No More Learning

"Dr Sholto" said Winnie.
Dr Sholto was some years younger than Belacqua, a pale dark man with a brow. He was delighted—how would he say? —at so unexpected a pleasure, honoured he was sure to make the acquaintance of any friend of Miss Coates. Now they would do him the favour to ad- journ. . . ? This meant drink. But Belacqua, having other fish to fry, sighed and improvised a long courteous state- ment to the effect that there was a point in connexion with the church which he was most anxious to check at first hand, so that if he might accept on behalf of Miss Coates, who was surely tired after her long walk from Malahide . . .
"Malahide! " ejaculated Dr Sholto.
. . . and be himself excused, they could all three meet at the main entrance of the asylum in, say, an hour. How would that be? Dr Sholto demurred politely. Winnie thought hard and said nothing.
"I'll go down by the Banks" said Belacqua agreeably "and follow the road round. Au revoir. "
They stood for a moment watching him depart. When he ventured to look back they were gone. He changed his course and came to where the bicycle lay in the grass. It was a fine light machine, with red tires and wooden rims. He ran down the margin to the road and it bounded alongside under his hand. He mounted and they flew down the hill and round the corner till they came at
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length to the stile that led into the field where the church was. The machine was a treat to ride, on his right hand the sea was foaming among the rocks, the sands ahead were another yellow again, beyond them in the distance the cottages of Rush were bright white, Belacqua's sadness fell from him like a shift. He carried the bicycle into the field and laid it down on the grass. He hastened on foot, without so much as a glance at the church, across the fields, over a wall and a ditch, and stood before the poor wooden door of the tower. The locked appearance of this did not deter him. He gave it a kick, it swung open and he went in.
Meantime Dr Sholto, in his pleasantly appointed sanc- tum, improved the occasion with Miss Winifred Coates. Thus they were all met together in Portrane, Winnie, Belacqua, his heart and Dr Sholto, and paired off to the satisfaction of all parties. Surely it is in such little ad- justments that the benevolence of the First Cause appears beyond dispute. Winnie kept her eye on the time and arrived punctually with her friend at the main entrance. There was no sign of her other friend.
"Late" said Winnie "as usual. "
In respect of Belacqua Sholto felt nothing but rancour. "Pah" he said, "he'll be sandpapering a tomb. "
A stout block of an old man in shirt sleeves and slip-
pers was leaning against the wall of the field. Winnie still sees, as vividly as when then they met her anxious gaze for the first time, his great purple face and white mous- taches. Had he seen a stranger about, a pale fat man in a black leather coat.
"No miss" he said.
"Well" said Winnie, settling herself on the wall, to Sholto, "I suppose he's about somewhere. "
A land of sanctuary, he had said, where much had been suffered secretly. Yes, the last ditch.
"You stay here" said Sholto, madness and evil in his heart, "and I'll take a look in the church. "
The old man had been showing signs of excitement. "Is it an escape? " he enquired hopefully.
"No no" said Winnie, "just a friend. "
But he was off, he was unsluiced.
"I was born on Lambay" he said, by way of opening to an endless story of a recapture in which he had dis- tinguished himself, "and I've worked here man and boy. "
"In that case" said Winnie "maybe you can tell me what the ruins are. "
"That's the church" he said, pointing to the near one, it had just absorbed Sholto, "and that" pointing to the far one " 's the tower. "
"Yes" said Winnie "but what tower, what was it? "
"The best I know" he said "is some Lady Something had it. "
This was news indeed.
"Then before that again" it all came back to him with
a rush "you might have heard tell of Dane Swift, he kep
a"—he checked the word and then let it come regard- —
less "he kep a motte in it. "
"A moth? " exclaimed Winnie.
"A motte" he said "of the name of Stella. "
Winnie stared out across the grey field. No sign of
Sholto, nor of Belacqua, only this puce mass up against her and a tale of a motte and a star. What was a motte? "You mean" she said "that he lived there with a
woman? "
"He kep her there" said the old man, he had read it
in an old Telegraph and he would adhere to it, "and came down from Dublin. "
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Little fat Presto, he would set out early in the morning, fresh and fasting, and walk like camomile.
Sholto appeared on the stile in the crenellated wall, waving blankly. Winnie began to feel that she had made a mess of it.
"God knows" she said to Sholto when he came up "where he is. "
"You can't hang around here all night" he said. "Let me drive you home, I have to go up to Dublin anyhow. "
"I can't leave him" wailed Winnie.
"But he's not here, damn it" said Sholto, "if he was he'd be here. "
The old man, who knew his Sholto, stepped into the breach with a tender of his services: he would keep his eyes open.
"Now" said Sholto, "he can't expect you to wait here for ever. "
A young man on a bicycle came slowly round the cor- ner from the Donabate direction, saluted the group and was turning into the drive of the asylum.
"Tom" cried Sholto.
Tom dismounted. Sholto gave a brief satirical descrip- tion of Belacqua's person.
"You didn't see that on the road" he said "did you? "
"I passed the felly of it on a bike" said Tom, pleased to be of use, "at Ross's gate, going like flames. "
"On a BIKE! " cried Winnie. "But he hadn't a bike. "
"Tom" said Sholto "get out the car, look sharp now, and run her down here. "
"But it can't have been him" Winnie was furious for several reasons, "I tell you he had no bike. "
"Whoever it is" said Sholto, master of the situation, "we'll pass him before he gets to the main road. "
But Sholto had underestimated the speed of his man, who was safe in Taylor's public-house in Swords, drinking in a way that Mr Taylor did not like, before they were well on their way.
FINGAL 35
Ding-Dong
IVIy sometime friend Belacqua enlivened the last phase of his solipsism, before he toed the line and began to relish the world, with the belief that the best thing he had to do was to move constantly from place to place. He did not know how this conclusion had been gained, but that it was not thanks to his preferring one place to an- other he felt sure. He was pleased to think that he could give what he called the Furies the slip by merely setting himself in motion. But as for sites, one was as good as another, because they all disappeared as soon as he came to rest in them. The mere act of rising and going, ir- respective of whence and whither, did him good. That was so. He was sorry that he did not enjoy the means to indulge this humour as he would have wished, on a large scale, on land and sea. Hither and thither on land and sea! He could not afford that, for he was poor. But in a small way he did what he could. From the ingle to the window, from the nursery to the bedroom, even from one quarter of the town to another, and back, these little acts of motion he was in a fair way of making, and they certainly did do him some good as a rule. It was the old story of the salad days, torment in the terms and in the intervals a measure of ease.
Being by nature however sinfully indolent, bogged in indolence, asking nothing better than to stay put at the
36
good pleasure of what he called the Furies, he was at times tempted to wonder whether the remedy were not rather more disagreeable than the complaint. But he could only suppose that it was not, seeing that he con- tinued to have recourse to it, in a small way it is true, but nevertheless for years he continued to have recourse to it, and to return thanks for the little good it did him.
The simplest form of this exercise was boomerang, out and back; nay, it was the only one that he could afford for many years. Thus it is clear that his contrivance did not proceed from any discrimination between different points in space, since he returned directly, if we except an occasional pause for refreshment, to his point of depar- ture, and truly no less recruited in spirit than if the in- terval had been whiled away abroad in the most highly
reputed cities.
I know all this because he told me. We were Pylades
and Orestes for a period, flattened down to something very genteel; but the relation abode and was highly con- fidential while it lasted. I have witnessed every stage of the exercise. I have been there when he set out, springing up and hastening away without as much as by your leave, impelled by some force that he did not care to gainsay. I have had glimpses of him enjoying his little trajectory. I have been there again when he returned, transfigured and transformed. It was very nearly the reverse of the author of the Imitation's "glad going out and sad com- ing in. "
He was at pains to make it clear to me, and to all those to whom he exposed his manoeuvre, that it was in no way cognate with the popular act of brute labour, digging and such like, exploited to disperse the dumps, an anti- dote depending for its efficaciousness on mere physical exhaustion, and for which he expressed the greatest con-
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tempt. He did not fatigue himself, he said; on the con- trary. He lived a Beethoven pause, he said, whatever he meant by that. In his anxiety to explain himself he was liable to come to grief. Nay, this anxiety in itself, or so at least it seemed to me, constituted a break-down in the self-sufficiency which he never wearied of arrogating to himself, a sorry collapse of my little internus homo, and alone sufficient to give him away as inept ape of his own shadow. But he wriggled out of everything by pleading that he had been drunk at the time, or that he was an incoherent person and content to remain so, and so on. He was an impossible person in the end. I gave him up in the end because he was not serious.
One day, in a positive geyser of confidence, he gave me an account of one of these "moving pauses. " He had a strong weakness for oxymoron. In the same way he over-indulged in gin and tonic-water.
Not the least charm of this pure blank movement, this "gress" or "gression," was its aptness to receive, with or without the approval of the subject, in all their integrity the faint inscriptions of the outer world. Exempt from destination, it had not to shun the unforeseen nor turn aside from the agreeable odds and ends of vaudeville that are liable to crop up. This sensitiveness was not the least charm of this roaming that began by being blank, not the least charm of this pure act the alacrity with which it welcomed defilement. But very nearly the least.
Emerging, on the particular evening in question, from the underground convenience in the maw of College Street, with a vague impression that he had come from following the sunset up the Liffey till all the colour had been harried from the sky, all the tulips and aerugo ex- punged, he squatted, not that he had too much drink taken but simply that for the moment there were no
grounds for his favouring one direction rather than an- other, against Tommy Moore's plinth. Yet he durst not dally. Was it not from brooding shill I, shall I, dilly, dally, that he had come out? Now the summons to move on was a subpoena. Yet he found he could not, any more than Buridan's ass, move to right or left, backward or forward. Why this was he could not make out at all. Nor was it the moment for self-examination. He had experi- enced little or no trouble coming back from the Park Gate along the north quay, he had taken the Bridge and Westmoreland Street in his stride, and now he suddenly found himself good for nothing but to loll against the plinth of this bull-necked bard, and wait for a sign.
There were signs on all hands. There was the big Bovril sign to begin with, flaring beyond the Green. But it was useless. Faith, Hope and—what was it? —Love, Eden missed, every ebb derided, all the tides ebbing from the shingle of Ego Maximus, little me. Itself it went no- where, only round and round, like the spheres, but mutely. It could not dislodge him now, it could only put ideas into his head. Was it not from sitting still among his ideas, other people's ideas, that he had come away? What would he not give now to get on the move again! Away from ideas!
Turning aside from this and other no less futile em- blems, his attention was arrested by a wheel-chair being pushed rapidly under the arcade of the Bank, in the di- rection of Dame Street. It moved in and out of sight behind the bars of the columns. This was the blind para- lytic who sat all day near to the corner of Fleet Street, and in bad weather under the shelter of the arcade, the same being wheeled home to his home in the Coombe. It was past his time and there was a bitter look on his face. He would give his chairman a piece of his mind when
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he got him to himself. This chairman, hireling or poor relation, came every evening a little before the dark, unfastened from the beggar's neck and breast the placard announcing his distress, tucked him up snugly in his coverings and wheeled him home to his supper. He was well advised to be assiduous, for this beggar was a power in the Coombe. In the morning it was his duty to shave his man and wheel him, according to the weather, to one or other of his pitches. So it went, day after day.
This was a star the horizon adorning if you like, and Belacqua made off at all speed in the opposite direction. Down Pearse Street, that is to say, long straight Pearse Street, its vast Barrack of Glencullen granite, its home of tragedy restored and enlarged, its coal merchants and Florentine Fire Brigade Station, its two Cervi saloons, ice-cream and fried fish, its dairies, garages and monu- mental sculptors, and implicit behind the whole length of its southern frontage the College. Perpetuis futuris temporibus duraturum. It was to be hoped so, indeed.
It was a most pleasant street, despite its name, to be abroad in, full as it always was with shabby substance and honest-to-God coming and going. All day the road- way was a tumult of buses, red and blue and silver. By one of these a little girl was run down, just as Belacqua drew near to the railway viaduct. She had been to the Hibernian Dairies for milk and bread and then she had plunged out into the roadway, she was in such a child- ish fever to get back in record time with her treasure to the tenement in Mark Street where she lived. The good milk was all over the road and the loaf, which had sustained no injury, was sitting up against the kerb, for all the world as though a pair of hands had taken it up and set it down there. The queue standing for the Palace Cinema was torn between conflicting desires: to
keep their places and to see the excitement. They craned their necks and called out to know the worst, but they stood firm. Only one girl, debauched in appearance and swathed in a black blanket, fell out near the sting of the queue and secured the loaf. With the loaf under her blanket she sidled unchallenged down Mark Street and turned into Mark Lane. When she got back to the queue her place had been taken of course. But her sally had not cost her more than a couple of yards.
Belacqua turned left into Lombard Street, the street of the sanitary engineers, and entered a public house. Here he was known, in the sense that his grotesque exterior had long ceased to alienate the curates and make them giggle, and to the extent that he was served with his drink with- out having to call for it. This did not always seem a privilege. He was tolerated, what was more, and let alone by the rough but kindly habitues of the house, recruited for the most part from among dockers, railwaymen and vague joxers on the dole. Here also art and love, scrab- bling in dispute or staggering home, were barred, or, per- haps better, unknown. The aesthetes and the impotent were far away.
These circumstances combined to make of this place a very grateful refuge for Belacqua, who never omitted, when he found himself in its neighbourhood with the price of a drink about him, to pay it a visit.
When I enquired how he squared such visits with his anxiety to keep on the move and his distress at finding himself brought to a standstill, as when he had come out of the underground in the mouth of College Street, he re- plied that he did not. "Surely" he said "my resolution has the right to break down. " I supposed so indeed. "Or" he said "if you prefer, I make the raid in two hops instead of non-stop. From what" he cried "does that disqualify
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me, I should very much like to know. " I hastened to assure him that he had a perfect right to suit himself in what, after all, was a manuoeuvre of his own contriving, and that the raid, to adopt his own term, lost nothing by being made in easy stages. "Easy! " he exclaimed, "how easy? "
But notice the double response, like two holes to a burrow.
Sitting in this crapulent den, drinking his drink, he gradually ceased to see its furnishings with pleasure, the bottles, representing centuries of loving research, the stools, the counter, the powerful screws, the shining pha- lanx of the pulls of the beer-engines, all cunningly devised and elaborated to further the relations between purveyor and consumer in this domain. The bottles drawn and emptied in a twinkling, the casks responding to the slight- est pressure on their joysticks, the weary proletarians at rest on arse and elbow, the cash register that never complains, the graceful curates flying from customer to customer, all this made up a spectacle in which Belacqua was used to take delight and chose to see a pleasant instance of machinery decently subservient to appetite. A great major symphony of supply and demand, effect and cause, fulcrate on the middle C of the counter and wax- ing, as it proceeded, in the charming harmonics of blas- phemy and broken glass and all the aliquots of fatigue and ebriety. So that he would say that the only place where he could come to anchor and be happy was a low public-house, and that all the wearisome tactics of gress and dud Beethoven would be done away with if only he could spend his life in such a place. But as they closed at ten, and as residence and good faith were viewed as incompatible, and as in any case he had not the means to consecrate his life to stasis, even in the meanest bar, he supposed he must be content to indulge this whim from
time to time, and return thanks for such sporadic mercy. All this and much more he laboured to make clear. He seemed to derive considerable satisfaction from his failure
to do so.
But on this particular occasion the cat failed to jump,
with the result that he became as despondent as though he were sitting at home in his own great armchair, as anxious to get on the move and quite as hard put to it to do so. Why this was he could not make out. Whether the trituration of the child in Pearse Street had upset him without his knowing it, or whether (and he put forward this alternative with a truly insufferable complacency) he had come to some parting of the ways, he did not know at all. All he could say was that the objects in which he was used to find such recreation and repose lost gradu- ally their hold upon him, he became insensible to them little by little, the old itch and algos crept back into his mind.
He had come briskly all the way from Tommy Moore, and now he suddenly found himself sitting para- lysed and grieving in a pub of all places, good for noth- ing but to stare at his spoiling porter, and wait for a sign.
To this day he does not know what caused him to look up, but look up he did. Feeling the impulse to do this strong upon him, he forced his eyes away from the glass of dying porter and was rewarded by seeing a hat- less woman advancing slowly towards him up the body of the bar. No sooner had she come in than he must have become aware of her. That was surely very curious in the first instance. She seemed to be hawking some ware or other, but what it was he could not see, except that it was not studs or laces or matches or lavender or any of the usual articles. Not that it was unusual to find a woman in that public-house, for they came and went
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freely, slaking their thirst and beguiling their sorrows with no less freedom than their men-folk. Indeed it was al- ways a pleasure to see them, their advances were always most friendly and honourable, Belacqua had many a de- lightful recollection of their commerce.
Hence there was no earthly reason why he should see in the advancing figure of this mysterious pedlar anything untoward, or in the nature of the sign in default of which he was clamped to his stool till closing-time. Yet the impulse to do so was so strong that he yielded to it, and as she drew nearer, having met with more rebuffs than pence in her endeavours to dispose of her wares, what- ever they were, it became clear to him that his instinct had not played him false, in so far at least as she was a woman of very remarkable presence indeed.
Her speech was that of a woman of the people, but of a gentlewoman of the people. Her gown had served its time, but yet contrived to be respectable. He noticed with a pang that she sported about her neck the insidious little mock fur so prevalent in tony slumland. 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
A WET NIGHT 51
52 MORE PRICKS THAN KICKS
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.