No More Learning

"Is that the lot? "
Belacqua did not altogether care for her tone.
"And a toe" he said "to come off, or rather portion of a
toe.
"Top" she guffawed "and bottom. "
There was no controverting this. But he had learnt his
lesson. He let it pass.
This woman was found to improve on acquaintance.
She had a coarse manner, but she was exceedingly gentle. She taught all her more likely patients to wind bandages. To do this well with the crazy little hand-windlass that she provided was no easy matter. The roll would become fusiform. But when one got to know the humours of the apparatus, then it could be coaxed into yielding the hard slender spools, perfect cylinders, that delighted her. All these willing slaves that passed through her hands, she blandished each one in turn. "I never had such tight straight bandages" she would say. Then, just as the friend- ship established on this basis seemed about to develop
into something more—how shall I say? —substantial, the patient would all of a sudden be well enough to go home. Some malignant destiny pursued this splendid woman. Years later, when the rest of the staff was forgotten, she would drift into the mind. She marked down Belacqua for the bandages.
Miranda came back, this time with the dressing-tray. That voluptuous undershot cast of mouth, the clenched lips, almost bocca romana, how had he failed to notice it before? Was it the same woman?
"Now" she said.
She lashed into the part with picric and ether. It beat him to understand why she should be so severe on his little bump of amativeness. It was not septic to the best of his knowledge. Then why this severity? Merely on the off chance of its coming in for the fag-end of a dig? It was very strange. It had not even been shaved. It jutted out under the short hairs like a cuckoo's bill. He trusted it would come to no harm. Really he could not afford to have it curtailed. His little bump of amativeness.
When his entire nape was as a bride's adorned (bating the obscene stain of the picric) and so tightly bandaged that he felt his eyes bulging, she transferred her compas- sion to the toes. She scoured the whole phalanx, top and bottom. Suddenly she began to titter. Belacqua nearly kicked her in the eye, he got such a shock. How dared she trespass on his programme! He refusing to be tickled in this petty local way, trying with his teeth to reach his under-lip and gouging his palms, and she forgetting her- self, there was no other word for it. There were limits, he felt, to Democritus.
"Such a lang tootsy" she giggled.
Heavenly father, the creature was bilingual. A lang tootsy! Belacqua swallowed his choler.
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"Soon to be syne" he said in a loud voice. What his repartee lacked in wit it made up for in style. But it was lost on this granite Medusa.
"A long foot" he said agreeably "I know, or a long nose. But a long toe, what does that denote? "
No answer. Was the woman then altogether cretinous? Or did she not hear him? Belting away there with her urinous picric and cooling her porridge in advance. He would try her again.
"I say" he roared "that that toe you like so much will soon be only a memory. " He could not put it plainer than that.
Her voice after his was scarcely audible. It went as fol- lows:
— "Yes"—the word died away and was repeated "yes,
his troubles are nearly over. "
Belacqua broke down completely, he could not help it.
This distant voice, like a cor anglais coming through the evening, and then the his, the his was the last straw. He buried his face in his hands, he did not care who saw him.
"I would like" he sobbed "the cat to have it, if I might. "
She would never have done with her bandage, it cannot have measured less than a furlong. But of course it would never do to leave anything to chance, Belacqua could ap- preciate that. Still it seemed somehow disproportioned to the length of even his toe. At last she made all fast round his shin. Then she packed her tray and left. Some people go, others leave. Belacqua felt like the rejected of those two that night in a bed. He felt he had set Miranda some- how against him. Was this then the haporth of paint? Miranda on whom so much depended. Merde!
It was all Lister's fault. Those damned happy Vic- torians.
His heart gave a great leap in its box with a fulminat- ing sense that he was all wrong, that anger would stand by him better than the other thing, the laugh seemed so feeble, so like a whinge in the end. But on second thoughts no, anger would turn aside when it came to the point, leaving him like a sheep. Anyhow it was too late to turn back. He tried cautiously what it felt like to have the idea in his mind. . . . Nothing happened, he felt no shock. So at least he had spiked the brute, that was something.
At this point he went downstairs and had a truly mili- tary evacuation, Army Service Corps. Coming back he did not doubt that all would yet be well. He whistled a snatch outside the duty-room. There was nothing left of his room when he got back but Miranda, Miranda more prognathous than ever, loading a syringe. Belacqua tried to make light of this.
"What now? " he said.
But she had the weapon into his bottom and discharged before he realised what was happening. Not a cry escaped him.
"Did you hear what I said? " he said. "I insist, it is my right, on knowing the meaning of this, the purpose of this injection, do you hear me? "
"It is what every patient gets" she said "before going down to the theatre. "
Down to the theatre! Was there a conspiracy in this place to destroy him, body and soul? His tongue clave to his palate. They had desiccated his secretions. First blood to the profession!
The theatre-socks were the next little bit of excitement. Really the theatre seemed to take itself very seriously. To hell with your socks, he thought, it's your mind I want.
Now events began to move more rapidly. First of all an angel of the Lord came to his assistance with a funny
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story, really very funny indeed, it always made Belacqua laugh till he cried, about the parson who was invited to take a small part in an amateur production. All he had to do was to snatch at his heart when the revolver went off, cry "By God! I'm shot! " and drop dead. The parson said certainly, he would be most happy, if they would have no objection to his drawing the line at "By God! " on such a secular occasion. He would replace it, if they had no ob- jection, by "Mercy! " or "Upon my word! " or something of that kind. "Oh my! I'm shot! " how would that be?
But the production was so amateur that the revolver went off indeed and the man of God was transfixed.
"Oh! " he cried "oh . . . ! . . . By Christ! I am Shot! "
It was a mercy that Belacqua was a dirty lowdown Low Church Protestant high-brow and able to laugh at this sot- tish jest. Laugh! How he did laugh, to be sure. Till he cried.
He got up and began to titivate himself. Now he could hear the asthmatic breathing if he listened hard. The day was out of danger, any fool could see that. 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.