Dream of Fair to Middling Women (11 page)

J'aime et je veux pââââlir. Livid rapture of the Zurbaran Saint-Onan. Schwindsucht and pollution in the umbra in the tunnel in the Thebaid. Rapturous strange death! Plus précieuse que la vie, the dirty dog. But right enough all the same what more miserable than the miserable man that commiserates not himself, cæsura, with new grief grieves not for his grief, is not worn by a double sorrow, drowns not in ken of shore? Who said all that? Turned he hath the audacious soul, turned he hath and turned again, on back, sides and belly, like little Miss Florence on the tick while Virgil and Sordello—yet all was very sore. As an herpetic taratantaratarantula (have you spotted the style?) hath he consumèd away. He dared to go off the deep end
with his shadowy love and he daily watered by daily littles the ground under his face and beerbibbing did not lay siege to his spirit and he was continent though not in the least sustenant and many of his months have since run out with him the pestilent person to take him from behind his crooked back and set him before his ulcerous gob in the boiling over of his neckings and in chambering and wantonness and in bitter and blind bawling against the honey what honey bloody well you know the honey and in canvassing and getting and weltering in filth and scratching off the scabs of lust. All on a mild scale, of course, don't be misled, Paterson's Camp Coffee is the Best with Sanka. Perhaps the pen ran away, don't for a moment imagine Belacqua is down the drain, of course he has got a bit wasted that was bound to happen and his bitch of a heart knocks hell out of his bosom three or four nights in the week and to make a long story short Lucy and Jude are kept going pretty well from dawn to dark with his shingles and graphospasmus and weeping eczema and general condition, but for all that we will all agree that it's a long call from feeling a bit slack and run down to lying senseless in a deathsweat.

Here we are. Out we get. Step around. Thank you dear. You put on the light. Up we go. Out of step. Randygasp of ruthilarity in honour of private joke. Here we are. There they are. Hello hello. Great to be here. Grand to be here. Same old Wohnung. Wunnerful to be here. Prosit. God bless. Lav on the left. Won't be a sec. Mind the bike. Mind the skis. Beschissenes Dasein beschissenes Dasein Augenblick bitte beschissenes Dasein Augenblickchen bitte beschissenes

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All that sublimen of blatherskite just to give some idea of the state the poor fellow was in on arrival. We would not wish our young hero to be misjudged, or hastily judged, by the reader, for the want of a few facts. We strive to give the capital facts of his case. Facts, we cannot repeat it too often, let us have facts, plenty of facts.

Now there is a lull, now the Madonna's Mammy, the eternal grandmother if all worked out according to plan, dared be the very bowels of compassion. She put him lying down on the settee.

“Poor Bel” she said “look Smerry, he is ill.”

Smerry, biding her time in a corner, casting up the pubic content of this lover haggard before the fact, had a great look of the B.V. before the tidings.

“Drink this” said the Mandarin.

“Domine” responded Belacqua, sitting up and dipping the glass of fiery liquor at parents and child “non sum dignus.”

“Don't you think” said Mammy “that Smerry looks rather a pet in that frock?”

Belacqua, the brandy drunk, was well able to do the false and the suave and the bland demon.

“Your third or fourth daughter” he said “looks to me more beautiful if possible than ever before. Would” he sucked in his cheeks and launched a heavy sigh “that the same could be said of me.”

“Poor Bel” said Mammy. “But we'll look after you, won't we, Smerry?”

“A chaser” insinuated the Mandarin “a cognate chaser.” The Smeraldina-Rima had worked it out and felt very cross.

“What's wrong with him anyhow?” she demanded.

Belacqua unleashed the chaser and exchanged a leer of intelligence with Mammy.

“Collywobbles” he said slyly.

The Smeraldina, very touchy as we know already on the subject of her small vocabulary, had no patience with this kind of thing.

“What's that?” she moaned “something to eat?”

The Mandarin took a fleet pace to the rere, clapped a long yellow finger to the wing of his nose, and, poised with flexed knee on one tiptoe like a ballerina, dangling the bottle, announced in a general way:

“Der Mench ist ein Gewohnheitstier!”

“Something you've et, dear” said Mammy facetiously. The Smeraldina-Rima held aloof from the salvo of merriment that greeted this little effort of Mammy's.

“Don't be so horrid” she cried “making jokes that I can't understand. How am I to know what are cobble-wobbles…”

”Colly”
corrected Mammy “wobbles.”

“Egal!” exploded the Smeraldina “how am I to know anything when you never sent me to school?”

“My dear young lady” said the Mandarin gravely “your education has cost us thousands. Nothing short” he said “of thousands of pounds.”

“Cheer up Smerry” exhorted the multipara “if I was young and beautiful and had a nice young man” holding up the apodasis to ogle the hope of her grandmaternity “to take me out, I wouldn't care whether I knew what collywobbles were or not. You'll know soon enough. Wait till you're my age” she exclaimed, as though that were hardly to be expected, “and you'll know.”

The Smeraldina-Rima surveyed the nice young man
who was going to take her out. He was stretched on the settee.

“Out!” she loosed a piercing cackle “so siehst Du aus!”

Indeed what with his slugging-a-bed in the morning and soaks with the Mandarin in the evening and in the afternoon his absorption in a Vasari he had found in his host's library and the latest pictures hanging on his host's wall and the inneffectual darts he was liable to make at the piano at any hour of the day or night and his objection to going out to be frozen to death when there was nothing to prevent him from hatching a great thought over the stove, he was only able, in the week that elapsed between his arrival and Silvester, three times to promenade her, and two of these times Mammy, whose Spreegeist infuriated the Madonna beyond measure, came with. The Madonna was displeased, this was not the treatment she was used to. So the only evening they spent alone together was marred by a copious tiff with tears to follow.

All this pitted of course with the usual fiascos and semi-fiascos, he doing his poor best to oblige her and she hers to be obliged, in an absence of all douceness; Mammy getting more and more fed up as herself as happy beldam waned in her mind, the Mandarin very bottle-nosed and courtly and gestural and somehow Venetian, waiving his patria potestas on all available occasions.

Silvester, when high tea had passed from them, found him seated to himself on the settee in the candlelight of course with a bottle of course again. If they were not there they would be in a minute. He felt very bad. Would he last into the New Year, that was the question. He feared to fall to pieces. He thought he was going light, not so much in the head as in the centre, vaguely the midriff. The
least heedlessness now on my part, he thought, and I fly at once to pieces.

He had read all the opening of Vasari and wondered why, so little did it matter. The even-fisted pettifogger. What mattered? He mattered.

He goggled like a fool at the shrieking paullo-post-Expression of the Last Supper hanging on the wall fornenst him, livid in the restless yellow light, its thirteen flattened flagrant egg-heads gathered round the tempter and his sop and the traitor and his burse. The tempter and the traitor and the Jugendbund of eleven. John the Divine was the green egg at the head of the board. What a charming undershot purity of expression to be sure! He would ask for a toad to eat in a minute.

Ask (we are sorry, we fear he is off again under the limen, it is not our fault) for your toad, John, to eat, swallow a viper or a scorpion or a morpion and let me tell all you boys what it feels like to be in Old Nick's bath. I am in the extreme centre of Old Nick's bath, I have gone light in the centre, I am at the frontiers of the boundless, I am the scourged cream of human adversity, yes, the quintessence and the upshot. A whore, boys, is a deep ditch of diabolic water, there am I, shall I then be hot in a cold cause, is it fair to expect that, would it not be much nicer to know a few good digs of compunction and clip Jesus straight away and stand fast for ever? Oh sometimes as now I almost think: nothing is less like me than me. It must be either that I am not adequately alkaline or that there is a cavity needing filling under my navel spiral where the big weight ought to be. Fire and stone and torment by skewering. Four skewers and a good dig with a blade and there you have a Pro-Cathedral. And the pros and cons.

Oh very well so then in that case since you insist my
fiery petrifactors, first of all then algebraically, take the firstfather in the eburnine sacristy. No appetite for the Passover, boys, but have it your own way. A dream of lines palped the dust the dust of the ground. Yah! My time is at hand. Now come off it out of that on to the gravel. The difficult art of shortening, boys, temper and fresco, in oil and miniature on wood and stones and canvas, tarsia and tinted wood for stories, etching with iron and printing with copper, follow the man with the pitcher, niello, the enamel of the goldsmith and gold and damask having a high time together, go upstairs with the goodman, figures on glass and flowers and figurines on cloth of gold and stories and waterpassions on earthern jars, is it I, the most beautiful invention of the woven arras, the carving the vexing of steels and jewels, is it I. Yah! Now what would be very nice to know is what all this lapidary catlap that we hear about a heavyweight majority putting the shot to the glory of got to do with one little putto, ah the dear little putto, for the colours and the hair-pencils and the most modest predella. I go as it is written of me. A fico and a fouter for your stags of amber and your pines of bronze and your marble love-potions and your frozen fugues, as it is written so help me but woe to that man, and your mard of gold sculpppt and foil of silver painted and the swivelling snivelling miracle of your belly-cum-bum totalities and realities, dee 'and is wid me, and the fatal slip of a hairy hand. Who are your patrons? Greeks? Kings? Lovers? Gladly for Apelle a warrior's lust, the ravishing Campaspe. Yah! Wid me on dee table. You can keep your George Bernard Pygmalion.
And
your prostated elephantiatics. The man of my peace. Did you never hear tell how Big George cubed a nude in a corslet and a mirror and a sleeping cistern? Hath lifted up his heel against me. Wet doom of lime. That thou doest do
quickly. A ewe can grow gold. And it was night. Oh the moon shines bright on Aceldama, his boots are crackling, for want of…

Pardon now just consider the treasurer's bowels clotting the lush blood. Always trust the medical vestryman for the stercoraceous detail.

Quick now with an eight cylinder accelerando there I am the twilight mummyfœtus, the old heart becalmed in snowbroth, paralysed before this diademitonic Caesarian of a livid spectrum, ripped from Dan unto Beersheba, tight-lipped, rapt in the upper torture-chamber. The Rabbi, the lemon-egg, the non-playing captain, wearing the blazer wove, would you believe it, from the throat, where it must have been clasped, throughout, facing, not seeing, down the operating-table's length, on his right hand naturally, his green of course toady. What a desolation of Bullscrit hesitation and the Y of the crossroads to run between this head and that boosom. My darling from the power of the dog, whose darling, bloody well you, was it wine and myrrh that like the last breakfast or the white handkerchief of any polyglot musical pallid brigand of a pessimist he received not? Pink of course for the insidious chairman, the perfidious very much more than papal key, with the little phallic pouch trapped in his plump pink palpers, his lips parted for the garden, or was it vinegar and gall maybe, a boil on his neck that I cannot see, his Gilles de Rais orbs, quite too Rio-Santo,
focussed
on the patibulary melancholy of the lemon of lemons, was it vinegar then or hyssop on the sponge or the reed of hyssop, and of course before gliding on to more pleasant topics allusion must be made to blood-faced Tom with his bow-tie moustache disbelieving in the Sherry Cobbler that is my. A masterly study, boys, there's no getting away from it, of what I once saw described as the
bulliest feed in ‘istory if the boyscouts ‘adn't booked a trough for th'eleventh's eleventh eleven years after, and there not as much as the weeniest gutta of Sehnsucht between the eloquent boards of this book. Did they slit your palate Thérése Philosophe? Only the labia minora? Well I am glad to know that.

“Of all the Bitchlein” he said “speaking as a cad, that schweigen niemals im Wald, or ever unclasped a starchèd snood before my incompetence and of all the respectably abgeknutscht (pump it out, pump it out like a very snot-cork: abbb-gekkk-kkknnn-nutscht) heifers that ever wasted collop-tight bloomers on my bloodless nonchalance, you are the champion, you are the Queen of Spain, and I do not care for cocoanuts, I never did care for cocoanuts.”

Oh Florence Florence concerning the branny desquamation of my papular pustular variola inform the medical man. Dust me Florence with violet or starch powder. Rub me with spirits of wine or brandy. See how the litmus is depressed by my incontinence. Place me in an airbed. Raise me slightly. Lower the drawsheet. Hoist the restraining-sheet. See I am seized with a vomiting. My tongue is foul and my bowels are confined. I am irritable in manner. I resent being disturbed. I am intolerant of light. I am observed to pick at the bedclothes. It is the end. My breathing stops for half an hour. I pass everything nolens volens under me. My face becomes not merely pale but dusky. I perspire profusely. I sink gradually. I die in a convulsion. Swathe me oh swathe me in oakum or charpie. Knot my cord twice. Place me in my flannel receiver, gently does it. The brightest bottle and the best is the one with the caoutchouc teat. At eighteen months, not before, give me pounded meat and light puddings. I have a rather third or fourth generation snuffle, very trying, and my
buttocks ache in the absence of emerald stools. Give me koumiss and manna and a torrestial clyster of Revalenta Arabica. Wrap me in my isolation sheet. Mammy I am sorry to say has pigmentation of the mammæ, a clavus hystericus, a phantom tumour, a spurious pain, two vats of colostrum, the whites and a white leg. She is a domestic servant of pale aspect. Enquire carefully into her lochia. Pharoah her nipples with Kólnischeswasserbrand. Shin up her udder-rope with glycerine of belladonna. I am found after a pleasant little supper of cheese wine and spirits sleeping soundly in the knee-and-elbow position, my head enlarged, my abdomen distended and my cute little fontanelle wide open. There is only one thing to do: stupe me in turpentine. The bed shakes and I go blue. I attempt to drink boiling water from the spout of the teakettle. Remove the fire-dogs, fleams, knives, razors, round pans, batteries, slipper pans, catheters, rods, écra-seurs, probes, bougies, pumps, bistouries, charcoal, Al-lingham's clamp, don't forget Allingham's clamp, and Higginson's syringe. Bind me oh bind me in huckaback. Telephone for Surgeon Battey, Ballsbridge two and a bit. See how my sweat is yellow, see how it stains my pilch. My pus is laudable yellow sweet and faint. Sponge me down quickly the night sweats of phthisis. Sterilise the harelip needles for my Cockburn nævus, I have five. Wipe him with a soft cloth, put him into his glass, tempt him with a little milk, salt him a little and he'll disgorge, rinse him a little and he'll do again. Pass over the flexile collodion of the British Bulldog's Pharmacopoeia. Rub me in neatsfoot. Pinch my feet firmly but not too firmly all the same, twist my toes in all directions, knead my small muscles, knead my large muscles, grasp my legs, one by one, run the hand up me firmly, strike the muscles
very
firmly, effleurage you know and pétrissage and a tantinet of tapotement, pinch my abdomen all over, in both hands firmly grasp my abdomen, firmly draw the flesh downwards to the colon, be firm in all things, pinch the whole of my back, make a sweep—whoosh!—several times downwards quickly the length of my spina bifida, skate-roll my bottom, bruise my flexors, batter my extensors, leave me in the blanket. Inunction for my exanthem and—handy-dandy!—I expire in my Gorgonzola varnish. His pinky-spongies floated.