More Pricks Than Kicks Read online

He fell on the bag and ripped out the notice for her inspection. Painted roughly in white on an old number-plate she beheld:

  TEMPORARILY SANE

  IK-6996 had been erased to make room for this inscription. It was a palimpsest.

  Ruby, pot-valiant, let a loud scoff.

  “It won't do” she said, “it won't do at all.”

  It was a disappointment to hear her say this. Poor Belacqua. Sadly he held the plate out at arm's length.

  “You don't like it” he said.

  “Bad” said Ruby “very bad.”

  “I don't mean the way it's presented” said Belacqua, “I mean the idea.”

  It was all the same what he meant.

  “If I had a paddle” she said “I'd bury it, idea and all.”

  Belacqua laid the offensive object face downward in the heather. Now there was nothing left in the bag but the firearm, the ammunition and the veronal.

  The light began to die, there was no time to be lost.

  “Will you be shot” said Belacqua “or poisoned? If the former, have you any preference? The heart? The temple? If the latter” passing over the bag, “help yourself.”

  Ruby passed it back.

  “Load” she ordained.

  “Chevaliers d'industrie” said Belacqua, inserting the ball, “nearly all blow their brains out. Kreuger proved the rule.”

  “We don't exactly die together darling” drawled Ruby “or do we?”

  “Alas” sighed Belacqua “what can you expect? But a couple of minutes” with a bounteous brandish of the revolver, “the time it takes to boil an egg, what is that to eternity?”

  “Still” said Ruby “it would have been rather nice to pass out together.”

  “The problem of precedence” said Belacqua, as from a rostrum, “always arises, even as between the Pope and Napoleon.”

  “‘The Pope the puke’” quoted Ruby “‘he bleached her soul…’”

  “But perhaps you don't know that story” said Belacqua, ignoring the irrelevance.

  “I do not” said Ruby “and I have no wish to.”

  “Well” said Belacqua “in that case I will merely say that they solved it in a strictly spatial manner.”

  “Then why not we?” said Ruby.

  The gas seems to be escaping somewhere.

  “We” said Belacqua “like twins——”

  “Are gone astray” sneered Ruby.

  “Are slaves of the sand-glass. There is not room for us to run out arm in arm.”

  “As though there were only the one in the world” said Ruby. “Pah!”

  “We happen to pine in the same one” said Belacqua, “that is the difficulty.”

  “Well, it's a minor point” said Ruby “and by all means ladies first.”

  “Please yourself” said Belacqua, “I'm the better shot.”

  But Ruby, instead of expanding her bosom or holding up her head to be blown off, helped herself to a drink. Belacqua fell into a passion.

  “Damn it” he cried “didn't we settle all these things weeks ago? Did we or did we not?”

  “A settlement was reached” said Ruby, “certainly.”

  “Then why all this bloody talk?”

  Ruby drank her drink.

  “And leave us a drop in the bottle” he snarled, “I'll need it when you're gone.”

  That indescribable sensation, compound of exasperation and relief, relaxing, the better to grieve, the coenaesthesis of the consultant when he finds the surgeon out, now burst inside Belacqua. He felt suddenly hot within. The bitch was backing out.

  Though whiskey as a rule helped Ruby to feel starry, yet somehow on this occasion it failed to effect her in that way, which is scarcely surprising if we reflect what a very special occasion it was. Now to her amazement the revolver went off, harmlessly luckily, and the bullet fell in terram nobody knows where. But for fully a minute she thought she was shot. An appalling silence, in the core of which their eyes met, succeeded the detonation.

  “The finger of God” whispered Belacqua.

  Who shall judge of his conduct at this crux? Is it to be condemned as wholly despicable? Is it not possible that he was gallantly trying to spare the young woman embarassment? Was it tact or concupiscence or the white feather or an accident or what? We state the facts. We do not presume to determine their significance.

  “Digitus Dei” he said “for once.”

  That remark rather gives him away, does it not?

  When the first shock of surprise had passed and the silence spent its fury a great turmoil of life-blood sprang up in the breasts of our two young felons, so that they came together in inevitable nuptial. With the utmost reverence at our command, moving away on tiptoe from where they lie in the ling, we mention this in a low voice.

  It will quite possibly be his boast in years to come, when Ruby is dead and he an old optimist, that at least on this occasion, if never before nor since, he achieved what he set out to do; car, in the words of one competent to sing of the matter, l'Amour et la Mort—caesura—n'est qu'une mesme chose.

  May their night be full of music at all events.

  1 This figure, owing to the glittering vitrine behind which the canvas cowers, can only be apprehended in sections. Patience, however, and a retentive memory have been known to elicit a total statement approximating to the intention of the painter.

  Walking Out

  ONE fateful fine Spring evening he paused, not so much in order to rest as to have the scene soak through him, out in the middle of the late Boss Croker's Gallops, where no horses were to be seen any more. Pretty Polly that great-hearted mare was buried in the vicinity. To stroll over this expanse in fine weather, these acres of bright green grass, was almost as good as to cross the race-course of Chantilly with one's face towards the Castle. Leaning now on his stick, between Leopardstown down the hill to the north and the heights of Two Rock and Three Rock to the south, Belacqua regretted the horses of the good old days, for they would have given to the landscape something that the legions of sheep and lambs could not give. These latter were springing into the world every minute, the grass was spangled with scarlet afterbirths, the larks were singing, the hedges were breaking, the sun was shining, the sky was Mary's cloak, the daisies were there, everything was in order. Only the cuckoo was wanting. It was one of those Spring evenings when it is a matter of some difficulty to keep God out of one's meditations.

  Belacqua leaned all his spare weight on the stick and took in the scene, in a sightless passionate kind of way, and his Kerry Blue bitch sat on the emerald floor beside him. She was getting old now, she could not be bothered hunting any more. She could tree a cat, that was no bother, but beyond that she did not care to go. So she just remained seated, knowing perfectly well that there were no cats in Croker's Gallops, and did not care very much what happened. The bleating of the lambs excited her slightly.

  My God, it occurred to Belacqua, I must be past my best when I find myself preferring this time of year to the late Autumn.

  This vivid thought, quite irrefutable as he recognised at once, did not so distress him that he was unable to move on. Past the worst of his best, there was nothing so very terrible in that, on the contrary. Soon he might hope to be creeping about in a rock-garden with tears in his eyes. Indeed proof, if proof he needed, that he was rather elated than distressed, appears in his taking his weight off the stick and moving forward; for the effect of a real dereliction was always to cast him up high and dry and unable to stir. The bitch walked behind. She was hot and bored.

  Slowly he raised his eyes till they were levelled at his destination. Tom Wood, it graced like a comb a low hill in the distance. There he had assignation, but only in the sense that an angler has with the fish in a river. He had been there so often that he knew all its ins and outs, yet he could not have given a name to its timber. Oak, he supposed vaguely, or elm, but even had he looked he would not have been any wiser. This country lad, he could not tell an oak from an elm. Larches however he knew, fr
om having climbed them as a little fat boy, and a young plantation of these, of a very poignant reseda, caught his eye now on the hillside. Poignant and assuasive at once, the effect it had upon him as he advanced was prodigious.

  He thought if only his wife would consent to take a cicisbeo how pleasant everything would be all round. She knew how he loved her and yet she would not hear of his getting her a cicisbeo. He was merely betrothed, but already he thought of his fiancée as his wife, an anticipation that young men undertaking this change of condition might be well advised to imitate. Time and again he had urged her to establish their married life on this solid basis of a cuckoldry. She understood and appreciated his sentiment, she acknowledged that his argument was sound, and yet she would not or could not bring herself to act accordingly. He was not a bad-looking young fellow, a kind of cretinous Tom Jones. She would kill his affection with her nonsense before the wedding bells, that would be the end of it.

  Turning this and cognate anxieties over and over in his mind he came at length to the southern limit of the Gallops and the by-road that he had to cross to get into the next list of fields. Thus, large tracts of champaign, hedges and ditches and blessed grass and daisies, then the deep weal of road, again and again, until he would come to the wood. The wall was too high for the bitch at her time of life, so he helped her across with a vigorous heave on the grey hunkers. This gave him pleasure if he had stopped to analyse it. But himself, he made short work of the obstacle, thinking: what a splendid thing it is when all is said and done to be young and vigorous.

  In the ditch on the far side of the road a strange equipage was installed: an old high-wheeled cart, hung with rags. Belacqua looked round for something in the nature of a team, the crazy yoke could scarcely have fallen from the sky, but nothing in the least resembling a draught-beast was to be seen, not even a cow. Squatting under the cart a complete down-and-out was very busy with something or other. The sun beamed down on this as though it were a new-born lamb. Belacqua took in the whole outfit at a glance and felt, the wretched bourgeois, a paroxysm of shame for his capon belly. The bitch, in a very remote manner, stepped up to the cart and sniffed at the rags.

  “Cmowathat!” vociferated the vagabond.

  Now Belacqua could see what he was doing. He was mending a pot or a pan. He beat his tool against the vessel in his anxiety. But the bitch made herself at home.

  “Wettin me throusers” said the vagabond mildly “wuss 'n meself.”

  So that was his trousers!

  This privacy which he had always assumed to be inalienable, this ultimate prerogative of the Christian man, had now been violated by somebody's pet. Yet he might have been calling a score, his voice was so devoid of rancour. But Belacqua was embarrassed in the last degree.

  “Good evening” he piped in fear and trembling, “lovely evening.”

  A smile proof against all adversity transformed the sad face of the man under the cart. He was most handsome with his thick, if unkempt, black hair and moustache.

  “Game ball” he said.

  After that further comment was impossible. The question of apology or compensation simply did not arise. The instinctive nobility of this splendid creature for whom private life, his joys and chagrins at evening under the cart, was not acquired, as Belacqua one day if he were lucky might acquire his, but antecedent, disarmed all the pot-hooks and hangers of civility. Belacqua made an inarticulate flourish with his stick and passed down the road out of the life of this tinker, this real man at last.

  But he had not gone far, he had not yet turned aside into the next zone of field, before he heard cries behind him and the taratantara of hooves. This was none other than his dearest Lucy, his betrothed, astride her magnificent jennet. Reining in she splashed past him in a positive tornado of caracoling. When her mount had calmed down and her own panting somewhat abated she explained to the astonished and, be it said, somewhat vexed Belacqua how she came to be there.

  “Oh, I called round and they told me you were gone out.”

  Belacqua caressed the soft jowl of the jennet. Poor beast, it had been ridden into a lather. It looked at him with a very white eye. It would tolerate his familiarities since of such was its servitude, but it hoped, before it died, to bite a man.

  “So I didn't know what to do, so what do you think?”

  Belacqua could not imagine. There seemed to be nothing to do under the circumstances but make the best of it.

  “I got up on the roof and did the Sister Ann.”

  “No!” exclaimed Belacqua. This was pleasant.

  “Yes, and I found you in the end, all alone in the Gallops.”

  This was charming. Belacqua came over to her leg.

  “Darling!” she ejaculated.

  “Well” he said “well well well.”

  “So I skited round by the road” she was overcome by the success of her little manœuvre “and here I am.”

  She had rounded him up, she had cut him off, it was nearly as good as catching an ocean greyhound on the pictures. He kissed her flexed knee.

  “Brava!”

  To think that somebody needed him in this way! He could not but be touched.

  In face and figure Lucy was entrancing, her entire person was quite perfect. For example, she was as dark as jet and of a paleness that never altered, and her thick short hair went back like a pennon from her fanlight forehead. But it would be waste of time to itemise her. Truly there was no fault or flaw in the young woman. Yet we feel we must say before we let her be, her poor body that must wither, that her nether limbs, from where they began even unto where they ended, would have done credit to a Signorelli page. Let us put it this way, that through her riding-breeches they came through. What more can be said for a woman's legs, thighs included? Or is all this merely ridiculous?

  Belacqua wondered, when the first rapture at having been spied from afar had worn off, what the hell she wanted. But it appeared that she did not want anything in particular, she just wanted to be with him. This was a falsehood of course, she did want something in particular. However.

  “Listen my dear Lucy” he said with a kind of final franchise “I know you won't mind if I can't spend this evening with my”—it took him some time to find a term of endearment to cover the facts—“my Fünklein.”

  But she pulled a very bitter face. The lizard of hers, he seemed to be making a habit of giving her the go-by, very soon if he did not watch out she would have no use for him.

  “I have the chinks” he complained and apologised. “God help me, I'm no fit company for anyone let alone lovely Lucy.”

  Indeed she was better than lovely, with its suggestion of the Nobel Yeats, with her jet of hair and her pale set face, the whipcord knee and the hard bust sweating a little inside the black jersey.

  Now it is her turn to go on.

  Does he really imagine, she wondered, that it is his company I want, which seems to me at this stage about as futile an article as a pen-wiper. Let the ink clot on the nib, let the wine, to put it another way, scour the lees.

  He spoke, as she knew he was bound to, if only she held her pose long enough.

  “I went out to walk it off.”

  “Walk what off?” cried Lucy. She was sick and tired of his moods.

  “Oh I don't know” he said, “our old friend, the devil's bath.”

  He drew designs with his devil's finger on the jennet's coat, wondering how to put it.

  “Then I thought” he said at last “that the best thing to do was to go to the wood for a little sursum corda.”

  This was another falsehood, because the wood had been in his thoughts all day. He told it with a kind of miserable conviction.

  “Corda is good” said Lucy.

  As she uttered these words with one of her smart smiles the truth, or something that seemed very like it, struck her with such violence that she nearly fell out of the saddle. But she recovered herself and Belacqua, back at the bridle courting disaster, saw nothing.

  “I know�
�� he said sadly “you don't believe in these private experiences, women don't I know as a rule. And if you distrust them now——”

  He stopped, and it was obvious, even to the jennet, that he had gone too far.

  What was the bitch doing all this time? She was sitting in the ditch, listening.

  The sun seemed to be sinking in the south, for the group was now wholly in the shadow of the high hedge on Lucy's left, though to be sure on her right the Gallops were still shining. Though the larks had gone to bed and the rooks were going there was no loss of pastoral clamour, for the lambs cried more loudly as the light fell and dogs began to bark in the distance. The cuckoo however was still in abeyance. Belacqua stepped back into the ditch and stood irresolute beside his pet, the jennet drooped its head and closed its eyes, Lucy sat very still on its back staring straight before her, they all seemed to be listening, the woman, the bitch, the jennet and the man. The vagabond could see them between adjoining spokes of his wheel, by moving his head into the right position he was far enough away to frame the whole group in a sector of his wheel.

  Lucy, resolved to put her terrible surmise to the proof, had very soon shamed her lover into making terms, for of course he was as wax in her hands1 when it came to a course of action. It was arranged that they should meet at the gate that led off the lane into the wood, he going his way across country direct and she, because it was out of the question to negotiate walls and dikes with the jennet, her devious one by road. What adverse fate forbad them at this point to fund their ways? The group broke up and soon the vagabond, peering out through his sector, saw only the grey of the road with its green hem.

  Lucy jogged along briskly. We may mention that the effect of this motion was usually to exhilarate her, but it did not do so now, so stunned was she by the sudden vision of Belacqua that damned him, were it true, as her mate, her partner in life's journey. If what she dreaded were true her heart was broken, to say nothing of her engagement. But could it? This young man of good family, so honourable to her certain knowledge in all his dealings, so spiritual, a Varsity man too, could he be such a creepy-crawly? It seemed inconceivable that she should have been so blinded to his real nature as to let her love, born in a spasm more than a year ago in the Portrush Palais de Danse, increase steadily from day to day till now it amounted to something like a morbid passion. Yet at the same time she was forced to admit how perfectly the horrible diagnosis which had just been revealed to her fitted in with certain aspects of his behaviour that she had never been able to fathom: all his baby talk, for example, of her living with him like a music while being the wife in body of another; all his fugues into “sursum corda” and “private experience,” from the inception of their romance, when he used to leave her in the evening and prowl among the sandhills, until now, the very eve of their nuptials, a time that she would always think of, whatever its upshot, as throttled in a pinetum.