More Pricks Than Kicks (9 page)

Suddenly walking through the rain was not enough, stepping out smartly, buttoned up to the chin, in the cold and the wet, was an inadequate thing to be doing. He stopped on the crown of Baggot Street bridge, took off his reefer, laid it on the parapet and sat down beside it. The Guard was forgotten. Stooping forward then where he sat and flexing his leg until the knee was against his ear and the heel caught on the parapet (admirable posture) he took off his boot and laid it beside the reefer. Then he let down that leg and did the same with the other. Next, resolved to get full value from the bitter nor'-wester that was blowing, he slewed himself right round. His feet dangled over the canal and he saw, lurching across the remote hump of Leeson Street bridge, trams like hiccups-o'-the-wisp. Distant lights on a dirty night, how he loved them, the dirty low-church Protestant! He felt very chilly. He took off his jacket and belt and laid them with the other garments on the parapet. He unbuttoned the top of his filthy old trousers and coaxed out his German shirt. He bundled the skirt of the shirt under the fringe of his pullover and rolled them up clockwise together until they were hooped fast across his thorax. The rain beat against his chest and belly and trickled down. It was even more agreeable than he had anticipated, but very cold. It was now, beating his bosom thus bared to the mean storm vaguely with marble palms, that he took leave of himself and felt wretched and sorry for what he had done. He had done wrong, he realised that, and he was heartily sorry. He sat on, drumming his stockinged heels sadly against the stone, wondering whence on earth could comfort spring, when suddenly the thought of the bottle he had bought pierced his gloomy condition like a beacon. It was there at hand in his pocket, a breast of Bisquit in the pocket of his reefer. He dried himself as best he might with his cambric pochette and adjusted his clothes. When everything was back in place, the reefer buttoned up as before, the boots laced and not a hole skipped, then, but not a moment before, he permitted himself to drink the bottle at a single gulp. The effect of this was to send what is called a glow of warmth what is called coursing through his veins. He squelched off down the street at a trot, resolved to make it, in so far as he had the power to do so, a non-stop run to Casa Frica. Jogging along with his elbows well up he prayed that his appearance might not provoke too much comment.

His mind, in the ups and downs of the past hour, had not had leisure to dwell upon the sufferings in store for it. Even the Alba's scarlet gown—for the qualified assurance of the Venerilla, that it buttoned up
with the help of God,
had not been of a nature to purge it altogether of misgiving—had ceased to be a burden. But now, when the Frica came pattering out of the mauve salon to intercept him in the vestibule and with her presence shocked him into something worse than sobriety, the full seriousness of his position came to him with the force of an abstract calamity.

“There you are” she whinnied “at long last.”

“Here” he said rudely “I float.”

She recoiled with bursting eyes and clapped a hand to her teeth. Was it possible that he had been courting damp death and damnation or something of the kind? The wet dripped off him as he stood aghast before her and gathered in a little pool at his feet. How dilated her nostrils were!

“You must get out of those wet things” said the Frica, she must hurry now and put the lens in the keyhole, “this very moment. But the dear boy is drenched to the … skin!” There was no nonsense about the Frica. When she meant skin she said skin. “Every stitch” she gloated “must come off at once, this very instant.”

From the taut cock of the face viewed as a whole, and in particular from the horripilating detail of the upper-lip writhing up and away in a kind of a duck or a cobra sneer to the quivering snout, he derived the impression that something had inflamed her. And right enough a condition of the highest mettle and fettle had followed hard upon her asinine dumfusion. For here indeed was an unexpected little bit of excitement! In a moment she would break into a caper. Belacqua thought it might be as well to take this disposition in time.

“No” he said composedly, “if I might have a towel…”

“A towel!” The scoff was so shocked that she was obliged to blow her nose better late than never.

“It would take off the rough wet” he said.

The rough wet! But how too utterly absurd to speak of the rough wet when it was clear to be seen that he was soaked through and through.

“To the skin!” she cried.

“No” he said, “if I might just have a towel…”

Caleken, though deeply chagrined as may well be imagined, knew her man well enough to realise that his determination to accept no more final comfort at her hands than the loan of a towel was unalterable. Also in the salon her absence was beginning to make itself heard, the mice were beginning to enjoy themselves. So off she pattered with a sour look—goose, thought Belacqua, flying barefoot from McCabe—and was back in no time with a hairy towel of great size and a hand-towel.

“You'll get your death” she said, with the adenoidal asperity that he knew so well, and left him. Rejoining her guests she felt that all this had happened to her before, by hearsay or in a dream.

Chas, conversing in low tones with the Shawly, was waiting in some trepidation to be called on for his contribution. This was the famous occasion when Chas, as though he had taken leave of his senses or begun to be irked by his brand new
toga virilis
, concluded an unexceptionable recitation with the quatrain:

The Alba, whom in order to rescue Belacqua we were obliged to abandon just as with characteristic impetuosity she swallowed the pill, opened her campaign by sending Mr Higgins and the P.B. flying, there is no other word for it, about their business. Upon which, not deigning to have any share in the sinister kiss-me-Charley hugger-mugger that had spread like wildfire throughout the building, till it raged from attic to basement, under the aegis of the rising strumpet and the casual cicisbeo, she proceeded in her own quiet and inimitable style to captivate all those who had curbed their instinct to join in the vile necking expressly in order to see what they could make of this pale little person so self-possessed and urbane in the best sense in the scarlet costume. So that, from the point of view of her Maker and in the absence of Belacqua, she was quite a power for good that evening in Casa Frica.

It had not occurred to her, fond as she was of that shabby hero in her own rather stealthy and sinuous fashion, to miss him or think of him at all unless possibly as a rather acute spectator whose eyes behind his glasses upon her and vernier of appraisement going like mad might have slightly spiced her fun. Among the many whom the implacable Frica had hounded from the joys of sense she had marked down for her own one of the grave Jews, him with the bile-tinged conjunctivae, and the merchant prince. She addressed herself to the Jew, but too slackly, as to an insipid dish, and was repulsed. Scarcely had she reloaded and trained her charms more nicely upon this interesting miscreant, of whom she proposed, her mind full of hands rubbing, to make a most salutary example, than the Frica, still smarting under her frustration, announced in a venomous tone of voice that Monsieur Jean du Chas, too well known to the Dublin that mattered for the most talentuous nonesuch that he was to require any introduction, had kindly consented to set the ball a-rolling. Notwithstanding the satisfaction that would have accured to the Alba had Chas died the death without further delay, she made no attempt to restrain her merriment, in which of course she was uproariously seconded by the P.B., when he came out with the iniquitous apothegm quoted above, and the less so as she observed how bitter-sweetly the paleographer and Parabimbi, who had been surprised by the Frica being slightly naughty together, dissociated themselves from the applause that greeted his descent from the estrade.

This, roughly speaking, was the position when Belacqua framed himself in the doorway.

Surveying him as he stood bedraggled under the lintel, clutching his enormous glasses (a precautionary measure that he never neglected when there was the least danger of his
appearing
embarrassed, appearing in italics because he was always embarrassed), bothered seriously in his mind by a neat little point that had arisen out of nowhere in the vestibule, waiting no doubt for some kind friend to lead him to a seat, the Alba thought she had never seen anybody, man or woman, look quite such a sovereign booby. Seeking to be God, she thought, in the slavish arrogance of a piffling evil.

“Like something” she said to her neighbour the P.B. “that a dog would bring in.”

The P.B. played up, he overbade.

“Like something” he said “that, on reflection, he would not.”

He cackled and snuffled over his sottish mot as though it were his own.

In an unsubduable movement of misericord the Alba started out of her chair.

“Niño” she called, without shame or ceremony.

The distant call came to Belacqua like a pint of Perrier to drink in a dungeon. He stumbled towards it.

“Move up in the bed” she ordered the P.B. “and make room.”

Everybody in the row had to move up one. Like the totem chorus, thought the Alba with complacency, in
Rose Marie
. Belacqua came down on the end seat thus freed like a sack of potatoes. Observe, now at last they are juxtaposed. His next difficulty was how to get her on his other side, for he could not bear on any account to be on a person's right hand, without finding himself stuck up against the P.B. as a result. Though it scarcely required an expert statistician to realise that the desired order could only be established by his changing places with the P.B., leaving the Alba where she was, yet he wasted much valuable time, in a fever of notes of exclamation, failing to understand that of the six ways in which they could arrange themselves only one satisfied his conditions. He sat not looking, his head sunk, plucking vaguely at his filthy old trousers. When she placed her hand on his sleeve he roused himself and looked at her. To her disgust he was shedding tears.

“At it again” she said.

The Parabimbi could bear it no longer. Clutching and clawing and craning her neck all over the suffocating paleographer she demanded in a general way:

“What's that? Who's that? Is that
promessi?
”

“I was amazed” said a voice, “truly amazed, to find Sheffield more hilly than Rome.”

Belacqua made a stupendous effort to acknowledge the cordial greeting of the P.B., but could not. He longed to subside on the floor and pillow his head on the slight madder thigh of his one and only.

“The bicuspid” from the Ovoidologist “monotheistic fiction ripped by the sophists, Christ and Plato, from the violated matrix of pure reason.”

Who shall silence them, at last? Who shall circumcise their lips from speaking, at last?

The Frica insisted that she trod the estrade.

“Maestro Gormely” she said “will now play.”

Maestro Gormely executed Scarlatti's Capriccio, without the least aid or accompaniment, on the viol d'amore. This met with no success to speak of.

“Plato!” sneered the P.B. “Did I hear the word Plato? That dirty little Borstal Boehme!” That was a sockdologer for someone if you like.

“Mr Larry O'Murcahaodha”—the Frica pronounced it as though he were a connection of Hiawatha—“will now sing.”

Mr Larry O'Murcahaodha tore a greater quantity than seemed fair of his native speech-material to flat tatters.

“I can't bear it” said Belacqua, “I can't bear it.”

The Frica threw the Poet into the breach. She informed the assistance that it was privileged.

“I think I am accurate in saying” she presented her teeth for the lie “one of his most recent compositions.”

“Vinegar” moaned Belacqua “on nitre.”

“Don't you try” said with forced heartiness the Alba, who began to fear for her wretched adorer, “to put across the Mrs Gummidge before the coverture on me.”

He had no desire, oh none, to put across the Mrs Gummidge at any stage of her experience or anything whatever on her or anyone else. His distress was profound and unaffected. He had abandoned all hope of getting her where he wanted her, he could neither be on her left hand nor at her feet. His only remaining concern, before his soul heaved anchor, was to get some kind friend to scotch a wolf that he could not hold off by the ears very much longer. He leaned across to the Polar Bear.

“I wonder” he said “could you possibly—”

“Motus!” screamed the bibliomaniac, from the back row.

The P.B. turned a little yellow, as well he might.

“Let the man say his lines” he hissed “can't you?”

Belacqua said in a loud despairing voice, falling back into position, a foreign word that he would understand.

“What is it?” whispered the Alba.

Belacqua was green, he did the King of Brobdingnag in a quick dumb crambo.

“Curse you” said the Alba, “what is it?”

“Let the man say his lines” he mumbled, “why won't you let the man say his lines?”

An outburst of applause unprecedented in the annals of the mauve salon suggested that he might have done so at last.

“Now” said the Alba.

Belacqua helped himself to a deep breath of the rank ambience and then, with the precipitation of one exhibiting a tongue-teaser, rattled off the borrowed quodlibet as follows:

“When with indifference I remember my past sorrow, my mind has indifference, my memory has sorrow. The mind, upon the indifference which is in it, is indifferent; yet the memory, upon the sorrow which is in it, is not sad.”

“Again” she said, “slower.”

He was getting on nicely with the repeat when the Alba had a sudden idea and stopped him.

“See me home” she said.

“Have you got it” said Belacqua, “because I haven't.”

She covered his hand with her hand.