky the best part of the way down to Galway.
They all stopped for a drink. Thelma, as ever on his wrong side, began to insist that she was Mrs Shuah, mak- ing his little heart go pit-a-pat. He turned a face that she had never seen upon her.
"Do you ever hear tell of a babylan? " he said.
Now Thelma was a brave girl.
"A what did you say? " she said.
Belacqua went to the trouble of spelling the strange
word.
"Never" she said. "What is it? Something to eat? " "Oh" he said "you're thinking of a baba. "
"Well then" she said.
His eyes were parched, he closed them and saw, clearer
than ever before, the mule, up to its knees in mire, and astride its back a beaver, flogging it with a wooden sword. But she was not merely brave, she was discreet as well.
"Your veronica" she said "that I wanted so much, where is it gone? "
He clapped his hand to the place. Alas! the tassel had drooped, wormed its stem out of the slit, fallen to the ground and been trodden underfoot.
"Gone west" he said. They went further.
The Smeraldina's Billet Doux
JDel bel by own bloved, allways and for ever mine! ! Your letter is soked with tears death is the onely thing.
I had been crying bitterly, tears! tears! tears! and nothing els, then your letter cam with more tears, after I had read it ofer and ofer again I found I had ink spots on my face. The tears are rolling down my face. It is very early in the morning, the sun is riseing behind the black trees and soon that will change, the sky will be blue and the trees a golden brown, but there is one thing that dosent change, this pain and thos tears. Oh! Bel I love you terrible, I want you terrible, I want your body your soft white body Nagelnackt! My body needs you so terrible, my hands and lips and breasts and everything els on me, sometimes I find it very hard to keep my promise but I have kept it up till now and will keep on doing so untill we meet again and I can at last have you, at last be the Geliebte. Whitch is the greater: the pain of being away from eachother, or the pain of being with eachother, crying at eachother beauty? I sopose the last is the greater, otherwise we would of given up all hope of ever being anything els but miserable.
I was at a grand Film last night, first of all there wasent any of the usual hugging and kissing, I think I have never enjoyed or felt so sad at a Film as at that one, Sturm iiber Asien, if it comes to Dublin you must go and see it, the same Regie as Der Lebende Leichnam, it was realey
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THE SMERALDINA's BILLET DOUX 153
something quite different from all other Films, nothing to do with Love (as everybody understands the word) no silly girls makeing sweet faces, nearly all old people from Asien with marvellous faces, black lakes and grand Land- schaften. Comeing home there was a new moon, it looked so grand ofer the black trees that it maid me cry. I opened my arms wide and tryed to imagine that you were lieing against my breasts and looking up at me like you did those moonlight nights when we walked together under the big chestnut trees with the stars shineing through the branches.
I met a new girl, very beautiful, pitch black hairs and very pale, she onely talks Egyptian. She told me about the man she loves, at present he is in Amerika far away in some lonely place and wont be back for the next three years and cant writ to her because there is no post office where he is staying and she onely gets a letter every 4 months, imagine if we only got a letter from each other every 4 months what sort of state we would be in by now, the poor girl I am very sorry for her. We went to a 5 o'clock tea dance, it was rather boreing but quite amuse- ing to see the people thinking of nothing but what they have on and the men settling their tyes every 5 minutes. On the way home I sudenly got in to a terrible state of sadness and woulden say a word, of course they were rage- ing with me, at the moment I dident care a dam, when I got in to the bus I got out a little Book and pencil and wrot down 100 times: Bloved Bloved Bloved Bel Bel Bel, I felt as if I never longed so much in my Me for the man I love, to be with him, with him. I want you so much in every sence of the word, you and onely you. After I got out of the bus and was walking down the street I yelled out wahnsinnig wahnsinnig! wahnsinnig! Frau Schlank brought down your sock and that made me cry more than ever. I dont think I will send it to you, I will put it in to
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the drawer with your sweet letter. I had allso a letter from a man who asked me to go out with him to dance on Saturday evening, I sopose I will go. I know my bloved dosent mind and it makes the time go round quicker, the man is a bit of a fool but dances quite well and is the right hight for me. A flirt is very amuseing but shouldent go further than that.
Then I met the old man with the pipe and he told me I had a blue letter and then the fat man with the keys in the passage and he said Griiss Gott but I dident hear him.
Soon I will be counting the hours untill I can go to the station and find you amongst the crowded platform but I dont think I will be able to wear my grey costume if it is too cold and then I will have to wear Mammy furcoat. You will be by me on the 23th wont you Bel, my Bel with the beautiful lips and hands and eyes and face and every- thing that is on you, and now with your poor sore face it would make no diffrence. Two more weeks of agony pain and sadness! 14 more days oh! God and thos sleepless nights! ! ! How long?