Sproule, his duties at an end, received his commission in the Oval bar, where nothing would do him but that Hairy should toast his employer in gin and peppermint.
“Happy dawg” said Sproule. He had come unscathed through the Great War.
The hyperaesthesia of Hairy was so great that the mere fact of standing on licensed ground, without the least reference to its liberties, was of force sufficient to exhilarate him. Now therefore, under the influence of his situation, he dilated with splendid incoherence on the contradiction involved in the idea of a happy Belacqua and on the impertinence of desiring that he should derogate into such an anomaly.
“Fornication” he vociferated “before the Shekinah.”
This observation was accompanied and graced by a spasm of such passionate repugnance that it was no less an act of charity on the part of the ex-jobber, who was familiar with Boy Scouts and their ways and knew that he might never pass that way again, to substitute his empty glass for the bumper of his agitated companion.
In the bright street a bitter-sweet sorrow entered into Sproule, sweet at parting, bitter at the knowledge that his services were no longer required.
“Farewell” he said, flinging out his dreadful hand, “may luck rise with you on the way.”
But Hairy was too full, too overcome by the fumes of his position, to shake, let alone reply. He stepped, as upon an Underground escalator, into the stream of pedestrians and was gone. Sproule raised his sad eyes to the sky and saw the day, its outstanding hours that could not be numbered, in the form of a beautiful Girl Guide galante, reclining among the clouds. She beckoned to him with her second finger, like one preparing a certificate in pianoforte, Junior Grade, at the Leinster School of Music. Closing his mind softly on this delicious vision, feeling it in his mind like a sponge of toilet vinegar on a fever, he advanced into the Oval towards it.
Whom should Hairy meet on the crest of the Metal Bridge but Walter Draffin, fresh from his effeminate ablutions and as spruce and keen as a new-ground hatchet in his miniature tails and stripes. The sun shone bright upon him, his languorous poll, for he carried his topper crown downward in his hand. The two gentlemen were on speaking terms.
“This is where I stand” said the little creature, with a sigh that made Hairy look nervously round for prisons and palaces, “and watch the Liffey swim.”
“Blue-eyed cats” quoted the colossal Capper, for no other reason than that the phrase had been running in his mind and now here was a chance to discharge it on a wit, “are always deaf.”
Walter smiled, he felt greatly pleased, he held up his little face to the kindly sun like a child to be kissed.
“The burrowing tucutucu” he answered “is occasionally blind, but the mole is never sober.”
The mole is never sober. A profound mot. Hairy, having tried all he knew to say as much, hung his head, a gallant loser, consoled by the certitude that Walter would take the will for the deed. Poor Hairy, there was a great deal he understood, but he could not make this known in the absence of a battery of writing materials.
“That unspeakable invite” exclaimed Walter, “of all things to be destitute of enjambment!”
He was confirmed in his initial misgiving by Hairy's having clearly no idea what he was talking about. There was nothing for it but to put it into his book. Walter's book was a long time in coming out because he refused to regard it as anything more than a mere dump for whatever he could not get off his chest in the ordinary way.
“So off you go” he said “to attend your happy client, and I to buy myself a buttonhole.”
This, ensuing so soon upon mole and enjambment, brought Hairy's brain to the boil, and out of his mouth came the one word “rose” like a big bubble.
“Blood-red and newly born” said Walter “to aromatic pain. Eh?”
Hairy, with a sudden feeling that he was wasting his client's time and his own precarious energies on a kind of rubber Stalin, took his departure with a more than boorish abruptness, leaving Walter to enjoy the great central agency and hang out as it were his cowlick to air or dry. A passing humorist dropped a penny into the empty hat, it fell on the rich wadding without a sound, and so the joke was lost.
In Parliament Street a funeral passed and Hairy did not uncover. Many of the chief mourners, consoling themselves in no small measure with the reverence expressed by every section of the community, noticed with rage in their hearts that he did not, though to be sure they made no allusion to it at the time. Let this be a lesson to young men, strangers perhaps to sorrow, to uncover whenever a funeral passes, less in act of respect towards the defunct than in sympathetic acknowledgment of the survivors. One of these fine days Hairy will observe, from where he sits bearing up bravely behind the hearse in a family knot, a labourer let go of his pick with one hand, or gay dandy snatch both his out of his pockets, in a gesture of more value and comfort than a ton of lilies. Take the case of Belacqua, who ever since the commitment of his Lucy wears a hat, contrary to his inclination, on the off chance of his encountering a cortège.
The best man had received instructions to collect in Molesworth Street the Morgan, fast but noisy, lent for the period of the high time journey by a friend of the bboggses. Needless to say some eejit had parked it so far up towards the arty end that luckless Hairy, coming from the west upon the stand after the usual Duke Street complications, hastening along the shady southern pavement because he felt there was not a moment to lose, was almost in despair of ever finding the solitary hind-wheel that he had been advised to look out for. He was much relieved to espy it at last, last but one or two in the row, but embarrassed also to remark a group made up of small boys, loafers and the official stand attendant gathered round and passing judgment on the strange machine's design and performance. He kept his head none the less and examined the car, as he had been strictly enjoined to do, for any hymeneal insignia that might have been annexed, doubtless with the very best intentions, to its body, such as a boot, an inscription or other shameful badge. Satisfied that there were none, he hoisted his vast frame on board the light weight which thereupon reduced the expert comment of the bystanders, if we except the attendant who was most grave and attentive, to jeers and laughter, by rocking like a cockle-shell. Hairy, wondering what on earth to do next, sat blushing and hopeless at the controls. The general provisions for starting a motor engine were familiar to him, and these in every imaginable combination he fruitlessly applied to that, exceptional presumably, fitted to the Morgan. The boys were most anxious to push, the loafers to give a tow, while the attendant could not be deterred from flooding the car-burettor and swinging the engine, which started most perversely and unexpectedly with a backfire that broke the obliging fellow's arm. Hairy was so pressed for time that he hardened his heart to the consistence of an Uebermensch's, roared his engine and found himself abruptly, in a paroxysm of plunges and saccades, cutting the corner of Kildare Street under the prow of a bus, which happily did no more than remove the back number-plate and thus provide, not merely a neat instance of poetic justice, but the winged attendant with the nucleus of compensation.
All these little encounters and contretemps take place in a Dublin flooded with sunshine.
Belacqua had passed an excellent night, as he always did when he condescended to assign precise value to the content of his mind, no matter whether that were joy or sorrow, and did not awake when Hairy stalled the machine beneath his window on the cruel stroke of midday. Much liquor in secret the previous evening may have contributed to this torpor, but scarcely if at all, for many and many a time when footless, and simply because the forces in his mind would not resolve, he had tossed and turned like the Florence of Sordello, and found all postures painful.
He opened his burning eyes on Hairy, rose, bathed, shaved and decked himself out, all in silence and without the least assistance. They plunged the packed bag in the well of the Morgan. Belacqua stood before the pier-glass.
“It's a small thing, Hairy” he said, and his voice, a
fter so long silence, grated on his ear, “separates lovers.”
“Not mountain chain” said Hairy.
“No, nor city ramparts” said Belacqua.
Hairy made a lunge of condolence at his companion, he simply could not help it, and was repulsed.
“Am I all right behind?” asked Belacqua.
“You know what it is” said Hairy, asserting thus and with a clarity quite unusual in him his independence and intolerance of all posterior aspects, “you perish in your own plenty.”
Belacqua pressed apart his lips with his forefinger.
“If what I love” he said “were only in Australia.”
Capper the faithful companion simply faded away, at least for the purposes of conversation.
“Whereas what I am on the look out for” said Belacqua, pursuing it would almost seem his train of thought, “is nowhere as far as I can see.”
“Vobiscum” whispered Capper. “Am I right?”
A cloud obscured the sun, the room grew dark, the light ebbed from the pier-glass and Belacqua, feeling his eyes moist, turned away from the blurred image of himself.
“Remember” he said, “true of me now who have ceased to Charleston: Dum vivit aut bibit aut minxit. Take a note of it now.”
The Quaker's get!
Then driving through the City it occurred to him that an empty buttonhole would be the haporth of tar and no error. So he entered a flower-shop and came out with a purple tassel of veronica, fixed in the wrong lapel. Hairy stared. What startled him was not so much the breach of etiquette as the foolhardiness of getting married in a turned suit.
A pestilential hotel was their next stop. Hairy changed his clothes and looked more mangy king of beasts than ever. Belacqua lunched frugally on stout and scallions, scarcely the meal, one would have thought, for a man about to be married for the second time. However.
At the Church of Saint Tamar, pointed almost to the point of indecency, the maids, attired in glove-tight gossamer and sporting the awful ox-eyes, having just been joined by Mrs bboggs, who had chosen gauze and a bunch of omphalodes in her bosom, and Walter, very shaky and exalted, were massed in the porch when Morgante and Morgutte, to adopt the venomous reference of Una, not arm in arm but in single file, came forward. All but Walter were taken quite aback by the bridegroom's breath. Mrs bboggs buried her face (poor little Thelma!) in the omphalodes, the Cleggs turned scarlet in unison, the Purefoys crowded into a shade, while Una was only restrained by her hatred of anything in the nature of sacrilege from spitting it out. Miss Perdue found the smell rather refreshing. The cad and his faithful companion advanced to the chancel and took up their stand beside the gate, the latter to the right and a little to the rear, holding a hat in each hand.
The south pews were plentifully furnished with members and adherents of the bboggs clan, while those to the north were empty save for two grotesques, seated far apart: Jimmy the Duck Skyrm, an aged cretin, outrageous in pepper and salt, Lavallière and pull-over, gnashing his teeth without ceasing at invisible spaghetti; and Hermione Näutzsche, a powerfully built nymphomaniac panting in black and mauve between shipped crutches. Her missing sexual hemisphere, despite a keen look out all her life long, had somehow never entered her orbit, and now, bursting as she was with chalk at every joint, she had no great hopes of being rounded off in that interesting sense. Little does she dream what a flurry she has set up in the spirits of Skyrm, as he gobbles and mumbles the air at the precise remove of enchantment behind her.
“Ecce” hissed Hairy, according to plan, and Belacqua's heart made a hopeless dash against the wall of its box, the church suddenly cruciform cage, the bulldogs of heaven holding the chancel, the procession about to give tongue in the porch, the transepts culs-de-sac. The organist darted into his loft like an assassin and set in motion the various forces that could be relied on to mature in a merry peal all in good time. Thelma, looking very striking and illegitimate in grey and green pieds de poule, split skirt and piqué insertions of negress pink, swept up the aisle on the right arm of Otto Olaf, in whose head since leaving 55 a snatch had been churning and did not now desert him:
Drink little at a time,
Put water in your wine,
Miss your glass when you can,
And go off the first man.
Wise old Otto Olaf! He died in the end of clot and left his cellar to the cuckoo.
The maids, terminating in the curious deltoid formation of the Alba, Mrs bboggs and Walter, took their speed from the bride and their demeanour from the head-maid, with the result that their advance was at once rapid and sullen, for Una had become aware of an uncontrollable and ill-placed dehiscence in the stuff of her gossamer. The dread lest this should come to a head as she braced herself to receive her foul little sister's gloves and bouquet, over and above an habitual misanthropy aggravated by the occasion, had made her, and hence her team of maids, appear as cross as two sticks. Always excepting the Alba who, bating the old pain in the core of her vitals that seemed to be a permanent part of her existence, could scarcely have been more diverted had she been the bride herself instead of the odd maid out. Also with Walter so close on her heels she was kept busy.
Without going so far as to say that Belacqua felt God or Thelma the sum of the Apostolic series, still there was in some indeterminate way communicated to the solemnisation a kind or sort of mystical radiance that Joseph Smith would have found touching. Belacqua passed the ring like a mouse belling the cat, with a quick prayer all his own that the marriage knuckle of his love might so swell against the token and pledge as to spare her the pain of ever reading, inscribed on its inner periphery: Mens mea Lucia lucescit luce tua. His state of mind was so tense and complex at this stage (not to be wondered at when we consider all that he had gone through: the bereavement, obliging him to wear a hat at all seasons; the sweet and fierce pain of his passion for Miss bboggs; the long retreat in bed that had landed him in a nice marasmus; the stout and scallions; and now the sense of being cauterized with an outward and visible sign) that it might be likened to that of his dear departed Lucy listening pale and agog for the second incidence of
in the first movement of the Unbuttoned Symphony. Say what you will, you can't keep a dead mind down.
Talking of cats, Thelma remained throughout the service feline and inscrutable and was not at all incommoded by the famous viticultural passage which so abashed, or perhaps better angered, Belacqua that his platter face went from its native dingy to scarlet and back again through livid. Should he then avail himself of the first … opportunity to sulphurate his bride and thus make sure? No, that would be doing the dirty on man's innocency. And make sure of what? Olives? The absurdity of the figure and all its harmonics like muscae volitantes provoked him to a copious scoff that would have put the kibosh on the sacrament altogether had it not been for the coolness and skill of the priest who covered as with a hand this coarseness with a collect.
Talking of hands, Thelma's right, as it danced through the find-the-lady sleights recommended in the liturgy, had quite bewitched the chancel. The curate swore he had never seen anything like it outside the Musée Rodin, it reminded the clerk of a Dürer cartoon and the priest of his incumbency, and it indicted Belacqua, tempest of stifled groans at having to produce anti-clockwise eyes and gestures for so long at a stretch, with Maupassant's scorching phrase: phylloxera of the spirit.
At length they had consented together beyond all possibility of cavil, the dearly beloved had for ever after held their peace and then let their cry come with a rush, and Otto Olaf's rendering of:
Be present, awful Father!
To give away this bride
had so moved the Sidneian heart of Skyrm that he transferred himself, for better for worse, into the pew where Hermione sat as on a thwart, and there, under cover of a kinsman's seasonable emotion, rooted and snuffled his way into her affections with a suilline avidity that can only have seemed horrible to any decent person not conversant with the phenomenon of crystallisation. T
he vestry was over, its signatures, duties and busses, and Mrs bboggs was back in 55, whipping the muslin off the Delikatessen, almost before the organist had regained control of his instrument. The Alba went with Walter in a taxi, Otto Olaf and Morgutte took a tram, the two grotesques never knew how they got there, while as for the maids, all but Una who wisely huddled on a cloak and cadged a lift, why they just floated on foot like brownies through the garish thoroughfares.
These are the little things that are so important.
To say that the drawing-room was thronged would be to put it mildly. It was stiff with guests. Otto Olaf found himself in that most painful of all possible positions, constrained to see his furniture, his loved ones, suffer and know himself helpless to relieve them.
There was something so bright and meaty about the assembly, something so whorled in its disposition with the procession loosely coiled in the midst waiting to move off, that Walter was slowly but surely put in mind of a Benozzo fresco and said so in his high-smelling voice to the Alba.
“Ass and all” she replied, with indescribable bitterness.
Una stamped her foot like a sheep and like sheep all present turned scared faces towards her. She had somehow contrived to consolidate and shore up her gossamer, but now she had fresh grounds for complaint, namely, that the newly married couple, who should have been first home and in position for congratulations, had actually not yet turned up. Thus the action was brought to a dead halt. In its present headless condition the procession could not uncoil itself out through the door as arranged, and it was obvious that until the procession uncoiled itself there could be no relief for the congestion of casual ladies and gentlemen of which it was, so to speak, the mainspring. But let the truant pair appear and take their station and lo the press, as though by magic, would tick off merrily to its stand-up lunch. In the meantime, what a waste of good saliva!
More Pricks Than Kicks Page 12
