Belacqua, idealised
something
hor- rid, made the widow and her huge escort, who now stalked off, four lovely deaf ears, faces tilted slightly to the starry sky, one in this sordid matter.
Samuel Beckett
A little sealed cardboard box lying on the mantelpiece caught his eye.
He read the inscription: Fraisse's Ferruginous Ampoules for the Intensive Treatment of Anaemia by Intramuscular Squirtation.
Registered Trademark—Mozart.
The little Hexenmeister of Don Giovanni, now in his narrow cell for ever mislaid, dragged into bloodlessness!
How very amus- ing.
Really the world was in great form this morning.
Now two further women, there was no end to them, the one of a certain age, the other not, entered, ripping off their regulation cuffs as they advanced. They pounced on the bed. The precautionary oil-sheet, the cradle . . . Belac- qua padded up and down before the fire, the ends of his pyjamas tucked like a cyclist's into the sinister socks. He would smoke one more cigarette, nor count the cost. It was
astonishing, when he came to think of it, how the entire routine of this place, down to the meanest detail, was cal- culated to a cow's toe to promote a single end, the relief of suffering in the long run. Observe how he dots his i's now and crucifies his t's to the top of his bent. He was being put to his trumps.
Surreptitiously they searched his yellow face for signs of discomposure. In vain. It was a mask. But perhaps his voice would tremble. One, she whose life had changed, took it upon herself to say in a peevish tone:
"Sister Beamish won't bless you for soiling her good socks. "
Sister Beamish would not bless him.
The voice of this person was in ruins, but she abused it further.
"Would you not stand on the mat? "
His mind was made up in a flash: he would stand on the mat. He would meet them in this matter. If he refused to stand on the mat he was lost in the eyes of these two women.
"Anything" he said "to oblige Sister Beamish. "
Miranda was having a busy morning. Now she appeared for the fourth or fifth time, he had lost count, complete with shadowy assistants. The room seemed full of grey women. It was like a dream.
"If you have any false teeth" she said "you may remove them. "
His hour was at hand, there was no blinking at the fact.
Going down in the lift with Miranda he felt his glasses under his hand. This was a blessed accident if you like, just when the silence was becoming awkward.
"Can I trust you with these? " he said.
She put them into her bosom. The divine creature! He would assault her in another minute.
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"No smoking" she said "in the operating-theatre. "
The surgeon was washing his invaluable hands as Belac- qua swaggered through the antechamber. He that hath clean hands shall be stronger. Belacqua cut the surgeon. But he flashed a dazzling smile at the Wincarnis. She would not forget that in a hurry.
He bounced up on to the table like a bridegroom. The local doc was in great form, he had just come from stand- ing best man, he was all togged up under his vestments. He recited his exhortation and clapped on the nozzle.
"Are you right? " said Belacqua.
The mixture was too rich, there could be no question about that. His heart was running away, terrible yellow yerks in his skull. "One of the best," he heard those words that did not refer to him. The expression reassured him. The best man clawed at his tap.
By Christ! he did die!
They had clean forgotten to auscultate him!
Draff
Shuah, Belacqua, in a Nursing Home.
1hough this was stale news to Mrs Shuah, for she had inserted it ( by telephone ) herself, yet she felt, on reading it in the morning after paper, a little shock of surprise, as
on opening telegram confirming advance booking in crowded hotel. Then the thought of friends, their unas- sumed grief giving zest to their bacon and eggs, the first phrases of sympathy with her in this great loss modulating from porridge to marmalade, from whispers and gasps to the calm ejaculations of chat, in a dozen households that she could have mentioned, set in motion throughout her bodily economy, with results that plainly appeared at once on her face, the wheels of mourning. Whereupon she was without thought or feeling, just a slush, a teary coenaesthe- sis.
This particular Mrs Shuah, as stated thus far at all events, does not sound very like Thelma nee bboggs, nor is she. Thelma nee bboggs perished of sunset and honey- moon that time in Connemara. Then shortly after that they suddenly seemed to be all dead, Lucy of course long since, Ruby duly, Winnie to decency, Alba Perdue in the natural course of being seen home. Belacqua looked round and the Smeraldina was the only sail in sight. In next to no time she had made up his mind by not merely loving but
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wanting him with such quasi-Gorgonesque impatience as her letter precited evinces. She and no other therefore is the Mrs Shuah who now, after less than a year in the ultra- violet intimacy of the compound of ephebe and old wo- man that he was, reads in the paper that she had begun to survive him.
Bodies don't matter but hers went something like this: big enormous breasts, big breech, Botticelli thighs, knock- knees, square ankles, wobbly, poppata, mammose, slob- bery-blubbery, bubbubbubbub, the real button-busting Weib, ripe. Then, perched away high out of sight on top of this porpoise prism, the sweetest little pale Pisanello of a birdface ever. She was like Lucrezia del Fede, pale and belle, a pale belle Braut, with a winter skin like an old sail in the wind. The root and the source of the athletic or aesthetic blob of a birdnose never palled, unless when he had a costive coryza himself, on Belacqua's forefinger pad and nail, with which he went probing and plumbing and boring the place just as for many years he polished his glasses (ecstasy of attrition! ), or suffered the shakes and grace-note strangulations and enthrottlements of the Win- kelmusik of Szopen or Pichon or Chopinek or Chopinetto or whoever it was embraced her heartily as sure as his name was Fred, dying all his life (thank you Mr Auber) on a sickroom talent (thank you Mr Field) and a Klein- meister's Leidenschaftsucherei (thank you Mr Beckett), or ascended across the Fulda or the Tolka or the Poddle or the Volga as the case might be, and he never dreaming that on each and all these occasions he was pandering to the most iniquitous excesses of a certain kind of sub- limation. The wretched little wet rag of an upper lip, pug- nozzling up and back in what you might nearly call a kind of a duck or a cobra sneer to the nostrils, was happily to some extent amended by the wanton pout of its fellow
and the forward jaws to match—a brilliant recovery. The skull of this strapping girl was shaped like a wedge. The ears of course were shells, the eyes shafts of reseda (his favourite colour) into an oreless mind. The hair was as black as the pots and grew so thick and low athwart the templesthatthebrowwasreducedtoafanlight justthe
(
kind of shaped brow that he most admired). But what
matter about bodies?
She got out of the narrow bed on the wrong side, but
she was never clear in her mind as to which was the right side and which the wrong, and went into the room where he was laid out, the big bible wrapped in a napkin still under his chin. She stood at the end of the bed in her lotus chintz pyjamas, as glazed as those eyes that she could not see, and held her breath. His forehead, when she ventured to lay the back of her hand across it, was much less chilly than she had expected, but that no doubt was explained by her own peripheral circulation, which was wretched. She caught hold of his hands, folded, not on his breast as she would have wished, but lower down, and rearranged them. Scarcely had she gone down on her bended knees after having made this adjustment when a spasm of anx- iety, lest there should be anything the matter with this corpse that rigor mortis had apparently passed over, straightened her up. She hoped it was all right. Baulked of her prayer, baulked of a last long look at the disaffected face, its contemptuous probity that would fall to pieces, she took herself off to prepare her weeds, for it would not do to be seen in lotus chintz. Black suited her, black and green had always been her colours. She found in her room what she had in mind, an Ethiope one-piece gashed and slashed with emerald insertions. She brought it to her work-table in the penannular bow-window, she sat down trembling and began to fix it. It was like being up
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in the sky in a bubble, the sun streaming in ( through the
curtains, theblueallroundher. Soonthefloorwasstrewn )
with the bright cuttings, it went to her heart to rip them they looked so lovely. Not a flower, not a flower sweet.
One insertion in the Press
Makes minus how many to make a black dress?
She was so sad and busy, the sobs were so quick to ripen and burst in her mind and the work was so nice, that she did not notice a fat drab demon approach the house nor hear his uproarious endeavours not to intrude on the gravel. Up came his card. Mr Malacoda. Most respectfully desirous to measure. A sob, instead of bursting, withered. The Smeraldina whimpered that she was sorry but she could not admit this Mr Malacoda, she could not have the Master measured. Mary Ann's leprous features were much abused with the usual. In a crisis like this, however, she was worth ten or fifteen of her mistress.
"He'd be about the Master's size" she said.
Just fancy her noticing that!
"Then why don't you tell him so" moaned the Smer-
aldina "and let do the best he can and not be coming up here to torment me. "
What could an inch or so possibly matter this way or that? There was no question of having to skimp aragonite or peperino. The coffin was not going to eat him.
Mary Ann returned to the torment with the sad news that Mr Malacoda was at that very moment springing up the stairs with a tape in his black claws. The Smeraldina started up, clutching the scissor, and began to plunge to- wards the door. But the thought of the thoral chintz brought her up short. Had again!
"You might at least bring me a cup of tea" she said. Mary Ann left the room.
"And a lightly boiled egg" cried the Smeraldina.
A small wreath, of arum lilies needless to say, arrived in a box—anonymous. This the Smeraldina buried. She sought out the gardener, a slow shy slob of a man with a dripping moustache, and found him watering in a dazed and hopeless manner a bed of blighted sweet-william. Someone had stolen his rose, he mowed down the flowers with hard jets of water. She sent him flying up into the heart of the mountains with two sacks to gather bracken. Then he might go home. Herself she stripped a eucalyptus of its boughs.
The parson came churning up the avenue in bottom gear, confirmed his worst fears with a quick look at the windows, let fall his rustless all-steel in sorrow and anger on the gravel, and walked right in.
"I never knew anyone founder" he declared in a pas- sionate way, "and I've seen a good many. "
"No" said the Smeraldina.
"Automatic dispensation" he cried. "Strength from on high" snapping his thumb "like that. Meet in Paradize. "
"Yes" said the Smeraldina.
"No sooner does he arrive" clasping his hands and look- ing up (why up? ) "there where there is no time, than you burst in upon him. "
"He's all right" said the Smeraldina. "I know that. " "Therefore be glad" cried the parson.
He pedalled away like a weaver's shuttle (but not be-
fore she had covenanted to be glad) to administer the Eucharist, of which he always carried an abundance in a satchel on the bracket of his bike, to a moneyed wether up the road whose tale was nearly told. Seven and six a time.
Capper Quin arrived on tiptire, in a car of his very own. He grappled with the widow, he simply could not help it. She was a sensible girl in some ways, she was not ashamed
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to let herself go in the arms of a man of her own weight at last. They broke away, carrot plucked from tin of grease, and Hairy stood humbly before her, hers to command. He was greatly improved, commerce with the things of time had greatly improved him. Now he could speak quite nicely, he did not simply have to abandon his periods in despair after a word or two.
She stood by while he freighted the car. The sacks dis- tended with fern and bracken; the boughs of eucalyptus, piecemeal to meet the occasion, tied up in an old stable jacket; a superb shrub of verbena treated in the same way; a vat of moss; a bag of wire tholes. When all these things had been safely stowed and the car pointed in the right direction, Hairy followed her lead into the house and took up position, the crutch well split, the great feet splayed, swollen paws appaumee two dangling chunks of blood ballast, aborted mammae much in evidence, at gaze. Even Ireland has a few animals, now generally regarded as varieties, which have been ranked as species by some zoologists. He felt his face improving as grief modelled the features.
"Might I see him? " he whispered, like a priest asking for a book in the Trinity College Library.
She had herself supported up the stairs, she led the way into the death-chamber as though it belonged to her. They diverged, the body was between them on the bed like the keys between nations in Velasquez's Lances, like the water between Buda and Pest, and so on, hyphen of reality.
"Very beautiful" said Hairy.
"I think very" said the Smeraldina.
"They all are" said Hairy.
Shed a tear, damn you, she thought, I can't. But he
went one better, he choked a whole bucketful back. His face improved rapidly.
They met again at the foot of the bed, like parallels made to for the sake of argument, and occupied this fresh viewpoint with heads together until the Smeraldina, feel- ing the absurdity of the position, detached herself, left the room and closed the door behind her, on the dying and the dead.
Hairy felt it was up to him now to feel something.
"You are quieter than humus" he said in his mind, "you will give the bowels of the earth a queer old lesson in quiet. "
That was the best he could manage at the time. But bowels surely was hardly the right word. That was where Queen Anne had the gout.
The hands pious on the sternum were unseemly, de- funct crusader, absolved from polite campaign. Hairy reached out with his endless arms and tugged at the marble members. Two nouns and two adjectives. Not a stir out of them. How stupid of him.
"This is final" he thought.
Belacqua had often looked forward to meeting the girls, Lucy especially, hallowed and transfigured beyond the veil. What a hope! Death had already cured him of that naivete.
Hairy, anxious though he was to rejoin the Smeraldina while his face was at its best, before it relapsed into the workaday dumpling, steak and kidney pudding, had his work cut out to tear himself away. For he could not throw off the impression that he was letting slip a rare occasion to feel something really stupendous, something that no- body had ever felt before. But time pressed. The Smeral- dina was pawing the ground, his own personal features were waning (or, perhaps better, waxing). In the end he took his leave without kneeling, without a prayer, but his brain quite prostrate and suppliant before this first fact of
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its experience. That was at least something. He would have welcomed a long Largo, on the black notes for pref- erence.
In the cemetery the light was failing, the sea moonstone washing the countless toes turned up, the mountains swarthy Uccello behind the headstones. The loveliest little lap of earth you ever saw. Hairy shifted the roof of planks from off the brand-new pit and went down, down, down the narrow steps carefully not removed by the grounds- man. His head came to rest below the surface of the earth. What a nerve the man had to be sure. The significance of this was lost on the Smeraldina, she merely crouched on the brink.
Well, to make a long story short, the pair of them be- tween them, she feeding him from above, upholstered the grave: the floor with moss and fern, the walls with the verdure outstanding. Low down the clay was so hard that Hairy had to take his shoe to the tholes. However they made a great job of it, not a spot of clay showed when they had done, all was lush, green and most sweet smell- ing.
But soon it would be black and dark night, a chill wind arose, the pangs of light began on the foothills, the moon- stone turned to ashes. The Smeraldina shivered, as well she might. Hairy, taking a last look round at his handi- work, was as snug as a bug in a rug. Belacqua lay dead on the bed with the timeless mock on the face. Hairy came up out of the hole, drew up the steps behind him, put back the planks and rubbed his hands with a sigh, labour ended, labour of love, painful duty.
All of a sudden the groundsman was there, a fine man in ruins, as drunk as he knew how, giving point to the consecrated ground. He was most moved by their atten- tions, without parallel in his experience of the forsaken.
For his own part he could be relied on to work himself to the bone for the defunct, whom he had known well, not only as a man, but as a boy also. The Smeraldina had a quick vision of Belacqua as a boy, shinning up the larch trees, his breast expanding to the world.
Hairy feeling father, brother, husband, confessor, friend of the family (what family? ) and the inevitable something more, did the heavy with the reeling groundsman. The Smeraldina played up.
Belacqua, idealised something hor- rid, made the widow and her huge escort, who now stalked off, four lovely deaf ears, faces tilted slightly to the starry sky, one in this sordid matter.
"Home Hairy" she said.
Hairy quickened his step, enveloped her, helped her along.
"I don't see the moon" she said.
Like a jack-in-the-box the satellite obliged, let down her shining ladder to the shore. She had a long lonely climb before her.
The groundsman, cut to the quick, mindful of his lum- bago, sat down on the planks and lowered his bottle of stout. Guinness for Thinness, stultifying stout. He had lost interest in all the shabby mysteries, he was beyond caring. He strained his ear for the future, and what did he hear? All the ancient punctured themes recurring, creeping up the treble out of sound. Very well. Let the essence of his being stay where it was, in liquor and liquor's harmonics, accepted gladly as the ultimate expression of his non- chalance. He rose and made his water agin a cypress.
That night Hairy lay in his bed, tossed and turned for various reasons, fell off at last into a troubled sleep, woke not at all refreshed to a day of wind and rain, the weather having broken in the small hours.
At midday to the Smeraldina, in bed indulging her most
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secret thoughts, salivating slightly for a lightly boiled egg, Mary Ann appeared. Mr Malacoda. Keen to coffin. The Smeraldina observed in a bitter voice that if the man must coffin why coffin he must, surely there was no clear call on Mary Ann to make a point of pestering her with what could not be cured.
A thin wall, a good but thin wall, separated her from Mr Malacoda and assistant ungulata, in a fever to have done. Cerements did not suit the defunct, with their riot of frills and lace they made him look like a pantomime baby.
When Hairy arrived it was the magic hour, Homer dusk, when the subliminal rats came abroad on their rounds. The little something extra that he felt he had come in for made great strides at the expense of its co-heirs. He agreed ab- solutely that cerements did not suit the defunct, somehow they made him look so put-upon and helpless, almost as though he had not done dying. He stayed to supper.
A point to bear in mind is that the Smeraldina was so naturally happy-go-lucky that she did not find it at all easy to feel deeply, or rather, perhaps better, be deeply sentimental. Her life had been springing leaks for as long as she cared to remember. A husband—and how! —was oakum in the end the same as everything else, prophylac- tic, a wire bandage of Jalade-Lafont. Belacqua had come unstuck like his own favour of veronica in What a Mis- fortune. Losers seekers. The position was not quite so simple as all that, there was some sentimental factor in play (or at work) complicating the position, but that was more or less it.
That night the weather so mended as to be more than merely clement for the ceremony. Malacoda and Co. turned up bright and early with their six cylinder hearse, black as Ulysses's cruiser. The demon, quite unable to control his impatience to cover, could only manage a quick
flirt with Mary Ann. The Smeraldina was through with the death-chamber, not that she was callous, quite the reverse, but the livery of death, leaving aside its pale flag alto- gether, was too much for her. Hairy, more and more self- assured servitor, was of the same opinion. So let the good man cover by all means. That was what he was there for, that was what he was paid for. Let the whole nightmare brood walk up by all manner of means.
Now he was grinning up at the lid at last. "No flowers" said Hairy.
God forbid!
"And no friends. "
Need he ask!
The parson arrived in the nick of time. He had been casting out devils all morning, he was in a muck sweat.
Hairy scampered out into the sunlight and the balmy breeze, free of the house that was suddenly jerry-built mausoleum, with a message from his sweet ward to the driver whose name was Scarmiglione, a strongly worded message exhorting him to temper full speed with due cau- tion. "Let her out" said Hairy in his pretentious jargon "to the irreducible coefficient of safety. " Scarmiglione met this request with a look of petrified courtesy. On these trips he deferred to the speed-controlling washer of his own mind and conscience, and to none other. He was adamant in this matter. Hairy shrank away from the affable rictus.
All aboard. All souls at half-mast. Aye-aye.
Mary Ann found the gardener shut up in the toolshed, all of a heap on an upturned box, nervously tying knots in a piece of raffia. He was not neglecting his work, he was
grieving.
"The only one" said Mary Ann, alluding to their late
employer, "as ever I dreamed on," as though that could possibly interest the gardener. But what higher tribute
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could she pay? The gardener had secured his retreat, she could not come at him, she could only hold her livid far- thing of a face at the broken window and commit copious nuisance with her opinions and impressions. She did not expect an answer, she did not pause for one, she received none. He heard the voice at a great distance, but could make no sense of it. For he was, temporarily at all events, just a clod of gloom, in which concern for his own state of health counted for more than he would have cared to admit. Was he overdoing things about the place? It was hard to say. He heard Mary Ann in the run, her voice raised in furious hallali, butchering a fowl for the table. He began to look about for his line. It was gone from its place. Someone had stolen his line. Some unauthorised person had taken his line, with the result that now he was helpless to put down his broccoli. He rose and let himself out, he slobbered out of darkness into light, he chose a place in the sun and settled, he was like a colossal fly trim- ming its load of typhus. Gradually he cheered up. Ten to one God was in his heaven.
Though the grave was deep the committal was neat, not a hitch; its words perhaps a trifle mis-directed on the vile, the sure and certain hope rather gobbled up in the fact of departure. The tone conveyed to "earth to earth" was a triumph of passionate and contemptuous reproach to all the living. How dared they continue full of misery! Pah!
"Now in Gaelic" said Hairy on the way home "they could not say that. "
"What could they not say? " said the parson. He would not rest until he knew.
"O Death where is thy sting? " replied Hairy. "They have no words for these big ideas. "
This was more than enough for the parson, a canon of
the Church of Ireland, who hastily exclaimed, no doubt by way of a shining straw, to the Smeraldina:
,,
"My wife would so much like to see you.
"O Anthrax" said Hairy "where is thy pustule? "
"She has been through the fire" said the parson, "she
understands. My poor dear mother-in-law! "
"O G. P. I. " said Hairy "where are thy rats? "
By the mercy of God the good canon was slow to wrath. "And so on" said Hairy "and so forth. They can't say it
once and for all. A spalpeen's babble. "
Belacqua dead and buried, Hairy seemed to have taken
on a new lease of life. He spoke well, with commendable assurance; he looked better, less obese cretin and spado than ever before; and he felt better, which was a great thing. Perhaps the explanation of this was that while Belacqua was alive Hairy could not be himself, or, if you prefer, could be nothing else. Whereas now the defunct, such of his parts at least as might be made to fit, could be pressed into service, incorporated in the daily ellipses of Capper Quin without his having to face the risk of exposure. Already Belacqua was not wholly dead, but merely mutilated. The Smeraldina appreciated this with- out thinking.
As for her, it was almost as though she had suffered the inverse change. She had died in part. She had defi- nitely ceased to exist in that particular part which Belac- qua had been at such pains to isolate, the public part so cruelly made private for his convenience, her last clandes- tine aspect1 reduced to a radiograph and exploited to gin- ger his secret occasions. That was down the mine Daddy with the dead Sadomasochist. Her spiritual equivalent, to give it a name, had been measured, coffined and covered
1 What a competent poet once called the bella menzogna.
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by Nick Malacoda. As material for anagogy (Greek g if you don't mind) the worms were welcome to her.
What was left was just a fine strapping lump of a girl or woman, theatre nurse in Yellow from the neck down, bursting with Lebensgeist at every suture, itching to be taken at her—very much so to speak—face value, and by force for preference.
Now it so happened that these two processes, a kind of marginal metabolism possibly you might call them, inde- pendent but of common origin, constructive in the case of the man, destructive and delightfully excrementitious in the case of the woman, culminated simultaneously on the drive back from the grave.
Hairy stopped the car.
"Step down" he said to the parson, "I don't like you. " The parson appealed mutely to the Smeraldina. She had
nothing whatever to say to him. Never again in this life would she occupy any position more partisan than that of a comfortably covered bone of contention, her mind was made up.
"Bill the executors" said Hairy "and out you hop. "
The parson did as Hairy bid. He felt miserable. They did not even give him a chance to cock up the other cheek. He racked his brains for coals of fire. As the car began to move away he jumped up nimbly on the running-board, stooped forward in the lee of the windscreen and began, heedless of punctuation, in a lamentable voice:
".
. .
no more death neither sorrow nor crying neither
"
shall there be any more
At which point, the car beginning to sway in a perilous
manner, he was obliged to break off in order to save his life. He stood in the road, far from home, and hoped, with- out exactly making a prayer out of it, that they might be forgiven.
"Wouldn't he give you the sick" said Hairy "with his Noo Gefoozleum. "
Little remains to be told. On their return they found the house in flames, the home to which Belacqua had brought three brides a raging furnace. It transpired that during their absence something had snapped in the brain of the gardener, who had ravished the servant girl and then set the premises on fire. He had neither given himself up nor tried to escape, he had shut himself up in the tool-shed and awaited arrest.
"Ravished Mary Ann" exclaimed the Smeraldina.
"So she deposes" said a high official of the Civic Guard. "It was she who raised the alarm. "
Hairy looked this dignitary up and down.
"I don't see your fiddle" he said.
"Where is the girl? " asked the Smeraldina.
"She has gone home to her Mother" answered the high
official.
She tried him again.
"Where is the gardener? "
But he had been expecting this question.
"He resisted arrest, he has been taken to hospital. " "Where are the heroes of the fire-brigade" said Hairy,
entering into the spirit of the thing, "the boys of the old brigade, the Tara Street Cossacks? May we expect them to-day? They would act as a kind of antiphlogistic. "
This Hairy was a revelation to the Smeraldina, he was indeed hairy.
"They are unavoidably detained" replied the Commis- sioner.
"Take me away" said the Smeraldina firmly, "the house is insured. "
The Commissioner made a mental note of this suspi- cious circumstance.
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Poor Smeraldina! She was more than ever at a loose end now.
"Why not come with me" said Hairy, "now that all this has happened, and be my love? "
"I don't understand" said the Smeraldina.
Hairy explained exactly what he meant. In the heart of the purple mountains the car conked out. Hairy had ex- hausted his petrol supply. But nothing daunted he con- tinued to explain. He explained and explained, the same old thing over and over again. At last he too conked out.
"Perhaps after all" murmured the Smeraldina "this is what darling Bel would wish. "
"What is? " cried Hairy aghast.
She handed him back his explanation in a nutshell. "Darling Smerry! " cried Hairy. "What else? "
They fell silent. Hairy, gazing straight before him
through the anti-dazzle windscreen, whose effect by the way on the mountains was to make them look not unlike the picture by Paul Henry, was inclined to think that it was about time they started to make a move. But this seemed out of the question. The Smeraldina, far far away with the corpse and her own spiritual equivalent in the bone-yard by the sea, was dwelling at length on how she would shortly gratify the former, even as it, while still un- finished, had that of Lucy,1 and blot the latter for ever from her memory.
"We must think of an inscription" she said.
"He did mention one to me once" said Hairy, "now that I come to think of it, that he would have endorsed, but I can't recall it. "
The groundsman stood deep in thought. What with the company of headstones sighing and gleaming like bones, the moon on the job, the sea tossing in her dreams
A most foully false analogy.
and panting, and the hills observing their Attic vigil in the background, he was at a loss to determine off-hand whether the scene was of the kind that is termed roman- tic or whether it should not with more justice be deemed classical. Both elements were present, that was indisput- able. Perhaps classico-romantic would be the fairest esti- mate. A classico-romantic scene.
Personally he felt calm and wistful. A classico-romantic working-man therefore. The words of the rose to the rose floated up in his mind: "No gardener has died, comma, within rosaceous memory. " He sang a little song, he drank his bottle of stout, he dashed away a tear, he made him- self comfortable.
So it goes in the world.
THE END
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Now two further women, there was no end to them, the one of a certain age, the other not, entered, ripping off their regulation cuffs as they advanced. They pounced on the bed. The precautionary oil-sheet, the cradle . . . Belac- qua padded up and down before the fire, the ends of his pyjamas tucked like a cyclist's into the sinister socks. He would smoke one more cigarette, nor count the cost. It was
astonishing, when he came to think of it, how the entire routine of this place, down to the meanest detail, was cal- culated to a cow's toe to promote a single end, the relief of suffering in the long run. Observe how he dots his i's now and crucifies his t's to the top of his bent. He was being put to his trumps.
Surreptitiously they searched his yellow face for signs of discomposure. In vain. It was a mask. But perhaps his voice would tremble. One, she whose life had changed, took it upon herself to say in a peevish tone:
"Sister Beamish won't bless you for soiling her good socks. "
Sister Beamish would not bless him.
The voice of this person was in ruins, but she abused it further.
"Would you not stand on the mat? "
His mind was made up in a flash: he would stand on the mat. He would meet them in this matter. If he refused to stand on the mat he was lost in the eyes of these two women.
"Anything" he said "to oblige Sister Beamish. "
Miranda was having a busy morning. Now she appeared for the fourth or fifth time, he had lost count, complete with shadowy assistants. The room seemed full of grey women. It was like a dream.
"If you have any false teeth" she said "you may remove them. "
His hour was at hand, there was no blinking at the fact.
Going down in the lift with Miranda he felt his glasses under his hand. This was a blessed accident if you like, just when the silence was becoming awkward.
"Can I trust you with these? " he said.
She put them into her bosom. The divine creature! He would assault her in another minute.
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"No smoking" she said "in the operating-theatre. "
The surgeon was washing his invaluable hands as Belac- qua swaggered through the antechamber. He that hath clean hands shall be stronger. Belacqua cut the surgeon. But he flashed a dazzling smile at the Wincarnis. She would not forget that in a hurry.
He bounced up on to the table like a bridegroom. The local doc was in great form, he had just come from stand- ing best man, he was all togged up under his vestments. He recited his exhortation and clapped on the nozzle.
"Are you right? " said Belacqua.
The mixture was too rich, there could be no question about that. His heart was running away, terrible yellow yerks in his skull. "One of the best," he heard those words that did not refer to him. The expression reassured him. The best man clawed at his tap.
By Christ! he did die!
They had clean forgotten to auscultate him!
Draff
Shuah, Belacqua, in a Nursing Home.
1hough this was stale news to Mrs Shuah, for she had inserted it ( by telephone ) herself, yet she felt, on reading it in the morning after paper, a little shock of surprise, as
on opening telegram confirming advance booking in crowded hotel. Then the thought of friends, their unas- sumed grief giving zest to their bacon and eggs, the first phrases of sympathy with her in this great loss modulating from porridge to marmalade, from whispers and gasps to the calm ejaculations of chat, in a dozen households that she could have mentioned, set in motion throughout her bodily economy, with results that plainly appeared at once on her face, the wheels of mourning. Whereupon she was without thought or feeling, just a slush, a teary coenaesthe- sis.
This particular Mrs Shuah, as stated thus far at all events, does not sound very like Thelma nee bboggs, nor is she. Thelma nee bboggs perished of sunset and honey- moon that time in Connemara. Then shortly after that they suddenly seemed to be all dead, Lucy of course long since, Ruby duly, Winnie to decency, Alba Perdue in the natural course of being seen home. Belacqua looked round and the Smeraldina was the only sail in sight. In next to no time she had made up his mind by not merely loving but
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wanting him with such quasi-Gorgonesque impatience as her letter precited evinces. She and no other therefore is the Mrs Shuah who now, after less than a year in the ultra- violet intimacy of the compound of ephebe and old wo- man that he was, reads in the paper that she had begun to survive him.
Bodies don't matter but hers went something like this: big enormous breasts, big breech, Botticelli thighs, knock- knees, square ankles, wobbly, poppata, mammose, slob- bery-blubbery, bubbubbubbub, the real button-busting Weib, ripe. Then, perched away high out of sight on top of this porpoise prism, the sweetest little pale Pisanello of a birdface ever. She was like Lucrezia del Fede, pale and belle, a pale belle Braut, with a winter skin like an old sail in the wind. The root and the source of the athletic or aesthetic blob of a birdnose never palled, unless when he had a costive coryza himself, on Belacqua's forefinger pad and nail, with which he went probing and plumbing and boring the place just as for many years he polished his glasses (ecstasy of attrition! ), or suffered the shakes and grace-note strangulations and enthrottlements of the Win- kelmusik of Szopen or Pichon or Chopinek or Chopinetto or whoever it was embraced her heartily as sure as his name was Fred, dying all his life (thank you Mr Auber) on a sickroom talent (thank you Mr Field) and a Klein- meister's Leidenschaftsucherei (thank you Mr Beckett), or ascended across the Fulda or the Tolka or the Poddle or the Volga as the case might be, and he never dreaming that on each and all these occasions he was pandering to the most iniquitous excesses of a certain kind of sub- limation. The wretched little wet rag of an upper lip, pug- nozzling up and back in what you might nearly call a kind of a duck or a cobra sneer to the nostrils, was happily to some extent amended by the wanton pout of its fellow
and the forward jaws to match—a brilliant recovery. The skull of this strapping girl was shaped like a wedge. The ears of course were shells, the eyes shafts of reseda (his favourite colour) into an oreless mind. The hair was as black as the pots and grew so thick and low athwart the templesthatthebrowwasreducedtoafanlight justthe
(
kind of shaped brow that he most admired). But what
matter about bodies?
She got out of the narrow bed on the wrong side, but
she was never clear in her mind as to which was the right side and which the wrong, and went into the room where he was laid out, the big bible wrapped in a napkin still under his chin. She stood at the end of the bed in her lotus chintz pyjamas, as glazed as those eyes that she could not see, and held her breath. His forehead, when she ventured to lay the back of her hand across it, was much less chilly than she had expected, but that no doubt was explained by her own peripheral circulation, which was wretched. She caught hold of his hands, folded, not on his breast as she would have wished, but lower down, and rearranged them. Scarcely had she gone down on her bended knees after having made this adjustment when a spasm of anx- iety, lest there should be anything the matter with this corpse that rigor mortis had apparently passed over, straightened her up. She hoped it was all right. Baulked of her prayer, baulked of a last long look at the disaffected face, its contemptuous probity that would fall to pieces, she took herself off to prepare her weeds, for it would not do to be seen in lotus chintz. Black suited her, black and green had always been her colours. She found in her room what she had in mind, an Ethiope one-piece gashed and slashed with emerald insertions. She brought it to her work-table in the penannular bow-window, she sat down trembling and began to fix it. It was like being up
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in the sky in a bubble, the sun streaming in ( through the
curtains, theblueallroundher. Soonthefloorwasstrewn )
with the bright cuttings, it went to her heart to rip them they looked so lovely. Not a flower, not a flower sweet.
One insertion in the Press
Makes minus how many to make a black dress?
She was so sad and busy, the sobs were so quick to ripen and burst in her mind and the work was so nice, that she did not notice a fat drab demon approach the house nor hear his uproarious endeavours not to intrude on the gravel. Up came his card. Mr Malacoda. Most respectfully desirous to measure. A sob, instead of bursting, withered. The Smeraldina whimpered that she was sorry but she could not admit this Mr Malacoda, she could not have the Master measured. Mary Ann's leprous features were much abused with the usual. In a crisis like this, however, she was worth ten or fifteen of her mistress.
"He'd be about the Master's size" she said.
Just fancy her noticing that!
"Then why don't you tell him so" moaned the Smer-
aldina "and let do the best he can and not be coming up here to torment me. "
What could an inch or so possibly matter this way or that? There was no question of having to skimp aragonite or peperino. The coffin was not going to eat him.
Mary Ann returned to the torment with the sad news that Mr Malacoda was at that very moment springing up the stairs with a tape in his black claws. The Smeraldina started up, clutching the scissor, and began to plunge to- wards the door. But the thought of the thoral chintz brought her up short. Had again!
"You might at least bring me a cup of tea" she said. Mary Ann left the room.
"And a lightly boiled egg" cried the Smeraldina.
A small wreath, of arum lilies needless to say, arrived in a box—anonymous. This the Smeraldina buried. She sought out the gardener, a slow shy slob of a man with a dripping moustache, and found him watering in a dazed and hopeless manner a bed of blighted sweet-william. Someone had stolen his rose, he mowed down the flowers with hard jets of water. She sent him flying up into the heart of the mountains with two sacks to gather bracken. Then he might go home. Herself she stripped a eucalyptus of its boughs.
The parson came churning up the avenue in bottom gear, confirmed his worst fears with a quick look at the windows, let fall his rustless all-steel in sorrow and anger on the gravel, and walked right in.
"I never knew anyone founder" he declared in a pas- sionate way, "and I've seen a good many. "
"No" said the Smeraldina.
"Automatic dispensation" he cried. "Strength from on high" snapping his thumb "like that. Meet in Paradize. "
"Yes" said the Smeraldina.
"No sooner does he arrive" clasping his hands and look- ing up (why up? ) "there where there is no time, than you burst in upon him. "
"He's all right" said the Smeraldina. "I know that. " "Therefore be glad" cried the parson.
He pedalled away like a weaver's shuttle (but not be-
fore she had covenanted to be glad) to administer the Eucharist, of which he always carried an abundance in a satchel on the bracket of his bike, to a moneyed wether up the road whose tale was nearly told. Seven and six a time.
Capper Quin arrived on tiptire, in a car of his very own. He grappled with the widow, he simply could not help it. She was a sensible girl in some ways, she was not ashamed
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to let herself go in the arms of a man of her own weight at last. They broke away, carrot plucked from tin of grease, and Hairy stood humbly before her, hers to command. He was greatly improved, commerce with the things of time had greatly improved him. Now he could speak quite nicely, he did not simply have to abandon his periods in despair after a word or two.
She stood by while he freighted the car. The sacks dis- tended with fern and bracken; the boughs of eucalyptus, piecemeal to meet the occasion, tied up in an old stable jacket; a superb shrub of verbena treated in the same way; a vat of moss; a bag of wire tholes. When all these things had been safely stowed and the car pointed in the right direction, Hairy followed her lead into the house and took up position, the crutch well split, the great feet splayed, swollen paws appaumee two dangling chunks of blood ballast, aborted mammae much in evidence, at gaze. Even Ireland has a few animals, now generally regarded as varieties, which have been ranked as species by some zoologists. He felt his face improving as grief modelled the features.
"Might I see him? " he whispered, like a priest asking for a book in the Trinity College Library.
She had herself supported up the stairs, she led the way into the death-chamber as though it belonged to her. They diverged, the body was between them on the bed like the keys between nations in Velasquez's Lances, like the water between Buda and Pest, and so on, hyphen of reality.
"Very beautiful" said Hairy.
"I think very" said the Smeraldina.
"They all are" said Hairy.
Shed a tear, damn you, she thought, I can't. But he
went one better, he choked a whole bucketful back. His face improved rapidly.
They met again at the foot of the bed, like parallels made to for the sake of argument, and occupied this fresh viewpoint with heads together until the Smeraldina, feel- ing the absurdity of the position, detached herself, left the room and closed the door behind her, on the dying and the dead.
Hairy felt it was up to him now to feel something.
"You are quieter than humus" he said in his mind, "you will give the bowels of the earth a queer old lesson in quiet. "
That was the best he could manage at the time. But bowels surely was hardly the right word. That was where Queen Anne had the gout.
The hands pious on the sternum were unseemly, de- funct crusader, absolved from polite campaign. Hairy reached out with his endless arms and tugged at the marble members. Two nouns and two adjectives. Not a stir out of them. How stupid of him.
"This is final" he thought.
Belacqua had often looked forward to meeting the girls, Lucy especially, hallowed and transfigured beyond the veil. What a hope! Death had already cured him of that naivete.
Hairy, anxious though he was to rejoin the Smeraldina while his face was at its best, before it relapsed into the workaday dumpling, steak and kidney pudding, had his work cut out to tear himself away. For he could not throw off the impression that he was letting slip a rare occasion to feel something really stupendous, something that no- body had ever felt before. But time pressed. The Smeral- dina was pawing the ground, his own personal features were waning (or, perhaps better, waxing). In the end he took his leave without kneeling, without a prayer, but his brain quite prostrate and suppliant before this first fact of
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its experience. That was at least something. He would have welcomed a long Largo, on the black notes for pref- erence.
In the cemetery the light was failing, the sea moonstone washing the countless toes turned up, the mountains swarthy Uccello behind the headstones. The loveliest little lap of earth you ever saw. Hairy shifted the roof of planks from off the brand-new pit and went down, down, down the narrow steps carefully not removed by the grounds- man. His head came to rest below the surface of the earth. What a nerve the man had to be sure. The significance of this was lost on the Smeraldina, she merely crouched on the brink.
Well, to make a long story short, the pair of them be- tween them, she feeding him from above, upholstered the grave: the floor with moss and fern, the walls with the verdure outstanding. Low down the clay was so hard that Hairy had to take his shoe to the tholes. However they made a great job of it, not a spot of clay showed when they had done, all was lush, green and most sweet smell- ing.
But soon it would be black and dark night, a chill wind arose, the pangs of light began on the foothills, the moon- stone turned to ashes. The Smeraldina shivered, as well she might. Hairy, taking a last look round at his handi- work, was as snug as a bug in a rug. Belacqua lay dead on the bed with the timeless mock on the face. Hairy came up out of the hole, drew up the steps behind him, put back the planks and rubbed his hands with a sigh, labour ended, labour of love, painful duty.
All of a sudden the groundsman was there, a fine man in ruins, as drunk as he knew how, giving point to the consecrated ground. He was most moved by their atten- tions, without parallel in his experience of the forsaken.
For his own part he could be relied on to work himself to the bone for the defunct, whom he had known well, not only as a man, but as a boy also. The Smeraldina had a quick vision of Belacqua as a boy, shinning up the larch trees, his breast expanding to the world.
Hairy feeling father, brother, husband, confessor, friend of the family (what family? ) and the inevitable something more, did the heavy with the reeling groundsman. The Smeraldina played up.
Belacqua, idealised something hor- rid, made the widow and her huge escort, who now stalked off, four lovely deaf ears, faces tilted slightly to the starry sky, one in this sordid matter.
"Home Hairy" she said.
Hairy quickened his step, enveloped her, helped her along.
"I don't see the moon" she said.
Like a jack-in-the-box the satellite obliged, let down her shining ladder to the shore. She had a long lonely climb before her.
The groundsman, cut to the quick, mindful of his lum- bago, sat down on the planks and lowered his bottle of stout. Guinness for Thinness, stultifying stout. He had lost interest in all the shabby mysteries, he was beyond caring. He strained his ear for the future, and what did he hear? All the ancient punctured themes recurring, creeping up the treble out of sound. Very well. Let the essence of his being stay where it was, in liquor and liquor's harmonics, accepted gladly as the ultimate expression of his non- chalance. He rose and made his water agin a cypress.
That night Hairy lay in his bed, tossed and turned for various reasons, fell off at last into a troubled sleep, woke not at all refreshed to a day of wind and rain, the weather having broken in the small hours.
At midday to the Smeraldina, in bed indulging her most
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secret thoughts, salivating slightly for a lightly boiled egg, Mary Ann appeared. Mr Malacoda. Keen to coffin. The Smeraldina observed in a bitter voice that if the man must coffin why coffin he must, surely there was no clear call on Mary Ann to make a point of pestering her with what could not be cured.
A thin wall, a good but thin wall, separated her from Mr Malacoda and assistant ungulata, in a fever to have done. Cerements did not suit the defunct, with their riot of frills and lace they made him look like a pantomime baby.
When Hairy arrived it was the magic hour, Homer dusk, when the subliminal rats came abroad on their rounds. The little something extra that he felt he had come in for made great strides at the expense of its co-heirs. He agreed ab- solutely that cerements did not suit the defunct, somehow they made him look so put-upon and helpless, almost as though he had not done dying. He stayed to supper.
A point to bear in mind is that the Smeraldina was so naturally happy-go-lucky that she did not find it at all easy to feel deeply, or rather, perhaps better, be deeply sentimental. Her life had been springing leaks for as long as she cared to remember. A husband—and how! —was oakum in the end the same as everything else, prophylac- tic, a wire bandage of Jalade-Lafont. Belacqua had come unstuck like his own favour of veronica in What a Mis- fortune. Losers seekers. The position was not quite so simple as all that, there was some sentimental factor in play (or at work) complicating the position, but that was more or less it.
That night the weather so mended as to be more than merely clement for the ceremony. Malacoda and Co. turned up bright and early with their six cylinder hearse, black as Ulysses's cruiser. The demon, quite unable to control his impatience to cover, could only manage a quick
flirt with Mary Ann. The Smeraldina was through with the death-chamber, not that she was callous, quite the reverse, but the livery of death, leaving aside its pale flag alto- gether, was too much for her. Hairy, more and more self- assured servitor, was of the same opinion. So let the good man cover by all means. That was what he was there for, that was what he was paid for. Let the whole nightmare brood walk up by all manner of means.
Now he was grinning up at the lid at last. "No flowers" said Hairy.
God forbid!
"And no friends. "
Need he ask!
The parson arrived in the nick of time. He had been casting out devils all morning, he was in a muck sweat.
Hairy scampered out into the sunlight and the balmy breeze, free of the house that was suddenly jerry-built mausoleum, with a message from his sweet ward to the driver whose name was Scarmiglione, a strongly worded message exhorting him to temper full speed with due cau- tion. "Let her out" said Hairy in his pretentious jargon "to the irreducible coefficient of safety. " Scarmiglione met this request with a look of petrified courtesy. On these trips he deferred to the speed-controlling washer of his own mind and conscience, and to none other. He was adamant in this matter. Hairy shrank away from the affable rictus.
All aboard. All souls at half-mast. Aye-aye.
Mary Ann found the gardener shut up in the toolshed, all of a heap on an upturned box, nervously tying knots in a piece of raffia. He was not neglecting his work, he was
grieving.
"The only one" said Mary Ann, alluding to their late
employer, "as ever I dreamed on," as though that could possibly interest the gardener. But what higher tribute
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could she pay? The gardener had secured his retreat, she could not come at him, she could only hold her livid far- thing of a face at the broken window and commit copious nuisance with her opinions and impressions. She did not expect an answer, she did not pause for one, she received none. He heard the voice at a great distance, but could make no sense of it. For he was, temporarily at all events, just a clod of gloom, in which concern for his own state of health counted for more than he would have cared to admit. Was he overdoing things about the place? It was hard to say. He heard Mary Ann in the run, her voice raised in furious hallali, butchering a fowl for the table. He began to look about for his line. It was gone from its place. Someone had stolen his line. Some unauthorised person had taken his line, with the result that now he was helpless to put down his broccoli. He rose and let himself out, he slobbered out of darkness into light, he chose a place in the sun and settled, he was like a colossal fly trim- ming its load of typhus. Gradually he cheered up. Ten to one God was in his heaven.
Though the grave was deep the committal was neat, not a hitch; its words perhaps a trifle mis-directed on the vile, the sure and certain hope rather gobbled up in the fact of departure. The tone conveyed to "earth to earth" was a triumph of passionate and contemptuous reproach to all the living. How dared they continue full of misery! Pah!
"Now in Gaelic" said Hairy on the way home "they could not say that. "
"What could they not say? " said the parson. He would not rest until he knew.
"O Death where is thy sting? " replied Hairy. "They have no words for these big ideas. "
This was more than enough for the parson, a canon of
the Church of Ireland, who hastily exclaimed, no doubt by way of a shining straw, to the Smeraldina:
,,
"My wife would so much like to see you.
"O Anthrax" said Hairy "where is thy pustule? "
"She has been through the fire" said the parson, "she
understands. My poor dear mother-in-law! "
"O G. P. I. " said Hairy "where are thy rats? "
By the mercy of God the good canon was slow to wrath. "And so on" said Hairy "and so forth. They can't say it
once and for all. A spalpeen's babble. "
Belacqua dead and buried, Hairy seemed to have taken
on a new lease of life. He spoke well, with commendable assurance; he looked better, less obese cretin and spado than ever before; and he felt better, which was a great thing. Perhaps the explanation of this was that while Belacqua was alive Hairy could not be himself, or, if you prefer, could be nothing else. Whereas now the defunct, such of his parts at least as might be made to fit, could be pressed into service, incorporated in the daily ellipses of Capper Quin without his having to face the risk of exposure. Already Belacqua was not wholly dead, but merely mutilated. The Smeraldina appreciated this with- out thinking.
As for her, it was almost as though she had suffered the inverse change. She had died in part. She had defi- nitely ceased to exist in that particular part which Belac- qua had been at such pains to isolate, the public part so cruelly made private for his convenience, her last clandes- tine aspect1 reduced to a radiograph and exploited to gin- ger his secret occasions. That was down the mine Daddy with the dead Sadomasochist. Her spiritual equivalent, to give it a name, had been measured, coffined and covered
1 What a competent poet once called the bella menzogna.
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by Nick Malacoda. As material for anagogy (Greek g if you don't mind) the worms were welcome to her.
What was left was just a fine strapping lump of a girl or woman, theatre nurse in Yellow from the neck down, bursting with Lebensgeist at every suture, itching to be taken at her—very much so to speak—face value, and by force for preference.
Now it so happened that these two processes, a kind of marginal metabolism possibly you might call them, inde- pendent but of common origin, constructive in the case of the man, destructive and delightfully excrementitious in the case of the woman, culminated simultaneously on the drive back from the grave.
Hairy stopped the car.
"Step down" he said to the parson, "I don't like you. " The parson appealed mutely to the Smeraldina. She had
nothing whatever to say to him. Never again in this life would she occupy any position more partisan than that of a comfortably covered bone of contention, her mind was made up.
"Bill the executors" said Hairy "and out you hop. "
The parson did as Hairy bid. He felt miserable. They did not even give him a chance to cock up the other cheek. He racked his brains for coals of fire. As the car began to move away he jumped up nimbly on the running-board, stooped forward in the lee of the windscreen and began, heedless of punctuation, in a lamentable voice:
".
. .
no more death neither sorrow nor crying neither
"
shall there be any more
At which point, the car beginning to sway in a perilous
manner, he was obliged to break off in order to save his life. He stood in the road, far from home, and hoped, with- out exactly making a prayer out of it, that they might be forgiven.
"Wouldn't he give you the sick" said Hairy "with his Noo Gefoozleum. "
Little remains to be told. On their return they found the house in flames, the home to which Belacqua had brought three brides a raging furnace. It transpired that during their absence something had snapped in the brain of the gardener, who had ravished the servant girl and then set the premises on fire. He had neither given himself up nor tried to escape, he had shut himself up in the tool-shed and awaited arrest.
"Ravished Mary Ann" exclaimed the Smeraldina.
"So she deposes" said a high official of the Civic Guard. "It was she who raised the alarm. "
Hairy looked this dignitary up and down.
"I don't see your fiddle" he said.
"Where is the girl? " asked the Smeraldina.
"She has gone home to her Mother" answered the high
official.
She tried him again.
"Where is the gardener? "
But he had been expecting this question.
"He resisted arrest, he has been taken to hospital. " "Where are the heroes of the fire-brigade" said Hairy,
entering into the spirit of the thing, "the boys of the old brigade, the Tara Street Cossacks? May we expect them to-day? They would act as a kind of antiphlogistic. "
This Hairy was a revelation to the Smeraldina, he was indeed hairy.
"They are unavoidably detained" replied the Commis- sioner.
"Take me away" said the Smeraldina firmly, "the house is insured. "
The Commissioner made a mental note of this suspi- cious circumstance.
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Poor Smeraldina! She was more than ever at a loose end now.
"Why not come with me" said Hairy, "now that all this has happened, and be my love? "
"I don't understand" said the Smeraldina.
Hairy explained exactly what he meant. In the heart of the purple mountains the car conked out. Hairy had ex- hausted his petrol supply. But nothing daunted he con- tinued to explain. He explained and explained, the same old thing over and over again. At last he too conked out.
"Perhaps after all" murmured the Smeraldina "this is what darling Bel would wish. "
"What is? " cried Hairy aghast.
She handed him back his explanation in a nutshell. "Darling Smerry! " cried Hairy. "What else? "
They fell silent. Hairy, gazing straight before him
through the anti-dazzle windscreen, whose effect by the way on the mountains was to make them look not unlike the picture by Paul Henry, was inclined to think that it was about time they started to make a move. But this seemed out of the question. The Smeraldina, far far away with the corpse and her own spiritual equivalent in the bone-yard by the sea, was dwelling at length on how she would shortly gratify the former, even as it, while still un- finished, had that of Lucy,1 and blot the latter for ever from her memory.
"We must think of an inscription" she said.
"He did mention one to me once" said Hairy, "now that I come to think of it, that he would have endorsed, but I can't recall it. "
The groundsman stood deep in thought. What with the company of headstones sighing and gleaming like bones, the moon on the job, the sea tossing in her dreams
A most foully false analogy.
and panting, and the hills observing their Attic vigil in the background, he was at a loss to determine off-hand whether the scene was of the kind that is termed roman- tic or whether it should not with more justice be deemed classical. Both elements were present, that was indisput- able. Perhaps classico-romantic would be the fairest esti- mate. A classico-romantic scene.
Personally he felt calm and wistful. A classico-romantic working-man therefore. The words of the rose to the rose floated up in his mind: "No gardener has died, comma, within rosaceous memory. " He sang a little song, he drank his bottle of stout, he dashed away a tear, he made him- self comfortable.
So it goes in the world.
THE END
DRAFF 191
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