Zoe ended the discussion by driving half an inch of pen-knife 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 pen-knife 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
tight 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 spot,” 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 finger-marks 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 box-spring 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 defæcation, 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 pen-knife 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.”
“Good-bye,” said Rosie from the door.
“Good-bye,” 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.