Dream of Fair to Middling Women (21 page)

The Polar Bear disposed of a large information on these subjects and the Alba listened and did not interrupt. Of the Holy Ghost, however, he did not care to speak.

“Even were it not an impertinence” he said “for me, a spoilt Roundhead, to speak to you, brought up on real unspottednesses, of the Holy Ghost, I prefer” with a leer and a lowered voice “not to deal with that subject in a public place. Nor are the epigrams with which I would be obliged, so pungent and to the point and in every way excellent do I consider them, to punctuate my relation, for the ears of a maid. You are broadminded, not squeamish, but I prefer not.”

A ridiculus mus of mucus was born in an ear-splitting eruption to the orator. He savoured it and put it away.

“Now Louise Labbé” he said “was a great poet, a great poet, perhaps one of the greatest of all time, of physical passion, of passion purely and exclusively physical. She did not know the love from which the body has been refined, in which the body has been consumed. She did not care for the Chanson de Toile's extremities of tenderness and service, the nostalgia of Doon for his “belle Doette”. But what she did know and care for and enshrine in imperishable verse…”

The Alba folded up her legs, more under her this time, and listened, he had a pleasant voice, and did not interrupt.

Then, after a time, she ceased to listen. He had nearly polished off the unreal co-ordinates, he was saying: “and so we invent them”, and she ceased to be bothered listening. Then he, sensing that she had withdrawn her attention, ceased to speak. They sat on in silence, not at all embarrassed by this cleavage.

The Alba allowed herself, against her better judgement, to be absorbed in the review of how her days up to then had been spent, of how she had been spent, of how she had been spent and almost, it seemed to her and to
many that knew her, extinguished by her days. The days were not hers to spend, they were waste land to earn. She had earned her days. It was she who had been spent, she and the richness of days that were not hers until she had earned and impoverished them. She had been spent in daywinning. Poor in days she was light and full of light. Rich in days she was heavy and full of darkness. Living was a growing heavy and dark and rich in days. Natural death was black wealth of days. The brightness of day-poverty was music unscored for the need of keeping alive and well so that she might die, the music of days that were not hers and of which each hour was too manifold for possession. She made a version of each hour and day, she made a grotesque song of their music, she carried the version and song away hers, a growing weight of darkness upon her, she called the days thus earned and impoverished hers. She reviled the need, the unsubduable tradition of living up to dying, that forced her to score and raid thus the music of days. The heavy gloom of carnal custom. To extirpate the need and remain light and full of light, to secede from the companies of the dutifully dying and go with them no more from heaviness to heaviness and from darkness to darkness according to their law, to abide, light and full of light, caught in the fulness of this total music of days… She was a rock, dayless, furled in a water that she was not doomed to harness. Alone, unlonely, unconcerned, moored in the seethe of an element in which she had no movement and from which therefore she was not doomed to filch the daily mite that would guarantee, in a freighting and darkening of her spirit, the declension of that movement. The days, unopened and unmapped, would not spend her. They would break over in their fulness, uncashed. She would abide unladen and undarkened.

The Polar Bear, having ceased to rest and speak and having eaten his cake, began to fidget. He was getting hot. The great heat that was within this man began to make itself felt. He said he was navré, he must go, he found, looking at his watch, that he really must go, otherwise he would miss his bus and then the family would worry. His blasting ailing sister, moreover, would be clamouring for her haply merdiferous lubricant. It had been a real pleasure to have had this little chat. When would they foregather again?

“Yes” said the Alba “time to go. This evening there is a visitor, I should be back. In the morning there is a priest to deal with and a dress to come into town about, I must get to bed in good time. And then no doubt your precious Belacqua will be round in the afternoon, bursting with simple profundities. Then in the evening I am going on the skite with the Venerilla.”

At the end of the street they parted. The Alba boarded a tram and like a Cézanne monster it carried her off, it moaned down Nassau Street into the darkness, little thinking what a royal and fragile tuppenny fare it had in keeping. The poor old P.B. plunged sadly on foot towards the quays. He had not a moment to spare, he had yet to buy the Baby.

Seeing as how we are more or less all set now for Belacqua and the Alba to meet at least, make contact at least and carry along for a time side by side, failing to coalesce, or, better said, dropping for once the old sweet song of failure, just not doing so, either because each in his and her own way was made of sterner stuff than, say, any single bee in d'Alembert's dream of the coagulum of continuous
bees or because they had no particular lust to mingle or because the duration of their mere contiguity was on the short side for the answer to the love tot to be 1 or because they abode a pair of articles of such a hard, heterogeneos and complex constitution that they were a great deal more likely to break down and come unstuck in two separate non-synchronised processes each on his and her side of the fence than sink their differences and pool their resources in the slush of platitudinous treacle that is wont to grace these occasions, take your choice and pick your fancy: seeing as how then, to repeat that beautiful conjunction, it is now or never the time to sidetrack and couple those two lone birds and give them at least a chance to make a hit and bring it off, would it not be idle on our part to temporise further and hold up the happy event with the gratuitous echolalia and claptrap rhapsodies that are palmed off as passion and lyricism and the high spots of the creative ecstasy, the crises, no less, in our demiurgent tension after unity of consciousness (as if we bothered our arse about our pestilential consciousness), and which, as a matter of fact, are nothing more or less, if any dear reader would care to come in on a good thing, than padding: the fall-back and the stand-by, don't you know, of the gentleman scrivener who has no very near or dear or clear ideas on any subject whatsoever and whose talent is not the dense talent of the proselytiser and proxenete but the rarer article in the interests of whose convulsions clouds of words condense to no particular purpose.

Yet even to such a one, notwithstanding his horror of the
ficum voco ficum
buckram and swashbuckle, comes the one clear cry and earnest recommendation to spigot the faucet and throttle the cock, the cockwash, and cut the cackle. This tergiversator lends ear in accordance, and with
the terrible scowl, with the very worse will in the world, he drags himself across the threshold of the gehenna of nar-ratio recta.

We had no idea ars longa was such a Malebolge.

He galloped round sure enough according to plan to pay his respects and in the most morose of humours. For his native city had got him again, her miasmata already had all but laid him low, the yellow marsh fever that she keeps up her sleeve for her more distinguished sons had clapped its clammy honeymoon hands upon him, his moral temperature had gone sky-rocketing aloft, soon he would shudder and kindle in hourly ague.

All went off more or less as she had predicted. Out of the kindness of her heart, the sympathy that had been lit for him within her, she unleashed her eyes on him, she gave them carte blanche and he bled.

“I read your poem” she said in her soft ruined voice “but you will do better than that. It is clever, too clever, it amused me, it pleased me, it is good, but you will get over all that.”

The “too clever” was a cropper and she felt it, without having to refer to his expression, as soon as it was out of her mouth. They were rare with her, these deviations of her instinct, but she was subject to them. Well muffled, however, in the sure phrase, alleviated by the charm of her husky delivery, it damaged her position scarcely at all and would not have jarred on any sensibility less tremulous than that of her interlocutor, shrinking away as it always did, and more of course than ever at this moment, from the least roughness of contact, ready to cry out at the littlest scratch.

“Already” he said, calmly, “I have done better.”

The hair-spring of her instinct kept her silent and that silence, together with a new quality in her presence, a silence of body, did work. This was the complicating of conversation of which she had spoken to the Polar Bear in the lounge that evening with the bitter shrug that took its seat so well upon her, that rode her with such grace, we mean that she brought off with an aisance and a naturel that enchanted all beholders apt to apprehend that most tenuous of all the tenuous emanations of real personality, charm. Cæsura.

“Better” he was obliged by her immobility to hedge “is perhaps not quite the word. What I mean, when I say that already I have done better, is, that I have achieved a statement more ample, in so far as it embraces and transcends the poem that you are good enough to remember, and with that more temperate, less mannered, more banal (oh, Alba, a most precious quality, that), nearer to the low-voiced Pushkinian litotes. Better? Other. Me now, not a production of me then. In that sense, and of course that is the sense in which you speak, better.”

He turned it off, but she was not quite ready for him.

“There is a shortness of poetic sight” he proceeded wild-ishly “when the image of the emotion is focussed before the verbal retina; and a longness of same, when it is focussed behind. There is an authentic trend from that shortsightedness to this long-sightedness. Poetry is not concerned with normal vision, when word and image coincide. I have moved from the short-sighted poem of which you spoke to a long-sighted one of which I now speak. Here the word is prolonged by the emotion instead of the emotion being gathered into and closed by the word. There are the
two modes, say Marlowe and Chenier, keeping the order, and who shall choose between them? When you say ‘he will do better' you may mean: ‘he will write a poem of a more perfect short-sightedness', or again you may mean: ‘he will express himself more totally in the long-sighted mode'. Already, I repeat, I have expressed myself more totally in the long-sighted mode. I dislike the word better.”

There seemed no reason why he should stop, and doubtless he would not, had not her instinct (this time I suppose we might say, her taste) broken the silence and she moved.

“Yes” she said “but don't do yourself an injury trying to circumvent it.” Suddenly, flickering out at him like a sting, putting it up to him, the hard word. “And
verbal retina
” she said “I don't get. Can a word have a retina?”

He stiffened his neck against her at once. Observe how their relation already is thickening, soon it will be a monstrous tangle, a slough of granny's-bends.

“I could justify my figure” he said, with a great show of fatigue and altitudino, “if I could be bothered. Words shall put forth for me the organs that I choose. Need I remind you how they relieved themselves under Apollinaire?”

Satisfied that she had goaded him into stiffening himself against her, she moved now on suave words away from the ravaged zone. She wanted to hear all about Liebert who made no sign of life though he owed a letter this long time. Had Belacqua set eyes on the new Madame?

“Platinum” she was bound “they always are.”

It was Belacqua's turn to be at a loss. What could she mean?

“No matter” she said “is she or is she not?”

“Not” he was sorry to say “what you might call hell-blond, that lovely shade russet, if you think that would do
to translate
rousse.
It's silly of me, I know” he lisped “but I hate to be a snob and use the mot juste.”

“Mamon!” she said, letting herself out just at the right moment, “don't be so squeamish, my dear, say it the best way first, the best people will understand. The lady, russet, you say, and with that ravishing, she must be to have got him?”

Got
was the second slip so far.

“He was supposed to love me, you know” she hastened, but not too precipitately, to say “so I have what you might call a vested interest in his vicissitudes.”

Such long words for such a little girl!

“Good rather than beautiful, I would have said; a good, non-beautiful gal.”

“You did know he loved me?”

“He gave me to understand.”

“But I could not…”

“That also.”

“Ah, so he knew?”

“Did you not arrange that he should?”

The Alba reared up her head sharply, she started to her feet, it was very sudden, and declared that since the tea appeared to be undrinkable she would see was there a drop of brandy left in the cupboard. Did he drink brandy in the afternoon, before his dinner?

“Preferably” he was happy to say “in the afternoon, before my dinner.”

She brought big tumblers and a dying noggin. She zigzagged in and out through the furniture with little fleet steps, grousing an Irish air:

'Woe and pain, pain and woe,

Are my lot, night and noon…'

“She is not heavy enough” the thought came to him watching her flicker from point to point “upon my word she is not heavy enough to hang herself.”

They drank.

“Permit me to appreciate” he said “that superb and regal peignoir. It is like a Rimbaud Illumination, barbarous and royal. Cloth of gold, if I have an eye left in my head. Most insidiously flagrant and flamboyant, yes. You could say ‘sortez!' with Roxane.”

“But since there are no mutes at my beck…” She spoke from a real sorrow. “Beyond the door, a loudspeaker, it only wounds; beyond that again a melancholy gardener, watering the dying flowers; then you are in the street and free.”