Go Down, Matthew
‘Can’t you be quiet now?’ the doctor said. He had come in late one afternoon to find Nora writing a letter. ‘Can’t you be done now, can’t you give up? Now be still, now that you know what the world is about, knowing it’s about nothing?’ He took his hat and coat off without being asked, placing his umbrella in a corner. He came forward into the room. ‘And me who seem curious because no one has seen me for a million years, and now I’m seen! Is there such extraordinary need of misery to make beauty? Let go Hell; and your fall will be broken by the roof of Heaven.’ He eyed the tea-tray and, seeing that the tea-pot had long since become cold, poured himself a generous port. He threw himself into a chair and added more softly, as Nora turned away from her letter, ‘In the far reaches of India there is a man being still beneath a tree. Why not rest? Why not put the pen away? Isn’t it bitter enough for Robin that she is lost somewhere without receiving mail? And Jenny, what of her now? Taken to drink and appropriating Robin’s mind with vulgar inaccuracy, like those eighty-two plaster virgins she bought because Robin had one good one; when you laugh at the eight-two standing in a row, Jenny runs to the wall, back to the picture of her mother, and stands there between two tortures—the past that she can’t share, and the present that she can’t copy. What of her now? Looking at her quarters with harrowing, indelicate cries; burying her middle at both ends, searching the world for the path back to what she wanted once and long ago! The memory past, and only by a coincidence, a wind, the flutter of a leaf, a surge of tremendous recollection goes through her, and swooning she knows it gone. Cannot a beastly thing be analogous to a fine thing, if both are apprehensions? Love of two things often makes one thing right. Think of the fish racing the sea, their love of air and water turning them like wheels, their tails and teeth biting the water, their spines curved round the air. Is that not Jenny? She who could not encompass anything whole, but only with her teeth and tail, and the spine on her sprung up. Oh, for God’s sake! Can’t you rest now?’
‘If I don’t write to her, what am I to do? I can’t sit here for ever—thinking!’
‘Terra damnata et maledicta!’ exclaimed the doctor, banging his fist down. ‘My uncle Octavius, the trout-tickler of Itchen, was better, he ate his fish when he caught it! But you, you must unspin fate, go back to find Robin! That’s what you are going to do. In your chair should have been set the Holy Stone, to say yes to your yes, no to your no; instead it’s lost in Westminster Abbey, and if I could have stopped Brech on his way with it into Ireland and have whispered in his ear I would have said, “Wait” (though it was seven hundred years B.C.); it might have been passed around. It might have stopped you, but no, you are always writing to Robin. Nothing will curb it. You’ve made her a legend and set before her head the Eternal Light, and you’ll keep to it even if it does cost her the tearing open of a million envelopes to her end. How do you know what sleep you raise her from? What words she must say to annul the postman’s whistle to another girl rising up on a wild elbow? Can’t you let any of us loose? Don’t you know your holding on is her only happiness and so her sole misery. You write and weep and think and plot, and all the time what is Robin doing? Chucking Jack Straws, or sitting on the floor playing soldiers; so don’t cry to me, who have no one to write to, and only taking in a little light laundry known as the Wash of the World. Dig a hole, drop me in! Not at all. St. Matthew’s Passion by Bach I’ll be. Everything can be used in a lifetime, I’ve discovered that.’
‘I’ve got to write to her,’ Nora said. ‘I’ve got to.’
‘No man knows it as I know it, I who am the god of darkness. Very well, but know the worst, then. What of Felix and his son Guido, that sick lamenting, fevered child? Death in the weather is a tonic to him. Like all the new young his sole provision for old age is hope of an early death. What spirits answer him who will never come to man’s estate? The poor shattered eagerness. So, I say, was Robin purposely unspun? Was Jenny a sitting bitch for fun? Who knows what knives hash her apart? Can’t you rest now, lay down the pen? Oh, papelero, have I not summed up my time! I shall rest myself some day by the brim of Saxon-les-Bains and drink it dry, or go to pieces in Hamburg at the gambling table, or end up like Madame de Staël—with an affinity for Germany. To all kinds of ends I’ll come. Ah yes, with a crupper of maiden’s hair to keep my soul in place, and in my vanguard a dove especially feathered to keep to my wind, as I ride that grim horse with ample glue in every hoof to post up my deeds when I’m dropped in and sealed with earth. In time everything is possible and in space everything forgivable; life is but the intermediary vice. There is eternity to blush in. Life laid end to end is what brings on flux in the clergy—can’t you rest now, put down the pen? Oh, the poor worms that never arrive! Some strangely connived angel pray for us! We shall not encompass it—the defunctive murmur in the cardiac nerve has given us all our gait. And Robin? I know where your mind is! She, the eternal momentary—Robin who was always the second person singular. Well,’ he said with violence, ‘lie weeping with a sword in your hand! Haven’t I eaten a book too? Like the angels and prophets? And wasn’t it a bitter book to eat? The archives of my case against the law, snatched up and out of the tale-telling files by my high important friend. And didn’t I eat a page and tear a page and stamp on others and flay some and toss some into the toilet for relief’s sake—then think of Jenny without a comma to eat, and Robin with nothing but a pet name—your pet name to sustain her; for pet names are a guard against loss, like primitive music. But does that sum her up? Is even the end of us an account? No, don’t answer, I know that even the memory has weight. Once in the war I saw a dead horse that had been lying long against the ground. Time and the birds, and its own last concentration had removed the body a great way from the head. As I looked upon that head, my memory weighed for the lost body; and because of that missing quantity even heavier hung that head along the ground. So love, when it has gone, taking time with it, leaves a memory of its weight.’
She said: ‘She is myself. What am I to do?’
‘Make birds’ nests with your teeth, that would be better,’ he said angrily, ‘like my English girl friend. The birds liked them so well that they stopped making their own (does that sound like any nest you have made for any bird, and so broken it of its fate?). In the spring they form a queue by her bedroom window and stand waiting their turn, holding on to their eggs as hard as they can until she gets around to them, strutting up and down on the ledge, the eyes in their feathers a quick shine and sting, whipped with impatience, like a man waiting at a toilet door for someone inside who had decided to read the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. And then think of Robin who never could provide for her life except in you. Oh, well,’ he said under his breath, ‘ “happy are they whom privacy makes innocent."’
Nora turned around, and speaking in a voice that she tried to make steady said: ‘Once, when she was sleeping, I wanted her to die. Now, that would stop nothing.’
The doctor, nodding, straightened his tie with two fingers. ‘The number of our days is not check rein enough to look upon the death of our love. While living we knew her too well, and never understood, for then our next gesture permitted our next misunderstanding. But death is intimacy walking backward. We are crazed with grief when she, who once permitted us, leaves to us the only recollection. We shed tears of bankruptcy then. So it’s well she didn’t.’ He sighed. ‘You are still in trouble—I thought you had put yourself outside of it. I might have known better, nothing is what everybody wants, the world runs on that law. Personally, if I could, I would instigate Meat-Axe Day, and out of the goodness of my heart I would whack your head off along with a couple of others. Every man should be allowed one day and a hatchet just to ease his heart.’
She said: ‘What will happen now, to me and to her?’
‘Nothing,’ the doctor answered, ‘as always. We all go down in battle, but we all come home.’
She said: ‘I can only find her again in my sleep or in her death; in both she has forgotten me.’
‘Listen,’ the doctor said, putting down his glass. ‘My war brought me many things; let yours bring you as much. Life is not to be told, call it as loud as you like, it will not tell itself. No one will be much or little except in someone else’s mind, so be careful of the minds you get into, and remember Lady Macbeth, who had her mind in her hand. We can’t all be as safe as that.’
Nora got up nervously and began walking. ‘I’m so miserable, Matthew, I don’t know how to talk, and I’ve got to. I’ve got to talk to somebody. I can’t live this way.’ She pressed her hands together, and, without looking at the doctor, went on walking.
‘Have you any more port?’ he inquired, putting the empty bottle down. Mechanically, Nora brought him a second decanter. He took the stopper out, held it to his nose a moment, then poured himself a glass.
‘You are’, he said, testing the wine between his lower lip and teeth, ‘experiencing the inbreeding of pain. Most of us do not dare it. We wed a stranger, and so “solve” our problem. But when you inbreed with suffering (which is merely to say that you have caught every disease and so pardoned your flesh) you are destroyed back to your structure as an old master disappears beneath the knife of the scientist who would know how it was painted. Death I imagine will be pardoned by the same identification; we all carry about with us the house of death, the skeleton, but unlike the turtle our safety is inside, our danger out. Time is a great conference planning our end, and youth is only the past putting a leg forward. Ah, to be able to hold on to suffering, but to let the spirit loose! And speaking of being destroyed, allow me to illustrate by telling you of one dark night in London, when I was hurrying along, my hands before me, praying I’d get home and into bed and wake up in the morning without finding my hands on my hips. So I started for London Bridge—all this was a long time ago, and I’d better be careful or one of these days I’ll tell a story that will give up my age.
‘Well, I went off under London Bridge and what should I see? A Tuppeny Upright! And do you know what a Tuppeny Upright might be? A Tuppeny is an old-time girl, and London Bridge is her last stand, as the last stand for a grue is Marseilles, if she doesn’t happen to have enough pocket money to get to Singapore. For tuppence, an upright is all anyone can expect. They used to walk along slowly, all ruffles and rags, with big terror hats on them, a pin stuck over the eye and slap up through the crown, half their shadows on the ground and the other half crawling along the wall beside them; ladies of the haute sewer taking their last stroll, sauntering on their last Rotten Row, going slowly along in the dark, holding up their badgered flounces, or standing still, silent and as indifferent as the dead, as if they were thinking of better days, or waiting for something that they had been promised when they were little girls; their poor damned dresses hiked up and falling away over the rump, all gathers and braid, like a Crusader’s mount, with all the trappings gone sideways with misery.’
While the doctor had been speaking Nora had stopped, as if he had got her attention for the first time.
‘And once Father Lucas said to me, “Be simple, Matthew, life is a simple book, and an open book, read and be simple as the beasts in the field; just being miserable isn’t enough—you have got to know how.” So I got to thinking and I said to myself, “This is a terrible thing that Father Lucas has put on me—be simple like the beasts and yet think and harm nobody.” I began walking then. It had begun to snow and the night was down. I went toward the Ile, because I could see the lights in the show-windows of Our Lady and all the children in the dark with the tapers twinkling, saying their prayers softly with that small breath that comes off little lungs, whispering fatally about nothing, which is the way children say their prayers. Then I said, “Matthew, tonight you must find a small church where there are no people, where you can be alone like an animal, and yet think.” So I turned off and went down until I came to St. Merri and I went forward and there I was. All the candles were burning steadily for the troubles that people had entrusted to them and I was almost alone, only in a far corner an old peasant woman saying her beads.
‘So I walked straight up to the box for the souls in Purgatory, just to show that I was a true sinner, in case there happened to be a Protestant about. I was trying to think which of my hands was the more blessed, because there’s a box in the Raspail that says the hand you give with to the Little Sisters of the Poor, that will be blessed all day. I gave it up, hoping it was my right hand. Kneeling in a dark corner, bending my head over and down, I spoke to Tiny O’Toole, because it was his turn, I had tried everything else. There was nothing for it this time but to make him face the mystery so it could see him clear as it saw me. So then I whispered, “What is this thing, Lord?” And I began to cry; the tears went like rain goes down on the world, without touching the face of Heaven. Suddenly I realized that it was the first time in my life my tears were strange to me, because they just went straight forward out of my eyes; I was crying because I had to embarrass Tiny like that for the good it might do him.
‘I was crying and striking my left hand against the prie-Dieu, and all the while Tiny O’Toole was lying in a swoon. I said, “I have tried to seek, and I only find.” I said, “It is I, my Lord, who know there’s beauty in any permanent mistakes like me. Haven’t I said it so? But", I says, “I’m not able to stay permanent unless you help me, oh Book of Concealment! C’est le plaisir qui me bouleversé! The roaring lion goes forth, seeking his own fury! So tell me, what is permanent of me, me or him?” And there I was in the empty, almost empty church, all the people’s troubles flickering in little lights all over the place. And I said, “This would be a fine world, Lord, if you could get everybody out of it.” And there I was holding Tiny, bending over and crying, asking the question until I forgot, and went on crying, and I put Tiny away then, like a ruined bird, and went out of the place and walked looking at the stars that were twinkling, and I said, “Have I been simple like an animal, God, or have I been thinking?"’
She smiled. ‘Sometimes I don’t know why I talk to you. You’re so like a child; then again I know well enough.’
‘Speaking of children—and thanks for the compliment—take for instance the case of Don Anticolo, the young tenor from Beirut—he dipped down into his pelvis for his Wagner, and plunged to his breast pit for his Verdi—he’d sung himself once and a half round the world, a widower with a small son, scarcely ten by the clock when, presto—the boy was bitten by a rat while swimming in Venezia and this brought on a fever. His father would come in and take hold of him every ten minutes (or was it every half-hour?) to see if he was less hot, or hotter. His daddy was demented with grief and fear, but did he leave his bedside for a moment? He did, because, though the son was sick, the fleet was in. But being a father, he prayed as he drank the champagne; and he wished his son alive as he chucked over the compass and invited the crew home, bow and sprit. But when he got home the little son lay dead. The young tenor burst into tears and burned him and had the ashes put into a zinc box no bigger than a doll’s crate and held ceremony over him, twelve sailors all in blue standing about the deal table, a glass in their hands, sorrow in their sea-turned eye slanting under lids thinned by the horizon, as the distracted father and singer tossed the little zinc box down upon the table crying: “This, gentlemen, is my babe, this, lads, my son, my sailors, my boy!” and at that, running to the box and catching it up and dashing it down again, repeating, and weeping, “My son, my baby, my boy!” with trembling fingers nudging the box now here now there about the table, until it went up and down its length a dozen times; the father behind it, following it, touching it, weeping and crying like a dog who noses a bird that has, for some strange reason, no more movement.’
The doctor stood up, then sat down again. ‘Yes, oh God, Robin was beautiful. I don’t like her, but I have to admit that much: sort of fluid blue under her skin, as if the hide of time had been stripped from her, and with it, all transactions with knowledge. A sort of first position in attention; a face that will age only under the blows of perpetual childhood. The temples like those of young beasts cutting horns, as if they were sleeping eyes. And that look on a face we follow like a witch-fire. Sorcerers know the power of horns; meet a horn where you like and you know you have been identified. You could fall over a thousand human skulls without the same trepidation. And do old duchesses know it also! Have you ever seen them go into a large assembly of any sort, be it opera or bezique, without feathers, flowers, sprigs of oat, or some other gadget nodding above their temples!’
She had not heard him. ‘Every hour is my last, and,’ she said desperately, ‘one can’t live one’s last hour all one’s life!’
He grinned. ‘Even the contemplative life is only an effort, Nora my dear, to hide the body so the feet won’t stick out. Ah,’ he added, ‘to be an animal, born at the opening of the eye, going only forward, and, at the end of day, shutting out memory with the dropping of the lid.’
‘Time isn’t long enough,’ she said, striking the table. ‘It isn’t long enough to live down her nights. God,’ she cried, ‘what is love? Man seeking his own head? The human head, so rented by misery that even the teeth weigh! She couldn’t tell me the truth, because she had never planned it; her life was a continual accident, and how can you be prepared for that? Everything we can’t bear in this world, some day we find in one person, and love it all at once. A strong sense of identity gives man an idea he can do no wrong; too little accomplishes the same. Some natures cannot appreciate, only regret. Will Robin only regret?’ She stopped abruptly, gripping the back of the chair. ‘Perhaps not,’ she said, ‘for even her memory wearied her.’ Then she said with the violence of misery, ‘There’s something evil in me, that loves evil and degradation—purity’s black backside! That loves honesty with a horrid love; or why have I always gone seeking it at the liar’s door?’
‘Look here,’ said the doctor. ‘Do you know what has made me the greatest liar this side of the moon, telling my stories to people like you, to take the mortal agony out of their guts, and to stop them from rolling about, and drawing up their feet, and screaming, with their eyes staring over their knuckles with misery which they are trying to keep off, saying, “Say something, doctor, for the love of God!” And me talking away like mad. Well that, and nothing else, has made me the liar I am.
‘Suppose your heart were five feet across in any place, would you break it for a heart no bigger than a mouse’s mute? Would you hurl yourself into any body of water, in the size you now are, for any woman that you had to look for with a magnifying glass, or any boy if he was as high as the Eiffel Tower or did droppings like a fly? No, we all love in sizes, yet we all cry out in tiny voices to the great booming God, the older we get. Growing old is just a matter of throwing life away back; so you finally forgive even those that you have not begun to forget. It is that indifference which gives you your courage, which to tell the truth is no courage at all. There is no truth, and you have set it between you; you have been unwise enough to make a formula; you have dressed the unknowable in the garments of the known.’
‘Man,’ she said, her eyelids quivering, ‘conditioning himself to fear, made God; as the prehistoric, conditioning itself to hope, made man—the cooling of the earth, the receding of the sea. And I, who want power, chose a girl who resembles a boy.’
‘Exactly,’ said the doctor. ‘You never loved anyone before, and you’ll never love anyone again, as you love Robin. Very well—what is this love we have for the invert, boy or girl? It was they who were spoken of in every romance that we ever read. The girl lost, what is she but the Prince found? The Prince on the white horse that we have always been seeking. And the pretty lad who is a girl, what but the prince-princess in point lace—neither one and half the other, the painting on the fan! We love them for that reason. We were impaled in our childhood upon them as they rode through our primers, the sweetest lie of all, now come to be in boy or girl, for in the girl it is the prince, and in the boy it is the girl that makes a prince a prince—and not a man. They go far back in our lost distance where what we never had stands waiting; it was inevitable that we should come upon them, for our miscalculated longing has created them. They are our answer to what our grandmothers were told love was, and what it never came to be; they, the living lie of our centuries. When a long lie comes up, sometimes it is a beauty; when it drops into dissolution, into drugs and drink, into disease and death, it has at once a singular and terrible attraction. A man can resent and avoid evil on his own plane, but when it is the thin blown edge of his reverie, he takes it to his heart, as one takes to one’s heart the dark misery of the close nightmare, born and slain of the particular mind; so that if one of them were dying of the pox, one would will to die of it too, with two feelings, terror and joy, welded somewhere back again into a formless sea where a swan (would it be ourselves, or her or him, or a mystery of all) sinks crying.
‘Love is death, come upon with passion; I know that is why love is wisdom. I love her as one condemned to it.’
‘Oh, Widow Lazarus! Arisen from your dead! Oh lunatic humour of the moon! Behold this fearful tree, on which sits singing the drearful bird— Turdus musicus, or European singing thrush; sitting and singing the refrain—all in the tear-wet night—and it starts out largo, but it ends like I Hear You Calling Me, or Kiss Me Again, gone wild. And Diane, where is she? Diane of Ephesus in the Greek Gardens, singing and shaken in every bosom; and Rack and Ruin, the dogs of the Vatican, running up and down the papal esplanade and out into the Ramblar with roses in their tails to keep off care. Don’t I know it all! Do you think that I, the Old Woman who lives in the closet, do not know that every child, no matter what its day, is born prehistorically and that even the wrong thought has caused the human mind incredible effort? Bend down the tree of knowledge and you’ll unroost a strange bird. Suffering may be composed wickedly and of an inferior writhing. Rage and inaccuracy howl and blow the bone, for, contrary to all opinion, all suffering does not purify—begging everybody’s pardon, which is called everybody’s know. It moils and blathers some to perjury; the peritoneum boils and brings on common and cheap praying a great way sunk in pointless agony.’
‘Jenny,’ she said.
‘It rots her sleep—Jenny is one of those who nip like a bird and void like an ox—the poor and lightly damned! That can be a torture also. None of us suffers as much as we should, or loves as much as we say. Love is the first lie; wisdom the last. Don’t I know that the only way to know evil is through truth? The evil and the good know themselves only by giving up their secret face to face. The true good who meets the true evil (Holy Mother of Mercy! are there any such?) learns for the first time how to accept neither; the face of the one tells the face of the other the half of the story that both forgot.’
‘To be utterly innocent’, he went on, ‘would be to be utterly unknown, particularly to oneself.’
‘Sometimes Robin seemed to return to me’, Nora said unheeding, ‘for sleep and safety, but,’ she added bitterly, ‘she always went out again.’
The doctor lit a cigarette; lifting his chin he blew the smoke high. ‘To treat her lovers to the great passionate indifference. Say,’ he exclaimed, bringing his chin down. ‘Dawn, of course, dawn! That’s when she came back frightened. At that hour the citizen of the night balances on a thread that is running thin.’
‘Only the impossible lasts forever; with time, it is made accessible. Robin’s love and mine was always impossible, and loving each other, we no longer love. Yet we love each other like death.’
‘Um,’ murmured the doctor, ‘beat life like a dinner bell, yet there is one hour that won’t ring—the hour of disentanglement. Oh well,’ he sighed, ‘everyman dies finally of that poison known as the-heart-in-the-mouth. Yours is in your hand. Put it back. The eater of it will get a taste for you; in the end his muzzle will be heard barking among your ribs. I’m no exception, God knows, I’m the last of my line, the fine hair-line of least resistance. It’s a gruesome thing that man learns only by what he has between the one leg and the other! Oh, that short dangle! We corrupt mortality by its industry. You never know which one of your ends it is that is going to be the part you can’t take your mind off.’
‘If only you could take my mind off, Matthew—now, in this house that I took that Robin’s mind and mine might go together. Surprising, isn’t it, I’m happier when I’m alone now, without her, because when she was here with me, in this house, I had to watch her wanting to go and yet to stay. How much of our life do we put into a life that we may be damned? Then she was back stumbling through the house again, listening for a footstep in the court, for a way to leave and not to go, trying to absorb, with the intensity of her ear, any sound that would have made me suspicious, yet hoping I would break my heart in safety; she needed that assurance. Matthew, was it a sin that I believed her?’
‘Of course, it made her life wrong.’
‘But when I didn’t believe her any more, after the night I came to see you; that I have to think of all the time, I don’t dare to stop, for fear of the moment it will come back again.’
‘Remorse,’ said the doctor, ‘sitting heavy, like the arse of a bull—you had the conceit of “honesty” to keep that arse from cracking your heart; but what did she have? Only your faith in her—then you took that faith away! You should have kept it always, seeing that it was a myth; no myth is safely broken. Ah, the weakness of the strong! The trouble with you is, you are not just a myth-maker, you are also a destroyer, you made a beautiful fable, then put Voltaire to bed with it; ah, the Dead March in “Saul"!’
Nora said, as if she had not been interrupted—‘Because after that night, I went to see Jenny. I remember the stairs. They were of brown wood, and the hall was ugly and dark, and her apartment depressing. No one would have known that she had money. The walls had mustard-coloured paper on them as far as the salon, and something hideous in red and green and black in the hall, and away at the end, a bedroom facing the hall-door, with a double-bed. Sitting up against, the pillow was a doll. Robin had given me a doll. I knew then, before I asked, that this was the right house, before I said, “You are Robin’s mistress, aren’t you?” That poor shuddering creature had pelvic bones I could see flying through her dress. I wanted to lean forward and laugh with terror. She was sitting there doubled up with surprise, her raven’s bill coming up saying, “Yes.” Then I looked up and there on the wall was the photograph of Robin when she was a baby (the one that she had told me was lost).
‘She went to pieces; she fell forward on my lap. At her next words I saw that I was not a danger to her, but someone who might understand her torture. In great agitation she said, “I went out this afternoon, I didn’t think she would call me, because you had been away to the country, Robin said, and would be back this evening and so she would have to stay home with you, because you had been so good to her always; though God knows I understand there is nothing between you any longer, that you are ‘just good friends’; she has explained that—still, I nearly went mad when I found that she had been here and I was out. She has told me often enough, ‘Don’t leave the house, because I don’t know exactly when I am going to be able to get away, because I can’t hurt Nora.’ “ Nora’s voice broke. She went on.
‘Then Jenny said, “What are you going to do? What do you want me to do?” I knew all the time that she could do nothing but what she wanted to do, and that whatever it was, she was a liar, no matter what truth she was telling. I was dead. I felt stronger then, and I said, yes I would have a drink. She poured out two, knocking the bottle against the glass and spilling the liquor on the dark ugly carpet. I kept thinking, what else is it that is hurting me; then I knew the doll; the doll in there on the bed.’ Nora sat down, facing the doctor. ‘We give death to a child when we give it a doll—it’s the effigy and the shroud; when a woman gives it to a woman, it is the life they cannot have, it is their child, sacred and profane; so when I saw that other doll—‘ Nora could not go on. She began to cry. ‘What part of monstrosity am I that I am always crying at its side!
‘When I got home Robin had been waiting, knowing, because I was late, that something was wrong. I said, “It is over—I can’t go on. You have always lied to me, and you have denied me to her. I can’t stand it any more."
‘She stood up then, and went into the hall. She jerked her coat off the hook and I said, “Have you nothing to say to me?” She turned her face to me. It was like something once beautiful found in a river—and flung herself out of the door.’
‘And you were crying,’ the doctor said, nodding. ‘You went about the house like someone sunken under lightness. You were ruined and you kept striking your hands together, laughing crazily and singing a little and putting your hands over your face. Stage-tricks have been taken from life, so finding yourself employing them you were confused with a sense of shame. When you went out looking for someone to go mad with, they said, “For God’s sake look at Nora!” For the demolishing of a great ruin is always a fine and terrifying spectacle. Why is it that you want to talk to me? Because I’m the other woman that God forgot.’
‘There’s nothing to go by, Matthew,’ she said. ‘You do not know which way to go. A man is another person—a woman is yourself, caught as you turn in panic; on her mouth you kiss your own. If she is taken you cry that you have been robbed of yourself. God laughs at me; but his laughter is my love.’
‘You have died and arisen for love,’ said Matthew. ‘But unlike the ass, returning from the market you are always carrying the same load. Oh, for God’s sweet sake, didn’t she ever disgust you! Weren’t you sometimes pleased that you had the night to yourself, wishing, when she did come home, that it was never?’
‘Never, and always; I was frightened she would be gentle again. That,’ she said, ‘that’s an awful fear. Fear of the moment when she would turn her words, making them something between us that nobody else could possibly share—and she would say, “You have got to stay with me or I can’t live.” Yet one night she ran behind me in the Montparnasse quarter, where I had gone looking for her because someone had called me, saying, she was sick and couldn’t get home (I had stopped going out with her because I couldn’t bear to see the “evidence of my eyes”); running behind me for blocks saying, with a furious panting breath, “You are a devil! You make everything dirty!” (I had tried to take someone’s hands off her. They always put hands on her when she was drunk.) “You make me feel dirty and tired and old!"
I turned against the wall. The policemen and the people in the street collected. I was cold and terribly ashamed. I said, “Do you mean that?” And she said she meant it. She put her head down on one of the officers’ shoulders. She was drunk. He had her by her wrist, one hand on her behind. She did not say anything about that, because she did not notice, and kept spitting horrible things at me. Then I walked away very fast. My head seemed to be in a large place. She began running after me. I kept on walking. I was cold, and I was not miserable any more. She caught me by the shoulder and went against me, grinning. She stumbled and I held her, and she said, seeing a poor wretched beggar of a whore, “Give her some money, all of it!” She threw the francs into the street and bent down over the filthy baggage and began stroking her hair, gray with the dust of years, saying, “They are all God-forsaken, and you most of all, because they don’t want you to have your happiness. They don’t want you to drink. Well, here, drink! I give you money and permission! These women—they are all like her,’ she said with fury. “They are all good—they want to save us!” She sat down beside her.
‘It took me and the garçon half an hour to get her up and into the lobby, and when I got her that far she began fighting, so that suddenly, without thinking, but out of weariness and misery I struck her; and at that she started, and smiled, and went up the stairs with me without complaint. She sat up in bed and ate eggs and called me, “Angel! Angel!” and ate my eggs too, and turned over, and went to sleep. Then I kissed her, holding her hands and feet, and I said: “Die now, so you will be quiet, so you will not be touched again by dirty hands; so you will not take my heart and your body and let them be nosed by dogs—die now, then you will be mine forever.” (What right has anyone to that?)’ She stopped. ‘She was mine only when she was drunk, Matthew, and had passed out. That’s the terrible thing, that finally she was mine only when she was dead drunk. All the time I didn’t believe her life was as it was and yet, the fact that I didn’t, proves something is wrong with me. I saw her always like a tall child who had grown up the length of the infant’s gown, walking and needing help and safety; because she was in her own nightmare. I tried to come between and save her, but, I was like a shadow in her dream that could never reach her in time, as the cry of the sleeper has no echo, myself echo struggling to answer; she was like a new shadow walking perilously close to the outer curtain, and I was going mad because I was awake and seeing it, unable to reach it, unable to strike people down from it; and it moving, almost unwalking, with the face saintly and idiotic.
‘And then that day I’ll remember all my life, when I said: “It is over now,” she was asleep and I struck her awake. I saw her come awake and turn befouled before me, she who had managed in that sleep to keep whole. Matthew, for God’s sake, say something, you are awful enough to say it, say something! I didn’t know, I didn’t know that it was to be me who was to do the terrible thing! No rot had touched her until then, and there before my eyes I saw her corrupt all at once and withering, because I had struck her sleep away, and I went mad and I’ve been mad ever since; and there’s nothing to do; nothing! You must say something, oh God, say something!’
‘Stop it! Stop it!’ he cried. ‘Stop screaming! Put your hands down! Stop it! You were a “good woman", and so a bitch on a high plane, the only one able to kill yourself and Robin! Robin was outside the “human type"—a wild thing caught in a woman’s skin, monstrously alone, monstrously vain; like the paralysed man in Coney Island—(take away a man’s conformity and you take away his remedy)—who had to lie on his back in a box, but the box was lined with velvet, his fingers jewelled with stones, and suspended over him where he could never take his eyes off, a sky-blue mounted mirror, for he wanted to enjoy his own “difference". Robin is not in your life, you are in her dream, you’ll never get out of it. And why does Robin feel innocent? Every bed she leaves, without caring, fills her heart with peace and happiness. She has made her “escape” again. That’s why she can’t “put herself in another’s place", she herself is the only “position"; so she resents it when you reproach her with what she had done. She knows she is innocent because she can’t do anything in relation to any one but herself. You almost caught hold of her, but she put you cleverly away by making you the Madonna. What was your patience and terror worth all these years if you couldn’t keep them for her sake? Did you have to learn wisdom on her knees?
‘Oh, for God’s sweet sake, couldn’t you stand not learning your lesson? Because the lesson we learn is always by giving death and a sword to our lover. You are full to the brim with pride, but I am an empty pot going forward, saying my prayers in a dark place; because I know no one loves, I, least of all, and that no one loves me, that’s what makes most people so passionate and bright, because they want to love and be loved, when there is only a bit of lying in the ear to make the ear forget what time is compiling. So I, Dr. O’Connor, say, creep by, softly, softly, and don’t learn anything, because it’s always learned of another person’s body; take action in your heart and be careful whom you love—for a lover who dies, no matter how forgotten, will take somewhat of you to the grave. Be humble like the dust, as God intended, and crawl, and finally you’ll crawl to the end of the gutter and not be missed and not much remembered.’
‘Sometimes’, Nora said, ‘she would sit at home all day, looking out of the window or playing with her toys, trains, and animals and cars to wind up, and dolls and marbles and soldiers. But all the time she was watching me, to see that no one called, that the bell did not ring, that I got no mail, nor anyone hallooing in the court, though she knew that none of these things could happen. My life was hers.
‘Sometimes, if she got tight by evening, I would find her standing in the middle of the room, in boy’s clothes, rocking from foot to foot, holding the doll she had given us—"our child"—high above her head, as if she would cast it down, a look of fury on her face. And one time, about three in the morning when she came in, she was angry because for once I had not been there all the time, waiting. She picked up the doll and hurled it to the floor and put her foot on it, crushing her heel into it; and then, as I came crying behind her, she kicked it, its china head all in dust, its skirt shivering and stiff, whirling over and over across the floor, its blue bow now over, now under.’
The doctor brought his palms together. ‘If you, who are blood-thirsty with love, had left her alone, what? Would a lost girl in Dante’s time have been a lost girl still, and he had turned his eyes on her? She would have been remembered, and the remembered put on the dress of immunity. Do you think that Robin had no right to fight you with her only weapon? She saw in you that fearful eye that would make her a target forever. Have not girls done as much for the doll?—the doll—yes, target of things past and to come? The last doll, given to age, is the girl who should have been a boy, and the boy who should have been a girl! The love of that last doll was foreshadowed in that love of the first. The doll and the immature have something right about them, the doll, because it resembles, but does not contain life, and the third sex, because it contains life but resembles the doll. The blessed face! It should be seen only in profile, otherwise it is observed to be the conjunction of the identical cleaved halves of sexless misgiving! Their kingdom is without precedent. Why do you think I have spent near fifty years weeping over bars but because I am one of them! The uninhabited angel! That is what you have always been hunting!’
‘Perhaps, Matthew, there are devils? Who knows if there are devils? Perhaps they have set foot in the uninhabited. Was I her devil trying to bring her comfort? I enter my dead and bring no comfort, not even in my dreams. There in my sleep was my grandmother, who I loved more than anyone, tangled in the grave grass, and flowers blowing about and between her; lying there in the grave, in the forest, in a coffin of glass, and flying low, my father who is still living; low going and into the grave beside her, his head thrown back and his curls lying out, struggling with her death terribly, and me, stepping about its edges, walking and wailing without a sound; round and round, seeing them struggling with that death as if they were struggling with the sea and my life; I was weeping and unable to do anything or take myself out of it. There they were, in the grave glass, and the grave water and the grave flowers and the grave time, one living and one dead and one asleep. It went on forever, though it had stopped, my father stopped beating and just lay there floating beside her, immovable, yet drifting in a tight place. And I woke up and still it was going on; it went down into the dark earth of my waking as if I were burying them with the earth of my lost sleep. This I have done to my father’s mother, dreaming through my father, and have tormented them with my tears and with my dreams: for all of us die over again in somebody’s sleep. And this, I have done to Robin: it is only through me that she will die over and over, and it is only through me, of all my family, that my grandfather dies, over and over. I woke and got up out of bed and putting my hands between my knees I said, “What was that dream saying, for God’s sake, what was that dream?” For it was for me also.’
Suddenly, Dr. Matthew O’Connor said: ‘It’s my mother without argument I want!’ And then, in his loudest voice he roared: ‘Mother of God! I wanted to be your son—the unknown beloved second would have done!’
‘Oh, Matthew. I don’t know how to go. I don’t know which way to turn! Tell her, if you ever see her, that it is always with her in my arms—forever it will be that way until we die. Tell her to do what she must, but not to forget.’
‘Tell her yourself,’ said the doctor, ‘or sit in your own trouble silently, if you like, it’s the same with ermines—those fine yellow ermines that women pay such a great price for—how did they get that valuable colour? By sitting in bed all their lives and pissing the sheets, or weeping in their own way. It’s the same with persons; they are only of value when they have laid themselves open to “nuisance"—their own, and the world’s. Ritual itself constitutes an instruction. So we come back to the place from which I set out; pray to the good God, she will keep you. Personally I call her “she” because of the way she made me; it somehow balances the mistake.’ He got up and crossed to the window. ‘That priceless galaxy of misinformation called the mind, harnessed to that stupendous and threadbare glomerate compulsion called the soul, ambling down the almost obliterated bridle path of Well and Ill, fortuitously planned—is the holy Habeas-Corpus, the manner in which the body is brought before the judge—still—in the end Robin will wish you in a nunnery where what she loved is, by surroundings, made safe, because as you are you keep “bringing her up", as cannons bring up the dead from deep water.’
‘In the end’, Nora said, ‘they came to me, the girls Robin had driven frantic—to me, for comfort!’ She began to laugh. ‘My God,’ she said, ‘the women I’ve held upon my knees!’
‘Women’, the doctor said, ‘were born on the knees, that’s why I’ve never been able to do anything about them, I’m on my own so much of the time.’
‘Suddenly, I knew what all my life had been, Matthew, what I hoped Robin was—the secure torment. We can hope for nothing greater, except hope. If I asked her, crying, not to go out, she would go just the same, richer in her heart because I had touched it, as she was going down the stairs.’
‘Lions grow their manes and foxes their teeth on that bread,’ interpolated the doctor.
‘In the beginning, when I tried to stop her from drinking and staying out all night, and from being defiled, she would say—"Ah, I feel so pure and gay!” as if the ceasing of that abuse was her only happiness and peace of mind; and so I struggled with her as with the coils of my own most obvious heart, holding her by the hair, striking her against my knees, as some people in trouble strike their hands too softly; and as if it were a game, she raised and dropped her head against my lap, as a child bounces in a crib to enter excitement, even if it were someone gutted on a dagger. I thought I loved her for her sake, and I found it was for my own.’
‘I know,’ said the doctor, ‘there you were sitting up high and fine, with a rose-bush up your arse.’
She looked at him, then she smiled. ‘How should you know?’
‘I’m a lady in no need of insults,’ said the doctor. ‘I know.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You know what none of us know until we have died. You were dead in the beginning,’
The twilight was falling. About the street lamps there was a heavy mist. ‘Why don’t you rest now?’ asked the doctor. ‘Your body is coming to it, you are forty and the body has a politic too, and a life of its own that you like to think is yours. I heard a spirit mew once, but I knew it was a mystery eternally moving outward and on, and not my own.’
‘I know,’ she said, ‘now.’ Suddenly, she began to cry, holding her hands. ‘Matthew,’ she said, ‘have you ever loved someone and it became yourself?’
For a moment he did not answer. Taking up the decanter, he held it to the light.
‘Robin can go anywhere, do anything,’ Nora continued, ‘because she forgets, and I nowhere, because I remember.’ She came towards him. Matthew,’ she said, ‘you think I have always been like this. Once I was remorseless, but this is another love—it goes everywhere, there is no place for it to stop—it rots me away. How could she tell me when she had nothing to tell that wasn’t evidence against herself?’
The doctor said, ‘You know as well as I do that we were born twelve, and brought up thirteen, and that some of us lived. My brother, whom I had not seen in four years, and loved the most of all, died, and who was it but me my mother wanted to talk to? Not those who had seen him last, but me who had seen him best, as if my memory of him were himself; and because you forget Robin the best, it’s to you she turns. She comes trembling, and defiant, and belligerent, all right —that you may give her back to herself again as you have forgotten her—you are the only one strong enough to have listened to the prosecution, your life; and to have built back the amazing defence, your heart!
‘The scalpel and the Scriptures have taught me that little I did not already know. And I was doing well enough’, he snapped, ‘until you came along and kicked my stone over, and out I came, all moss and eyes; and here I sit, as naked as only those things can be, whose houses have been torn away from them to make a holiday, and it my only skin—labouring to comfort you. Am I supposed to render up my paradise—that splendid acclimatation—for the comfort of weeping women and howling boys? Look at Felix now, what kind of a Jew is that? Screaming up against tradition like a bat against a window-pane, high-up over the town, his child a boy weeping “o’er graves of hope and pleasure gone".
‘Ah, yes—I love my neighbour. Like a rotten apple to a rotten apple’s breast affixed we go down together, nor is there a hesitation in that decay, for when I sense such, there I apply the breast the firmer, that he may rot as quickly as I, in which he stands in dire need or I miscalculate the cry. I, who am done sooner than any fruit! The heat of his suppuration has mingled his core with mine, and wrought my own to the zenith before its time. The encumbrance of myself I threw away long ago, that breast to breast I might go with my failing friends. And do they love me for it? They do not. So have I divorced myself, not only because I was born as ugly as God dared premeditate, but because with propinquity and knowledge of trouble I have damaged my own value. And death—have you thought of death? What risk do you take? Do you know which dies first, you or she? And which is the sorrier part, head or feet? I say, with that good Sir Don, the feet. Any man can look upon the head in death, but no man can look upon the feet. They are most awfully tipped up from the earth. I’ve thought of that also. Do you think, for Christ’s sweet sake,’ he shouted suddenly, ‘that I am so happy that you should cry down my neck? Do you think there is no lament in this world, but your own? Is there not a forbearing saint somewhere? Is there no bread that does not come proffered with bitter butter? I, as good a Catholic as they make, have embraced every confection of hope, and yet I know well, for all our outcry and struggle, we shall be for the next generation not the massive dung fallen from the dinosaur, but the little speck left of a humming-bird; so as well sing our Chi vuol la Zingarella (how women love it!) while I warble my Sonate au Crépuscule, throwing in der Erlkönig for good measure, not to mention Who is Sylvia? Who is anybody!
‘Oh,’ he cried. ‘A broken heart have you! I have falling arches, flying dandruff, a floating kidney, shattered nerves and a broken heart! But do I scream that an eagle has me by the balls or has dropped his oyster on my heart? Am I going forward screaming that it hurts, that my mind goes back, or holding my guts as if they were a coil of knives? Yet you are screaming, and drawing your lip and putting your hand out and turning round and round! Do I wail to the mountains of the trouble I have had in the valley, or to every stone of the way it broke my bones, or of every lie, how it went down into my belly and built a nest to hatch me to my death there? Isn’t everyone in the world peculiarly swung and me the craziest of the lot?—so that I come dragging and squealing, like a heifer on the way to slaughter, knowing his cries have only half a rod to go, protesting his death—as his death has only a rod to go to protest his screaming? Do you walk high Heaven without shoes? Are you the only person with a bare foot pressed down on a rake? Oh, you poor blind cow! Keep out of my feathers; you ruffle me the wrong way and flit about, stirring my misery! What end is sweet? Are the ends of the hair sweet when you come to number them?’
‘Listen,’ Nora said. ‘You’ve got to listen! She would come back to me after a night all over the city and lie down beside me and she would say, “I want to make everyone happy,” and her mouth was drawn down. “I want everyone to be gay, gay. Only you,” she said, holding me, “only you, you mustn’t be gay or happy, not like that, it’s not for you, only for everyone else in the world.” She knew she was driving me insane with misery and fright; only’, she went on, ‘she couldn’t do anything because she was a long way off and waiting to begin. It’s for that reason she hates everyone near her. It’s why she falls into everything, like someone in a dream. It’s why she wants to be loved and left alone, all at the same time. She would kill the world to get at herself if the world were in the way, and it is in the way. A shadow was falling on her—mine—and it was driving her out of her wits.’
She began to walk again. ‘I have been loved’, she said, ‘by something strange, and it has forgotten me.’ Her eyes were fixed and she seemed to be talking to herself. ‘It was me made her hair stand on end, because I loved her. She turned bitter because I made her fate colossal. She wanted darkness in her mind—to throw a shadow over what she was powerless to alter—her dissolute life, her life at night; and I, I dashed it down. We will never have it out now,’ Nora said. ‘It’s too late. There is no last reckoning for those who have loved too long, so for me there is no end. Only I can’t, I can’t wait for ever!’ she said frantically. ‘I can’t live without my heart!
‘In the beginning, after Robin went away with Jenny to America, I searched for her in the ports. Not literally, in another way. Suffering is the decay of the heart; all that we have loved becomes the “forbidden", when we have not understood it all, as the pauper is the rudiment of a city, knowing something of the city, which the city, for its own destiny, wants to forget. So the lover must go against nature to find love. I sought Robin in Marseilles, in Tangier, in Naples, to understand her, to do away with my terror. I said to myself, I will do what she has done, I will love what she has loved, then I will find her again. At first it seemed that all I should have to do would be to become “debauched", to find the girls that she had loved; but I found that they were only little girls that she had forgotten. I haunted the cafés where Robin had lived her night-life; I drank with the men, I danced with the women, but all I knew was that others had slept with my lover and my child. For Robin is incest too, that is one of her powers. In her, past-time records, and past time is relative to us all. Yet not being the family she is more present than the family. A relative is in the foreground only when it is born, when it suffers and when it dies, unless it becomes one’s lover, then it must be everything, as Robin was; yet not as much as she, for she was like a relative found in another generation. I thought, “I will do something that she will never be able to forgive, then we can begin again as strangers.” But the sailor got no further than the hall. He said: “ Mon dieu, il y a deux chevaux de bois dans la chambre à coucher.’’’’
‘Christ!’ muttered the doctor.
‘So’, Nora continued, ‘I left Paris. I went through the streets of Marseilles, the waterfront of Tangier, the basso porto of Naples. In the narrow streets of Naples, ivies and flowers were growing over the broken-down walls. Under enormous staircases, rising open to the streets, beggars lay sleeping beside images of St. Gennaro; girls going into the churches to pray were calling out to boys in the squares. In open door-ways night-lights were burning all day before gaudy prints of the Virgin. In one room that lay open to the alley, before a bed covered with a cheap heavy satin comforter, in the semi-darkness, a young girl sat on a chair, leaning over its back, one arm across it, the other hanging at her side, as if half of her slept; and half of her suffered. When she saw me she laughed, as children do, in embarrassment. Looking from her to the Madonna behind the candles, I knew that the image, to her, was what I had been to Robin, not a saint at all, but a fixed dismay, the space between the human and the holy head, the arena of the “indecent” eternal. At that moment I stood in the centre of eroticism and death, death that makes the dead smaller, as a lover we are beginning to forget dwindles and wastes; for love and life are a bulk of which the body and heart can be drained, and I knew in that bed Robin should have put me down. In that bed we would have forgotten our lives in the extremity of memory, moulted our parts, as figures in the wax works are moulted down to their story, so we would have broken-down to our love.’
The doctor stood up. He staggered as he reached for his hat and coat. He stood in confused and unhappy silence—he moved toward the door. Holding the knob in his hand he turned toward her. Then he went out.
The doctor, walking with his coat-collar up, entered the Café de la Mairie du VIe. He stood at the bar and ordered a drink, looking at the people in the close, smoke-blue room, he said to himself, ‘Listen!’ Nora troubled him, the life of Nora and the lives of the people in his life. ‘The way of a man in a fog!’ he said. He hung his umbrella on the bar ledge. ‘To think is to be sick,’ he said to the barman. The barman nodded.
The people in the café waited for what the doctor would say, knowing that he was drunk and that he would talk; in great defaming sentences his betrayals came up; no one ever knew what was truth and what was not. ‘If you really want to know how hard a prize-fighter hits,’ he said, look-around, ‘you have got to walk into the circle of his fury and be carried out by the heels, not by the count.’
Someone laughed. The doctor turned slowly. ‘So safe as all that?’ he asked sarcastically; ‘so damned safe? Well, wait until you get in gaol and find yourself slapping the bottoms of your feet for misery.’
He put his hand out for his drink—muttering to himself: ‘Matthew, you have never been in time with any man’s life and you’ll never be remembered at all, God save the vacancy! The finest instrument goes wrong in time—that’s all, the instrument gets broken, and I must remember that when everyone is strange; it’s the instrument gone flat. Lapidary, engrave that on my stone when Matthew is all over and lost in a field.’ He looked around. ‘It’s the instrument, gentlemen, that has lost its G string, otherwise he’d be playing a fine tune; otherwise he’d still be passing his wind with the wind of the north—otherwise touching his billycock!’
‘Only the scorned and the ridiculous make good stories,’ he added angrily, seeing the habitues smiling, ‘so you can imagine when you’ll get told! Life is only long enough for one trade; try that one!’
An unfrocked priest, a stout pale man with woman’s hands, on which were many rings, a friend of the doctor’s, called him and asked him to have a drink. The doctor came, carefully bringing his umbrella and hat. The priest said: ‘I’ve always wanted to know whether you were ever really married or not.’
‘Should I know that?’ inquired the doctor. ‘I’ve said I was married and I gave the girl a name and had children by her, then, presto! I killed her off as lightly as the death of swans. And was I reproached for that story? I was. Because even your friends regret weeping for a myth, as if that were not practically the fate of all the tears in the world! What if the girl was the wife of my brother and the children my brother’s children? When I laid her down her limbs were as handsome and still as two May boughs from the cutting—did he do as much for her? I imagined about her in my heart as pure as a French print, a girl all of a little bosom and a bird cage, lying back down comfortable with the sea for a background and a rope of roses to hold her. Has any man’s wife been treated better than that? Who says she might not have been mine, and the children also? Who for that matter’, he said with violence, ‘says they are not mine? Is not a brother his brother also, the one blood cut up in lengths, one called Michael and the other Matthew? Except that people get befuddled seeing them walk in different directions? Who’s to say that I’m not my brother’s wife’s husband and that his children were not fathered in my lap? Is it not to his honour that he strikes me as myself? And when she died, did my weeping make his weeping less?’
The ex-priest said, ‘Well, there’s something in that, still I like to know what is what.’
‘You do, do you?’ said the doctor. ‘Well then, that’s why you are where you are now, right down in the mud without a feather to fly with, like the ducks in Golden Gate park—the largest park in captivity—everybody with their damnable kindness having fed them all the year round to their ruin because when it comes time for their going south they are all a bitter consternation, being too fat and heavy to rise off the water, and, my God, how they flop and struggle all over the park in autumn, crying and tearing their hair out because their nature is weighed down with bread and their migration stopped, by crumbs. You wring your hands to see it, and that’s another illustration of love; in the end you are too heavy to move with the greediness in your stomach. And’, said the doctor, ‘it would be the same with me if I’d let it, what with the wind at the one end and the cyclone at the other. Yet there are some that I have neglected for my spirit’s sake—the old yeomen of the Guard and the beefeaters of the Tower because of their cold kidneys and gray hairs, and the kind of boy who only knows two existences—himself in a mirror—back and front.’ He was very drunk now. He looked about the café. He caught someone nudging someone. He looked up at the ex-priest and cursed. ‘What people! All queer in a terrible way. There were a couple of queer good people once in this world—but none of you,’ he said, addressing the room, ‘will ever know them. You think you are all studded with diamonds, don’t you! Well, part the diamonds and you’ll find slug’s meat. My God,’ he said, turning around, ‘when I think!’ He began to pound the table with his glass. ‘May they all be damned! The people in my life who have made my life miserable, coming to me to learn of degradation and the night. Nora, beating her head against her heart, sprung over, her mind closing her life up like a heel on a fan, rotten to the bone for love of Robin. My God, how that woman can hold on to an idea! And that old sandpiper, Jenny! Oh, it’s a grand bad story, and who says I’m a betrayer? I say, tell the story of the world to the world!’
‘A sad and a corrupt age,’ the ex-priest said.
Matthew O’Connor called for another drink. ‘What do they all come to me for? Why do they all tell me everything then expect it to lie hushed in me, like a rabbit gone home to die? And that Baron Felix, hardly muttered a word in his life, and yet his silence breeds like scum on a pond; and that boy of his, Guido, by Robin, trying to see across the Danube with the tears in his eyes, Felix holding on to his hand and the boy holding on to the image of the Virgin on a darkening red ribbon, feeling its holy lift out of the metal and calling it mother; and me not even knowing which direction my end is coming from. So, when Felix said to me, “Is the child infirm?” I said, “Was the Mad King of Bavaria infirm?” I’m not one to cut the knot by drowning myself in any body of water, not even the print of a horse’s hoof, no matter how it has been raining.’
People had begun to whisper and the waiters moved closer, watching. The ex-priest was smiling to himself, but O’Connor did not seem to see or hear anything but his own heart. ‘Some people’, he said, ‘take off head-first into any body of water and six glasses later someone in Haarlem gets typhoid from drinking their misery. God, take my hand and get me up out of this great argument—the more you go against your nature, the more you will know of it—hear me, heaven! I’ve done, and been everything that I didn’t want to be or do—Lord, put the light out—so I stand here, beaten up and mauled and weeping, knowing I am not what I thought I was, a good man doing wrong, but the wrong man doing nothing much, and I wouldn’t be telling you about it if I weren’t talking to myself. I talk too much, because I have been made so miserable by what you are keeping hushed. I’m an old worn out lioness, a coward in my corner, for the sake of my bravery I’ve never been one thing that I am, to find out what I am! Here lies the body of Heaven. The mocking bird howls through the pillars of Paradise, oh, Lord! Death in Heaven lies couched on a mackerel sky, on her breast a helmet and at her feet a foal with a silent marble mane. Nocturnal sleep is heavy on her eyes.’
‘Funny little man,’ someone said, ‘never stops talking—always getting everyone into trouble by excusing them, because he can’t excuse himself—the Squatting Beast, coming out at night’—as he broke off, the voice of the doctor was heard: ‘And what am I? I’m damned, and carefully public!’
He fumbled for a cigarette, found it and lit it.
‘Once upon a time, I was standing listening to a quack hanky-panky of a medicine man saying: “Now, ladies and gentlemen, before I behead the small boy, I will endeavour to entertain you with a few parlour tricks.” He had a turban cocked over his eye and a moaning in his left ventricle which was meant to be the whine of Tophet, and a loin-cloth as big as a tent and protecting about as much. Well, he began doing his tricks. He made a tree grow out of his left shoulder and dashed two rabbits out of his cuffs and balanced three eggs on his nose. A priest, standing in the crowd, began to laugh, and a priest laughing always makes me wring my hands with doubt. The other time was when Catherine the Great sent for me to bleed her. She took to the leech with rowdy Saxon abandon, saying: “Let him drink, I’ve always wanted to be in two places at once!"’
‘For heaven’s sake,’ the ex-priest said. ‘Remember your century at least!’
For a moment the doctor looked angry. ‘See here,’ he said, ‘don’t interrupt me. The reason I’m so remarkable is that I remember everyone even when they are not about. It’s the boys that look as innocent as the bottom of a plate that get you into trouble, not a man with a prehistoric memory.’
‘Women can cause trouble too,’ the ex-priest said lamely.
‘That’s another story,’ the doctor said. ‘What else has Jenny ever done, and what else has Robin ever done? And Nora, what’s she done but cause it, by taking it in at night like a bird-coop? And I myself wish I’d never had a button up my middle —for what I’ve done and what I’ve not done all goes back to that—to be recognized, a gem should lie in a wide open field; but I’m all aglitter in the underbrush! If you don’t want to suffer you should tear yourself apart. Were not the several parts of Caroline of Hapsburg put in three utterly obvious piles?—her heart in the Augustiner church, her intestines in St. Stefan’s and what was left of the body in the vault of the Capucines? Saved by separation. But I’m all in one piece! Oh, the new moon! ‘ he said. ‘When will she come riding?’
‘Drunk and telling the world,’ someone said.
The doctor heard but he was too far gone to care, too muddled in his mind to argue, and already weeping.
‘Come,’ the ex-priest said, ‘I’ll take you home.’
The doctor waved his arm. ‘Revenge is for those who have loved a little, for anything more than that justice is hardly enough. Some day I’m going to Lourdes and scramble in the front row and talk about all of you.’ His eyes were almost closed. He opened them and looked about him and a fury came over him. ‘Christ Almighty!’ he said. ‘Why don’t they let me alone, all of them?’
The ex-priest repeated, ‘Come, I’ll take you home.’
The doctor tried to rise. He was exceedingly drunk and now extremely angry all at once. His umbrella fell to the floor with the crash of a glass as he swung his arm upward against the helping hand. ‘Get out! Get out!’ he said. ‘What a damnable year, what a bloody time! How did it happen, where did it come from?’
He began to scream with sobbing laughter. ‘Talking to me—all of them—sitting on me as heavy as a truck horse—talking! Love falling buttered side down, fate falling arse up! Why doesn’t anyone know when everything is over, except me? That fool Nora, holding on by her teeth, going back to find Robin! And Felix—eternity is only just long enough for a Jew! But there’s someone else—who was it, damn it all—who was it? I’ve known everyone,’ he said, ‘everyone!’ He came down upon the table with all his weight, his arms spread, his head between them, his eyes wide open and crying, staring along the table where the ash blew and fluttered with his gasping breath. ‘For Christ’s sweet sake!’ he said, and his voice was a whisper, ‘Now that you have all heard what you wanted to hear, can’t you let me loose now, let me go? I’ve not only lived my life for nothing, but I’ve told it for nothing—abominable among the filthy people—I know, it’s all over, everything’s over, and nobody knows it but me—drunk as a fiddler’s bitch—lasted too long—‘ He tried to get to his feet, gave it up. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘the end—mark my words—now nothing, but wrath and weeping!’