I do not, rejoined the Pooka.
Then a potion, herbal and decanted from the juice of roots, unsurpassed for the extirpation of personal lice?
Doubts as to the sex of cattle, observed the Pooka after he had first adjusted the hard points of his fingers one against the other, arise only when the animal is early in its youth and can be readily resolved by the use of a prongs or other probing instrument – or better still, a magnifying glass of twenty diameters. Jackdaws who discourse or who are accustomed to express themselves in Latin or in the idiom of sea-faring men may betray an indication of the nature of their talent by inadvertently furnishing the same answer to all questions, making claim in this manner to unlimited ignorance or infinite wisdom. If a cock may secrete eggs from his interior, equally a hen can crow at four-thirty of a morning. Rats have been observed to fly, small bees can extract honey from dung and agamous mammals have been known to produce by the art of allogamy a curious off-spring azoic in nature and arachnoid in appearance. It is not false that a servant is a servant but truth is an odd number and one master is a great mistake. Myself I have two.
Allogamy and arachnoid I understand, said Trellis, but the meaning you attach to azoic is a thing that is not clear to me at all.
Devoid of life, having no organic remains, said the Pooka.
That is an elegant definition, said Trellis, affording an early-morning smile for the enjoyment of his guest. A grain of knowledge with the dawning of the day is a breakfast for the mind. I will now re-enter the darkness of my sleep, remembering to examine it anew on my recovery. My serving-girl, she is the little guide who will conduct you from the confinement of my walls. I have little doubt that the science of bird-flight is known to rats of cunning and resource, but nevertheless I have failed to observe such creatures passing by in the air through the aperture of my window. Good morning, Sir.
Your courteous salutation is one I cannot accept, answered the Pooka, for this reason, that its valedictory character invalidates it It is my mission here this morning to introduce you to a wide variety of physical scourges, torments, and piteous blood-sweats. The fulness of your suffering, that will be the measure of my personal perfection. A window without ratflight past it is a backyard without a house.
Your talk surprises me, said Trellis. Furnish three examples.
Boils upon the back, a burst eyeball, a leg-withering chill, thorn-harrowed ear-lobes, there are four examples.
By God we’re here at last, said Furriskey loudly. He made a noise with the two of them, his palm and his knee. We’re here at last From now on it’s a fight to the finish, fair field and no favour.
Strop the razor, boys, smiled Shanahan. Mr Lamont, kindly put the poker in the fire.
Here there was a laugh, immelodious, malicious, high-pitched.
Now, now, boys, said Orlick. Now, now, boys. Patience.
I think we are doing very well, said Furriskey. We’ll have the skin off his back yet. He’ll be a sorry man.
That is a piteous recital, said Trellis. Provide further examples five in number.
With a slight bow the Pooka arranged the long-nailed fingers of his left hand in a vertical position and then with his remaining hand he pressed a finger down until it was horizontal in respect of each of the agonies he recited.
An anabasis of arrow-points beneath the agnail, razor-cut to knee-rear, an oak-stirk in the nipple, suspension by nose-ring, three motions of a cross-cut athwart the back, rat-bite at twilight, an eating of small-stones and a drinking of hog-slime, these are eight examples.
These are eight agonies, responded Trellis, that I would not endure for a chest of treasure. To say which of them is worst, that would require a winter in a web of thought. A glass of milk, that is the delicacy I offer you before you go.
These and other gravities you must endure, said the Pooka, and the one that you find the worst, that is the thing you must whisper after in the circle of my ear. To see you arise and dressing against the hour of your torment, that would be a courtesy. A glass of milk is bad for my indigestion. Acorns and loin-pie, these are my breakfasttide delights. Arise, Sir, till I inflict twin nipple-hurts with the bevel of my nails.
An agitation to the seat of the Devil’s trousers of decent sea-man’s serge betokened that his hair-tail and his shirt-tails were engaged in slow contention and stiff whirly gambols of precise intent His face (as to colour) was grey.
Colour of the face of Trellis, not counting the tops of pimples: white.
Keep away, you crump, you, he roared. Oh, by God, I’ll kick your guts around the room if you don’t keep your hands off me!
These piteous visitations shall not accurse you singly, observed the Pooka in a polite tone, nor shall they come together in triads. These hurts shall gather to assail you in their twos or fours or in their sixties; and all for this reason, that truth is one.
It was then that the Pooka MacPhellimey exercised the totality of his strange powers by causing with a twist of his hard horn-thumb a stasis of the natural order and a surprising kinesis of many in-calculable influences hitherto in suspense. A number of miracles were wrought as one and together. The man in the bed was beleaguered with the sharpness of razors as to nipples, knee-rear and bellyroll. Leaden-hard forked arteries ran speedily about his scalp, his eye-beads bled and the corrugations of boils and piteous tumuli which appeared upon the large of his back gave it the appearance of a valuable studded shield and could be ascertained on counting to be sixty-four in number. He suffered a contraction of the intestines and a general re-arrangement of his interior to this result, that a meat repast in the process of digestion was ejected on the bed, on the coverlet, to speak precisely. In addition to his person, his room was also the subject of mutations unexplained by any purely physical hypothesis and not to be accounted for by mechanical devices relating to the manipulation of guy-ropes, pulley-blocks, or mechanical collapsible wallsteads of German manufacture, nor did the movements of the room conform to any known laws relating to the behaviour of projectiles as ascertained by a study of gravitation enforced by calculations based on the postulata of the science of ballistics. On the contrary, as a matter of fact, the walls parted; diminished and came back again with loud noises and with clouds of choking lime-dust, frequently forming hexagons instead of squares when they came together. The gift of light was frequently withdrawn without warning and there was a continuous loud vomit-noise offensive to persons of delicate perceptions. Chamber-pots flew about in the aimless parabolae normally frequented by blue-bottles and heavy articles of furniture – a wardrobe would be a typical example – could be discerned stationary in the air without’ visible means of support. A clock could be heard incessantly reciting the hours, a token that the free flight of time had also been interfered with; while the mumbling of the Pooka at his hell-prayers and the screaming of the sufferer, these were other noises perceptible to the practised ear. The obscure atmosphere was at the same time pervaded by a stench of incommunicable gravity.
The butt of that particular part of the story is this, that Trellis; wind-quick, eye-mad, with innumerable boils upon his back and upon various parts of his person, flew out in his sweat-wet night-shirt and day-drawers, out through the glass of the window till he fell with a crap on the cobbles of the street A burst eyeball, a crushed ear and bone-breaks two in number, these were the agonies that were his lot as a result of his accidental fall. The Pooka, a master of the science of rat-flight, fluttered down through the air with his black cloak spread about him like a raincloud, down to the place where the stunned one was engaged in the re-gathering of his wits, for these were the only little things he had for defending himself from harm; and this is a précis of the by-play the pair of them engaged in with their tongues.
You hog of hell, you leper’s sore you! said Trellis in a queer voice that came through the grid of his bleeding mouth-hiding hand. He reclined on the mud-puddled cobbles, a tincture of fine blood spreading about his shirt. You leper’s death-puke!
It was an early-morning s
treet, its quiet distances still small secrets shared by night with day. Two fingers at the eyes of his nostrils, the Pooka delicately smelt the air, a token that he was engaged in an attempt to predict the character of the weather.
You leper’s lights, said Trellis.
To forsake your warm bed, said the other courteously, without the protection of your heavy great-coat of Galway frieze, that was an oversight and one which might well be visited with penalties pulmonary in character. To inquire as to the gravity of your sore fall, would that be inopportune?
You black bastard, said Trellis.
The character of your colloquy is not harmonious, rejoined the Pooka, and makes for barriers between the classes. Honey-words in torment, a growing urbanity against the sad extremities of human woe, that is the further injunction I place upon your head; and for the avoidance of opprobrious oddity as to numerals, I add this, a sickly suppuration at the base of the left breast.
I find your last utterance preoccupying to my intellect, said Trellis, and I am at the same time not unmindful of the incidence of that last hurt upon my person…
Come here for a minute, said Shanahan, there’s one thing you forgot. There’s one cat in the bag that didn’t jump.
Which cat would that be? Orlick asked.
Our man is in the room. Right The boyo starts his tricks. Right The room begins to dance. The smell and the noise starts. Right Everything goes bang bar one thing. That one thing is a very important article of furniture altogether. Gentlemen, I refer to our friend the ceiling. Is my Nabs too much of a gentleman to get the ceiling on the napper?
Oh, God that’s a terrible thing to get, said Lamont. A friend of mine got a crack of a lump of plaster on the neck here, look. By God Almighty it nearly creased him.
Didn’t I tell you it was good, said Shanahan.
Nearly killed him, nearly put the light out for good.
A wallop of the ceiling is all I ask, Sir, Shanahan said. What do you say now? A ton of plaster on the napper.
It’s a bit late to think of it now, you know, Orlick answered, table-tap for doubt.
He was in the Mater for a week, said Lamont People were remarking the scab for the best part of a year – do you know that? Oh, not a bit of him could wear a collar.
It means bringing the whole party into the house again, said Orlick.
And well worth it! said Furriskey, slapping the sun-bright serge of his knee. And well worth it, by God.
Wheel him in, man, begged Shanahan. He’d be in and out by now if we had less talk out of us.
A second thought is never an odd thought, said the Pooka with a courteous offering of his snuff-box, and it is for that reason that it would be wisdom for the pair of us to penetrate again to the privacy of your bedroom. The collapse of the ceiling, that is one thing we forgot.
That time you spoke, said Trellis, the sweetness of your words precluded me from comprehending the meaning you attach to them.
It is essential, explained the Pooka, that we return to your room the way we may perfect these diversions upon which the pair of us were engaged.
That is an absorbing project, said Trellis. In what manner do we re-attain the street ?
The way we came, said the Pooka.
Our project is the more absorbing for that, said Trellis, a small tear running evenly from his eye to his chin and a convulsion piteous to behold running the length of his backbone.
The Pooka thereupon betook himself into the upper air with a graceful retraction of his limbs beneath his cloak in the fashion of a gannet in full flight and flew until he had attained the sill of his window, with Trellis for company and colloquy by his side by the means of a hair-grip; and these were the subjects they held brief discourse on the time they were in flight together, videlicet, the strange aspect of tramway wires which, when viewed from above and from a postulated angle, have the appearance of confining the street in a cage; the odd probity of tricycles; this curious circumstance, that a dog as to his legs is evil and sinful but attains sanctity at the hour of his urination.
It is my intention, said the Pooka in the ear of Trellis, to remain resting here on the stone-work of this window; as for you, to see you regain the security of your bedroom (littered as it is by a coat of lime), that would indeed be a graceful concession to my eccentric dawning-day desires.
Easily accomplished, said Trellis, as he crawled in his crimson robe to the interior of his fine room, but give me time, for a leg that is in halves is a slow pilgrim and my shoulder is out of joint.
When he had crawled on to the floor, the ceiling fell upon his head, hurting him severely and causing the weaker parts of his skull to cave in. And he would have remained there till this, buried and for dead beneath the lime-clouded fall, had not the Pooka given him a quantity of supernatural strength on loan for five minutes, enabling him to raise a ton of plaster with the beam of his back and extricate himself until he achieved a lime-white hurtling through the window and dropped with a crap on the cobbles of the street again, the half of the blood that was previously in him now around him and on his outside.
It was here that Furriskey held up the further progress of the tale with his hand in warning.
Maybe we’re going a bit too hard on him, he warned. You can easily give a man a bigger hiding than he can hold.
We’re only starting, man, said Shanahan.
Gentlemen, I beg of you, leave everything to me, said Orlick with a taste of anger in his words. I guarantee that there will be no untoward fatality.
I draw the line at murder myself, observed Lamont.
I think we are doing very well, said Shanahan.
All right, Sir, away we go again, but don’t forget he has a weak heart Don’t give him more than he can carry now.
That will be all right, answered Orlick.
Thereafter the Pooka applied his two horn-hard thumbs tcgether, turning them at incustomary angles and scrubbing them on the good-quality kerseymere of his narrow trousers so that further sorcery was worked to this effect, that Trellis was beleaguered by an anger and a darkness and he was filled with a restless tottering unquiet and with a disgust for the places that he knew and with a desire to go where he never was, so that he was palsied of hand and foot and eye-mad and heart-quick so that he went bird-quick in craze and madness into the upper air, the Pooka at his rat-flight beside him and his shirt, red and blood-lank, fluttering heavily behind him.
To fly, observed the Pooka, towards the east to discover the seam between night and day, that is an aesthetic delight. Your fine overcoat of Galway frieze, the one with the khaki lining, you forgot that on the occasion of your second visit to your bedroom.
The gift of flight without the sister-art of landing, answered Trellis, that is always a doubt. I feel a thirst and the absence of a drink of spring water for a longer period than five minutes might well result in my death. It might be wisdom for the pair of us to attain land, me to lie upon my back and you to pour water from your hat into my interior. I have a hole here in my neck and through it the half of a cupful might escape before it could attain my stomach.
It was here that Orlick laid his pen upon its back.
Talking of water, Mr Furriskey, he said, pardon my asking but where is the parochial house, the bath-room, you know ?
The important apartment to which you refer. Sir, answered Furriskey with gravity, is on your left on the first landing on your way up, you can’t miss it.
Ah. In that case there will be a slight intermission. I must retire for meditation and prayer. The curtain will be lowered to denote the passage of time. Gentlemen, adios!
Safe home, cried Shanahan, waving his hand.
Orlick arose stiffly from where he was and left the room, pushing back his hair and running it swiftly through the comb of his fingers. Lamont extracted a small box from his pocket, exhibited it and proved to the company beyond doubt that it contained but one cigarette; he lit the sole cigarette with the aid of a small machine depending for its utility on the co
mbustibility of petroleum vapour when mixed with air. He sucked the smoke to the bottom of his lungs and these following words were mixed with it when he blew it out again on the flat of the table.
Do you know we’re doing welL We’re doing very well. By God he’ll rue the day. He’ll be a sorry man now.
A bigger hiding, remarked Furriskey with articulation leisurely in character, no man ever got A more ferocious beating was never banded out by the hand of man.
Gentlemen, said Shanahan, we’re taking all the good out of it by giving him a rest, we’re letting him get his wind. Now that’s a mistake.
He’ll get more than his wind.
Now I propose with your very kind permission to give our friend a little hiding of my own. A side-show, you understand. We’ll put him back where we found him before the master comes back. Is the motion passed?
Now be careful, warned Lamont. Easy now. You’d better leave him be. We’re doing very nicely so we are.
Not at all, man. Listen. A little party on our own.
The two lads in the air came to a sudden stop by order of his Satanic Majesty. The Pooka himself stopped where he was, never mind how it was done. The other fell down about a half a mile to the ground on the top of his snot and broke his two legs in halves and fractured his fourteen ribs, a terrible fall altogether. Down flew the Pooka after a while with a pipe in his mouth and the full of a book of fancy talk out of him as if this was any consolation to our friend, who was pumping blood like a stuck pig and roaring out strings of profanity and dirty foul language, enough to make the sun set before the day was half over.
Enough of that, my man, says the Pooka taking the pipe from his mouth. Enough of your dirty tongue now, Caesar. Say you like it
I’m having a hell of a time, says Trellis. I’m nearly killed laughing. I never had such gas since I was a chiseller.
That’s right, says the Pooka, enjoy yourself. How would you like a kick on the side of the face ?
Which side? says Trellis.
The left side, Caesar, says the Pooka.
You’re too generous altogether, says Trellis. I don’t know you well enough to take a favour like that from you.
At Swim-Two-Birds Page 20
