Echo's Bones

  ‘That will be all for the present I rather fancy.’

  ‘Certainly’ said Belacqua. ‘One thing at a time.’

  But how he shuddered to think what that one thing might be!

  ‘You talk wildly’ said Lord Gall. ‘Get you up on my neck.’

  Before Belacqua had properly smoked this word of command and consequently long before the limbs of his body could begin to defer to it or otherwise, Lord Gall had ripped off his tarboosh (so designed that it could be telescoped like a crush hat and carried in the breast), flung himself down camel amuck, butted madly into the closed, nay folded, crutch of Adeodatus, pinned his ankles, swept him off the face of the earth in a nightmare pickaback and dashed up the tree.

  Poor Belacqua, never longed his Mother so to see him first as now he, bursting with apprehension, for terra firma, some pleasant fence, the rhinal meditation, the private palpitation, the sense of sin and solid discomfort. Sedendo et quiescendo, yes, who said that? I came, I sat down, I went away, was that the ending end of all earthly sagacity, the cream, the quintessence and the upshot, or was it not? Little wealth, ill health and a life by stealth. But this, this rape, this contempt of his person, this violation of his postliminy, really it was not to be endured. In an unsubduable fit of pique he out with his razor and set to scalp Lord Gall, execrating him in the strongest terms the while.

  ‘Drop that’ said Lord Gall sharply, ‘drop it this moment.’

  Belacqua withheld his hand.

  ‘Or I drop you’ said Lord Gall, ‘yes, like an oyster on the Aeschylus of Wormwood, pardon the reference.’

  The top-gallant was lavishly appointed. Lord Gall discharged Belacqua into a cauldron of cushions, opened a bottle of Mumm, yes really opened a bottle of Mumm . . .

  ‘To the hair on your chest’ he said, ‘forgive my brusqueness, my first name is Haemo don’t you see, Haemo, so beastly plethoric, all this beef you see, these steaks and collops you may have noticed, my blasted blood boils and it’s all up, I pledge you my word as apparently the last of the line I grovel before you, believe me or not sometimes I look on myself as utterly odious, I imprecate the hour I was got, with what gust I leave it to you to imagine, I —’

  No doubt Lord Gall would have continued quite happily to patter up and down this crazy scantling of small chat far into the night were it not that a wind arose and shook the tree and rocked the crow’s nest where they were and caused him thus to choke on a quick quinsy of alarm, greatly to the relief of Belacqua who began to feel as bruised in spirit as Richilda, relict of Albert, Duke of Ebersberg, in her happy little body, that is to say fatally. Lord Gall clung to the mast, Belacqua was tossed like a cork on his cushions, the furniture stampeded, a genuine Uccello flew out through the window. The wind dropped, the chamber quivered to rest and Belacqua, emboldened by the spectacle of his oppressor spreadeagled like an O.H.M.S. malefactor to the grating or triangles, said:

  ‘State your business.’

  Lord Gall came shamefacedly unstuck, sidled to an obviously secret drawer, mixed himself a stiff black velvet, knocked it back, mixed himself another, flung it down, struck an attitude, quoted:

  ‘The jealous swan against his death that singeth,

  And eke the owl that of death bode bringeth . . .’,

  mixed himself a third, tossed it off, lay down on his back on the floor, drew up his knees and let them sag asunder in supreme abandon, clasped his hands behind his head, coughed, spat, missed, swore, apologised, belched, apologised, sneered and stated his quandary in the following vigorous terms:

  ‘You know who I am. I have and I hold in tail male special, yes, tail male special, this Eden of Wormwood, one of the few terrestrial Paradises outstanding in this country. While my medical advisers assure me that I lack the power of procreation, my chaplains are good enough to condone this incapacity as one that is natural, absolute, perpetual and antecedent. My wife is a fruitful earth I have no doubt, albeit she harbours, contracted in the alcove of the priapean Baron Extravas, protector under the instrument, reversioner of Wormwood and fiend in human guise, the spirochaeta pallida.’

  Lord Gall ceased, sat up, fumbled in his great patch fob, drew out a mourning envelope containing ashes and dusted a liberal sprinkling of these over his skull. Belacqua, crazed with compassion, rolling about in a maffick of grief in his cauldron or basket, felt it incumbent upon him to hazard a kind word:

  ‘Disentail’ he cried, ‘bar it and hang the expense.’

  Lord Gall cast up his arms, held them on high clenching and unclenching their hands, then set up, in deference no doubt to their aggrieved extensors, a fierce double-fisted attack on his breasts, knocked himself flat and said, or rather yelped:

  ‘And kotow to the cad that peppered my love!’

  He frothed at the blobbers.

  ‘Adeodatus’ he said, ‘what is the sine qua non of every dirty deed of disentailment, answer me that.’

  Belacqua was stumped.

  ‘I give you up till ten’ said Lord Gall, ‘then I fire. One, two —’

  Belacqua put on his considering cap.

  ‘Four’ said Lord Gall, ‘five —’

  ‘An official representation’ said Belacqua ‘of six or more villains.’

  ‘Seven, eight’ said Lord Gall, ‘nine —’

  ‘Or rather I should say’ said Belacqua, ‘the wink from the protector.’

  ‘Very good’ said Lord Doyle, ‘and who is the protector here? Come now, answer up.’

  ‘Baron Abore’ said Belacqua, ‘I think you said.’

  ‘Wrong’ said Lord Gall. ‘Bend over.’

  ‘Partepost’ quavered Belacqua.

  ‘Bend over’ roared Lord Gall. ‘Hold out your little bum here this instant.’

  ‘Have pity’ cried Belacqua, ‘I have it.’

  ‘You have not got it sir’ thundered Lord Gall. ‘You know you have not.’

  ‘Extravas’ said Belacqua. ‘Keep your hair on.’

  ‘Hair!’ scoffed Lord Gall. ‘Hair! Why my very dundraoghaires’ passing his hands over his chaps and discovering their total impubescence ‘are a concession to my station.’ He put them back. ‘For example, I have never known what it is to have hair on the head. All my life long, ever since I was – perish the day! – deprived of the breast, I have been as bald as a coot.’

  Belacqua stood up in his basket.

  ‘It is time I was getting on’ he said.

  Lord Gall took not the slightest notice, not the slightest.

  ‘Very good’ he said, ‘Baron Extravas, that Frascatorian viper, do you imagine for one moment that he would agree to be barred in the eye or that I, Haemo Gall, backmarker in every form of athletic contest open to the peerage, would so far demean myself as to crawl to such an eversore? Pah!’

  Belacqua hopped out of the basket or cauldron and squared up, dauntless little gamecock, to the aspermatic colossus, who upon the conclusion of his last outburst had sat up and wrapped his thighs about his face. That is my position, thought Belacqua, how dare he. Lord Gall peeped out.

  ‘What is it now?’ he said.

  ‘Stand up’ said Belacqua, ‘be a little soldier, bite on the bullet.’

  Lord Gall reeled to his feet and like a zebra began to act on the brainwave of more booze.

  ‘Stop!’ cried Belacqua. ‘Don’t be misled. Wine is a mocker.’

  ‘Just one small tilly dawson’ begged Lord Gall, ‘and then I perish.’

  ‘Why did the barmaid sham pain?’ demanded Belacqua.

  ‘Because the stout porter bit her’ answered Lord Gall quite correctly.

  ‘Very well’ said Belacqua. ‘You ask my advice. Here it is.’

  ‘Make it short’ said Lord Gall, ‘facile, sweet and plain, I do beseech you.’

  ‘As I see it’ said Belacqua, ‘the issue is perfectly distinct.’

  ‘Extinct’ said Lord Gall. ‘However don’t let me interrupt you.’

  ‘One: no lives can be dropped. Two: you can’t cut off the entail.
Three: Wormwood reverts to the Baron.’

  ‘Must you really go now?’ said Lord Gall.

  ‘Before I go —’ said Belacqua.

  ‘Excuse me’ said Lord Gall, ‘but have you made arrangements to be borne up on the way down?’

  ‘Before I leave you’ said Belacqua, ‘there is just one word I should like to add. This yoke that is your portion, wear it lightly, do not let it wring your withers. Keep up your games, cultivate Wormwood in a good and husbandlike manner and according to local malfeasance, cherish Lady Gall, serve God, honour his assigns, early to bed, early to rise, fear no man, pray for the Baron, pray for me, good prayers and often for me if you would be so kind, keep up your pecker, stick to your games, transmit to posterity a name —’

  ‘A name!’ hooted Lord Gall. ‘What name? Emptybreeks?’

  So the battle raged, first one gaining the upper hand, then the other obtaining the advantage. Meantime the afternoon had not been idle, it had worn away, Belacqua thirsted for his quinquina. He had said that he would go and he was genuinely anxious to be gone, to fly away from Lord Gall, his tragic and oppressive presence. Unhappily the quomodo had yet to be contrived. He prayed for a Moby Dick of a miracle, but with so little conviction that he was not heard.

  ‘Emptybreeks!’ said Lord Gall. ‘A name to conjure with.’

  ‘Let us be serious’ said Belacqua. ‘We are getting what my dear tutor used to call no forrader.’

  ‘Don’t rip up old stories’ said Lord Gall. ‘Come to the point.’

  ‘We all have our little afflictions’ said Belacqua, ‘they come to us all one and all sooner or later, if not to-day to-morrow or the day after, that is fatal. Yet I receive the impression that you put yourself forward as unique.’

  ‘Come to the point’ said Lord Gall.

  ‘Look at me’ said Belacqua. ‘In virtue of the cruel rule that the image runs with the shadow, I am now precluded from looking into my eyes. I, Belacqua Shuah, Master of Arts, who spent my life between a bottle and a mirror, can no longer admire the front of my face. Yet I don’t make a song about it. I put up with it. What can’t —’

  ‘Stop!’ cried Lord Gall. ‘Stop! Stop! Stop! Stop!’

  ‘The old itch’ said Belacqua ‘to get in front of a mirror and then when there to wipe my face off it does more damage in five minutes than all the other pains and aches of the reversion in a week.’

  ‘And yet you don’t make a song about it’ said Lord Gall.

  ‘I do not’ said Belacqua, ‘I would scorn to.’

  ‘The point’ said Lord Gall, ‘the point.’

  ‘It is not enough to be continent —’ said Belacqua.

  ‘It most certainly is not’ said Lord Gall. ‘I believe you.’

  ‘You must be sustenant also’ said Belacqua, ‘that is, titter affliction out of existence.’

  ‘Christian’ said Lord Gall with indescribable asperity ‘bleeding science.’

  ‘On the contrary’ said Belacqua, ‘these were the first self- supporting steps of thought in the west —’

  ‘Saving a slight tendency to overwork the figure’ said Lord Gall ‘you phrase your ideas with distinction I should say.’

  ‘My ideas!’ exclaimed Belacqua. ‘Really, my Lord, you forget that I am a postwar degenerate. We have our faults, but ideas is not one of them.’

  ‘Well’ said Lord Gall, ‘yours or another’s, proceed.’

  ‘Men set them up —’

  ‘What?’ said Lord Gall. ‘Set what up?’

  ‘The steps of course’ said Belacqua, ‘set them up in every region of Magna Graecia, ascended to their apex of neutrality, found a comfortable position and drew them up —’

  Lord Gall was really very dense. He could not follow the simplest discourse.

  ‘What?’ he said. ‘Drew what up?’

  ‘Why the steps to be sure’ said Belacqua, ‘drew them up after them.’

  ‘Damn it all’ said Lord Gall, ‘they are sitting on them, how can they draw them up?’

  ‘That is the point’ said Belacqua. ‘We have lost that faculty.’

  ‘We certainly have’ said Lord Gall, ‘I believe you.’

  ‘Yes’ said Belacqua, ‘ever since Socrates, the first great white-headed boy, with what delicious irony the whole world knows, turned up the tail of his abolla at the trees.’

  Lord Gall pondered these strange things.

  ‘Look at me’ said Belacqua. ‘Am I recalcitrant? Now I ask you.’

  ‘In your own small way’ said Lord Gall, ‘I wouldn’t put it past you.’

  ‘Well well’ said Belacqua, ‘it’s a strange world. And now I really must be off.’

  Lord Gall stared out of the window.

  ‘Off you hop’ he said, ‘don’t wait for me.’

  These cruel words left Belacqua no alternative but to dash himself heartily against the walls, happily padded, of the aerie. When thoroughly spent, but not a moment before, he said:

  ‘Come come my lord, we are not children. Have the goodness to set me down. This is mere foolishness, my readers will be out of all patience.’

  ‘Bide a wee’ said Lord Gall.

  ‘But I tell you I mot gon hoom’ whined Belacqua, ‘the sonne draweth weste.’

  ‘Approach’ said Lord Gall.

  Belacqua, by now quite green, as green as Circe’s honey, did not wait to be asked twice, and was rewarded for his alacrity by being caught up in the arms of his host or gaoler, who blew a box of asphodel off the window-sill and in its stead installed Belacqua. Poor Belacqua. Never did his mother . . . Lord Gall held him fast by the scruff of the pants.

  ‘An ego jam sedeo?’ said Belacqua. The rags of Latin flogged into us at school, in after life they stand to us well.

  ‘Never mind about that now’ said Lord Gall. ‘What do you see?’

  ‘A woolpack sky’ said Belacqua, ‘as beautiful as when I was a little boy.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘Archipelagoes of pollards, spangled with glades.’

  ‘Cut out the style’ said Lord Gall. ‘What else?’

  ‘In the far distance a castle, and a young person, yes I venture to say a very charming young person, paddling in the moat.’

  ‘Bully for you’ said Lord Gall. ‘My sweet column of quiet, partner of my porridge days, you ought to meet her.’

  This possibility so entranced his lordship that for quite a time he could not go on with what he was saying. Belacqua was aware of the mouth opening and shutting behind (Lord Gall trying to go on and failing) and then, the angina of rapture dispersing, the pent up voice gushing into his ear-hole:

  ‘Oughtn’t you?’

  ‘Cer’nly’ said Belacqua, ‘most happy to.’

  ‘You know what I mean?’ said Lord Gall.

  ‘I think I can guess what you are driving at’ said Belacqua.

  ‘Good man’ said Lord Gall, ‘I bet you can. All this is vieux jeu. Now then, what else do you see?’

  ‘Miles and miles of bright blue grass’ said Belacqua.

  ‘My champaign land’ said Lord Gall blushingly, ‘very prettily put.’

  ‘Timberlike trees in great profusion’ said Belacqua, ‘brushwood in abundance and diadems of lakes.’

  ‘Cut out the style’ shouted Lord Gall, ‘how often must I tell you?’

  A crocodile, of men, and women, and children, passed slowly across a glade. Lord Gall obliged with a telescope, saying:

  ‘Rose lens, my invention.’

  Festooned with babies, the Smeraldina; a cynic in a spasm; a wedge of coisidte, fizzing through the future like a scoop through Stilton; a Nazi with his head in a clamp; a monster shaped like mankind exactly; Dáib and Seanacán, four legs in three tights and half a codpiece; a large Drumm pram, empty; the goat, confiding his chemical changes to Madam Frica, who derived such relish from the relation as was only superseded some days later, when she threw a party for a skunk; a tiny tot on her own. So they passed by and passed away . . .

  ‘Well’ said L
ord Gall, when they had both quite done blowing their noses and wiping their eyes, or rather the other way about, ‘what do you think of dear old Wormwood? Its animal life and vegetation? Does the little you have seen please you?’

  ‘Immensely’ said Belacqua, ‘more than I can say. That pram I found most moving.’

  ‘Excessively utile dulci’ said Lord Gall, ‘I vote for it every time. When the boy scouts get tired they lie down and wait for it to come up. You noticed its cutwater of course.’

  Night fell like a lid.

  ‘Most extraordinary thing!’ exclaimed Belacqua.

  Lord Gall lifted him off the sill, tossed him back into his cushions, closed the window, lit a candle, came over and sat down on the edge of the basket and began to speak with surprising sobriety.

  ‘You have given me a great deal of trouble. Just consider: I take you off your fence, I tow you at high speed and no small pains across some of the finest country, I tell you one you didn’t know, I let you have a peep at my treasure, I fly with you to my nest, I treat you to Mumm, I put up with your filthy bourgeois behaviour, I take you into my confidence, I endeavour to break down every barrier between us . . .’

  Belacqua lighted a cigar at the candle but did not offer one to his benefactor.

  ‘You have been most thoughtful and attentive’ he said, ‘I know. Don’t you find the air up here rather close?’

  ‘And that is all the thanks I get’ said Lord Gall, ‘a criticism of my own system of ventilation, my own patent, my very own. Oh Adeodatus!’

  ‘I did not mean to be unkind’ said Belacqua.

  ‘Why do you suppose I have gone to all this trouble?’ said Lord Gall. ‘Can you think of no good reason?’

  ‘I never care to look into motive’ said Belacqua. ‘It seems to be an impertinence. And that is a thing I have nearly done with.’

  So the combat waxed and waned, each one giving to the other as good as he got. But is it not surely rather absurd that two reasonable men, on account of some purely capricious interdependence (as opposed to that relating the leprechaun, let us say, to the bleb, or Dáib to Seanacán), should insist on an act of contention that has, so to speak, consumed its bone, even as the fare that makes enemies of the best of friends never becomes a reality for the conductor? Still it may well be that we do them an injustice and that the bone is still there. Only time (if and when he eats it) can show.