The hunchback’s dry knot of hair rides his scalp as if in the grip of a hurricane. His face becomes so taut with laughter that one fears it will suddenly fly into a dozen rough fragments, like a canvas mask. He is breathing right in the mouth of Eustace, leaning on the desk, offering his amusement to the blond man, who sits in utter disgust, laughing back at him. Once every twelve snicks or so Marney’s body suffers a sort of tiny compensating convulsion. It is like watching a shirt pass through a wringer. His arms are tossed wide, his head comes down. Then the magazine of laughter is emptied snick snick snick. Shall he tell us what it is? he says at last, archly. Shall he? It’s the girls’ lavatory. They follow each other out into the hall; Eustace is driving him back deliberately now, laughing him back to his room. And Marney retreats with self-satisfied unction, snickering and louting. Projects himself uncouthly upstairs again like a crab, while Eustace keeps him on his way with little squirts of laughter. Then back to his desk, swearing under his breath, disgusted, outraged, humiliated. Marney! Eustace sitting there furious with Marney, in his little polished black hoofs, with his blond hair falling away on each side of his head.
The human comedy! The divine drama of a blocked shithouse all entangled with Marney, the little brown hoofs, the bucket of green ice and the canary setting out like Columbus every ten minutes and ending like Sir Walter Raleigh. The adventure of the ship, like a wooden body, and the spiritual adventure in the tower. I am not trying to muddle you. It is only that I myself am muddled by these phenomena — the snow, and Marney’s raw Spanish tulip, Eustace and the impotence of being earnest. If I look at him now he will be a little ashamed, remembering his laughter. In order not to let me see this, he will turn aside to the little mirror on the wall and examine the cavities in his teeth. From the lavatory a boiled pudding; from the hall where the coats hang like the girls’ playground selves, waiting for the clock, a whiff, human, sweaty, polluted with cheap scent and rice powder; from Eustace a pert fart — just to show that the equilibrium of his sunny temperament is restored.
It is not what one thinks, I have discovered from the books I read, that is important; it is not even what one does. It is what one is, essentially. That is why there is such confusion when I set out in an attempt to begin this spiritual adventure, because the fine logical borders of my reality completely disappear when a word comes to seize them; I attempt to put myself in jail, as it were, in the padded cell of language, only to discover that the whole external façade is implicated in this process. There is the ego, plus a number of fantastic appendages, with personal pronouns attached to them. My desk, for example, behind the door; my spring, filling by bowels with mushy ice; my Eustace too, my Marney … It is a rapacious mechanism which attempts to swallow the world. In it there is no paradigm of irrelevances. Everything is included in this dragnet — as one might set a lobster pot one night and find a continent in it when the sun rises. The hotel breathing quietly in a snowstorm of electric light; the existence here in which there is neither faith, hope, nor charity; Lobo sitting like a disconsolate robin (a Peruvian robin) by the locked door, waiting for Miss Venable to open to him; or Eustace sifting his voiceless farts through his underclothes and hastily opening the window. (And then, to annihilate this confusion of realities, today there is a wind blowing up from the Levant. The morning came like a fog along a roll of developed film.… It is a little unreasonable.)
I am sitting at the desk when Ohm appears, agitated, sweating. He teaches economics. His slack black coat-tails mourn agitatedly behind his thin back. His moustache lies down wearily on his lip. His corncrake voice is deeper by two tones than normal. Imagine a small soiled penguin with a weak backbone and broken flippers. That is Ohm. For Godsake, he is saying, Eustace must do something. There is one of the girls howling her heart out and he cannot find out what is wrong with her. His violet eyes are full of tears. She does not seem in pain but she is.… Eustace puts on his glasses and asks, where is she? Outside the door? Have her sent in at once.
She is there all of a sudden, a rather fine-looking girl of about fourteen. Thick bronze pigtails, and her face trampled with weeping. All of a sudden she says, “I’m bleedin’, sir.” A strange mixture of fear, shame, and puzzlement. Bleeding? The tears are running down her face again; she is giving out enormous male sniffs. Then, with her throat full of fog, she points at herself queerly and says, “I’m bleedin’ down there, between my legs, sir.” And before we can say or do anything, she falls down as softly and expertly as an adagio in front of the desk, in a faint. The confusion is immediately precipitated like a Morris dance. Ohm beats his own coat-tails in a wild dash to the telephone and starts ringing up a doctor. Eustace and I pick her up and put her on a couch. Perhaps the poor girl stabbed herself with a pen nib or something. For a while we chafe her hands and Eustace calls the English mistress in, who lights trails of brown paper and holds them shakily under the girl’s nose. There is whispering in the commerce room, and peeping at doors. The whole school is shaken to the roots. Then someone suggests examining her. “Yes, yes,” flutters Ohm like a ballet dancer. “She might be bleeding to death.” The English mistress declines the privilege out of modesty. She has no roof to her mouth, and also she is scared. Besides, she could never be able to explain coherently to anyone afterwards, supposing she did find out. Well, one of the older girls is called in, and we males retire. In ten minutes the English mistress comes out with a scarlet face, and runs to the lavatory to have a good weep. In the commerce room they are whispering: “What? Her period? What was all the row?” etc. etc. The doctor, when he arrives, gives us the news in stilted throaty medical terms. He is proud of knowing the terminology, it seems. The English mistress asks for the day off to get over her blushes. She will be bleeding next if she’s not careful. “It wasn’t that I was scared of,” says Eustace, contemptuously. “Silly little Winnie. Them girls get up to queer tricks sometimes. Ah well.” He is smiling now. Expelling his noiseless laughter out between his teeth with gusts of cigarette smoke. The temperature chart has fallen to subnormal following the anticlimax. Ohm stands there in his soiled penguins and gives a giggle of relief, then catches his boss’s eye and becomes flint again — passive, soiled, immobile, and very shy. Suddenly remembering, Eustace sits up and says, “Mr. Ohm, sir.” The violet eyes sink to the ground as he stands there, waiting. “Do you notice a queer smell, sir, in here, sir?” The eyes flash up to Eustace, to me, flutter and wander out into the garden. He does not sniff or move a muscle. It is as if he were sniffing with his mind. “No,” he says harshly at last. “No, sir.”
This question of the boiled pudding steaming in its rags! Or Severn drifting down among the floating furniture in a birdcage across Venice. If it were in my choice I would reject a petrarchal coronation — on account of my dying day, and because women have cancers. (This is a spiritual adventure, not the memoirs of a plumber.) “Do it please,” says Eustace, “do it for me this once and I’ll promise it’s the last time.” Ohm has trotted away through the yard door, to his desk in the economics room. Inevitably someone must go into that little hole and prize open the cistern lid to make the plunger plunge. Eustace is sitting there leaning forward, with an anxious, preoccupied look — as if he can hear the shit slowly piling up. “Go on,” he wheedles softly, miserably.