Dream of Fair to Middling Women (28 page)

Suddenly walking through the rain was not enough, striding along smartly, well muffled up, in the cold and the wet was an inadequate thing to be doing. He halted on the crown of Baggot Street Bridge, took off his reefer and hat, laid them on the parapet and sat down beside them. The Guard was forgotten. Stooping forward there where he sat and flexing his leg until the knee was against his ear and the heel rested on the parapet he took off his shoe and set it down beside the coat and the hat. Then he let down that leg and did the same with the other. Next, in order that he might get full value from the bitter northwester that was blowing, he slewed himself round on his chilled soaked bottom. His legs dangled over the canal and he could see the trams hiccuping across the remote hump of Leeson Street Bridge. Distant lights on a dirty night, how he loved them, the dirty low-church Protestant! He felt very cold. He took off his jacket and belt and laid them down beside the other garments on the parapet. He unbuttoned the top of his filthy old trousers and pulled out the German shirt.

Then, bundling the skirt of the shirt under the fringe of his pullover, he rolled them up clockwise together until they were hooped fast across his thorax. It was not worth his while taking them off altogether, and the less so as there was collar and studs and tie and cufflinks to complicate the operation. The rain beat against his chest and belly and trickled down. It was even more agreeable than he had hoped, but very cold. It was now, beating his bosom thus bared to the mean storm vaguely with marble palms, that he parted company with himself and felt wretched and sorry for what he had done. He had done wrong, he realised that, and he was heartily sorry. Still, uncertain as to how best he might be comforted, he sat on, drumming his stockinged heels irritably against the stone. Suddenly the thought of the bottle he had bought pierced through his gloomy condition like a beacon. It was still there in his pocket, in the breast of his reefer. He dried himself as best he might with his Paris pochette and adjusted his clothes. When he was more or less in order, but not before, well muffled up once more in his reefer and with the shoes back on his feet, then he took a stiff pull on the bottle. That did him the hell of a lot of good. It sent what is called a warm glow what is called coursing through his veins. He repeated the dose and felt better again. Heartened, he squelched off down the street at a trot, resolved to make it, in so far as in him lay, a non-stop run as far as the Frica's. The rain had abated, and he saw no reason why it should be remarked that there was anything amiss with his appearance. With his elbows well up he jogged along. Some hundred yards short of the house he drew up and lit a cigarette for malas and maxillas, lit it to put himself into countenance.

Why did the Smeraldina-Rima elect to rise before him at this precise moment, and in a posture suggestive of reproach what was more, the little head bowed and the arms dangling and the tall stout body still? That was what he could not make out. He called to mind the calamitous Silvester: how he had offended her in the first instance by wanting to languish on quietly in the Wohnung, with the candle-light and a sanies of music from Mammy and the wine of music, Rhine wine; how then he had all but swooned with joy at the spectacle of his to all intents and purposes betrothed prancing off angrily in the embrace of the glider-champion; how then, having delivered her over to the unbridled desires of the Belshazzar and Herr Sauerwein the portraitist, of whom it may perhaps be now the moment to say that he did away with himself in the Seine, he jumped from a bridge, like all suicides, never from the bank, in consideration of his being too modern to live, he had sought, found, and lost, accompanied by the Mandarin, Abraham's bosom in a house of ill fame.

It was with this phrase, the ut sharpened, quantified and sustained to a degree that had never been intended by the Swan of Bonn, moaning in his memory, that he rang hell out of the Frica's door.

His mind, in the ups and downs of the past half-hour, coming now to a head in such a stress of remembrance, had not had leisure to pore over what was in pickle for him. Even the Alba's scarletest gown or robe—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 torment it. But now, standing in the hall, the full seriousness of his position burst upon him. When the Frica pattered out of the mauve salon, where all her guests were rounded up, to greet this late arrival, he was shocked and sobered by her appearance and general rig-out.

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

“Here” he said rudely “I float.”

She recoiled, clapped a hand to her teeth, and goggled.
Where
had he been?
Wat
had he been doing? Had he, oh was it possible he had, been trying to drown himself? To be sure, 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” she declared “this very moment. I declare to goodness you are 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 her 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 supposed her to be in a state of more than usual excitement. This he was conceited enough to ascribe to the prospect she appeared to entertain of his divesting himself instantly of every stitch. Nor was he entirely at fault. A condition of the highest mettle and fettle had followed hard upon her asinine dumbfusion. For here indeed was an unexpected little bit of excitement! In a moment she would break into a caracole. Belacqua thought it might be wiser 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 had to blow her nose headlongly before him.

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

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

“Through and through!” she cried.

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

She was profoundly chagrined, but realised that there was no shaking his resolve to accept no more thorough comfort at her hands than that which a towel could provide. And in the salon they were waiting for her, her absence was beginning to make itself felt in the salon. So off she canterered with the best grace she could muster, and was back in no time with a bath-towel.

“Really!” she said, and left him for her guests.

Chas, conversing in low tones with the Shawly, was waiting nervously to be called on for his contribution. This was the famous occasion on which Chas, as though he had suddenly taken leave of his senses, closed his perfectly respectable recitation with the iniquitous quatrain:

Toutes êtes, serez ou fûtes,

De fait ou de volonté, putes,

Et qui bien vous chercheroit

Toutes putes vous trouveroit.

The Alba, whom in order to rescue Belacqua we were obliged to abandon just as with characteristic impetuosity she made up her mind to see things through come what might, had opened her campaign by sending Jem Higgins and the Polar Bear 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 wild-fire through the house, till it raged from attic to basement, under the aegis of the rising whore and the disaffected cicisbeo, she proceeded quietly, on her own, in her own quiet way, to bewitch those who, in ordinary circumstances, would have participated joyfully in the vile necking, but who had remained on expressly to see what could be made of this little pale person so self-possessed and urbane in the best sense in the scarlet costume. The parodist, notably, she had strongly affected. So that, from a certain point of view, she was quite a little power for good that evening.

Fond as she was, really very, very fond in her own rather stealthy and sinuous fashion, of Belacqua, it did not occur to her to miss him or think of him at all unless it were as a rather distinguished spectator whose eyes behind his glasses upon her and vernier of appreciation might have salted her fun. Among the many hounded by the implacable Frica from their shabby joys she had marked down for her own one of the grave Jews, him with the bile-tinged conjunctivae, and the merchant prince. Then she supposed Jem could drive her home. She addressed herself to the Jew, but too slackly, as to an insipid dish, and was repulsed. Politely repulsed. This was a set-back that she had been far from expecting. 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 the disappointment inflicted on her by Belacqua, announced in a venomous tone of voice that Monsieur Jean du Chas, too well known to them all for what he was, a most talentuous young Parisian, to require any introduction,
had kindly consented to set the ball a-rolling. In spite of the satisfaction that would have accrued to the Alba had Chas there and then been torn limb from limb before her eyes, she made no attempt to restrain her merriment, in which of course she was joined by the Polar Bear, when he concluded his recitation with the cynical aphorism quoted above, and the less so as she observed with what an aigre-douceur the paleographer and Para-bimbi, who had been surprised by the Frica being a little naughty together, dissociated themselves from the applause that greeted his descent from the estrade.
Je hais les tours de Saint-Sulpice
could have caused her scarce more amusement at that particular moment, though in a less stale run of events she would certainly have found the one as banal as the other.

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

Watching him closely as he stood bedraggled in the doorway, clutching his glasses in his fist (a precautionary measure that he never neglected when there was any danger of his
appearing
embarrassed), bothered seriously in his mind by a neat little point that had presented itself to him in the hall, waiting no doubt for some kind person to offer him a chair, the Alba thought that she had seldom seen anybody looking more sovereignly ridiculous. Seeking to be God, she thought, in the slavish arrogance of a piffling evil.

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

The P.B. played up, he overbid.

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

He cackled and snuffled over this sottish mot as though
it were his own. In an unsubduable movement of misericord she started out of her chair.

“Niño” she called, without ceremony or shame.

The cry came like a drink of water to drink in prison to the ear of Belacqua. He stumbled towards it.

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

Everybody in the row had to move up one.

“Niño” she came again, thumping the place thus freed, “here.”

Belacqua collapsed heavily into the chair by her side. You see, now they are side by side. She placed her hand on his sleeve. He sat not looking, his head lowered, plucking vaguely at his filthy old trousers. When she shook him he lifted his head and looked at her. To her disgust he was crying.

“You've been drinking” she said.

The Parabimbi snatched at the paleographer, she craned her neck at the same time.

“What's that?” she demanded in a general way. “What's going on there. Who's that? Are they promessi?”

She was not alone in her impertinent curiosity.

“Who is the young man?” said the parodist, and, “Who might that be, do you suppose” in the whisky contralto of the bibliomaniac's light of love.

“I was astonished” said a voice “really astounded, to find that Sheffield was more hilly than Rome.”

Belacqua made a stupendous effort to acknowledge the cordial greeting of the Polar Bear, but he could not. He felt an enormous desire to slip down on the floor and lay his head against the slight madder thigh of the Alba.

“The bicuspid” from the professor “monotheistic fiction
torn by the sophists, Christ and Plato, from the violated matrix of pure reason”

Oh, who shall silence them, at last? Who shall circumcise their lips from talking, at last?

The Frica insisted on the fact that she trod the estrade.

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

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

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