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CHAPTER XX

 

ZOE ended the discussion by driving half an inch of penknife into Coleman’s left arm and running out of the flat, slamming the door behind her.  Coleman was used to this sort of thing; this sort of thing, indeed, was what he was there for.  Carefully he pulled out the penknife which had remained sticking in his arm.  He looked at the blade and was relieved to see that it wasn’t so dirty as might have been expected.  He found some cotton wool, mopped up the blood as it oozed out, and dabbed the wound with iodine.  Then he set himself to bandage it up.  But to tie a bandage round one’s own left arm is not easy.  Coleman found it impossible to keep the lint in place, impossible to get the bandage right enough.  At the end of a quarter of an hour he had only succeeded in smearing himself very copiously with blood, and the wound was still unbound.  He gave up the attempt and contented himself with swabbing up the blood as it came out.

       ‘And forthwith came there out blood and water,’ he said aloud, and looked at the red stain on the cotton wool.  He repeated the words again and again, and at the fiftieth repetition burst out laughing.

       The bell in the kitchen suddenly buzzed.  Who could it be?  He went to the front door and opened it.  On the landing outside stood a tall slender young woman with slanting Chinese eyes and a wide mouth, elegantly dressed in a black frock piped with white.  Keeping the cotton wool still pressed to his bleeding arm, Coleman bowed as gracefully as he could.

       ‘Do come in,’ he said.  ‘You are just in the nick of time.  I am on the point of bleeding to death.  And forthwith came there out blood and water.  Enter, enter,’ he added, seeing the young woman still standing irresolutely on the threshold.

       ‘But I wanted to see Mr Coleman,’ she said, stammering a little and showing her embarrassment by blushing.

       ‘I am Mr Coleman.’  He took the cotton wool for a moment from his arm and looked with the air of a connoisseur at the blood on it.  ‘But I shall very soon cease to be that individual unless you come and tie up my wounds.’

       ‘But you’re not the Mr Coleman I thought you were,’ said the young lady, still more embarrassed.  ‘You have a beard, it is true; but …’

       ‘Then I must resign myself to quit this life, must I?’  He made a gesture of despair, throwing out both hands.  ‘Out, out, brief Coleman.  Out, damned sport,’ and he made as though to close the door.

       The young lady checked him.  ‘If you really need tying up,’ she said, ‘I’ll do it, of course.  I passed my First-Aid Exam in the war.’

       Coleman reopened the door.  ‘Saved!’ he said.  ‘Come in.’

       It had been Rosie’s original intention yesterday to go straight on from Mr Mercaptan’s to Toto’s.  She would see him at once, she would ask him what he meant by playing that stupid trick on her.  She would give him a good talking to.  She would even tell him that she would never see him again.  But, of course, if he showed himself sufficiently contrite and reasonably explanatory, she would consent – oh, very reluctantly – to take him back into favour.  In the free, unprejudiced circles in which she now moved, this sort of joke, she imagined, was a mere trifle.  It would be absurd to quarrel seriously about it.  But still, she was determined to give Toto a lesson.

       When, however, she did finally leave Mr Mercaptan’s delicious boudoir, it was too late to think of going all the way to Pimlico, to the address which Mr Mercaptan had given her.  She decided to put it off till the next day.

       And so the next day, duly, she had set out for Pimlico – to Pimlico, and to see a man called Coleman!  It seemed rather dull and second-rate after Sloane Street and Mr Mercaptan.  Poor Toto! – the sparkle of Mr Mercaptan had made him look rather tarnished.  That essay on the ‘Jus Primæ Noctis’ – ah! Walking through the unsavoury mazes of Pimlico, she thought of it, and, thinking of it, smiled.  Poor Toto!  And also, she mustn’t forget, stupid, malicious, idiotic Toto!  She had made up her mind exactly what she should say to him; she had even made up her mind what Toto would say to her.  And when the scene was over they would go and dine at the Café Royal – upstairs, where she had never been.  And she would make him rather jealous by telling him how much she had liked Mr Mercaptan; but not too jealous.  Silence is golden, as her father used to say when she used to fly into tempers and wanted to say nasty things to everybody within range.  Silence, about some things, is certainly golden.

       In the rather gloomy little turning off Lupus Street to which she had been directed, Rosie found the number, found, in the row of bells and cards, the name.  Quickly and decidedly she mounted the stairs.

       ‘Well,’ she was going to say as soon as she saw him, ‘I thought you were a civilized being.’  Mr Mercaptan had dropped a hint that Coleman wasn’t really civilized; a hint was enough for Rosie.  ‘But I see,’ she would go on, ‘that I was mistaken.  I don’t like to associate with boors.’  The fastidious lady had selected him as a young poet, not as a ploughboy.

       Well rehearsed, Rosie rang the bell.  And then the door had opened on this huge bearded Cossack of a man, who smiled, who looked at her with bright, dangerous eyes, who quoted the Bible and who was bleeding like a pig.  There was blood on his shirt, blood on his trousers, blood on his hands, bloody fingermarks on his face; even the blond fringe of his beard, she noticed, was dabbled here and there with blood.  It was too much, at first, even for her aristocratic equanimity.

       In the end, however, she followed him across a little vestibule into a bright, whitewashed room empty of all furniture but a table, a few chairs and a large boxspring and mattress, which stood like an island in the middle of the floor and served as bed or sofa as occasion required.  Over the mantelpiece was pinned a large photographic reproduction of Leonardo’s study of the anatomy of love.  There were no other pictures on the walls.

       ‘All the apparatus is here,’ said Coleman, and he pointed to the table.  ‘Lint, bandages, cotton wool, iodine, gauze, oiled silk.  I have them all ready in preparation for these little accidents.’

       ‘But do you often manage to cut yourself in the arm?’ asked Rosie.  She took off her gloves and began to undo a fresh packet of lint.

       ‘One gets cut,’ Coleman explained.  ‘Little differences of opinion, you know.  If your eye offend you, pluck it out; love your neighbour as yourself.  Argal: if his eye offend you – you see?  We live on Christian principles here.’

       ‘But who are “we”?’ asked Rosie, giving the cut a last dressing of iodine and laying a big square of lint over it.

       ‘Merely myself and – how shall I put it? – my helpmate,’ Coleman answered.  ‘Ah! you’re wonderfully skilful at this business,’ he went on.  ‘You’re the real hospital-nurse type; all maternal instincts.  When pain and anguish wring the brow, an interesting mangle thou, as we used to say in the good old days when the pun and the Spoonerismus were in fashion.’

       Rosie laughed.  ‘Oh, I don’t spend all my time tying up wounds,’ she said, and turned her eyes for an instant from the bandage.  After the first surprise she was feeling her cool self again.

       ‘Brava!’ cried Coleman.  ‘You make them too, do you?  Make them first and cure them afterwards in the grand old homœopathic way.  Delightful!  You see what Leonardo has to say about it.’  With his free hand he pointed to the photograph over the mantelpiece.

       Rosie, who had noticed the picture when she came into the room, preferred not to look at it too closely a second time.  ‘I think it’s rather revolting,’ she said, and was very busy with the bandage.

       ‘Ah! but that’s the point, that’s the whole point,’ said Coleman, and his clear blue eyes were alive with dancing lights.  ‘That’s the beauty of the grand passion.  It is revolting.  You read what the Fathers of the Church have to say about love.  They’re the men.  It was Odo of Cluny, wasn’t it, who called woman a saccus stercoris, a bag of muck.  Si quis enim considerat quæ intra nares et quæ intra fauces et quæ intra ventrem lateant, sordes ubique reperiet.’  The Latin rumbled like eloquent thunder in Coleman’s mouth.  ‘Et si nec extremis digitis flegma vel stercus tangere patimur, quomodo ipsum stercoris saccum amplecti desideramus.’  He smacked his lips.  ‘Magnificent!’ he said.

       ‘I don’t understand Latin,’ said Rosie, ‘and I’m glad of it.  And your bandage is finished.  Look.’

       ‘Interesting mangle!’  Coleman smiled his thanks.  ‘But Bishop Odo, I fear, wouldn’t even have spared you; not even for your good works.  Still less for your good looks, which would only have provoked him to dwell with the more insistency on the visceral secrets which they conceal.’

       ‘Really,’ Rosie protested.  She would have liked to get up and go away, but the Cossack’s blue eyes glittered at her with such a strange expression and he smiled so enigmatically, that she found herself still sitting where she was, listening with a disgusted pleasure to his quick talk, his screams of deliberate and appalling laughter.

       ‘Ah!’ he exclaimed, throwing up his hands, ‘what sensualists these old fellows were!  What a real voluptuous feeling they had for dirt and gloom and sordidness and boredom, and all the horrors of vice.  They pretended they were trying to dissuade people from vice by enumerating its horrors.  But they were really only making it more spicy by telling the truth about it.  O esca vermium, O massa pulveris!  What nauseating embracements!  To conjugate the copulative verb, boringly, with a sack of tripes – what could be more exquisitely and piercingly and deliriously vile?’  And he threw back his head and laughed; the blood-dabbled tips of his blond beard shook.  Rosie looked at them, fascinated with disgust.

       ‘There’s blood on your beard,’ she felt compelled to say.

       ‘What of it? Why shouldn’t there be?’ Coleman asked.

       Confused, Rosie felt herself blushing.  ‘Only because it’s rather unpl-leasant.  I don’t know why.  But it is.’

       ‘What a reason for immediately falling into my arms!’ said Coleman.  ‘To be kissed by a beard is bad enough at any time.  But by a bloody beard – imagine!’

       Rosie shuddered.

       ‘After all,’ he said, ‘what interest or amusement is there in doing the ordinary things in the obvious way?  Life au naturel.’  He shook his head.  ‘You must have garlic and saffron.  Do you believe in God?’

       ‘Not m-much,’ said Rosie, smiling.

       ‘I pity you.  You must find existence dreadfully dull.  As soon as you do, everything becomes a thousand times life-size.  Phallic symbols five hundred feet high,’ he lifted his hand.  ‘A row of grinning teeth you could run the hundred yards on.’  He grinned at her through his beard.  ‘Wounds big enough to let a coach-and-six drive into their purulent recesses.  Every slightest act eternally significant.  It’s only when you believe in God, and especially in hell, that you can really begin enjoying life.  For instance, when in a few moments you surrender yourself to the importunities of my bloody beard, how prodigiously much more you’d enjoy it if you could believe you were committing the sin against the Holy Ghost – if you kept thinking calmly and dispassionately all the time the affair was going on: All this is not only a horrible sin, it is also ugly, grotesque, a mere defecation, a …’

       Rosie held up her hand.  ‘You’re really horrible,’ she said.  Coleman smiled at her.  Still, she did not go.

       ‘He who is not with me is against me,’ said Coleman.  ‘If you can’t make up your mind to be with, it’s surely better to be positively against than merely negatively indifferent.’

       ‘Nonsense!’ exclaimed Rosie feebly.

       ‘When I call my lover a nymphomaniacal dog, she runs the penknife into my arm.’

       ‘Well, do you enjoy it?’ asked Rosie.

       ‘Piercingly,’ he answered.  ‘It is at once sordid to the last and lowest degree and infinitely and eternally significant.’

       Coleman was silent and Rosie too said nothing.  Futilely she wished it had been Toto instead of this horrible, dangerous Cossack.  Mr Mercaptan ought to have warned her.  But then, of course, he supposed that she already knew the creature.  She looked up at him and found his bright eyes fixed upon her; he was silently laughing.

       ‘Don’t you want to know who I am?’ she asked.  ‘And how I got here?’

       Coleman blandly shook his head.  ‘Not in the very least,’ he said.

       Rosie felt more helpless, somehow, than ever.  ‘Why not?’ she asked as bravely and impertinently as she could.

       Coleman answered with another question.  ‘Why should I?’

       ‘It would be natural curiosity.’

       ‘But I know all I want to know,’ he said.  ‘You are a woman or, at any rate, you have all the female stigmata.  Not too sumptuously well-developed, let me add.  You have no wooden legs.  You have eyelids that flutter up and down over your eyes like a moving shutter in front of a signalling lamp, spelling out in a familiar code the letters: A.M.O.R., and not, unless I am very much mistaken, those others: C.A.S.T.I.T.A.S.  You have a mouth that looks as though it knew how to taste and how to bite.  You …’

       Rosie jumped up.  ‘I’m going away,’ she said.

       Coleman leaned back in his chair and hallooed with laughter.  ‘Bite, bite, bite,’ he said.  ‘Thirty-two times.’  And he opened and shut his mouth as fast as he could, so that his teeth clicked against one another with a little dry, bony noise.  ‘Every mouthful thirty-two times.  That’s what Mr Gladstone said.  And surely Mr Gladstone’ – he rattled his sharp, white teeth again –  ‘surely Mr Gladstone should know.’

       ‘Goodbye,’ said Rosie from the door.

       ‘Goodbye,’ Coleman called back; and immediately afterwards jumped to his feet and made a dash across the room towards her.

       Rosie uttered a cry, slipped through the door and, slamming it behind her, ran across the vestibule and began fumbling with the latches of the outer door.  It wouldn’t open, it wouldn’t open.  She was trembling; fear made her feel sick.  There was a rattling at the door behind her.  There was a whoop of laughter, and then the Cossack’s hands were on her arms, his face came peering over her shoulder, and the blond beard dabbled with blood prickled against her neck and face.

       ‘Oh, don’t, don’t, don’t!’ she implored, turning away her head.  Then all at once she began violently crying.

       ‘Tears!’ exclaimed Coleman in rapture, ‘genuine tears!’  He bent eagerly forward to kiss them away, to drink them as they fell.  ‘What an intoxication,’ he said, looking up to the ceiling like a chicken that has taken a sip of water; he smacked his lips.

       Sobbing uncontrollably, Rosie had never in all her life felt less like a great, fastidious lady.