Belacqua turned left into Lombard Street, the street of the sanitary engineers, and entered a public house. Here he was known, in the sense that his grotesque exterior had long ceased to alienate the curates and make them giggle, and to the extent that he was served with his drink without having to call for it. This did not always seem a privilege. He was tolerated, what was more, and let alone by the rough but kindly habitués of the house, recruited for the most part from among dockers, railwaymen and vague joxers on the dole. Here also art and love, scrabbling in dispute or staggering home, were barred, or, perhaps better, unknown. The aesthetes and the impotent were far away.
These circumstances combined to make of this place a very grateful refuge for Belacqua, who never omitted, when he found himself in its neighbourhood with the price of a drink about him, to pay it a visit.
When I enquired how he squared such visits with his anxiety to keep on the move and his distress at finding himself brought to a standstill, as when he had come out of the underground in the mouth of College Street, he replied that he did not. “Surely” he said “my resolution has the right to break down.” I supposed so indeed. “Or” he said “if you prefer, I make the raid in two hops instead of non-stop. From what” he cried “does that disqualify me, I should very much like to know.” I hastened to assure him that he had a perfect right to suit himself in what, after all, was a manuoeuvre of his own contriving, and that the raid, to adopt his own term, lost nothing by being made in easy stages. “Easy!” he exclaimed, “how easy?”
But notice the double response, like two holes to a burrow.
Sitting in this crapulent den, drinking his drink, he gradually ceased to see its furnishings with pleasure, the bottles, representing centuries of loving research, the stools, the counter, the powerful screws, the shining phalanx of the pulls of the beer-engines, all cunningly devised and elaborated to further the relations between purveyor and consumer in this domain. The bottles drawn and emptied in a twinkling, the casks responding to the slightest pressure on their joysticks, the weary proletarians at rest on arse and elbow, the cash register that never complains, the graceful curates flying from customer to customer, all this made up a spectacle in which Belacqua was used to take delight and chose to see a pleasant instance of machinery decently subservient to appetite. A great major symphony of supply and demand, effect and cause, fulcrate on the middle C of the counter and waxing, as it proceeded, in the charming harmonics of blasphemy and broken glass and all the aliquots of fatigue and ebriety. So that he would say that the only place where he could come to anchor and be happy was a low public-house, and that all the wearisome tactics of gress and dud Beethoven would be done away with if only he could spend his life in such a place. But as they closed at ten, and as residence and good faith were viewed as incompatible, and as in any case he had not the means to consecrate his life to stasis, even in the meanest bar, he supposed he must be content to indulge this whim from time to time, and return thanks for such sporadic mercy.
All this and much more he laboured to make clear. He seemed to derive considerable satisfaction from his failure to do so.
But on this particular occasion the cat failed to jump, with the result that he became as despondent as though he were sitting at home in his own great armchair, as anxious to get on the move and quite as hard put to it to do so. Why this was he could not make out. Whether the trituration of the child in Pearse Street had upset him without his knowing it, or whether (and he put forward this alternative with a truly insufferable complacency) he had come to some parting of the ways, he did not know at all. All he could say was that the objects in which he was used to find such recreation and repose lost gradually their hold upon him, he became insensible to them little by little, the old itch and algos crept back into his mind. He had come briskly all the way from Tommy Moore, and now he suddenly found himself sitting paralysed and grieving in a pub of all places, good for nothing but to stare at his spoiling porter, and wait for a sign.
To this day he does not know what caused him to look up, but look up he did. Feeling the impulse to do this strong upon him, he forced his eyes away from the glass of dying porter and was rewarded by seeing a hatless woman advancing slowly towards him up the body of the bar. No sooner had she come in than he must have become aware of her. That was surely very curious in the first instance. She seemed to be hawking some ware or other, but what it was he could not see, except that it was not studs or laces or matches or lavender or any of the usual articles. Not that it was unusual to find a woman in that public-house, for they came and went freely, slaking their thirst and beguiling their sorrows with no less freedom than their men-folk. Indeed it was always a pleasure to see them, their advances were always most friendly and honourable, Belacqua had many a delightful recollection of their commerce.
Hence there was no earthly reason why he should see in the advancing figure of this mysterious pedlar anything untoward, or in the nature of the sign in default of which he was clamped to his stool till closing-time. Yet the impulse to do so was so strong that he yielded to it, and as she drew nearer, having met with more rebuffs than pence in her endeavours to dispose of her wares, whatever they were, it became clear to him that his instinct had not played him false, in so far at least as she was a woman of very remarkable presence indeed.
Her speech was that of a woman of the people, but of a gentlewoman of the people. Her gown had served its time, but yet contrived to be respectable. He noticed with a pang that she sported about her neck the insidious little mock fur so prevalent in tony slumland. The one deplorable feature of her get up, as apprehended by Belacqua in his hasty survey, was the footwear—the cruel strait outsizes of the suffragette or welfare worker. But he did not doubt for a moment that they had been a gift, or picked up in the pop for a song. She was of more than average height and well in flesh. She might be past middle-age. But her face, ah her face, was what Belacqua had rather refer to as her countenance, it was so full of light. This she lifted up upon him and no error. Brimful of light and serene, serenissime, it bore no trace of suffering, and in this alone it might be said to be a notable face. Yet like tormented faces that he had seen, like the face in the National Gallery in Merrion Square by the Master of Tired Eyes, it seemed to have come a long way and subtend an infinitely narrow angle of affliction, as eyes focus a star. The features were null, only luminous, impassive and secure, petrified in radiance, or words to that effect, for the reader is requested to take notice that this sweet style is Belacqua's. An act of expression, he said, a wreathing or wrinkling, could only have had the effect of a dimmer on a headlight. The implications of this triumphant figure, the just and the unjust, etc., are better forgone.
At long last she addressed herself to Belacqua.
“Seats in heaven” she said in a white voice “tuppence apiece, four fer a tanner.”
“No” said Belacqua. It was the first syllable to come to his lips. It had not been his intention to deny her.
“The best of seats” she said “again I'm sold out. Tuppence apiece the best of seats, four fer a tanner.”
This was unforeseen with a vengeance, if not exactly vaudeville. Belacqua was embarrassed in the last degree, but transported also. He felt the sweat coming in the small of his back, above his Montrouge belt.
“Have you got them on you?” he mumbled.
“Heaven goes round” she said, whirling her arm, “and round and round and round and round and round.”
“Yes” said Belacqua “round and round.”
“Rowan” she said, dropping the d's and getting more of a spin into the slogan, “rowan an' rowan an' rowan.”
Belacqua scarcely knew where to look. Unable to blush he came out in this beastly sweat. Nothing of the kind had ever happened to him before. He was altogether disarmed, unsaddled and miserable. The eyes of them all, the dockers, the railwaymen and, most terrible of all, the joxers, were upon him. His tail drooped. This female dog of a pixy with her tiresome Ptolemy, he was
at her mercy.
“No” he said “no thank you, no not this evening thank you.”
“Again I'm sold out” she said “an' buked out, four fer a tanner.”
“On whose authority …” began Belacqua, like a Scholar.
“For yer frien'” she said “yer da, yer ma an' yer motte, four fer a tanner.” The voice ceased, but the face did not abate.
“How do I know” piped Belacqua “you're not sellin' me a pup?”
“Heaven goes rowan an' rowan…”
“Rot you” said Belacqua “I'll take two. How much is that?”
“Four dee” she said.
Belacqua gave her a sixpence.
“Gobbless yer honour” she said, in the same white voice from which she had not departed. She made to go.
“Here” cried Belacqua “you owe me twopence.” He had not even the good grace to say tuppence.
“Arragowan” she said “make it four cantcher, yer frien', yer da, yer ma an' yer motte.”
Belacqua could not bicker. He had not the strength of mind for that. He turned away.
“Jesus” she said distinctly “and his sweet mother preserve yer honour.”
“Amen” said Belacqua, into his dead porter.
Now the woman went away and her countenance lighted her to her room in Townsend Street.
But Belacqua tarried a little to listen to the music. Then he also departed, but for Railway Street, beyond the river.
A Wet Night
HARK, it is the season of festivity and goodwill. Shopping is in full swing, the streets are thronged with revellers, the Corporation has offered a prize for the best-dressed window, Hyam's trousers are down again.
Mistinguett would do away with chalets of necessity. She does not think them necessary. Not so Belacqua. Emerging happy body from the hot bowels of Mc-Louglin's he looked up and admired the fitness of Moore's bull neck, not a whit too short, with all due respect to the critics. Bright and cheery above the strom of the Green, as though coached by the Star of Bethlehem, the Bovril sign danced and danced through its seven phases.
The lemon of faith jaundiced, annunciating the series, was in a fungus of hopeless green reduced to shingles and abolished. Whereupon the light went out, in homage to the slain. A sly ooze of gules, carmine of solicitation, lifting the skirts of green that the prophecy might be fulfilled, shocking Gabriel into cherry, flooded the sign. But the long skirts came rattling down, darkness covered their shame, the cycle was at an end. Da capo.
Bovril into Salome, thought Belacqua, and Tommy Moore there with his head on his shoulders. Doubt, Despair and Scrounging, shall I hitch my bath-chair to the greatest of these? Across the way, beneath the arcade, the blind paralytic was in position, he was well tucked up in his coverings, he was lashing into his dinner like any proletarian. Soon his man would come and wheel him home. No one had ever seen him come or go, he was there one minute and gone the next. He went and returned. When you scrounge you must go and return, that was the first great article of Christian scrounging. No man could settle down to scrounge properly in a foreign land. The Wanderjahre were a sleep and a forgetting, the proud dead point. You came back wise and staked your beat in some sheltered place, pennies trickled in, you were looked up to in a tenement.
Belacqua had been proffered a sign, Bovril had made him a sign.
Whither next? To what licensed premises? To where the porter was well up, first; and the solitary shawly like a cloud of latter rain in a waste of poets and politicians, second; and he neither knew nor was known, third. A lowly house dear to shawlies where the porter was up and he could keep himself to himself on a high stool with a high round and feign to be immersed in the Moscow notes of the Twilight Herald. These were very piquant.
Of the two houses that appealed spontaneously to these exigencies the one, situate in Merrion Row, was a home from home for jarveys. As some folk from hens, so Belacqua shrank from jarveys. Rough, gritty, almost verminous men. From Moore to Merrion Row, moreover, was a perilous way, beset at this hour with poets and peasants and politicians. The other lay in Lincoln Place, he might go gently by Pearse Street, there was nothing to stop him. Long straight Pearse Street, it permitted of a simple cantilena in his mind, its footway peopled with the tranquil and detached in fatigue, its highway dehumanised in a tumult of buses. Trams were monsters, moaning along beneath the wild gesture of the trolley. But buses were pleasant, tires and glass and clash and no more. Then to pass by the Queens, home of tragedy, was charming at that hour, to pass between the old theatre and the long line of the poor and lowly queued up for thruppence worth of pictures. For there Florence would slip into the song, the Piazza della Signoria and the No 1 tram and the Feast of St John, when they lit the torches of resin on the towers and the children, while the rockets at nightfall above the Cascine were still flagrant in their memory, opened the little cages to the glutted cicadae after their long confinement and stayed out with their young parents long after their usual bedtime. Then slowly in his mind down the sinister Uffizi to the parapets of Arno, and so on and so forth. This pleasure was dispensed by the Fire Station opposite which seemed to have been copied here and there from the Palazzo Vecchio. In deference to Savonarola? Ha! Ha! At all events it was as good a way as any other to consume the Homer hour, darkness filling the streets and so on, and a better than most in virtue of his great thirst towards the lowly house that would snatch him in off the street through the door of its grocery department if by good fortune that were still open.
Painfully then under the College ramparts, past the smart taxis, he set off, clearing his mind for its song. The Fire Station worked without a hitch and all was going as well as could be expected considering what the evening held in pickle for him when the blow fell. He was run plump into by one Chas, a highbrow bromide of French nationality with a diabolical countenance compound of Skeat's and Paganini's and a mind like a tattered concordance. It was Chas who would not or could not leave well alone, Belacqua being rapt in his burning feet and the line of the song in his head.
“Halte-là” piped the pirate, “whither so gay?”
In the lee of the Monumental Showroom Belacqua was obliged to pause and face this machine. It carried butter and eggs from the Hibernian Dairy. Belacqua however was not to be drawn.
“Ramble” he said vaguely “in the twilight.”
“Just a song” said Chas “at twilight. No?”
Belacqua tormented his hands in the gloom. Had he been blocked on his way and violated in the murmur of his mind to listen to this clockwork Bartlett? Apparently.
“How's the world” he said nevertheless, in spite of everything, “and what's the news of the great world?”
“Fair” said Chas, cautiously, “fair to meedling. The poem moves, eppure.”
If he mentions ars longa, Belacqua made this covenant with himself, he will have occasion to regret it.
“Limae labor” said Chas “et mora.”
“Well” said Belacqua, casting off with clean hands, “see you again.”
“But shortly, I thrust” cried Chas, “casa Frica, dis collied night. No?”
“Alas” said Belacqua, well adrift.
Behold the Frica, she visits talent in the Service Flats. In she lands, singing Havelock Ellis in a deep voice, frankly itching to work that which is not seemly. Open upon her concave breast as on a lectern lies Portigliotti's Penombre Claustrali, bound in tawed caul. In her talons earnestly she grasps Sade's 120 Days and the Anterotica of Aliosha G. Brignole-Sale, unopened, bound in shagreened caul. A septic pudding hoodwinks her, a stodgy turban of pain it laps her horse face. The eyehole is clogged with the bulbus, the round pale globe goggles exposed. Solitary meditation has furnished her with nostrils of generous bore. The mouth champs an invisible bit, foam gathers at the bitter commissures. The crateriform brisket, lipped with sills of paunch, cowers ironically behind a maternity tunic. Keyholes have wrung the unfriendly withers, the osseous rump screams behind the hobble-skirt. Wastes of woad worsted
advertise the pasterns. Aïe!
This in its absinthe whinny had bidden Belacqua and, what is more, the Alba, to backstairs, claret cup and the intelligentsia. The Alba, Belacqua's current one and only, had much pleasure in accepting for her scarlet gown and broad pale bored face. The belle of the ball. Aïe!
But seldom one without two and scarcely had Chas been shed than lo from out the Grosvenor sprang the homespun Poet wiping his mouth and a little saprophile of an anonymous politico-ploughboy setting him off. The Poet sucked his teeth over this unexpected pleasure. The golden eastern lay of his bullet head was muted by no covering. Beneath the Wally Whitmaneen of his Donegal tweeds a body was to be presumed. He gave the impression of having lost a harrow and found a figure of speech. Belacqua was numbed.
“Drink” decreed the Poet in a voice of thunder.
Belacqua slunk at his heels into the Grosvenor, the gimlet eyes of the saprophile probed his loins.
“Now” exulted the Poet, as though he had just brought an army across the Beresina, “give it a name and knock it back.”
“Pardon me” stuttered Belacqua “just a moment, will you be so kind.” He waddled out of the bar and into the street and up it at all speed and into the lowly public through the groceries door like a bit of dirt into a Hoover. This was a rude thing to do. When intimidated he was rude beyond measure, not timidly insolent like Stendhal's Comte de Thaler, but finally rude on the sly. Timidly insolent when, as by Chas, exasperated; finally rude on the sly when intimidated, outrageously rude behind the back of his oppressor. This was one of his little peculiarities.
More Pricks Than Kicks Page 4