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 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 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 homoeopathic 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 a woman a saccus stercoris, a bag of muck. Si quis enim considerat quae intra nares et quae intra fauces et quae 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
