cold as January at the best of times, he was no more capable now, when any moment might be the last of the current lot, ring him back to the gloom where stews and therefore Privets had no sense, of rising to such a buxom occasion than Alfieri or Jean-Jacques of dancing a minuet. Yet he was sorely tempted to try, that was the bitch of it.
‘Dry those handsome eyes’ he said as distinctly as the cigar would allow. ‘Don’t drown the babies I see there for a corpse in torment.’
He withdrew the cigar, put his features into a sudden spin of anguish, righted them no less abruptly, replaced the cigar. That was the kind of thing he meant, that was the torment coming to the surface to breathe. Now she knew.
Soothed by this kind clonus she said:
‘It is not so much you as your shadow. What has befallen it?’
Now the fact of the matter is that a personal shadow is like happiness, possession of being well deceived, hypnosis, (1) apprehensible only as a lack. A stranger’s shadow, the shadows of natural things, of trees, wings, ocean clouds and the rest, one goes honing after these and indeed it is hard to imagine how one could ever manage without them. But one’s own, except in the case of a very nervous subject, (2) is as unobtrusive as the motion of the earth, to adopt the system of Galileo, that dials it.
1. Cf. Titania and the Ass.
2. Cf. Richard III.
Belacqua looked wildly about him.
‘God I don’t know at all’ he exclaimed. ‘I thought I had it.’
Zaborovna delivered herself now and not a moment too soon of the butterfly doctrine noted above. It was true, she said, of more things than heartsease (a woman’s term) and shadow. It was only a chance, she said, that she had seen hers at all. She would pay more attention to it in future. She looked to make sure it was still there.
‘You may be right’ said Belacqua. ‘I don’t say you’re not. I’m a marked man whatever way you look at it.’
There is more in it than that, thought Zaborovna, but hist!
‘Every evening during the season’ she said, ‘Saturdays excepted, I lend myself to sublime delinquencies in the old town where I lodge, and lodge in some splendour believe me. Happily to-night I am not booked.’
The sun set, the rooks flew home. Why did Belacqua always seem to be abroad at this hour of lowest vitality surely? Portions of a poem by Uhland came into his mind. They received short shrift.
‘No crows where I come from’ he said, ‘God be praised.’
‘Ah’ said Zaborovna. ‘Then there is a God after all?’
‘Presumably’ said Belacqua. ‘I know no more than I did.’
He seemed to have recovered from his sense of bereavement. Nevertheless she was right, there was more in it, as the sequel may well show, than he thought.
‘I should be happy to put you up’ said Zaborovna.
A long black cylindrical Galloway cow, in her heyday a kind and quick feeder, now obviously seriously ill with rinderpest, red-water and contagious abortion, staggered out of the ground fog, collapsed and slipped calf. It was all over in a flash.
‘Happy to put you up’ said Zaborovna.
‘When you say “put me up”’ said Belacqua, ‘what do you mean exactly?’
Not having properly sized up her man she kept the wrong things back.
‘You are far too hospitable’ said Belacqua, ‘I couldn’t dream of it.’
The cow, greatly eased, on her back, her four legs indicting the firmament, was in the article of death. Belacqua knew what that was.
‘And you don’t utter all your mind’ he said, ‘unless I am greatly mistaken.’
‘Well then’ she said, ‘fried garlic and Cuban rum, what do you say to that?’
‘Human rum!’ exclaimed Belacqua.
‘Cuban’ she said, ‘a guinea a bottle.’
Something simply had to happen, the ground-fog lifted, the sky was mare’s-tail and shed a livid light, ghastly in the puddles that pitted the land, but beautiful also, like the complexion in Addison’s disease. A child, radiant in scarlet diaper and pale blue pilch, skipped down off the road and began to sail a boat.
‘Though you hedge’ said Belacqua, ‘Miss Privet, yet do you win, and my shame be my glory.’
‘That’s a sensible cadaver’ said Zaborovna. She began to back away most gracefully.
‘Let the deadbeats get on’ said Belacqua, ‘I can’t bear a crowd.’
The faithful, seeded with demons, a dim rabble, cringing home after Vespers, regrettably not Sicilian. In the van an Editor, of a Monthly masquerading as a Quarterly, his po hat cockaded fore and aft with a title-page and a poem of pleasure, a tailor of John Jameson o’Lantern dancing before him; next, a friend’s wife, splendid specimen of exophthalmic goitre, storming along, her nipples up her nose; next, a Gipsy Rondo, glabrous but fecund, by-blow of a long line of aguas and iluminaciones; next, Hairy, leaning back, moving very stiff and open; next, in a covered Baby Austen, the Count of Parabimbi and his lady; next, trained to a hair, a nest of rank outsiders, mending in perfect amity a hard place in Eliot, relaxing from time to time to quire their manifesto: ‘Boycott Poulter’s Measure!’; next, as usual in the thick of the mischief, a caput of highly liberally educated ex-eunuchs, rotating slowly as they tottered forward, their worn buttocks gleaming through the slits in their robes; next, Caleken Frica, stark staring naked, jotting notes for period dialogue with a cauter dipped in cocoa round the riddle of her navel minnehaha minnehaha; next, a honeymoon unicorn, brow-beating his half-hunter; next, a Yogi milkman, singeing his beard with a standard candle, a contortionist leprechaun riding in his brain (abdominal); next, the sisters, Debauch and Death, holding their noses. So they passed by and passed away, those mentioned and one or two more, the second after the first, the third after the second, and so forth in order, until the last – a fully grown androgyne of tempestuous loveliness – after the rest, and after the last a spacious nothing.
‘Bad one by one’ said Belacqua, ‘very bad all together.’
A frightful sound as of rent silk put the heart across him.
‘There never was such a season for mandrakes’ said Zaborovna.
‘Alas’ said Belacqua, ‘Gnaeni, the pranic bleb, is far from being a mandrake. His leprechaun lets him out about this time every Sunday. They have no conduction.’
The dead cow would soon be a source of embarrassment.
‘You remember the wonderful lines’ said Belacqua:
‘A dog, a parrot or an ape . . .
Engross
