Dream of Fair to Middling Women Read online

  The Polar Bear came cataracting—too late; the tram had gathered way, now it is screaming past the Mansion House. He tore at the strap.

  “Can't the bloody thing be stopped?” he cried.

  “Next stop the Green” said the conductor.

  “Damn the Green” cried the P.B. “damn you and your damn Green.”

  He drew his plump hand's glabrous crown across his raw mouth. Three nouns, three adjectives.

  “The Dublin United Tramways Bloody Company” he vociferated “seems to exist for the sole purpose of dragging its clients forcibly out of their way to Greens. Isn't there enough green in this merdific island? I get on to your accursed bolide at the risk of my life at the College Green and get fired out at the next of your verminous plaguespots whether I like it or not. If it's not the Stephen's Green it's Green's bloody library. What we want” he screamed from the sidewalk “in this pestiferous country is red for a change and plenty of it.”

  Alas the conductor was slow, he was Irish, his name was Hudson, he had not the Cockney gift of repartee. He might have made a very nice use of Green St, and he did not, he missed his chance. Very much later in the day, brooding over this incident, the right answer came to him, or one of the answers that would have done, and from that moment forth he had at least a presentable anecdote for his colleagues at the depot. But too late. Once again the Polar Bear had been let go unscathed.

  Fiercely now retracing his steps, weighed down by the bag, he had occasion most bitterly to upbraid a walleyed employee of the R.A.C., a little mousy ex-service creature known to the members as Dick Deadeye. With a courtly gesture Dick motioned back the pedestrians that the cars for whose comings and goings he was responsible might issue forth unimpeded from the garage. It was the rush hour for the little man. The Polar Bear was among the pedestrians, one of those pedestrians was he.

  “Curse you” he snarled “oh, curse you. Shall I stand here all night?”

  “Sorry sir” said Dick, motioning him back, “duty.”

  “B--- your duty” snarled the P.B.

  “And you sir” said Dick.

  The Polar Bear raised the bag.

  “You damned little impertinent pimp of hell you” he frothed at the commissures.

  Dick stood his ground, he would do his duty. “If you lay a finger on me sir” he was moved to mention over his shoulder “I'll have the law of you.”

  In this black city of ours that comes out seventh in occidental statistics, or did, such painful scenes are of daily occurrence. Men of the high standing of the Polar Bear, men of culture and distinction, occupying positions of responsibility in the City, permit themselves, condescend, to bandy invective with the meanest of day-labourers. Gone is patrician hauteur, gone, it almost seems, with the Garrison. The scurvy dog has taught the snarl to his scurvy master, the snarl, the fawn, the howl and the cocked leg: the general coprotechnics. And we are all dogs together in the dogocracy of unanimous scurrility.

  (Overstatement. Dickens.)

  The point it seems almost worth our while trying to make is not that the passing of the Castle as it was in the days of the Garrison is to be deprecated. Not at all. We hope we know our place better than that. We uncover our ancient Irish wedgehead in deference to that happy ejection. Nor are we the least prone to suggest that the kennel is a less utopian community than the pen or coop or shoal or convent or any other form of natural or stylicised pullulation. If these or similar termini were capable of providing us with the point, any point, would we not have been guilty of ad quem? And we cannot but feel, after all our toil, that it is rather late in the day for ad quem. We mean, dem it all, do we tolerate buffers in our regiment?

  Con moto, then, for we have not a moment to lose, and not to overdo the tedium, we come to our point which is one of departure, an a quo that we fancy Watteau himself would not have turned up his nose at, not for us, we stay where we are, but for the eager young sociologists that abound in our midst (Merrion Row, Portobello, Mary St and passim) and particularly the more serious few that have not forgotten the striking phrase of the Paris schoolman, the master and author of them that are anxious to have an opinion, the bearded bonhomme: one commences to reread Proudhon, or, perhaps better, one recommences to read Proudhon. He only has to place himself at this centre of focus, he only has to gird up his lusty loins at this point, blick from this Punkt, the ardent young politico-social psycho-scientific sleuth that we have in mind, and he shall command an ample perspective: the French provincial towns, the Five towns, the Tweed, emigration in the west, the alas rapidly waning Italian commune, the plight of the small farmer in the Europe of our time, the impressive decadential trend in the great cities of the west (and the east, for all we know) from the sale and purchase of labour in the market-place to the saving of same in the tavern. Etc.

  Thus here in what immediately precedes we have an example of how, if instead of pressing à la Titania asses to our boosoms, of being satisfied to strain in healthy hypnosis to our boosoms the Hudsons and Deadeyes of daily, yea and hourly, encounter, their duties and their fleers, we could only learn to school ourselves to see all things great and small about us and their emanations, all the articles of bric-à-brac through which we move, as so many tunics of so many onions, if we could only learn to school ourselves to nurture that divine and fragile Fünkelein of curiosity struck from the desire to bind for ever in imperishable relation the object to its representation, the stimulus to the molecular agitation that it sets up, percipi to percipere, of how then there is no knowing on what sublime platform, non-political, Beobachtungspost at once and springboard, we may find ourselves poised and watchful, potential beyond measure ere we take off, unafraid, swallow-wise, through reefless airs for a magic land.

  From the Hudsons and the Deadeyes and the P.B.s to a magic land! It is only necessary to follow the directions. For magic here is not milk and honey (Gawd forbid) nor Heaven's High Halls where all at last is in the very best of health nor everlasting sweet pea, no, it is the absence of Polar Bears and Deadeyes and the coprotechnics in which they are co-ordinate. It is the abolition of that class of person and that class of thing. There is not a trace, not as much as a suspicion of the old stench, of the premises in the conclusion. How is that for a fine figure of a syllogism? That is how you get away from the ignoble scuffling and snarling of bosthoonery and tinned Kultur. Presticerebration. That is how you can get rid of gowned poets and uniformed peasants. You Roentgen them to start off with, you strip off the millions of leathery tunics. It takes time but it is pleasant work. Then you find when you come to the core and the kernel and the seat of the malady that behold it is a bel niente. Now there are few things more bel than a niente but considered as a premise, and be you Abbot himself, it presents certain difficulties in the manner of manipulation. So you draw your wand and strike from the air ad your own sweet lib whatever premises you fancy. You will have to live on them, you cannot get rid of them, so take much thought, tis a critical moment. Then proceed in the ordinary way. The public never spots the deception. The public is too busy admiring the seamless tights of the performer and listening to the patter of the parable. All that is necessary is to follow directions.

  Now he is drawing nigh, in a spouting and ingurgi-tation of crassamenta he joins issue with the perron, straining and heaving against the great load of himself he stamps the steps behind him in a cruel flatfooted diagonal, one by one he spurns them out of his path.

  Oh where now are the hard nervous soles, smelling of bracken and thyme, of Bilitis or a chaste huntress or even a sinuous nautch-gal, scaling prestly from the sea shallow tiers of pale red marble? They are elsewhere Doctor Scholl. Or the muddy chubby feet of little Stoebli, he was an idle young herd, he was a blue flower in the mountain, he is akimbo on his lil bottom in the mountain dew, by the outposts of the dark forest he whittles his staff, he is like a starved della Robbia, we are told there is peach-down on his cheeks but what does that matter, there are his feet, muck caking in the toepits, the arches
laced with mire. All the belled cattle for leagues around, above and below, are his father's stock. They are in his keeping. Then James, the hero, the steel mountaineer, comes striding through hornbeams. Then in a minute it is morning.

  The P.B. lowered himself, his great load, coat, bag, hat, mucus, fury and exhaustion, on to the divan as soon as it occurred to the Alba to unfold her noble legs and make room for him beside her. After a few moments of silence and withdrawal, she waiting, he panting, to lower the temperature of this man and still the clamours and alarums of the trying hours through which he had passed, and the customary feintes and passes obiter between her amused that he should present himself so frankly after his time and him so glad and grateful that she had not bounced off in a huff on the tick but permitted herself to grant him a few moments’ grace, then the pretty smart slap-up dialogue, transcribed herewith without frills or falbalas (tired of them) as follows, took place.

  P.B.

  Frankly I find Belacqua changed more than 1 could have believed possible after so short an absence. Physically sadly so and mentally a hardening, I trust not a sclerosis, and a sourness, if I am to judge by the few words he has bestowed on me since his return, that are new in him and particularly shocking for me in one whose curiosity and enthusiasm for cosa mentale were charming without ever being merely naive. Perhaps I exaggerate. I hope I do. I told Chas, you know Chas…

  A.

  No.

  P. B.

  A colleague and friend of Liebert, a bit of a bore and a morpion, but means well, friend of Belacqua—I told him to tell Belacqua that you had been asking after him. That will gratify him. You know, he has a great gradh for you.

  A.

  But I was not asking after him. How would I be asking after him when I don't know him. Now I'll have him skipping round to the house and pestering me. You might have known I had had enough of that…

  P.B.

  But, my dear Alba, it was only the other day that you spoke so well of him to me, you know you did. Is it possible that you have forgotten?

  A.

  I may have referred atonily to the creature in the current of conversation, but I did not ask after him. How would I ask for him when I scarcely know him?

  P.B.

  But…

  A.

  You live on indiscretions. Now I'll have him cantering round to pay his respects.

  P.B.

  And wouldn't you like to see him?

  A.

  What's the good? What is the good of starting again? You know, or you ought to, how it is with me and how it has always been. You of all people ought to know that I don't want to and that it's no good. I can only do him injury and open my own. It has always been so. It might amuse him for a bit, but it won't amuse me. I'm tired flogging the trivial excitement. What did you want to say anything to Chas for! Why couldn't you leave it alone? Now I'll have to choke him off. More work.

  P.B.

  I don't think I know exactly what you mean, and I am sure you are making a song about nothing. I assure you he is neither vulnerable nor troublesome. On the contrary. It is simply that he would like to see you and talk to you.

  A.

  But don't you see that he cannot simply see me and talk to me? I find myself unable to permit it. If he sees me at all it must be non-simply. And I shall be obliged to complicate our conversation. I cannot have a simple relation with the cerebral type, and you can see he is that from a mile off. I have to make it a mess and a knot and a tangle. I can't help it. So what's the good? It's too difficult to untie.

  P.B.

  Well, if I had known…

  A.

  God knows you might know by this time. But I don't want to talk about people and things—bulks. Not even about myself. Entertain me. Tell me about Louise Labbé or the Holy Ghost or the unreal coordinates. And more brandy if you have the price of it. Tell me about the Egyptian Book of the Dead.

  The Polar Bear disposed of a large information on these subjects and the Alba listened and did not interrupt. Of the Holy Ghost, however, he did not care to speak.

  “Even were it not an impertinence” he said “for me, a spoilt Roundhead, to speak to you, brought up on real unspottednesses, of the Holy Ghost, I prefer” with a leer and a lowered voice “not to deal with that subject in a public place. Nor are the epigrams with which I would be obliged, so pungent and to the point and in every way excellent do I consider them, to punctuate my relation, for the ears of a maid. You are broadminded, not squeamish, but I prefer not.”

  A ridiculus mus of mucus was born in an ear-splitting eruption to the orator. He savoured it and put it away.

  “Now Louise Labbé” he said “was a great poet, a great poet, perhaps one of the greatest of all time, of physical passion, of passion purely and exclusively physical. She did not know the love from which the body has been refined, in which the body has been consumed. She did not care for the Chanson de Toile's extremities of tenderness and service, the nostalgia of Doon for his “belle Doette”. But what she did know and care for and enshrine in imperishable verse…”

  The Alba folded up her legs, more under her this time, and listened, he had a pleasant voice, and did not interrupt.

  Then, after a time, she ceased to listen. He had nearly polished off the unreal co-ordinates, he was saying: “and so we invent them”, and she ceased to be bothered listening. Then he, sensing that she had withdrawn her attention, ceased to speak. They sat on in silence, not at all embarrassed by this cleavage.

  The Alba allowed herself, against her better judgement, to be absorbed in the review of how her days up to then had been spent, of how she had been spent, of how she had been spent and almost, it seemed to her and to many that knew her, extinguished by her days. The days were not hers to spend, they were waste land to earn. She had earned her days. It was she who had been spent, she and the richness of days that were not hers until she had earned and impoverished them. She had been spent in daywinning. Poor in days she was light and full of light. Rich in days she was heavy and full of darkness. Living was a growing heavy and dark and rich in days. Natural death was black wealth of days. The brightness of day-poverty was music unscored for the need of keeping alive and well so that she might die, the music of days that were not hers and of which each hour was too manifold for possession. She made a version of each hour and day, she made a grotesque song of their music, she carried the version and song away hers, a growing weight of darkness upon her, she called the days thus earned and impoverished hers. She reviled the need, the unsubduable tradition of living up to dying, that forced her to score and raid thus the music of days. The heavy gloom of carnal custom. To extirpate the need and remain light and full of light, to secede from the companies of the dutifully dying and go with them no more from heaviness to heaviness and from darkness to darkness according to their law, to abide, light and full of light, caught in the fulness of this total music of days… She was a rock, dayless, furled in a water that she was not doomed to harness. Alone, unlonely, unconcerned, moored in the seethe of an element in which she had no movement and from which therefore she was not doomed to filch the daily mite that would guarantee, in a freighting and darkening of her spirit, the declension of that movement. The days, unopened and unmapped, would not spend her. They would break over in their fulness, uncashed. She would abide unladen and undarkened.

  The Polar Bear, having ceased to rest and speak and having eaten his cake, began to fidget. He was getting hot. The great heat that was within this man began to make itself felt. He said he was navré, he must go, he found, looking at his watch, that he really must go, otherwise he would miss his bus and then the family would worry. His blasting ailing sister, moreover, would be clamouring for her haply merdiferous lubricant. It had been a real pleasure to have had this little chat. When would they foregather again?

  “Yes” said the Alba “time to go. This evening there is a visitor, I should be back. In the morning there is a priest to deal with and a dress to come into t
own about, I must get to bed in good time. And then no doubt your precious Belacqua will be round in the afternoon, bursting with simple profundities. Then in the evening I am going on the skite with the Venerilla.”

  At the end of the street they parted. The Alba boarded a tram and like a Cézanne monster it carried her off, it moaned down Nassau Street into the darkness, little thinking what a royal and fragile tuppenny fare it had in keeping. The poor old P.B. plunged sadly on foot towards the quays. He had not a moment to spare, he had yet to buy the Baby.

  Seeing as how we are more or less all set now for Belacqua and the Alba to meet at least, make contact at least and carry along for a time side by side, failing to coalesce, or, better said, dropping for once the old sweet song of failure, just not doing so, either because each in his and her own way was made of sterner stuff than, say, any single bee in d'Alembert's dream of the coagulum of continuous bees or because they had no particular lust to mingle or because the duration of their mere contiguity was on the short side for the answer to the love tot to be 1 or because they abode a pair of articles of such a hard, heterogeneos and complex constitution that they were a great deal more likely to break down and come unstuck in two separate non-synchronised processes each on his and her side of the fence than sink their differences and pool their resources in the slush of platitudinous treacle that is wont to grace these occasions, take your choice and pick your fancy: seeing as how then, to repeat that beautiful conjunction, it is now or never the time to sidetrack and couple those two lone birds and give them at least a chance to make a hit and bring it off, would it not be idle on our part to temporise further and hold up the happy event with the gratuitous echolalia and claptrap rhapsodies that are palmed off as passion and lyricism and the high spots of the creative ecstasy, the crises, no less, in our demiurgent tension after unity of consciousness (as if we bothered our arse about our pestilential consciousness), and which, as a matter of fact, are nothing more or less, if any dear reader would care to come in on a good thing, than padding: the fall-back and the stand-by, don't you know, of the gentleman scrivener who has no very near or dear or clear ideas on any subject whatsoever and whose talent is not the dense talent of the proselytiser and proxenete but the rarer article in the interests of whose convulsions clouds of words condense to no particular purpose.