More Pricks Than Kicks

by Beckett, Samuel

  “Right enough” said Winnie “I never saw Lambay look so close.”

  Belacqua could see the man scraping away at his furrow and felt a sudden longing to be down there in the clay, lending a hand. He checked the explanation of this that was beginning and looked at the soft chord of yellow on the slope, gorse and ragwort juxtaposed.

  “The lovely ruins” said Winnie “there on the left, covered with ivy.” Of a church and, two small fields further on, a square bawnless tower.

  “That” said Belacqua “is where I have sursum corda.”

  “Then hadn't we better be getting on” said Winnie, quick as lightning.

  “This absurd tower” he said, now that he had been told, “is before the asylum, and they are before the tower.” He didn't say! “The crenels on the wall I find as moving…”

  Now the loonies poured out into the sun, the better behaved left to their own devices, the others in herds in charge of warders. The whistle blew and the herd stopped; again, and it proceeded.

  “As moving” he said “and moving in the same way, as the colour of the brick in the old mill at Feltrim.”

  Who shall silence them, at last?

  “It's pinked” continued Belacqua, “and as a little fat overfed boy I sat on the floor with a hammer and a pinking-iron, scalloping the edge of a red cloth.”

  “What ails you?” asked Winnie.

  He had allowed himself to get run down, but he scoffed at the idea of a sequitur from his body to his mind.

  “I must be getting old and tired” he said “when I find the nature outside me compensating for the nature inside me, like Jean-Jacques sprawling in a bed of saxifrages.”

  “Appearing to compensate” she said. She was not sure what she meant by this, but it sounded well.

  “And then” he said “I want very much to be back in the caul, on my back in the dark for ever.”

  “A short ever” she said “and working day and night.”

  The beastly punctilio of women.

  “Damn it” he said “you know what I mean. No shaving or haggling or cold or hugger-mugger, no”—he cast about for a term of ample connotation—“no night-sweats.”

  Below in the playground on their right some of the milder patients were kicking a football. Others were lounging about, alone and in knots, taking their ease in the sun. The head of one appeared over the wall, the hands on the wall, the cheek on the hands. Another, he must have been a very tame one, came half-way up the slope, disappeared into a hollow, emerged after a moment and went back the way he had come. Another, his back turned to them, stood fumbling at the wall that divided the grounds of the asylum from the field where they were. One of the gangs was walking round and round the playground. Below on the other hand a long line of workmen's dwellings, in the gardens children playing and crying. Abstract the asylum and there was little left of Portrane but ruins.

  Winnie remarked that the lunatics seemed very sane and well-behaved to her. Belacqua agreed, but he thought that the head over the wall told a tale. Landscapes were of interest to Belacqua only in so far as they furnished him with a pretext for a long face.

  Suddenly the owner of the bicycle was running towards them up the hill, grasping the fork. He came barging over the wall, through the chord of yellow and pounding along the crest of the slope. Belacqua rose feebly to his feet. This maniac, with the strength of ten men at least, who should withstand him? He would beat him into a puddle with his fork and violate Winnie. But he bore away as he drew near, for a moment they could hear his panting, and plunged on over the shoulder of the rise. Gathering speed on the down grade, he darted through the gate in the wall and disappeared round a corner of the building. Belacqua looked at Winnie, whom he found staring down at where the man had as it were gone to ground, and then away at the distant point where he had watched him scraping his furrows and been envious. The nickel of the bike sparkled in the sun.

  The next thing was Winnie waving and halloing. Belacqua turned and saw a man walking smartly towards them up the slope from the asylum.

  “Dr Sholto” said Winnie.

  Dr Sholto was some years younger than Belacqua, a pale dark man with a brow. He was delighted—how would he say?—at so unexpected a pleasure, honoured he was sure to make the acquaintance of any friend of Miss Coates. Now they would do him the favour to adjourn …? This meant drink. But Belacqua, having other fish to fry, sighed and improvised a long courteous statement to the effect that there was a point in connexion with the church which he was most anxious to check at first hand, so that if he might accept on behalf of Miss Coates, who was surely tired after her long walk from Malahide…

  “Malahide!” ejaculated Dr Sholto.

  …and be himself excused, they could all three meet at the main entrance of the asylum in, say, an hour. How would that be? Dr Sholto demurred politely. Winnie thought hard and said nothing.

  “I'll go down by the Banks” said Belacqua agreeably “and follow the road round. Au revoir.”

  They stood for a moment watching him depart. When he ventured to look back they were gone. He changed his course and came to where the bicycle lay in the grass. It was a fine light machine, with red tires and wooden rims. He ran down the margin to the road and it bounded alongside under his hand. He mounted and they flew down the hill and round the corner till they came at length to the stile that led into the field where the church was. The machine was a treat to ride, on his right hand the sea was foaming among the rocks, the sands ahead were another yellow again, beyond them in the distance the cottages of Rush were bright white, Belacqua's sadness fell from him like a shift. He carried the bicycle into the field and laid it down on the grass. He hastened on foot, without so much as a glance at the church, across the fields, over a wall and a ditch, and stood before the poor wooden door of the tower. The locked appearance of this did not deter him. He gave it a kick, it swung open and he went in.

  Meantime Dr Sholto, in his pleasantly appointed sanctum, improved the occasion with Miss Winifred Coates. Thus they were all met together in Portrane, Winnie, Belacqua, his heart and Dr Sholto, and paired off to the satisfaction of all parties. Surely it is in such little adjustments that the benevolence of the First Cause appears beyond dispute. Winnie kept her eye on the time and arrived punctually with her friend at the main entrance. There was no sign of her other friend.

  “Late” said Winnie “as usual.”

  In respect of Belacqua Sholto felt nothing but rancour.

  “Pah” he said, “he'll be sandpapering a tomb.”

  A stout block of an old man in shirt sleeves and slippers was leaning against the wall of the field. Winnie still sees, as vividly as when then they met her anxious gaze for the first time, his great purple face and white moustaches. Had he seen a stranger about, a pale fat man in a black leather coat.

  “No miss” he said.

  “Well” said Winnie, settling herself on the wall, to Sholto, “I suppose he's about somewhere.”

  A land of sanctuary, he had said, where much had been suffered secretly. Yes, the last ditch.

  “You stay here” said Sholto, madness and evil in his heart, “and I'll take a look in the church.”

  The old man had been showing signs of excitement.

  “Is it an escape?” he enquired hopefully.

  “No no” said Winnie, “just a friend.”

  But he was off, he was unsluiced.

  “I was born on Lambay” he said, by way of opening to an endless story of a recapture in which he had distinguished himself, “and I've worked here man and boy.”

  “In that case” said Winnie “maybe you can tell me what the ruins are.”

  “That's the church” he said, pointing to the near one, it had just absorbed Sholto, “and that” pointing to the far one “'s the tower.”

  “Yes” said Winnie “but what tower, what was it?”

  “The best I know” he said “is some Lady Something had it.”

  This was news indeed.

&nbs
p; “Then before that again” it all came back to him with a rush “you might have heard tell of Dane Swift, he kep a”—he checked the word and then let it come regardless—“he kep a motte in it.”

  “A moth?” exclaimed Winnie.

  “A motte” he said “of the name of Stella.”

  Winnie stared out across the grey field. No sign of Sholto, nor of Belacqua, only this puce mass up against her and a tale of a motte and a star. What was a motte?

  “You mean” she said “that he lived there with a woman?”

  “He kep her there” said the old man, he had read it in an old Telegraph and he would adhere to it, “and came down from Dublin.”

  Little fat Presto, he would set out early in the morning, fresh and fasting, and walk like camomile.

  Sholto appeared on the stile in the crenellated wall, waving blankly. Winnie began to feel that she had made a mess of it.

  “God knows” she said to Sholto when he came up “where he is.”

  “You can't hang around here all night” he said. “Let me drive you home, I have to go up to Dublin anyhow.”

  “I can't leave him” wailed Winnie.

  “But he's not here, damn it” said Sholto, “if he was he'd be here.”

  The old man, who knew his Sholto, stepped into the breach with a tender of his services: he would keep his eyes open.

  “Now” said Sholto, “he can't expect you to wait here for ever.”

  A young man on a bicycle came slowly round the corner from the Donabate direction, saluted the group and was turning into the drive of the asylum.

  “Tom” cried Sholto.

  Tom dismounted. Sholto gave a brief satirical description of Belacqua's person.

  “You didn't see that on the road” he said “did you?”

  “I passed the felly of it on a bike” said Tom, pleased to be of use, “at Ross's gate, going like flames.”

  “On a BIKE!” cried Winnie. “But he hadn't a bike.”

  “Tom” said Sholto “get out the car, look sharp now, and run her down here.”

  “But it can't have been him” Winnie was furious for several reasons, “I tell you he had no bike.”

  “Whoever it is” said Sholto, master of the situation, “we'll pass him before he gets to the main road.”

  But Sholto had underestimated the speed of his man, who was safe in Taylor's public-house in Swords, drinking in a way that Mr Taylor did not like, before they were well on their way.

  Ding-Dong

  MY sometime friend Belacqua enlivened the last phase of his solipsism, before he toed the line and began to relish the world, with the belief that the best thing he had to do was to move constantly from place to place. He did not know how this conclusion had been gained, but that it was not thanks to his preferring one place to another he felt sure. He was pleased to think that he could give what he called the Furies the slip by merely setting himself in motion. But as for sites, one was as good as another, because they all disappeared as soon as he came to rest in them. The mere act of rising and going, irrespective of whence and whither, did him good. That was so. He was sorry that he did not enjoy the means to indulge this humour as he would have wished, on a large scale, on land and sea. Hither and thither on land and sea! He could not afford that, for he was poor. But in a small way he did what he could. From the ingle to the window, from the nursery to the bedroom, even from one quarter of the town to another, and back, these little acts of motion he was in a fair way of making, and they certainly did do him some good as a rule. It was the old story of the salad days, torment in the terms and in the intervals a measure of ease.

  Being by nature however sinfully indolent, bogged in indolence, asking nothing better than to stay put at the good pleasure of what he called the Furies, he was at times tempted to wonder whether the remedy were not rather more disagreeable than the complaint. But he could only suppose that it was not, seeing that he continued to have recourse to it, in a small way it is true, but nevertheless for years he continued to have recourse to it, and to return thanks for the little good it did him.

  The simplest form of this exercise was boomerang, out and back; nay, it was the only one that he could afford for many years. Thus it is clear that his contrivance did not proceed from any discrimination between different points in space, since he returned directly, if we except an occasional pause for refreshment, to his point of departure, and truly no less recruited in spirit than if the interval had been whiled away abroad in the most highly reputed cities.

  I know all this because he told me. We were Pylades and Orestes for a period, flattened down to something very genteel; but the relation abode and was highly confidential while it lasted. I have witnessed every stage of the exercise. I have been there when he set out, springing up and hastening away without as much as by your leave, impelled by some force that he did not care to gainsay. I have had glimpses of him enjoying his little trajectory. I have been there again when he returned, transfigured and transformed. It was very nearly the reverse of the author of the Imitation's “glad going out and sad coming in.”

  He was at pains to make it clear to me, and to all those to whom he exposed his manoeuvre, that it was in no way cognate with the popular act of brute labour, digging and such like, exploited to disperse the dumps, an antidote depending for its efficaciousness on mere physical exhaustion, and for which he expressed the greatest contempt. He did not fatigue himself, he said; on the contrary. He lived a Beethoven pause, he said, whatever he meant by that. In his anxiety to explain himself he was liable to come to grief. Nay, this anxiety in itself, or so at least it seemed to me, constituted a break-down in the self-sufficiency which he never wearied of arrogating to himself, a sorry collapse of my little internus homo, and alone sufficient to give him away as inept ape of his own shadow. But he wriggled out of everything by pleading that he had been drunk at the time, or that he was an incoherent person and content to remain so, and so on. He was an impossible person in the end. I gave him up in the end because he was not serious.

  One day, in a positive geyser of confidence, he gave me an account of one of these “moving pauses.” He had a strong weakness for oxymoron. In the same way he over-indulged in gin and tonic-water.

  Not the least charm of this pure blank movement, this “gress” or “gression,” was its aptness to receive, with or without the approval of the subject, in all their integrity the faint inscriptions of the outer world. Exempt from destination, it had not to shun the unforeseen nor turn aside from the agreeable odds and ends of vaudeville that are liable to crop up. This sensitiveness was not the least charm of this roaming that began by being blank, not the least charm of this pure act the alacrity with which it welcomed defilement. But very nearly the least.

  Emerging, on the particular evening in question, from the underground convenience in the maw of College Street, with a vague impression that he had come from following the sunset up the Liffey till all the colour had been harried from the sky, all the tulips and aerugo expunged, he squatted, not that he had too much drink taken but simply that for the moment there were no grounds for his favouring one direction rather than another, against Tommy Moore's plinth. Yet he durst not dally. Was it not from brooding shill I, shall I, dilly, dally, that he had come out? Now the summons to move on was a subpoena. Yet he found he could not, any more than Buridan's ass, move to right or left, backward or forward. Why this was he could not make out at all. Nor was it the moment for self-examination. He had experienced little or no trouble coming back from the Park Gate along the north quay, he had taken the Bridge and Westmoreland Street in his stride, and now he suddenly found himself good for nothing but to loll against the plinth of this bull-necked bard, and wait for a sign.

  There were signs on all hands. There was the big Bovril sign to begin with, flaring beyond the Green. But it was useless. Faith, Hope and—what was it?—Love, Eden missed, every ebb derided, all the tides ebbing from the shingle of Ego Maximus, little me. Itself it went nowher
e, only round and round, like the spheres, but mutely. It could not dislodge him now, it could only put ideas into his head. Was it not from sitting still among his ideas, other people's ideas, that he had come away? What would he not give now to get on the move again! Away from ideas!

  Turning aside from this and other no less futile emblems, his attention was arrested by a wheel-chair being pushed rapidly under the arcade of the Bank, in the direction of Dame Street. It moved in and out of sight behind the bars of the columns. This was the blind paralytic who sat all day near to the corner of Fleet Street, and in bad weather under the shelter of the arcade, the same being wheeled home to his home in the Coombe. It was past his time and there was a bitter look on his face. He would give his chairman a piece of his mind when he got him to himself. This chairman, hireling or poor relation, came every evening a little before the dark, unfastened from the beggar's neck and breast the placard announcing his distress, tucked him up snugly in his coverings and wheeled him home to his supper. He was well advised to be assiduous, for this beggar was a power in the Coombe. In the morning it was his duty to shave his man and wheel him, according to the weather, to one or other of his pitches. So it went, day after day.

  This was a star the horizon adorning if you like, and Belacqua made off at all speed in the opposite direction. Down Pearse Street, that is to say, long straight Pearse Street, its vast Barrack of Glencullen granite, its home of tragedy restored and enlarged, its coal merchants and Florentine Fire Brigade Station, its two Cervi saloons, ice-cream and fried fish, its dairies, garages and monumental sculptors, and implicit behind the whole length of its southern frontage the College. Perpetuis futuris temporibus duraturum. It was to be hoped so, indeed.

  It was a most pleasant street, despite its name, to be abroad in, full as it always was with shabby substance and honest-to-God coming and going. All day the roadway was a tumult of buses, red and blue and silver. By one of these a little girl was run down, just as Belacqua drew near to the railway viaduct. She had been to the Hibernian Dairies for milk and bread and then she had plunged out into the roadway, she was in such a childish fever to get back in record time with her treasure to the tenement in Mark Street where she lived. The good milk was all over the road and the loaf, which had sustained no injury, was sitting up against the kerb, for all the world as though a pair of hands had taken it up and set it down there. The queue standing for the Palace Cinema was torn between conflicting desires: to keep their places and to see the excitement. They craned their necks and called out to know the worst, but they stood firm. Only one girl, debauched in appearance and swathed in a black blanket, fell out near the sting of the queue and secured the loaf. With the loaf under her blanket she sidled unchallenged down Mark Street and turned into Mark Lane. When she got back to the queue her place had been taken of course. But her sally had not cost her more than a couple of yards.