No More Learning

The light began to die, there was no time to be lost.
"Will you be shot" said Belacqua "or poisoned? If the former, have you any preference? The heart? The temple? If the latter" passing over the bag, "help yourself. "
Ruby passed it back.
"Load" she ordained.
"Chevaliers d'industrie" said Belacqua, inserting the
ball, "nearly all blow their brains out. Kreuger proved the rule. "
"We don't exactly die together darling" drawled Ruby "or do we? "
"Alas" sighed Belacqua "what can you expect? But a
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couple of minutes" with a bounteous brandish of the revolver, "the time it takes to boil an egg, what is that to eternity? "
"Still" said Ruby "it would have been rather nice to pass out together. "
"The problem of precedence" said Belacqua, as from a rostrum, "always arises, even as between the Pope and Napoleon. "
* 'ThePopethepuke'"quotedRuby"Tiebleachedher soul
"But perhaps you don't know that story" said Belacqua, ignoring the irrelevance.
"I do not" said Ruby "and I have no wish to. "
"Well" said Belacqua "in that case I will merely say that they solved it in a strictly spatial manner. "
"Then why not we? " said Ruby.
The gas seems to be escaping somewhere.
"
"We" said Belacqua "like twins
"Are gone astray" sneered Ruby.
"Are slaves of the sand-glass. There is not room for us
to run out arm in arm. "
"As though there were only the one in the world" said
Ruby. "Pah! "
"We happen to pine in the same one" said Belacqua,
"that is the difficulty. "
"Well, it's a minor point" said Ruby "and by all means
ladies first. "
"Please yourself" said Belacqua, "I'm the better shot. " But Ruby, instead of expanding her bosom or holding
up her head to be blown off, helped herself to a drink. Belacqua fell into a passion.
"Damn it" he cried "didn't we settle all these things weeks ago? Did we or did we not? "
"A settlement was reached" said Ruby, "certainly. "
"Then why all this bloody talk? "
Ruby drank her drink.
"And leave us a drop in the bottle" he snarled, 'Til need
it when you're gone. "
That indescribable sensation, compound of exasperation
and relief, relaxing, the better to grieve, the coenaesthesis of the consultant when he finds the surgeon out, now burst inside Belacqua. He felt suddenly hot within. The bitch was backing out.
Though whiskey as a rule helped Ruby to feel starry, yet somehow on this occasion it failed to effect her in that way, which is scarcely surprising if we reflect what a very special occasion it was. Now to her amazement the re- volver went off, harmlessly luckily, and the bullet fell in terram nobody knows where. But for fully a minute she thought she was shot. An appalling silence, in the core of which their eyes met, succeeded the detonation.
"The finger of God" whispered Belacqua.
Who shall judge of his conduct at this crux? Is it to be condemned as wholly despicable? Is it not possible that he was gallantly trying to spare the young woman embarass- ment? Was it tact or concupiscence or the white feather or an accident or what? We state the facts. We do not presume to determine their significance.
"Digitus Dei" he said "for once. "
That remark rather gives him away, does it not?
When the first shock of surprise had passed and the
silence spent its fury a great turmoil of life-blood sprang up in the breasts of our two young felons, so that they came together in inevitable nuptial. With the utmost rev- erence at our command, moving away on tiptoe from where they lie in the ling, we mention this in a low voice.
It will quite possibly be his boast in years to come, when Ruby is dead and he an old optimist, that at least
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on this occasion, if never before nor since, he achieved what he set out to do; car, in the words of one competent tosingofthematter,VAmouretlaMort—caesura nest quune mesme chose.
May their night be full of music at all events.
Walking Out
vJne fateful fine Spring evening he paused, not so much in order to rest as to have the scene soak through him, out in the middle of the late Boss Croker's Gallops, where no horses were to be seen any more. Pretty Polly that great-hearted mare was buried in the vicinity. To stroll over this expanse in fine weather, these acres of bright green grass, was almost as good as to cross the race-course of Chantilly with one's face towards the Castle. Leaning now on his stick, between Leopardstown down the hill to the north and the heights of Two Rock and Three Rock to the south, Belacqua regretted the horses of the good old days, for they would have given to the landscape some- thing that the legions of sheep and lambs could not give. These latter were springing into the world every minute, the grass was spangled with scarlet afterbirths, the larks were singing, the hedges were breaking, the sun was shin- ing, the sky was Mary's cloak, the daisies were there, everything was in order. Only the cuckoo was wanting. It was one of those Spring evenings when it is a matter of some difficulty to keep God out of one's meditations.
Belacqua leaned all his spare weight on the stick and took in the scene, in a sightless passionate kind of way, and his Kerry Blue bitch sat on the emerald floor beside him. She was getting old now, she could not be bothered hunting any more. She could tree a cat, that was no
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bother, but beyond that she did not care to go. So she just remained seated, knowing perfectly well that there were no cats in Croker's Gallops, and did not care very much what happened. The bleating of the lambs excited her slightly.
My God, it occurred to Belacqua, I must be past my best when I find myself preferring this time of year to the late Autumn.
This vivid thought, quite irrefutable as he recognised at once, did not so distress him that he was unable to move on. Past the worst of his best, there was nothing so very terrible in that, on the contrary. Soon he might hope to be creeping about in a rock-garden with tears in his eyes. Indeed proof, if proof he needed, that he was rather elated than distressed, appears in his taking his weight off the stick and moving forward; for the effect of a real derelic- tion was always to cast him up high and dry and unable to stir. The bitch walked behind. She was hot and bored.
Slowly he raised his eyes till they were levelled at his destination. Tom Wood, it graced like a comb a low hill in the distance. There he had assignation, but only in the sense that an angler has with the fish in a river. He had been there so often that he knew all its ins and outs, yet he could not have given a name to its timber. Oak, he supposed vaguely, or elm, but even had he looked he would not have been any wiser. This country lad, he could not tell an oak from an elm. Larches however he knew, from having climbed them as a little fat boy, and a young plantation of these, of a very poignant reseda, caught his eye now on the hillside. Poignant and assuasive at once, the effect it had upon him as he advanced was prodigious.
He thought if only his wife would consent to take a cicisbeo how pleasant everything would be all round. She knew how he loved her and yet she would not hear of his
getting her a cicisbeo. He was merely betrothed, but al- ready he thought of his fiancee as his wife, an anticipation that young men undertaking this change of condition might be well advised to imitate. Time and again he had urged her to establish their married life on this solid basis of a cuckoldry. She understood and appreciated his senti- ment, she acknowledged that his argument was sound, and yet she would not or could not bring herself to act accordingly. He was not a bad-looking young fellow, a kind of cretinous Tom Jones. She would kill his affection with her nonsense before the wedding bells, that would be the end of it.
Turning this and cognate anxieties over and over in his mind he came at length to the southern limit of the Gal- lops and the by-road that he had to cross to get into the next list of fields. Thus, large tracts of champaign, hedges and ditches and blessed grass and daisies, then the deep weal of road, again and again, until he would come to the wood. The wall was too high for the bitch at her time of life, so he helped her across with a vigorous heave on the grey hunkers. This gave him pleasure if he had stopped to analyse it. But himself, he made short work of the obstacle, thinking: what a splendid thing it is when all is said and done to be young and vigorous.
In the ditch on the far side of the road a strange equi- page was installed: an old high-wheeled cart, hung with rags. Belacqua looked round for something in the nature of a team, the crazy yoke could scarcely have fallen from the sky, but nothing in the least resembling a draught- beast was to be seen, not even a cow. Squatting under the cart a complete down-and-out was very busy with some- thing or other. The sun beamed down on this as though it were a new-born lamb. Belacqua took in the whole outfit at a glance and felt, the wretched bourgeois, a paroxysm
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of shame for his capon belly. The bitch, in a very remote manner, stepped up to the cart and sniffed at the rags.
"Cmowathat! " vociferated the vagabond.
Now Belacqua could see what he was doing. He was mending a pot or a pan. He beat his tool against the vessel in his anxiety. But the bitch made herself at home.
"Wettin me throusers" said the vagabond mildly "wuss . "
'n meself
So that was his trousers!
This privacy which he had always assumed to be in-
alienable, this ultimate prerogative of the Christian man, had now been violated by somebody's pet. Yet he might have been calling a score, his voice was so devoid of ran- cour. But Belacqua was embarrassed in the last degree.
"Good evening" he piped in fear and trembling, "lovely evening. "
A smile proof against all adversity transformed the sad face of the man under the cart. He was most handsome with his thick, if unkempt, black hair and moustache.
"Game ball" he said.
After that further comment was impossible. The ques- tion of apology or compensation simply did not arise. The instinctive nobility of this splendid creature for whom pri- vate life, his joys and chagrins at evening under the cart, was not acquired, as Belacqua one day if he were lucky might acquire his, but antecedent, disarmed all the pot- hooks and hangers of civility. Belacqua made an inarticu- late flourish with his stick and passed down the road out of the life of this tinker, this real man at last.
But he had not gone far, he had not yet turned aside into the next zone of field, before he heard cries behind him and the taratantara of hooves. This was none other than his dearest Lucy, his betrothed, astride her magnifi- cent jennet. Reining in she splashed past him in a positive
tornado of caracoling. When her mount had calmed down and her own panting somewhat abated she explained to the astonished and, be it said, somewhat vexed Belacqua how she came to be there.
"Oh, I called round and they told me you were gone out. "
Belacqua caressed the soft jowl of the jennet. Poor beast, it had been ridden into a lather. It looked at him with a very white eye. It would tolerate his familiarities since of such was its servitude, but it hoped, before it died, to bite a man.
"So I didn't know what to do, so what do you think? "
Belacqua could not imagine. There seemed to be noth- ing to do under the circumstances but make the best of it.
"I got up on the roof and did the Sister Ann. "
"No! " exclaimed Belacqua. This was pleasant.
"Yes, and I found you in the end, all alone in the
Gallops. "
This was charming. Belacqua came over to her leg. "Darling! " she ejaculated.
"Well" he said "well well well. "
"So I skited round by the road" she was overcome by
the success of her little manoeuvre "and here I am. "
She had rounded him up, she had cut him off, it was nearly as good as catching an ocean greyhound on the
pictures. He kissed her flexed knee. "Brava! "
To think that somebody needed him in this way! He could not but be touched.
In face and figure Lucy was entrancing, her entire person was quite perfect. For example, she was as dark as jet and of a paleness that never altered, and her thick short hair went back like a pennon from her fanlight fore- head. But it would be waste of time to itemise her. Truly
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there was no fault or flaw in the young woman. Yet we feel we must say before we let her be, her poor body that must wither, that her nether limbs, from where they began even unto where they ended, would have done credit to a Signorelli page. Let us put it this way, that through her riding-breeches they came through. What more can be said for a woman's legs, thighs included? Or is all this merely ridiculous?
Belacqua wondered, when the first rapture at having been spied from afar had worn off, what the hell she wanted. But it appeared that she did not want anything in particular, she just wanted to be with him. This was a false- hood of course, she did want something in particular. However.
"Listen my dear Lucy" he said with a kind of final fran- chise "I know you won't mind if I can't spend this evening with my"—it took him some time to find a term of endear-
—
ment to cover the facts "my Fiinklein. "
But she pulled a very bitter face. The lizard of hers, he seemed to be making a habit of giving her the go-by, very soon if he did not watch out she would have no use for him.
"I have the chinks" he complained and apologised. "God help me, I'm no fit company for anyone let alone lovely Lucy. "
Indeed she was better than lovely, with its suggestion of the Nobel Yeats, with her jet of hair and her pale set face, the whipcord knee and the hard bust sweating a little inside the black jersey.
Now it is her turn to go on.
Does he really imagine, she wondered, that it is his company I want, which seems to me at this stage about as futile an article as a pen-wiper. Let the ink clot on the nib, let the wine, to put it another way, scour the lees.
He spoke, as she knew he was bound to, if only she held her pose long enough.
"I went out to walk it off. "
"Walk what off? " cried Lucy. She was sick and tired of his moods.
"Oh I don't know" he said, "our old friend, the devil's bath. "
He drew designs with his devil's finger on the jennet's coat, wondering how to put it.
"Then I thought" he said at last "that the best thing to do was to go to the wood for a little sursum corda. "
This was another falsehood, because the wood had been* in his thoughts all day. He told it with a kind of miserable conviction.
"Corda is good" said Lucy.
As she uttered these words with one of her smart smiles the truth, or something that seemed very like it, struck her with such violence that she nearly fell out of the saddle. But she recovered herself and Belacqua, back at the bridle courting disaster, saw nothing.
"I know" he said sadly "you don't believe in these private experiences, women don't I know as a rule. And if
"
you distrust them now
He stopped, and it was obvious, even to the jennet, that
he had gone too far.
What was the bitch doing all this time? She was sitting
in the ditch, listening.
The sun seemed to be sinking in the south, for the
group was now wholly in the shadow of the high hedge on Lucy's left, though to be sure on her right the Gallops were still shining. Though the larks had gone to bed and the rooks were going there was no loss of pastoral clam- our, for the lambs cried more loudly as the light fell and dogs began to bark in the distance. The cuckoo however
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was still in abeyance. Belacqua stepped back into the ditch and stood irresolute beside his pet, the jennet drooped its head and closed its eyes, Lucy sat very still on its back staring straight before her, they all seemed to be listening, the woman, the bitch, the jennet and the man. The vagabond could see them between adjoining spokes of his wheel, by moving his head into the right position he was far enough away to frame the whole group in a sector of his wheel.
Lucy, resolved to put her terrible surmise to the proof, had very soon shamed her lover into making terms, for of course he was as wax in her hands1 when it came to a course of action. It was arranged that they should meet at the gate that led off the lane into the wood, he going his way across country direct and she, because it was out of the question to negotiate walls and dikes with the jennet, her devious one by road. What adverse fate forbad them at this point to fund their ways? The group broke up and soon the vagabond, peering out through his sector, saw only the grey of the road with its green hem.
Lucy jogged along briskly. We may mention that the effect of this motion was usually to exhilarate her, but it did not do so now, so stunned was she by the sudden vi- sion of Belacqua that damned him, were it true, as her mate, her partner in life's journey. If what she dreaded were true her heart was broken, to say nothing of her en- gagement. But could it?
This young man of good family, so honourable to her certain knowledge in all his dealings, so spiritual, a Varsity man too, could he be such a creepy- crawly? It seemed inconceivable that she should have been so blinded to his real nature as to let her love, born in a spasm more than a year ago in the Portrush Palais de
1 Cp. Fingal.
Danse, increase steadily from day to day till now it amounted to something like a morbid passion. Yet at the same time she was forced to admit how perfectly the hor- rible diagnosis which had just been revealed to her fitted in with certain aspects of his behaviour that she had never been able to fathom: all his baby talk, for example, of her living with him like a music while being the wife in body of another; all his fugues into "sursum corda" and "private experience," from the inception of their romance, when he used to leave her in the evening and prowl among the sandhills, until now, the very eve of their nuptials, a time that she would always think of, whatever its upshot, as throttled in a pinetum.
There even now a pretty little German girl subsided, with a "wie heimlich! " on the bed of needles alongside her Harold's Cross Tanzherr.
The way screwed uphill between hedges of red may. Lucy, anxious to be the first to arrive, kept the jennet at the trot, digging in her knees and timing the rise and fall of the difficult motion to a nicety. Yet her engrossment was so profound that she might have had privet on either hand for all she knew or cared, so that the blossom, fading now in a most beautiful effect as the shadows lengthened, was quite lost on the unhappy horsewoman. She saw noth- ing of the wood, the root of all the mischief, that loomed directly at some little distance before her, its outposts of timber serried enough to make a palisade, but not so closely as to screen the secret things beyond them. She was spared the high plume of smoke waxing and waning, like a Lied, fume of signs, against the dark green of the pines.
Belacqua saw these things, the trees, the plume of smoke, the may, dead lambs also lying in the hedgetops, all the emblems of the spring of the year. He would. And
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Lucy, groping in a sudden chaos of mind, saw nothing. Poor little Lucy! The more she struggled to eject the idea that possessed her ever since those careless words: "Corda is good," the more it seemed to prevail to the exclusion of all others. The derogation of her gentle Belacqua from one whom she had loved in all the shadows and tangles of his conduct to a trite spy of the vilest description was not to be set aside by a girl of her mettle merely on account of its being a great shock to her sentimental system. The two Belacquas, the old and dear enigma and now this patent cad, played cruel battledore with her mind. But she would decide between them before she slept, how she did not know, she had laid no plan, but somehow she would do it. Whatever loathing the truth might beget within her, was it not better to be sure than sorry?
Now it was definitely dusk.
A superb silent limousine, a Daimler no doubt, driven by a drunken lord, swept without warning round a bend in the narrow round and struck the jennet a fearful blow in the sternum. Lucy came a sickening cropper backwards down the rampant hind-quarters, the base of her spine, then of her skull, hit the ground a double welt, the jennet fell on top of her, the wheels of the car jolted over what was left of the jennet, who expired there and then in the twilight, sans jeter un cri. Lucy however was not so for- tunate, being crippled for life and her beauty dreadfully marred.
Now it is Belacqua's turn to carry on.
He arrived in due course at the rendezvous, expecting to find Lucy there before him, for he had loitered on the way to marvel at the evening effects. He climbed the gate and sat down on the grass to await her arrival, but of course she did not turn up.
"Damn it" he said at last to the bitch "does she expect me to wait here all night? "
He gave her five more minutes, then he rose and walked up the hill till he came to the skirts of the wood. There he turned and combed the darkling landscape with his weak eye. Just as she but a short time back had stood on the housetop and looked for him eagerly and found him, so he did now standing on the hilltop in respect of her, with this difference however, that his eagerness was so slight that he was rather relieved than otherwise when he could see no sign of her. Gradually indeed he ceased to look for her and looked at the scene instead.
It was at this moment that he heard with a pang, rat- tling away in the distance, crex-crex, crex-crex, crex-crex, the first corncrake of the season. With a pang, because he had not yet heard the cuckoo. He could not help feeling that there must be something wrong somewhere when a man who had been listening day after day for the cuckoo suddenly heard the corncrake instead. The velvet third of the former bird, with its promise of happiness, was de- niged him, and the death-rattle of one that he had never seen proposed in its place. It was a good thing for Belac- qua that he set no store by omens. He tethered the bitch to a tree, switched on his pineal eye and entered the wood.
With all the delays that he had been put to on Lucy's account he was long past his usual time and it was very dark in the wood. He drew blank in all the usual coverts and was just about to give it up as a bad job and wend his way home when he suddenly spied a flutter and a gleam of white in a hollow. This was Fraulein and friend. Belacqua came up on them cautiously from behind and watched for a short time. But for once, whatever was the matter with him, he seemed to find but little zest in the performance,
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so little indeed that he surprised himself not looking at all but staring vacantly into the shadows, alive to nothing but the weight and darkness and silence of the wood bear- ing down on top of him. It was all very submarine and op- pressive.
He roused himself finally and moved away on tiptoe over the moss that would not betray him. He would go home and sit with Lucy and play the gramophone and see how he felt then. But he stumbled against a rotten bough growing close to the ground, it snapped off with a loud re- port and he fell forward on his face. Then almost before he knew what had happened, he was running in and out through the trees with the infuriated Tanzherr pounding along behind in hot pursuit.
Any advantage that familiarity with the ground may have conferred on Belacqua was liberally outweighed by the condition of his feet that were so raw with one thing and another that even to walk was painful, while to run was torture. As he neared the point where he had tethered the bitch and entered the wood he realised that he was being overhauled fast and that there was nothing for it but to turn and give battle. Shortening his grasp of the stick and slackening his pace as he ran clear of the trees he stopped abruptly, turned and with both hands thrust the sharp ferrule at the hypogastrium of his pursuer. This blow, however well conceived, was prematurely delivered. The Tanzherr saw it on its way, jazzed neatly out of the line, skidded round, lowered his head, charged, crashed into his quarry and bore him to the ground.
Now a fierce struggle ensued. Belacqua, fighting like a woman, kicking, clawing, tearing and biting, put up a gal- lant resistance. But his strength was as little as his speed and he was soon obliged to cry mercy. Whereupon the victor, holding him cruelly by the nape face downward,
administered a brutal verberation with the stick. The bitch, to do her justice, strained at her tether. The Frau- lein, wraith-like in the gloom in her flimsy white frock, came to the edge of the wood and watched, rapt, clutch- ing her bosom, valour towards men being an emblem of ability towards women.
Belacqua's screams grew fainter and fainter and at length the Tanzherr, his fury appeased, desisted, launched a parting kick and swaggered off with his girly under his brawny arm.
How long he lay there, half insensible, he never knew. It was black night when he crept painfully to the bitch and released her. Nor has he ever been able to understand how he reached home, crawling rather than climbing over the various hedges and ditches, leaving the bitch to fol- low as best she could. So much for his youth and vigour.
But tempus edax, for now he is happily married to Lucy and the question of cicisbei does not arise. They sit up to all hours playing the gramophone, An die Musik is a great favourite with them both, he finds in her big eyes better worlds than this, they never allude to the old days when she had hopes of a place in the sun.
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What a Misfortune
JDelacqua was so happy married to the crippled Lucy that he tended to be sorry for himself when she died, which she did on the eve of the second anniversary of her
1
terrible accident, after two years of great physical suffer-
ing borne with such fortitude as only women seem able to command, having passed from the cruellest extremes of hope and despair that ever sundered human heart to their merciful resolution, some months before her decease, in a tranquillity of acquiescence that was the admiration of her friends and no small comfort to Belacqua himself.
Her death came therefore as a timely release and the widower, to the unutterable disgust of the deceased's ac- quaintance, wore none of the proper appearances of grief. He could produce no tears on his own account, having as a young man exhausted that source of solace through over- indulgence; nor was he sensible of the least need or incli- nation to do so on hers, his small stock of pity being de- voted entirely to the living, by which is not meant this or that particular unfortunate, but the nameless multitude of the current quick, life, we dare almost say, in the abstract. This impersonal pity was damned in many quarters as an intolerable supererogation and in some few as a positive sin against God and Society. But Belacqua could not help
i Cp. Walking Out. 114
WHAT A MISFORTUNE 115
it, for he was alive to no other kind than this: final, uni- form and continuous, unaffected by circumstance, as- signed without discrimination to all the undead, without works. The public, taking cognisance of it only as callous- ness in respect of this or that wretched individual, had no use for it; but its private advantages were obviously very great.
All the hags and faggots, male and female, that he had ever seen or heard of, inarticulate with the delicious mucus of sympathy, disposed in due course of that secre- tion, when its flavour had been quite exhausted, viva sputa and by letter post, through the emunctory of his bereave. - ment. He felt as though he had been sprayed from head to foot with human civet and would never again be clean or smell sweet, i. e. of himself, whose odours he snuffed up at all times with particular complacency. These however began to reassert themselves as time ran out and the spittle of the hags, while Lucy's grave subsided, grew green and even began to promise daisies, was introverted upon their own sores and those more recent of their nearest and dearest. Restored to these dearworthy effluvia, lapped in this pungent cocoon as the froghopper in its foam, Belac- qua would walk in his garden and play with the snap- dragons. To kneel before them in the dust and the clay of the ground and throttle them gently till their tongues pro- truded, at that indigo hour when the only barking ( to con- sider but a single pastoral motiv) to be heard was that which could be scarcely heard, released so far away under the mountains that it came as a pang of sound of just the right severity, was the recreation he found best suited to his melancholy at this season and most satisfying to that fairy tale need of his nature whose crises seemed to cor- respond with those of his precious ipsissimosity, if such a beautiful word may be said to exist. It pleased his fancy
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to think of himself as a kind of easy-going Saint George at the Court of Mildendo.
The snapdragons were beginning to die of their own accord and Belacqua to feel more and more the lack of those windows on to better worlds that Lucy's big black eyes had been, when he woke up one fine afternoon to find himself madly in love with a girl of substance—a divine frenzy, you understand, none of your lewd passions. This lady he served at his earliest convenience with a tender of his hand and fortune which, however inconsiderable, had a certain air of distinction, being unearned. First she said no, then oh no, then oh really, then but really, then, in ringing tones, yes sweetheart.
When we say a girl of substance we mean that her promissory wad, to judge by her father's bearing in gen- eral and in particular by his respiration after song, was, so to speak, short-dated. To deny that Belacqua was alive to this circumstance would be to present him as an' even greater imbecile than he was when it came to seeing the obvious; whereas to suggest that it was implied, however slightly, in his brusque obsession with the beneficiary to be, would constitute such obloquy as we do not much care to deal in. Let us therefore put forth a minimum of charity and observe in a casual way, with eyes cast down and head averted until the phase has ceased to vibrate, that he hap- pened to conceive one of his Olympian fancies for a fairly young person with expectations. We can't straddle the fence nicer than that.
Her name it was Thelma bboggs, younger daughter of Mr and Mrs Otto Olaf bboggs. She was not beautiful in the sense that Lucy was; nor could she be said to tran- scend beauty, as the Alba seemed to do; nor yet to have slammed her life and person in its face, as Ruby perhaps had. She brought neither the old men running nor the
WHAT A MISFORTUNE 117
young men to a standstill. To be quite plain she was and always had been so definitely not beautiful that once she was seen she was with difficulty forgotten, which is more than can be said for, say, the Venus Callipyge. Her trouble was to get herself seen in the first instance. But what she did have, as Belacqua never wearied of asserting to him- self, was a most cherharming personality, together with intense appeal, as he repudiated with no less insistence, from the strictly sexual standpoint.
Otto Olaf had made his money in toilet requisites and necessaries. His hobby, since retiring from active participa- tion in the affairs of the splendid firm that was his life-work, brain-child, labour of love and the rest, was choice furni- ture. He was said to have the finest and most comprehen- sive collection of choice furniture in North Great George's Street, from which lousy locality, notwithstanding the prayers of his wife and first-born for a home of their own very own in Foxrock, he refused coarsely to remove. The fondest memories of his boyhood, beguiled as a plumber's improver; the most copious sweats and triumphs of his prime, both in business and (with a surly look at Mrs bboggs) the office and affairs of love, from the vernal equinox, in his self-made sanitary phrase, to the summer solstice of his life; all the ups and downs of a strenuous career, instituted in the meanest household fixture and closing now in the glories of Hepplewhites and bombe commodes, were bound up in good old grand old North Great George's Street, in consideration of which he had pleasure in referring his wife and first-born to that portion of himself which he never desired any person to kick nor volunteered to kiss in another.
The one ground lay under Mr bboggs's contempt for Belacqua and Thelma's consent to be his bride: he was a poet. A poet is indeed a very nubile creature, dowered,
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don't you know, with the love of love, like La Roche- foucauld's woman from her second passion on. So nubile that the women, God bless them, cant resist them, God help them. Except of course those intended merely for breeding and innocent of soul, who prefer, as less likely to upset them, the more balanced and punctual raptures of a chartered accountant or a publisher's reader. Now Thelma, however much she left to be desired, was not a brood- maiden. She had at least the anagram of a good face, while as for soul, sparkling or still as preferred, it was her speciality. Which explains how Belacqua had merely to hold out against no and its derivatives to have her fly in the end, as a swallow to its eave or a long losing jenny down the whirlpool of a pocket, into his keycold embrace.
Mr bboggs, on the other hand, was of Coleridge's opin- ion that every literary man ought to have an illiterate pro- fession. Indeed he seemed to go a step further than Cole- ridge when he asserted, to the embarrassment of Mrs bboggs and Thelma, the satisfaction of his elder daughter Una, for whom an ape had already been set aside in hell, and the alarm of Belacqua, that when he looked round and saw what they called a poet allowing his bilge to interfere with his business he developed a Beltschmerz of such in- tensity that he was obliged to leave the room. The poet present, observing that Mr bboggs remained seated, plucked up courage to exclaim:
"Beltschmerz, Mr bboggs sir, did I hear you say? "
Mr bboggs threw back his head until it seemed as though his dewlap must burst and sang, in the slight sweet tenor that never failed to electrify those that heard it for the first time:
"He wore a belt Whenever he felt
"He took quinine
. "
"Otto" cried Mrs bboggs. "Enough. "
"As clear as a bell" said Belacqua "and I was never told. "
"Yes" said Mr bboggs, "a real quality voice. " He closed his eyes and was back in the bathrooms of his beginnings. "A trifle fine" he conceded.
"Fine how are you! " cried Belacqua. "A real three di- mensional organ, Mr bboggs sir, I give you my word and honour. "
Mrs bboggs had a lover in the Land Commission, so much so in fact that certain ill-intentioned ladies of her acquaintance lost no occasion to insist on the remarkable disparity, in respect not only of physique but of tempera- ment, between Mr bboggs and Thelma: he so sanguine, so bland and solid in every way, which properties, observe, were no less truly to be predicated of his Una; and she such a black wisp of a creature. A most extraordinary anomaly, to put it mildly, and one that could scarcely be ignored by any friend of the family.
The presumptive cuckoo, if not exactly one of those dap-
WHAT A MISFORTUNE 119
A pain in his tiddlypush,
A chemical vest
To cover his chest
When cannoning off the cush. "
Belacqua said in a grieved tone to Mrs bboggs, appre- ciation being most penetrating when oblique:
"I never knew Mr bboggs had such a voice. "
This endowment Mr bboggs, when the dewlap, like a bagful of ferrets, had settled down after a brief convul- sion, proceeded to demean further:
. .
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per little bureaucrats that give the impression of having come into the world dressed by Austin Reed, presented some of the better-known differentiae: the dimpled chin, the bright brown doggy eyes that were so appealing, the unrippled surface of vast white brow whose area was at least double that of the nether face, and anchored there for all eternity the sodden cowlick that looked as though it were secreting macassar to discharge into his eye. With his high heels he attained to five foot five, his nose was long and straight and his shoes a size and a half too large to bear it out. A plug of moustache cowered at his nostrils like a frightened animal before its lair, at the least sign of danger it would scurry up into an antrum. He expelled his words with gentle discrimination, as a pastry-cook squirts icing upon a cake. He had a dirty mind, great assurance and ability towards women, and a cap for every joke, ancient and modern. He drank just a little in public for the sake of sociability, but made up for it in private. His name was Walter Draffin.
The horns of Otto Olaf sat easily upon him. He knew all there was to be known about Walter Draffin and treated him with special consideration. Any man who saved him trouble, as Walter had for so many years, could rely on his esteem. Thus the treacherous bureaucrat was made free of the house in North Great George's Street where, as formerly he had abused that privilege in the bed of his host, so now he did out of his decanter. Indeed he was subject to such vertiginous satisfactions in his elevated position on Saint Augustine's ladder, the deeds of shame with Mrs bboggs beyond recall in the abyss, that the power to tell himself when would desert him completely.
Bridie bboggs was nothing at all, neither as wife, as Otto Olaf had been careful to ascertain before he made her one, nor as mistress, which suited Walter's taste for
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moderation in all things. Unless some small positive value be allowed her in right of the fascination which she seemed to exert over her domestic staff, whose obstinacy in the employment of a mistress neutral to the point of idiocy moved such others as were better equipped and worse served to expressions of admiration that were not free of malice, no doubt.
The elder daughter was very dull. Think of holy Juliana of Norwich, to her aspect add a dash of souring, to her tissue half a hundredweight of adipose, abstract the char- ity and prayers, spray in vain with opopanax and assa- foetida, and behold a radiant Una after a Hammam and a face massage. But withal she rejoiced in one accomplish- ment for which Belacqua had no words to express his re- spect, namely, an ability to play from memory, given the opening bar, any Mozart sonata whatsoever, with a xylo- phonic precision and an even-handed mezzo forte that scorned to observe the least distinction between those notes that were significant and those that were not. Belacqua, anxious to improve his position with Una, who held him and all that pertained to him in the greatest abhorrence, would control these feats, choking with ad- miration, in Augener's edition; which trouble, however, he very soon learned to spare himself.
A little bird whispered when to Walter Draffin who, with his right hand thus released, drew from his pocket a card and read, printed in silver on an azure ground:
Mr and Mrs Otto Olaf bboggs request the pleasure of
Mr Walter Drafrm's Company
at the marriage of their daughter Thelma
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with
Mr Belacqua Shuah
at the Church of Saint Tamar Glasnevin
on Saturday, 1st August,
at 2:30 p. m.
and afterwards
at 55 North Great George's Street
55 North Great George's Street
R. S. V. P.
How like an epitaph it read, with the terrible sigh in the end-pause of each line. And yet, thought Walter, quenching the conceit as he did so, one might have ex- pected a little enjambment in an invitation to such an oc- casion. Ha! He drew back his head from the card in order that he might see it as a whole. A typical Bridie bboggs production. What did it remind him of? A Church of Ire- land Sunday School certificate of good conduct and regu- lar attendance? No. They had his in the old home locked up in the family Bible, marking the place where Lamen- tations ended and Ezekiel began. Then perhaps the menu of an Old Boys Reunion Dinner, incorporating the School colours? No. Walter heaved a heavy sigh. He knew it re- minded him of something, but what that something was, over and above Bridie and her sense of style, he could not discover. No doubt it would come back to him when he was least expecting it. But his little enjambment joke was pretty hot. He slaked it a second time. The only thing he did not like about it was its slight recondity, so few people knowing what an enjambment was. For example, it could not be expected to convulse a snug. Well, he must just put it into his book.
Under separate cover by the same post he received a note from Mrs bboggs : "Dear Walter, Both Otto and I are
WHAT A MISFORTUNE 123
most anxious that you, as such an old friend of the family, should propose the health of the happy couple. We do hope, dear Walter, and I feel confident, that you will. " To which he hastened to reply: "Dear Bridie, Of course I shall be most happy and honoured to perform. "
Dear Otto Olaf! Wrapped up in his tables and chairs and allowing himself to be duped, as he knew, by Walter and, as he thought, by Belacqua. Let Mr Draffin, who had been of service, drink his whiskey; and Thelma, that by- product of a love-encounter, bestow herself on whom she pleased. Let there be a circus wedding by all means, his house invaded and his furniture wrecked. The days that came after would be of better rest. Dear Otto Olaf!
Belacqua prepared to negotiate a loan sufficient to meet his obligations, which fell heavily on a man of his modest condition. There was the ring (Lucy's redeemed), the endless fees relative to the ceremony, duties to vicar, verger, organist, officiating clergymen and bell-ringers, the big bridal bouquet, the little nosegays for the maids, new linen and other indispensable household effects, to say nothing at all of the price of a quick honeymoon, which fiasco, touring Connemara in a borrowed car, he had no intention of allowing to run away with more than a week or ten days.
His best man helped him to work it out over a bottle. —
"I do not propose " said Belacqua, when the average of their independent estimates had been augmented by ten pounds for overhead expenses.
"Overhead! " cackled the best man. "Very good! " Belacqua shrank in a most terrifying manner.
"Either I misunderstand you" he said "or you forget
yourself. "
"Beg pardon" said the best man, "beg pardon, beg par-
don. No offence. "
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Belacqua came back into the picture at his own conven- ience.
"I do not propose" he resumed "to affront you with a gift on this delicate occasion. "
The best man bridled and squirmed at the mere sugges- tion.
"But" Belacqua made haste to extenuate this refinement of feeling "if you would care to have the original manu- script of my Hypothalamion, corrected, autographed, dated, inscribed and half-bound in time-coloured skivers, you are more than welcome. "
Capper Quin, for so we must call him, known to his admirers as Hairy, he was so glabrous, and to the ladies as Tiny, he was so enormous, was not merely a bachelor, and thus qualified to attend Belacqua without violence to etiquette, but also one of the coming writers, which ac- counts for his alacrity to hold the hat of a member of the Cuttings Association. He now choked with gratification.
. " and broke down. To construct a sentence with subject, predicate and
object Hairy required a pencil and a sheet of paper. "Capper" said Belacqua, "say no more. I'll have it made
up for you.