At Swim-Two-Birds (25 page)

I think, said Orlick, we might requisition the services of the Pooka MacPhellimey.

If you don't hurry and get down to business, Sir, said Furriskey, Trellis will get us before we get him. He'll hammer the lights out of us. Get him on the run, Mr. Orlick. Get the Pooka and let him go to work right away. God, if he catches us at this game...

What about this for a start, asked Shanahan, a big boil on the small of his back where he can't get at it. It's a well-known fact that every man has a little square on his back that he can't itch with his hand. Here, look.

There's such a thing as a scratching-post, observed Lamont.

Wait now! said Orlick. Silence please.

Tuesday had come down through Foster Avenue and Dundrum, brine-fresh from sea-travel, a corn-yellow sundrench that called forth the bees at an incustomary hour to their day of bumbling. Small, house-flies performed brightly in the embrasures of the windows, whirling without fear on imaginary trapezes in the lime-light of the sunslants.

Dermot Trellis neither slept nor woke but lay there in his bed, a twilight in his eyes. His hands he rested emptily at his thighs and his legs stretched loose-jointed and heavily to the bed-bottom. His diaphragm, a metronome of quilts, heaved softly and relaxed in the beat of his breathing. Generally speaking, he was at peace.

The utterance of a civil cough beside his ear recalled him to his reason. His eyes, startled sentries in red watch-towers on the brink of morning, brought him this intelligence, that the Pooka MacPhellimey was sitting there beside him on the cabinet of his pots, a black walking-stick of invaluable ebony placed civilly across the knees of his tight trousers. His temples were finely scented with an expensive brand of balsam and fine snuff-dust could be discerned on the folds of his cravat. A top-hat was inverted on the floor, with woven gloves of black wool placed neatly in its interior.

Good morning to you, Sir, said the Pooka with melodious intonation. No doubt you have awakened to divert yourself with the refreshment of the dawn.

Trellis composed his pimples the way they would tell of the greatness of the surprise that was in his mind.

Your visit to my house this morning, he said, that surprises me. A bull may sometimes be a cow, a jackdaw may discourse, cocks have established from time to time the hypothesis that the egg is impeculiar to the she-bird, but a servant is at all times a servant notwithstanding. I do not recall that I desired you for a guest at an hour when I am accustomed to be unconscious in the shadow of my sleep. Perchance you bring a firkin of sweet ointment compounded for the relief of boils?

I do not, rejoined the Pooka.

Then a potion, herbal and decanted from the juice of roots, unsurpassed for the extirpation of personal lice?

Doubts as to the sex of cattle, observed the Pooka after he had first adjusted the hard points of his fingers one against the other, arise only when the animal is early in its youth and can be readily resolved by the use of a prongs or other probing instrument - or better still, a magnifying glass of twenty diameters. Jackdaws who discourse or who are accustomed to express themselves in Latin or in the idiom of sea-faring men may betray an indication of the nature of their talent by inadvertently furnishing the same answer to all questions, making claim in this manner to unlimited ignorance or infinite wisdom. If a cock may secrete eggs from his interior, equally a hen can crow at four-thirty of a morning. Rats have been observed to fly, small bees can extract honey from dung and agamous mammals have been known to produce by the art of allogamy a curious offspring azoic in nature and arachnoid in appearance. It is not false that a servant is a servant but truth is an odd number and one master is a great mistake. Myself I have two.

Allogamy and arachnoid I understand, said Trellis, but the meaning you attach to azoic is a think that is not clear to me at all.

Devoid of life, having no organic remains, said the Pooka.

That is an elegant definition, said Trellis, affording an early-morning smile for the enjoyment of his guest. A grain of knowledge with the dawning of the day is a breakfast for the mind. I will now re-enter the darkness of my sleep, remembering to examine it anew on my recovery. My serving-girl, she is the little guide who will conduct you from the confinement of my walls. I have little doubt that the science of bird-flight is known to rats of cunning and resource, but nevertheless I have failed to observe such creatures passing by in the air through the aperture of my window. Good morning, Sir.

Your courteous salutation is one I cannot accept, answered the Pooka, for this reason, that its valedictory character invalidates it. It is my mission here this morning to introduce you to a wide variety of physical scourges, torments, and piteous blood-sweats. The fulness of your suffering, that will be the measure of my personal perfection. A window without rat-flight past it is a backyard without a house.

Your talk surprises me, said Trellis. Furnish three examples.

Boils upon the back, a burst eye-ball, a leg-withering chill, thorn-harrowed ear-lobes, these are four examples.

By God we're here at last, said Furriskey loudly. He made a noise with the two of them, his palm and his knee. We're here at list. From now on it's a fight to the finish, fair field and no favour.

Strop the razor, boys, smiled Shanahan. Mr. Lamont, kindly put the poker in the fire.

Here there was a laugh, immelodious, malicious, high-pitched.

Now, now, boys, said Orlick. Now, now, boys. Patience.

I think we are doing very well, said Furriskey. We'll have the skin off his back yet. He'll be a sorry man.

That is a piteous recital, said Trellis. Provide further examples five in number.

With a slight bow the Pooka arranged the long-nailed fingers of his left hand in a vertical position and then with his remaining hand he pressed a finger down until it was horizontal in respect of each of the agonies he recited.

An anabasis of arrow-points beneath the agnail, razorcut to knee-rear, an oak-stirk in the nipple, suspension by nose-ring, three motions of a cross-cut athwart the back, rat-bite at twilight, an eating of small-stones and a drinking of hog-slime, these are eight examples.

These are eight agonies, responded Trellis, that I would not endure for a chest of treasure. To say which of them is worst, that would require a winter in a web of thought. A glass of milk, that is the delicacy I offer you before you go.

These and other gravities you must endure, said the Pooka, and the one that you find the worst, that is the thing you must whisper after in the circle of my ear. To see you arise and dressing against the hour of your torment, that would be a courtesy. A glass of milk is bad for my indigestion. Acorns and loin-pie, these are my breakfast-tide delights. Arise, Sir, till I inflict twin nipple-hurts with the bevel of my nails.

An agitation to the seat of the Devil's trousers of decent sea-man's serge betokened that his hair-tail and his shirttails were engaged in slow contention and stiff whirly gambols of precise intent. His face (as to colour) was grey.

Colour of the face of Trellis, not counting the tops of pimples:
white.

Keep away, you Grump, you, he roared. Oh, by God, I'll kick your guts around the room if you don't keep your hands off me!

These piteous visitations shall not accurse you singly, observed the Pooka. in a polite tone, nor shall they come together in triads. These hurts shall gather to assail you in their twos or fours or in their sixties; and all for this reason, that truth is one.

It was then that the Pooka MacPhellimey exercised the totality of his strange powers by causing with a twist of his hard horn-thumb a stasis of the natural order and a surprising kinesis of many incalculable influences hitherto in suspense. A number of miracles were wrought as one and together. The man in the bed was beleaguered with the sharpness of razors as to nipples, knee-rear and belly-roll. Leaden-hard forked arteries ran speedily about his scalp, his eye-beads bled and the corrugations of boils and piteous tumuli which appeared upon the large of his back gave it the appearance of a valuable studded shield and could be ascertained on counting to be sixty-four in number. He suffered a contraction of the intestines and a general re-arrangement of his interior to this result, that a meat repast in the process of digestion was ejected on the bed, on the coverlet, to speak precisely. In addition to his person, his room was also the subject of mutations unexplained by any purely physical hypothesis and not to be accounted for by mechanical devices relating to the manipulation of guy-ropes, pulley-blocks, or mechanical collapsible wallsteads of German manufacture, nor did the movements of the room conform to any known laws relating to the behaviour of projectiles as ascertained by a study of gravitation enforced by calculations based on the postulata of the science of ballistics. On the contrary, as a matter of fact, the walls parted, diminished and came back again with loud noises and with clouds of choking lime-dust, frequently forming hexagons instead of squares when they came together. The gift of light was frequently withdrawn without warning and there was a continuous loud vomit-noise offensive to persons of delicate perceptions. Chamber-pots flew about in the aimless parabolae normally frequented by blue-bottles and heavy articles of furniture - a wardrobe would be a typical example - could be discerned stationary in the air without visible means of support. A clock could be heard incessantly reciting the hours, a token that the free flight of time had also been interfered with; while the mumbling of the Pooka at his hell-prayers and the screaming of the sufferer, these were other noises perceptible to the practised ear. The obscure atmosphere was at the same time pervaded by a stench of incommunicable gravity.

The butt of that particular part of the story is this, that Trellis, wind-quick, eye-mad, with innumerable boils upon his back and upon various parts of his person, flew out in his sweat-wet night-shirt and day-drawers, out through the glass of the window till he fell with a crap on the cobbles of the street. A burst eye-ball, a crushed ear and bone-breaks two in number, these were the agonies that were his lot as a result of his accidental fall. The Pooka, a master of the science of rat-flight, fluttered down through the air with his black cloak spread about him like a rain-cloud, down to the place where the stunned one was engaged in the re-gathering of his wits, for these were the only little things he had for defending himself from harm; and this is a precis of the by-play the pair of them engaged in with their tongues:

You hog of hell, you leper's sore you! said Trellis in a queer voice that came through the grid of his bleeding mouth-hiding hand. He reclined on the mud-puddled cobbles, a tincture of fine blood spreading about his shirt. You leper's death-puke!

It was an early-morning street, its quiet distances still small secrets shared by night with day. Two fingers at the eyes of his nostrils, the Pooka delicately smelt the air, a token that he was engaged in an attempt to predict the character of the weather.

You leper's lights, said Trellis.

To forsake your warm bed, said the other courteously, without the protection of your heavy great-coat of Galway frieze, that was an oversight and one which might well be visited with penalties pulmonary in character. To inquire as to the gravity of your sore fall, would that be inopportune?

You black bastard, said Trellis.

The character of your colloquy is not harmonious, rejoined the Pooka, and makes for barriers between the classes. Honey-words in torment, a growing urbanity against the sad extremities of human woe, that is the further injunction I place upon your head; and for the avoidance of opprobrious oddity as to numerals, I add this, a sickly suppuration at the base of the left breast.

I find your last utterance preoccupying to my intellect, said Trellis, and I am at the same time not unmindful of the incidence of that last hurt upon my person...

Come here for a minute, said Shanahan, there's one thing you forgot. There's one cat in the bag that didn't jump.

Which cat would that be? Orlick asked.

Our man is in the room. Right. The boyo starts his tricks. Right. The room begins to dance. The smell and the noise starts. Right. Everything goes bang bar one thing. That one thing is a very important article of furniture altogether. Gentlemen, I refer to our friend the ceiling.
Is my Nabs too much of a gentleman to get the ceiling on the napper?

Oh, God that's a terrible thing to get, said Lamont. A friend of mine got a crack of a lump of plaster on the neck here, look. By God Almighty it nearly creased him.

Didn't I tell you it was good, said Shanahan.

Nearly killed him, nearly put the light out for good.

A wallop of the ceiling is all I ask, Sir, Shanahan said. What do you say now? A ton of plaster on the napper.

It's a bit late to think of it now, you know, Orlick answered, table-tap for doubt.

He was in the Mater for a week, said Lamont. People were remarking the scab for the best part of a year - do you know that? Oh, not a bit of him could wear a collar.

It means bringing the whole party into the house again, said Orlick.

And well worth it! said Furriskey, slapping the sun-bright serge of his knee. And well worth it, by God.

Wheel him in man, begged Shanahan. He'd be in and out by now if we had less talk out of us.

A second thought is never an odd thought, said the Pooka with a courteous offering of his snuff-box, and it is for that reason that it would be wisdom for the pair of us to penetrate again to the privacy of your bedroom. The collapse of the ceiling, that is one thing we forgot.

That time you spoke, said Trellis, the sweetness of your words precluded me from comprehending the meaning you attach to them.

It is essential, explained the Pooka, that we return to your room the way we may perfect these diversions upon which the pair of us were engaged.

That is an absorbing project, said Trellis. In what manner do we re-attain the street?

The way we came, said the Pooka.