More Pricks Than Kicks (22 page)

“What could they not say?” said the parson. He would not rest until he knew.

“O Death where is thy sting?” replied Hairy. “They have no words for these big ideas.”

This was more than enough for the parson, a canon of the Church of Ireland, who hastily exclaimed, no doubt by way of a shining straw, to the Smeraldina:

“My wife would so much like to see you.”

“O Anthrax” said Hairy “where is thy pustule?”

“She has been through the fire” said the parson, “she understands. My poor dear mother-in-law!”

“O G.P.I.” said Hairy “where are thy rats?”

By the mercy of God the good canon was slow to wrath.

“And so on” said Hairy “and so forth. They can't say it once and for all. A spalpeen's babble.”

Belacqua dead and buried, Hairy seemed to have taken on a new lease of life. He spoke well, with commendable assurance; he looked better, less obese cretin and spado than ever before; and he felt better, which was a great thing. Perhaps the explanation of this was that while Belacqua was alive Hairy could not be himself, or, if you prefer, could be nothing else. Whereas now the defunct, such of his parts at least as might be made to fit, could be pressed into service, incorporated in the daily ellipses of Capper Quin without his having to face the risk of exposure. Already Belacqua was not wholly dead, but merely mutilated. The Smeraldina appreciated this without thinking.

As for her, it was almost as though she had suffered the inverse change. She had died in part. She had definitely ceased to exist in that particular part which Belacqua had been at such pains to isolate, the public part so cruelly made private for his convenience, her last clandestine aspect
¹
reduced to a radiograph and exploited to ginger his secret occasions. That was down the mine Daddy with the dead Sadomasochist. Her spiritual equivalent, to give it a name, had been measured, coffined and covered by Nick Malacoda. As material for anagogy (Greek g if you don't mind) the worms were welcome to her.

What was left was just a fine strapping lump of a girl or woman, theatre nurse in
Yellow
from the neck down, bursting with Lebensgeist at every suture, itching to be taken at her—very much so to speak—face value, and by force for preference.

Now it so happened that these two processes, a kind of marginal metabolism possibly you might call them, independent but of common origin, constructive in the case of the man, destructive and delightfully excrementitious in the case of the woman, culminated simultaneously on the drive back from the grave.

Hairy stopped the car.

“Step down” he said to the parson, “I don't like you.”

The parson appealed mutely to the Smeraldina. She had nothing whatever to say to him. Never again in this life would she occupy any position more partisan than that of a comfortably covered bone of contention, her mind was made up.

“Bill the executors” said Hairy “and out you hop.”

The parson did as Hairy bid. He felt miserable. They did not even give him a chance to cock up the other cheek. He racked his brains for coals of fire. As the car began to move away he jumped up nimbly on the running-board, stooped forward in the lee of the windscreen and began, heedless of punctuation, in a lamentable voice:

“…no more death neither sorrow nor crying neither shall there be any more——”

At which point, the car beginning to sway in a perilous manner, he was obliged to break off in order to save his life. He stood in the road, far from home, and hoped, without exactly making a prayer out of it, that they might be forgiven.

“Wouldn't he give you the sick” said Hairy “with his Noo Gefoozleum.”

Little remains to be told. On their return they found the house in flames, the home to which Belacqua had brought three brides a raging furnace. It transpired that during their absence something had snapped in the brain of the gardener, who had ravished the servant girl and then set the premises on fire. He had neither given himself up nor tried to escape, he had shut himself up in the tool-shed and awaited arrest.

“Ravished Mary Ann” exclaimed the Smeraldina.

“So she deposes” said a high official of the Civic Guard. “It was she who raised the alarm.”

Hairy looked this dignitary up and down.

“I don't see your fiddle” he said.

“Where is the girl?” asked the Smeraldina.

“She has gone home to her Mother” answered the high official.

She tried him again.

“Where is the gardener?”

But he had been expecting this question.

“He resisted arrest, he has been taken to hospital.”

“Where are the heroes of the fire-brigade” said Hairy, entering into the spirit of the thing, “the boys of the old brigade, the Tara Street Cossacks? May we expect them to-day? They would act as a kind of antiphlogistic.”

This Hairy was a revelation to the Smeraldina, he was indeed hairy.

“They are unavoidably detained” replied the Commissioner.

“Take me away” said the Smeraldina firmly, “the house is insured.”

The Commissioner made a mental note of this suspicious circumstance.

Poor Smeraldina! She was more than ever at a loose end now.

“Why not come with me” said Hairy, “now that all this has happened, and be my love?”

“I don't understand” said the Smeraldina.

Hairy explained exactly what he meant. In the heart of the purple mountains the car conked out. Hairy had exhausted his petrol supply. But nothing daunted he continued to explain. He explained and explained, the same old thing over and over again. At last he too conked out.

“Perhaps after all” murmured the Smeraldina “this is what darling Bel would wish.”

“What is?” cried Hairy aghast.

She handed him back his explanation in a nutshell.

“Darling Smerry!” cried Hairy. “What else?”

They fell silent. Hairy, gazing straight before him through the anti-dazzle windscreen, whose effect by the way on the mountains was to make them look not unlike the picture by Paul Henry, was inclined to think that it was about time they started to make a move. But this seemed out of the question. The Smeraldina, far far away with the corpse and her own spiritual equivalent in the bone-yard by the sea, was dwelling at length on how she would shortly gratify the former, even as it, while still unfinished, had that of Lucy,
¹
and blot the latter for ever from her memory.

“We must think of an inscription” she said.

“He did mention one to me once” said Hairy, “now that I come to think of it, that he would have endorsed, but I can't recall it.”

The groundsman stood deep in thought. What with the company of headstones sighing and gleaming like bones, the moon on the job, the sea tossing in her dreams and panting, and the hills observing their Attic vigil in the background, he was at a loss to determine off-hand whether the scene was of the kind that is termed romantic or whether it should not with more justice be deemed classical. Both elements were present, that was indisputable. Perhaps classico-romantic would be the fairest estimate. A classico-romantic scene.

Personally he felt calm and wistful. A classico-romantic working-man therefore. The words of the rose to the rose floated up in his mind: “No gardener has died, comma, within rosaceous memory.” He sang a little song, he drank his bottle of stout, he dashed away a tear, he made himself comfortable.

So it goes in the world.

THE END