Dream of Fair to Middling Women

by Samuel Beckett

  Painfully then under the College ramparts, past the smart taxis, he set off, winding up the cerebro-musical-box. The Fire Station worked like the trusty fetish it was, and all was going as well as could be expected considering what lay before him later in the evening when a terrible thing happened. He ran plump into Chas. It was Chas who could not or would not leave well alone, Belacqua being absorbed in his poor feet and the line of the tune in his mind. It was all Chas's fault.

  “Halte-là” exclaimed the pirate “whither so gay?”

  Under the overhead railway Belacqua was obliged to halt and face this machine. It carried butter and loaf bought at the dairy. There is only one dairy of any real consequence in Pearse St proper—though a multitude of fine little general groceries in the lanes that lie between it and the river—and it is close to the tomb-stone manufactory. It is of great consequence. Chas bought his fuel there. Every evening he called round for re-fills. Belac-qua, however, was giving nothing away.

  “Ramble” he said vaguely “in the twilight.”

  “Just a song” said his dear friend “at twilight. Hein?”

  Belacqua fidgeted in the gloom cast by the viaduct. Had he been blocked on his way and violated in the quiet of his mind to listen to this clockwork fiend? Apparently.

  “How's the world” he said, however, in spite of everything, “and what's the news of the great world?”

  “Fair” said Chas, cautiously, “fair to meedling. The poem moves, eppure.”

  “Ah.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well” said Belacqua, drawing away, “au plaisir.

  ” “But this very evening” cried Chas “chez the Frica? Hein?”

  “Alas” said Bel, well adrift.

  And she. In her scarletest robe. And her broad bored pale face. The belle of the ball. Aïe!

  But never one without two, and sure enough behold now from out the Grosvenor sprang the homespun poet wiping his mouth and a little macaco 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 mitigated by no covering. Beneath the Wally Whitmaneen of his Donegal tweeds his body was to be presumed. He gave the impression of having lost a harrow and found a figure of speech. He struck terror into the heart of our hero.

  He issued a word of command.

  “Drink.”

  Belacqua slunk at his heels into the Grosvenor, the bright gimlet eyes of the macaco probed his loins.

  “Now” proclaimed the Poet, as though he had just brought an army across the Beresina, “give it a name.”

  “Excuse me” stammered Belacqua “just an instant, will you have the kindness?”

  He waddled out of the bar and out into the street and up the street at all speed and into the lowly public through the door of its grocery department. That 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; definitely rude on the sly when intimidated, outrageously rude behind the back of his oppressor. That was Belacqua. Do we begin to know him?

  He bought a paper from a charming little sloven, no, but a positively exquisite little Stoebli, he would not menace him, a freelance clearly, he slipped in on his dirty bare feet with only three or four under his arm for sale. Belacqua gave him a threepenny bit and a cigarette picture. He sat on a stool to himself in the central leaf of the main triptych, his feet on a round so high that his knees topped the curb of the counter—a most comfortable seat—and drank stout scarcely at half-mast (but he durst not stir) and made a show of reading the paper.

  'A woman’ he read with appreciation ‘is either: a short-below-the-waist, a big-hip, a sway-back, a big-abdomen or an average. If the bust be too cogently controlled, then shall fat roll from scapula to scapula. If it be made passable and slight, then shall the diaphragm bulge and be unsightly. Why not invest therefore chez a reputable corset-builder in the brassière-cum-corset déecolleté, made from the finest Brochés, Coutils and Elastics, quintuple stitched in wearing parts, fitted with unbreakable spiral steels. It bestows glorious diaphragm and hip support, it enhances the sleeveless backless evening gown…'

  Very good! Would the scarletest robe be backless? Was she a short-below-the-waist or a sway-back. She had no waist. If she swayed at all it was forward. She was not to be classified. Not to be corseted. Not a woman. Grock ad libitum inquit.

  He began now to be harrassed by dread less the robe should turn out, by God, to be backless. Not but that he thought the back thus bared would not be good. The omoplates would be well marked, they would have a fine free ball-and-socket motion. In repose they would be the blades of an anchor, the fine furrow of the spine its stem. His mind pored over this back that he hoped devoutly not to see. He saw it in his mind as an anchor, a flower-de-luce, a spatulate leaf with segments, like the wings of a butterfly at work on a flower, angled back slightly from the common hinge; then, fetching from further afield, as an obelisk, a cross-potent, pain and death, still death, a bird crucified on a wall. This flesh and bones swathed in scarlet, this heart of washed flesh draped in scarlet.

  Unable any longer to bear his uncertainty as to the rig of the robe he passed through the counter and got her house on the telephone.

  “Dressing” said the Venerilla “and raging.”

  No, she couldn't be got down. She'd been up in her room cursing and swearing for the last hour.

  “I'm afraid of me gizzard” said the voice “to go near her.”

  “Is it closed at the back” demanded Belacqua “or is it open?”

  “Is what closed?”

  “The dress” cried Belacqua “what do you think? The dress she is wearing. Is it closed?”

  The Venerilla said to hold on while she called it to the eye of the mind.

  “Is it the red one?” she said, after a pause.

  “The scarlet bloody dress of course” he cried out of his torment “do you not know?”

  “Hold on now… It buttons…”

  “Buttons? How—buttons?”

  “It buttons up behind, sir, with the help of God.”

  “Again” said Belacqua.

  “Amn't I after telling” moaned the Venerilla down the instrument “that it buttons up on her!”

  “Praise be to God” said Belacqua “and his Blissful Mother.”

  Now they get themselves ready, the men, women and children that the Frica's mother through the Frica had bidden. From divers points of the cities and suburbs, the nursery, the public-house, the solicitude of the family circle, the bachelor from his cosy and the student from his dirty quarters, they converged now upon her. Who—her? The Frica. Some were on their way, others on the threshold, the threshold of departure, yet others putting the finishing touches to their toilet, or, having done so, chafing to be on the road. But all, one and sundry, whatever their status and wherever their dwelling, however great their impatience or reluctance to be off, would be at more pains to respect the ten or fifteen minutes that etiquette required should intercalate the hush of their proud dead calm between the opening of the door and the first application for admission than would at first thought seem compatible, except the enormous importance in the cerebellum of fashionable Dublin of so grotesque a function as that now to be held be fully appreciated, with their complete indifference, on the occasion of an orchestral concert, as to whether they reached their seats before the conductor his pulpit, or inversely. To set out to make those pains consistent with this nonchalance would be to do the fashional psyche at all times and in all places, and a fortiori the Dublin specimen, the injury of supposing it to partake of the nature of a fixed gear. Our constant concern for the necks, and more particularly when they threaten to turn out to be wry, of our figures, will not tolerate anything more persuasive on this head than a bald blunt pronunciamento, to wit: that the fashionable psyche disposes of a more restless clutch and a more copious gamut of rati
os than any engine ever contrived by the bottom speed ingenuity of man. That is why it is more charming than any engine.

  There is yet time, before the masks get together and join issue, for a quick razzia of eavesdropping, a few pothooks and hangers of peeping and creeping and instantaneity.

  Calm now and sullen the Alba, dressed insidiously up to the nines, bides her time in the sunken kitchen, paying no heed to her fool and foil the Venerilla. She is in pain, her brandy is at hand, mulling in the big glass on the range. We have seen her absented and distracted in mind, we have been privileged to see her, in a manner of speaking, sheathed. But now we are expected to suppose, behind this façade abandoned in elegance, sagging in its elegance and clouded in its native sorrow that her thought for the moment is at no pains to dissemble, a more anxious rite than luxury of meditation. The truth of the matter is that her mind is at prayer-stool before a perhaps futile purpose, she is loading the spring of her mind for a perhaps unimportant undertaking. Letting her outside rip for the moment she is screwing herself up and up, she is winding up the weights of her mind, to being the belle of the ball. Any less bountiful girl would have scorned such a performance and considered this class of absorption at the service of so simple an occasion unwarranted and, what was worse, a sad give away. Here am I, a less bountiful would have said, the belle, and yonder is the ball. It is only a question of bringing these two items together and the thing is done. Are we then expected to insinuate, with such a simplist, that the Alba questioned the virtue of her appearance? Not for a moment. She had merely to unleash her eyes, she had merely to unseel them, and well she knew it, and she could have mercy on whom she would. That was all right. Everything was in order as far as that went. But what she did question, and this ought to do to explain her demeanour to the puzzled, was the fitness of a distinction that was hers for the wanting. She only had to open her eyes and take it. That the very simplicity of the gest turned her in the first place against it, relegating it among the many things that were not her genre, cannot be denied. But there we have only a minute aspect of her position. It is with the disparagement attaching to the quality of the exploit in the thought of Belacqua, and in hers tending to, that she now wrestles. It is with its no doubt unworthiness that she has now to do. Sullen and still, aware of the brandy at hand but not thirsting for it, she cranks herself up to a reality of preference, slowly and surely she gilds her option, she exalts it into realms of choice. She will do this thing, she will, she will be the belle, gladly, gravely and carefully, humiliter, simpliciter, fideliter, and not merely because she might just as well. Is she, who knows, to be equilibrated in Buridan's marasmus? Shall she founder in a strait of two wills? By hanging in suspense be the more killed? She who knows? Soon she will chafe to be off. And now she dare, until it be time, the clock strike, delegate a portion of her attention for the purpose of re-organising her features, hands, shoulders, back, hang of robe, general bearing, outside in a word. The inside is fixed up. At once she is thirsty for the Hennessy. She sings to herself, for her own pleasure, stressing all the words that should be stressed, like Dan the first to warble like a turdus:

  No me jodas en el suelo

  como se fuera una perra,

  que con esos cojonazos

  me echas en el cono tierra…

  The Polar Bear was on his way, speeding along the dark country roads in a big honest slob of a clanging bus, engaging with the effervescent distinction of a Renaissance cardinal in rather indolent tongue-play an acquaintance of long standing, a Jesuit with no or but little nonsense about him.

  “The Lebensbahn” he was saying “of the Galilean is the tragedy of an individualism that will not capitulate. The humilities and renunciations are on a par with the miracles, arrogance and egoism. He is the first great self-contained man. The crytic abasement before the woman taken red-handed is as great a piece of megalomaniacal impertinence as his interference in the affairs of his friend Lazarus. He opens the series of fashionable suicides. He is responsible for the wretched Nemo and his co-ratés, bleeding in paroxysms of dépit on an unimpressed public.”

  The Polar Bear coughed up a plump cud of mucus, spun it round the avid bowl of his palate and stowed it away for future dégustation.

  The Jesuit with no or but little nonsense about him was grateful for the opportunity of making it clear that this kind of thing tired him.

  “If you knew” he said “how you bore me with your twice two is four.”

  The P.B. failed to appreciate the application…

  “You bore me” said the S.J. “the way an infant prodigy does…” He paused. “In his hairless voice” he continued “preferring the chemist Borodine to Mozart.”

  “Mozart” said the P.B. “was, I understand, an infant prodigy.”

  That was a nasty one. Let him make what he chose of that one.

  “Our Lord…”

  The Polar Bear, nettled, requested him rudely to speak for himself.

  “Our Lord was not.”

  “By some accounts” said the Polar Bear “he had a prodigious birth.”

  “When you grow up to be a big boy” said the Jesuit “and are old enough to understand the humility that is beyond masochism, come and talk to me again. Not cis-, but ultra-masochistic. Beyond pain and service.”

  “But precisely” exclaimed the P.B. “he did not serve, the late lamented. What else am I saying? A valet does not have big ideas. He let down the central agency.”

  “The humility” murmured the dissociable sociétaire “of a love too great for skivvying and too real for the tonic of urtication.”

  The infant prodigy sneered, at this comfortable variety.

  “You make things pleasant for yourselves” he sneered “I must say.”

  “The best reason” said the Jesuit “that can be given for believing is that it is more amusing. Disbelief” said this soldier of Xist, preparing to arise “is a bore. We do not count our change. We simply cannot bear to be bored.”

  “Say that from the pulpit” said the P.B. “and you'll be drummed into the wilderness.”

  The Jesuit laughed profusely. Was it possible to conceive of a more artless impostor of a mathematician than this fellow!

  “What I say” he laughed “is strictly orthodox. I could justify it on my head before any Council, though I cannot imagine the Council naive enough to take exception to it. And would you” he begged, buttoning across his coat, “would you, my dear fellow, have the goodness to bear in mind that I am not a P.P.”

  “I won't forget” said the P.B. “that you don't scavenge. Your love is too great for skivvying.”

  “Egg-sactly” said the S.J. “But they are excellent men. A shade on the assiduous side. A shade too anxious to balance accounts. Otherwise…” He stood up. “Observe” he said “I desire to get down, I pull this cord and the bus stops and lets me down.”

  “Well?”

  “In just such a Gehenna of links” said this remarkable man, with one foot on the pavement, “I forged my vocation.”

  With these words he was gone and the burden of his fare had fallen on the Polar Bear.

  * * *

  Chas had promised to pick up the Shetland Shawly, and now, cinched beyond reproach in his smoking, he paused on his way to catch the tram in order to explain the world to a group of students.

  “The difference, if I may say so…”

  “Oh” cried the students, una voce, “oh please!”

  “The difference, then I say, between Bergson and Einstein, the essential difference, is the difference between a philosopher and a sociologist…”

  “Oh!” cried the students.

  “Yes” said Chas, casting up what was the longest phrase that could be placed before his tram, that had hove into view, would draw abreast.

  “And if it is the smart thing nowadays to speak of Bergson as a bit of a cod” he edged away “it is that the trend of our modern vulgarity is from the object” he made a dive for the tram “and the idea to sense” he cried fr
om the step “and REASON.”

  “Sense” echoed the students “and reason!”

  The difficulty was to know what exactly he meant by sense.

  “He must mean senses” said a first “smell, you know, and so on.”

  “Nay” said a second “he must mean common sense.”

  “I think” said a third “that he meant instinct, intuition, don't you know, and that kind of thing.”

  A fourth was curious to know what instinct there was in Einstein, a fifth what absolute in Bergson, a sixth what either had to do with the world.

  “We must ask him” said a seventh “that is all. We must not confuse ourselves with inexpert speculation. Then we shall see who is right.”

  “We must ask him” cried the students “then we shall see…”

  On that understanding, that the first to see him again would be sure and ask him, they went on their not so very different ways.