Dream of Fair to Middling Women Read Online Free PDF Page A

novelist.) But what can you do with a person like Nemowho will not for any consideration be condensed into a liû, who is not a note at all but the most regrettable simultaneity of notes. Were it possible to oralise say half-a-dozen Lîng-Liûn phoenix arising as one immortal purple bird from the ashes of a common pyre and crying simultaneously, as each one saw fit, a cry of satisfaction or of disappointment, a rough idea of the status of this Nemo might be obtained: a symphonic, not a melodic, unit. Our line bulges every time he appears. Now that is a thing that we do not like to happen, and the less so as we are rather keenly aware of the infrequency of one without two. Dare we count on the Alba? Dare we count on Chas. Indeed we tend, on second thoughts, to smell the symphonic rat in our principal boy. He might just manage, semel et simul, the Beneficient Fecundity and the Imperfect; or, better still, furnish a bisexual bulge with a Great Iron of the Woods. But ping! a mere liû! We take leave to doubt it.
    Anyhow the next thing was a tiff with a lady, oh a proper lady, who told Belacqua to his brazen face that he was treating her like dirt and behaving like a cad, taking everything and giving nothing; and he said behind her back that she was jealous of the Smeraldina-Rima. This lady, whom we propose to polish off now once and for all, had a great deal of the predatory masochism of the passionate Quaker. She felt that going through hell was all my eye unless some peeping Nightingale got a thrill out of it. She wouldn't allow you to do anything for her, but it was a real pleasure, if you see what we mean, to refuse. Now of course he was too ecstatic a spectator altogether to come down to the mark from that point of view. Miranda was not in his class at all. He might conceivably have suffered mildly with those whose sufferings he saw reported in the continental press. But sonst, in the words of the song, gar nix.
    The real presence was a pest because it did not give the imagination a break. Without going as far as Stendhal, who said—or repeated after somebody—that the best music (what did he know about music anyway?) was the music that became inaudible after a few bars, we do declare and maintain stiffly (at least for the purposes of this paragraph) that the object that becomes invisible before your eyes is, so to speak, the brightest and best. This is not to suggest that the lady in question did that. We simply mean that at the time we are referring to she was not an object at all, no, not an object in any sense of the word. Is that what we mean? What do we mean? Anyway, what it boils down to in the end is this: that he did not want to be slavered and slabbered on by her, he thought it would be nice to be slavered and slabbered on elsewhere for a change. So he packed a bag and made to depart. His Father said “tant pis, good-luck”, lifted his shoulders and paid for his ticket. His Mother put her head into the taxi and before she broke down (the Mother, not the taxi) breathed “be happy”, as if to insinuate: “again and again I request you to be merry”. Long John Silver, the Polar Bear and a dear friend, on whom we are inclined to count to put a stop to this chronicle, waved a Mallarmean farewell from the Carlyle Pier. At Ostend he secured a corner seat in a through horsebox to Wien and defended it for 29 hours against all comers. The last 599 kilometres on beer (terrible stuff!), and in a horsebox, not a corridor coach, which explains why he stepped hastily out of the train at the Westbahnhof and looked feverishly up and down the platform.
    The effect or concert of effects, unimportant as it seems to us and dull as ditchwater as we happen to know, that elicited the Smeraldina-Rima, shall not, for those and other reasons that need not be gone into, be stated. Milieu,race, family, structure, temperament, past and present and consequent and antecedent back to the first combination and