“So I went around the gallery a third time, and I knew that, Hindu or no Hindu, I was in on what was wrong with the world—and I said the world’s like that poor distressed moll of a Jenny, never knowing which end to put its mittens on, and pecking about like a mystified rook until this particular night gave her a hoist and set her up at the banquet (where she has been sitting dumbfounded ever since), and Robin the sleeping and troubled, looking amazed. It was more than a boy like me (who am the last woman left in this world, though I am the bearded lady) could bear, and I went into a lather of misery watching them, and thinking of you, and how in the end you’ll all be locked together, like the poor beasts that get their antlers mixed and are found dead that way, their heads fattened with a knowledge of each other they never wanted, having had to contemplate each other, head-on and eye to eye, until death; well, that will be you and Jenny and Robin. You, who should have had a thousand children and Robin, who should have been all of them; and Jenny the bird, snatching the oats out of love’s droppings—and I went mad, I’m like that. What an autopsy I’ll make, with everything all which ways in my bowels! A kidney and a shoe cast of the Roman races; a liver and a long-spent whisper, a gall and a wrack of scolds from Milano, and my heart that will be weeping still when they find my eyes cold, not to mention a thought of Cellini in my crib of bones, thinking how he must have suffered when he knew he could not tell it for ever—(beauty’s name spreads too thick). And the lining of my belly, flocked with the locks cut off love in odd places that I’ve come on, a bird’s nest to lay my lost eggs in, and my people as good as they come, as long as they have been coming, down the grim path of ‘We know not’ to ‘We can’t guess why.’
“Well, I was thinking of you, a woman at best, and you know what that means? Not much in the morning—all trussed up with pain’s bridle. Then I turned my eyes on Jenny, who was turning her eyes looking for trouble, for she was then at that pitch of life that she knew to be her last moment. And do you need the doctor to tell you that that is a bad strange hour for a woman? If all women could have it all at once, you could beat them in flocks like a school of scorpions; but they come eternally, one after the other, and go head foremost into it alone. For men of my kind it isn’t so bad; I’ve never asked better than to see the two ends of my man no matter how I might be dwindling. But for one like Jenny, the poor ruffled bitch, why, God knows, I bled for her because I knew in an instant the kind of a woman she was, one who had spent all her life rummaging through photographs of the past, searching for the one who would be found leaning sideways with a look as if angels were sliding down her hip—a great love who had been spared a face but who’d been saddled with loins, leaning against a drape of Scotch velvet with a pedestal at the left twined with ivy, a knife in her boot and her groin pouting as if she kept her heart in it. Or searching among old books for the passion that was all renunciation and lung trouble, with flowers at the bosom—that was Jenny—so you can imagine how she trembled when she saw herself going toward fifty without a thing done to make her a tomb-piece, or anything in her past that would get a flower named for her. So I saw her coming forward, stepping lightly and trembling and looking at Robin, saying to me (I’d met her, if you call it meeting a woman when you pound her kidney), ‘Won’t you introduce me?’ and my knees knocking together; and my heart as heavy as Adam’s off ox, because you are a friend of mine and a good poor thing, God knows, who will never put a stop to anything; you may be knocked down, but you’ll crawl on for ever, while there’s any use to it, so I said, ‘Certainly, damn it!’ and brought them together. As if Robin hadn’t met enough people without me making it worse.”
“Yes,” she said, “she met everyone.”
“Well,” he went on, “the house was beginning to empty, all the common clay was pouring down the steps talking of the Diva (there’s something wrong with any art that makes a woman all bust!) and how she had taken her high L, and all the people looking out of the corners of their eyes to see how their neighbours were dressed, and some of them dropping their cloaks rather low to see the beast in a man snarling up in his neck—and they never guessed that it was me, with both shoulders under cover, that brought the veins to their escorts’ temples—and walking high and stately—the pit of my stomach gone black in the darkness that was eating it away for thinking of you, and Robin smiling sideways like a cat with canary feathers to account for, and Jenny tripping beside her so fast that she would get ahead and have to run back with small cries of ambition, saying wistfully, ‘You must come to my house for late supper.’
“God help me, I went! For who will not betray a friend or, for that matter, himself for a whisky and soda, caviare and a warm fire—and that brings me to the ride that we took later. As Don Antonio said long ago, ‘Didst thou make a night of it?’ And was answered (by Claudio), ‘Yes. Egad! And morning too; for about eight o’clock the next day, slap! They all soused upon their knees, kissed around, burned their commodes, drank my health, broke their glasses and so parted.’ So Cibber put it, and I put it in Taylor’s words: ‘Did not
Periander
think fit to lie with his wife
Melissa
after she had already gone hent to heaven?’ Is this not night work of another order also, but night work still? And in another place, as Montaigne says: ‘Seems it not to be a lunatic humour of the moon that
Endymion
was by the lady moon lulled to sleep for many months together that she might have her joy of him who stirred not at all except in sleep.’
“Well, having picked up a child in transit, a niece of someone Jenny knew, we all went riding down the
Champs Elysées
. We went straight as a die over the
Pont Neuf
and whirled around into the
rue du Cherche-Midi
, God forgive us! Where you, weak vessel of love, were lying awake and wondering where, and all the time Jenny doing the deed that was as bad and out of place as that done by Catherine of Russia, and don’t deny it, who took old Poniatovsky’s throne for a water-closet. And suddenly I was glad I was simple and didn’t want a thing in the world but what could be had for five francs. And I envied Jenny nothing she had in her house, though I admit I had been sort of casting my eye over a couple of books, which I would have spirited away if they hadn’t been bound in calf—for I might steal the mind of Petronius, as well I knew, but never the skin of a calf—for the rest, the place was as full of the wrong thing as you would care to spend your inheritance on—well, I furnished my closet with phenomenal luck at the fair, what with shooting a row of chamber-pots and whirling a dozen wheels to the good, and everyone about me getting nothing for a thousand francs but a couple of velvet dogs, or dolls that looked as if they had been up all night. And what did I walk home with for less than five francs? A fine frying-pan that could coddle six eggs, and a raft of minor objects that one needs in the kitchen—so I looked at Jenny’s possessions with scorn in my eye. It may have been all most ‘unusual,’ but who wants a toe-nail that is thicker than common? And that thought came to me out of the contemplation of the mad strip of the inappropriate that runs through creation, like my girl friend who married some sort of Adriatic bird who had such thick ones that he had to trim them with a horse-file—my mind is so rich that it is always wandering! Now I am back to the time when that groom walked into my life wearing a priest’s collar that he had no more right to than I have to a crupper. Well, then the carriages came up with their sweet wilted horses, and Robin went down the steps first, and Jenny tearing after her saying, ‘Wait! Wait!’ as if she were talking to an express on its way into Boston, and dragging her shawl and running, and we all got in—she’d collected some guests who were waiting for her in the house.”
The doctor was embarrassed by Nora’s rigid silence; he went on. “I was leaning forward on my cane as we went down under the trees, holding it with both hands, and the black wagon I was in was being followed by a black wagon, and that by another, and the wheels were turning, and I began saying to myself: The trees are better, and grass is better, and animals are all right and the birds in the air are fine. And everything we do is decent when the mind begins to forget—the design of life; and good when we are forgotten—the design of death. I began to mourn for my spirit, and the spirits of all people who cast a shadow a long way beyond what they are, and for the beasts that walk out of the darkness alone; I began to wail for all the little beasts in their mothers, who would have to step down and begin going decent in the one fur that would last them their time. And I said to myself: For these I would go bang on my knees, but not for her—I wouldn’t piss on her if she were on fire! I said, Jenny is so greedy that she wouldn’t give her shit to the crows. And then I thought: Oh, the poor bitch, if she were dying, face down in a long pair of black gloves, would I forgive her? And I knew I would forgive her, or anyone making a picture. And then I began looking at the people in that carriage, very carefully raising my eyes so they would not notice anything unusual, and I saw the English girl sitting up there pleased and frightened.
“And then at the child—there was terror in it and it was running away from something grown up; I saw that she was sitting still and she was running; it was in her eyes and in her chin, drawn down, and her eyes wide open. And then I saw Jenny sitting there shaking, and I said: ‘God, you are no picture!’ And then Robin was going forward, and the blood running red, where Jenny had scratched her, and I screamed and thought: ‘Nora will leave that girl some day; but though those two are buried at opposite ends of the earth, one dog will find them both.’”
Baron Felix, who had given up his place in the bank, though not his connections with it, had been seen in many countries standing before that country’s palace gate, holding his gloved hands before him in the first unconcluded motion of submission; contemplating relics and parts, with a tension in his leg that took the step forward or back a little quicker than his fellow sightseer.
As at one time he had written to the press about this noble or that (and had never seen it in print), as he had sent letters to declining houses and never received an answer, he was now amassing a set of religious speculations that he eventually intended sending to the Pope. The reason for this was that as time passed it became increasingly evident that his child, if born to anything, had been born to holy decay. Mentally deficient and emotionally excessive, an addict to death; at ten, barely as tall as a child of six, wearing spectacles, stumbling when he tried to run, with cold hands and anxious face, he followed his father, trembling with an excitement that was a precocious ecstasy. Holding his father’s hand, he climbed palace and church steps with the tearing swing of the leg necessitated by a measure that had not taken a child into account; staring at paintings and wax reproductions of saints, watching the priests with the quickening of the breath of those in whom concentration must take the place of participation, as in the scar of a wounded animal will be seen the shudder of its recovery.
When Guido had first spoken of wishing to enter the church, Felix had been startled out of himself. He knew that Guido was not like other children, that he would always be too estranged to be argued with; in accepting his son the Baron saw that he must accept a demolition of his own life. The child would obviously never be able to cope with it. The Baron bought his boy a Virgin in metal, hanging from a red ribbon, and placed it about his neck, and in doing so, the slight neck, bent to take the ribbon, recalled to him Robin’s, as she stood back to him in the antique shop on the Seine.
So Felix began to look into the matter of the church. He searched the face of every priest he saw in the streets; he read litanies and examined chasubles and read the Credo; he inquired into the state of monasteries. He wrote, after much thought, to the Pope, a long disquisition on the state of the cloth. He touched on Franciscan monks and French priests, pointing out that any faith that could, in its profoundest unity, compose two such dissimilar types—one the Roman, shaved and expectant of what seemed, when one looked into his vacantly absorbed face, nothing more glorious than a muscular resurrection; and the other, the French priest, who seemed to be composite of husband and wife in conjunction with original sin, carrying with them good and evil in constantly quantitative ascent and descent, the unhappy spectacle of a single ego come to a several public dissolution—must be profoundly elastic.
He inquired if this might not be the outcome of the very different confessional states of the two countries. Was it not, he asked, to be taken for granted that the Italian ear must be less confounded because, possibly, it was harking the echo of its past, and the French that of the future? Was it conceivable that the “confessions” of the two nations could, in the one case, produce that living and expectant coma and, in the other, that worldly, incredible, indecent gluttony? He said that he himself had come to the conclusion that the French, the more secular, were a very porous people. Assuming this, it was then only natural that from listening to a thousand and one lay sins, the priest, upon reaching no riper age than two score, should find it difficult to absolve, the penitent having laid himself open to a peculiar kind of forgiveness; not so much absolution as exigency, for the priest was himself a vessel already filled to overflowing, and gave pardon because he could no longer hold—he signed with the cross, hastily and in stress, being, like a full bladder, embarrassed and in need of an immediate privacy. The Franciscan, on the other hand, had still a moment to wait. There was no tangent in his iris, as one who in blessing is looking for relief.
Felix received no answer. He had expected none. He wrote to clear some doubt in his mind. He knew that in all probability the child would never be “chosen.” If he were the Baron hoped that it would be in Austria, among his own people, and to that end he finally decided to make his home in Vienna.