Echo's Bones. Samuel Beckett
‘Whoever you are’ he cried, ‘Jetzer or Juniperus —’
No answer.
‘Firk away’ he screamed, ‘firk away, it is better than secret love.’
‘Love’ said a wearish voice behind him, ‘turn round my young friend, face this way do, and tell me what you know of that disorder.’
Belacqua did as he was bid, because a little bird told him, do you see, that his hour had come and that it would be rather more graceful, not to say more sensible, to take it by the forelock, and looked down on a bald colossus, the Saint Paul’s skull gathered into ropy dundraoghaires and a seamless belcher, dangling to and fro that help to holy living a Schenectady putter, clad in amaranth caoutchouc cap-à-pie, a cloak of gutta percha streaming back from the barrel of his bust, in his hand a gum tarboosh.
‘I fear I caught you’ said this strange figure ‘with my last long putt. I got right under the beggar.’
‘Then you have lost your ball’ said Belacqua. ‘What a shame!’
‘I make my own’ said the giant, ‘I have some hundred thousand in a bag at home.’
‘Where do you suppose’ said Belacqua ‘all this is leading to?’
‘I am Lord Gall’ said the colossus, ‘if that means anything to you. Lord Gall of Wormwood. This is Wormwood. Possibility of issue is extinct.’
‘Fecks’ said Belacqua, ‘never say die, the law won’t.’
‘The law is a ginnet’ said Lord Gall. ‘Did I ever tell you that one?’
‘I may know it’ said Belacqua, ‘there aren’t many I haven’t forgotten at one time or another. But fire away.’
‘It’s a prime story’ said Lord Gall, ‘told me in a dream, or rather a vision. I’ll communicate it as we go along.’
‘Forgive me’ said Belacqua, ‘but go along whither?’
‘By heaven’ exclaimed Lord Gall, ‘I have it all mapped out, believe me or believe me not. I don’t know who you are, but that you will do me the hell of a lot of good I have little doubt. In fact I was thinking —’
Lord Gall blushed and could not go on. He tormented the tassel of his tarboosh. Belacqua urged him to conceal nothing.
‘We are quite alone’ he said ‘except for a goat somewhere.’
‘Well’ said Lord Gall, ‘I was thinking, if you did not mind, of addressing you in future as Adeodatus.’
He let fall the putter, settled the tarboosh firmly on his head, reached up with his arms and set Belacqua gently on the ground beside him.
‘Take my hand’ he said.
Timidly Belacqua made a little fist, placed in the monstrous bud, glowing with rings, of his patron, who suffered it to nestle there and even treated it to a long long fungoid squeeze that was most gratifying no doubt. Lord Gall stood, vibrating from head to foot, the cloak cracking like a banner, the sweat distilling through the caoutchouc in sudden stains, getting up steam in fact. Then abruptly he moved forward with a kind of religious excitement that jerked Belacqua clean off his feet.
‘Steady’ said Lord Gall.
Belacqua made a perfect landing and scuttled along in great style, a willing little pony.
‘Now then’ said Lord Gall. ‘When our Lord —’
‘Your putter sir’ cried Belacqua, ‘you have left it behind.’
‘Pox on my putter’ roared Lord Gall, vexed to the pluck, ‘I have quiverfuls at home.’
Faster and faster they sped over the pasture, paved with edible mushrooms which Lord Gall scattered and spurned like a great elephant and big, Belacqua would have staked his reputation, with truffles. Yet he did not dare suggest that they should stop and fill their hankies.
‘When our Lord’ said Lord Gall, ‘do you heed me?’
Belacqua felt that this was a piece of rhetoric. He was right.
‘When our Lord’ said Lord Gall for the third time ‘stood in need of a mount and before the ass, to her undying credit, agreed unconditionally to carry him, he made overtures to the horse, who required notice of the question, and to the mule and ginnet, who bluntly refused.’
‘The pigdogs!’ cried Belacqua.
‘Therefore’ proceeded Lord Gall ‘the Lord laid a curse on the mule and the ginnet, whose gist was that they should go no farther. With the twofold result that —’
‘Primo’ piped Belacqua.
‘Primo: they have a glorious time. Secun —’
‘In what sense’ said Belacqua ‘do they have a glorious time?’
As a train from a tunnel or a lady from a tank of warm water so now a wail, compound of impatience and rosy pudency, burst from the kidney-lipped maw of the raconteur.
‘You hog’s pudding’ he cried, ‘but inasmuch as they are not tenants in tail, what else?’
The oaths and groans of the unhappy man were happily to some extent drownded in a cyclone of wrath and disdain, something between the crowing of croop and a flushing-box doing its best, which at this juncture sprang up in his lights, bust all the bronchi, tattered the pleura, came thrashing and howling up his windpipe like an unclean spirit and left him quite breathless. But in his twenty-five stone of blubber, brawn, bone and bombast there was still ample motion to keep him going again his bellows should mend, which they very soon did he was thankful to say and did say.
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