Dream of Fair to Middling Women Read online

  Yet even to such a one, notwithstanding his horror of the ficum voco ficum buckram and swashbuckle, comes the one clear cry and earnest recommendation to spigot the faucet and throttle the cock, the cockwash, and cut the cackle. This tergiversator lends ear in accordance, and with the terrible scowl, with the very worse will in the world, he drags himself across the threshold of the gehenna of nar-ratio recta.

  We had no idea ars longa was such a Malebolge.

  He galloped round sure enough according to plan to pay his respects and in the most morose of humours. For his native city had got him again, her miasmata already had all but laid him low, the yellow marsh fever that she keeps up her sleeve for her more distinguished sons had clapped its clammy honeymoon hands upon him, his moral temperature had gone sky-rocketing aloft, soon he would shudder and kindle in hourly ague.

  All went off more or less as she had predicted. Out of the kindness of her heart, the sympathy that had been lit for him within her, she unleashed her eyes on him, she gave them carte blanche and he bled.

  “I read your poem” she said in her soft ruined voice “but you will do better than that. It is clever, too clever, it amused me, it pleased me, it is good, but you will get over all that.”

  The “too clever” was a cropper and she felt it, without having to refer to his expression, as soon as it was out of her mouth. They were rare with her, these deviations of her instinct, but she was subject to them. Well muffled, however, in the sure phrase, alleviated by the charm of her husky delivery, it damaged her position scarcely at all and would not have jarred on any sensibility less tremulous than that of her interlocutor, shrinking away as it always did, and more of course than ever at this moment, from the least roughness of contact, ready to cry out at the littlest scratch.

  “Already” he said, calmly, “I have done better.”

  The hair-spring of her instinct kept her silent and that silence, together with a new quality in her presence, a silence of body, did work. This was the complicating of conversation of which she had spoken to the Polar Bear in the lounge that evening with the bitter shrug that took its seat so well upon her, that rode her with such grace, we mean that she brought off with an aisance and a naturel that enchanted all beholders apt to apprehend that most tenuous of all the tenuous emanations of real personality, charm. Cæsura.

  “Better” he was obliged by her immobility to hedge “is perhaps not quite the word. What I mean, when I say that already I have done better, is, that I have achieved a statement more ample, in so far as it embraces and transcends the poem that you are good enough to remember, and with that more temperate, less mannered, more banal (oh, Alba, a most precious quality, that), nearer to the low-voiced Pushkinian litotes. Better? Other. Me now, not a production of me then. In that sense, and of course that is the sense in which you speak, better.”

  He turned it off, but she was not quite ready for him.

  “There is a shortness of poetic sight” he proceeded wild-ishly “when the image of the emotion is focussed before the verbal retina; and a longness of same, when it is focussed behind. There is an authentic trend from that shortsightedness to this long-sightedness. Poetry is not concerned with normal vision, when word and image coincide. I have moved from the short-sighted poem of which you spoke to a long-sighted one of which I now speak. Here the word is prolonged by the emotion instead of the emotion being gathered into and closed by the word. There are the two modes, say Marlowe and Chenier, keeping the order, and who shall choose between them? When you say ‘he will do better’ you may mean: ‘he will write a poem of a more perfect short-sightedness', or again you may mean: ‘he will express himself more totally in the long-sighted mode'. Already, I repeat, I have expressed myself more totally in the long-sighted mode. I dislike the word better.”

  There seemed no reason why he should stop, and doubtless he would not, had not her instinct (this time I suppose we might say, her taste) broken the silence and she moved.

  “Yes” she said “but don't do yourself an injury trying to circumvent it.” Suddenly, flickering out at him like a sting, putting it up to him, the hard word. “And verbal retina” she said “I don't get. Can a word have a retina?”

  He stiffened his neck against her at once. Observe how their relation already is thickening, soon it will be a monstrous tangle, a slough of granny's-bends.

  “I could justify my figure” he said, with a great show of fatigue and altitudino, “if I could be bothered. Words shall put forth for me the organs that I choose. Need I remind you how they relieved themselves under Apollinaire?”

  Satisfied that she had goaded him into stiffening himself against her, she moved now on suave words away from the ravaged zone. She wanted to hear all about Liebert who made no sign of life though he owed a letter this long time. Had Belacqua set eyes on the new Madame?

  “Platinum” she was bound “they always are.”

  It was Belacqua's turn to be at a loss. What could she mean?

  “No matter” she said “is she or is she not?”

  “Not” he was sorry to say “what you might call hell-blond, that lovely shade russet, if you think that would do to translate rousse. It's silly of me, I know” he lisped “but I hate to be a snob and use the mot juste.”

  “Mamon!” she said, letting herself out just at the right moment, “don't be so squeamish, my dear, say it the best way first, the best people will understand. The lady, russet, you say, and with that ravishing, she must be to have got him?”

  Got was the second slip so far.

  “He was supposed to love me, you know” she hastened, but not too precipitately, to say “so I have what you might call a vested interest in his vicissitudes.”

  Such long words for such a little girl!

  “Good rather than beautiful, I would have said; a good, non-beautiful gal.”

  “You did know he loved me?”

  “He gave me to understand.”

  “But I could not…”

  “That also.”

  “Ah, so he knew?”

  “Did you not arrange that he should?”

  The Alba reared up her head sharply, she started to her feet, it was very sudden, and declared that since the tea appeared to be undrinkable she would see was there a drop of brandy left in the cupboard. Did he drink brandy in the afternoon, before his dinner?

  “Preferably” he was happy to say “in the afternoon, before my dinner.”

  She brought big tumblers and a dying noggin. She zigzagged in and out through the furniture with little fleet steps, grousing an Irish air:

  'Woe and pain, pain and woe,

  Are my lot, night and noon…'

  “She is not heavy enough” the thought came to him watching her flicker from point to point “upon my word she is not heavy enough to hang herself.”

  They drank.

  “Permit me to appreciate” he said “that superb and regal peignoir. It is like a Rimbaud Illumination, barbarous and royal. Cloth of gold, if I have an eye left in my head. Most insidiously flagrant and flamboyant, yes. You could say ‘sortez!’ with Roxane.”

  “But since there are no mutes at my beck…” She spoke from a real sorrow. “Beyond the door, a loudspeaker, it only wounds; beyond that again a melancholy gardener, watering the dying flowers; then you are in the street and free.”

  “Free?”

  “Of the seraglio.” She folded up her legs and looked at him with her mouth. “Didn't you know?”

  Belacqua began to feel ill at ease. He fidgeted on his seat.

  “Don't tell me” exclaimed the Alba “the child has piles!”

  Then, he remaining remote and blank, she thought she could safely let it come, she felt it would be all right, the fiery question that had been threatening this long time back, itching in her ears.

  “What is love?”

  Belacqua withdrew his little finger sadly from his nostril and shanghaied his catch on the chair-arm.

  “A great Devil” he said.


  “No. A little devil, an imp.”

  “A great Devil, a fiend.”

  “He is young” she sighed “but that will pass.”

  “I am” he admitted sadly “a juvenile man, scarcely pubic. But I will not agree that love is an imp when I am of the opinion that love is a fiend. That would be fake blasé. And fake blasé” here his voice rang, it was suddenly proud, “is a vulgarity that I cannot tolerate and to which I decline to bend.”

  He sat bolt upright, declining to bend, red in the face.

  “Sans blahague !” she mocked grockly, she would be sorry for this, “ce qu'il est sentimentique !”

  The Homer dusk, mutatis mutandis, lapsed, as through the deeps of ocean a drowned body lapses. They kept their seats, they delved into the subject, they treated it coldly and carefully. She got his measure, he was not altogether unworthy. The aged gardener, brooding over the fragility of all life, moved vaguely in the little garden, assailing, he did not want to, he would have much preferred not, but he was forced to, his rose had been taken and hidden, with hard jets of water the vanquished flowers. The trams moaned up and down across the maw of the avenue, and passed. In the house not a mouse was stirring. It was the magic hour, the magic tragic prepuscule, alluded to and torn to tatters passim above, when the poets come abroad on the lamplighters’ spoors, when Nemo is in position, when Night has its nasty difficult birth all over the sheets of dusk, and the dark eyes of the beautiful darken also. This was the case now with the Alba, furled in her coils upon the settee, the small broad pale face spotted in a little light escaped from the throttled west. Her great eyes went as black as sloes, they went as big and black as El Greco painted, with a couple of good wet slaps from his laden brush, in the Burial of the Count of Orgaz the debauched eyes of his son or was it his mistress? It was a remarkable thing to see. Pupil and white swamped in the dark iris gone black as night. Then lo! she is at the window, she is taking stock of her cage. Now under the threat of night the evening is albescent, its hues have blanched, it is dim white and palpable, it pillows and mutes her head. So that as from transparent polished glass or, if you prefer, from tranquil shining waters, the details of his face return so feeble that a pearl on a white brow comes not less promptly to his pupils, so now he sees her vigilant face and in him is reversed the error that lit love between the man (if you can call such a spineless creature a man) and the pool. For she had closed the eyes.

  “Spirit of the moon” he said.

  She begged his pardon.

  He said it again.

  “There is one poem by the Ronsard” she said, moving back gaily towards him into captivity, “entitled: Magic, or, Deliverance from Love. If you are familiar with it we could give earth to this conversation there.”

  “A great poem” he gushed “a great poem. But why do you say the Ronsard?”

  She had just felt like it, she had felt she would like to.

  “He was a comic old lecher” she said. Her jaw dropped in a way that made him a little anxious. “So we are of one mind” she said “think of that!”

  After that he had no excuse for prolonging his visit. He had paid his respects. Perhaps even he had got copy for his wombtomb.

  In the vestibule, the safe side of the Radio, he hoped that he had not fatigued her. No, that was not possible. At the garden gate he told her a storiette.

  “You know what the rose said to the rose?”

  No, she did not seem to have heard that one.

  “‘No gardener has died within the memory of roses.’”

  “Very neat” she said “very graceful. Adios.”

  She stood watching him waddle through the gloaming.

  There is a class of lady that stands at the gate (though more usually in her porch) witnessing the recession of her visitor. His posteriors, she thought, are on the big side for his boots… Otherwise… She turned to go in, she strutted in a slow swagger prisonwards down the garden path, she flaunted the glittering peignoir for the envy of Mrs ---, her neighbour, her enemy.

  They do much time side by side, azure skies come and go, the waters go. And they go from intimacy to intimacy, that is to say, about them rises the marsh of granny's-bends that is their relation.

  Bear in mind, we are particularly anxious that you should, how his want to go—no matter where, anywhere, anywhere bar Moscow and England, increases with the climbing frequency of the place-ague. She too has said she wants to go. She must be off, she says. That is true, but frivolous also. She does not seriously want to move, she is past that. Still, she clasps and unclasps her hands, she does and undoes them, her hands that are just right, on the large side for her body as his posteriors for his boots, and says that carajo! but she must go, must get away, that she will go out of her mind. But she works herself up to it, she drinks and starves and smokes and dopes herself into a regular how-dee-do, she plunges into town to buy a ticket and drags home in the tram with a fish or a bag of buttered eggs. She is not serious, she does not seriously want to stir, not in her most buried forum. Her inner spectator, the good and faithful witness, yawns the usual, turns over on her other haunch, and the Alba lets it go at that. Still, great mangling and laundrying of hands goes on between the pair of them, even suicide is dragged in by the cork of the bottle, its pros and cons piously sifted. He comes out in hard and full pulses all over his public parts and in spasms of subsultus bungles a petit mal ult. horis. But she, does not really care about moving (must we drum that drum for ever?), she puts not her trust in changes of scenery, she is too inward by a long chalk, she inclines towards an absolute moral geography, her soul is her only poste restante. Whereas he does care, he prays fervently to be set free in a general way, he is such a very juvenile man. But he will get over all that. Hence, she shall not go. She can talk and talk and take trams into Cook's, but she shall not go. She can talk and talk and suddenly crucify her hands, saying: Shall I be mewed up, shall I, like a falcon, all the days of my life, shall I, in this stenching city?, she shall not go. He shall go. Wait till you see. He would be gone long ago but for the morass of nerve-squitch and beauty and that most tenuous of all the tenuous etc., where bogged beside the royal Alba he wallows caught in the reeds of their relation.

  He has not lain with her. Nor she with him. None of that kind of thing here, if you don't mind.

  What we are doing now, of course, is setting up the world for a proper swell slap-up explosion. The bang is better than the whimper. It is easier to do. It is timed for about ten or fifteen thousand words hence. We shall blow him out of the muck that way.

  And the family? And Chas? And the P.B., the poor old P.B? To say nothing of the boys and girls he left behind him, and whom soon he runs the risk of rejoining. Are they then to be let slide? Are they, squeezed dry, to be cast aside into the gutter, the tragic gutter of not being referred to any more in this book? You fondly ask. Because we (concensus of me) we have not the slightest idea where they come in or if they come in at all. Beyond a few nebulous directions we have no plans, but none at all, for the late Fall and Winter. We hope to keep our hands off all families, because they tend to make us magdalen. And Chas? We find that the body of our feeling corresponds with that enunciated by the Polar Bear, to wit, that Chas is inclined to be rather a bore and a crab-louse. We can always fire him into the aching boosom of his Shetland Shawly if at any moment we find ourself short of copy or at all uncertain as to how to proceed. In what concerns the Polar Bear, we confess ourself totally at a loss. He may loom large yet, he may have to be called on to do the best he can as an out-at-elbow down-at-heel gone-in-the-legs Colossus. But it is not possible to make any statement. How much more pleasant it would be for all parties all round, he is such a nice fellow, were it but feasible to arrange for him to be left in peace. He merits peace. Perviam pacts ad patriam perpetuæ claritatis—that is the fond hope and the vow, may it gleam through the horrid latin and light him, that we make, both now and ever, for the poor old P.B. We cannot do fairer than that. We would not ask better for ourself.
By paths of peace to the land of everlasting clearness..! Can you beat it?

  Clearness standing here of course for us for the obscure clarté that already more than once has been flogged to within one candle-power of its life, way back in the wilds of this old maid.

  Now once more and for the last time we are obliged to hark back to the liu business, a dreadful business, feeling heartily sorry that we ever fell into the temptation of putting up that owld Tale of a Tub concerning Christopher Lîng-Liûn and his bamboo Yankee doodle. Our excuse must be that we were once upon a time inclined to fancy ourself as the Cézanne, shall we say, of the printed page, very strong on architectonics. We live and learn, we draw breath from our heels now, like a pure man, and we honour our Father, our Mother, and Goethe.

  The observation we feel we simply must place now, this very moment, preparatory to saying no more at all about it, is: that just as we feared the Alba and Co. have turned out to be as miserable a lot of croakers as Belacqua at his best and hoarsest and the entire continental circus. Such a collection of Kakiamouni wops, scorching away from their centres, no syndicate of authors, it is our stiff conviction, ever had the misfortune to have to do with. What would Leibnitz say?