Dream of Fair to Middling Women Page 14

  Then we feel also that this hyphenating is getting out of hand. Cacoethes scribendi, the doom of the best of penmen.

  From Cuxhaven, after a very dark night in Altona, he took ship back to the land. The second night out, Cherbourg that noon having been delivered of the Yanks, he drew himself forth and down from the hot upper couchette where he lay and climbed the steep little ladder out from the well of steerage-class, if steerage can be said to have any class at all. It was quiet at this hour, that was only to be expected, the spit of deck so it was, by day a reeking perturbation of Poles and Hamburgers, happy to get away or grieved to go, getting on to something good against the long Atlantic hours or staunching their national tunes. There was one enormous bosthoon of a Pole, like a civic guard, a fresh and young Pole, a button-burster, in brilliant check trousers that stuck, inter alia, to his opulent thighs, and cinched in a short ultramarine double-dugger. He was the cock, he owned the deck. It was quiet now, it had been scoured sweet and clean by the night, the night that was fine by the grace of God and his Abbé Gabriel. A fair September night on the bosom of the deep.

  Now the day is over, Belacqua is on the deep blue sea, he is alone on the deck of steerage-class. What shall we make him do now, what would be the correct thing for him to think for us? To begin with, of course, he moves forward, like the Cartesian earthball, with the moving ship, and then on his own account to the windy prow. He can go no further with security. He leans out to starboard, if that means landward when land is to the right of the ship's motion, and scans the waste of waters, the distant beacons. Was it Beachy Head or the Isle of Wight, was it Land's End or tragic lightboats standing afar out about the shallows of the sea, or lightbuoys moored over the shoals? They were red and green and white and they lancinated his heart, they brought down his lips and head over the froth of water. If I were in, he thought richly, and it up to me to swim to one of those lights that I can see from here—how would I know that land was there, I would see no light from the level of the sea, I would certainly drown in a panic.

  Does he remain bowed over the rail, his hair in the wind, his spectacles in the breast of his reefer, peering at the seethe of flowers, the silver fizz of flowers, scored by the prow? Suppose, for the sake of argument, that he does. Then in his brain also the molecules must ferment in sympathy, panic-stricken they must seethe, saddened and stilled when he raises his eyes to the beacons, then off again on the boil when he brings his head down once more over the swell, the black swell where he might well be and it up to him to do something about it and trying to float and making a dreadful hash of that and spending rather than fostering his strength the while he cast round for an issue and a direction in which to paddle deliberately away, using the breast-stroke their Father had taught them, when they were tiny, first John, then him.

  That was in the blue-eyed days when they rode down to the sea on bicycles, Father in the van, his handsome head standing up out of the great ruff of the family towel, John in the centre, lean and gracefully seated, Bel behind, his feet speeding round in the smallest gear ever constructed. They were the Great Bear, the Big Bear and the Little Bear; aliter sic, the Big, Little and Small Bears. That will never be known for certain now. As in single file they sped along the breakwater each one of the vast iron lids of the shafts that had been sunk for some reason or other in the concrete coughed under the wheels; six wheels, six coughs; two great râles, two big and two little. Then silence till the next lot. Many was the priest coming back safe from his bathe that they passed, his towel folded suavely, like a waiter's serviette, across his arm. The superlative Bear would then discharge the celebrated broadside: B-P! B-P! B-P! and twist round with his handsome face wreathed in smiles in the saddle to make sure that the sally had not been in vain. It had never been known to be in vain. It would have been furnished by John or Bel had the occasion been let pass by Father. The occasion had never been known to be let pass by Father. The priest always pressed his trigger. He shared that distinction with, among other stimuli, a dish of curry. A dish of curry always pressed Father's trigger.

  “Oh!” he was dumbfounded “oh! curry from the currycomb!”

  Then John and Bel would titter and their Mother fail to be amused only in the rare event of what she considered a housewifely negligence, a siphon, for example, forgotten, oppressing her conscience.

  Belacqua, tired of the game of beacons and drowning, threw back his head for a mouthful of the starry, pressed himself in a more intimate manner against the bulwark, and, what do you think, set to think about the girls he had left behind him!

  The opening passages were quite pleasant. It was because he was a poor performer that he was pleased to despise the performance. He was blind to the charms of the mighty steaks and jug-dugs of the Smeraldina-Rima and angered by the Priapean whirlijiggery-pokery of the Syra-Cusa because in both cases he was disarmed, he was really unable to rise to such superlative carnal occasions. It is time I learnt, he thought. I will study in the Nassau Street School, I will frequent the Railway Street Academies. But he was inclined to agree with Grock, when that faithful philosopher blew from his French horn the first throaty cui bono of the meditation, that it might be just as well after all to leave well alone. If he could not he could not. It was a bloody business and what did it matter? When he meets the angel of his dreams, hee! hee!, the issue will only arise in so far as it is compatible with his indolence. My indolence, the debility of my complexion, the honing of my soul after the penumbra, these, he reassured himself, are of more moment than a pimp's technique, these shall be my first care, my first and last care.

  He launched, in token of this decision, overboard a foaming spit. Back adown the great hull, astern, by the way on the ocean greyhound it was swept. So shall their voices pass away…

  Just a tincture of the sublime now, he thought, cocking up his eye at the starfield, before back to the bunk. But again she balked him, swinging her bright legs at the earth-ball, forcing back upon the boiling ocean his eyes that would not submit for any consideration to ransack those blessed skirts.

  Vieil Océan! Well, it was to be supposed so, bad and all as it sounded, and notwithstanding the contributions of post-war sputum. Isodore, Hughetto plumed with a café liégeois, less than Byron of Lara. And Rimbaud, the Infernal One, the Ailing Seer. In his latter days, when he mastered the art of the tag, then he could hold up his curly head with the best of them. Shall he roll his eyes, blush and quote him in translation? You know of course, don't you, that he did him pat into English?

  I shall write a book, he mused, tired of the harlots of earth and air—I am hemmed in, he submused, on all sides by putes, in thought or in deed, hemmed in and about; a great big man must be hired to lift the hem—a book where the phrase is self-consciously smart and slick, but of a smartness and slickness other than that of its neighbours on the page. The blown roses of a phrase shall catapult the reader into the tulips of the phrase that follows. The experience of my reader shall be between the phrases, in the silence, communicated by the intervals, not the terms, of the statement, between the flowers that cannot coexist, the antithetical (nothing so simple as antithetical) seasons of words, his experience shall be the menace, the miracle, the memory, of an unspeakable trajectory. (Thoroughly worked up now by this programme, he pushed himself off the bulwark and strode the spit of the deck with long strides and rapidly.) I shall state silences more competently than ever a better man spangled the butterflies of vertigo. I think now (he waddled up and down under the moon, il arpenta le pont, there is a phrase for a New England Lanson, convinced that he was a positive crucible of cerebration) of the dehiscing, the dynamic décousu, of a Rembrandt, the implication lurking behind the pictorial pretext threatening to invade pigment and oscuro; I think of the Selbstbildnis, in the toque and the golden chain, of his portrait of his brother, of the cute little Saint Matthew angel that I swear van Ryn never saw the day he painted, in all of which canvases during lunch on many a Sunday I have discerned a disfaction, a désuni, an Unge
bund, a flottement, a tremblement, a tremor, a tremolo, a disaggregating, a disintegrating, an efflorescence, a breaking down and multiplication of tissue, the corrosive ground-swell of Art. It is the Pauline (God forgive him for he knew not what he said) cupio dissolvi. It is Horace's solvitur acris hiems. It might even be at a pinch poor Hölderlin's alles hineingeht Schlangen gleich. Schlangen gleich! (By this time the unhappy Belacqua was well on his way up the rigging.) I think of Beethofen, his eyes are closed, the poor man he was very shortsighted they say, his eyes are closed, he smokes a long pipe, he listens to the Ferne, the unsterbliche Geliebte, he unbuttons himself to Teresa ante rem, I think of his earlier compositions where into the body of the musical statement he incorporates a punctuation of dehiscence, flottements, the coherence gone to pieces, the continuity bitched to hell because the units of continuity have abdicated their unity, they have gone multiple, they fall apart, the notes fly about, a blizzard of electrons; and then vespertine compositions eaten away with terrible silences, a music one and indivisible only at the cost of as bloody a labour (bravo!) as any known to man (and woman? from the French horn) and pitted with dire stroms of silence, in which has been engulfed the hysteria that he used to let speak up, pipe up, for itself. And I think of the ultimately unprevisible atom threatening to come asunder, the left wing of the atom plotting without ceasing to spit in the eye of the physical statistician and commit a most copious offence of nuisance on his cenotaphs of indivisibility.

  All that, conceded Belacqua, postponing the mare's-nest and the stars to another occasion, is a bit up in the rigging. If ever I do drop a book, which God forbid, trade being what it is, it will be a ramshackle, tumbledown, a bone-shaker, held together with bits of twine, and at the same time as innocent of the slightest velleity of coming unstuck as Mr Wright's original flying-machine that could never be persuaded to leave the ground.

  But there he was probably wrong.

  On that unwarrantable impression he clawed his way back through the raw flaws of wind and down the steep little ladder into the hot bowels of steerage-class. Now he lies on his right side, all but on his chest, in the upper couchette, in the hot bowels of the vessel. He thanks God, ere sleep dusk his eyes and his breath be faded, that his pleura had been pleased to weep where they did, that they had not washed into slush the pulsing snowball of his little heart that went pit-a-pat, ä tombeau ouvert (was he not after all in the heart of the movement and was it not a fact that man trägt wieder Herzlein?), when darkness fell. He gives heartfelt thanks to whatever Gods there be for the merciful posture that could put such a various pair of birds to sleep, still the tempestuous poles of his thorax, pour painkiller on its zones.

  Next dusk shall gather round him seated in the tug. It rocks itself upon the evening water livid under the bright decks. The whistler has come out with the emigrants and their friends, they have climbed aboard, with a slow frail music he feeds their lament, they cry down from the rail and their silence weaves an awning over the tug, the tug is grappled to the high bulwark by their cries and their silence and the tendrils of the whistling. Beyond Cobh across the harbour fireflies are moving in Hy-Brasil's low hills, the priests are abroad there with bludgeons. The captain of the tug stands by his wheel on his little bridge, his head is thrown back, he is abusing the young German mate in charge of the unlading, he is not afraid. The saloon band vomits Dear Little Shamrocks, it pukes the crassamenta of its brasses down on top of the tug, we are all boys together, we belch therefore the chorus, the liana of silence and whistling is sundered, we are set adrift. Next to Belacqua the slut bawn is now weeping, she is weeping and waving a fairly clean portion of Bourbon bloomer. That is very meet, proper and, given her present condition, her bounden duty. Before Xmas she shall be in Green St, she shall be in Railway St under the new government. She was born well, she lived well and she died well, Colleen Cress-well in Clerkenwell and Bridewell. Now they are free, they are flying across the harbour to the landing-stage, a pinnace of souls. Belacqua lights a cigarette quick for malas and maxillas, he hoists his heavy fibre case up on the gun-whale beside him. Now he is all set, he is ready to skip ashore. Jean will be there to meet him, Jean with the grace of God will be there, his dear friend, Jean du Chas.

  Thus dusk shall ere long gather about him—unless to be sure we take it into our head to scuttle at dead of night the brave ship where now he lies a-dreaming (creeks and springboards), the noble Hapak and all its freights, crew and cargo, and Belacqua along with his palpitations and adhesions and effusions and agenesia and wombtomb and æesthetic of inaudibilities.

  L'andar su che porta?…

  Oh but the bay, Mr Beckett, didn't you know, about your brow.

  THREE

  They took the dull coast road home, three days and three nights they dawdled up homeward along it, by Youghal, Tramore, Wicklow Town, living on the fat of the land. Chas payed, Belacqua having spent his last shillings in Cork on scent for a lady, a neat involucrate flasket of Cologne water, very fine, for his Mother, she stands listening on the perron, for all the stout in bottle they drank on the way, he shelled out for all the stout that helped to bloat the sadness of the sad evenings, and they went down to all the shores, they paced up and down, up and down, side by side, on the firm sand near the waves, and there Chas, in the chill evening and rain of course threatening, did develop his unheard of musical relations with one Ginette Mac Something, the hem of the hem of the hem of the hem of whose virginity (vidual) toga he would never, jamais au grand jamais, presume and was not worthy to lift the littlest notch let alone hoist aloft thigh-high.

  “Je la trouve adorable, quoique peu belle. Elle a surtout beaucoup de GOUT, elle est intelligente et douce, mais douce, mon cher, tu n'peux pas t'imaginer, et des gestes, mon cher, tu sais, très désarmants.”

  Belacqua saw at once how lovely she must be, he was quite sure she was very remarkable, and dare he hope that on some not too distant occasion he might be privileged to catch a glimpse of her sailing through the dusk when the dusk was she?

  “Elle a une petite gueule” moaned Chas “qui tremble comme un petit nuage.”

  Belacqua found that a striking rapprochement, and in the long gloomy silence that ensued he was at some pains to fix it for ever in his mind:

  le ténébreux visage

  bouge comme un nuage…

  j'adore de Ginette le ténébreux visage

  qui tremblote et qui bouge comme un petit nuage

  “I have a strong weakness” he assured his dear friend “for the epic caesura, don't you know. I like to compare it, don't you know, to the heart of the metre missing a beat.”

  Chas thought this was a remarkable comparison, and a long gloomy silence ensued.

  “There is much to be done, don't you think” said Belacqua “with a more nervous treatment of the caesura”, meaning there was nothing at all to be done don't you think, with the tenebrous Ginette, “just as the preterites and past subjunctives have never since Racine, it seems to me, been exploited poetically to the extent they merit to be. You know:

  ‘Vous mourûtes aux bords...’”

  “Où vous fûtes laissée” whistled Chas.

  “And the celebrated ‘quel devint… ‘ of the unfortunate Antiochus.”

  Chas shivered.

  “Shall we go in?” he said.

  Thus every night for three nights they left a dark shore, the dark sand, on which a soft rain would ere long be softly falling, falling, because it would bloody well have to.

  Belacqua was heartily glad to get back to his parents’ comfortable private residence, ineffably detached and situated and so on, and his first act, once spent the passion of greeting after so long and bitter a separation, was to plunge his prodigal head into the bush of verbena that clustered about the old porch (wonderful bush it was to be sure, even making every due allowance for the kind southern aspect it enjoyed, it never had been known to miss a summer since first it was reared from a tiny seedling) and longly to swim and swoon on the rich bosom of i
ts fragrance, a fragrance in which the least of his childish joys and sorrows were and would for ever be embalmed.

  His mother he found looking worn. She had not been in the best of health lately, she said, not at the top of her form, but she was much better now, now she felt fine.

  It was really wonderful to get back to the home comforts. Belacqua tried all the armchairs in the house, he poltrooned in all the poltrone. Then he went and tried both privies. The seats were in rosewood. Douceurs…!

  The postman flew up with letters, he skidded up the drive on his bicycle, scattering the loose gravel. He was more pleased than he could say, but compounded with his aphasia to the extent anyhow of “Welcome home” in the attractive accent and the old familiar smile there under the noble moustache “master Bel.” Yes, yes, évidemment. But where was the slender one, where was he, that was the question, as thin and fine as the greyhound he tended, the musical one, a most respectable and industrious young fellow he was, by cheer industry, my dear, plus personal charm, those were the two sides of the ladder on which this man had mounted, had he not raised himself above his station, out of the horrible slum of the cottages, did he not play on the violin, own an evening suit of his own and dance fleetly with the gentry, and: as he lay as a child wide awake long after he should have been fast asleep at the top of the house on a midsummer's night Belacqua would hear him, the light nervous step on the road as he danced home after his rounds, the keen loud whistling: The Roses are Blooming in Picardy… No man had ever whistled like that, and of course women can't. That was the original, the only, the unforgettable banquet of music. There was no music after—only, if one were lucky, the signet of rubies and the pleasant wine. He whistled the Roses are Blooming and danced home down the road under the moon, in the light of the moon, with perhaps a greyhound or two to set him off, and the dew descending.