Echo's Bones

by Samuel Beckett

  Doyle sighed.

  ‘I do think you might tell me’ he said.

  ‘Aren’t you a perfect little pest’ cried Belacqua, ‘wanting to know everything. Who but an imbecile can care from what? Isn’t derogation in the dear old abstract good enough?’

  Doyle, silent and inclined to brood, gave the false impression that he did not think so, that he had the very lowest opinion of the abstract, false because his mind was dwelling on something quite different. He was thinking that perhaps it might be wise to run back for his trowel.

  ‘If it’s good enough for me’ shouted Belacqua ‘isn’t it too good for you? There you glump like a fluke in a tup and want to know from what. Can you think of any thing existing, God or Gonococcus, lower than the creature, his three score years and ten of hot cockles?’

  Doyle, deep down in his heart, felt this to be an overstatement. But he knew that it would never do to say that. Doyle was a natural man of the world.

  ‘Réchauffé cockles’ he said.

  This little effort, worthy of the Communist painter and decorator in his palmiest days, transported Belacqua and caused him to ejaculate:

  ‘Hah! There she spouts, the Mick I know, the great greedy wild free human heart I know!’

  ‘“But”’ said Doyle, ‘you were saying “but —”’

  ‘My memory has gone to hell altogether’ said Belacqua. ‘If you can’t give me a better cue than that I’ll have to be like the embarrassed caterpillar and go back to my origins.’

  Doyle did not smoke the reference.

  ‘He was working away at his hammock’ said Belacqua, ‘and not doing a damn bit of harm to man or beast, when up comes old Monkeybrand bursting with labour-saving devices. The caterpillar was far from feeling any benefit.’

  Bear in mind that all this time Doyle had been going away and coming back, ostentatiously eased, as regular as clockwork.

  ‘What ails you Mick?’ said Belacqua not unkindly.

  Doyle however would not brook even the most courteous attention to be drawn to his weakness and so he just blushed through the blue and rapped out the following reminder, yes really rapped it out:

  ‘You were mentioning how that though’ – surely a rather unusual construction? – ‘as a foetus you erred, yet —’

  ‘Ah yes to be sure’ said Belacqua, ‘thank you Mick’, and fell into rêverie as though time were of no consequence.

  After a long silence, suffered by Doyle as scarcely less than a tribute to his high-class folly, something inside Belacqua said for him:

  ‘Sometimes he feels as though this old wound of his life had no intention of healing.’

  ‘That sounds bad’ said Doyle, ‘I grant you. Has he tried saline?’

  ‘He has tried everything’ said the voice ‘from fresh air and early hours to irony and great art.’

  ‘And obtained no relief?’

  The thought of not being able to obtain relief sent Doyle flying. When he came back the voice admitted that great art had proved a great boon while it lasted.

  ‘But he couldn’t stand the pace’ it sighed, ‘the counter irritation was something terrific.’

  Belacqua passed his hand over his face.

  ‘How do I look?’ he said.

  ‘Your eyes are full of tears’ said Doyle, ‘positively flooded my poor friend.’

  ‘I didn’t mention’ said Belacqua, ‘or did I, that all reflectors of what kind soever have cast me off. Yes. They cut me now. I don’t exist for them. I remember the first time —’

  ‘If you will mewl without ceasing’ said Doyle, ‘what else can you expect?’

  ‘Twas on an Ash Wed-nes-day —’

  ‘I declare to me God’ said Doyle, ‘you wear me to the pith with your —’

  ‘With my what?’ said Belacqua. ‘What does poor Bel wear Mick to the pith with?’

  ‘How shall I say?’ said Doyle. ‘Shall I say with the eccentricities of your conversation, your buckled discourse? You must be rotten through and through to fly out of your own system the way you do. Stick to the point, honour your father, your mother and Göthe. Do I make myself at all clear?’

  ‘Bright as light and clear as wind’ said Belacqua.

  ‘Good’ said Doyle. ‘Now are you right now, are you all set to take over?’

  ‘Keyed up’ said Belacqua. ‘I’ll snap in a second.’

  ‘That first, fatal, foetal’ said Doyle, sitting down inexorably on all the commas, ‘error, or, better, blunder, notwithstanding —’

  Dead silence.

  ‘Go ON’ shrieked Doyle, ‘don’t pick, play a card curse you!’

  ‘Comma’ said Belacqua, ‘notwithstanding, comma, yes, blunder, better still, comma, notwithstanding, two dots, yes, ha —’

  Inhuman cry.

  ‘What was that?’ cried Belacqua.

  Another and another. Doyle, Doyle, his head flung back, his throat olive convulsed, was making them. Up they came, bubbling from his belly, with whose awful heaving the scarlet slogan was in entire sympathy. He could not go on making them and live, Belacqua did not need to have been bumped off by a Fellow of some Royal College of Surgeons to see that. He made seven in all and then he stopped. Another three would have counted him out.

  ‘What you need’ said Belacqua ‘is perfect quiet and darkness.’

  Horror! It was dawning.

  ‘For one gentleman’ said Belacqua ‘with a fusilade of amplified death-rattles to intrude upon another in the very ecstasy of his peroration seems to be the act of a cad and a curdog. I stand open to correction.’

  ‘The two dots’ panted Doyle, ‘they seemed to scorch me like hell-fire.’

  Dawn, aborting all over the layette of night. Pfui!

  ‘When you are quite ready’ said Belacqua, ‘recovered, almost your old self again, then I have hopes of proceeding, under one, two and three, to bury this demented conversation. But not until you are quite ready, not a moment before.’

  ‘One, two, three’ groaned Doyle. ‘God forgive you.’

  ‘One’ said Belacqua: ‘I shall make a statement; two, I shall make a suggestion; three, I shall aid you to act upon it, with or without modifications, or, bist Du nicht willig, bid thee farewell.’

  ‘Bating Chinese corkscrews in my skull’ said Doyle, ‘I feel A.I.’

  Belacqua settled himself more comfortably, i.e. more thighs and less rump, on the headstone, and began:

  ‘One: scarcely —’

  ‘Bear with me’ murmured Doyle.

  ‘What do you say?’ said Belacqua. ‘Don’t be so beastly inaudible.’

  ‘Is it de rigueur’ said Doyle, ‘the crazy old chronology? One, two, three. Why people have not got the gumption to begin with the Dove and end up with the Son passes my persimmon.’

  ‘I dare not’ said Belacqua, ‘much as I should like to, put the cart before the horse in this particular case.’

  ‘Well if you can’t’ said Doyle, going away and coming back, ‘you can’t. The horse, the cart, and then – ?’

  ‘Then haply the deluge’ said Belacqua. ‘And keep your bake shut now or I’ll fly away with you.’

  ‘Game ball’ said Doyle.

  The vagabond again! Dear oh dear oh dear! The good old pastoral days, prior to Thanatos.

  ‘One’ said Belacqua, ‘scarcely had my cord been clumsily severed than I struggled to reintegrate the matrix, nor did I relax those newborn efforts until death came and undid me.’

  ‘But did it?’ said Doyle.

  ‘It is doing so’ said Belacqua, ‘it cannot go any faster.’

  ‘And it is on that basis’ said Doyle, ‘in consideration of a life-time of gaudy prenatal velleities, that you deem that death has done the dirty on you?’

  ‘I did feel’ said Belacqua, ‘I must admit I did feel that I was being hardly used. But that impression, I am happy to say, has since been corrected.’

  ‘Why then – ?’ said Doyle.

  ‘I should really greatly prefer not to go into that question’
said Belacqua. ‘Economy is the great thing now, from now on till the end.’

  ‘Then let us have the cart’ said Doyle. ‘The old stars are like stains of dew.’

  ‘Two’ said Belacqua, ‘I lay you the most fabulous odds that nothing of me subsists in this grave. Not a ring, not a hair, not the crown of a tooth, not a nail, not a bone. Is that a bet or do we part?’

  ‘Make it three to one’ whined Doyle, ‘cantcher? A half-dozen of stout to a nice pint.’

  ‘Done’ said Belacqua. ‘Better a gull than a Protestant Gael.’

  ‘In the event of dispute’ said Doyle, ‘it might be a wise thing to appoint an arbitrator. My terrace teems with archaeologists, any one of whom I happen to know would be more than happy to act.’

  More than happy! What an expression for a man in Doyle’s position.

  ‘What dispute can conceivably arise between gentlemen?’ said Belacqua. ‘Have a little sense Doyle.’

  Doyle ate dirt.

  ‘Thank you Doyle’ said Belacqua.

  ‘Shall I grovel now’ said Doyle, ‘or are you appeased.’

  ‘That will do nicely’ said Belacqua. ‘I am not a jealous person.’

  ‘Then three’ said Doyle.

  ‘To work’ cried Belacqua, ‘and may the better man win!’

  ‘My hand on that’ exclaimed Doyle with much heartiness.

  Thus it was that Doyle, slush though he was of incuriosity, did after all reach forth. Sooner or later, willing or unwillingly, they all do. There are no exceptions to this rule, take it or leave it.

  Consequently in the dawn dust of a dove’s heart descending after her pains to arrive they fell to and that with such a will, Doyle revelling in the glow of exertion, Belacqua in a fever of curiosity naturally, that the long lid of Nichol’s box, its handsome finish rather thrown away in the mire and gloom of the pit, in next to no time amply repaid them. But behind their backs the sea had developed the stippled contexture of hammered lead, very saturnine, and the submarine, plunging up and down madly in the shallows, an agitato that entered the corner of Belacqua’s eye as an admonition not to dally.

  ‘Many hands make light work’ said Doyle complacently, kneeling on the box, wiping the last clots of muck from the lid with a damp clout, wondering what on earth had possessed him to tackle such a job alone, at his time of life, with his increasing physical disabilities. Then unexpectedly he clapped his hand to where he felt his heart beating, not far from the armpit. Was he going to have a seizure, that was the interesting question.

  ‘Misery!’ he cried. ‘I forgot the turnascrew.’

  But Belacqua, persuaded that there was not a moment to lose, cried out a curse on all turnascrews, snatched up the axe and dealt the coffin such a welt as laid it open from stem to stern, shivering all its brass bands and catapulting Doyle into the adjoining plot sacred to the memory of one Gottlob. Doyle, on whom the long night of knock-about was beginning to tell and small wonder, rose to his feet very groggy, all the wind taken out of him, and went away needless to say. Belacqua parted the frilled cerements and peeped inside to see what he could see. But what with the dark and the dank vapours blurring his glasses he could see nothing and he felt the same reluctance to thrust in his hand and grope as all hypersensitive people do at the thought of retrieving some precious object, a locket or a coin, from say an earth-closet. So he just sat tight until Doyle came back and then called out to him to pass down his lantern.

  ‘Certainly’ said Doyle, ‘of course.’

  ‘Yes’ said Belacqua, ‘show a glim, there’s a dear fellow, I’m blinded.’

  Doyle kneeled on the lip of the excavation and lowered the lantern. Suddenly he was Adam that good old man, trembling with loyalty and constant service, though no sympathetic metamorphosis we regret to say was evinced by Belacqua, who sniffed and said:

  ‘Do you smell the tubers?’

  Doyle could not honestly say that he did.

  ‘Light and sweetness’ said Belacqua, ‘Sweetness and Light, Obliterate dole, And engender delight.’

  ‘Bravo’ said Doyle.

  ‘And whoso lacks these shall consume like a spider away.’

  Belacqua threw open the shutter of the lantern and the light streamed over his face.

  ‘Fortunate candle!’ he cried, ‘you might be greasing the palm of some saint this minute.’

  He cocked up the yellow beam at Doyle.

  ‘You don’t look well at all Doyle’ he said, ‘with your scalped belly.’

  As he turned and stooped to investigate his remains (if any) it occurred to him that he was at the mercy of this strange sexton or groundsman or whatever you like to call him, so advantageously placed above and behind him, all manner of lethal implements to his hand, and rage in his heart as likely as not. Consequently it was in a state of some trepidation that he extirpated the rank shroud, coaxed the lantern into the coffin and played its yellow eye in all directions. As for the unhappy Doyle, all that he could see was the peering bulk of the inquirer and an inconsiderable section of the coffin’s interior, where the alternation of dim flashes with periods of total obscuration entered his consciousness, for he was rather too ecstatically disposed at this crisis to associate his impressions in a reasonable way, like the frolics of a toy moon in a toy storm. Then abruptly the ubiquitous flickering resolved itself into a steady tremolo of light over a small area, narrowing and brightening, the area not the tremolo, as Belacqua poked forward the lantern at his find.

  ‘Give it a name’ said Doyle in a voice that he had some difficulty in recognising.

  What a scene when you come to think of it! Belacqua petrified link-boy, the scattered guts of ground, the ponderous anxiomaniac on the brink in the nude like a fly on the edge of a sore, (5) in the grey flaws of tramontane the hundreds of headstones sighing and gleaming like bones, the hamper, mattock, shovel, spade and axe cabal of vipers, most malignant, the clothes-basket a coffin in its own way, and of course the prescribed hush of great solemnity broken only by the sea convulsed in one of those dreams, ah one of those dreams, the submarine wallowing and hooting on the beach like an absolute fool, and dawn toddling down the mountains. What a scene! Worthy of Mark Disney.

  5. Indeed there was more than a little of the gardener in Draff about Doyle.

  Belacqua’s immobility began to prey on Doyle, who craned down, collapsed gargoyle, into the void.

  ‘A little Goldwasser’ he urged, ‘direct from Danzig.’

  Poor Belacqua, the best he could do by way of response to this kind offer was a lightning shudder, like a zip fastener it rattled down the slats of his spine. He was properly buttoned up this time. And poor Doyle too, we don’t forget him, all poor people we don’t forget them, in a chaos of spirit he fell tooth and nail on the hamper, tore forth the jar, fairy jar, sausage balloon, bit off its fragile neck, yes really seemed to bite it off, drained in a frenzy its cordial contents, essence of flecked pupil of women adored in secret, and went away.

  The Alba said in a general way:

  ‘Shall we tarry here until perdition catch us?’

  The passengers agreed that that would be a mistake.

  ‘Have we not gone out of our way’ she said ‘to do the right thing, the kind thing?’

  ‘Miles out of our course’ said the passengers.

  ‘What thanks do we get?’ said the Alba.

  The passengers were beginning to cotton on.

  ‘Small thanks’ they cried.

  ‘To hell with him so’ said the Alba.

  So the submarine departed, very cross indeed.

  In the coffin the handful of stones that Belacqua had found, the lantern lying on its side, the sweet smell of tubers killed in the snuff of candle.

  The cemetery a cockpit of comic panic, Doyle stalking and rushing the tombstones, squatting behind them in ambush, behaving in a way quite foreign to his nature.

  So it goes in the world.

  ANNOTATIONS

  The following abbreviations have been used for fre
quently cited texts; full details of editions used are found in the bibliography.

  Augustine St Augustine: Confessions

  Burton Robert Burton: The Anatomy of Melancholy

  Cooper William M. Cooper: Flagellation and the Flagellants

  CP Samuel Beckett: Collected Poems

  Dis Samuel Beckett: Disjecta

  DN Beckett’s Dream Notebook, with entry number

  Dream Samuel Beckett: Dream of Fair to Middling Women

  Garnier Pierre Garnier: Onanisme seul et à deux sous toutes ses formes et leurs consequences

  Giles H. A. Giles: The Civilisation of China

  Lockhart J. G. Lockhart: The History of Napoleon Bonaparte

  LSB I Samuel Beckett: The Letters of Samuel Beckett, vol. 1: 1929–1940

  LSB II Samuel Beckett: The Letters of Samuel Beckett, vol. 2: 1941–1956

  MPTK Samuel Beckett: More Pricks Than Kicks

  OED The Oxford English Dictionary

  Renard Jules Renard: Le Journal de Jules Renard 1887–1910

  Taylor Jeremy Taylor: The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living and Holy Dying

  TCD Trinity College Dublin

  UoR University of Reading

  Roman numerals relate to book and chapter, or act and scene of the cited work. No specific page number is given for books that are available in multiple editions. All citations from the Bible are from the Authorised King James Version.

  Title: taken from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (III, l. 399), as noted in DN: ‘Echo’s bones were turned to stone’ (1101). Her love for Narcissus unrequited, Echo pines away until only her voice and her bones remain.

  ‘shafts’: cf. ‘shafts of emergal’ in Dream (16).

  ‘back into the muck’: a commonplace and persuasive description of the world in the Beckett canon. He was fond of the line ‘the world is dung’ (‘e fango e il mondo’) in Giacomo Leopardi’s ‘To Himself’ (‘A se stesso’), a poem Beckett typed out in the 1930s (TCD MS10971/9).

  ‘lord of the manor’: together with ‘trespass’, ‘acquiescence’ and ‘duty of care’, forms the legal terminology of this first sentence, and anticipates the legal issue of Lord Gall’s estate later in the text.

  ‘free among the dead’: based on St Augustine’s Confessions (IX, xiii); as noted in DN, Christ was ‘“free among the dead” – He was the only Dead free from the debt of Death’ (180; cf. also Dream 86). As Augustine goes on to say, having laid down his life, Christ is able to take it up again, reflecting Belacqua’s return from the dead. The phrase ‘free among the dead’ also occurs in Psalm 88.