More Pricks Than Kicks (7 page)

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 S
ENSE
”—he cried from the step—“
AND
R
EASON
.”

“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:

C
ALVARY BY
N
IGHT

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, would 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.”

Hard on the heels of the Poet came a gaggle of non-descripts, then a public botanist, then a Galway Gael, then the Shetland Shawly with her Chas. Him the Student, mindful of his pledge, accosted.

“In what sense”—he would have it out of him or perish—“did you use
sense
when you said…?”

“He said that?” exclaimed the botanist.

“Chas” said Caleken, as though she were announcing the name of a winner.

“Adsum” admitted Chas.

A plum of phlegm burst in the vestibule.

“What I want to know” complained the Student, “what we all want to know, is in what sense he was using
sense
when he said…”

The Gael, in the heart of a cabbage of nondescripts, was bungling Duke Street's thought for the day to the crone.

“Owen …” he began again, when a nameless ignoramus, anxious to come into the picture as early on in the proceedings as possible, said rashly:

“What Owen?”

“Good evening” squalled the Polar Bear, “good evening good evening. Wat a night, Madame” he addressed himself vehemently, out of sheer politeness, directly to his hostess, “God
wat
a night!”

The crone was as fond of the P.B. as though she had bought him in Clery's toy fair.

“And you so far to come!” She wished she could dandle him on her knee. He was a shabby man and often moody. “Too good of you to come” she hushabied, “too good of you.”

The Man of Law, his face a blaze of acne, was next, escorting the Parabimbi and three tarts dressed for the backstairs.

“I met him” whispered Chas “zigzagging down Pearse Street, Brunswick Street, you know, that was.”

“En route?” ventured Caleken. She was a bit above herself with all the excitement.

“Hein?”

“On his way here?”

“Well” said Chas, “I regret, my dear Miss Frica, that he did not make it ab
sol
utely clear if he comes or not.”

The Gael said to the P.B. in an injured voice:

“Here's a man wants to know what Owen.”

“Not possible” said the P.B., “you astonish me.”

“Is it of the sweet mouth?” said a sandy son of Ham.

Now the prong of the P.B.'s judgment was keen and bright.

“That
emmerdeur
” he jeered, “the strange sweet mouth!”

The Parabimbi jumped.

“You said?” she said.

Caleken emerged from the ruck, she came to the fore.

“What can be keeping the girls” she said. It was not exactly a question.