More Pricks Than Kicks (17 page)

Belacqua reviled his captor and accuser with the utmost ferocity. Otto Olaf, then Capper, broke their ranks, the former to make a peace at all hazard, the latter, with bursting heart, a clean breast. The attendant was very soon browbeaten into admission that his injury had resulted, not from the ordinary exercise of his functions, not yet from any act of solicited assistance, but purely and simply from his own excessive zeal, rooted beyond a shadow of a doubt in greed.

A whip-round was made, and a small sum, on no account to be regarded as anything in the nature of an indemnity, subscribed charitably for his relief. This closed the incident.

“My heart bleeds for him” said Walter.

“Not at all” said the Alba, “is he not insured?”

She had a sudden idea.

“See me home” she said to Walter.

Walter explained how he had been let in for a health, upon which, if the offer were still open, he would be more than happy to see her home. They would go one of the long ways round that he adored.

“I make no promises” said the Alba.

The lunch was a great disappointment to all and sundry—a few firkins of molasses and husks off the ice. Belacqua closed his eyes and saw, clearer than ever before, a beer-engine. The sweets were doled out and then Thelma refused to cut the cake. She was a very strange girl. Pressed hard by Una and Bridie she appealed to her husband. Her husband! His advice to her, quite frankly, when after great difficulty he discovered what she was talking about, was that it might be rather more gracious to cut the brute since all seemed so set on her doing so. Warming to his subject he urged her to hold out just a little longer, soon it would be all over. What had begun as a hurried and rather furtive aside now developed into a regular tête-à-tête, and when at length Thelma turned to do the gracious thing she found the cake in bits. It had been dressed with orange blossoms. What few of these had escaped the onivomaniacs she gathered up and hid in her bosom. These she would lock up in the furthest recesses of a casket and cherish as long as she drew breath, these and her own two orchids and Belacqua's veronica, which spire of passionate devotion she had resolved to secure against all comers, vogue la galère! Time might pulverise these mementoes but at least their elements would belong to her for ever. She was a most strange girl.

Walter wiped his boots on the Aubusson of Otto Olaf's Empire ottoman, beat on his glass of Golden Guinea with his fizz-whisk for silence to fall and paid out his discourse, in a pawl-and-ratchet monotone than could never be unsaid, as follows:

“It is on record that a lady member of the Lower House, and feme covert what is more, rose to her feet, those feet—for she was of Dublin stock—that Swift, rebuking the women of this country for their disregard of Shank's mare, described as being fit for nothing better than to be laid aside, and declared: ‘I would rather commit adultery than suffer one drop of intoxicating liquor to pass my lips.’ To which a gross baker, returned in the Labour interest, retorted: ‘Wouldn't we all rather do that, Maam?’”

This opening passage was rather too densely packed to gain the general suffrage. On Otto Olaf it took effect some five minutes later, causing him to laugh in a helpless and hysterical manner. The sight of Walter, ranging to and fro on his fantastic upholstery as though he were caged or contesting an election, had capsized his whole nervous system and his heart was filling up rapidly with evil and madness.

“‘
Il faut marcher avec son temps
’ said a Deputy of the extreme Right. ‘
Cela dépend
’ answered Briand in his sepulchral sneer ‘
dans quoi il marche
.’ So do not heckle me, Herrschaften, because that would about finish me.”

He dropped his head, like a pelican after a long journey, pricked up the ears of his fearful moustache and shuffled and shifted his feet like one surprised in a dishonourable course of action. “He is out of his head” said the chief of the ill-intentioned ladies. Otto Olaf sidled up to the dumb-waiter. Una sat down with great ostentation on a pouf. “Let me know when he starts” she said. Thelma's eyes were darting this way and that in search of orange-blossom, Belacqua was watching Thelma and the Alba was watching him. James and Hermione, emboldened by the molasses, were trying themselves on before a Regence trumeau. Mrs bboggs was manoeuvering for a vantage-ground that would bring both husband and lover into her field of vision. The usual precautionary plain-clothes man, standing head and shoulders out of the ruck, was reading his paper. Two splendid mixers found themselves adjacent. “Drunk” said the first, “well lit” agreed the second, and they exchanged a long look of intelligence.

In fairness to Walter it must be said that he was far from being penetrate with this hangdog façade, behind which all was mercy-seat al fresco and Shekinah and himself, in the smartest mail, having his wounds dressed by the Alba-Morgen and looking through the orchards at the sun setting awkwardly in the blue shallows. Coming to with a start, shedding his cloak of dejection, he spoke the first words that he came across in his head:

Mrs bboggs, having already trembled to hear the belated chuckling of Otto Olaf and to observe his stealthy movements as he called in all the castle puddings on the dumb-waiter, was hardly surprised when he now opened rapid fire on his enemy with these. But Walter was able to block such trivial missiles, even caught one and ate it, while the old man's strength, and with it his rage, was soon spent. His arteries began to fray, with the fatal result as aforesaid, from this moment.

“I raise this glass” said Walter, extending it low down and a little to the left before him like a buckler, “this glorious bumper, on behalf of those present and the many prevented by age, sickness, infirmity or previous engagement from being with us, to you, dearest Thelma, whom we all love, and to you, Mr Shuah, whom Thelma loving and being loved of her we all love too I feel sure, now on the threshold of your bliss, and to such and so many consummations, earthy and other, as you have in mind.”

He plied the whisk, dealt himself a slow uppercut with the glass, and drank.

“I close these eyes” he proceeded, fixing them on Mrs bboggs and returning the glass to its base, “and I see them in that memorable island, Avalon, Atlantis, Hesperides, Ui Breasail, I don't insist, lapped in the Siamese haecceity of puffect love, revelling in the most delightful natural surroundings. Oh may that star, that radiant radical of their desire, not of mine, my friends, nor yet of yours, for no two stars, as Saint Paul tells us, are on a par in the matter of glory, delight them without ceasing with legitimate inflexions!” He unleashed what was left of the glorious bumper. “To Hymen's gracious mussy and protection we commit them, now, henceforth and for evermore. Slainte.”

This was the end of Walter's speech, and a very good end for such a bad speech every one felt it to be, but as he remained upright on the ottoman in a rapt and suspended pose, drinking in the plaudits, Belacqua assumed that there was some yet to come and so was startled to hear the voice of Una, whom the least semblance of procrastination invariably threw into the most dreadful passion, calling on him petulantly to do the needful: “Now Mr Shuah, now then Mr Shuah, we're waiting on yer Mr Shuah.” This sordid hitch caused his acknowledgment to be rather less cordial than he had intended. He made it from where he stood, in the white voice of which he was a master:

“I have to thank: Miss bboggs, who henceforward may be so addressed without the least ambiguity, for her as always timely reminder; Mr. Draffin, for his kind torrents of meiosis; Mr and Mrs small double bee, for their Bounty; the Maids, with special reference to Belle-Belle their leader, for their finely calculated offices this day, something more than merely buttress and less than
vis a tergo
; the Skyrm and Näutzsche, who I am glad to see have not yet done rising to the occasion; my faithful friend and best of men, Tiny Hairy Capper Quin, tipping the scale, day in day out, for me and for many, whose spiritual body is by now I feel confident a
fait accompli
; the entire Church staff; the Abbé Gabriel; as many, in fine, as have found the time to witness and acclaim, in how small a way soever, this instant of the whirligig. Eleleu. Jou Jou.”

A student of Plutarch found himself rubbing shoulders with a physicist of the modern school.

“There you have him” said the first “in a nutshell.”

“This bivalve world” said the other.

Their eyes met and filled with tears.

Whatever small chance these words of Belacqua might have had of giving satisfaction was more than cancelled by his having been observed, in a dumbshow portmanteau of Selah and sigh of relief, to check off on his fingers each acknowledgment as it was made. Thelma marched to the door in an atmosphere of silence and shock, opened it and closed it behind her, which expression of independence rather cut the ground away from under Una, who had planned to sit down with a bang on the pouf, just at the moment when her services were obviously most needed, and thus put an open slight on the bride.

Hairy on the other hand, faithful to the last to his commission, reported smartly for duty.

“Slip out quick” said Belacqua “and run her behind into the lane off Denmark Street.”

The guests were now adjourning stiffly to the drawingroom, Walter and Otto Olaf polarised in bitter tig about the person of the Alba, Otto Olaf being it, while Hermione and James, he propelling her in a tomb-deep armchair on casters, closed the recession. This grotesque equipage was brought to a standstill in the passage in consequence of the passenger's putting her feet to the ground, whether from coquetry or fatigue we leave it to the reader to determine.

“My crutches Jim” she said.

Jim went back for the crutches, Walter took sanctuary with Hermione, the Alba sent Otto Olaf flying, Jim came back with the sweeps, Hermione got them under her somehow, Walter rejoined the Alba. They remained all four quietly where they were, in the passage, discussing ways and means, severally first, then, when their interests were overheard to coincide, together. Four heads are better than two, eight than four, and so on.

After a fairly decent interval Belacqua excused himself just for a moment (as he did, it may be remembered, to the Poet in the Grosvenor), left the room, sprang up the stairs, caught up his bride like a Cossack and conveyed her by clandestine ways down to the garden that lay behind the house. He opened the wicket into the lane with the key that his love had fondly hoped would facilitate his suit in its early stages, and in another moment they had been clear of the abhorred premises when the sound of a broken-winded hue in the garden caused him to turn back. This proceeded from that irrepressible quartet, Hermione, the Alba, Walter and James, perspiring, suppliant, making their getaway.

Belacqua stood like a stock at gaze, with an overwhelming sense that all this would happen to him again, in a dream or subsequent existence. Then he stepped to the one side, Thelma to the other, of the wicket, Caudine exit, saying to himself, as he watched the fugitives storm the postern like women boarding a tram: “It is right that they who are loved should live.” It was from this moment that he used to date in after years his crucial loss of interest in himself, as in a grape beyond his grasp.

But the alarm had been given, faces sprang up in the windows, Una began to scream havoc fit to burst, the mixers and the plain-clothes man came plunging up the garden in the van of pursuit. Belacqua threw them a tub in the form of Hairy, locked the wicket on the outside and committed himself and his wife to the Morgan, fast but noisy.

As for the other four, they did not feel safe until they reached the Cappella Lane, superb cenotheca, in Charlemont House. Nobody would ever think of looking for them there.

Lucy was
atra cura
in the dicky the best part of the way down to Galway.

They all stopped for a drink. Thelma, as ever on his wrong side, began to insist that she was Mrs Shuah, making his little heart go pit-a-pat. He turned a face that she had never seen upon her.

“Do you ever hear tell of a babylan?” he said.

Now Thelma was a brave girl.

“A what did you say?” she said.

Belacqua went to the trouble of spelling the strange word.

“Never” she said. “What is it? Something to eat?”

“Oh” he said “you're thinking of a baba.”

“Well then” she said.

His eyes were parched, he closed them and saw, clearer than ever before, the mule, up to its knees in mire, and astride its back a beaver, flogging it with a wooden sword.

But she was not merely brave, she was discreet as well.

“Your veronica” she said “that I wanted so much, where is it gone?”

He clapped his hand to the place. Alas! the tassel had drooped, wormed its stem out of the slit, fallen to the ground and been trodden underfoot.

“Gone west” he said.