Dream of Fair to Middling Women (20 page)

She would set off through the forests and she would take her time. No forced marches. The birds would scuttle above bleeding in the tree-tops. A fizz of scampering birds, it would lead her to the honey. What honey? They would not fly, their wings were in tatters, she would not see them, desperately they would sprawl and flounder high overhead through the treacherous stools, it is a poor shoal of wounded noddies threshing aloft. In the heat of their endeavours they loose their siftings unashamed, they cannot help it, a dew of white dung it lapses down through the green sunlight, it drenches the leaves, the fizz of their endeavour leads her forward to the court of honey. What honey? The green of Circe? Alas, a pint of that and a gallon of gall, salt in my mouth for ever and ever.

She plunged her hand into the stuff of her hat as though it were a tuft of grass growing, she extirpated the smart bowler in a rage. With a scroll of the blackest hair she swathed the eburnine distemper of her temple. She tottered to her feet, she disengaged herself from the divan, till she was a slight, vigilant figure, still, erect, the big head lowered, the finger-tips earthing her through the low table, cabling her fast to the earth. She waited. She listened for the lounge to be centralised. She thought she had fever. Then ten to one the waiter would come.

“Madame” said the waiter.

“My coat” she said, breaking the circuit, “and I ordered another glass of brandy” she said, reseated, “if you remember.”

She had not, and the waiter remembered nothing of the kind.

“Hennessey!” she cried “3-star—double—degustation—hurry!” she cried “can't you see I am dying?”

She folded up her high-bred legs, she nested against the arm of the divan. The lounge had slipped back to its natural slipshod, tangle of private spirals and foci.

But the heated brain of the beautiful Alba was off: why am I thus abroad, why in the name of God do I come thus abroad, maltworm, girlfish, frog in a puddle? Am I then to be baptised? married? buried? Then why am I not in my chamber, giving ear to the big wind. And the eyes of a man are upon me, as those bloodshot of Orestes up and down his sister's rags. The old ruffian, why does he not come, and entertain me?

“Sugar” she said to the trembling waiter.

Now the day was over, it was quite the busiest hour of the day for the lounge-attendants, the better-to-do of the city were taking refuge from the dusk. It was the hour of the nimble lamplighters, flying through the suburbs on bicycles, tilting at the standards. The local poets, in this respect differing from the better-to-do, crept forth at this hour and came abroad, each from his public-house, for the daily snipe of inspiration. It was soon known in the snug that Seum or Liam or Harry or Sean had gone out but was expected back ere long. They would not have long to wait for him. He would return, his voice, his familiar step, advancing down the body of the public-house, would make it known that he had returned. He would pay his round, for was he not a very decent man and a great bard and a great man to talk later in the evening?

Belacqua cowered beneath the battalions of the sky. He had disembarrassed himself rapidly of his dear friend who had said:

“He mentioned some Alba who had been enquiring tenderly after you.”

She had not. The Polar Bear used words loosely, he threw them about.

Now Belacqua is on the bridge with Nemo, they are curved over the parapet, their bottoms are outlined and not in vain in the dusk descending. He lifts his head in due course to the doomed flowers, the livid tulips. Very poignant, yes, they lancinate his little heart, they seldom fail to oblige. His lips are brought down and his head again, yes, the gulls were there. They never miss an evening. They are grey slush in the spewing meatus of the sewer. Now it is time to go, it is yet time. They lapse down together and away from the right quays, they have ceded, they are being harried from the city. It is the placenta of the departed, the red rigor of post-partum.

The Polar Bear came cataracting—too late; the tram had gathered way, now it is screaming past the Mansion House. He tore at the strap.

“Can't the bloody thing be stopped?” he cried.

“Next stop the Green” said the conductor.

“Damn the Green” cried the P.B. “damn you and your damn Green.”

He drew his plump hand's glabrous crown across his raw mouth. Three nouns, three adjectives.

“The Dublin United Tramways Bloody Company” he vociferated “seems to exist for the sole purpose of dragging its clients forcibly out of their way to Greens. Isn't there
enough green in this merdific island? I get on to your accursed bolide at the risk of my life at the College Green and get fired out at the next of your verminous plaguespots whether I like it or not. If it's not the Stephen's Green it's Green's bloody library. What we want” he screamed from the sidewalk “in this pestiferous country is red for a change and plenty of it.”

Alas the conductor was slow, he was Irish, his name was Hudson, he had not the Cockney gift of repartee. He might have made a very nice use of Green St, and he did not, he missed his chance. Very much later in the day, brooding over this incident, the right answer came to him, or one of the answers that would have done, and from that moment forth he had at least a presentable anecdote for his colleagues at the depot. But too late. Once again the Polar Bear had been let go unscathed.

Fiercely now retracing his steps, weighed down by the bag, he had occasion most bitterly to upbraid a walleyed employee of the R.A.C., a little mousy ex-service creature known to the members as Dick Deadeye. With a courtly gesture Dick motioned back the pedestrians that the cars for whose comings and goings he was responsible might issue forth unimpeded from the garage. It was the rush hour for the little man. The Polar Bear was among the pedestrians, one of those pedestrians was he.

“Curse you” he snarled “oh, curse you. Shall I stand here all night?”

“Sorry sir” said Dick, motioning him back, “duty.”

“B--- your duty” snarled the P.B.

“And you sir” said Dick.

The Polar Bear raised the bag.

“You damned little impertinent pimp of hell you” he frothed at the commissures.

Dick stood his ground, he would do his duty. “If you lay a finger on me sir” he was moved to mention over his shoulder “I'll have the law of you.”

In this black city of ours that comes out seventh in occidental statistics, or did, such painful scenes are of daily occurrence. Men of the high standing of the Polar Bear, men of culture and distinction, occupying positions of responsibility in the City, permit themselves, condescend, to bandy invective with the meanest of day-labourers. Gone is patrician hauteur, gone, it almost seems, with the Garrison. The scurvy dog has taught the snarl to his scurvy master, the snarl, the fawn, the howl and the cocked leg: the general coprotechnics. And we are all dogs together in the dogocracy of unanimous scurrility.

(Overstatement. Dickens.)

The point it seems almost worth our while trying to make is not that the passing of the Castle as it was in the days of the Garrison is to be deprecated. Not at all. We hope we know our place better than that. We uncover our ancient Irish wedgehead in deference to that happy ejection. Nor are we the least prone to suggest that the kennel is a less utopian community than the pen or coop or shoal or convent or any other form of natural or stylicised pullulation. If these or similar termini were capable of providing us with the point, any point, would we not have been guilty of
ad quem?
And we cannot but feel, after all our toil, that it is rather late in the day for
ad quem.
We mean, dem it all, do we tolerate buffers in our regiment?

Con moto, then, for we have not a moment to lose, and not to overdo the tedium, we come to our point which is one of departure, an
a quo
that we fancy Watteau himself would not have turned up his nose at, not for us, we stay where we are, but for the eager young sociologists that
abound in our midst (Merrion Row, Portobello, Mary St and passim) and particularly the more serious few that have not forgotten the striking phrase of the Paris schoolman, the master and author of them that are anxious to have an opinion, the bearded bonhomme:
one commences to reread Proudhon, or, perhaps better, one recommences to read Proudhon.
He only has to place himself at this centre of focus, he only has to gird up his lusty loins at this point, blick from this Punkt, the ardent young politico-social psycho-scientific sleuth that we have in mind, and he shall command an ample perspective: the French provincial towns, the Five towns, the Tweed, emigration in the west, the alas rapidly waning Italian commune, the plight of the small farmer in the Europe of our time, the impressive decadential trend in the great cities of the west (and the east, for all we know) from the sale and purchase of labour in the market-place to the saving of same in the tavern. Etc.

Thus here in what immediately precedes we have an example of how, if instead of pressing à la Titania asses to our boosoms, of being satisfied to strain in healthy hypnosis to our boosoms the Hudsons and Deadeyes of daily, yea and hourly, encounter, their duties and their fleers, we could only learn to school ourselves to see all things great and small about us and their emanations, all the articles of bric-à-brac through which we move, as so many tunics of so many onions, if we could only learn to school ourselves to nurture that divine and fragile Fünkelein of curiosity struck from the desire to bind for ever in imperishable relation the object to its representation, the stimulus to the molecular agitation that it sets up, percipi to percipere, of how then there is no knowing on what sublime platform, non-political, Beobachtungspost at once and springboard, we
may find ourselves poised and watchful, potential beyond measure ere we take off, unafraid, swallow-wise, through reefless airs for a magic land.

From the Hudsons and the Deadeyes and the P.B.s to a magic land! It is only necessary to follow the directions. For magic here is not milk and honey (Gawd forbid) nor Heaven's High Halls where all at last is in the very best of health nor everlasting sweet pea, no, it is the absence of Polar Bears and Deadeyes and the coprotechnics in which they are co-ordinate. It is the abolition of that class of person and that class of thing. There is not a trace, not as much as a suspicion of the old stench, of the premises in the conclusion. How is that for a fine figure of a syllogism? That is how you get away from the ignoble scuffling and snarling of bosthoonery and tinned Kultur. Presticerebration. That is how you can get rid of gowned poets and uniformed peasants. You Roentgen them to start off with, you strip off the millions of leathery tunics. It takes time but it is pleasant work. Then you find when you come to the core and the kernel and the seat of the malady that behold it is a bel niente. Now there are few things more bel than a niente but considered as a premise, and be you Abbot himself, it presents certain difficulties in the manner of manipulation. So you draw your wand and strike from the air ad your own sweet lib whatever premises you fancy. You will have to live on them, you cannot get rid of them, so take much thought, tis a critical moment. Then proceed in the ordinary way. The public never spots the deception. The public is too busy admiring the seamless tights of the performer and listening to the patter of the parable. All that is necessary is to follow directions.

Now he is drawing nigh, in a spouting and ingurgi-tation of crassamenta he joins issue with the perron, straining
and heaving against the great load of himself he stamps the steps behind him in a cruel flatfooted diagonal, one by one he spurns them out of his path.

Oh where now are the hard nervous soles, smelling of bracken and thyme, of Bilitis or a chaste huntress or even a sinuous nautch-gal, scaling prestly from the sea shallow tiers of pale red marble? They are elsewhere Doctor Scholl. Or the muddy chubby feet of little Stoebli, he was an idle young herd, he was a blue flower in the mountain, he is akimbo on his lil bottom in the mountain dew, by the outposts of the dark forest he whittles his staff, he is like a starved della Robbia, we are told there is peach-down on his cheeks but what does that matter, there are his feet, muck caking in the toepits, the arches laced with mire. All the belled cattle for leagues around, above and below, are his father's stock. They are in his keeping. Then James, the hero, the steel mountaineer, comes striding through hornbeams. Then in a minute it is morning.

The P.B. lowered himself, his great load, coat, bag, hat, mucus, fury and exhaustion, on to the divan as soon as it occurred to the Alba to unfold her noble legs and make room for him beside her. After a few moments of silence and withdrawal, she waiting, he panting, to lower the temperature of this man and still the clamours and alarums of the trying hours through which he had passed, and the customary feintes and passes obiter between her amused that he should present himself so frankly after his time and him so glad and grateful that she had not bounced off in a huff on the tick but permitted herself to grant him a few moments' grace, then the pretty smart slap-up dialogue, transcribed herewith without frills or falbalas (tired of them) as follows, took place.