"
here is right, through bashfulness from venery.
here is right, through bashfulness from venery.
Samuel Beckett
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. Wat a night, Madame" he addressed him- self vehemently, out of sheer politeness, directly to his hostess, "God wat a night! "
The crone was as fond of the P. B. as though she had bought him in Clery's toy fair.
"And you so far to come! " She wished she could dandle him on her knee. He was a shabby man and often moody. "Too good of you to come" she hushabied, "too good of you. "
The Man of Law, his face a blaze of acne, was next, es- corting the Parabimbi and three tarts dressed for the backstairs.
"I met him" whispered Chas "zigzagging down Pearse
"did you use sense when you said ? "
. . .
. .
. " he began again, when a nameless ignora-
. " . .
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Street, Brunswick Street, you know, that was. "
"En route? " ventured Caleken. She was a bit above her-
self with all the excitement. "Hem? "
"On his way here? "
"Well" said Chas, "I regret, my dear Miss Frica, that he did not make it absolutely clear if he comes or not. "
The Gael said to the P. B. in an injured voice:
"Here's a man wants to know what Owen. "
"Not possible" said the P. B. , "you astonish me. "
"Is it of the sweet mouth? " said a sandy son of Ham. Now the prong of the P. B. 's judgment was keen and
bright.
"That emmerdeur" he jeered, "the strange sweet mouth! "
The Parabimbi jumped.
"You said? " she said.
Caleken emerged from the ruck, she came to the fore. "What can be keeping the girls" she said. It was not ex-
actly a question.
"And your sister" enquired the botanist, "Your charming
sister, where can she be this evening now I wonder. "
The Beldam sprang into the breach.
"Unfortunately" she said, in ringing tones and with great
precipitation, "in bed, unwell. A great disappointment to us all. "
"Nothing of moment, Madam" said the Man of Law "let us hope? "
"Thank you, no. Happily not. A slight indisposition. Poor little Dandelion! " The Beldam heaved a heavy sigh.
The P. B. exchanged a look of intelligence with the Gael. "What girls? " he said.
Caleken expanded her lungs:
"Pansy"—the Poet had a palpitation, why had he not
A WET NIGHT 65
—
brought his nux vomica? "Lilly Neary, Olga, Elliseva,
Bride Maria, Alga, Ariana, tall Tib, slender Sib, Alma —
Beatrix, Alba " They were really too numerous, she could not go through the entire list. She staunched her mouth.
"Alba! " ejaculated the P. B. , "Alba! She! "
"And why" interposed the Countess of Parabimbi "why not Alba, whoever she may be, rather than, say, the Wife of Bath? "
A nondescript appeared in their midst, he panted the glad tidings. The girls had arrived.
"They are gurrls" said the botanist "beyond question. But are they the gurrls? "
"Now I hope we can start" said the younger Frica, and, the elder being aware of no let or hindrance, up on to the estrade smartly she stepped and unveiled the refresh- ments. Turning her back on the high dumb-waiter, with a great winged gesture of lapidated piety, she instituted the following selection:
"Cup! Squash! Cocoa! Force! Julienne! Pan Kail! Cock- a-Leekie! Hulluah! Apfelmus! Isinglass! Ching-Ching! "
A terrible silence fell on the assembly.
"Great cry" said Chas "and little wool. "
The more famished faithful stormed the platform.
Two banned novelists, a bibliomaniac and his mistress,
a paleographer, a violist d'amore with his instrument in a bag, a popular parodist with his sister and six daughters, a still more popular Professor of Bullscrit and Compar- ative Ovoidology, the saprophile the better for drink, a communist painter and decorator fresh back from the Moscow reserves, a merchant prince, two grave Jews, a rising strumpet, three more poets with Lauras to match, a disaffected cicisbeo, a chorus of playwrights, the inevit-
"
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able envoy of the Fourth Estate, a phalanx of Grafton Street Sturmers and Jemmy Higgins arrived now in a body. No sooner had they been absorbed than the Para- bimbi, very much the lone bird on this occasion in the absence of her husband the Count who had been unable to escort her on account of his being buggered if he would, got in her attributions of the Frica for which, as has been shown, the Beldam was so profoundly beholden.
"Maaaacche! " said the Countess of Parabimbi, "I do but constate.
She held the saucer under her chin like a communion- card. She lowered the cup into its socket without a sound.
"Excellent" she said, "most excellent Force. "
The crone smiled from the teeth outward.
"So glad" she said, "so glad. "
The Professor of Bullscrit and Comparative Ovoidology
was nowhere to be seen. But that was not his vocation, he was not a little boy. His function was to be heard. He was widely and distinctly heard.
"When the immortal Byron" he bombled "was about to
say Ravenna? "
"Allow me" said the rising strumpet: "a sandwich: egg,
tomato, cucumber. "
"Did you know" blundered the Man of Law "that the
Swedes have no fewer than seventy varieties of Smoerr- broed? "
The voice of the arithmomaniac was heard:
"The arc" he said, stooping to all in the great plainness of his words, "is longer than its chord. "
"Madam knows Ravenna? " said the paleographer.
leave Ravenna, to sail in search of some distant shore . "
where a hero's death might end his immortal spleen "Ravenna! " exclaimed the Countess, memory tugging at her carefully cultivated heart-strings, "did I hear someone
. .
"Do I know Ravenna! " exclaimed the Parabimbi. "Sure I know Ravenna. A sweet and noble city. "
"You know of course" said the Man of Law "that Dante died there. "
"Right" said the Parabimbi, "so he did. "
"You know of course" said the Professor "that his tomb is in the Piazza Byron. I did his epitaph in the eye into blank heroics. "
"You knew of course" said the paleographer "that under
. "
Belisarius
"My dear" said the Parabimbi to the Beldam, "how well
it goes. What a happy party and how at home they all seem. I declare" she declared "I envy you your flair for making people feel at their ease. "
The Beldam disclaimed faintly any such faculty. It was Caleken's party reelly, it was Caleken who had arranged everything reelly. She personally had had very little to do with the arrangements. She just sat there and looked ex- hausted. She was just a weary old Norn.
"To my thinking" boomed the Professor, begging the question as usual, "the greatest triumph of the human mind was the calculation of Neptune from the observed vagaries of the orbit of Uranus. "
"And yours" said the P. B. That was an apple of gold and a picture of silver if you like.
The Parabimbi waxed stiff.
"What's that? " she cried, "what's that he says? "
A still more terrible silence fell on the assembly. The
saprophile had slapped the communist painter and dec- orator.
The Frica, supported by Mr Higgins, pounced on the disturbance.
"Go" she said to the saprophile "and let there be no scene. "
. .
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Mr Higgins, who kicked up his heels in the scrum for the Rangers, made short work of the nuisance. The Frica turned on the poor P. and D.
"It is not my intention" she said "to tolerate hooligans in this house. "
"He called me a bloody Bolshy" protested the glorious Komsomolet, "and he a labour man himself. "
"Let there be no more of it" said the Frica, "let there be no more of it. " She was very optative. "I beg of you. " She stepped back fleetly to the altar.
"You heard what she said" said the Gael.
"Let there be no more of it" said the native speaker.
"I beg of you" said the P. B.
But now she cometh that all this may disdain, Alba,
dauntless daughter of desires. Entering just on the turn of the hush, advancing like a midinette to pay her ironical respects to the Beldam, she fired the thorns under every pot. Turning her scarlet back on the crass crackling of the Parabimbi she mounted the estrade and there, silent and still before the elements of refreshment, in profile to the assistance, cast her gravitational nets.
The rising strumpet studied how to do it. The sister of the parodist passed on to such as were curious what little she and her dear nieces knew of the Alba who was much spoken of in certain virtuous circles to which they had access, though to be sure how much of what they heard was true and how much mere idle gossip they were really not in a position to determine. However, for what it was worth, it appeared . . .
The Gael, the native speaker, a space-writer and the violist d'amore got together as though by magic.
"Well" invited the space-writer. "Pret-ty good" said the Gael. "Ex-quisite" said the violist d'amore.
The native speaker said nothing.
"Well" insisted the space-writer, "Larry? "
Larry tore his eyes away from the estrade and said,
drawing his palms slowly up the flanks of his kilt: "Jaysus! "
"Meaning to say? " said the space-writer.
Larry turned his wild gaze back on the estrade.
"You don't happen to know" he said finally "does she? " "They all do" said the violist d'amore.
"Like hell they do" groaned the Gael, ricordandosi del
tempo felice.
"What I want to know" said the Student, "what we all
.
"
here is right, through bashfulness from venery. It is a pity, but there you are. "
Great wits will jump and Jemmy Higgins and the P. B. converged on the estrade.
"You look pale" said the Frica "and ill, my pet. "
The Alba raised her big head from the board, looked longly at the Frica, closed her eyes and intoned:
Woe and Pain, Pain and Woe,
Are my lot, night and noon . . . Caleken fell back.
"Keep them off" said the Alba.
"Keep them off! " echoed Caleken, "keep them off? " "We go through this world" observed the Alba "like
sunbeams through cracks in cucumbers. "
Caleken was not so sure about the sunbeams.
"Take a little cup" she urged, "it will do you good. Or
a Ching-Ching. "
"Keep them off" said the Alba, "off off off off. "
But the P. B. and Higgins were on the estrade, they
hemmed her in.
are most anxious to know
"Some do abstain" said the space-writer, "our friend
. .
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"So be it" said the Alba, "let it run over by all means. " Phew! The Frica was unspeakably relieved.
Half-past nine. The guests, led by the rising strumpet
and declining cicisbeo, began to scatter through the house. The Frica let them go. In due course she would visit the alcoves, she would round them up for the party proper to begin. Had not Chas promised a piece of old French? Had not the Poet written a poem specially? She had peeped into the bag in the hall and seen the viol d'amore. So they would have a little music.
Half-past nine. It was raining bitterly when Belacqua, keyed up to take his bearings, issued forth into the un- intelligible world of Lincoln Place. But he had bought a bottle, it was like a breast in the pocket of his reefer. He set off unsteadily by the Dental Hospital. As a child he had dreaded its facade, its sheets of blood-red glass. Now they were black, which was worse again, he having put aside a childish thing or two. Feeling suddenly white and clammy he leaned against the iron wicket set in the Col- lege wall and looked at Johnston, Mooney and O'Brien's clocks. Something to ten by the whirligig and he dis- inclined to stand, let alone walk. And the daggers of rain. He raised his hands and held them before his face, so close that even in the dark he could see the lines. They smelt bad. He carried them on to his forehead, the fingers sank in his wet hair, the heels crushed torrents of indigo out of his eyeballs, the rabbet of his nape took the cornice, it wrung the baby anthrax that he always wore just above his collar, he intensified the pressure and the pangs, they were a guarantee of identity.
The next thing was his hands dragged roughly down from his eyes, which he opened on the vast crimson face
of an ogre. For a moment it was still, plush gargoyle, then it moved, it was convulsed. This, he thought, is the face of some person talking. It was. It was that part of a Civic Guard pouring abuse upon him. Belacqua closed his eyes, there was no other way of ceasing to see it. Subduing a great desire to visit the pavement he catted, with unde- monstrative abundance, all over the boots and trouser- ends of the Guard, in return for which incontinence he received such a dunch on the breast that he fell hip and thigh into the outskirts of his own offal. He had no feeling of hurt either to his person or to his amour propre, only a very amiable weakness and an impatience to be on the move. It must have gone ten. He bore no animosity to- wards the Guard, although now he began to hear what he was saying. He knelt before him in the filth, he heard all the odious words he was saying in the recreation of his duty, and bore him not the slightest ill-will. He reached up for a purchase on his gleaming cape and hoisted himself to his feet. The apology he made when stable for what had occurred was profusely rejected. He furnished his name and address, whence he came and whither he went, and why, his occupation and immediate business, and why. It distressed him to learn that for two pins the Guard would frog-march him to the Station, but he appreciated the officer's dilemma.
"Wipe them boots" said the Guard.
Belacqua was only too happy, it was the least he could do. Contriving two loose swabs of the Twilight Herald he stooped and cleaned the boots and trouser-ends to the best of his ability. A magnificent and enormous pair of boots emerged. He rose, clutching the fouled swabs, and looked up timidly at the Guard, who seemed rather at a loss as how best to press home his advantage.
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"I trust, Sergeant," said Belacqua, in a murmur pitched to melt the hardest heart, "that you can see your way to overlooking my misdemeanour. "
Justice and mercy had doubtless joined their ancient issue in the conscience of the Guard, for he said nothing. Belacqua tendered his right hand, innocent of any more mercantile commodity than that "gentle peace" recom- mended by the immortal Shakespeare, having first wiped it clean on his sleeve. This member the Dogberry, after a brief converse with his incorruptible heart, was kind enough to invest with the office of a cuspidor. Belacqua strangled a shrug and moved away in a tentative manner.
"Hold on there" said the Guard.
Belacqua halted, but in a very irritating way, as though he had just remembered something. The Guard, who had much more of the lion than of the fox, kept him standing until inside his helmet the throbbing of his Leix and Offaly head became more than he could endure. He then decided to conclude his handling of this small affair of public order.
"Move on" he said.
Belacqua walked away, holding tightly on to the swabs, which he rightly interpreted as litter. Once safely round the corner of Kildare Street he let them fall. Then, after a few paces forward, he halted, turned, hastened back to where they were fidgeting on the pavement and threw them into an area. Now he felt extraordinarily light and limber and haeres caeli. He followed briskly through the mizzle the way he had chosen, exalted, fashioning in- tricate festoons of words. It occurred to him, and he took great pleasure in working out this little figure, that the locus of his fall from the vague grace of the drink had intersected with that of his rise thereunto at its most agreeable point. That was beyond a doubt what had hap-
pened. Sometimes the drink-line looped the loop like an eight and if you had got what you were looking for on the way up you got it again on the way down. The bum- less eight of the drink-figure. You did not end up where you started, but coming down you met yourself going up. Sometimes, as now, you were glad; more times you were sorry and hastened on to your new home.
Suddenly walking through the rain was not enough, stepping out smartly, buttoned up to the chin, in the cold and the wet, was an inadequate thing to be doing. He stopped on the crown of Baggot Street bridge, took off his reefer, laid it on the parapet and sat down beside it. The Guard was forgotten. Stooping forward then where he sat and flexing his leg until the knee was against his ear and the heel caught on the parapet (admirable pos- ture) he took off his boot and laid it beside the reefer. Then he let down that leg and did the same with the other. Next, resolved to get full value from the bitter nor'-wester that was blowing, he slewed himself right round. His feet dangled over the canal and he saw, lurching across the remote hump of Leeson Street bridge, trams like hiccups-o'-the-wisp. Distant lights on a dirty night, how he loved them, the dirty low-church Protes- tant! He felt very chilly. He took off his jacket and belt and laid them with the other garments on the parapet. He unbuttoned the top of his filthy old trousers and coaxed out his German shirt. He bundled the skirt of the shirt under the fringe of his pullover and rolled them up clock- wise together until they were hooped fast across his thorax. The rain beat against his chest and belly and trickled down. It was even more agreeable than he had anticipated, but very cold. It was now, beating his bosom thus bared to the mean storm vaguely with marble palms, that he took leave of himself and felt wretched and sorry
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for what he had done. He had done wrong, he realised that, and he was heartily sorry. He sat on, drumming his stockinged heels sadly against the stone, wondering whence on earth could comfort spring, when suddenly the thought of the bottle he had bought pierced his gloomy condition like a beacon. It was there at hand in his pocket, a breast of Bisquit in the pocket of his reefer. He dried himself as best he might with his cambric pochette and adjusted his clothes. When everything was back in place, the reefer buttoned up as before, the boots laced and not a hole skipped, then, but not a moment before, he per- mitted himself to drink the bottle at a single gulp. The effect of this was to send what is called a glow of warmth what is called coursing through his veins. He squelched off down the street at a trot, resolved to make it, in so far as he had the power to do so, a non-stop run to Casa Frica. Jogging along with his elbows well up he prayed that his appearance might not provoke too much com- ment.
His mind, in the ups and downs of the past hour, had not had leisure to dwell upon the sufferings in store for it. Even the Alba's scarlet gown—for the qualified assur- ance of the Venerilla, that it buttoned up with the help of God, had not been of a nature to purge it altogether of misgiving—had ceased to be a burden. But now, when the Frica came pattering out of the mauve salon to intercept him in the vestibule and with her presence shocked him into something worse than sobriety, the full seriousness of his position came to him with the force of an abstract calamity.
"There you are" she whinnied "at long last. "
"Here" he said rudely "I float. "
She recoiled with bursting eyes and clapped a hand to
her teeth. Was it possible that he had been courting damp
death and damnation or something of the kind? The wet dripped off him as he stood aghast before her and gath- ered in a little pool at his feet. How dilated her nostrils were!
"You must get out of those wet things" said the Frica, she must hurry now and put the lens in the keyhole, "this very moment. But the dear boy is drenched to the . . . skin! " There was no nonsense about the Frica. When she meant skin she said skin. "Every stitch" she gloated "must come off at once, this very instant. "
From the taut cock of the face viewed as a whole, and in particular from the horripilating detail of the upper-lip writhing up and away in a kind of a duck or a cobra sneer to the quivering snout, he derived the impression that something had inflamed her. And right enoifgh a condition of the highest mettle and fettle had followed hard upon her asinine dumfusion. For here indeejlawas an unex- pected little bit of excitement! In a moment she would break into a caper. Belacqua thought it might be as well to take this disposition in time.
"No" he said composedly, "if I might have a towel
. "
"A towel! " The scoff was so shocked that she was obliged to blow her nose better late than never.
"It would take off the rough wet" he said.
The rough wet! But how too utterly absurd to speak of the rough wet when it was clear to be seen that he was soaked through and through.
"To the skin! " she cried.
"No" he said, "if I might just have a towel
Caleken, though deeply chagrined as may well be im-
agined, knew her man well enough to realise that his determination to accept no more final comfort at her hands than the loan of a towel was unalterable. Also in the salon her absence was beginning to make itself heard, the
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. .
. "
. .
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mice were beginning to enjoy themselves. So off she pat- tered with a sour look—goose, thought Belacqua, flying barefoot from McCabe—and was back in no time with a hairy towel of great size and a hand-towel.
"You'll get your death" she said, with the adenoidal as- perity that he knew so well, and left him. Rejoining her guests she felt that all this had happened to her before, by hearsay or in a dream.
Chas, conversing in low tones with the Shawly, was waiting in some trepidation to be called on for his con- tribution. This was the famous occasion when Chas, as though he had taken leave of his senses or begun to be irked by his brand new toga virilis, concluded an unex- ceptionable recitation with the quatrain:
Toutes etes, serez ou futes, De fait ou de volonte, putes, Et qui bien vous chercheroit Toutes putes vous trouveroit.
The Alba, whom in order to rescue Belacqua we were obliged to abandon just as with characteristic impetuosity she swallowed the pill, opened her campaign by sending Mr Higgins and the P. B. flying, there is no other word for it, about their business. Upon which, not deigning to have any share in the sinister kiss-me-Charley hugger-mugger that had spread like wildfire throughout the building, till it raged from attic to basement, under the aegis of the rising strumpet and the casual cicisbeo, she proceeded in her own quiet and inimitable style to captivate all those who had curbed their instinct to join in the vile necking expressly in order to see what they could make of this pale little person so self-possessed and urbane in the best sense in the scarlet costume. So that, from the point of
view of her Maker and in the absence of Belacqua, she was quite a power for good that evening in Casa Frica.
It had not occurred to her, fond as she was of that shabby hero in her own rather stealthy and sinuous fashion, to miss him or think of him at all unless possibly as a rather acute spectator whose eyes behind his glasses upon her and vernier of appraisement going like mad might have slightly spiced her fun. Among the many whom the implacable Frica had hounded from the joys of sense she had marked down for her own one of the grave Jews, him with the bile-tinged conjunctivae, and the merchant prince. She addressed herself to the Jew, but too slackly, as to an insipid dish, and was repulsed. Scarcely had she reloaded and trained her charms more nicely upon this interesting miscreant, of whom she pro- posed, her mind full of hands rubbing, to make a most salutary example, than the Frica, still smarting under her frustration, announced in a venomous tone of voice that Monsieur Jean du Chas, too well known to the Dublin that mattered for the most talentuous nonesuch that he was to require any introduction, had kindly consented to set the ball a-rolling. Notwithstanding the satisfaction that would have accrued to the Alba had Chas died the death without further delay, she made no attempt to restrain her merriment, in which of course she was uproariously seconded by the P. B. , when he came out with the iniq- uitous apothegm quoted above, and the less so as she observed how bitter-sweetly the paleographer and Para- bimbi, who had been surprised by the Frica being slightly naughty together, dissociated themselves from the ap- plause that greeted his descent from the estrade.
This, roughly speaking, was the position when Belacqua framed himself in the doorway.
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Surveying him as he stood bedraggled under the lintel, clutching his enormous glasses (a precautionary measure that he never neglected when there was the least danger of his appearing embarrassed, appearing in italics because he was always embarrassed), bothered seriously in his mind by a neat little point that had arisen out of nowhere in the vestibule, waiting no doubt for some kind friend to lead him to a seat, the Alba thought she had never seen anybody, man or woman, look quite such a sovereign booby. Seeking to be God, she thought, in the slavish arrogance of a piffling evil.
"Like something" she said to her neighbour the P. B. "that a dog would bring in. "
The P. B. played up, he overbade.
"Like something" he said "that, on reflection, he would not. "
He cackled and snuffled over his sottish mot as though it were his own.
In an unsubduable movement of misericord the Alba started out of her chair.
"Nino" she called, without shame or ceremony.
The distant call came to Belacqua like a pint of Perrier to drink in a dungeon. He stumbled towards it.
"Move up in the bed" she ordered the P. B. "and make room. "
Everybody in the row had to move up one. Like the totem chorus, thought the Alba with complacency, in Rose Marie. Belacqua came down on the end seat thus freed like a sack of potatoes. Observe, now at last they are juxtaposed. His next difficulty was how to get her on his other side, for he could not bear on any account to be on a person's right hand, without finding himself stuck up against the P. B. as a result. Though it scarcely required an expert statistician to realise that the desired order
could only be established by his changing places with the P. B. , leaving the Alba where she was, yet he wasted much valuable time, in a fever of notes of exclamation, failing to understand that of the six ways in which they could arrange themselves only one satisfied his conditions. He sat not looking, his head sunk, plucking vaguely at his filthy old trousers. When she placed her hand on his sleeve he roused himself and looked at her. To her disgust he was shedding tears.
"At it again" she said.
The Parabimbi could bear it no longer. Clutching and clawing and craning her neck all over the suffocating paleographer she demanded in a general way:
"What's that? Who's that? Is that promessi? "
"I was amazed" said a voice, "truly amazed, to find Sheffield more hilly than Rome/'
Belacqua made a stupendous effort to acknowledge the cordial greeting of the P.
"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. Wat a night, Madame" he addressed him- self vehemently, out of sheer politeness, directly to his hostess, "God wat a night! "
The crone was as fond of the P. B. as though she had bought him in Clery's toy fair.
"And you so far to come! " She wished she could dandle him on her knee. He was a shabby man and often moody. "Too good of you to come" she hushabied, "too good of you. "
The Man of Law, his face a blaze of acne, was next, es- corting the Parabimbi and three tarts dressed for the backstairs.
"I met him" whispered Chas "zigzagging down Pearse
"did you use sense when you said ? "
. . .
. .
. " he began again, when a nameless ignora-
. " . .
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Street, Brunswick Street, you know, that was. "
"En route? " ventured Caleken. She was a bit above her-
self with all the excitement. "Hem? "
"On his way here? "
"Well" said Chas, "I regret, my dear Miss Frica, that he did not make it absolutely clear if he comes or not. "
The Gael said to the P. B. in an injured voice:
"Here's a man wants to know what Owen. "
"Not possible" said the P. B. , "you astonish me. "
"Is it of the sweet mouth? " said a sandy son of Ham. Now the prong of the P. B. 's judgment was keen and
bright.
"That emmerdeur" he jeered, "the strange sweet mouth! "
The Parabimbi jumped.
"You said? " she said.
Caleken emerged from the ruck, she came to the fore. "What can be keeping the girls" she said. It was not ex-
actly a question.
"And your sister" enquired the botanist, "Your charming
sister, where can she be this evening now I wonder. "
The Beldam sprang into the breach.
"Unfortunately" she said, in ringing tones and with great
precipitation, "in bed, unwell. A great disappointment to us all. "
"Nothing of moment, Madam" said the Man of Law "let us hope? "
"Thank you, no. Happily not. A slight indisposition. Poor little Dandelion! " The Beldam heaved a heavy sigh.
The P. B. exchanged a look of intelligence with the Gael. "What girls? " he said.
Caleken expanded her lungs:
"Pansy"—the Poet had a palpitation, why had he not
A WET NIGHT 65
—
brought his nux vomica? "Lilly Neary, Olga, Elliseva,
Bride Maria, Alga, Ariana, tall Tib, slender Sib, Alma —
Beatrix, Alba " They were really too numerous, she could not go through the entire list. She staunched her mouth.
"Alba! " ejaculated the P. B. , "Alba! She! "
"And why" interposed the Countess of Parabimbi "why not Alba, whoever she may be, rather than, say, the Wife of Bath? "
A nondescript appeared in their midst, he panted the glad tidings. The girls had arrived.
"They are gurrls" said the botanist "beyond question. But are they the gurrls? "
"Now I hope we can start" said the younger Frica, and, the elder being aware of no let or hindrance, up on to the estrade smartly she stepped and unveiled the refresh- ments. Turning her back on the high dumb-waiter, with a great winged gesture of lapidated piety, she instituted the following selection:
"Cup! Squash! Cocoa! Force! Julienne! Pan Kail! Cock- a-Leekie! Hulluah! Apfelmus! Isinglass! Ching-Ching! "
A terrible silence fell on the assembly.
"Great cry" said Chas "and little wool. "
The more famished faithful stormed the platform.
Two banned novelists, a bibliomaniac and his mistress,
a paleographer, a violist d'amore with his instrument in a bag, a popular parodist with his sister and six daughters, a still more popular Professor of Bullscrit and Compar- ative Ovoidology, the saprophile the better for drink, a communist painter and decorator fresh back from the Moscow reserves, a merchant prince, two grave Jews, a rising strumpet, three more poets with Lauras to match, a disaffected cicisbeo, a chorus of playwrights, the inevit-
"
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able envoy of the Fourth Estate, a phalanx of Grafton Street Sturmers and Jemmy Higgins arrived now in a body. No sooner had they been absorbed than the Para- bimbi, very much the lone bird on this occasion in the absence of her husband the Count who had been unable to escort her on account of his being buggered if he would, got in her attributions of the Frica for which, as has been shown, the Beldam was so profoundly beholden.
"Maaaacche! " said the Countess of Parabimbi, "I do but constate.
She held the saucer under her chin like a communion- card. She lowered the cup into its socket without a sound.
"Excellent" she said, "most excellent Force. "
The crone smiled from the teeth outward.
"So glad" she said, "so glad. "
The Professor of Bullscrit and Comparative Ovoidology
was nowhere to be seen. But that was not his vocation, he was not a little boy. His function was to be heard. He was widely and distinctly heard.
"When the immortal Byron" he bombled "was about to
say Ravenna? "
"Allow me" said the rising strumpet: "a sandwich: egg,
tomato, cucumber. "
"Did you know" blundered the Man of Law "that the
Swedes have no fewer than seventy varieties of Smoerr- broed? "
The voice of the arithmomaniac was heard:
"The arc" he said, stooping to all in the great plainness of his words, "is longer than its chord. "
"Madam knows Ravenna? " said the paleographer.
leave Ravenna, to sail in search of some distant shore . "
where a hero's death might end his immortal spleen "Ravenna! " exclaimed the Countess, memory tugging at her carefully cultivated heart-strings, "did I hear someone
. .
"Do I know Ravenna! " exclaimed the Parabimbi. "Sure I know Ravenna. A sweet and noble city. "
"You know of course" said the Man of Law "that Dante died there. "
"Right" said the Parabimbi, "so he did. "
"You know of course" said the Professor "that his tomb is in the Piazza Byron. I did his epitaph in the eye into blank heroics. "
"You knew of course" said the paleographer "that under
. "
Belisarius
"My dear" said the Parabimbi to the Beldam, "how well
it goes. What a happy party and how at home they all seem. I declare" she declared "I envy you your flair for making people feel at their ease. "
The Beldam disclaimed faintly any such faculty. It was Caleken's party reelly, it was Caleken who had arranged everything reelly. She personally had had very little to do with the arrangements. She just sat there and looked ex- hausted. She was just a weary old Norn.
"To my thinking" boomed the Professor, begging the question as usual, "the greatest triumph of the human mind was the calculation of Neptune from the observed vagaries of the orbit of Uranus. "
"And yours" said the P. B. That was an apple of gold and a picture of silver if you like.
The Parabimbi waxed stiff.
"What's that? " she cried, "what's that he says? "
A still more terrible silence fell on the assembly. The
saprophile had slapped the communist painter and dec- orator.
The Frica, supported by Mr Higgins, pounced on the disturbance.
"Go" she said to the saprophile "and let there be no scene. "
. .
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Mr Higgins, who kicked up his heels in the scrum for the Rangers, made short work of the nuisance. The Frica turned on the poor P. and D.
"It is not my intention" she said "to tolerate hooligans in this house. "
"He called me a bloody Bolshy" protested the glorious Komsomolet, "and he a labour man himself. "
"Let there be no more of it" said the Frica, "let there be no more of it. " She was very optative. "I beg of you. " She stepped back fleetly to the altar.
"You heard what she said" said the Gael.
"Let there be no more of it" said the native speaker.
"I beg of you" said the P. B.
But now she cometh that all this may disdain, Alba,
dauntless daughter of desires. Entering just on the turn of the hush, advancing like a midinette to pay her ironical respects to the Beldam, she fired the thorns under every pot. Turning her scarlet back on the crass crackling of the Parabimbi she mounted the estrade and there, silent and still before the elements of refreshment, in profile to the assistance, cast her gravitational nets.
The rising strumpet studied how to do it. The sister of the parodist passed on to such as were curious what little she and her dear nieces knew of the Alba who was much spoken of in certain virtuous circles to which they had access, though to be sure how much of what they heard was true and how much mere idle gossip they were really not in a position to determine. However, for what it was worth, it appeared . . .
The Gael, the native speaker, a space-writer and the violist d'amore got together as though by magic.
"Well" invited the space-writer. "Pret-ty good" said the Gael. "Ex-quisite" said the violist d'amore.
The native speaker said nothing.
"Well" insisted the space-writer, "Larry? "
Larry tore his eyes away from the estrade and said,
drawing his palms slowly up the flanks of his kilt: "Jaysus! "
"Meaning to say? " said the space-writer.
Larry turned his wild gaze back on the estrade.
"You don't happen to know" he said finally "does she? " "They all do" said the violist d'amore.
"Like hell they do" groaned the Gael, ricordandosi del
tempo felice.
"What I want to know" said the Student, "what we all
.
"
here is right, through bashfulness from venery. It is a pity, but there you are. "
Great wits will jump and Jemmy Higgins and the P. B. converged on the estrade.
"You look pale" said the Frica "and ill, my pet. "
The Alba raised her big head from the board, looked longly at the Frica, closed her eyes and intoned:
Woe and Pain, Pain and Woe,
Are my lot, night and noon . . . Caleken fell back.
"Keep them off" said the Alba.
"Keep them off! " echoed Caleken, "keep them off? " "We go through this world" observed the Alba "like
sunbeams through cracks in cucumbers. "
Caleken was not so sure about the sunbeams.
"Take a little cup" she urged, "it will do you good. Or
a Ching-Ching. "
"Keep them off" said the Alba, "off off off off. "
But the P. B. and Higgins were on the estrade, they
hemmed her in.
are most anxious to know
"Some do abstain" said the space-writer, "our friend
. .
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"So be it" said the Alba, "let it run over by all means. " Phew! The Frica was unspeakably relieved.
Half-past nine. The guests, led by the rising strumpet
and declining cicisbeo, began to scatter through the house. The Frica let them go. In due course she would visit the alcoves, she would round them up for the party proper to begin. Had not Chas promised a piece of old French? Had not the Poet written a poem specially? She had peeped into the bag in the hall and seen the viol d'amore. So they would have a little music.
Half-past nine. It was raining bitterly when Belacqua, keyed up to take his bearings, issued forth into the un- intelligible world of Lincoln Place. But he had bought a bottle, it was like a breast in the pocket of his reefer. He set off unsteadily by the Dental Hospital. As a child he had dreaded its facade, its sheets of blood-red glass. Now they were black, which was worse again, he having put aside a childish thing or two. Feeling suddenly white and clammy he leaned against the iron wicket set in the Col- lege wall and looked at Johnston, Mooney and O'Brien's clocks. Something to ten by the whirligig and he dis- inclined to stand, let alone walk. And the daggers of rain. He raised his hands and held them before his face, so close that even in the dark he could see the lines. They smelt bad. He carried them on to his forehead, the fingers sank in his wet hair, the heels crushed torrents of indigo out of his eyeballs, the rabbet of his nape took the cornice, it wrung the baby anthrax that he always wore just above his collar, he intensified the pressure and the pangs, they were a guarantee of identity.
The next thing was his hands dragged roughly down from his eyes, which he opened on the vast crimson face
of an ogre. For a moment it was still, plush gargoyle, then it moved, it was convulsed. This, he thought, is the face of some person talking. It was. It was that part of a Civic Guard pouring abuse upon him. Belacqua closed his eyes, there was no other way of ceasing to see it. Subduing a great desire to visit the pavement he catted, with unde- monstrative abundance, all over the boots and trouser- ends of the Guard, in return for which incontinence he received such a dunch on the breast that he fell hip and thigh into the outskirts of his own offal. He had no feeling of hurt either to his person or to his amour propre, only a very amiable weakness and an impatience to be on the move. It must have gone ten. He bore no animosity to- wards the Guard, although now he began to hear what he was saying. He knelt before him in the filth, he heard all the odious words he was saying in the recreation of his duty, and bore him not the slightest ill-will. He reached up for a purchase on his gleaming cape and hoisted himself to his feet. The apology he made when stable for what had occurred was profusely rejected. He furnished his name and address, whence he came and whither he went, and why, his occupation and immediate business, and why. It distressed him to learn that for two pins the Guard would frog-march him to the Station, but he appreciated the officer's dilemma.
"Wipe them boots" said the Guard.
Belacqua was only too happy, it was the least he could do. Contriving two loose swabs of the Twilight Herald he stooped and cleaned the boots and trouser-ends to the best of his ability. A magnificent and enormous pair of boots emerged. He rose, clutching the fouled swabs, and looked up timidly at the Guard, who seemed rather at a loss as how best to press home his advantage.
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"I trust, Sergeant," said Belacqua, in a murmur pitched to melt the hardest heart, "that you can see your way to overlooking my misdemeanour. "
Justice and mercy had doubtless joined their ancient issue in the conscience of the Guard, for he said nothing. Belacqua tendered his right hand, innocent of any more mercantile commodity than that "gentle peace" recom- mended by the immortal Shakespeare, having first wiped it clean on his sleeve. This member the Dogberry, after a brief converse with his incorruptible heart, was kind enough to invest with the office of a cuspidor. Belacqua strangled a shrug and moved away in a tentative manner.
"Hold on there" said the Guard.
Belacqua halted, but in a very irritating way, as though he had just remembered something. The Guard, who had much more of the lion than of the fox, kept him standing until inside his helmet the throbbing of his Leix and Offaly head became more than he could endure. He then decided to conclude his handling of this small affair of public order.
"Move on" he said.
Belacqua walked away, holding tightly on to the swabs, which he rightly interpreted as litter. Once safely round the corner of Kildare Street he let them fall. Then, after a few paces forward, he halted, turned, hastened back to where they were fidgeting on the pavement and threw them into an area. Now he felt extraordinarily light and limber and haeres caeli. He followed briskly through the mizzle the way he had chosen, exalted, fashioning in- tricate festoons of words. It occurred to him, and he took great pleasure in working out this little figure, that the locus of his fall from the vague grace of the drink had intersected with that of his rise thereunto at its most agreeable point. That was beyond a doubt what had hap-
pened. Sometimes the drink-line looped the loop like an eight and if you had got what you were looking for on the way up you got it again on the way down. The bum- less eight of the drink-figure. You did not end up where you started, but coming down you met yourself going up. Sometimes, as now, you were glad; more times you were sorry and hastened on to your new home.
Suddenly walking through the rain was not enough, stepping out smartly, buttoned up to the chin, in the cold and the wet, was an inadequate thing to be doing. He stopped on the crown of Baggot Street bridge, took off his reefer, laid it on the parapet and sat down beside it. The Guard was forgotten. Stooping forward then where he sat and flexing his leg until the knee was against his ear and the heel caught on the parapet (admirable pos- ture) he took off his boot and laid it beside the reefer. Then he let down that leg and did the same with the other. Next, resolved to get full value from the bitter nor'-wester that was blowing, he slewed himself right round. His feet dangled over the canal and he saw, lurching across the remote hump of Leeson Street bridge, trams like hiccups-o'-the-wisp. Distant lights on a dirty night, how he loved them, the dirty low-church Protes- tant! He felt very chilly. He took off his jacket and belt and laid them with the other garments on the parapet. He unbuttoned the top of his filthy old trousers and coaxed out his German shirt. He bundled the skirt of the shirt under the fringe of his pullover and rolled them up clock- wise together until they were hooped fast across his thorax. The rain beat against his chest and belly and trickled down. It was even more agreeable than he had anticipated, but very cold. It was now, beating his bosom thus bared to the mean storm vaguely with marble palms, that he took leave of himself and felt wretched and sorry
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for what he had done. He had done wrong, he realised that, and he was heartily sorry. He sat on, drumming his stockinged heels sadly against the stone, wondering whence on earth could comfort spring, when suddenly the thought of the bottle he had bought pierced his gloomy condition like a beacon. It was there at hand in his pocket, a breast of Bisquit in the pocket of his reefer. He dried himself as best he might with his cambric pochette and adjusted his clothes. When everything was back in place, the reefer buttoned up as before, the boots laced and not a hole skipped, then, but not a moment before, he per- mitted himself to drink the bottle at a single gulp. The effect of this was to send what is called a glow of warmth what is called coursing through his veins. He squelched off down the street at a trot, resolved to make it, in so far as he had the power to do so, a non-stop run to Casa Frica. Jogging along with his elbows well up he prayed that his appearance might not provoke too much com- ment.
His mind, in the ups and downs of the past hour, had not had leisure to dwell upon the sufferings in store for it. Even the Alba's scarlet gown—for the qualified assur- ance of the Venerilla, that it buttoned up with the help of God, had not been of a nature to purge it altogether of misgiving—had ceased to be a burden. But now, when the Frica came pattering out of the mauve salon to intercept him in the vestibule and with her presence shocked him into something worse than sobriety, the full seriousness of his position came to him with the force of an abstract calamity.
"There you are" she whinnied "at long last. "
"Here" he said rudely "I float. "
She recoiled with bursting eyes and clapped a hand to
her teeth. Was it possible that he had been courting damp
death and damnation or something of the kind? The wet dripped off him as he stood aghast before her and gath- ered in a little pool at his feet. How dilated her nostrils were!
"You must get out of those wet things" said the Frica, she must hurry now and put the lens in the keyhole, "this very moment. But the dear boy is drenched to the . . . skin! " There was no nonsense about the Frica. When she meant skin she said skin. "Every stitch" she gloated "must come off at once, this very instant. "
From the taut cock of the face viewed as a whole, and in particular from the horripilating detail of the upper-lip writhing up and away in a kind of a duck or a cobra sneer to the quivering snout, he derived the impression that something had inflamed her. And right enoifgh a condition of the highest mettle and fettle had followed hard upon her asinine dumfusion. For here indeejlawas an unex- pected little bit of excitement! In a moment she would break into a caper. Belacqua thought it might be as well to take this disposition in time.
"No" he said composedly, "if I might have a towel
. "
"A towel! " The scoff was so shocked that she was obliged to blow her nose better late than never.
"It would take off the rough wet" he said.
The rough wet! But how too utterly absurd to speak of the rough wet when it was clear to be seen that he was soaked through and through.
"To the skin! " she cried.
"No" he said, "if I might just have a towel
Caleken, though deeply chagrined as may well be im-
agined, knew her man well enough to realise that his determination to accept no more final comfort at her hands than the loan of a towel was unalterable. Also in the salon her absence was beginning to make itself heard, the
A WET NIGHT 75
. .
. "
. .
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mice were beginning to enjoy themselves. So off she pat- tered with a sour look—goose, thought Belacqua, flying barefoot from McCabe—and was back in no time with a hairy towel of great size and a hand-towel.
"You'll get your death" she said, with the adenoidal as- perity that he knew so well, and left him. Rejoining her guests she felt that all this had happened to her before, by hearsay or in a dream.
Chas, conversing in low tones with the Shawly, was waiting in some trepidation to be called on for his con- tribution. This was the famous occasion when Chas, as though he had taken leave of his senses or begun to be irked by his brand new toga virilis, concluded an unex- ceptionable recitation with the quatrain:
Toutes etes, serez ou futes, De fait ou de volonte, putes, Et qui bien vous chercheroit Toutes putes vous trouveroit.
The Alba, whom in order to rescue Belacqua we were obliged to abandon just as with characteristic impetuosity she swallowed the pill, opened her campaign by sending Mr Higgins and the P. B. flying, there is no other word for it, about their business. Upon which, not deigning to have any share in the sinister kiss-me-Charley hugger-mugger that had spread like wildfire throughout the building, till it raged from attic to basement, under the aegis of the rising strumpet and the casual cicisbeo, she proceeded in her own quiet and inimitable style to captivate all those who had curbed their instinct to join in the vile necking expressly in order to see what they could make of this pale little person so self-possessed and urbane in the best sense in the scarlet costume. So that, from the point of
view of her Maker and in the absence of Belacqua, she was quite a power for good that evening in Casa Frica.
It had not occurred to her, fond as she was of that shabby hero in her own rather stealthy and sinuous fashion, to miss him or think of him at all unless possibly as a rather acute spectator whose eyes behind his glasses upon her and vernier of appraisement going like mad might have slightly spiced her fun. Among the many whom the implacable Frica had hounded from the joys of sense she had marked down for her own one of the grave Jews, him with the bile-tinged conjunctivae, and the merchant prince. She addressed herself to the Jew, but too slackly, as to an insipid dish, and was repulsed. Scarcely had she reloaded and trained her charms more nicely upon this interesting miscreant, of whom she pro- posed, her mind full of hands rubbing, to make a most salutary example, than the Frica, still smarting under her frustration, announced in a venomous tone of voice that Monsieur Jean du Chas, too well known to the Dublin that mattered for the most talentuous nonesuch that he was to require any introduction, had kindly consented to set the ball a-rolling. Notwithstanding the satisfaction that would have accrued to the Alba had Chas died the death without further delay, she made no attempt to restrain her merriment, in which of course she was uproariously seconded by the P. B. , when he came out with the iniq- uitous apothegm quoted above, and the less so as she observed how bitter-sweetly the paleographer and Para- bimbi, who had been surprised by the Frica being slightly naughty together, dissociated themselves from the ap- plause that greeted his descent from the estrade.
This, roughly speaking, was the position when Belacqua framed himself in the doorway.
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Surveying him as he stood bedraggled under the lintel, clutching his enormous glasses (a precautionary measure that he never neglected when there was the least danger of his appearing embarrassed, appearing in italics because he was always embarrassed), bothered seriously in his mind by a neat little point that had arisen out of nowhere in the vestibule, waiting no doubt for some kind friend to lead him to a seat, the Alba thought she had never seen anybody, man or woman, look quite such a sovereign booby. Seeking to be God, she thought, in the slavish arrogance of a piffling evil.
"Like something" she said to her neighbour the P. B. "that a dog would bring in. "
The P. B. played up, he overbade.
"Like something" he said "that, on reflection, he would not. "
He cackled and snuffled over his sottish mot as though it were his own.
In an unsubduable movement of misericord the Alba started out of her chair.
"Nino" she called, without shame or ceremony.
The distant call came to Belacqua like a pint of Perrier to drink in a dungeon. He stumbled towards it.
"Move up in the bed" she ordered the P. B. "and make room. "
Everybody in the row had to move up one. Like the totem chorus, thought the Alba with complacency, in Rose Marie. Belacqua came down on the end seat thus freed like a sack of potatoes. Observe, now at last they are juxtaposed. His next difficulty was how to get her on his other side, for he could not bear on any account to be on a person's right hand, without finding himself stuck up against the P. B. as a result. Though it scarcely required an expert statistician to realise that the desired order
could only be established by his changing places with the P. B. , leaving the Alba where she was, yet he wasted much valuable time, in a fever of notes of exclamation, failing to understand that of the six ways in which they could arrange themselves only one satisfied his conditions. He sat not looking, his head sunk, plucking vaguely at his filthy old trousers. When she placed her hand on his sleeve he roused himself and looked at her. To her disgust he was shedding tears.
"At it again" she said.
The Parabimbi could bear it no longer. Clutching and clawing and craning her neck all over the suffocating paleographer she demanded in a general way:
"What's that? Who's that? Is that promessi? "
"I was amazed" said a voice, "truly amazed, to find Sheffield more hilly than Rome/'
Belacqua made a stupendous effort to acknowledge the cordial greeting of the P.
