Dream of Fair to Middling Women (26 page)

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 from 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.

The hair of the homespun Poet did not lend itself kindly to striking effects of dressing, so closely was it cropped. Here again, in his plumping for the austerity of a rat's-back, he proclaimed himself in reaction against the nineties. But the little there was to do he had done, with a lotion he had given alertness to the stubble. And he had changed his tie. Now, though alone and unobserved, he paced up and down. He was making up his piece, almost an occasional one, whose main features he had established one recent gusty afternoon on the summit of the Hill of Allen. He would deliver it when his hostess came with her petition, he would not hum and haw like an amateur pianist nor yet as good as spit in her eye like a professional one. No, he would stand up at once and say—not declaim, state with gravity—with that penetrating Middle West melancholy like an ogleful of tears:

CALVARY BY NIGHT

the water

the waste of water

in the womb of water

an pansy leaps

rocket of bloom flare flower of night wilt for me

on the breasts of the water it has closed it has made

an act of floral presence on the water

the tranquil act of its cycle on the waste

from the spouting forth

to the re-enwombing

an untroubled bow of petal and fragrance

kingfisher abated

drowned for me

Lamb of my insustenance

till the clamour of a blue flower

beat on the walls of the womb of

the waste of

the water

Determined to put across this strong composition and make something of a stir, he was anxious that there should be no fault or flaw in the mode of presentation that he had adopted as being the best suited to his Hill of Allen manner. He must have it pat, so as to be able to not say it pat, so as to give the impression that in the travail of its exteriorisation he was torn asunder. Taking his cue from the humblest juggler who charms us by failing once, twice, and then the third time, in a positive lather of willing, bringing it off, he deemed that this little turn, if it were to go down at all, required stress to be laid not so much on the content of the performance as on the ordeal of spiritual evisceration endured by the performer. So he paced to and fro, making a habit of the words and effects of
Calvary by Night.

*    *    *

The Frica combed her hair, back and back she raked her tresses till to close her eyes became a problem. The effect was throttled gazelle, more appropriate to evening wear than foal at foot. The Smeraldina-Rima, in the early stages of her campaign, when her face would still stand it, had favoured the same taut Sabine coiffure. Until Mammy, by dint of protesting that it made her little face look like a sucked lozenge, had persuaded her to fluff things a bit and crimp them. Alas! nimbed she was altogether too big dolly that opens and shuts her eyes. Nor indeed was lozenge, sucked or bucked, by any means the most ignoble office that the face of woman might discharge. For here at hand, saving us our fare to Derbyshire, we have the Frica, looking something horrid.

Throttled gazelle gives no idea. Her features, as though the hand of an unattractive ravisher were knotted in her chevelure, were all set at half-cock and locked in a rictus. She had frowned to pencil her eyebrows, so now she had four. The dazzled iris was domed in a white agony of entreaty. The upper-lip snarled away to the untented nostrils. Would she bite her tongue off?—that was the interesting question. The tilted chin betrayed a patent clot of thyroid gristle. It was impossible to put aside the dreadful suspicion that her flattened mammæ, in sympathy with this tormented eructation of countenance, had been exalted into two cutwaters and were rowelling her brassière. But the face was beyond suspicion, a flagrant seat of injury. She had only to extend the fingers of both hands so that the palm and fingers of the one touched the palm and fingers of the other and hold them thus joined before the breast with a slight upward inclination to look like a briefless martyress in rut.

Nevertheless the arty Countess of Parabimbi, backing
through the press, would dangle into the mauve presence of the crone-mother, and “My dear” she would be positively obliged to ejaculate “naver have I seen your Caleken
quite
so striking. Quite Sistine!”

What would Madame be pleased to mean? The Cumaean Sibyl on a bearing-rein, sniffing the breeze for the Grimm brothers? Oh, she did not care to be so infernally finical and nice, that would be like working out how many pebbles in Tom Thumb's pocket, it was just a vague impression, it was just that she looked, with that strange limy hobnailed texture of complexion, so
frescosa,
from the waist up, my dear, with that distempered cobalt modesty-piece, a positive gem of ravished Quattrocento, a positive jewel, my dear, of sweaty Big Tom. Upon which the vidual virgin, well aware after all these years that all things in heaven, the earth and the waters were as they were taken, would return thanks to the Countess of Parabimbi for her erudite and gracious appreciations.

This may be premature. We have set it down too soon, perhaps. Still, let it stand.

It would be nice to go on sneering at the Frica, the long afternoon would slip over like a dream of water. What more agreeable way of getting through the hours of siesta than with itching point and graver to overcharge her with the stipplings and hatching of a fabricated indignation? Not sæva, fabricated. Alas, not at all sæva. If only it were possible to be genuinely annoyed with the girl. But it is not. Not for any length of time. No doubt she has her faults. Who has not? No doubt also she is someone's darling. Neither shall we, however that may be, condemn the damn girl further. She is dull, she is stale, she is not worthy of our steel. And anyhow there is the bell at last, pealing down her Fallopian pipettes, galvanising her away from the
mirror as though her navel had been pressed in annunciation.

The Student, whose name we shall never know, was the first to arrive. A foul little brute he was, with a brow.

“Gracious goodness!” he exclaimed, for the benefit of the two Fricas, on the threshold of the mauve drawingroom “don't tell me I am the first!”

“Only” said Caleken, who could smell a poet against the wind, “by a short gaffe. Don't” she said coldly “distress yourself. You are not the only one.”

Hard on the heels of the Poet came a gaggle of nondescripts, then a young pastoralist, then a Gael, an Irish one, then the Shawly with her Chas. Him the Student, mindful of his vow, buttonholed.

“In what sense” he demanded, without exordium, “did you use
sense
when you said…”

“He said that?” exclaimed the pastoralist.

“Chas” said the Frica, as though she were announcing a score.

“Adsum” said Chas.

A plum of phlegm burst in the vestibule.

“What I want to know” complained the Student “what we all want to know, is in what sense he was using
sense
when he said…”

The Gael was endeavouring to transmit Camden Street's thought for the day to the Freudlose Witwe for the benefit of the nondescripts.

“Owen…”he began, when an anonymous ignoramus anxious to come into the picture as early on in the proceedings as possible said rashly:

“What Owen?”

“Good-evening” gushed the Polar Bear “good-evening good-evening good-evening. Wat a night, Madame” he addressed himself vehemently, out of sheer politeness, directly to his hostess, “God,
wat
a night.”

Now she had great gradh for him.

“And you so far to come!” She was sorry she could not croon it frankly, nor lay her claw tenderly on his shabby sleeve. He was a shabby man, and often moody. “So good of you to come” as fondly as she durst “so good of you.”

The Man of Law was next, accompanied by the Countess of Parabimbi and three tarts dressed for the back-stairs.

“I met him” whispered Chas “staggering down Pearse Street, Brunswick Street you know, that was.”

“En route?” said the Frica.

“Hein?”

“On his way here?”

“Well” said Chas “my dear Miss Frica, I fear that he did not make clear to me if he is coming or not.”