More Pricks Than Kicks (15 page)

“I am all in favour” said Thelma “of as few as is decent.”

“It's a very distinguished quorum” said Otto Olaf, “more so even than nine.”

“As head maid” said Una “I protest.”

Again Mrs bboggs came to the rescue. She had never been in such form.

“Then that leaves one” she said.

“What about Ena Nash?” said Thelma.

“Impossible” said Una. “She reeks.”

“Then the McGillycuddy woman” said Otto Olaf.

Mrs bboggs sat up.

“I know of no McGillycuddy woman” said Una. “Mother, do you know of any McGillycuddy woman?”

No, Mrs bboggs was completely in the dark. She and Una therefore began to wait indignantly for an explanation.

“Sorry” said Otto Olaf, “no offence.”

“But who is the woman?” cried mother and daughter together.

“I spoke without thinking” said Otto Olaf.

Mrs bboggs was utterly nonplussed. How was it possible to name a woman without thinking? The thing was psychologically impossible. With mouth ajar and nostrils dilated she goggled psychological impossibilities at the offender.

“Hell roast the pair of you” he said in a sudden pet, “I was only joking.”

Mrs bboggs, though still entirely at a loss, made up her mind in a flash to accept this explanation. Una was not in the least amused. In fact she was sorely tempted to wash her hands of the whole affair.

“I propose Alba Perdue” she said. It was really more a nomination than a proposal.

“That is her last word” observed Otto Olaf.

Alba Perdue, it may be remembered, was the nice little girl in
A Wet Night
. Thelma, whom Belacqua had favored with his version of that half-remembered love, could hardly dissemble her great satisfaction. When the turmoil of her blood had sufficiently abated she pronounced, in a voice just loud enough to be heard, this most depreciative hyperbole.

“I second that.”

Now it was Otto Olaf's turn to make inquiries.

“I understand” said Una who, unlike her father, could give a plain answer to a plain question, “correct me, Thelma, if I am wrong, an old flame of the groom.”

“Then she won't act” said the simple Otto Olaf.

Even Mrs bboggs could not refrain from joining in the outburst of merriment that greeted this fatuity. Una in particular seemed certain to do herself an injury. She trembled and perspired in a most fearful manner.

“Oh my God!” she panted, “won't act!”

But Nature takes care of her own and a loud rending noise was heard. Una stopped laughing and remained perfectly still. Her bodice had laid down its life to save hers.

Belacqua was so quiescent during the fortnight that preceded the ceremony that it almost seemed as though he were to suffer a complete metamorphosis. He had left all the arrangements to the discretion of Capper Quin, saying: “Here is the money, do the best you can.”

But before being overtaken by this inertia, which proceeded partly from fatigue and partly no doubt from the need for self-purification, he had been kept busy in a number of ways: finding a usurer, redeeming the ring, and searching among the hags for two to tally with Mr and Mrs bboggs in the interest of the nuptial jamboree. In the prosecution of this last duty Belacqua was called upon to sustain every kind of abusive denial and suffer Lucy's posthumous temperature to be thrown in his face, as though she were a bottle of white Burgundy. Until finally a female cousin, so remote as to be scarcely credible, and a kind of moot Struldbrug, to whom Belacqua's father had used to refer as “dear old Jimmy the Duck,” agreed to rise to the occasion. Hermione Näutzsche and James Skyrm were the names of these two deadbeats. Belacqua had not laid eyes on either of them since he was an infant prodigy.

Except for a short daily visit from Thelma, swallowed as being all in the game. Belacqua's retreat was undisturbed. The wedding gifts flowed in, not upon him, for he was friendless, but upon her, and she encouraged him day by day with the bulletin of their development.

She arrived one afternoon in a state of some excitement. Belacqua raised himself in the bed to be kissed, which he was with such unexpected voracity that he went weak before the end. Poor fellow, he had not been giving due attention to his meals.

“Your present is got” she said.

To Belacqua, who had been setting aside a portion of each day for polyglot splendours, this phrase came as a great shock. Perhaps the present would make him amends.

“It came this morning” she said.

“At what time exactly?” said Belacqua, easing his nerves in the usual sneer. “That is most important.”

“What devil” said Thelma, her gaiety all gone, “makes you so beastly?”

Ah, if he only knew.

“But it so happens” she said “that I can tell you.”

Belacqua thought for a bit and then plumped for saying nothing.

“Because” she proceeded “the first thing I did was to set it.”

The hideous truth dawned on his mind.

“Not a clock” he implored, “don't say a grandfather clock.”

“The grandfather and mother” she did say “of a period clock.”

He turned his face to the wall. He who of late years and with the approval of Lucy would not tolerate a chronometer of any kind in the house, for whom the local publication of the hours was six of the best on the brain every hour, and even the sun's shadow a torment, now to have this time-fuse deafen the rest of his days. It was enough to make him break off the engagement.

Long after she had gone he tossed and turned until the thought, like God appearing to a soul in hell, that he could always spike the monster's escapement and turn its death's-head to the wall, came in the morning with the canticle of the ring-doves. Then he slept.

What time Capper Quin was here, there and everywhere, attending to the interests of his principal. Conscious of his own shortcomings in a matter so far removed from the integrities of self-expression, he engaged, on the basis of a modest inverted commission, to aid him in his work, one Sproule, a lately axed jobber to a firm in the City, whose winning manner and familiarity with the shopping centres north of the river were beyond rubies. Bright and early on the fateful Saturday they met to buy the bouquets, the big one for the bride and the seven nosegays.

“Mrs bboggs” said Hairy, “ought we?”

“Ought we what?” said Sproule.

“I thought maybe a bloom” said Hairy.

“Superfoetation” said Sproule.

He led the way to a florist's off Mary Street. The proprietress, having just discovered among her stock an antirrhinum with the rudiment of a fifth stamen, was highly delighted.

“Oh, Mr Sproule sir” she exclaimed, “would you believe it…”

“Good morning” said Sproule. “One large orchid and seven of your best ox-eyes.”

Now Capper Quin, however unsuited to strike a bargain, was endowed with a sense of fitness, and one so exquisite indeed that he could make himself clear in its defence.

“On behalf of my client” he said “I must insist on two orchids.”

“By all means” said Sproule. “Make it three, make it a dozen.”

“Two” repeated Hairy.

“Two large orchids” said Sproule “and seven of your best ox-eyes.”

As though by magic wand the nine blooms appeared in her hand.

“Four lots” said Sproule, “one, two, three and one with orchids.” Rapidly he equated addresses and consignments on a sheet of paper. “So” he said, “first thing.”

She now mentioned a sum that caused the buyer great amusement. He appealed to Hairy.

“Mr Quin” he said, “do I wake or sleep?”

She not merely made good her figures but mentioned that she had to live. Sproule could not see the connexion. He pinched his cheek to make sure he was not in Nassau Street.

“My dear madam” he said, “we do not have to live in Nassau Street.”

This thrust so weakened his adversary that she suffered him to place specie in her hand.

“Take this” he said, in a eucharistic voice, “or leave it.”

The cold alloy in her hot palm, conjoined with the depression and the urge to live, determined the issue in Sproule's favour. Upon which the combatants shook hands with great heartiness. How could there be any question of rancour when both were fully satisfied of having obtained the victory?

Sproule, his duties at an end, received his commission in the Oval bar, where nothing would do him but that Hairy should toast his employer in gin and peppermint.

“Happy dawg” said Sproule. He had come unscathed through the Great War.

The hyperaesthesia of Hairy was so great that the mere fact of standing on licensed ground, without the least reference to its liberties, was of force sufficient to exhilarate him. Now therefore, under the influence of his situation, he dilated with splendid incoherence on the contradiction involved in the idea of a happy Belacqua and on the impertinence of desiring that he should derogate into such an anomaly.

“Fornication” he vociferated “before the Shekinah.”

This observation was accompanied and graced by a spasm of such passionate repugnance that it was no less an act of charity on the part of the ex-jobber, who was familiar with Boy Scouts and their ways and knew that he might never pass that way again, to substitute his empty glass for the bumper of his agitated companion.

In the bright street a bitter-sweet sorrow entered into Sproule, sweet at parting, bitter at the knowledge that his services were no longer required.

“Farewell” he said, flinging out his dreadful hand, “may luck rise with you on the way.”

But Hairy was too full, too overcome by the fumes of his position, to shake, let alone reply. He stepped, as upon an Underground escalator, into the stream of pedestrians and was gone. Sproule raised his sad eyes to the sky and saw the day, its outstanding hours that could not be numbered, in the form of a beautiful Girl Guide galante, reclining among the clouds. She beckoned to him with her second finger, like one preparing a certificate in pianoforte, Junior Grade, at the Leinster School of Music. Closing his mind softly on this delicious vision, feeling it in his mind like a sponge of toilet vinegar on a fever, he advanced into the Oval towards it.

Whom should Hairy meet on the crest of the Metal Bridge but Walter Draffin, fresh from his effeminate ablutions and as spruce and keen as a new-ground hatchet in his miniature tails and stripes. The sun shone bright upon him, his languorous poll, for he carried his topper crown downward in his hand. The two gentlemen were on speaking terms.

“This is where I stand” said the little creature, with a sigh that made Hairy look nervously round for prisons and palaces, “and watch the Liffey swim.”

“Blue-eyed cats” quoted the colossal Capper, for no other reason than that the phrase had been running in his mind and now here was a chance to discharge it on a wit, “are always deaf.”

Walter smiled, he felt greatly pleased, he held up his little face to the kindly sun like a child to be kissed.

“The burrowing tucutucu” he answered “is occasionally blind, but the mole is
never
sober.”

The mole is never sober
. A profound mot. Hairy, having tried all he knew to say as much, hung his head, a gallant loser, consoled by the certitude that Walter would take the will for the deed. Poor Hairy, there was a great deal he understood, but he could not make this known in the absence of a battery of writing materials.

“That unspeakable invite” exclaimed Walter, “of all things to be destitute of enjambment!”

He was confirmed in his initial misgiving by Hairy's having clearly no idea what he was talking about. There was nothing for it but to put it into his book. Walter's book was a long time in coming out because he refused to regard it as anything more than a mere dump for whatever he could not get off his chest in the ordinary way.

“So off you go” he said “to attend your happy client, and I to buy myself a buttonhole.”

This, ensuing so soon upon mole and enjambment, brought Hairy's brain to the boil, and out of his mouth came the one word “rose” like a big bubble.

“Blood-red and newly born” said Walter “to aromatic pain. Eh?”

Hairy, with a sudden feeling that he was wasting his client's time and his own precarious energies on a kind of rubber Stalin, took his departure with a more than boorish abruptness, leaving Walter to enjoy the great central agency and hang out as it were his cowlick to air or dry. A passing humorist dropped a penny into the empty hat, it fell on the rich wadding without a sound, and so the joke was lost.

In Parliament Street a funeral passed and Hairy did not uncover. Many of the chief mourners, consoling themselves in no small measure with the reverence expressed by every section of the community, noticed with rage in their hearts that he did not, though to be sure they made no allusion to it at the time. Let this be a lesson to young men, strangers perhaps to sorrow, to uncover whenever a funeral passes, less in act of respect towards the defunct than in sympathetic acknowledgment of the survivors. One of these fine days Hairy will observe, from where he sits bearing up bravely behind the hearse in a family knot, a labourer let go of his pick with one hand, or gay dandy snatch both his out of his pockets, in a gesture of more value and comfort than a ton of lilies. Take the case of Belacqua, who ever since the commitment of his Lucy wears a hat, contrary to his inclination, on the off chance of his encountering a cortège.

The best man had received instructions to collect in Molesworth Street the Morgan, fast but noisy, lent for the period of the high time journey by a friend of the bboggses. Needless to say some eejit had parked it so far up towards the arty end that luckless Hairy, coming from the west upon the stand after the usual Duke Street complications, hastening along the shady southern pavement because he felt there was not a moment to lose, was almost in despair of ever finding the solitary hind-wheel that he had been advised to look out for. He was much relieved to espy it at last, last but one or two in the row, but embarrassed also to remark a group made up of small boys, loafers and the official stand attendant gathered round and passing judgment on the strange machine's design and performance. He kept his head none the less and examined the car, as he had been strictly enjoined to do, for any hymeneal insignia that might have been annexed, doubtless with the very best intentions, to its body, such as a boot, an inscription or other shameful badge. Satisfied that there were none, he hoisted his vast frame on board the light weight which thereupon reduced the expert comment of the bystanders, if we except the attendant who was most grave and attentive, to jeers and laughter, by rocking like a cockle-shell. Hairy, wondering what on earth to do next, sat blushing and hopeless at the controls. The general provisions for starting a motor engine were familiar to him, and these in every imaginable combination he fruitlessly applied to that, exceptional presumably, fitted to the Morgan. The boys were most anxious to push, the loafers to give a tow, while the attendant could not be deterred from flooding the car-burettor and swinging the engine, which started most perversely and unexpectedly with a backfire that broke the obliging fellow's arm. Hairy was so pressed for time that he hardened his heart to the consistence of an Uebermensch's, roared his engine and found himself abruptly, in a paroxysm of plunges and saccades, cutting the corner of Kildare Street under the prow of a bus, which happily did no more than remove the back number-plate and thus provide, not merely a neat instance of poetic justice, but the winged attendant with the nucleus of compensation.