Chapter Three
The horrendously galling noise had wholly thwarted Pluck’s concentration—he had been studying; cerebrally, aesthetically, you understand, as his bodily ardour had dissipated via manual manipulation, as previously indicated, that afternoon; he had been studying the photographs of those anonymous, liberally endowed beauties of the beach, the parlour, the garden, the fairy glade—and, his attention thus burst, he donned eveningwear and descended the stairs once again into the embracing bosom of his fellow humanity. There was a ballroom in the hotel, and it was there that most of the guests had now assembled. Rolling his eyes, Pluck entered, wincing blatantly at the strains of a, to Pluck’s ears, cloying Schubertian lied interpreted with a dearth of imagination by Frau Gilda Hühnerbeinstein, opera diva of local renown and, to Pluck’s delight, no little girth.
Pluck found a seat at one of the large round tables and sat down. His appreciation was focused so narrowly on the expansiveness of the singer, however, that he’d neglected to first ascertain the vacancy or lack thereof of said chair, and found himself sat astride the unappreciative thighs of Monsieur Marcel Lapin-Défunt, a French diplomat who was wont to reserve his lap for the dandling of his mistresses.
“Oof!” (So spake Monsieur Lapin-Défunt.)
“Pardon me! But whatever are you doing beneath my bottom, monsieur?!” demanded Pluck in a tone of high offence.
“Get off me, you moron!”
“Pardon me, but would you be so kind as to remove your legs from underneath the seat of my trousers before I summon the porter?!”
Having exhausted diplomacy, Monsieur Lapin-Défunt threw Pluck bodily off him. The singing stopped, and the guests looked as one at the little man with the undersized head sprawling face-down on the carpet. His honour impermissibly tainted, Pluck grabbed hold of a chair to support his attempt to stand and confront his antagonist, but in so doing, pulled out the chair from underneath the slight but exquisite derrière of Madame Lapin-Défunt, a cervine beauty who collapsed with Parisian elegance onto the carpet, her wineglass fragmenting across the floor. Pluck returned to the floor, flailing for a handhold, grasping the coattail of Coronel Feosalma, late of the Spanish military, noble in mindset, dignified in deportment and ancient of age, now reduced to a wriggling heap on the carpet.
“I reached out to you for assistance, monsieur, and you failed to help me rise!” shouted Pluck to the coronel. “You have insulted me needlessly!”
“Get away from me before I kill you,” the coronel uttered, fumbling to assume a kneeling position and glowering at the interloper.
“I will have you arrested!” cried Pluck from the floor. “The police, manager! Summon the police and have this poltroon removed!”
At that, the coronel seized Pluck in a fearsome lock; the two tumbled about the floor, knocking into patrons’ chairs and tripping a passing waiter, the fresh fish from whose sterling silver-plated tray sluiced onto the coiled hair of a duchess.
“What goes on there?!” demanded the redoubtable dame from the stage (i.e., Frau Hühnerbeinstein). “What are you two doing?!”
Pluck sprang up at once. “Nothing, your grace, your majestical paragon of grace in melody and physical build! I pray you accept my limitless pardons on behalf of this ridiculous Italian gentleman who interrupted your performance!”
“I am Spanish, you brainless scum!” hissed the coronel, who drew back his arthritic fist in preparation for delivering a blow. Pluck seized a small dessert knife from the nearest table and announced, “For you, madame, I shall disembowel the stinking entrails of this swine and hurl them at you like flowers to a diva!”
“That will not be necessary, young man! I am perfectly content for my auditors’ viscera to remain within their fleshy confines. Please calm yourself down so that I might resume my song.”
Pluck glared at the coronel; bloodlust bloated his eyes. Slowly, ever so slowly, ever, ever so slowly, the hand with the dessert knife went down. He threw the knife behind him; it narrowly missed several patrons and clanked against a wall. That hand, that same hand, so recently prepared to annihilate his enemy, now extended towards him, while Pluck magnanimously proposed: “Friends?”
Growling, looking about him as others willed him to accept, caving, then, entirely to the pressure of his peers against his better judgement, the coronel took Pluck’s hand, recoiling only a little at its flaccidity.
“Best friends?” Pluck upped the ante.
“I shall not kill you today,” promised the coronel.
“But are we best friends?” Pluck persisted.
“No,” answered the coronel, with admirable forthrightness.
“But do you want to dine with me sometime, and go for walks, and, and, and, and come to my room and chat about art and nature and politics?”
“No.” The coronel found his chair, set it back on its legs, and sat down. Pluck followed him.
“But shall we tour the continent together, and you could show me the wonders of Italy and introduce me to your mummy and daddy, and we could hang out in gentlemen’s clubs and laugh over titbits in the papers and play cards, you’d have to teach me first, and read books to each other and—”
“Just, just, shut up, will you?” pleaded the exasperated coronel.
Pluck stood unbendingly beside him; he would not stop. “But we’re best friends! We’re best friends now! Best friends do things together, they go places together, they unburden themselves of their secrets and—”
The coronel bent his neck and covered his face with his palms. “Just go away from me. I beg you. I beg you.”
“Say you’ll go for a walk with me tomorrow! Say it! Say it!”
“Please,” begged the diva from the stage, “I would like to finish my song now.”
Pluck whirled to face her: “A thousand pardons, madame! I must apologise on behalf of my friend, who is going on a refreshing walk with me early tomorrow morning! Isn’t that right, ol’ pal o’ mine?”
“Absolutely not!”
A single tear—a single, lonely tear, lacking as it did even the company of a twin on the other side of Pluck’s pale face—trickled down his cheek. “I don’t want to be your friend anymore!” he screamed, and, for emphasis, turned his back to the coronel, who had learnt such a mastery of cloaking his feelings in the course of his service that anyone, to look at him, would think that he did not care.
“The poor man!” whispered someone (apropos of Pluck, not the coronel).
“Give him a chance!” said another.
“I hate to see friends quarrel,” opined a third.
“Go on the walk!” demanded a gentleman across the room, openly, to the coronel.
“Yes!” seconded another, who stood. “Go on the walk!”
The cry for clemency, for sympathy, for humanity, rolled contagiously around the ballroom, until by the end, almost all of the patrons who had not been insulted by Pluck since his arrival the day before had taken up the call:
“Go on the walk!” “Give him a chance!” “Stay friends!” “Friends are a precious thing!,” etc.
The coronel, gritting his teeth and looking about him, recognised a fight he could not win. “All right,” he mumbled.
“What was that? Speak up, you stupid old fool, we can’t hear you!” laughed Pluck, enormously happy.
“I said ‘all right’.”
“What’s that, you meek old idiot? I can’t hear!” Pluck laughed.
“I said ‘all right’!”
“He said he would!” remarked someone.
“He did!”
“He’ll do it!”
The ballroom belched forth a ringing round of applause. Pluck turned to bask therein, crying openly now.
“I love you all!” he shouted, higher-pitched than ever. “You guys! Let me tell you something: you’re just the best bunch of ladies and gents that has ever been assembled, anytime and anywhere, from the birth of the universe till the day it dies, that I promise you!”
The coronel, arms crossed rigidly across his pigeon chest, mumbled something in sailor’s Spanish.
“That’s the spirit!” Pluck slapped him heartily on the back, knocking the coronel forward, chin cracking onto the table, gut slammed by its edge. “By the way, friend, what’s your name?”
The coronel gasped, holding his stomach.
“What’s that?” To the room: “He can’t remember his name!”
All laughed.
“Eyague,” whispered the coronel.
“His name is ‘Eye-Goo’!” Pluck announced, to general applause.
Frau Hühnerbeinstein, too, clapped. “Very well. I love a happy ending as much as anyone—it restores a satisfying balance after an spell of dramatic discord, reaffirms the hegemony of order over chaos, certifies the centrality of man in the cosmic narrative, and justifies the presumption of meaning underpinning our universe—but now, please, monsieur, be seated, that the concert may resume. I dedicate this next song to the both of you—and to the eternal sacrament of perfect friendship.”
Pluck wiped his eyes and, as the diva launched herself into another song, sat down in the lap of Monsieur Lapin-Défunt. The latter threw off the former and grabbed his stick, with which he moved to strike Pluck, only to find his arm restrained by the moderating influence of Madame Lapin-Défunt (given name Petunia). From the floor, Pluck screamed: “Eye-Goo! Eye-Goo! Help me! This savage is trying to kill me!”
The coronel remaining in his seat, and the music halted once again, Herr Voot, the hotel manager, desisting from the violin with which he had been accompanying the diva, ordered the waiter to find the unfortunate fellow an empty seat. With an efficient briskness for which that métier is renowned, the waiter had Pluck, in seconds, wedged between a dainty Scottish horsebreeder and the spoilt adolescent son of an Iberian burgher. From that constricted vantage, one knee over the other, shoulders scrunched forward till they practically fused, Pluck watched, and, a little, listened to, Frau Hühnerbeinstein. It would not be incorrect to report that he was salivating. As the ennobling tones soared forth from her golden larynx, Frau Hühnerbeinstein’s eyes, surveying the room, alighted, sparrow-like, on the panting Pluck. Her eyes then, naturally, fluttered away in disgust, but not before Pluck had allowed a serviette to sail, for propriety’s sake, down upon his protruding lap. It was delightful here, Pluck ruminated, nestled amongst his many friends, marinating in the warmth of the fireplace that was a head taller than he, the constellation of chandeliers scintillating with trickling rivulets of light reflected from the hearth, then irradiating it back like a many-legged curtain of gold depending softly upon the people. Then the song finished, and everyone clapped, and Pluck, aroused with emotion, threw, he knew not why, his empty wineglass across the room at Monsieur Lapin-Défunt.
The latter rose at once to assault him, shouting something insensible about the demands of honour and the necessity of Pluck’s violent death, but his wife and an assortment of tactful members of the audience calmed him down.
The performance finished, more drinks were served, and Pluck took the opportunity to wander about the ballroom. He searched for his friend Eyague, but he had disappeared. “He must be searching for me,” thought Pluck, “and we are, funnily enough, missing each other!” He passed by that cad Stoupes, who was in a seat next to Enid. Why she would tolerate that ridiculous guttersnipe was more than he, even he, with all his powers of fathoming, could fathom. He stopped for a moment and, peering through the vase-shaped space between two gossiping gentlemen, watched them: Stoupes, perspiring offensively down the back of his neck, smirking his smarmy smirk, leaning in towards Enid, easily twice his age, turning away from him her thin, veined, ropey neck. He placed a hand on one of her bare, flabby arms, and she pulled it away. She stood up; Pluck noticed that her breast, evidently unsupported beneath her hanging, toga-like ballgown, sagged irrecoverably. Such a sight spiked Pluck’s sensitive soul, so that for a few seconds he reflected on his own mortality, before a large lady in a pea green dress passed by him and spring blossomed back into his consciousness, life reminded him of its abiding existence, and an infinitude of possibilities stretched out before him like a prairieful of deer stretched out before a cougar.
He swerved through the guests to Herr Voot’s table and crouched down next to a half-slumbering man in a wig who sat to the manager’s left.
“Excuse me, monsieur, but I have important news.”
The man in the wig turned his head. He had an illness, of some sort, Pluck decided, though he couldn’t diagnose it precisely and, in truth, did not care. The man raised his watery, long-suffering eyes to Pluck’s charcoal ones.
“Nothing is important, anymore,” the man opined in muted tones, and with that, lowered his head and closed his eyes once more.
“Buck up, friend, won’t you?” urged Pluck. “This blessed world of ours is simply chock-full of unpredictable wonders round each and every corner! Do you hear me? Chock-full!”
“Leave me be.” And the gentleman was so still that Pluck nearly thought he had died.
“Do you have a grown daughter, sir? Or perhaps a sister? Or friend far away, in such jeopardy that her only saviour in time of lament would be yourself?”
The man said nothing.
“The reason I ask,” Pluck continued, “is because you have a telegram in the lobby of a most urgent nature.”
“Have them bring it here.”
“In normal, civilised circumstances, monsieur, that is exactly what I would have them do, but, I am afraid to inform monsieur, there has been a mix-up of the most scandalous nature—”
“I would just as soon not be disturbed. My sole extant female relative is my sister-in-law—and she can go hang.” This outburst was followed by a snore.
Not to be put off, Pluck shuffled over to the gentleman in the chair to the manager’s right. This man had the build of a champion sportsman and a thick set of whiskers of equally impressive proportions. “Excuse me, monsieur.”
The man was just finishing a joke he was sharing with Voot: “—a bell on her bottom! A-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! D’ya get it?”
The manager laughed with a practised chuckle of such diplomacy that one could never hope to discern whether it was indicative of legitimate mirth, a decorous counterfeit thereof crafted to conceal an aloof dearth of amusement, or a semblance of counterfeit mirth designed to cloak the earnest mirth hiding beneath it which would appear untoward to onlookers of a certain bent. Meanwhile, Pluck had crouched down next to the brawny gent and now said to him:
“Excuse me, monsieur, but I have important news.”
The man’s beard turned towards him. “Yes? What is the news, then, I pray you, little man?”
“Sir, you have a telegram in the lobby of a most urgent nature.”
“I do? Well have them bring it in, then. What’s the problem?”
“In normal, civilised circumstances, monsieur, that is exactly what I would have them do, but, I am afraid to inform monsieur, there has been a mix-up of the most scandalous nature—”
“What kind of a mix-up? What are you blathering about, sir?”
“Monsieur—” He whispered, now. “You must pardon the indelicacy of my having to relate this, monsieur, but I found myself in the lobby, myself, just a moment ago, monsieur, and, monsieur, try as I did to interfere, monsieur, I could not prevent it. Monsieur.”
“Prevent what?”
“I simply could not prevent it.”
“Prevent what, for heaven’s sake?!”
“The porter Mifkin from reading it aloud to the guests and colleagues about him.”
“He what?!”
“I must say that he read it with a singular relish, appending humorous observations here and there, with a brazen disregard for the intimate nature of the contents of the note, I might add, monsieur.”
The reader might well imagine the violent stupefaction with which the wronged gentleman received this news. I know I can.
“‘Intimate nature’?!” The man leapt to his feet, as they say, with all the haste we would expect from one so offended.
“I assure you, monsieur, that I, following such ignominious revelations, will still endeavour to view your lordship with every respect which is your due; but, the world being what it is, and the contagion of scandal being what it is, I need hardly tell you that most of your other acquaintances will not.”
“Thank you, monsieur!” The man’s eyes flashed with outrage and a thirst for vengeance of a most honourable order. “I will not forget this courtesy.”
Pluck bowed—“At your service, monsieur”—and the gentleman stomped off. Pluck sat down in the vacant chair and pulled Herr Voot by his shoulder to attend to him. “Monsieur manager, I must discuss with you a most delicate matter.”
“Is the matter in question your feud with the French gentleman, or your love affair with the Spanish gentleman, monsieur?” retorted Voot.
“Neither, monsieur, though I thank you for remembering me. I am afraid the matter concerns a most disreputable deed perpetrated by one of your patrons upon another.”
The manager crossed his arms and his legs and looked Pluck over. Pluck returned the compliment. Looked at one way, Herr Voot had a most uninteresting face, in that it contained two eyes, a nose, a mouth, and all the rest of which most any other specimen of the species might equally boast. In that respect, there was nothing onto which the inquisitive gaze of a born connoisseur of the endless permutations of humanity like Pluck might latch. Viewed another way, however, the face in question could be said to harbour a few tantalising peculiarities: his eyebrows were straight and black and thin, and looked drawn-on, and mirrored the two strokes of his moustache exactly; his eyes disclosed the almost animal, pre-linguistic sadness of a puppy, loose in the rain outside the shack wherein its owner, unbeknownst to and yet, in some way, divined by the creature, has died; one eye, what’s more, was afforded a sheen from a large, foggy monocle uncomfortably clasped between eyebrow and cheek; his nose, originating at the source between his eyes like an average nose, distinguished itself by tapering in its southward progression to a tip against which, it appeared, one might sharpen one’s penknife; and finally, his lipless dash of a chin betrayed no more width than did his eyebrows. In summary, looking back over this paragraph, I must revert to my initial impression: it was a face not worth describing.
“Indeed?” rejoined Voot.
“Indeed,” affirmed Pluck. “Do you wish to hear it, or shall we remain seated here silently observing each other’s faces?”
“By all means, monsieur,” sighed the manager, now looking to his drink, now drinking it. “I pride myself on my fleet-footedness in undoing such disreputable deeds as the one to which you refer.”
“Then I shall continue,” continued Pluck, appeased. “I regret to inform you that a Mister Glen Stoupes of Canada insulted a lady in the tearoom this afternoon—”
“Indeed?”
“Indeed, then threatened to inflict bodily harm on myself—”
“Your name, sir?”
“Mister Pluck—”
“Mister Pluck.”
“—when I sought to intervene.”
“Might you provide me with some details of the insult, monsieur?”
“With every pleasure, monsieur: it consisted, I am afraid, in an open attack on the lady’s chastity, Herr Manager.”
“I see.”
“He implied,” Pluck continued, far beyond the bounds of necessity, “that the gentlemen who had enjoyed the fragrant delights of her vagina were manifold.”
Voot closed his eyes and nodded with encouraging resolution. “It would sound most serious, monsieur, and I thank you for, in this instance, shrugging off tact and reporting it to me in this gratuitous manner instead.”
Pluck bowed with all the forcefulness honour demanded, while still seated, but, given the close proximity of the interlocutors, his pasty forehead struck and dislodged the manager’s monocle so that it lacerated several sections of skin around the eye. Voot emitted a short exclamation of more air than content, followed by a most unmanful shriek, which understandably drew the attention of the guests in the vicinity. Humans being a naturally curious lot, they turned in the direction of the yelp in order to ascertain the motivation for its utterance; you or I would do the same.
Herr Voot’s poor chair tumbled to the floor while its recent occupant jumped up and danced about, hands to his eye, blood spurting in several directions. Pluck, gentle creature that he was, could not stand the sight of blood, any more than he could any other bodily fluid, very much including his own, and so shielded his (Pluck’s) eye and turned away. A waiter or two—Pluck didn’t note the number—snapped open napkins and rushed to their manager’s aid.
“You disgusting slob,” Pluck maligned Herr Voot, loudly, over his shoulder. “If you had the slightest sense of shame, you would resign your position at once and venture out to drown yourself in the nearest pond.”
Pluck’s exhortation went largely unheard by those around them, preoccupied as they were with the blood-geysering supervisor of the establishment. They sat Voot down, stemmed the gushing-away of his vital life-force and whispered sweet, soothing words in his ear, like an amorous lover pledging a gaudy wedding, with no intent to make good, for the immediate prospect of violating his sweetheart’s armoured maidenhood. Pluck, for his part, was surpassingly irritated by the lack of attention the manager was devoting to the improprieties with which Pluck had so lately acquainted him. “Pardon, pardon, monsieur, monsieur, madame,” Pluck m