He bought a paper of a charming little sloven, no but a truly exquisite little page, a freelance clearly, he would not menace him, he skipped in on his miry bare feet with only three or four under his oxter for sale. Belacqua gave him a thruppenny bit and a cigarette picture. He sat to himself on a stool in the central leaf of the main triptych, his feet on a round so high that his knees topped the curb of the counter (admirable posture for man with weak bladder and tendency to ptosis of viscera), drank despondent porter (but he dared not budge) and devoured the paper.
“A woman” he read with a thrill “is either: a short-below-the-waist, a big-hip, a sway-back, a big-abdomen or an average. If the bust be too cogently controlled, then shall fat roll from scapula to scapula. If it be made passable and slight, then shall the diaphragm bulge and be unsightly. Why not therefore invest chez a reputable corset-builder in the brassière-cum-corset décolleté, made from the finest Broches, Coutils and Elastics, centuple stitched in wearing parts, fitted with immovable spiral steels? It bestows stupendous diaphragm and hip support, it enhances the sleeveless backless neckless evening gown…”
O Love! O Fire! but would the scarlet gown lack all these parts? Was she a short-below or a sway-back? She had no waist, nor did she deign to sway. She was not to be classified. Not to be corseted. Not woman of flesh.
The face on the curate faded away and Grock's appeared in its stead.
“Say that again” said the red gash in the white putty.
Belacqua said it all and much more.
“Nisscht möööööööglich” moaned Grock, and was gone.
Now Belacqua began to worry lest the worst should come to the worst and the scarlet gown be backless after all. Not that he had any doubts as to the back thus bared being a sight for sore eyes. The omoplates would be well defined, they would have a fine free ball-and-socket motion. In repose they would be the blades of an anchor, the delicate furrow of the spine its stem. His mind pored over this back that inspired him with awe. He saw it as a flower-de-luce, a spatulate leaf with segments angled back, like the wings of a butterfly sucking a blossom, from their common hinge. Then, fetching from further afield, as an obelisk, a cross-potent, pain and death, still death, a bird crucified on a wall. This flesh and bones swathed in scarlet, this heart of washed flesh draped in scarlet….
Unable to bear any longer his doubt as to the rig of the gown he passed through the counter and got her house on the telephone.
“Dressing” said the maid, the Venerilla, his friend and bawd to be, “and spitting blood.”
No, she could not be got down, she had been up in her room cursing and swearing for the past hour.
“I'm afeared of me gizzard” said the voice “to go near her.”
“Is it closed at the back?” demanded Belacqua “or is it open?”
“Is what?”
“The gown” cried Belacqua, “what else? Is it closed?”
The Venerilla requested him to hold on while she called it to the eye of the mind. The objurgations of this ineffable member were clearly audible.
“Would it be the red one?” she said, after countless ages.
“The scarlet bloody gown of course” he cried out of his torment, “do you not know?”
“Hold on now. … It buttons…”
“Buttons? What buttons?”
“It buttons ups behind, sir, with the help of God.”
“Say it again” implored Belacqua, “over and over again.”
“Amn't I after saying” groaned the Venerilla “it buttons ups on her.”
“Praise be to God” said Belacqua “and his blissful Mother.”
Calm now and sullen the Alba, dressed insidiously up to the nines, bides her time in the sunken kitchen, paying no heed to her fool and foil who has made bold to lay open Belacqua's distress. She is in pain, her brandy is at hand, mulling in the big glass on the range. Behind her frontage abandoned in elegance, sagging in its elegance and clouded in its native sorrow, a more anxious rite than sumptuous meditation is in progress. For her mind is at prayer-stool before a perhaps futile purpose, she is loading the spring of her mind for a perhaps unimportant undertaking. Letting her outside rip pro tem she is screwing herself up and up, she is winding up the weights of her mind, to being the belle of the ball, banquet or party. Any less beautiful girl would have contemned such tactics and considered this class of absorption at the service of so simple an occasion unwarranted and, what was worse, a sad give away. Here am I, a less bountiful one would have argued, the belle, and there is the ball; let these two items be brought together and the thing is done. Are we then to insinuate, with such a simplist, that the Alba questioned the virtue of her appearance. Indeed and indeed we are not. She had merely to unleash her eyes, she had merely to unhood them, as well she knew, and she might have mercy on whom she would. There was no difficulty about that. But what she did question, balefully, as though she knew the answer in advance, was the fitness of a distinction hers for the asking, of a palm that she had merely to open her eyes and assume. That the simplicity of the gest turned her in the first place against it, relegating it among the multitude of things that were not her genre, is indisputable. But this was only a minute aspect of her position. It is with the disparagement attaching in the thought of Belacqua, and in hers tending to, to the quality of the exploit that she now wrestles. It is with its no doubt unworthiness that she now has to do. Sullen and still, aware of the brandy at hand but not thirsting for it, she cranks herself up to a reality of preference, slowly but surely she gilds her option, she exalts it into realms of choice. She will do this thing, she will be belle of the ball, gladly, gravely and carefully, humiliter, fideliter, simpliciter, and not merely because she might just as well. Is she, she a woman of the world, she who knows, to halt between two opinions, founder in a strait of two wills, hang in suspense and be the more killed? She who knows? So far from such nonsense she will soon chafe to be off. And now she dare, until it be time, the clock strike, delegate a portion of her attention with instructions to reorganise her features, hands, shoulders, back, outside in a word, the inside having been spiked. At once she thirsts for the Hennessy. She sings to herself, for her own pleasure, stressing all the words that cry for stress, like Dan the first to warble without fear or favour:
No me jodas en el suelo
Como si fuera una perra,
Que con esos cojonazos
Me echas en el coño tierra.
The Polar Bear, a big old brilliant lecher, was already on his way, speeding along the dark dripping country roads in a crass honest slob of a clangorous bus, engaging with the effervescent distinction of a Renaissance cardinal in rather languid tongue-play an acquaintance of long standing, a Jesuit with little or no nonsense about him.
“The Lebensbahn” he was saying, for he never used the English word when the foreign pleased him better, “of the Galilean is the tragi-comedy of the solipsism that will not capitulate. The humilities and retro me's and quaffs of sirreverence are on a par with the hey presto's, arrogance and egoism. He is the first great self-contained playboy. The cryptic abasement before the woman taken red-handed is as great a piece of megalomaniacal impertinence as his interference in the affairs of his boy-friend Lazarus. He opens the series of slick suicides, as opposed to the serious Empedoclean variety. He has to answer for the wretched Nemo and his coratés, bleeding in paroxysms of dépit on an unimpressed public.”
He coughed up a plump cud of mucus, spun it round the avid bowl of his palate and stowed it away for future degustation.
The S.J. with little or no nonsense had just enough strength to voice his fatigue.
“If you knew” he said “how you bore me with your twice two is four.”
The P.B. failed to get him.
“You bore me” drawled the S.J. “worse than an infant prodigy.” He paused to recruit his energies. “In his hairless voice” he proceeded “preferring the druggist Borodin to Mozart.”
“By all accounts” retorted the P.B
. “your sweet Mozart was a Hexenmeister in the pilch.”
That was a nasty one, let him make what he liked of that one.
“Our Lord——”
“Speak for yourself” said the P.B., nettled beyond endurance.
“Our Lord was not.”
“You forget” said the P.B., “he got it all over at procreation.”
“When you grow up to be a big boy” said the Jesuit “and can understand the humility that is beyond masochism, come and talk to me again. Not cis-, ultra-masochistic. Beyond pain and service.”
“But precisely” exclaimed the P.B., “he did not serve, the late lamented. What else am I saying? A valet does not have big ideas. he let down the central agency.”
“The humility” murmured the janizary “of a love too great for skivvying and too real to need the tonic of urtication.”
The infant prodigy sneered at this comfortable variety.
“You make things pleasant for yourselves” he sneered, “I must say.”
“The best reason” said the S.J. “that can be given for believing is that it is more amusing. Disbelief” said the soldier of Christ, making ready to arise “is a bore. We do not count our change. We simply cannot bear to be bored.”
“Say that from the pulpit” said the P.B. “and you'll be drummed into the wilderness.”
The S.J. laughed profusely. Was it possible to conceive a more artless impostor of a mathematician than this fellow!
“Would you” he begged, putting his greatcoat on, “would you, my dear good fellow, have the kindness to bear in mind that I am not a Parish Priest.”
“I won't forget” said the P.B. “that you don't scavenge. Your love is too great for the slops.”
“Egg-sactly” said the S.J. “But they are excellent men. A shade on the assiduous side, a shade too anxious to strike a rate. Otherwise …” He rose. “Observe” he said, “I desire to get down. I pull this cord and the bus stops and lets me down.”
The P.B. observed.
“In just such a Gehenna of links” said this remarkable man, with one foot on the pavement, “I forged my vocation.”
With which words he was gone and the burden of his fare had fallen on the P.B.
Chas's girl was a Shetland Shawly. He had promised to pick her up on his way to Casa Frica and now, cinched beyond reproach in his double-breasted smoking, he subdued his impatience to catch a tram in order to explain the world to a group of students.
“The difference, if I may say so——”
“Oh” cried the students, una voce, “oh please!”
“The difference, then, I say, between Bergson and Einstein, the essential difference, is as between philosopher and sociolog.”
“Oh!” cried the students.
“Yes” said Chas, casting up what was the longest divulgation he could place before the tram, which had hove into view, would draw abreast.
“And if it is the smart thing now to speak of Bergson as a cod”—he edged away—“it is that we move from the Object”—he made a plunge for the tram—“and the Idea to SENSE”—he cried from the step—“AND REASON.”
“Sense” echoed the students “and reason!”
The difficulty was to know what exactly he meant by sense.
“He must mean senses” said a first, “smell, don't you know, and so on.”
“Nay” said a second, “he must mean common sense.”
“I think” said a third “he must mean instinct, intuition, don't you know, and that kind of thing.”
A fourth longed to know what Object there was in Bergson, a fifth what a sociolog was, a sixth what either had to do with the world.
“We must ask him” said a seventh, “that is all. We must not confuse ourselves with inexpert speculation. Then we shall see who is right.”
“We must ask him” cried the students, “then we shall see….”
On which understanding, that the first to see him again would be sure and ask him, they went their not so very different ways.
The hair of the homespun Poet, so closely was it cropped, did not lend itself kindly to any striking effects of dressing. Here again, in his plumping for the austerity of a rat's back, he proclaimed himself in reaction to the nineties. But the little that there was to do he had done, with a lotion that he had he had given alertness to the stubble. Also he had changed his tie and turned his collar. And now, though alone and unobserved, he paced up and down. He was making up his piece, d'occasion perhaps in both senses, whose main features he had recently established riding home on his bike from the Yellow House. He would deliver it when his hostess came with her petition, he would not hum and haw like an amateur pianist nor yet as good as spit in her eye like a professional one. No he would arise and say, not declaim, state gravely, with the penetrating Middle West gravity that is like an ogleful of tears:
CALVARY BY NIGHT
the water
the waste of water
in the womb of water
an pansy leaps.
rocket of bloom flare flower of night wilt for me
on the breasts of the water it has closed it has made
an act of floral presence on the water
the tranquil act of its cycle on the waste
from the spouting forth
to the re-enwombing
untroubled bow of petaline sweet-smellingness
kingfisher abated
drowned for me
lamb of insustenance mine
till the clamour of a blue bloom
beat on the walls of the womb of
the waste of
the water
Resolved to put across this strong composition and cause something of a flutter he was anxious that there should be no flaw in the mode of presentation adopted by him as most worthy of his aquatic manner. In fact he had to have it pat in order not to have to say it pat, in order to give the impression that in the travail of its exteriorisation he was being torn asunder. Taking his cue from the equilibrist, who encaptures us by failing once, twice, three times, and then, in a regular lather of volition, bringing it off, he deemed that this little turn, if it were to conquer the salon, required stress to be laid not so much on the content of the performance as on the spiritual evisceration of the performer. Hence he paced to and fro, making a habit of the words and effects of Calvary by Night.
The Frica combed her hair, back and back she raked her purple tresses till to close her eyes became a problem. The effect was throttled gazelle, more appropriate to evening wear than her workaday foal at foot. Belacqua's Ruby, in her earlier campaigns, had favoured the same taut Sabine coiffure, till Mrs Tough, by dint of protesting that it made her little bird-face look like a sucked lozenge, had induced her to fluff things a bit and crimp them. Unavailingly alas! for nimbed she was altogether too big dolly that opens and shuts its eyes. Nor indeed was lozenge, sucked or buck, by any means the most ignoble office that face of woman might discharge. For here at hand, saving us our fare to Derbyshire, we have the Frica, looking something horrid.
Throttled gazelle gives no idea. Her features, as though the hand of an unattractive ravisher were knotted in her chevelure, were set at half-cock and locked in a rictus. She had frowned to pencil her eyebrows, so now she had four. The dazzled iris was domed in a white agony of entreaty, the upper lip writhed back in a snarl to the untented nostrils. Would she bite her tongue off, that was the interesting question. The nutcracker chin betrayed a patent clot of thyroid gristle. It was impossible to set aside the awful suspicion that her flattened mammae, in sympathy with this tormented eructation of countenance, had put forth cutwaters and were rowelling her corsage. But the face was beyond appeal, a flagrant seat of injury. She had merely to arrange her hands so that the palm and fingers of the one touched the palm and fingers of the other and hold them thus joined before the breast with a slight upward inclination to look like a briefless martyress in rut.
Nevertheless the arty Countess of Parabimbi, backing through the press, w
ould dangle into the mauve presence of the crone-mother, Caleken Frica's holiest thing alive, and
“My dear” she would positively be obliged to ejaculate, “never have I seen your Caleken quite so striking! Simply Sistine!”
What would her Ladyship be pleased to mean? The Cumaean Sibyl on a bearing-rein, sniffing the breeze for the Grimm Brothers? Oh, her Ladyship did not care to be so infernal finical and nice, that would be like working out how many pebbles in Tom Thumb's pocket. It was just a vague impression, it was merely that she looked, with that strange limy hobnailed texture of complexion, so frescosa, from the waist up, my dear, with that distempered cobalt modesty-piece, a positive gem of ravished Quattrocento, a positive jewel, my dear, of sweaty Big Tom. Whereupon the vidual virgin, well aware after these many years that all things in heaven, the earth and the waters were as they were taken, would vow to cherish as long as she was spared the learned praise of such an expert.
“Maaaccche!” bleats the Parabimbi.
This may be premature. We have set it down too soon, perhaps. Still, let it bloody well stand.
To return to the Frica, there is the bell at long last, pealing down her Fallopian pipettes, galvanising her away from the mirror as though her navel had been pressed in annunciation.
The Student, whose name we shall never know, was the first to arrive. A foul little brute he was, with a brow.
“Oh Lawdee!” he gushed, his big brown eyes looking della Robbia babies at the Frica, “don't tell me I'm the first!”
“Don't distress yourself” said Caleken, who could smell a poet against the wind, “only by a short gaffe.”