I just read chapters six and seven and what writing!! Minette and Halloday and Maxim are incredibly drawn out characters in a great bar scene. That was sooo enjoyable. "Wupert" with the lisp is a stroke of characterizational genius. So real and yet so funny without two dimensionalized, cartoonish characters. That is not easy to do. [Schoky, just compare the writing of chapter six with anything in Owen Meany and you can see the difference.] Let me just quote a few passages:
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The girl looked at Gerald with steady, calm curiosity. He laughed, hearing himself described. He felt proud too, full of male strength. His blue, keen eyes were lit up with laughter, his ruddy face, with its sharp fair hair, was full of satisfaction, and glowing with life. He piqued her.
`How long are you staying?' she asked him.
`A day or two,' he replied. `But there is no particular hurry.'
Still she stared into his face with that slow, full gaze which was so curious and so exciting to him. He was acutely and delightfully conscious of himself, of his own attractiveness. He felt full of strength, able to give off a sort of electric power. And he was aware of her dark, hot-looking eyes upon him. She had beautiful eyes, dark, fully-opened, hot, naked in their looking at him. And on them there seemed to float a film of disintegration, a sort of misery and sullenness, like oil on water. She wore no hat in the heated cafe, her loose, simple jumper was strung on a string round her neck. But it was made of rich peach-coloured crepe-de-chine, that hung heavily and softly from her young throat and her slender wrists. Her appearance was simple and complete, really beautiful, because of her regularity and form, her soft dark hair falling full and level on either side of her head, her straight, small, softened features, Egyptian in the slight fulness of their curves, her slender neck and the simple, rich-coloured smock hanging on her slender shoulders. She was very still, almost null, in her manner, apart and watchful.
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`There's Julius!' and he half rose to his feet, motioning to the newcomer. The girl, with a curious, almost evil motion, looked round over her shoulder without moving her body. Gerald watched her dark, soft hair swing over her ears. He felt her watching intensely the man who was approaching, so he looked too. He saw a pale, full-built young man with rather long, solid fair hair hanging from under his black hat, moving cumbrously down the room, his face lit up with a smile at once naive and warm, and vapid. He approached towards Birkin, with a haste of welcome.
It was not till he was quite close that he perceived the girl. He recoiled, went pale, and said, in a high squealing voice:
`Pussum, what are you doing here?'
The cafe looked up like animals when they hear a cry. Halliday hung motionless, an almost imbecile smile flickering palely on his face. The girl only stared at him with a black look in which flared an unfathomable hell of knowledge, and a certain impotence. She was limited by him.
`Why have you come back?' repeated Halliday, in the same high, hysterical voice. `I told you not to come back.'
The girl did not answer, only stared in the same viscous, heavy fashion, straight at him, as he stood recoiled, as if for safety, against the next table.
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Halliday took no notice, until the little plate was set before her. Then suddenly he cried:
`Pussum, you can't eat oysters when you're drinking brandy.'
`What has it go to do with you?' she asked.
`Nothing, nothing,' he cried. `But you can't eat oysters when you're drinking brandy.'
`I'm not drinking brandy,' she replied, and she sprinkled the last drops of her liqueur over his face. He gave an odd squeal. She sat looking at him, as if indifferent.
`Pussum, why do you do that?' he cried in panic. He gave Gerald the impression that he was terrified of her, and that he loved his terror. He seemed to relish his own horror and hatred of her, turn it over and extract every flavour from it, in real panic. Gerald thought him a strange fool, and yet piquant.
`But Pussum,' said another man, in a very small, quick Eton voice, `you promised not to hurt him.'
`I haven't hurt him,' she answered.
`What will you drink?' the young man asked. He was dark, and smooth-skinned, and full of a stealthy vigour.
`I don't like porter, Maxim,' she replied.
`You must ask for champagne,' came the whispering, gentlemanly voice of the other.
Gerald suddenly realised that this was a hint to him.
`Shall we have champagne?' he asked, laughing.
`Yes please, dwy,' she lisped childishly.
Gerald watched her eating the oysters. She was delicate and finicking in her eating, her fingers were fine and seemed very sensitive in the tips, so she put her food apart with fine, small motions, she ate carefully, delicately. It pleased him very much to see her, and it irritated Birkin. They were all drinking champagne. Maxim, the prim young Russian with the smooth, warm- coloured face and black, oiled hair was the only one who seemed to be perfectly calm and sober. Birkin was white and abstract, unnatural, Gerald was smiling with a constant bright, amused, cold light in his eyes, leaning a little protectively towards the Pussum, who was very handsome, and soft, unfolded like some red lotus in dreadful flowering nakedness, vainglorious now, flushed with wine and with the excitement of men. Halliday looked foolish. One glass of wine was enough to make him drunk and giggling. Yet there was always a pleasant, warm naivete about him, that made him attractive.
Isn't that great. And then notice how the drowning motif keps surfacing at the end of chapter six and into chapter seven:
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She turned and was gone again. She had been wearing a loose dressing-gown of purple silk, tied round her waist. She looked so small and childish and vulnerable, almost pitiful. And yet the black looks of her eyes made Gerald feel drowned in some potent darkness that almost frightened him.
and
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The Pussum lay in her bed, motionless, her round, dark eyes like black, unhappy pools. He could only see the black, bottomless pools of her eyes. Perhaps she suffered. The sensation of her inchoate suffering roused the old sharp flame in him, a mordant pity, a passion almost of cruelty.
