Nightwood (4 page)

“We may all be nature’s noblemen,” he was saying, and the mention of a nobleman made Felix feel happier the instant he caught the word, though what followed left him in some doubt, “but think of the stories that do not amount to much! That is, that are forgotten in spite of all man remembers (unless he remembers himself) merely because they befell him without distinction of office or title—that’s what we call legend and it’s the best a poor man may do with his fate; the other”—he waved an arm—“we call history, the best the high and mighty can do with theirs. Legend is unexpurgated, but history, because of its actors, is deflowered—every nation with a sense of humour is a lost nation, and every woman with a sense of humour is a lost woman. The Jews are the only people who have sense enough to keep humour in the family; a Christian scatters it all over the world.”

“
Ja! das ist ganz richtig
—” said the Duchess in a loud voice, but the interruption was quite useless. Once the doctor had his audience—and he got his audience by the simple device of pronouncing at the top of his voice (at such moments as irritable and possessive as a maddened woman’s) some of the more boggish and biting of the shorter early Saxon verbs—nothing could stop him. He merely turned his large eyes upon her and having done so noticed her and her attire for the first time, which, bringing suddenly to his mind something forgotten but comparable, sent him into a burst of laughter, exclaiming: “Well, but God works in mysterious ways to bring things up in my mind! Now I am thinking of Nikka, the nigger who used to fight the bear in the
Cirque de Paris
. There he was, crouching all over the arena without a stitch on, except an ill-concealed loin-cloth all abulge as if with a deep-sea catch, tattooed from head to heel with all the
ameublement
of depravity! Garlanded with rosebuds and hackwork of the devil—was he a sight to see! Though he couldn’t have done a thing (and I know what I am talking about in spite of all that has been said about the black boys) if you had stood him in a gig-mill for a week, though (it’s said) at a stretch it spelled Desdemona. Well then, over his belly was an angel from Chartres; on each buttock, half public, half private, a quotation from the book of magic, a confirmation of the Jansenist theory, I’m sorry to say and here to say it. Across his knees, I give you my word, ‘I’ on one and on the other, ‘can,’ put those together! Across his chest, beneath a beautiful caravel in full sail, two clasped hands, the wrist bones fretted with point lace. On each bosom an arrow-speared heart, each with different initials but with equal drops of blood; and running into the arm-pit, all down one side, the word said by Prince Arthur Tudor, son of King Henry the Seventh, when on his bridal night he called for a goblet of water (or was it water?). His Chamberlain, wondering at the cause of such drought, remarked on it and was answered in one word so wholly epigrammatic and in no way befitting the great and noble British Empire that he was brought up with a start, and that is all we will ever know of it, unless,” said the doctor, striking his hand on his hip, “you are as good at guessing as Tiny M’Caffery.”

“And the legs?” Felix asked uncomfortably.

“The legs,” said Doctor O’Connor, “were devoted entirely to vine work, topped by the swart rambler rose copied from the coping of the Hamburg house of Rothschild. Over his
dos
, believe it or not and I shouldn’t, a terse account in early monkish script—called by some people indecent, by others Gothic—of the really deplorable condition of Paris before hygiene was introduced, and nature had its way up to the knees. And just above what you mustn’t mention, a bird flew carrying a streamer on which was incised, ‘
Garde tout!
’ I asked him why all this barbarity; he answered he loved beauty and would have it about him.”

“Are you acquainted with Vienna?” Felix inquired.

“Vienna,” said the doctor, “the bed into which the common people climb, docile with toil, and out of which the nobility fling themselves, ferocious with dignity—I do, but not so well but that I remember some of it still. I remember young Austrian boys going to school, flocks of quail they were, sitting out their recess in different spots in the sun, rosy-cheeked, bright-eyed, with damp rosy mouths, smelling of the herd childhood, facts of history glimmering in their minds like sunlight, soon to be lost, soon to be forgotten, degraded into proof. Youth is cause, effect is age; so with the thickening of the neck we get data.”

“I was not thinking of its young boys, but of its military superiority, its great names,” Felix said, feeling that the evening was already lost, seeing that as yet the host had not made his appearance and that no one seemed to know it or to care and that the whole affair was to be given over to this volatile person who called himself a doctor.

“The army, the celibate’s family!” nodded the doctor. “His one safety.”

The young woman, who was in her late twenties, turned from the group, coming closer to Felix and the doctor. She rested her hands behind her against the table. She seemed embarrassed. “Are you both really saying what you mean, or are you just talking?” Having spoken, her face flushed, she added hurriedly, “I am doing advance publicity for the circus; I’m Nora Flood.”

The doctor swung around, looking pleased. “Ah!” he said, “Nora suspects the cold incautious melody of time crawling, but,” he added, “I’ve only just started.” Suddenly he struck his thigh with his open hand. “Flood, Nora, why, sweet God, my girl, I helped to bring you into the world!”

Felix, as disquieted as if he were expected to “do something” to avert a catastrophe (as one is expected to do something about an overturned tumbler, the contents of which is about to drip over the edge of the table and into a lady’s lap), on the phrase “time crawling” broke into uncontrollable laughter, and though this occurrence troubled him the rest of his life he was never able to explain it to himself. The company, instead of being silenced, went on as if nothing had happened, two or three of the younger men were talking about something scandalous, and the Duchess in her loud empty voice was telling a very stout man something about the living statues. This only added to the Baron’s torment. He began waving his hands, saying, “Oh, please! please!” and suddenly he had a notion that he was doing something that wasn’t laughing at all, but something much worse, though he kept saying to himself, “I am laughing, really laughing, nothing else whatsoever!” He kept waving his arms in distress and saying, “Please, please!” staring at the floor, deeply embarrassed to find himself doing so.

As abruptly he sat straight up, his hands on the arms of the chair, staring fixedly at the doctor who was leaning forward as he drew a chair up exactly facing him. “Yes,” said the doctor, and he was smiling, “you will be disappointed!
In questa tomba oscura
—oh, unfaithful one! I am no herbalist, I am no Rutebeuf, I have no panacea, I am not a mountebank—that is, I cannot or will not stand on my head. I’m no tumbler, neither a friar, nor yet a thirteenth-century Salome dancing arse up on a pair of Toledo blades—try to get any lovesick girl, male or female, to do that today! If you don’t believe such things happened in the long back of yesterday look up the manuscripts in the British Museum or go to the cathedral of
Clermont-Ferrand,
it’s all one to me; become as the rich Mussulmans of Tunis who hire silly women to reduce the hour to its minimum of sense, still it will not be a cure, for there is none that takes place all at once in any man. You know what man really desires?” inquired the doctor, grinning into the immobile face of the Baron. “One of two things: to find someone who is so stupid that he can lie to her, or to love someone so much that she can lie to him.”

“I was not thinking of women at all,” the Baron said, and he tried to stand up.

“Neither was I,” said the doctor. “Sit down.” He refilled his glass. “The
fine
is very good,” he said.

Felix answered, “No, thank you, I never drink.”

“You will,” the doctor said. “Let us put it the other way; the Lutheran or Protestant church versus the Catholic. The Catholic is the girl that you love so much that she can lie to you, and the Protestant is the girl that loves you so much that you can lie to her, and pretend a lot that you do not feel. Luther, and I hope you don’t mind my saying so, was as bawdy an old ram as ever trampled his own straw, because the custody of the people’s ‘remissions’ of sins and indulgences had been snatched out of his hands, which was in that day in the shape of half of all they had and which the old monk of Wittenberg had intended to get off with in his own way. So, of course, after that, he went wild and chattered like a monkey in a tree and started something he never thought to start (or so the writing on his side of the breakfast table would seem to confirm), an obscene megalomania—and wild and wanton stranger that
that
is, it must come clear and cool and long or not at all. What do you listen to in the Protestant church? To the words of a man who has been chosen for his eloquence—and not too eloquent either, mark you, or he gets the bum’s rush from the pulpit, for fear that in the end he will use his golden tongue for political ends. For a golden tongue is never satisfied until it has wagged itself over the destiny of a nation, and this the church is wise enough to know.

“But turn to the Catholic church, go into mass at any moment—what do you walk in upon? Something that’s already in your blood. You know the story that the priest is telling as he moves from one side of the altar to the other, be he a cardinal, Leo X, or just some poor bastard from Sicily who has discovered that
pecca fortiter
among his goats no longer masses his soul, and has, God knows, been God’s child from the start—it makes no difference. Why? Because you are sitting there with your own meditations
and
a legend (which is nipping the fruit as the wren bites), and mingling them both with the Holy Spoon, which is that story; or you can get yourself into the confessional, where, in sonorous prose, lacking contrition (if you must) you can speak of the condition of the knotty, tangled soul and be answered in Gothic echoes, mutual and instantaneous—one saying hail to your farewell. Mischief unravels and the fine high hand of Heaven proffers the skein again, combed and forgiven!

“The one House,” he went on, “is hard, as hard as the gift of gab, and the other is as soft as a goat’s hip, and you can blame no man for anything, and you can’t like them at all.”

“Wait!” said Felix.

“Yes?” said the doctor.

Felix bending forward, deprecatory and annoyed, went on: “I like the prince who was reading a book when the executioner touched him on the shoulder telling him that it was time, and he, arising, laid a paper-cutter between the pages to keep his place and closed the book.”

“Ah,” said the doctor, “that is not man living in his moment, it is man living in his miracle.” He refilled his glass.
“Gesundheit”
he said;
“Freude sei Euch von Gott beschieden, wie heut’ so immerdar!”

“You argue about sorrow and confusion too easily,” Nora said.

“Wait!” the doctor answered. “A man’s sorrow runs uphill; true it is difficult for him to bear, but it is also difficult for him to keep. I, as a medical man, know in what pocket a man keeps his heart and soul, and in what jostle of the liver, kidneys and genitalia these pockets are pilfered. There is no pure sorrow. Why? It is bedfellow to lungs, lights, bones, guts and gall! There are only confusions; about that you are quite right, Nora my child, confusions and defeated anxieties—there you have us, one and all. If you are a gymnosophist you
can
do without clothes, and if you are gimp-legged you will know more wind between the knees than another; still it is confusion; God’s chosen walk close to the wall.

“I was in a war once myself,” the doctor went on, “in a little town where the bombs began tearing the heart out of you, so that you began to think of all the majesty in the world that you would not be able to think of in a minute, if the noise came down and struck in the right place; I was scrambling for the cellar—and in it was an old Breton woman and a cow she had dragged with her, and behind that someone from Dublin saying, ‘Glory be to God!’ in a whisper at the far end of the animal. Thanks be to my Maker I had her head on, and the poor beast trembling on her four legs so I knew all at once that the tragedy of the beast can be two legs more awful than a man’s. She was softly dropping her dung at the far end where the thin Celtic voice kept coming up saying, ‘Glory be to Jesus!’ and I said to myself, ‘Can’t the morning come now, so I can see what my face is mixed up with?’ At that a flash of lightning went by and I saw the cow turning her head straight back so her horns made two moons against her shoulders, the tears soused all over her great black eyes.

“I began talking to her, cursing myself and the mick, and the old woman looking as if she were looking down her life, sighting it the way a man looks down the barrel of a gun for an aim. I put my hand on the poor bitch of a cow and her hide was running water under my hand, like water tumbling down from Lahore, jerking against my hand as if she wanted to go, standing still in one spot; and I thought, there are directions and speeds that no one has calculated, for believe it or not that cow had gone somewhere very fast that we didn’t know of, and yet was still standing there.”

The doctor lifted the bottle. “Thank you,” said Felix, “I never drink spirits.”

“You will,” said the doctor.

“There’s one thing that has always troubled me,” the doctor continued, “this matter of the guillotine. They say that the headsman has to supply his own knife, as a husband is supposed to supply his own razor. That’s enough to rot his heart out before he has whittled one head. Wandering about the
Boul ‘Mich’
one night, flittering my eyes, I saw one with a red carnation in his buttonhole. I asked him what he was wearing it for, just to start up a friendly conversation; he said, ‘It’s the headsman’s prerogative’—and I went as limp as a blotter snatched from the Senate. ‘At one time,’ he said, ‘the executioner gripped it between his teeth.’ At that my bowels turned turtle, seeing him in my mind’s eye stropping the cleaver with a bloom in his mouth, like Carmen, and he the one man who is supposed to keep his gloves on in church! They often end by slicing themselves up; it’s a rhythm that finally meets their own neck. He leaned forward and drew a finger across mine and said, ‘As much hair as thick as that makes it a little difficult,’ and at that moment I got heart failure for the rest of my life. I put down a franc and flew like the wind, the hair on my back standing as high as Queen Anne’s ruff! And I didn’t stop until I found myself spang in the middle of the
Musée de Cluny
, clutching the rack.”