This proceeded from that
irrepressible
quartet, Her- mione, the Alba, Walter and James, perspiring, suppliant, making their getaway.
Samuel Beckett
A profound mot.
Hairy, having tried all he knew to say as much, hung his head, a gallant loser, consoled by the certitude that Walter would take the will for the deed.
Poor Hairy, there was a great deal he understood, but he could not make this known in the absence of a battery of writing materials.
"That unspeakable invite" exclaimed Walter, "of all things to be destitute of enjambment! "
He was confirmed in his initial misgiving by Hairy's having clearly no idea what he was talking about. There was nothing for it but to put it into his book. Walter's book was a long time in coming out because he refused to regard it as anything more than a mere dump for what- ever he could not get off his chest in the ordinary way.
"So off you go" he said "to attend your happy client, and I to buy myself a buttonhole. "
This, ensuing so soon upon mole and enjambment, brought Hairy's brain to the boil, and out of his mouth came the one word "rose" like a big bubble.
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"Blood-red and newly born" said Walter "to aromatic pain. Eh? "
Hairy, with a sudden feeling that he was wasting his client's time and his own precarious energies on a kind of rubber Stalin, took his departure with a more than boorish abruptness, leaving Walter to enjoy the great central agency and hang out as it were his cowlick to air or dry. A passing humorist dropped a penny into the empty hat, it fell on the rich wadding without a sound, and so the joke was lost.
In Parliament Street a funeral passed and Hairy did not uncover. Many of the chief mourners, consoling them- selves in no small measure with the reverence expressed by every section of the community, noticed with rage in their hearts that he did not, though to be sure they made no allusion to it at the time. Let this be a lesson to young men, strangers perhaps to sorrow, to uncover when- ever a funeral passes, less in act of respect towards the de- funct than in sympathetic acknowledgment of the sur- vivors. One of these fine days Hairy will observe, from where he sits bearing up bravely behind the hearse in a family knot, a labourer let go of his pick with one hand, or gay dandy snatch both his out of his pockets, in a ges- ture of more value and comfort than a ton of lilies. Take the case of Belacqua, who ever since the commitment of his Lucy wears a hat, contrary to his inclination, on the off chance of his encountering a cortege.
The best man had received instructions to collect in Molesworth Street the Morgan, fast but noisy, lent for the period of the high time journey by a friend of the bboggses. Needless to say some eejit had parked it so far up towards the arty end that luckless Hairy, coming from the west upon the stand after the usual Duke Street com-
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plications, hastening along the shady southern pavement because he felt there was not a moment to lose, was almost in despair of ever finding the solitary hind-wheel that he had been advised to look out for. He was much relieved to espy it at last, last but one or two in the row, but embarrassed also to remark a group made up of small boys, loafers and the official stand attendant gathered round and passing judgment on the strange machine's design and performance. He kept his head none the less and examined the car, as he had been strictly enjoined to do, for any hymeneal insignia that might have been annexed, doubtless with the very best intentions, to its body, such as a boot, an inscription or other shameful badge. Satisfied that there were none, he hoisted his vast frame on board the light weight which thereupon reduced
the expert comment of the bystanders, if we except the attendant who was most grave and attentive, to jeers and laughter, by rocking like a cockle-shell. Hairy, wondering what on earth to do next, sat blushing and hopeless at the controls. The general provisions for starting a motor engine were familiar to him, and these in every imagi- nable combination he fruitlessly applied to that, excep- tional presumably, fitted to the Morgan. The boys were most anxious to push, the loafers to give a tow, while the at- tendant could not be deterred from flooding the car- burettor and swinging the engine, which started most perversely and unexpectedly with a backfire that broke the obliging fellow's arm. Hairy was so pressed for time that he hardened his heart to the consistence of an Ueber- mensch's, roared his engine and found himself abruptly, in a paroxysm of plunges and saccades, cutting the corner of Kildare Street under the prow of a bus, which happily did no more than remove the back number-plate and thus
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provide, not merely a neat instance of poetic justice, but the winged attendant with the nucleus of compensation.
All these little encounters and contretemps take place in a Dublin flooded with sunshine.
Belacqua had passed an excellent night, as he always did when he condescended to assign precise value to the content of his mind, no matter whether that were joy or sorrow, and did not awake when Hairy stalled the ma- chine beneath his window on the cruel stroke of midday. Much liquor in secret the previous evening may have contributed to this torpor, but scarcely if at all, for many and many a time when footless, and simply because the forces in his mind would not resolve, he had tossed and turned like the Florence of Sordello, and found all pos- tures painful.
He opened his burning eyes on Hairy, rose, bathed, shaved and decked himself out, all in silence and without the least assistance. They plunged the packed bag in the well of the Morgan. Belacqua stood before the pier-glass.
"It's a small thing, Hairy" he said, and his voice, after so long silence, grated on his ear, "separates lovers. "
"Not mountain chain" said Hairy.
"No, nor city ramparts" said Belacqua.
Hairy made a lunge of condolence at his companion,
he simply could not help it, and was repulsed.
"Am I all right behind? " asked Belacqua.
"You know what it is" said Hairy, asserting thus and
with a clarity quite unusual in him his independence and intolerance of all posterior aspects, "you perish in your own plenty. "
Belacqua pressed apart his lips with his forefinger.
"If what I love" he said "were only in Australia. " Capper the faithful companion simply faded away, at
least for the purposes of conversation.
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"Whereas what I am on the look out for" said Belacqua, pursuing it would almost seem his train of thought, "is nowhere as far as I can see. "
"Vobiscum" whispered Capper. "Am I right? "
A cloud obscured the sun, the room grew dark, the light ebbed from the pier-glass and Belacqua, feeling his eyes moist, turned away from the blurred image of himself.
"Remember" he said, "true of me now who have ceased to Charleston: Dum vivit aut bibit aut minxit. Take a note of it now. "
The Quaker's get!
Then driving through the City it occurred to him that an empty buttonhole would be the haporth of tar and no error. So he entered a flower-shop and came out with a purple tassel of veronica, fixed in the wrong lapel. Hairy stared. What startled him was not so much the breach of etiquette as the foolhardiness of getting married in a turned suit.
A pestilential hotel was their next stop. Hairy changed his clothes and looked more mangy king of beasts than ever. Belacqua lunched frugally on stout and scallions, scarcely the meal, one would have thought, for a man about to be married for the second time. However.
At the Church of Saint Tamar, pointed almost to the point of indecency, the maids, attired in glove-tight gos- samer and sporting the awful ox-eyes, having just been joined by Mrs bboggs, who had chosen gauze and a bunch of omphalodes in her bosom, and Walter, very shaky and exalted, were massed in the porch when Morgante and Morgutte, to adopt the venomous reference of Una, not arm in arm but in single file, came forward. All but Walter were taken quite aback by the bridegroom's breath. Mrs bboggs buried her face (poor little Thelma! ) in the omphalodes, the Cleggs turned scarlet in unison, the
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Purefoys crowded into a shade, while Una was only re- strained by her hatred of anything in the nature of sacri- lege from spitting it out. Miss Perdue found the smell rather refreshing. The cad and his faithful companion advanced to the chancel and took up their stand beside the gate, the latter to the right and a little to the rear, holding a hat in each hand.
The south pews were plentifully furnished with mem- bers and adherents of the bboggs clan, while those to the north were empty save for two grotesques, seated far apart: Jimmy the Duck Skyrm, an aged cretin, outrageous in pepper and salt, Lavalliere and pull-over, gnashing his teeth without ceasing at invisible spaghetti; and Hermione Nautzsche, a powerfully built nymphomaniac panting in black and mauve between shipped crutches. Her missing sexual hemisphere, despite a keen look out all her life long, had somehow never entered her orbit, and now, bursting as she was with chalk at every joint, she had no great hopes of being rounded off in that interesting sense. Little does she dream what a flurry she has set up in the spirits of Skyrm, as he gobbles and mumbles the air at
the precise remove of enchantment behind her.
"Ecce" hissed Hairy, according to plan, and Belacqua's heart made a hopeless dash against the wall of its box, the church suddenly cruciform cage, the bulldogs of heaven holding the chancel, the procession about to give tongue in the porch, the transepts culs-de-sac. The organist darted into his loft like an assassin and set in motion the various forces that could be relied on to mature in
a merry peal all in good time. Thelma, looking very strik- ing and illegitimate in grey and green pieds de poule, split skirt and pique insertions of negress pink, swept up the aisle on the right arm of Otto Olaf, in whose head
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since leaving 55 a snatch had been churning and did not now desert him:
Drink little at a time,
Put water in your wine,
Miss your glass when you can, And go off the first man.
Wise old Otto Olaf! He died in the end of clot and left his cellar to the cuckoo.
The maids, terminating in the curious deltoid forma- tion of the Alba, Mrs bboggs and Walter, took their speed from the bride and their demeanour from the head-maid, with the result that their advance was at once rapid and sullen, for Una had become aware of an uncontrollable and ill-placed dehiscence in the stuff of her gossamer. The dread lest this should come to a head as she braced her- self to receive her foul little sister's gloves and bouquet, over and above an habitual misanthropy aggravated by the occasion, had made her, and hence her team of maids, appear as cross as two sticks. Always excepting the Alba who, bating the old pain in the core of her vitals that seemed to be a permanent part of her existence, could scarcely have been more diverted had she been the bride herself instead of the odd maid out. Also with Walter so close on her heels she was kept busy.
Without going so far as to say that Belacqua felt God or Thelma the sum of the Apostolic series, still there was in some indeterminate way communicated to the solem- nisation a kind or sort of mystical radiance that Joseph Smith would have found touching. Belacqua passed the ring like a mouse belling the cat, with a quick prayer all his own that the marriage knuckle of his love might so
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swell against the token and pledge as to spare her the pain of ever reading, inscribed on its inner periphery: Mens mea Lucia lucescit luce tua. His state of mind was so tense and complex at this stage (not to be wondered at when we consider all that he had gone through: the bereavement, obliging him to wear a hat at all seasons; the sweet and fierce pain of his passion for Miss bboggs; the long retreat in bed that had landed him in a nice marasmus; the stout and scallions; and now the sense of being cauterized with an outward and visible sign) that it might be likened to that of his dear departed Lucy listening pale and agog for the second incidence of
in the first movement of the Unbuttoned Symphony. Say what you will, you can't keep a dead mind down.
Talking of cats, Thelma remained throughout the serv- ice feline and inscrutable and was not at all incommoded by the famous viticultural passage which so abashed, or perhaps better angered, Belacqua that his platter face went from its native dingy to scarlet and back again throughlivid. Shouldhethenavailhimselfofthefirst . . . opportunity to sulphurate his bride and thus make sure? No, that would be doing the dirty on man's innocency. And make sure of what? Olives? The absurdity of the figure and all its harmonics like muscae volitantes pro- voked him to a copious scoff that would have put the kibosh on the sacrament altogether had it not been for the coolness and skill of the priest who covered as with a hand this coarseness with a collect.
Talking of hands, Thelma's right, as it danced through the find-the-lady sleights recommended in the liturgy, had quite bewitched the chancel. The curate swore he had
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never seen anything like it outside the Musee Rodin, it reminded the clerk of a Diirer cartoon and the priest of his incumbency, and it indicted Belacqua, tempest of stifled groans at having to produce anti-clockwise eyes and ges- tures for so long at a stretch, with Maupassant's scorching phrase: phylloxera of the spirit.
At length they had consented together beyond all pos- sibility of cavil, the dearly beloved had for ever after held their peace and then let their cry come with a rush, and Otto Olaf's rendering of:
Be present, awful Father! To give away this bride
had so moved the Sidneian heart of Skyrm that he trans- ferred himself, for better for worse, into the pew where Hermione sat as on a thwart, and there, under cover of a kinsman's seasonable emotion, rooted and snuffled his way into her affections with a suilline avidity that can only have seemed horrible to any decent person not con- versant with the phenomenon of crystallisation. The vestry was over, its signatures, duties and busses, and Mrs bboggs was back in 55, whipping the muslin off the Delikatessen, almost before the organist had regained control of his instrument. The Alba went with Walter in a taxi, Otto Olaf and Morgutte took a tram, the two grotesques never knew how they got there, while as for the maids, all but Una who wisely huddled on a cloak and cadged a lift, why they just floated on foot like brownies through the garish thoroughfares.
These are the little things that are so important.
To say that the drawing-room was thronged would be to put it mildly. It was stiff with guests. Otto Olaf found himself in that most painful of all possible positions, con-
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strained to see his furniture, his loved ones, suffer and know himself helpless to relieve them.
There was something so bright and meaty about the assembly, something so whorled in its disposition with the procession loosely coiled in the midst waiting to move off, that Walter was slowly but surely put in mind of a Benozzo fresco and said so in his high-smelling voice to the Alba.
"Ass and all" she replied, with indescribable bitterness.
Una stamped her foot like a sheep and like sheep all present turned scared faces towards her. She had some- how contrived to consolidate and shore up her gossamer, but now she had fresh grounds for complaint, namely, that the newly married couple, who should have been first home and in position for congratulations, had actually not yet turned up. Thus the action was brought to a dead halt. In its present headless condition the procession could not uncoil itself out through the door as arranged, and it was obvious that until the procession uncoiled itself there could be no relief for the congestion of casual ladies and gentlemen of which it was, so to speak, the mainspring. But let the truant pair appear and take their station and lo the press, as though by magic, would tick off merrily to its stand-up lunch. In the meantime, what a waste of good saliva!
"Raise me up Mr Quin" cried Una, in her anger throw- ing caution to the winds.
Hairy looked wildly at the bust of his partner, for so she was in pursuance of the regulations, they together forming —to vary the figure slightly—the fourth link of this nup- tial hawser, in the immediate rear, that is, of Mrs bboggs and Skyrm, who in their turn surveyed the massive flitches of Hermione, sagging and flagging in her crutches as in a quicksand, and poor Otto Olaf, trembling in every limb
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—looked wildly at it for a point of purchase at once effec- tive and respectful, some form of nelson that would not be too familiar, though for what purpose she desired to be raised he did not pause to inquire.
But before he could begin to make a mess of it in his flushing blushing panting ponderous way a great pertur- bation, dominated by the voice of Belacqua raised in abuse, made itself heard in the vestibule. This was they at last, but escorted by a pukkah Civic Guard of the highest rank compatible with duty and the stricken car- park attendant, as pale as a stone and clutching in his whole hand the damning number-plate.
Otto Olaf inserted his elbow in the eye of Hermione's crutch and released a dig. Having thus gained her atten- tion he said, in a ruined whisper: "My right lung is very weak. "
Hermione let a little pipe of terror.
"But my left lung" he vociferated "is as sound as a bell. "
"I suppose" said Mrs bboggs to James Skyrm, whose facial paddles had begun to churn the air so fiercely that she feared lest he were meditating some gallant act on behalf of his kinswoman, "I presume and I take it that Mr bboggs may do and say what he likes in his own home. "
James, on the matter being presented to him in this light, toed the line at once.
The tilted kepi of the attendant, its green band and gilt harp, and the clang beneath in black and white of his riotous hair and brow, so ravished Walter that he merely had to close his eyes to be back in Pisa. The powers of evocation of this Italianate Irishman were simply im- mense, and if his Dream of Fair to Middling Women, held up in the limae labor stage for the past ten or fifteen years,
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ever reaches the public, and Walter says it is bound to, we ought all be sure to get it and have a look at it any- way.
Belacqua reviled his captor and accuser with the utmost ferocity. Otto Olaf, then Capper, broke their ranks, the former to make a peace at all hazard, the latter, with bursting heart, a clean breast. The attendant was very soon browbeaten into admission that his injury had re- sulted, not from the ordinary exercise of his functions, not yet from any act of solicited assistance, but purely and simply from his own excessive zeal, rooted beyond a shadow of a doubt in greed.
A whip-round was made, and a small sum, on no ac- count to be regarded as anything in the nature of an indemnity, subscribed charitably for his relief. This closed the incident.
"My heart bleeds for him" said Walter.
"Not at all" said the Alba, "is he not insured? "
She had a sudden idea.
"See me home" she said to Walter.
Walter explained how he had been let in for a health,
upon which, if the offer were still open, he would be more than happy to see her home. They would go one of the long ways round that he adored.
"I make no promises" said the Alba.
The lunch was a great disappointment to all and sundry —a few firkins of molasses and husks off the ice. Belacqua closed his eyes and saw, clearer than ever before, a beer- engine. The sweets were doled out and then Thelma refused to cut the cake. She was a very strange girl. Pressed hard by Una and Bridie she appealed to her husband. Her husband! His advice to her, quite frankly, when after great difficulty he discovered what she was
"
WHAT A MISFORTUNE 145
talking about, was that it might be rather more gracious to cut the brute since all seemed so set on her doing so. Warming to his subject he urged her to hold out just a little longer, soon it would be all over. What had begun as a hurried and rather furtive aside now developed into a regular tete-a-tete, and when at length Thelma turned to do the gracious thing she found the cake in bits. It had been dressed with orange blossoms. What few of these had escaped the onivomaniacs she gathered up and hid in her bosom. These she would lock up in the furthest recesses of a casket and cherish as long as she drew breath, these and her own two orchids and Belacqua's veronica, which spire of passionate devotion she had resolved to secure against all comers, vogue la galere! Time might pulverise these mementoes but at least their elements would belong to her for ever. She was a most strange girl.
Walter wiped his boots on the Aubusson of Otto Olafs Empire ottoman, beat on his glass of Golden Guinea with his fizz-whisk for silence to fall and paid out his discourse, in a pawl-and-ratchet monotone than could never be un- said, as follows:
"It is on record that a lady member of the Lower House, and feme covert what is more, rose to her feet, those feet—for she was of Dublin stock—that Swift, re- buking the women of this country for their disregard of Shank's mare, described as being fit for nothing better than to be laid aside, and declared: 1 would rather com- mit adultery than suffer one drop of intoxicating liquor to pass my lips/ To which a gross baker, returned in the Labour interest, retorted: Wouldn't we all rather do that, Maam? '
This opening passage was rather too densely packed
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to gain the general suffrage. On Otto Olaf it took effect some five minutes later, causing him to laugh in a helpless and hysterical manner. The sight of Walter, ranging to and fro on his fantastic upholstery as though he were caged or contesting an election, had capsized his whole nervous system and his heart was filling up rapidly with evil and madness.
" 7Z faut marcher avec son temps' said a Deputy of the extreme Right. 'Cela depend' answered Briand in his sepulchral sneer 'dans quoi il marche! So do not heckle me, Herrschaften, because that would about finish me. "
He dropped his head, like a pelican after a long journey, pricked up the ears of his fearful moustache and shuffled and shifted his feet like one surprised in a dishonourable course of action. "He is out of his head" said the chief of the ill-intentioned ladies. Otto Olaf sidled up to the dumb- waiter. Una sat down with great ostentation on a pouf. "Let me know when he starts" she said. Thelma's eyes were darting this way and that in search of orange-blos- som, Belacqua was watching Thelma and the Alba was watching him. James and Hermione, emboldened by the molasses, were trying themselves on before a Regence trumeau. Mrs bboggs was manoeuvering for a vantage- ground that would bring both husband and lover into her field of vision. The usual precautionary plain-clothes man, standing head and shoulders out of the ruck, was reading his paper. Two splendid mixers found themselves ad- jacent. "Drunk" said the first, "well lit" agreed the second, and they exchanged a long look of intelligence.
In fairness to Walter it must be said that he was far from being penetrate with this hangdog facade, behind which all was mercy-seat al fresco and Shekinah and him- self, in the smartest mail, having his wounds dressed by the Alba-Morgen and looking through the orchards at the
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sun setting awkwardly in the blue shallows. Coming to with a start, shedding his cloak of dejection, he spoke the first words that he came across in his head:
"Semper ibi juvenis cum virgine, nulla senectus . "
Nullaque vis morbi, nullus dolor.
. .
Mrs bboggs, having already trembled to hear the be- lated chuckling of Otto Olaf and to observe his stealthy movements as he called in all the castle puddings on the dumb-waiter, was hardly surprised when he now opened rapid fire on his enemy with these. But Walter was able to block such trivial missiles, even caught one and ate it, while the old man's strength, and with it his rage, was soon spent. His arteries began to fray, with the fatal result as aforesaid, from this moment.
"I raise this glass" said Walter, extending it low down and a little to the left before him like a buckler, "this glori- ous bumper, on behalf of those present and the many pre- vented by age, sickness, infirmity or previous engagement from being with us, to you, dearest Thelma, whom we all love, and to you, Mr Shuah, whom Thelma loving and being loved of her we all love too I feel sure, now on the threshold of your bliss, and to such and so many consum- mations, earthy and other, as you have in mind. "
He plied the whisk, dealt himself a slow uppercut with the glass, and drank.
"I close these eyes" he proceeded, fixing them on Mrs bboggs and returning the glass to its base, "and I see them in that memorable island, Avalon, Atlantis, Hesperides, Ui Breasail, I don't insist, lapped in the Siamese haecceity of puffect love, revelling in the most delightful natural surroundings. Oh may that star, that radiant radical of their desire, not of mine, my friends, nor yet of yours, for
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no two stars, as Saint Paul tells us, are on a par in the matter of glory, delight them without ceasing with legiti- mate inflexions! " He unleashed what was left of the glori- ous bumper. "To Hymen's gracious mussy and protection we commit them, now, henceforth and for evermore. Slainte. "
This was the end of Walter's speech, and a very good end for such a bad speech every one felt it to be, but as he remained upright on the ottoman in a rapt and sus- pended pose, drinking in the plaudits, Belacqua assumed that there was some yet to come and so was startled to hear the voice of Una, whom the least semblance of pro- crastination invariably threw into the most dreadful pas- sion, calling on him petulantly to do the needful: "Now Mr Shuah, now then Mr Shuah, we're waiting on yer Mr Shuah. " This sordid hitch caused his acknowledgment to be rather less cordial than he had intended. He made it from where he stood, in the white voice of which he was a master:
"I have to thank: Miss bboggs, who henceforward may be so addressed without the least ambiguity, for her as always timely reminder; Mr. Draffin, for his kind torrents of meiosis; Mr and Mrs small double bee, for their Bounty; the Maids, with special reference to Belle-Belle their leader, for their finely calculated offices this day, some- thing more than merely buttress and less than vis a tergo; the Skyrm and Nautzsche, who I am glad to see have not yet done rising to the occasion; my faithful friend and best of men, Tiny Hairy Capper Quin, tipping the scale, day in day out, for me and for many, whose spiritual body is by now I feel confident a fait accompli; the entire Church staff; the Abbe Gabriel; as many, in fine, as have found the time to witness and acclaim, in how small a way soever, this instant of the whirligig. Eleleu. Jou Jou. "
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A student of Plutarch found himself rubbing shoulders with a physicist of the modern school.
,, "There you have him" said the first "in a nutshell.
"This bivalve world" said the other.
Their eyes met and filled with tears.
Whatever small chance these words of Belacqua might
have had of giving satisfaction was more than cancelled by his having been observed, in a dumbshow portmanteau of Selah and sigh of relief, to check off on his fingers each acknowledgment as it was made. Thelma marched to the door in an atmosphere of silence and shock, opened it and closed it behind her, which expression of independence rather cut the ground away from under Una, who had planned to sit down with a bang on the pouf, just at the moment when her services were obviously most needed, and thus put an open slight on the bride.
Hairy on the other hand, faithful to the last to his com- mission, reported smartly for duty.
"Slip out quick" said Belacqua "and run her behind into the lane off Denmark Street. "
The guests were now adjourning stiffly to the drawing- room, Walter and Otto Olaf polarised in bitter tig about the person of the Alba, Otto Olaf being it, while Her- mione and James, he propelling her in a tomb-deep arm- chair on casters, closed the recession. This grotesque equipage was brought to a standstill in the passage in consequence of the passenger's putting her feet to the ground, whether from coquetry or fatigue we leave it to the reader to determine.
"My crutches Jim" she said.
Jim went back for the crutches, Walter took sanctuary with Hermione, the Alba sent Otto Olaf flying, Jim came back with the sweeps, Hermione got them under her somehow, Walter rejoined the Alba. They remained all
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four quietly where they were, in the passage, discussing ways and means, severally first, then, when their interests were overheard to coincide, together. Four heads are better than two, eight than four, and so on.
After a fairly decent interval Belacqua excused himself just for a moment (as he did, it may be remembered, to the Poet in the Grosvenor), left the room, sprang up the stairs, caught up his bride like a Cossack and conveyed her by clandestine ways down to the garden that lay be- hind the house. He opened the wicket into the lane with the key that his love had fondly hoped would facilitate his suit in its early stages, and in another moment they had been clear of the abhorred premises when the sound of a broken-winded hue in the garden caused him to turn back.
This proceeded from that irrepressible quartet, Her- mione, the Alba, Walter and James, perspiring, suppliant, making their getaway.
Belacqua stood like a stock at gaze, with an overwhelm- ing sense that all this would happen to him again, in a dream or subsequent existence. Then he stepped to the one side, Thelma to the other, of the wicket, Caudine exit, saying to himself, as he watched the fugitives storm the postern like women boarding a tram: "It is right that they who are loved should live. " It was from this moment that he used to date in after years his crucial loss of interest in himself, as in a grape beyond his grasp.
But the alarm had been given, faces sprang up in the windows, Una began to scream havoc fit to burst, the mixers and the plain-clothes man came plunging up the garden in the van of pursuit. Belacqua threw them a tub in the form of Hairy, locked the wicket on the outside and committed himself and his wife to the Morgan, fast but noisy.
As for the other four, they did not feel safe until they
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reached the Cappella Lane, superb cenotheca, in Charle- mont House. Nobody would ever think of looking for them there.
Lucy was atra cura in the dicky the best part of the way down to Galway.
They all stopped for a drink. Thelma, as ever on his wrong side, began to insist that she was Mrs Shuah, mak- ing his little heart go pit-a-pat. He turned a face that she had never seen upon her.
"Do you ever hear tell of a babylan? " he said.
Now Thelma was a brave girl.
"A what did you say? " she said.
Belacqua went to the trouble of spelling the strange
word.
"Never" she said. "What is it? Something to eat? " "Oh" he said "you're thinking of a baba. "
"Well then" she said.
His eyes were parched, he closed them and saw, clearer
than ever before, the mule, up to its knees in mire, and astride its back a beaver, flogging it with a wooden sword. But she was not merely brave, she was discreet as well.
"Your veronica" she said "that I wanted so much, where is it gone? "
He clapped his hand to the place. Alas! the tassel had drooped, wormed its stem out of the slit, fallen to the ground and been trodden underfoot.
"Gone west" he said. They went further.
The Smeraldina's Billet Doux
JDel bel by own bloved, allways and for ever mine! ! Your letter is soked with tears death is the onely thing.
I had been crying bitterly, tears! tears! tears! and nothing els, then your letter cam with more tears, after I had read it ofer and ofer again I found I had ink spots on my face. The tears are rolling down my face. It is very early in the morning, the sun is riseing behind the black trees and soon that will change, the sky will be blue and the trees a golden brown, but there is one thing that dosent change, this pain and thos tears. Oh! Bel I love you terrible, I want you terrible, I want your body your soft white body Nagelnackt! My body needs you so terrible, my hands and lips and breasts and everything els on me, sometimes I find it very hard to keep my promise but I have kept it up till now and will keep on doing so untill we meet again and I can at last have you, at last be the Geliebte. Whitch is the greater: the pain of being away from eachother, or the pain of being with eachother, crying at eachother beauty? I sopose the last is the greater, otherwise we would of given up all hope of ever being anything els but miserable.
I was at a grand Film last night, first of all there wasent any of the usual hugging and kissing, I think I have never enjoyed or felt so sad at a Film as at that one, Sturm iiber Asien, if it comes to Dublin you must go and see it, the same Regie as Der Lebende Leichnam, it was realey
152
THE SMERALDINA's BILLET DOUX 153
something quite different from all other Films, nothing to do with Love (as everybody understands the word) no silly girls makeing sweet faces, nearly all old people from Asien with marvellous faces, black lakes and grand Land- schaften. Comeing home there was a new moon, it looked so grand ofer the black trees that it maid me cry. I opened my arms wide and tryed to imagine that you were lieing against my breasts and looking up at me like you did those moonlight nights when we walked together under the big chestnut trees with the stars shineing through the branches.
I met a new girl, very beautiful, pitch black hairs and very pale, she onely talks Egyptian. She told me about the man she loves, at present he is in Amerika far away in some lonely place and wont be back for the next three years and cant writ to her because there is no post office where he is staying and she onely gets a letter every 4 months, imagine if we only got a letter from each other every 4 months what sort of state we would be in by now, the poor girl I am very sorry for her. We went to a 5 o'clock tea dance, it was rather boreing but quite amuse- ing to see the people thinking of nothing but what they have on and the men settling their tyes every 5 minutes. On the way home I sudenly got in to a terrible state of sadness and woulden say a word, of course they were rage- ing with me, at the moment I dident care a dam, when I got in to the bus I got out a little Book and pencil and wrot down 100 times: Bloved Bloved Bloved Bel Bel Bel, I felt as if I never longed so much in my Me for the man I love, to be with him, with him. I want you so much in every sence of the word, you and onely you. After I got out of the bus and was walking down the street I yelled out wahnsinnig wahnsinnig! wahnsinnig! Frau Schlank brought down your sock and that made me cry more than ever. I dont think I will send it to you, I will put it in to
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the drawer with your sweet letter. I had allso a letter from a man who asked me to go out with him to dance on Saturday evening, I sopose I will go. I know my bloved dosent mind and it makes the time go round quicker, the man is a bit of a fool but dances quite well and is the right hight for me. A flirt is very amuseing but shouldent go further than that.
Then I met the old man with the pipe and he told me I had a blue letter and then the fat man with the keys in the passage and he said Griiss Gott but I dident hear him.
Soon I will be counting the hours untill I can go to the station and find you amongst the crowded platform but I dont think I will be able to wear my grey costume if it is too cold and then I will have to wear Mammy furcoat. You will be by me on the 23th wont you Bel, my Bel with the beautiful lips and hands and eyes and face and every- thing that is on you, and now with your poor sore face it would make no diffrence. Two more weeks of agony pain and sadness! 14 more days oh! God and thos sleepless nights! ! ! How long? How long?
I had a very queer dream last night about you and me in a dark forest, we were lieing together on a path, when sudenly you changed in to a baby and dident know what love was and I was trying to tell you that I loved you more than anything on earth but you dident understand and wouldent have any thing to do with me but it was all a dream so it dosent count. There is no object in me trying to tell you how much I love you because I will never suc- ceed, I know that for sirten. Is he the man I have allways been looking for? Yes! but then why cant he give that what I have been longing for for the last 6 months? I ofen wonder what is on you that makes me love you so greatly. I love you iiber alles in dieser Welt, mehr als alles auf Himmel, Erde und Holle. One thing I thank God for that
THE SMERALDlNA's BILLET DOUX 155
our love is so vast. I ofen wonder who I am to thank that you are born and that we met, I sopose I beter not start trying to find out whose fault it is that you are born. It comes back to the same thing, and that is, that I onely know ONE THING and that is that / LOVE YOU AND I AM ALLWAYS YOUR SMERALDINA and that is the onely thing that matters most in our life YOU LOVE ME
AND ARE ALLWAYS MY BEL.
Analiese is hacking round on the piano and there is no
peace so I will stop. Now I am going to go on reading my Book called Die Grosse Liebe and then perhaps I will try and struggel through the Beethoven sonate, it is the onely thing that can take me away from my misery, I love play- ing quietly to myself in the evenings it gives me such a rest.
Bel! Bel! Bel! your letter has just come! Even if you cease to be all and allways mine! ! ! Oh! God how could you ever say such a thing, for lord sake dont! ! ! for god sake dont ever suggest such a thing again! I just berry my head in my hands and soke your letter with tears . . . Bel! Bel! how could you ever doubt me? Meine Ruh ist hin mein Herz ist schwer ich finde Sie nimmer und nimmer mehr. (GoethesFaust. ) LordLordLordforgodsaketell me strate away what agsactly I have done. Is everything indiffrent to you? Evedintly you cant be bothered with a goat like me. If I dont stop writing you wont be able to read this letter because it will be all ofer tears. Bel! Bel! my love is so vast that when I am introduced to some young man and he starts doing the polite I get a quivver all ofer. I know what I am lifeing for, your last letter is allways on my breast when I wake up in the morning and see the sun rise. Ich sen' Dich nicht mehr Tranen hindern mich! My God! my true dog! my baby!
I must get a new nib, this old pen is gone to the dogs,
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I can't writ with it any more, it is the one I got from Woll- worth so you can imagine how good it must be.
Mammy wanted me to go out for a walk this afternoon, but I hate walking, I get so tired putting one foot delib- ertely in front of the other. Do you remember last sum- mer (of course he dose) and how lovely it was lieing hearing the bees summing and the birds singing, and the big butterfly that cam past, it looked grand, it was dark brown with yellow spots and looked so beautiful in the sun, and my body was quite brown all ofer and I dident feel the cold any more. Now the snow is all melted and the wood is as black as ever and the sky is allways grey except in the early morning and even then one can onely see spots of red between the black clouds.
My hairs are freshily washed and I have a bit more energie than usual but still feel very passiv. For god sake dont overdo yourself and try and not get drunk again, I mean in that way that makes you sick.
We cam home in the bus this evening but we dident go that way through the fields with all the little paths be- cause the big road was mended. Mammy allways asks after you. She says the time is flying, it will be no time untill Xmas and she says she hopes Frau Holle makes her bed ofen. I heard her saying to Daddy, I wonder how it is that Ivy and Bill get on my nerves when they go on together and Smerry and Bel never did. She ment when we are sitting on eachother knee and so on, I think it is because the love between Ivy and Bill is not real, there allways sems to be some sort of affection about it.
I curse the old body all day asswell because I have some dam thing on my leg so that I can barely walk, I don't know what it is or how it got there but it is there and full of matter to hell with it.
To-day is one of the days when I see everything more
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clearer than ever and I am sure everything will go right in the end.
Der Tag wird kommen und die stille Nacht! ! !
I dont genau know when but if I dident think so I would cullaps with this agony, thes terrible long dark nights and onely your image to console me. I like the little white statue so much and am longing for the day when you and I will be standing like that and not haveing to think that there is somebody outside that can come in any minute.
Arschlochweh is married and gone to the Schweiz with his wife.
You ask me to give you a taske. I think I have gived you a big enough a taske. I am longing to see the "thing" you wrotaboutmy"beauty"(asyoucallit) Imustsay(with- out wanting any complements) I cant see anything very much to writ about except the usual rot men writ about women.
Darling Bel I must stop. My bed is lonely without me and your photograph is waiting to be kissed so I better give them both peace. Soon it will all take an end, you will be by me and will feel that marvellous pain again that we did in the dark mountains and the big black lake blow and will walk in the fields covered with cowslips and Flieder and will hold once more in your arms
your own sad bloved Smeraldina
P. S. One day nearer to the silent Night! ! !
Yellow
Ihe night-nurse bounced in on the tick of five and turned on the light. Belacqua waked feeling greatly refreshed and eager to wrestle with this new day. He had underlined, as quite a callow boy, a phrase in Hardy's Tess, won by dint of cogging in the Synod: When grief ceases to be specu- lative, sleep sees her opportunity. He had manipulated that sentence for many years now, emending its terms, as joy for grief, to answer his occasions, even calling upon it to bear the strain of certain applications for which he feared it had not been intended, and still it held good through it all. He waked with it now in his mind, as though it had been there all the time he slept, holding that fragile place against dreams.
The nurse brought a pot of tea and a glass of strong salts on a tray.
"Pfui! " exclaimed Belacqua.
But the callous girl preferred to disregard this.
"When are they doing me? " he asked.
"You are down for twelve" she said.
Down . . . !
She took herself off.
He drank the salts and two cups of tea and be damned
to the whole of them. Then of course he was wide awake, poor fellow. But what cared he, what cared saucy Bel-
158
acqua? He switched off the lamp and lay back on his back in this the darkest hour, smoking.
Carry it off as he might, he was in a dreadful situation. At twelve sharp he would be sliced open—zeep! —with a bistoury. This was the idea that his mind for the moment was in no fit state to entertain. If this Hunnish idea once got a foothold in his little psyche in its present unready condition, topsy-turvy after yesterday's debauch of anxi- ety and then the good night's sleep coming on top of that, it would be annihilated. The psyche, not the idea, which was precisely the reverse of what he wished. For himself, to do him justice, he did not care. His mind might cave in for all he cared, he was tired of the old bastardo. But the unfortunate part of it was that this would appear in his behaviour, he would scream and kick and bite and scratch when they came for him, beg for execution to be stayed and perhaps even wet the bed, and what a reflection on his late family that would be! The grand old family Huguenot guts, he could not do the dirty on them like that. (To say nothing of his natural anxiety to be put to rights with as little fuss as possible.
My sufferings under the anaesthetic, he reflected, will be exquisite, but I shall not remember them.
He dashed out his cigarette and put on the lamp, this not so much for the company of the light as in order to postpone daybreak until he should feel a little more sure of himself. Daybreak, with its suggestion of a nasty birth, he could not bear. Downright and all as he was, he could not bear the sight of this punctilious and almost, he some- times felt, superfluous delivery. This was mere folly and well he knew it. He tried hard to cure himself, to frighten or laugh himself out of this weakness, but to no avail. He would grow tired and say to himself: I am what I am
)
YELLOW 159
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That was the end of all his meditations and endeavours: I am what I am. He had read the phrase somewhere and liked it and made it his own.
But God at least was good, as He usually is if we only know how to take Him, in this way, that six hours sep- arated him (Belacqua) from the ordeal, six hours were allotted to him in which to make up his mind, as a pretty drab her face for an enemy. His getting the fleam in the neck, his suffering the tortures of the damned while seem- ing to slumber as peacefully as a little child, were of no consequence, as hope saved they were not, so long as his mind were master of the thought of them. What he had to do, and had with typical slackness put off doing till the last moment, was to arrange a hot reception in his mind for the thought of all the little acts of kindness that he was to endure before the day was out. Then he would be able
to put a good face on it. Otherwise not. Otherwise he would bite, scratch, etc. , when they came for him. Now the good face was all that concerned him, the bold devil- may-care expression. (Except of course that he was also anxioustobemadewellwiththeleastpossibleado. ) He did not pause to consider himself in this matter, the light that the coming ordeal would shed on his irrevocable self, because he really was tired of that old bastardo. No, his whole concern was with other people, the lift-boy, nurses and sisters, the local doc coming to put him off, the emi- nent surgeon, the handy man at hand to clean up and put the bits into the incinerator, and all the friends of his late family, who would ferret out the whole truth. It did not matter about him, he was what he was. But these out- siders, the family guts and so on and so forth, all these things had to be considered.
An asthmatic in the room overhead was coughing his heart up. God bless you, thought Belacqua, you make
things easier for me. But when did the unfortunate sleep? During the day, the livelong day, through the stress of the day. At twelve sharp he would be sound, or, better again, just dozing off.
"That unspeakable invite" exclaimed Walter, "of all things to be destitute of enjambment! "
He was confirmed in his initial misgiving by Hairy's having clearly no idea what he was talking about. There was nothing for it but to put it into his book. Walter's book was a long time in coming out because he refused to regard it as anything more than a mere dump for what- ever he could not get off his chest in the ordinary way.
"So off you go" he said "to attend your happy client, and I to buy myself a buttonhole. "
This, ensuing so soon upon mole and enjambment, brought Hairy's brain to the boil, and out of his mouth came the one word "rose" like a big bubble.
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"Blood-red and newly born" said Walter "to aromatic pain. Eh? "
Hairy, with a sudden feeling that he was wasting his client's time and his own precarious energies on a kind of rubber Stalin, took his departure with a more than boorish abruptness, leaving Walter to enjoy the great central agency and hang out as it were his cowlick to air or dry. A passing humorist dropped a penny into the empty hat, it fell on the rich wadding without a sound, and so the joke was lost.
In Parliament Street a funeral passed and Hairy did not uncover. Many of the chief mourners, consoling them- selves in no small measure with the reverence expressed by every section of the community, noticed with rage in their hearts that he did not, though to be sure they made no allusion to it at the time. Let this be a lesson to young men, strangers perhaps to sorrow, to uncover when- ever a funeral passes, less in act of respect towards the de- funct than in sympathetic acknowledgment of the sur- vivors. One of these fine days Hairy will observe, from where he sits bearing up bravely behind the hearse in a family knot, a labourer let go of his pick with one hand, or gay dandy snatch both his out of his pockets, in a ges- ture of more value and comfort than a ton of lilies. Take the case of Belacqua, who ever since the commitment of his Lucy wears a hat, contrary to his inclination, on the off chance of his encountering a cortege.
The best man had received instructions to collect in Molesworth Street the Morgan, fast but noisy, lent for the period of the high time journey by a friend of the bboggses. Needless to say some eejit had parked it so far up towards the arty end that luckless Hairy, coming from the west upon the stand after the usual Duke Street com-
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plications, hastening along the shady southern pavement because he felt there was not a moment to lose, was almost in despair of ever finding the solitary hind-wheel that he had been advised to look out for. He was much relieved to espy it at last, last but one or two in the row, but embarrassed also to remark a group made up of small boys, loafers and the official stand attendant gathered round and passing judgment on the strange machine's design and performance. He kept his head none the less and examined the car, as he had been strictly enjoined to do, for any hymeneal insignia that might have been annexed, doubtless with the very best intentions, to its body, such as a boot, an inscription or other shameful badge. Satisfied that there were none, he hoisted his vast frame on board the light weight which thereupon reduced
the expert comment of the bystanders, if we except the attendant who was most grave and attentive, to jeers and laughter, by rocking like a cockle-shell. Hairy, wondering what on earth to do next, sat blushing and hopeless at the controls. The general provisions for starting a motor engine were familiar to him, and these in every imagi- nable combination he fruitlessly applied to that, excep- tional presumably, fitted to the Morgan. The boys were most anxious to push, the loafers to give a tow, while the at- tendant could not be deterred from flooding the car- burettor and swinging the engine, which started most perversely and unexpectedly with a backfire that broke the obliging fellow's arm. Hairy was so pressed for time that he hardened his heart to the consistence of an Ueber- mensch's, roared his engine and found himself abruptly, in a paroxysm of plunges and saccades, cutting the corner of Kildare Street under the prow of a bus, which happily did no more than remove the back number-plate and thus
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provide, not merely a neat instance of poetic justice, but the winged attendant with the nucleus of compensation.
All these little encounters and contretemps take place in a Dublin flooded with sunshine.
Belacqua had passed an excellent night, as he always did when he condescended to assign precise value to the content of his mind, no matter whether that were joy or sorrow, and did not awake when Hairy stalled the ma- chine beneath his window on the cruel stroke of midday. Much liquor in secret the previous evening may have contributed to this torpor, but scarcely if at all, for many and many a time when footless, and simply because the forces in his mind would not resolve, he had tossed and turned like the Florence of Sordello, and found all pos- tures painful.
He opened his burning eyes on Hairy, rose, bathed, shaved and decked himself out, all in silence and without the least assistance. They plunged the packed bag in the well of the Morgan. Belacqua stood before the pier-glass.
"It's a small thing, Hairy" he said, and his voice, after so long silence, grated on his ear, "separates lovers. "
"Not mountain chain" said Hairy.
"No, nor city ramparts" said Belacqua.
Hairy made a lunge of condolence at his companion,
he simply could not help it, and was repulsed.
"Am I all right behind? " asked Belacqua.
"You know what it is" said Hairy, asserting thus and
with a clarity quite unusual in him his independence and intolerance of all posterior aspects, "you perish in your own plenty. "
Belacqua pressed apart his lips with his forefinger.
"If what I love" he said "were only in Australia. " Capper the faithful companion simply faded away, at
least for the purposes of conversation.
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"Whereas what I am on the look out for" said Belacqua, pursuing it would almost seem his train of thought, "is nowhere as far as I can see. "
"Vobiscum" whispered Capper. "Am I right? "
A cloud obscured the sun, the room grew dark, the light ebbed from the pier-glass and Belacqua, feeling his eyes moist, turned away from the blurred image of himself.
"Remember" he said, "true of me now who have ceased to Charleston: Dum vivit aut bibit aut minxit. Take a note of it now. "
The Quaker's get!
Then driving through the City it occurred to him that an empty buttonhole would be the haporth of tar and no error. So he entered a flower-shop and came out with a purple tassel of veronica, fixed in the wrong lapel. Hairy stared. What startled him was not so much the breach of etiquette as the foolhardiness of getting married in a turned suit.
A pestilential hotel was their next stop. Hairy changed his clothes and looked more mangy king of beasts than ever. Belacqua lunched frugally on stout and scallions, scarcely the meal, one would have thought, for a man about to be married for the second time. However.
At the Church of Saint Tamar, pointed almost to the point of indecency, the maids, attired in glove-tight gos- samer and sporting the awful ox-eyes, having just been joined by Mrs bboggs, who had chosen gauze and a bunch of omphalodes in her bosom, and Walter, very shaky and exalted, were massed in the porch when Morgante and Morgutte, to adopt the venomous reference of Una, not arm in arm but in single file, came forward. All but Walter were taken quite aback by the bridegroom's breath. Mrs bboggs buried her face (poor little Thelma! ) in the omphalodes, the Cleggs turned scarlet in unison, the
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Purefoys crowded into a shade, while Una was only re- strained by her hatred of anything in the nature of sacri- lege from spitting it out. Miss Perdue found the smell rather refreshing. The cad and his faithful companion advanced to the chancel and took up their stand beside the gate, the latter to the right and a little to the rear, holding a hat in each hand.
The south pews were plentifully furnished with mem- bers and adherents of the bboggs clan, while those to the north were empty save for two grotesques, seated far apart: Jimmy the Duck Skyrm, an aged cretin, outrageous in pepper and salt, Lavalliere and pull-over, gnashing his teeth without ceasing at invisible spaghetti; and Hermione Nautzsche, a powerfully built nymphomaniac panting in black and mauve between shipped crutches. Her missing sexual hemisphere, despite a keen look out all her life long, had somehow never entered her orbit, and now, bursting as she was with chalk at every joint, she had no great hopes of being rounded off in that interesting sense. Little does she dream what a flurry she has set up in the spirits of Skyrm, as he gobbles and mumbles the air at
the precise remove of enchantment behind her.
"Ecce" hissed Hairy, according to plan, and Belacqua's heart made a hopeless dash against the wall of its box, the church suddenly cruciform cage, the bulldogs of heaven holding the chancel, the procession about to give tongue in the porch, the transepts culs-de-sac. The organist darted into his loft like an assassin and set in motion the various forces that could be relied on to mature in
a merry peal all in good time. Thelma, looking very strik- ing and illegitimate in grey and green pieds de poule, split skirt and pique insertions of negress pink, swept up the aisle on the right arm of Otto Olaf, in whose head
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since leaving 55 a snatch had been churning and did not now desert him:
Drink little at a time,
Put water in your wine,
Miss your glass when you can, And go off the first man.
Wise old Otto Olaf! He died in the end of clot and left his cellar to the cuckoo.
The maids, terminating in the curious deltoid forma- tion of the Alba, Mrs bboggs and Walter, took their speed from the bride and their demeanour from the head-maid, with the result that their advance was at once rapid and sullen, for Una had become aware of an uncontrollable and ill-placed dehiscence in the stuff of her gossamer. The dread lest this should come to a head as she braced her- self to receive her foul little sister's gloves and bouquet, over and above an habitual misanthropy aggravated by the occasion, had made her, and hence her team of maids, appear as cross as two sticks. Always excepting the Alba who, bating the old pain in the core of her vitals that seemed to be a permanent part of her existence, could scarcely have been more diverted had she been the bride herself instead of the odd maid out. Also with Walter so close on her heels she was kept busy.
Without going so far as to say that Belacqua felt God or Thelma the sum of the Apostolic series, still there was in some indeterminate way communicated to the solem- nisation a kind or sort of mystical radiance that Joseph Smith would have found touching. Belacqua passed the ring like a mouse belling the cat, with a quick prayer all his own that the marriage knuckle of his love might so
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swell against the token and pledge as to spare her the pain of ever reading, inscribed on its inner periphery: Mens mea Lucia lucescit luce tua. His state of mind was so tense and complex at this stage (not to be wondered at when we consider all that he had gone through: the bereavement, obliging him to wear a hat at all seasons; the sweet and fierce pain of his passion for Miss bboggs; the long retreat in bed that had landed him in a nice marasmus; the stout and scallions; and now the sense of being cauterized with an outward and visible sign) that it might be likened to that of his dear departed Lucy listening pale and agog for the second incidence of
in the first movement of the Unbuttoned Symphony. Say what you will, you can't keep a dead mind down.
Talking of cats, Thelma remained throughout the serv- ice feline and inscrutable and was not at all incommoded by the famous viticultural passage which so abashed, or perhaps better angered, Belacqua that his platter face went from its native dingy to scarlet and back again throughlivid. Shouldhethenavailhimselfofthefirst . . . opportunity to sulphurate his bride and thus make sure? No, that would be doing the dirty on man's innocency. And make sure of what? Olives? The absurdity of the figure and all its harmonics like muscae volitantes pro- voked him to a copious scoff that would have put the kibosh on the sacrament altogether had it not been for the coolness and skill of the priest who covered as with a hand this coarseness with a collect.
Talking of hands, Thelma's right, as it danced through the find-the-lady sleights recommended in the liturgy, had quite bewitched the chancel. The curate swore he had
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never seen anything like it outside the Musee Rodin, it reminded the clerk of a Diirer cartoon and the priest of his incumbency, and it indicted Belacqua, tempest of stifled groans at having to produce anti-clockwise eyes and ges- tures for so long at a stretch, with Maupassant's scorching phrase: phylloxera of the spirit.
At length they had consented together beyond all pos- sibility of cavil, the dearly beloved had for ever after held their peace and then let their cry come with a rush, and Otto Olaf's rendering of:
Be present, awful Father! To give away this bride
had so moved the Sidneian heart of Skyrm that he trans- ferred himself, for better for worse, into the pew where Hermione sat as on a thwart, and there, under cover of a kinsman's seasonable emotion, rooted and snuffled his way into her affections with a suilline avidity that can only have seemed horrible to any decent person not con- versant with the phenomenon of crystallisation. The vestry was over, its signatures, duties and busses, and Mrs bboggs was back in 55, whipping the muslin off the Delikatessen, almost before the organist had regained control of his instrument. The Alba went with Walter in a taxi, Otto Olaf and Morgutte took a tram, the two grotesques never knew how they got there, while as for the maids, all but Una who wisely huddled on a cloak and cadged a lift, why they just floated on foot like brownies through the garish thoroughfares.
These are the little things that are so important.
To say that the drawing-room was thronged would be to put it mildly. It was stiff with guests. Otto Olaf found himself in that most painful of all possible positions, con-
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strained to see his furniture, his loved ones, suffer and know himself helpless to relieve them.
There was something so bright and meaty about the assembly, something so whorled in its disposition with the procession loosely coiled in the midst waiting to move off, that Walter was slowly but surely put in mind of a Benozzo fresco and said so in his high-smelling voice to the Alba.
"Ass and all" she replied, with indescribable bitterness.
Una stamped her foot like a sheep and like sheep all present turned scared faces towards her. She had some- how contrived to consolidate and shore up her gossamer, but now she had fresh grounds for complaint, namely, that the newly married couple, who should have been first home and in position for congratulations, had actually not yet turned up. Thus the action was brought to a dead halt. In its present headless condition the procession could not uncoil itself out through the door as arranged, and it was obvious that until the procession uncoiled itself there could be no relief for the congestion of casual ladies and gentlemen of which it was, so to speak, the mainspring. But let the truant pair appear and take their station and lo the press, as though by magic, would tick off merrily to its stand-up lunch. In the meantime, what a waste of good saliva!
"Raise me up Mr Quin" cried Una, in her anger throw- ing caution to the winds.
Hairy looked wildly at the bust of his partner, for so she was in pursuance of the regulations, they together forming —to vary the figure slightly—the fourth link of this nup- tial hawser, in the immediate rear, that is, of Mrs bboggs and Skyrm, who in their turn surveyed the massive flitches of Hermione, sagging and flagging in her crutches as in a quicksand, and poor Otto Olaf, trembling in every limb
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—looked wildly at it for a point of purchase at once effec- tive and respectful, some form of nelson that would not be too familiar, though for what purpose she desired to be raised he did not pause to inquire.
But before he could begin to make a mess of it in his flushing blushing panting ponderous way a great pertur- bation, dominated by the voice of Belacqua raised in abuse, made itself heard in the vestibule. This was they at last, but escorted by a pukkah Civic Guard of the highest rank compatible with duty and the stricken car- park attendant, as pale as a stone and clutching in his whole hand the damning number-plate.
Otto Olaf inserted his elbow in the eye of Hermione's crutch and released a dig. Having thus gained her atten- tion he said, in a ruined whisper: "My right lung is very weak. "
Hermione let a little pipe of terror.
"But my left lung" he vociferated "is as sound as a bell. "
"I suppose" said Mrs bboggs to James Skyrm, whose facial paddles had begun to churn the air so fiercely that she feared lest he were meditating some gallant act on behalf of his kinswoman, "I presume and I take it that Mr bboggs may do and say what he likes in his own home. "
James, on the matter being presented to him in this light, toed the line at once.
The tilted kepi of the attendant, its green band and gilt harp, and the clang beneath in black and white of his riotous hair and brow, so ravished Walter that he merely had to close his eyes to be back in Pisa. The powers of evocation of this Italianate Irishman were simply im- mense, and if his Dream of Fair to Middling Women, held up in the limae labor stage for the past ten or fifteen years,
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ever reaches the public, and Walter says it is bound to, we ought all be sure to get it and have a look at it any- way.
Belacqua reviled his captor and accuser with the utmost ferocity. Otto Olaf, then Capper, broke their ranks, the former to make a peace at all hazard, the latter, with bursting heart, a clean breast. The attendant was very soon browbeaten into admission that his injury had re- sulted, not from the ordinary exercise of his functions, not yet from any act of solicited assistance, but purely and simply from his own excessive zeal, rooted beyond a shadow of a doubt in greed.
A whip-round was made, and a small sum, on no ac- count to be regarded as anything in the nature of an indemnity, subscribed charitably for his relief. This closed the incident.
"My heart bleeds for him" said Walter.
"Not at all" said the Alba, "is he not insured? "
She had a sudden idea.
"See me home" she said to Walter.
Walter explained how he had been let in for a health,
upon which, if the offer were still open, he would be more than happy to see her home. They would go one of the long ways round that he adored.
"I make no promises" said the Alba.
The lunch was a great disappointment to all and sundry —a few firkins of molasses and husks off the ice. Belacqua closed his eyes and saw, clearer than ever before, a beer- engine. The sweets were doled out and then Thelma refused to cut the cake. She was a very strange girl. Pressed hard by Una and Bridie she appealed to her husband. Her husband! His advice to her, quite frankly, when after great difficulty he discovered what she was
"
WHAT A MISFORTUNE 145
talking about, was that it might be rather more gracious to cut the brute since all seemed so set on her doing so. Warming to his subject he urged her to hold out just a little longer, soon it would be all over. What had begun as a hurried and rather furtive aside now developed into a regular tete-a-tete, and when at length Thelma turned to do the gracious thing she found the cake in bits. It had been dressed with orange blossoms. What few of these had escaped the onivomaniacs she gathered up and hid in her bosom. These she would lock up in the furthest recesses of a casket and cherish as long as she drew breath, these and her own two orchids and Belacqua's veronica, which spire of passionate devotion she had resolved to secure against all comers, vogue la galere! Time might pulverise these mementoes but at least their elements would belong to her for ever. She was a most strange girl.
Walter wiped his boots on the Aubusson of Otto Olafs Empire ottoman, beat on his glass of Golden Guinea with his fizz-whisk for silence to fall and paid out his discourse, in a pawl-and-ratchet monotone than could never be un- said, as follows:
"It is on record that a lady member of the Lower House, and feme covert what is more, rose to her feet, those feet—for she was of Dublin stock—that Swift, re- buking the women of this country for their disregard of Shank's mare, described as being fit for nothing better than to be laid aside, and declared: 1 would rather com- mit adultery than suffer one drop of intoxicating liquor to pass my lips/ To which a gross baker, returned in the Labour interest, retorted: Wouldn't we all rather do that, Maam? '
This opening passage was rather too densely packed
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to gain the general suffrage. On Otto Olaf it took effect some five minutes later, causing him to laugh in a helpless and hysterical manner. The sight of Walter, ranging to and fro on his fantastic upholstery as though he were caged or contesting an election, had capsized his whole nervous system and his heart was filling up rapidly with evil and madness.
" 7Z faut marcher avec son temps' said a Deputy of the extreme Right. 'Cela depend' answered Briand in his sepulchral sneer 'dans quoi il marche! So do not heckle me, Herrschaften, because that would about finish me. "
He dropped his head, like a pelican after a long journey, pricked up the ears of his fearful moustache and shuffled and shifted his feet like one surprised in a dishonourable course of action. "He is out of his head" said the chief of the ill-intentioned ladies. Otto Olaf sidled up to the dumb- waiter. Una sat down with great ostentation on a pouf. "Let me know when he starts" she said. Thelma's eyes were darting this way and that in search of orange-blos- som, Belacqua was watching Thelma and the Alba was watching him. James and Hermione, emboldened by the molasses, were trying themselves on before a Regence trumeau. Mrs bboggs was manoeuvering for a vantage- ground that would bring both husband and lover into her field of vision. The usual precautionary plain-clothes man, standing head and shoulders out of the ruck, was reading his paper. Two splendid mixers found themselves ad- jacent. "Drunk" said the first, "well lit" agreed the second, and they exchanged a long look of intelligence.
In fairness to Walter it must be said that he was far from being penetrate with this hangdog facade, behind which all was mercy-seat al fresco and Shekinah and him- self, in the smartest mail, having his wounds dressed by the Alba-Morgen and looking through the orchards at the
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sun setting awkwardly in the blue shallows. Coming to with a start, shedding his cloak of dejection, he spoke the first words that he came across in his head:
"Semper ibi juvenis cum virgine, nulla senectus . "
Nullaque vis morbi, nullus dolor.
. .
Mrs bboggs, having already trembled to hear the be- lated chuckling of Otto Olaf and to observe his stealthy movements as he called in all the castle puddings on the dumb-waiter, was hardly surprised when he now opened rapid fire on his enemy with these. But Walter was able to block such trivial missiles, even caught one and ate it, while the old man's strength, and with it his rage, was soon spent. His arteries began to fray, with the fatal result as aforesaid, from this moment.
"I raise this glass" said Walter, extending it low down and a little to the left before him like a buckler, "this glori- ous bumper, on behalf of those present and the many pre- vented by age, sickness, infirmity or previous engagement from being with us, to you, dearest Thelma, whom we all love, and to you, Mr Shuah, whom Thelma loving and being loved of her we all love too I feel sure, now on the threshold of your bliss, and to such and so many consum- mations, earthy and other, as you have in mind. "
He plied the whisk, dealt himself a slow uppercut with the glass, and drank.
"I close these eyes" he proceeded, fixing them on Mrs bboggs and returning the glass to its base, "and I see them in that memorable island, Avalon, Atlantis, Hesperides, Ui Breasail, I don't insist, lapped in the Siamese haecceity of puffect love, revelling in the most delightful natural surroundings. Oh may that star, that radiant radical of their desire, not of mine, my friends, nor yet of yours, for
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no two stars, as Saint Paul tells us, are on a par in the matter of glory, delight them without ceasing with legiti- mate inflexions! " He unleashed what was left of the glori- ous bumper. "To Hymen's gracious mussy and protection we commit them, now, henceforth and for evermore. Slainte. "
This was the end of Walter's speech, and a very good end for such a bad speech every one felt it to be, but as he remained upright on the ottoman in a rapt and sus- pended pose, drinking in the plaudits, Belacqua assumed that there was some yet to come and so was startled to hear the voice of Una, whom the least semblance of pro- crastination invariably threw into the most dreadful pas- sion, calling on him petulantly to do the needful: "Now Mr Shuah, now then Mr Shuah, we're waiting on yer Mr Shuah. " This sordid hitch caused his acknowledgment to be rather less cordial than he had intended. He made it from where he stood, in the white voice of which he was a master:
"I have to thank: Miss bboggs, who henceforward may be so addressed without the least ambiguity, for her as always timely reminder; Mr. Draffin, for his kind torrents of meiosis; Mr and Mrs small double bee, for their Bounty; the Maids, with special reference to Belle-Belle their leader, for their finely calculated offices this day, some- thing more than merely buttress and less than vis a tergo; the Skyrm and Nautzsche, who I am glad to see have not yet done rising to the occasion; my faithful friend and best of men, Tiny Hairy Capper Quin, tipping the scale, day in day out, for me and for many, whose spiritual body is by now I feel confident a fait accompli; the entire Church staff; the Abbe Gabriel; as many, in fine, as have found the time to witness and acclaim, in how small a way soever, this instant of the whirligig. Eleleu. Jou Jou. "
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A student of Plutarch found himself rubbing shoulders with a physicist of the modern school.
,, "There you have him" said the first "in a nutshell.
"This bivalve world" said the other.
Their eyes met and filled with tears.
Whatever small chance these words of Belacqua might
have had of giving satisfaction was more than cancelled by his having been observed, in a dumbshow portmanteau of Selah and sigh of relief, to check off on his fingers each acknowledgment as it was made. Thelma marched to the door in an atmosphere of silence and shock, opened it and closed it behind her, which expression of independence rather cut the ground away from under Una, who had planned to sit down with a bang on the pouf, just at the moment when her services were obviously most needed, and thus put an open slight on the bride.
Hairy on the other hand, faithful to the last to his com- mission, reported smartly for duty.
"Slip out quick" said Belacqua "and run her behind into the lane off Denmark Street. "
The guests were now adjourning stiffly to the drawing- room, Walter and Otto Olaf polarised in bitter tig about the person of the Alba, Otto Olaf being it, while Her- mione and James, he propelling her in a tomb-deep arm- chair on casters, closed the recession. This grotesque equipage was brought to a standstill in the passage in consequence of the passenger's putting her feet to the ground, whether from coquetry or fatigue we leave it to the reader to determine.
"My crutches Jim" she said.
Jim went back for the crutches, Walter took sanctuary with Hermione, the Alba sent Otto Olaf flying, Jim came back with the sweeps, Hermione got them under her somehow, Walter rejoined the Alba. They remained all
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four quietly where they were, in the passage, discussing ways and means, severally first, then, when their interests were overheard to coincide, together. Four heads are better than two, eight than four, and so on.
After a fairly decent interval Belacqua excused himself just for a moment (as he did, it may be remembered, to the Poet in the Grosvenor), left the room, sprang up the stairs, caught up his bride like a Cossack and conveyed her by clandestine ways down to the garden that lay be- hind the house. He opened the wicket into the lane with the key that his love had fondly hoped would facilitate his suit in its early stages, and in another moment they had been clear of the abhorred premises when the sound of a broken-winded hue in the garden caused him to turn back.
This proceeded from that irrepressible quartet, Her- mione, the Alba, Walter and James, perspiring, suppliant, making their getaway.
Belacqua stood like a stock at gaze, with an overwhelm- ing sense that all this would happen to him again, in a dream or subsequent existence. Then he stepped to the one side, Thelma to the other, of the wicket, Caudine exit, saying to himself, as he watched the fugitives storm the postern like women boarding a tram: "It is right that they who are loved should live. " It was from this moment that he used to date in after years his crucial loss of interest in himself, as in a grape beyond his grasp.
But the alarm had been given, faces sprang up in the windows, Una began to scream havoc fit to burst, the mixers and the plain-clothes man came plunging up the garden in the van of pursuit. Belacqua threw them a tub in the form of Hairy, locked the wicket on the outside and committed himself and his wife to the Morgan, fast but noisy.
As for the other four, they did not feel safe until they
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reached the Cappella Lane, superb cenotheca, in Charle- mont House. Nobody would ever think of looking for them there.
Lucy was atra cura in the dicky the best part of the way down to Galway.
They all stopped for a drink. Thelma, as ever on his wrong side, began to insist that she was Mrs Shuah, mak- ing his little heart go pit-a-pat. He turned a face that she had never seen upon her.
"Do you ever hear tell of a babylan? " he said.
Now Thelma was a brave girl.
"A what did you say? " she said.
Belacqua went to the trouble of spelling the strange
word.
"Never" she said. "What is it? Something to eat? " "Oh" he said "you're thinking of a baba. "
"Well then" she said.
His eyes were parched, he closed them and saw, clearer
than ever before, the mule, up to its knees in mire, and astride its back a beaver, flogging it with a wooden sword. But she was not merely brave, she was discreet as well.
"Your veronica" she said "that I wanted so much, where is it gone? "
He clapped his hand to the place. Alas! the tassel had drooped, wormed its stem out of the slit, fallen to the ground and been trodden underfoot.
"Gone west" he said. They went further.
The Smeraldina's Billet Doux
JDel bel by own bloved, allways and for ever mine! ! Your letter is soked with tears death is the onely thing.
I had been crying bitterly, tears! tears! tears! and nothing els, then your letter cam with more tears, after I had read it ofer and ofer again I found I had ink spots on my face. The tears are rolling down my face. It is very early in the morning, the sun is riseing behind the black trees and soon that will change, the sky will be blue and the trees a golden brown, but there is one thing that dosent change, this pain and thos tears. Oh! Bel I love you terrible, I want you terrible, I want your body your soft white body Nagelnackt! My body needs you so terrible, my hands and lips and breasts and everything els on me, sometimes I find it very hard to keep my promise but I have kept it up till now and will keep on doing so untill we meet again and I can at last have you, at last be the Geliebte. Whitch is the greater: the pain of being away from eachother, or the pain of being with eachother, crying at eachother beauty? I sopose the last is the greater, otherwise we would of given up all hope of ever being anything els but miserable.
I was at a grand Film last night, first of all there wasent any of the usual hugging and kissing, I think I have never enjoyed or felt so sad at a Film as at that one, Sturm iiber Asien, if it comes to Dublin you must go and see it, the same Regie as Der Lebende Leichnam, it was realey
152
THE SMERALDINA's BILLET DOUX 153
something quite different from all other Films, nothing to do with Love (as everybody understands the word) no silly girls makeing sweet faces, nearly all old people from Asien with marvellous faces, black lakes and grand Land- schaften. Comeing home there was a new moon, it looked so grand ofer the black trees that it maid me cry. I opened my arms wide and tryed to imagine that you were lieing against my breasts and looking up at me like you did those moonlight nights when we walked together under the big chestnut trees with the stars shineing through the branches.
I met a new girl, very beautiful, pitch black hairs and very pale, she onely talks Egyptian. She told me about the man she loves, at present he is in Amerika far away in some lonely place and wont be back for the next three years and cant writ to her because there is no post office where he is staying and she onely gets a letter every 4 months, imagine if we only got a letter from each other every 4 months what sort of state we would be in by now, the poor girl I am very sorry for her. We went to a 5 o'clock tea dance, it was rather boreing but quite amuse- ing to see the people thinking of nothing but what they have on and the men settling their tyes every 5 minutes. On the way home I sudenly got in to a terrible state of sadness and woulden say a word, of course they were rage- ing with me, at the moment I dident care a dam, when I got in to the bus I got out a little Book and pencil and wrot down 100 times: Bloved Bloved Bloved Bel Bel Bel, I felt as if I never longed so much in my Me for the man I love, to be with him, with him. I want you so much in every sence of the word, you and onely you. After I got out of the bus and was walking down the street I yelled out wahnsinnig wahnsinnig! wahnsinnig! Frau Schlank brought down your sock and that made me cry more than ever. I dont think I will send it to you, I will put it in to
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the drawer with your sweet letter. I had allso a letter from a man who asked me to go out with him to dance on Saturday evening, I sopose I will go. I know my bloved dosent mind and it makes the time go round quicker, the man is a bit of a fool but dances quite well and is the right hight for me. A flirt is very amuseing but shouldent go further than that.
Then I met the old man with the pipe and he told me I had a blue letter and then the fat man with the keys in the passage and he said Griiss Gott but I dident hear him.
Soon I will be counting the hours untill I can go to the station and find you amongst the crowded platform but I dont think I will be able to wear my grey costume if it is too cold and then I will have to wear Mammy furcoat. You will be by me on the 23th wont you Bel, my Bel with the beautiful lips and hands and eyes and face and every- thing that is on you, and now with your poor sore face it would make no diffrence. Two more weeks of agony pain and sadness! 14 more days oh! God and thos sleepless nights! ! ! How long? How long?
I had a very queer dream last night about you and me in a dark forest, we were lieing together on a path, when sudenly you changed in to a baby and dident know what love was and I was trying to tell you that I loved you more than anything on earth but you dident understand and wouldent have any thing to do with me but it was all a dream so it dosent count. There is no object in me trying to tell you how much I love you because I will never suc- ceed, I know that for sirten. Is he the man I have allways been looking for? Yes! but then why cant he give that what I have been longing for for the last 6 months? I ofen wonder what is on you that makes me love you so greatly. I love you iiber alles in dieser Welt, mehr als alles auf Himmel, Erde und Holle. One thing I thank God for that
THE SMERALDlNA's BILLET DOUX 155
our love is so vast. I ofen wonder who I am to thank that you are born and that we met, I sopose I beter not start trying to find out whose fault it is that you are born. It comes back to the same thing, and that is, that I onely know ONE THING and that is that / LOVE YOU AND I AM ALLWAYS YOUR SMERALDINA and that is the onely thing that matters most in our life YOU LOVE ME
AND ARE ALLWAYS MY BEL.
Analiese is hacking round on the piano and there is no
peace so I will stop. Now I am going to go on reading my Book called Die Grosse Liebe and then perhaps I will try and struggel through the Beethoven sonate, it is the onely thing that can take me away from my misery, I love play- ing quietly to myself in the evenings it gives me such a rest.
Bel! Bel! Bel! your letter has just come! Even if you cease to be all and allways mine! ! ! Oh! God how could you ever say such a thing, for lord sake dont! ! ! for god sake dont ever suggest such a thing again! I just berry my head in my hands and soke your letter with tears . . . Bel! Bel! how could you ever doubt me? Meine Ruh ist hin mein Herz ist schwer ich finde Sie nimmer und nimmer mehr. (GoethesFaust. ) LordLordLordforgodsaketell me strate away what agsactly I have done. Is everything indiffrent to you? Evedintly you cant be bothered with a goat like me. If I dont stop writing you wont be able to read this letter because it will be all ofer tears. Bel! Bel! my love is so vast that when I am introduced to some young man and he starts doing the polite I get a quivver all ofer. I know what I am lifeing for, your last letter is allways on my breast when I wake up in the morning and see the sun rise. Ich sen' Dich nicht mehr Tranen hindern mich! My God! my true dog! my baby!
I must get a new nib, this old pen is gone to the dogs,
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I can't writ with it any more, it is the one I got from Woll- worth so you can imagine how good it must be.
Mammy wanted me to go out for a walk this afternoon, but I hate walking, I get so tired putting one foot delib- ertely in front of the other. Do you remember last sum- mer (of course he dose) and how lovely it was lieing hearing the bees summing and the birds singing, and the big butterfly that cam past, it looked grand, it was dark brown with yellow spots and looked so beautiful in the sun, and my body was quite brown all ofer and I dident feel the cold any more. Now the snow is all melted and the wood is as black as ever and the sky is allways grey except in the early morning and even then one can onely see spots of red between the black clouds.
My hairs are freshily washed and I have a bit more energie than usual but still feel very passiv. For god sake dont overdo yourself and try and not get drunk again, I mean in that way that makes you sick.
We cam home in the bus this evening but we dident go that way through the fields with all the little paths be- cause the big road was mended. Mammy allways asks after you. She says the time is flying, it will be no time untill Xmas and she says she hopes Frau Holle makes her bed ofen. I heard her saying to Daddy, I wonder how it is that Ivy and Bill get on my nerves when they go on together and Smerry and Bel never did. She ment when we are sitting on eachother knee and so on, I think it is because the love between Ivy and Bill is not real, there allways sems to be some sort of affection about it.
I curse the old body all day asswell because I have some dam thing on my leg so that I can barely walk, I don't know what it is or how it got there but it is there and full of matter to hell with it.
To-day is one of the days when I see everything more
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clearer than ever and I am sure everything will go right in the end.
Der Tag wird kommen und die stille Nacht! ! !
I dont genau know when but if I dident think so I would cullaps with this agony, thes terrible long dark nights and onely your image to console me. I like the little white statue so much and am longing for the day when you and I will be standing like that and not haveing to think that there is somebody outside that can come in any minute.
Arschlochweh is married and gone to the Schweiz with his wife.
You ask me to give you a taske. I think I have gived you a big enough a taske. I am longing to see the "thing" you wrotaboutmy"beauty"(asyoucallit) Imustsay(with- out wanting any complements) I cant see anything very much to writ about except the usual rot men writ about women.
Darling Bel I must stop. My bed is lonely without me and your photograph is waiting to be kissed so I better give them both peace. Soon it will all take an end, you will be by me and will feel that marvellous pain again that we did in the dark mountains and the big black lake blow and will walk in the fields covered with cowslips and Flieder and will hold once more in your arms
your own sad bloved Smeraldina
P. S. One day nearer to the silent Night! ! !
Yellow
Ihe night-nurse bounced in on the tick of five and turned on the light. Belacqua waked feeling greatly refreshed and eager to wrestle with this new day. He had underlined, as quite a callow boy, a phrase in Hardy's Tess, won by dint of cogging in the Synod: When grief ceases to be specu- lative, sleep sees her opportunity. He had manipulated that sentence for many years now, emending its terms, as joy for grief, to answer his occasions, even calling upon it to bear the strain of certain applications for which he feared it had not been intended, and still it held good through it all. He waked with it now in his mind, as though it had been there all the time he slept, holding that fragile place against dreams.
The nurse brought a pot of tea and a glass of strong salts on a tray.
"Pfui! " exclaimed Belacqua.
But the callous girl preferred to disregard this.
"When are they doing me? " he asked.
"You are down for twelve" she said.
Down . . . !
She took herself off.
He drank the salts and two cups of tea and be damned
to the whole of them. Then of course he was wide awake, poor fellow. But what cared he, what cared saucy Bel-
158
acqua? He switched off the lamp and lay back on his back in this the darkest hour, smoking.
Carry it off as he might, he was in a dreadful situation. At twelve sharp he would be sliced open—zeep! —with a bistoury. This was the idea that his mind for the moment was in no fit state to entertain. If this Hunnish idea once got a foothold in his little psyche in its present unready condition, topsy-turvy after yesterday's debauch of anxi- ety and then the good night's sleep coming on top of that, it would be annihilated. The psyche, not the idea, which was precisely the reverse of what he wished. For himself, to do him justice, he did not care. His mind might cave in for all he cared, he was tired of the old bastardo. But the unfortunate part of it was that this would appear in his behaviour, he would scream and kick and bite and scratch when they came for him, beg for execution to be stayed and perhaps even wet the bed, and what a reflection on his late family that would be! The grand old family Huguenot guts, he could not do the dirty on them like that. (To say nothing of his natural anxiety to be put to rights with as little fuss as possible.
My sufferings under the anaesthetic, he reflected, will be exquisite, but I shall not remember them.
He dashed out his cigarette and put on the lamp, this not so much for the company of the light as in order to postpone daybreak until he should feel a little more sure of himself. Daybreak, with its suggestion of a nasty birth, he could not bear. Downright and all as he was, he could not bear the sight of this punctilious and almost, he some- times felt, superfluous delivery. This was mere folly and well he knew it. He tried hard to cure himself, to frighten or laugh himself out of this weakness, but to no avail. He would grow tired and say to himself: I am what I am
)
YELLOW 159
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That was the end of all his meditations and endeavours: I am what I am. He had read the phrase somewhere and liked it and made it his own.
But God at least was good, as He usually is if we only know how to take Him, in this way, that six hours sep- arated him (Belacqua) from the ordeal, six hours were allotted to him in which to make up his mind, as a pretty drab her face for an enemy. His getting the fleam in the neck, his suffering the tortures of the damned while seem- ing to slumber as peacefully as a little child, were of no consequence, as hope saved they were not, so long as his mind were master of the thought of them. What he had to do, and had with typical slackness put off doing till the last moment, was to arrange a hot reception in his mind for the thought of all the little acts of kindness that he was to endure before the day was out. Then he would be able
to put a good face on it. Otherwise not. Otherwise he would bite, scratch, etc. , when they came for him. Now the good face was all that concerned him, the bold devil- may-care expression. (Except of course that he was also anxioustobemadewellwiththeleastpossibleado. ) He did not pause to consider himself in this matter, the light that the coming ordeal would shed on his irrevocable self, because he really was tired of that old bastardo. No, his whole concern was with other people, the lift-boy, nurses and sisters, the local doc coming to put him off, the emi- nent surgeon, the handy man at hand to clean up and put the bits into the incinerator, and all the friends of his late family, who would ferret out the whole truth. It did not matter about him, he was what he was. But these out- siders, the family guts and so on and so forth, all these things had to be considered.
An asthmatic in the room overhead was coughing his heart up. God bless you, thought Belacqua, you make
things easier for me. But when did the unfortunate sleep? During the day, the livelong day, through the stress of the day. At twelve sharp he would be sound, or, better again, just dozing off.
