Echo's Bones Page 3

  Tears rushed down the cheeks of Zaborovna as she hurled herself into the arms of her prey, no easy matter.

  ‘Wipe them’ said Belacqua.

  He was most ardent and sad all of a sudden, a Gilles de Rais twinkle in his eye. How long then was this, this – ha! – strangury of decency going to go on, going to go on. The Privet was present, panting away to no apparent avail, wilful waste, like the beatific paps of a nun of Minsk; while as for himself, cold as January at the best of times, he was no more capable now, when any moment might be the last of the current lot, ring him back to the gloom where stews and therefore Privets had no sense, of rising to such a buxom occasion than Alfieri or Jean-Jacques of dancing a minuet. Yet he was sorely tempted to try, that was the bitch of it.

  ‘Dry those handsome eyes’ he said as distinctly as the cigar would allow. ‘Don’t drown the babies I see there for a corpse in torment.’

  He withdrew the cigar, put his features into a sudden spin of anguish, righted them no less abruptly, replaced the cigar. That was the kind of thing he meant, that was the torment coming to the surface to breathe. Now she knew.

  Soothed by this kind clonus she said:

  ‘It is not so much you as your shadow. What has befallen it?’

  Now the fact of the matter is that a personal shadow is like happiness, possession of being well deceived, hypnosis, (1) apprehensible only as a lack. A stranger’s shadow, the shadows of natural things, of trees, wings, ocean clouds and the rest, one goes honing after these and indeed it is hard to imagine how one could ever manage without them. But one’s own, except in the case of a very nervous subject, (2) is as unobtrusive as the motion of the earth, to adopt the system of Galileo, that dials it.

  1. Cf. Titania and the Ass.

  2. Cf. Richard III.

  Belacqua looked wildly about him.

  ‘God I don’t know at all’ he exclaimed. ‘I thought I had it.’

  Zaborovna delivered herself now and not a moment too soon of the butterfly doctrine noted above. It was true, she said, of more things than heartsease (a woman’s term) and shadow. It was only a chance, she said, that she had seen hers at all. She would pay more attention to it in future. She looked to make sure it was still there.

  ‘You may be right’ said Belacqua. ‘I don’t say you’re not. I’m a marked man whatever way you look at it.’

  There is more in it than that, thought Zaborovna, but hist!

  ‘Every evening during the season’ she said, ‘Saturdays excepted, I lend myself to sublime delinquencies in the old town where I lodge, and lodge in some splendour believe me. Happily to-night I am not booked.’

  The sun set, the rooks flew home. Why did Belacqua always seem to be abroad at this hour of lowest vitality surely? Portions of a poem by Uhland came into his mind. They received short shrift.

  ‘No crows where I come from’ he said, ‘God be praised.’

  ‘Ah’ said Zaborovna. ‘Then there is a God after all?’

  ‘Presumably’ said Belacqua. ‘I know no more than I did.’

  He seemed to have recovered from his sense of bereavement. Nevertheless she was right, there was more in it, as the sequel may well show, than he thought.

  ‘I should be happy to put you up’ said Zaborovna.

  A long black cylindrical Galloway cow, in her heyday a kind and quick feeder, now obviously seriously ill with rinderpest, red-water and contagious abortion, staggered out of the ground fog, collapsed and slipped calf. It was all over in a flash.

  ‘Happy to put you up’ said Zaborovna.

  ‘When you say “put me up”’ said Belacqua, ‘what do you mean exactly?’

  Not having properly sized up her man she kept the wrong things back.

  ‘You are far too hospitable’ said Belacqua, ‘I couldn’t dream of it.’

  The cow, greatly eased, on her back, her four legs indicting the firmament, was in the article of death. Belacqua knew what that was.

  ‘And you don’t utter all your mind’ he said, ‘unless I am greatly mistaken.’

  ‘Well then’ she said, ‘fried garlic and Cuban rum, what do you say to that?’

  ‘Human rum!’ exclaimed Belacqua.

  ‘Cuban’ she said, ‘a guinea a bottle.’

  Something simply had to happen, the ground-fog lifted, the sky was mare’s-tail and shed a livid light, ghastly in the puddles that pitted the land, but beautiful also, like the complexion in Addison’s disease. A child, radiant in scarlet diaper and pale blue pilch, skipped down off the road and began to sail a boat.

  ‘Though you hedge’ said Belacqua, ‘Miss Privet, yet do you win, and my shame be my glory.’

  ‘That’s a sensible cadaver’ said Zaborovna. She began to back away most gracefully.

  ‘Let the deadbeats get on’ said Belacqua, ‘I can’t bear a crowd.’

  The faithful, seeded with demons, a dim rabble, cringing home after Vespers, regrettably not Sicilian. In the van an Editor, of a Monthly masquerading as a Quarterly, his po hat cockaded fore and aft with a title-page and a poem of pleasure, a tailor of John Jameson o’Lantern dancing before him; next, a friend’s wife, splendid specimen of exophthalmic goitre, storming along, her nipples up her nose; next, a Gipsy Rondo, glabrous but fecund, by-blow of a long line of aguas and iluminaciones; next, Hairy, leaning back, moving very stiff and open; next, in a covered Baby Austen, the Count of Parabimbi and his lady; next, trained to a hair, a nest of rank outsiders, mending in perfect amity a hard place in Eliot, relaxing from time to time to quire their manifesto: ‘Boycott Poulter’s Measure!’; next, as usual in the thick of the mischief, a caput of highly liberally educated ex-eunuchs, rotating slowly as they tottered forward, their worn buttocks gleaming through the slits in their robes; next, Caleken Frica, stark staring naked, jotting notes for period dialogue with a cauter dipped in cocoa round the riddle of her navel minnehaha minnehaha; next, a honeymoon unicorn, brow-beating his half-hunter; next, a Yogi milkman, singeing his beard with a standard candle, a contortionist leprechaun riding in his brain (abdominal); next, the sisters, Debauch and Death, holding their noses. So they passed by and passed away, those mentioned and one or two more, the second after the first, the third after the second, and so forth in order, until the last – a fully grown androgyne of tempestuous loveliness – after the rest, and after the last a spacious nothing.

  ‘Bad one by one’ said Belacqua, ‘very bad all together.’

  A frightful sound as of rent silk put the heart across him.

  ‘There never was such a season for mandrakes’ said Zaborovna.

  ‘Alas’ said Belacqua, ‘Gnaeni, the pranic bleb, is far from being a mandrake. His leprechaun lets him out about this time every Sunday. They have no conduction.’

  The dead cow would soon be a source of embarrassment.

  ‘You remember the wonderful lines’ said Belacqua:

  ‘A dog, a parrot or an ape . . .

  Engross the fancies of the fair.’

  Zaborovna let a ringing guffaw.

  ‘Did you see the Parabimbi’ she said. ‘Where did she get her crucified smile, the little immaculate conception?’

  Belacqua descended resolutely from the fence, took up a hole in his belt, plunged his hand into his pocket and pulled out a Partagas, the sweetest contingency by a long chalk to come his way for many a day, lit it, thought, Now if there should turn out to be a Voltigeur in this assortment . . . !, and said:

  ‘Whenever you are ready Miss.’

  She tossed back the hissing vipers of her hair, her entire body coquetted and writhed like a rope, foamed into a bawdy akimbo that treed, cigar and all, her interlocutor. Poor fellow, there he was, petrified, back on the fence. And Zaborovna, one minute the picture of exuberant continence, the next this Gorgon! Truly there is no accounting for some people. Women in particular seem most mutable, houses of infamous possibilities. So at least it seemed to Belacqua, not for the first time, numbed now on the fence. He himself varied by all means, but as something, som
e rhythmic principle whose seat he rather thought was in the pit of his stomach. An almanac of his inconstancies was not unthinkable. But these women, positively it was scarcely an exaggeration to say that the four and twenty letters made no more and no more capricious variety of words in as many languages than they, their jigsaw souls, foisted on them that they might be damned, diversity of moods. Exaggeration or not, that was how it struck Belacqua, more forcibly now, as he adhered firmly to the fence and heard with great thankfulness the floes of shock crack in his heart-box, than perhaps ever before.

  A quantity of phrases presented themselves to Zaborovna, who thus to her annoyance found herself faced with the alternative of saying nothing or preferring one.

  ‘The garlic won’t be worth eating’ she said and at once repented her choice, as though she had had the least part in it, the pretty creature. So astute in some matters, so crass in others, so crass-astute in as many again, intruding like a flea her loose familiarities into the most retired places, how can she ever expect, as she does, to excel?

  But now for it and like a lamb he followed her steps, up hill and down dale, to her lodging, where having arrived in the core of the darkest hour he at once devoured the garlic, tossed off the white rum, threw them thus mingled, after the manner of Ninus the Assyrian, higgledy-piggledy on the stones, mentioned that he was bemired with sins, naked of good deeds and the meat of worms, and then to his astonishment was ravished, but ravished out of the horrid jaws agape for the love-feast, the wrinkled gums and the Hutchinson fangs, which bit into nothing more fruity than what she afterwards described to a bosom pal as the dream of the shadow of the smoke of a rotten cigar, (3) just as the first sun opened a little eye in the heaven of blue Monday and gave light to a cock, ravished in the sense of reassumed, the first dose of resurgence having acted, into the lush plush of womby-tomby.

  3. The Voltigeur!

  To proceed, after what seemed to Belacqua countless as it were eructations into the Bayswater of Elysium, brash after brash of atonement for the wet impudence of an earthly state – the idea being of course that his heart, not his soul but his heart, drained and dried in this racking guttatim, should qualify at last as a plenum of fire for bliss immovable – he appears to us again and more or less in the familiar attitude all set for his extraordinary affair with the spado in tail, if such a curious animal can be said to exist. Perched then on the lofty boundary of a simply enormous estate, guzzling a cheroot, the air filled with the camembert odours of goat, the stags belling fit to burst, tears for the betossed soul (his misnomer) flowing freely which was all to the good, he received such a stunning crack on his eminent coccyx, that little known funny bone of amativeness, that he all but swooned for joy. Never had he experienced such a tingling sensation, it was like having one’s bottom skaterolled with knuckle-dusters.

  ‘Whoever you are’ he cried, ‘Jetzer or Juniperus —’

  No answer.

  ‘Firk away’ he screamed, ‘firk away, it is better than secret love.’

  ‘Love’ said a wearish voice behind him, ‘turn round my young friend, face this way do, and tell me what you know of that disorder.’

  Belacqua did as he was bid, because a little bird told him, do you see, that his hour had come and that it would be rather more graceful, not to say more sensible, to take it by the forelock, and looked down on a bald colossus, the Saint Paul’s skull gathered into ropy dundraoghaires and a seamless belcher, dangling to and fro that help to holy living a Schenectady putter, clad in amaranth caoutchouc cap-à-pie, a cloak of gutta percha streaming back from the barrel of his bust, in his hand a gum tarboosh.

  ‘I fear I caught you’ said this strange figure ‘with my last long putt. I got right under the beggar.’

  ‘Then you have lost your ball’ said Belacqua. ‘What a shame!’

  ‘I make my own’ said the giant, ‘I have some hundred thousand in a bag at home.’

  ‘Where do you suppose’ said Belacqua ‘all this is leading to?’

  ‘I am Lord Gall’ said the colossus, ‘if that means anything to you. Lord Gall of Wormwood. This is Wormwood. Possibility of issue is extinct.’

  ‘Fecks’ said Belacqua, ‘never say die, the law won’t.’

  ‘The law is a ginnet’ said Lord Gall. ‘Did I ever tell you that one?’

  ‘I may know it’ said Belacqua, ‘there aren’t many I haven’t forgotten at one time or another. But fire away.’

  ‘It’s a prime story’ said Lord Gall, ‘told me in a dream, or rather a vision. I’ll communicate it as we go along.’

  ‘Forgive me’ said Belacqua, ‘but go along whither?’

  ‘By heaven’ exclaimed Lord Gall, ‘I have it all mapped out, believe me or believe me not. I don’t know who you are, but that you will do me the hell of a lot of good I have little doubt. In fact I was thinking —’

  Lord Gall blushed and could not go on. He tormented the tassel of his tarboosh. Belacqua urged him to conceal nothing.

  ‘We are quite alone’ he said ‘except for a goat somewhere.’

  ‘Well’ said Lord Gall, ‘I was thinking, if you did not mind, of addressing you in future as Adeodatus.’

  He let fall the putter, settled the tarboosh firmly on his head, reached up with his arms and set Belacqua gently on the ground beside him.

  ‘Take my hand’ he said.

  Timidly Belacqua made a little fist, placed in the monstrous bud, glowing with rings, of his patron, who suffered it to nestle there and even treated it to a long long fungoid squeeze that was most gratifying no doubt. Lord Gall stood, vibrating from head to foot, the cloak cracking like a banner, the sweat distilling through the caoutchouc in sudden stains, getting up steam in fact. Then abruptly he moved forward with a kind of religious excitement that jerked Belacqua clean off his feet.

  ‘Steady’ said Lord Gall.

  Belacqua made a perfect landing and scuttled along in great style, a willing little pony.

  ‘Now then’ said Lord Gall. ‘When our Lord —’

  ‘Your putter sir’ cried Belacqua, ‘you have left it behind.’

  ‘Pox on my putter’ roared Lord Gall, vexed to the pluck, ‘I have quiverfuls at home.’

  Faster and faster they sped over the pasture, paved with edible mushrooms which Lord Gall scattered and spurned like a great elephant and big, Belacqua would have staked his reputation, with truffles. Yet he did not dare suggest that they should stop and fill their hankies.

  ‘When our Lord’ said Lord Gall, ‘do you heed me?’

  Belacqua felt that this was a piece of rhetoric. He was right.

  ‘When our Lord’ said Lord Gall for the third time ‘stood in need of a mount and before the ass, to her undying credit, agreed unconditionally to carry him, he made overtures to the horse, who required notice of the question, and to the mule and ginnet, who bluntly refused.’

  ‘The pigdogs!’ cried Belacqua.

  ‘Therefore’ proceeded Lord Gall ‘the Lord laid a curse on the mule and the ginnet, whose gist was that they should go no farther. With the twofold result that —’

  ‘Primo’ piped Belacqua.

  ‘Primo: they have a glorious time. Secun —’

  ‘In what sense’ said Belacqua ‘do they have a glorious time?’

  As a train from a tunnel or a lady from a tank of warm water so now a wail, compound of impatience and rosy pudency, burst from the kidney-lipped maw of the raconteur.

  ‘You hog’s pudding’ he cried, ‘but inasmuch as they are not tenants in tail, what else?’

  The oaths and groans of the unhappy man were happily to some extent drownded in a cyclone of wrath and disdain, something between the crowing of croop and a flushing-box doing its best, which at this juncture sprang up in his lights, bust all the bronchi, tattered the pleura, came thrashing and howling up his windpipe like an unclean spirit and left him quite breathless. But in his twenty-five stone of blubber, brawn, bone and bombast there was still ample motion to keep him going again his bellows should
mend, which they very soon did he was thankful to say and did say.

  ‘Secundo’ said Mazeppa.

  ‘Secundo’ said Lord Gall, ‘they can in no wise be translated into Gaelic.’

  Belacqua applauded.

  ‘Very nice’ he said, ‘witty but not vulgar, clean fun, a rare thing in this age. In a vision, did you say?’

  Lord Gall, so used as to be impervious to blandishment, slackened speed and came gently to rest at the foot of a forest giant.

  ‘My algum tree’ he said. ‘Highth – unknown; worth – not to be arrived at; girth – one half chain.’

  ‘Under the bark?’ said Belacqua.

  ‘Under the bloody bark of course’ said Lord Gall. ‘Where did you think?’

  Lord Gall, roused faintly, rub- rather than sud-orem being the ad quem, by such reiteration of ‘oh please sir!’ fatuity, flicked away the trusting hand of his tool as he might have a mosquito or the ash of a cigarette, sank his own thus freed into one of the many gnarls that adorned or marred the bole, one of those vulvate gnarls that Ruskin found more moving than even the noblest cisalpine medallions, pressed a button presumably for a deep slide-box, containing among an arsenal of strange objects that Belacqua could not for the moment identify a hogshead ale of hellebore, a double bass, a complete dry change and a full packet of photographs of Fräulein Dietrich, gushed forth with a piercing vagitus.

  ‘My treasure’ said Lord Gall simply, ‘my own, my dear bowels.’

  Lovingly he selected and secured a pair of brazen climbing-irons, slammed to the box by the superlative method of backing fiercely upon it with the bouncing bosses of the buckler of his bottom, remarking as he did do and without the least trace of affectation: