Squatting under the cart a
complete
down-and-out was very busy with some- thing or other.
Samuel Beckett
"
Ruby could not repress a shiver.
"In the name of God" she said "what notice? "
"The one that we are fled" replied Belacqua, and not
another word would he say though she begged him to tell her. The notice was his own idea and he was proud of it. When the time came she would have to subscribe to it whether she liked it or not. He would keep it as a little surprise for her.
They ascended the mountain in silence. Wisps of snipe and whatever it is of grouse squirted out of the heather on all sides, while the number of hares, brooding in their forms, that they started and sent bounding away, was a credit to the gamekeeper. They plunged on and up through the deep ling and whortleberry. Ruby was sweat- ing. A high mesh wire fence, flung like a shingles round the mountain, obstructed their passage.
"What are all the trusses for? " panted Ruby.
Right along on either hand as far as they could see there were fasces of bracken attached to the wire. Belacqua racked his brains for an explanation. In the end he had to give it up.
"God I don't know at all" he exclaimed.
It certainly was the most astounding thing.
Ladies first. Ruby scaled the fence. Belacqua, holding
LOVE AND LETHE 93
94 MORE PRICKS THAN KICKS
gallantly back with the bag in his hand, enjoyed a glimpse of her legs' sincerity. It was the first time he had had occasion to take stock of those parts of her and certainly he had seen worse. They pushed on and soon the summit, complete with fairy rath, came into view, howbeit still at a considerable distance.
Ruby tripped and fell, but on her face. Belacqua's strong arms were at hand to raise her up.
"Not hurt" he kindly inquired.
"This foul old skirt gets in my way" she said angrily.
"It is an encumbrance" agreed Belacqua, "off with it. " This struck Ruby as being such a good suggestion that
she acted upon it without further ado and stood revealed as one of those ladies who have no use for a petticoat. Belacqua folded the skirt over his arm, there being no room for it in the bag, and Ruby, greatly eased, stormed the summit in her knickers.
Belacqua, who was in the lead, halted all of a sudden, clapped his hands, spun round and told Ruby he had got it. He was keenly conscious of her standing knee-deep in the ling before him, grateful for a breather and not both- ering to ask what.
"They tie those bundles to the wire" he said "so that the grouse will see them. "
Still she did not understand.
"And not fly against the fence and hurt themselves. " Now she understood. The calm way she took it dis-
tressed Belacqua. It was to be hoped that the notice would have better success than this splendid divulgation. Now the ling was up to her garters, she seemed to be sink- ing in the heath as in a quickstand. Could it be that she was giving at the knees? "Spirits of this mountain" mur- mured the heart of Belacqua "keep me steadfast. "
Now since parking the car they had not seen a living soul.
The first thing they had to do of course when they got to the top was admire the view, with special reference to Dun Laoghaire framed to perfection in the shoulders of Three Rock and Kilmashogue, the long arms of the harbour like an entreaty in the blue sea. Young priests were singing in a wood on the hillside. They heard them and they saw the smoke of their fire. To the west in the valley a plantation of larches nearly brought tears to the eyes of Belacqua, till raising those unruly members to the slopes of Glendoo, mottled like a leopard, that lay beyond, he thought of Synge and recovered his spirits. Wicklow, full of breasts with pimples, he refused to consider. Ruby agreed. The city and the plains to the north meant nothing to either of them in the mood they were in. A human turd lay within the rath.
Like fantoccini controlled by a single wire they flung themselves down on the western "slope of heath. From now on till the end there is something very secco and Punch Judy about their proceedings, Ruby looking more bawdy
Magdalene than ever, Belacqua like a super out of the Harlot's Progress. He kept putting off opening the bag.
"I thought of bringing the gramophone" he said "and
"
Ravel's Pavane. Then
"Then you thought again" said Ruby. She had a most
irritating habit of interrupting.
"Oh yes" said Belacqua, "the usual pale cast. "
Notice the literary man.
"S'pity" said Ruby, "it might have made things easier. " Happy Infanta! Painted by Velasquez and then no more
pensums!
"If you would put back your skirt" said Belacqua vio-
LOVE AND LETHE 95
96 MORE PRICKS THAN KICKS
lently, "now that you have done walking, you would make things easier for me. "
How difficult things were becoming, to be sure. The least thing might upset the apple-cart at this juncture.
Ruby pricked up her ears. Was this a declaration at last? In case it might be she would not oblige him.
"I prefer it off" she said.
Belacqua, staring fiercely at the larches, sulked for a space.
"Weir he grumbled at last, "shall we have a little drink to start off? "
Ruby was agreeable. He opened the bag as little as pos- sible, put in his hand, snatched out the bottle, then the glasses and shut it quick.
"Fifteen year old" he said complacently, "on tick. "
All the money he owed for one thing or another. If he did not pull it off now once and for all he would be broke. "God" he exclaimed, executing a kind of passionate
tick-tack through his pockets, "I forgot the screw. "
"Pah" said Ruby, "what odds. Knock its head off, shoot
its neck off. "
But the screw turned up as it always does and they had
a long drink.
"Length without breath" gasped Belacqua "that's the
idea, Hiawatha at Dublin bar. "
They had another.
"That makes four doubles" said Ruby "and they say
there's eight in a bottle. "
Belacqua held up the bottle. In that case there was
something wrong with her statement.
"Never two without three" he said.
They had another.
"O Death in Life" vociferated Belacqua, "the days that
are no more. "
He fell on the bag and ripped out the notice for her inspection. Painted roughly in white on an old number- plate she beheld:
Temporarily Sane
IK-6996 had been erased to make room for this inscrip- tion. It was a palimpsest.
Ruby, pot-valiant, let a loud scoff.
"It won't do" she said, "it won't do at all. "
It was a disappointment to hear her say this. Poor
Belacqua. Sadly he held the plate out at arm's length. "You don't like it" he said.
"Bad" said Ruby "very bad. "
"I don't mean the way it's presented" said Belacqua, "I
mean the idea. "
It was all the same what he meant.
"If I had a paddle" she said "I'd bury it, idea and all. " Belacqua laid the offensive object face downward in the
heather. Now there was nothing left in the bag but the firearm, the ammunition and the veronal.
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
LOVE AND LETHE 97
98 MORE PRICKS THAN KICKS
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
LOVE AND LETHE 99
100 MORE PRICKS THAN KICKS
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
101
102 MORE PRICKS THAN KICKS
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
WALKING OUT 103
104 MORE PRICKS THAN KICKS
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
WALKING OUT 105
106 MORE PRICKS THAN KICKS
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
WALKING OUT 107
108 MORE PRICKS THAN KICKS
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
WALKING OUT 109
110 MORE PRICKS THAN KICKS
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,
WALKING OUT 111
112 MORE PRICKS THAN KICKS
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.
WALKING OUT 113
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
116 MORE PRICKS THAN KICKS
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.
Ruby could not repress a shiver.
"In the name of God" she said "what notice? "
"The one that we are fled" replied Belacqua, and not
another word would he say though she begged him to tell her. The notice was his own idea and he was proud of it. When the time came she would have to subscribe to it whether she liked it or not. He would keep it as a little surprise for her.
They ascended the mountain in silence. Wisps of snipe and whatever it is of grouse squirted out of the heather on all sides, while the number of hares, brooding in their forms, that they started and sent bounding away, was a credit to the gamekeeper. They plunged on and up through the deep ling and whortleberry. Ruby was sweat- ing. A high mesh wire fence, flung like a shingles round the mountain, obstructed their passage.
"What are all the trusses for? " panted Ruby.
Right along on either hand as far as they could see there were fasces of bracken attached to the wire. Belacqua racked his brains for an explanation. In the end he had to give it up.
"God I don't know at all" he exclaimed.
It certainly was the most astounding thing.
Ladies first. Ruby scaled the fence. Belacqua, holding
LOVE AND LETHE 93
94 MORE PRICKS THAN KICKS
gallantly back with the bag in his hand, enjoyed a glimpse of her legs' sincerity. It was the first time he had had occasion to take stock of those parts of her and certainly he had seen worse. They pushed on and soon the summit, complete with fairy rath, came into view, howbeit still at a considerable distance.
Ruby tripped and fell, but on her face. Belacqua's strong arms were at hand to raise her up.
"Not hurt" he kindly inquired.
"This foul old skirt gets in my way" she said angrily.
"It is an encumbrance" agreed Belacqua, "off with it. " This struck Ruby as being such a good suggestion that
she acted upon it without further ado and stood revealed as one of those ladies who have no use for a petticoat. Belacqua folded the skirt over his arm, there being no room for it in the bag, and Ruby, greatly eased, stormed the summit in her knickers.
Belacqua, who was in the lead, halted all of a sudden, clapped his hands, spun round and told Ruby he had got it. He was keenly conscious of her standing knee-deep in the ling before him, grateful for a breather and not both- ering to ask what.
"They tie those bundles to the wire" he said "so that the grouse will see them. "
Still she did not understand.
"And not fly against the fence and hurt themselves. " Now she understood. The calm way she took it dis-
tressed Belacqua. It was to be hoped that the notice would have better success than this splendid divulgation. Now the ling was up to her garters, she seemed to be sink- ing in the heath as in a quickstand. Could it be that she was giving at the knees? "Spirits of this mountain" mur- mured the heart of Belacqua "keep me steadfast. "
Now since parking the car they had not seen a living soul.
The first thing they had to do of course when they got to the top was admire the view, with special reference to Dun Laoghaire framed to perfection in the shoulders of Three Rock and Kilmashogue, the long arms of the harbour like an entreaty in the blue sea. Young priests were singing in a wood on the hillside. They heard them and they saw the smoke of their fire. To the west in the valley a plantation of larches nearly brought tears to the eyes of Belacqua, till raising those unruly members to the slopes of Glendoo, mottled like a leopard, that lay beyond, he thought of Synge and recovered his spirits. Wicklow, full of breasts with pimples, he refused to consider. Ruby agreed. The city and the plains to the north meant nothing to either of them in the mood they were in. A human turd lay within the rath.
Like fantoccini controlled by a single wire they flung themselves down on the western "slope of heath. From now on till the end there is something very secco and Punch Judy about their proceedings, Ruby looking more bawdy
Magdalene than ever, Belacqua like a super out of the Harlot's Progress. He kept putting off opening the bag.
"I thought of bringing the gramophone" he said "and
"
Ravel's Pavane. Then
"Then you thought again" said Ruby. She had a most
irritating habit of interrupting.
"Oh yes" said Belacqua, "the usual pale cast. "
Notice the literary man.
"S'pity" said Ruby, "it might have made things easier. " Happy Infanta! Painted by Velasquez and then no more
pensums!
"If you would put back your skirt" said Belacqua vio-
LOVE AND LETHE 95
96 MORE PRICKS THAN KICKS
lently, "now that you have done walking, you would make things easier for me. "
How difficult things were becoming, to be sure. The least thing might upset the apple-cart at this juncture.
Ruby pricked up her ears. Was this a declaration at last? In case it might be she would not oblige him.
"I prefer it off" she said.
Belacqua, staring fiercely at the larches, sulked for a space.
"Weir he grumbled at last, "shall we have a little drink to start off? "
Ruby was agreeable. He opened the bag as little as pos- sible, put in his hand, snatched out the bottle, then the glasses and shut it quick.
"Fifteen year old" he said complacently, "on tick. "
All the money he owed for one thing or another. If he did not pull it off now once and for all he would be broke. "God" he exclaimed, executing a kind of passionate
tick-tack through his pockets, "I forgot the screw. "
"Pah" said Ruby, "what odds. Knock its head off, shoot
its neck off. "
But the screw turned up as it always does and they had
a long drink.
"Length without breath" gasped Belacqua "that's the
idea, Hiawatha at Dublin bar. "
They had another.
"That makes four doubles" said Ruby "and they say
there's eight in a bottle. "
Belacqua held up the bottle. In that case there was
something wrong with her statement.
"Never two without three" he said.
They had another.
"O Death in Life" vociferated Belacqua, "the days that
are no more. "
He fell on the bag and ripped out the notice for her inspection. Painted roughly in white on an old number- plate she beheld:
Temporarily Sane
IK-6996 had been erased to make room for this inscrip- tion. It was a palimpsest.
Ruby, pot-valiant, let a loud scoff.
"It won't do" she said, "it won't do at all. "
It was a disappointment to hear her say this. Poor
Belacqua. Sadly he held the plate out at arm's length. "You don't like it" he said.
"Bad" said Ruby "very bad. "
"I don't mean the way it's presented" said Belacqua, "I
mean the idea. "
It was all the same what he meant.
"If I had a paddle" she said "I'd bury it, idea and all. " Belacqua laid the offensive object face downward in the
heather. Now there was nothing left in the bag but the firearm, the ammunition and the veronal.
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
LOVE AND LETHE 97
98 MORE PRICKS THAN KICKS
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
LOVE AND LETHE 99
100 MORE PRICKS THAN KICKS
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
101
102 MORE PRICKS THAN KICKS
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
WALKING OUT 103
104 MORE PRICKS THAN KICKS
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
WALKING OUT 105
106 MORE PRICKS THAN KICKS
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
WALKING OUT 107
108 MORE PRICKS THAN KICKS
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
WALKING OUT 109
110 MORE PRICKS THAN KICKS
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,
WALKING OUT 111
112 MORE PRICKS THAN KICKS
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.
WALKING OUT 113
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
116 MORE PRICKS THAN KICKS
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.
