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Nausicaa
[...]
But who was Gerty?
Gerty MacDowell who was seated near her companions,
lost in thought, gazing far away into the distance, was in very truth
as fair a specimen of winsome Irish girlhood as one could wish to see.
She was pronounced beautiful by all who knew her though, as folks often
said, she was more a Giltrap than a MacDowell. Her figure was slight and
graceful, inclining even to fragility but those iron jelloids she had
been taking of late had done her a world of good much better than the
Widow Welch’s female pills and she was much better of those discharges
she used to get and that tired feeling. The waxen pallor of her face was
almost spiritual in its ivorylike purity though her rosebud mouth was
a genuine Cupid’s bow, Greekly perfect. Her hands were of finely
veined alabaster with tapering fingers and as white as lemon juice and
queen of ointments could make them though it was not true that she used
to wear kid gloves in bed or take a milk footbath either. Bertha Supple
told that once to Edy Boardman, a deliberate lie, when she was black out
at daggers drawn with Gerty (the girl chums had of course their little
tiffs from time to time like the rest of mortals) and she told her not
let on whatever she did that it was her that told her or she’d never
speak to her again. No. Honour where honour is due. There was an innate
refinement, a languid queenly hauteur about Gerty which was unmistakably
evidenced in her delicate hands and higharched instep. Had kind fate but
willed her to be born a gentlewoman of high degree in her own right and
had she only received the benefit of a good education Gerty MacDowell
might easily have held her own beside any lady in the land and have seen
herself exquisitely gowned with jewels on her brow and patrician suitors
at her feet vying with one another to pay their devoirs to her. Mayhap
it was this, the love that might have been, that lent to her softlyfeatured
face at whiles a look, tense with suppressed meaning, that imparted a
strange yearning tendency to the beautiful eyes a charm few could resist.
Why have women such eyes of witchery? Gerty’s were of the bluest
Irish blue, set off by lustrous lashes and dark expressive brows. Time
gas when those brows were not so silkilyseductive. It was Madame Vera
Verity, directress of the Woman Beautiful page of the Princess novelette,
who had first advised her to try eyebrowleine which gave that haunting
expression to the eyes, so becoming in leaders of fashion, and she had
never regretted it. Then there was blushing scientifically cured and how
to be tall increase your height and you have a beautiful face but your
nose? That would suit Mrs Dignam because she had a button one. But Gerty’s
crowning glory was her wealth of wonderful hair. It was dark brown with
a natural wave in it. She had cut it that very morning on account of the
new moon and it nestled about her pretty head in a profusion of luxuriant
clusters and pared her nails too, Thursday for wealth. And just now at
Edy’s words as a telltale flush, delicate as the faintest rosebloom,
crept into her cheeks she looked so lovely in her sweet girlish shyness
that of a surety God’s fair land of Ireland did not hold her equal.
[…]
And Jacky Caffrey shouted to look, there was another
and she leaned back and the garters were blue to match on account of the
transparent and they all saw it and shouted to look, look there it was
and she leaned back ever so far to see the fireworks and something queer
was flying about through the air, a soft thing to and fro, dark. And she
saw a long Roman candle going up over the trees up, up, and, in the tense
hush, they were all breathless with excitement as it went higher and higher
and she had to lean back more and more to look up after it, high, high,
almost out of sight, and her face was suffused with a divine, an entrancing
blush from straining back and he could see her other things too, nainsook
knickers, the fabric that caresses the skin, better than those other pettiwidth,
the green, four and eleven, on account of being white and she let him
and she saw that he saw and then it went so high it went out of sight
a moment and she was trembling in every limb from being bent so far back
he had a full view high up above her knee no-one ever not even on the
swing or wading and she wasn’t ashamed and he wasn’t either
to look in that immodest way like that because he couldn’t resist
the sight of the wondrous revealment half offered like those skirt-dancers
behaving so immodest before gentlemen looking and he kept on looking,
looking. She would fain have cried to him chokingly, held out her snowy
slender arms to him to come, to feel his lips laid on her white brow the
cry of a young girl’s love, a little strangled cry, wrung from her,
that cry that has rung through the ages. And then a rocket sprang and
bang shot blind and O! then the Roman candle burst and it was like a sigh
of O! and everyone cried O! O! in raptures and it gushed out of it a stream
of rain gold hair threads and they shed and ah! they were all greeny dewy
stars falling with golden, O so lively! O so soft, sweet, soft!
[…]
Slowly without looking back she went down the uneven
strand to Cissy, to Edy, to Jacky and Tommy Caffrey, to little baby Boardman.
It was darker now and there were stones and bits of wood on the strand
and slippy seaweed. She balked with a certain quiet dignity characteristic
of her but with care and very slowly because Gerty MacDowell was…
Tight boots? No. She’s lame! O!
Mr Bloom watched her as she limped away. Poor girl!
That’s why she’s left on the shelf and the others did a sprint.
Thought something was wrong by the cut of her jib. Jilted beauty. A defect
is ten times worse in a woman. But makes them polite. Glad I didn’t
know it when she was on show. Hot little devil all the same.
ENG310C1 - University of Ulster
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