Nightwood (14 page)

Before leaving, however, he sought out the doctor. He was not in his lodging. The Baron aimlessly set off toward the square. He saw the small black clad figure moving toward him. The doctor had been to a funeral and was on his way to the
Café de la Mairie du VI
^e
to lift his spirits. The Baron was shocked to observe, in the few seconds before the doctor saw him, that he seemed old, older than his fifty odd years would account for. He moved slowly as if he were dragging water; his knees, which one seldom noticed, because he was usually seated, sagged. His dark shaved chin was lowered as if in a melancholy that had no beginning or end. The Baron hailed him, and instantly the doctor threw off his unobserved self, as one hides, hastily, a secret life. He smiled, drew himself up, raised his hand in greeting, though, as is usual with people taken unaware, with a touch of defence.

“Where have you been?” he said as he came to a standstill in the middle of the block. “I haven’t seen you for months, and,” he added, “it’s a pity.”

The Baron smiled in return. “I’ve been in mental trouble,” he said, walking beside the doctor. “Are you,” he added, “engaged for dinner?”

“No,” said the doctor, “I’ve just buried an excellent fellow. Don’t think you ever met him, a Kabyle, better sort of Arab. They have Roman blood, and can turn pale at a great pinch, which is more than can be said for most, you know,” he added, walking a little sideways, as one does when not knowing where a companion is going. “Do a bit for a Kabyle, back or front, and they back up on you with a camel or a bag of dates.” He sighed and passed his hand over his chin. “He was the only one I ever knew who offered me five francs before I could reach for my own. I had it framed in orange blossoms and hung it over the whatnot.”

The Baron was abstracted, but he smiled out of politeness. He suggested dining in the
Bois
. The doctor was only too willing, and at the sudden good news, he made that series of half-gestures of a person taken pleasantly unaware; he half held up his hands—no gloves—he almost touched his breast pocket—a handkerchief; he glanced at his boots, and was grateful for the funeral; he was shined, fairly neat; he touched his tie, stretching his throat muscles.

As they drove through the
Bois
the doctor went over in his mind what he would order—duck with oranges, no—having eaten on a poor man’s purse for so many years, habit had brought him to simple things with garlic. He shivered. He must think of something different. All he could think of was coffee and
Grand Marnier
, the big tumbler warmed with the hands, like his people warming at the peat fire. “Yes?” he said, and realized that the Baron had been speaking. The doctor lifted his chin to the night air and listened now with an intensity with which he hoped to reconstruct the sentence.

“Strange, I had never seen the Baronin in this light before,” the Baron was saying, and he crossed his knees. “If I should try to put it into words, I mean how I did see her, it would be incomprehensible, for the simple reason that I find that I never did have a really clear idea of her at any time. I had an image of her, but that is not the same thing. An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties. I had gathered, of course, a good deal from you, and later, after she went away, from others, but this only strengthened my confusion. The more we learn of a person, the less we know. It does not, for instance, help me to know anything of Chartres above the fact that it possesses a cathedral, unless I have lived in Chartres and so keep the relative heights of the cathedral and the lives of its population in proportion. Otherwise it would only confuse me to learn that Jean of that city stood his wife upright in a well; the moment I visualize this, the deed will measure as high as the building; just as children who have a little knowledge of life will draw a man and a barn on the same scale.”

“Your devotion to the past,” observed the doctor, looking at the cab metre with apprehension, “is perhaps like a child’s drawing.”

The Baron nodded. He was troubled. “My family is preserved because I have it only from the memory of one single woman, my aunt; therefore it is single, clear and unalterable. In this I am fortunate; through this I have a sense of immortality. Our basic idea of eternity is a condition that
cannot vary
. It is the motivation of marriage. No man really wants his freedom. He gets a habit as quickly as possible—it is a form of immortality.”

“And what’s more,” said the doctor, “we heap reproaches on the person who breaks it, saying that in so doing he has broken the image—of our safety.”

The Baron acquiesced. “This quality of one sole condition, which was so much a part of the Baronin, was what drew me to her; a condition of being that she had not, at that time, even chosen, but a fluid sort of possession which gave me a feeling that I would not only be able to achieve immortality, but be free to choose my own kind.”

“She was always holding God’s bag of tricks upside down,” murmured the doctor.

“Yet, if I tell the whole truth,” the Baron continued, “the very abundance of what then appeared to me to be security, and which was, in reality, the most formless loss, gave me at the same time pleasure and a sense of terrible anxiety, which proved only too legitimate.”

The doctor lit a cigarette.

“I took it,” the Baron went on, “for acquiescence, thus making my great mistake. She was really like those people who, coming unexpectedly into a room, silence the company because they are looking for someone who is not there.” He knocked on the cab window, got down and paid. As they walked up the gravel path he went on: “What I particularly wanted to ask you was, why did she marry me? It has placed me in the dark for the rest of my life.”

“Take the case of the horse who knew too much,” said the doctor, “looking between the branches in the morning, cypress or hemlock. She was in mourning for something taken away from her in a bombardment in the war—by the way she stood, that something lay between her hooves—she stirred no branch, though her hide was a river of sorrow; she was damned to her hocks, where the grass came waving up softly. Her eyelashes were gray-black, like the eyelashes of a nigger, and at her buttocks’ soft centre a pulse throbbed like a fiddle.”

The Baron, studying the menu, said, “The Petherbridge woman called on me.”

“Glittering God,” exclaimed the doctor, putting the card down. “Has it gone as far as that? I shouldn’t have thought it.”

“For the first moment,” the Baron continued, “I had no idea who she was. She had spared no pains to make her toilet rusty and grievous by an arrangement of veils and flat-toned dark material with flowers in it, cut plainly and extremely tight over a very small bust, and from the waist down gathered into bulky folds to conceal, no doubt, the widening parts of a woman well over forty. She seemed hurried. She spoke of you.”

The doctor put the menu on his knee. He raised his dark eyes with the bushy brows erect. “What did she say?”

The Baron answered, evidently unaware of the tender spot which his words touched: “Utter nonsense to the effect that you are seen nearly every day in a certain convent, where you bow and pray and get free meals and attend cases which are, well, illegal.”

The Baron looked up. To his surprise he saw that the doctor had “deteriorated” into that condition in which he had seen him in the street, when he thought himself unobserved.

In a loud voice the doctor said to the waiter, who was within an inch of his mouth: “Yes, and with oranges,
oranges!
”

The Baron continued hastily: “She gave me uneasiness because Guido was in the room at the time. She said that she had come to buy a painting—indeed, she offered me a very good price, which I was tempted to take (I’ve been doing a little dealing in old masters lately) for my stay in Vienna—but, as it turned out, she wanted the portrait of my grandmother, which on no account could I bring myself to part with. She had not been in the room five minutes before I sensed that the picture was an excuse, and that what she really wanted was something else. She began talking about the Baronin almost at once, though she mentioned no name at first, and I did not connect the story with my wife until the end. She said, ‘She is really quite extraordinary. I don’t understand her at all, though I must say I understand her better than other people.’ She added this with a sort of false eagerness. She went on: ‘She always lets her pets die. She is so fond of them, and then she neglects them, the way that animals neglect themselves.’

“I did not like her to talk about this subject, as Guido is very sensitive to animals, and I could fancy what was going on in his mind; he is not like other children, not cruel, or savage. For this very reason he is called ‘strange.’ A child who is mature, in the sense that the heart is mature, is always, I have observed, called deficient.” He gave his order and went on: “She then changed the subject—”

“Tacking into the wind like a barge.”

“Well, yes, to a story about a little girl she had staying with her (she called her Sylvia); the Baronin was also staying with her at the time, though I did not know that the young woman in question was the Baronin until later—well, anyway, it appears that this little girl Sylvia had ‘fallen in love’ with the Baronin and that she, the Baronin, kept waking her up all through the night to ask her if she ‘loved her.’

“During the holidays, while the child was away, Petherbridge became ‘anxious’—that is the way she put it—as to whether or not the ‘young lady had a heart.’”

“And brought the child back to prove it?” interpolated the doctor, casting an eye over the fashionable crowd beginning to fill the room.

“Exactly,” said the Baron, ordering wine. “I made an exclamation, and she said quickly, ‘You can’t blame me; you can’t accuse me of using a child for my own ends!’ Well, what else does it come to?”

“That woman,” the doctor said, settling himself more comfortably in his chair, “would use the third-rising of a corpse for her ends. Though,” he added, “I must admit she is very generous with money.”

The Baron winced. “So I gathered from her over-large bid for the portrait. Well, she went on to say that when they met the Baronin had so obviously forgotten all about her that the child was ‘ashamed.’ She said ‘shame went all over her.’ She was already at the door when she spoke the last sentence. In fact, she conducted the whole scene as though my room were a stage that had been marked out, and at this point she must read her final lines.

“‘Robin,’ she said, ‘Baronin Robin Volkbein; I wonder if she could be a relative.’

“For a whole minute I couldn’t move. When I turned around I saw that Guido was ill. I took him in my arms and spoke to him in German. He had often put questions to me about his mother and I had managed always to direct his mind to expect her.”

The doctor turned to the Baron with one of his sudden illuminations. “Exactly right. With Guido, you are in the presence of the ‘maladjusted.’ Wait! I am not using that word in the derogatory sense at all; in fact my great virtue is that I never use the derogatory in the usual sense. Pity is an intrusion when in the presence of a person who is a new position in an old account—which is your son. You can only pity those limited to their generation. Pity is timely and dies with the person; a pitiable man is his own last tie. You have treated Guido well.”

The Baron paused, his knife bent down. He looked up. “Do you know, Doctor, I find the thought of my son’s possible death at an early age a sort of dire happiness because his death is the most awful, the most fearful thing that could befall me. The unendurable is the beginning of the curve of joy. I have become entangled in the shadow of a vast apprehension which is my son; he is the central point toward which life and death are spinning, the meeting of which my final design will be composed.”

“And Robin?” the doctor asked.

“She is with me in Guido; they are inseparable, and this time,” the Baron said, catching his monocle, “with her full consent.” He leaned down and picked up his napkin. “The Baronin,” he continued, “always seemed to be looking for someone to tell her that she was innocent. Guido is very like her, except that he has his innocence. The Baronin was always searching in the wrong direction until she met Nora Flood, who seemed, from what little I knew of her, to be a very honest woman, at least by intention.

“There are some people,” he went on, “who must get permission to live, and if the Baronin finds no one to give her that permission, she will make an innocence for herself; a fearful sort of primitive innocence. It may be considered ‘depraved’ by our generation, but our generation does not know everything.” He smiled. “For instance Guido; how many will realize his value? One’s life is peculiarly one’s own when one has invented it.”

The doctor wiped his mouth. “In the acceptance of depravity the sense of the past is most fully captured. What is a ruin but Time easing itself of endurance? Corruption is the Age of Time. It is the body and the blood of ecstasy, religion and love. Ah, yes,” the doctor added, “we do not ‘climb’ to heights, we are eaten away to them, and then conformity, neatness, ceases to entertain us. Man is born as he dies, rebuking cleanliness; and there is its middle condition, the slovenliness that is usually an accompaniment of the ‘attractive’ body, a sort of earth on which love feeds.”

“That is true,” Felix said with eagerness. “The Baronin had an undefinable disorder, a sort of ‘odour of memory,’ like a person who has come from some place that we have forgotten and would give our life to recall.”

The doctor reached out for the bread. “So the reason for our cleanliness becomes apparent; cleanliness is a form of apprehension; our faulty racial memory is fathered by fear. Destiny and history are untidy; we fear memory of that disorder. Robin did not.”

“No,” Felix said in a low voice. “She did not.”

“The almost fossilized state of our recollection is attested to by our murderers and those who read every detail of crime with a passionate and hot interest,” the doctor continued. “It is only by such extreme measures that the average man can remember something long ago; truly, not that he remembers, but that crime itself is the door to an accumulation, a way to lay hands on the shudder of a past that is still vibrating.”