Where the Tree Falls
Baron Felix, who had given up his place in the bank, though not his connections with it, had been seen in many countries standing before that country’s palace gate, holding his gloved hands before him in the first unconcluded motion of submission; contemplating relics and parts, with a tension in his leg that took the step forward or back a little quicker than his fellow sightseer.
As at one time he had written to the press about this noble or that (and had never seen it in print), as he had sent letters to declining houses and never received an answer, he was now amassing a set of religious speculations that he eventually intended sending to the Pope. The reason for this was, that as time passed it became increasingly evident that his child, if born to anything, had been born to holy decay. Mentally deficient, and emotionally excessive, an addict to death; at ten, barely as tall as a child of six, wearing spectacles, stumbling when he tried to run, with cold hands and anxious face, he followed his father, trembling with an excitement that was a precocious ecstasy. Holding his father’s hand he climbed palace and church steps with the tearing swing of the leg necessitated by a measure that had not taken a child into account; staring at paintings and wax reproductions of saints, watching the priests with the quickening of the breath of those in whom concentration must take the place of participation, as in the scar of a wounded animal will be seen the shudder of its recovery.
When Guido had first spoken of wishing to enter the church, Felix had been startled out of himself. He knew that Guido was not like other children, that he would always be too estranged to be argued with; in accepting his son the Baron saw that he must accept a demolition of his own life. The child would obviously never be able to cope with it. The Baron bought his boy a virgin in metal, hanging from a red ribbon, and placed it about his neck, and in doing so, the slight neck, bent to take the ribbon, recalled to him Robin’s, as she stood back to him in the antique shop on the Seine.
So Felix began to look into the matter of the church. He searched the face of every priest he saw in the streets; he read litanies and examined chasubles and read the Credo; he inquired into the state of monasteries. He wrote, after much thought, to the Pope, a long disquisition on the state of the cloth. He touched on Franciscan monks and French priests, pointing out that any faith that could, in its profoundest unity, compose two such dissimilar types—one the Roman, shaved and expectant of what seemed, when one looked into his vacantly absorbed face, nothing more glorious than a muscular resurrection; and the other, the French priest, who seemed to be composite of husband and wife in conjunction with original sin, carrying with them good and evil in constantly quantitative ascent and descent, the unhappy spectacle of a single ego come to a several public dissolution,—must be profoundly elastic.
He inquired if this might not be the outcome of the very different confessional states of the two countries. Was it not, he asked, to be taken for granted that the Italian ear must be less confounded because, possibly, it was harking the echo of its past, and the French that of the future? Was it conceivable that the ‘confessions’ of the two nations could, in the one case, produce that living and expectant coma and, in the other, that worldly, incredible, indecent gluttony? He said that he himself had come to the conclusion that the French, the more secular, were a very porous people. Assuming this, it was then only natural that from listening to a thousand and one lay sins, the priest, upon reaching no riper age than two score, should find it difficult to absolve, the penitent having laid himself open to a peculiar kind of forgiveness; not so much absolution as exigency, for the priest was himself a vessel already filled to overflowing, and gave pardon because he could no longer hold—he signed with the cross, hastily and in stress, being, like a full bladder, embarrassed and in need of an immediate privacy. The Franciscan, on the other hand, had still a moment to wait. There was no tangent in his iris, as one who, in blessing is looking for relief.
Felix received no answer. He had expected none. He wrote to clear some doubt in his mind. He knew that in all probability the child would never be ‘chosen’. If he were the Baron hoped that it would be in Austria, among his own people, and to that end he finally decided to make his home in Vienna.
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 VIe 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 when 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 nunnery, 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.’
The Baron was silent a moment. Then he said: ‘Yes, something of this rigour was in the Baronin, in its first faint degree; it was in her walk, in the way she wore her clothes, in her silence, as if speech were heavy and unclarified. There was in her every movement a slight drag, as if the past were a web about her, as there is a web of time about a very old building. There is a sensible weight in the air around a thirteenth-century edifice’, he said with a touch of pomposity, ‘that is unlike the light air about a new structure; the new building seems to repulse it, the old to gather it. So about the Baronin there was a density, not of age, but of youth. It perhaps accounts for my attraction to her.’.
‘Animals find their way about largely by the keenness of their nose,’ said the doctor. ‘We have lost ours in order not to be one of them, and what have we in its place? A tension in the spirit which is the contraction of freedom. But,’ he ended, ‘all dreadful events are of profit.’
Felix ate in silence for a moment, then point-blank he turned to the doctor with a question. ‘You know my preoccupation; is my son’s better?’
The doctor, as he grew older, in answering a question seemed, as old people do, to be speaking more and more to himself, and, when troubled, he seemed to grow smaller. He said: ‘Seek no further for calamity; you have it in your son. After all, calamity is what we are all seeking. You have found it. A man is whole only when he takes into account his shadow as well as himself—and what is a man’s shadow but his upright astonishment? Guido is the shadow of your anxiety, and Guido’s shadow is God’s.’
Felix said: ‘Guido also loves women of history.’
‘Mary’s shadow!’ said the doctor.
Felix turned. His monocle shone sharp and bright along its edge. ‘People say that he is not sound of mind. What do you say?’
‘I say that a mind like his may be more apt than yours and mine—he is not made secure by habit—in that there is always hope.’
Felix said under his breath: ‘He does not grow up.’
Matthew answered: ‘The excess of his sensibilities may preclude his mind. His sanity is an unknown room: a known room is always smaller than an unknown. If I were you,’ the doctor continued, ‘I would carry that boy’s mind like a bowl picked up in the dark; you do not know what’s in it. He feeds on odd remnants that we have not priced; he eats a sleep that is not our sleep. There is more in sickness than the name of that sickness. In the average person is the peculiar that has been scuttled, and in the peculiar the ordinary that has been sunk; people always fear what requires watching.’
Felix ordered a fine. The doctor smiled. ‘I said you would come to it,’ he said, and emptied his own glass at a gulp.
‘I know,’ Felix answered, ‘but I did not understand. I thought you meant something else.’
‘What?’
Felix paused, turning the small glass around in his trembling hand. ‘I thought’, he said, ‘that you meant that I would give up.’
The doctor lowered his eyes. ‘Perhaps that is what I meant—but sometimes I am mistaken.’ He looked at Felix from under his heavy brows. ‘Man was born damned and innocent from the start, and wretchedly—as he must—on those two themes—whistles his tune.’
The Baron leaned forward. He said, in a low voice, ‘Was the Baronin damned?’
The doctor deliberated for a second, knowing what Felix had hidden in his question. ‘Guido is not damned,’ he said, and the Baron turned away quickly. ‘Guido’, the doctor went on, ‘is blessed—he is peace of mind—he is what you have always been looking for—Aristocracy’, he said smiling, ‘is a condition in the mind of the people when they try to think of something else and better—funny,’ he added sharply, ‘that a man never knows when he has found what he has always been looking for.’
‘And the Baronin,’ Felix said, ‘do you ever hear from her?’
‘She is in America now, but of course you know that. Yes, she writes, now and again, not to me—God forbid—to others.’
‘What does she say?’ the Baron said, trying not to show his emotion.
‘She says,’ the doctor answered, “Remember me.” Probably because she has difficulty in remembering herself.’
The Baron caught his monocle. ‘Altamonte, who has been in America, tells me that she seemed “estranged". Once’, he said, pinching his monocle into place, ‘I wanted, as you, who are aware of everything, know, to go behind the scenes, back-stage as it were, to our present condition, to find, if I could, the secret of time; good, perhaps that that is an impossible ambition for the sane mind. One has, I am now certain, to be a little mad to see into the past or the future, to be a little abridged of life to know life, the obscure life—darkly seen, the condition my son lives in; it may also be the errand on which the Baronin is going.’
Taking out his handkerchief, the Baron removed his monocle, wiping it carefully.
Carrying a pocket full of medicines, and a little flask of oil for the chapping hands of his son, Felix rode into Vienna, the child beside him; Frau Mann, opulent and gay, opposite, holding a rug for the boy’s feet. Felix drank heavily now, and to hide the red that flushed his cheeks he had grown a beard ending in two forked points on his chin. In the matter of drink, Frau Mann was now no bad second. Many cafés saw this odd trio, the child in the midst wearing heavy lenses that made his eyes drift forward, sitting erect, his neck holding his head at attention, watching his father’s coins roll, as the night drew out, farther and farther across the floor and under the feet of the musicians as Felix called for military music, for Wacht am Rhein, for Morgenrot, for Wagner; his monocle dimmed by the heat of the room, perfectly correct and drunk, trying not to look for what he had always sought, the son of a once great house; his eyes either gazing at the ceiling or lowered where his hand, on the table, struck thumb and little finger against the wood in rhythm with the music, as if he were playing only the two important notes of an octave, the low and the high; or nodding his head and smiling at his child, as mechanical toys nod to the touch of an infant’s hand, Guido pressing his own hand against his stomach where, beneath his shirt, he could feel the medallion against his flesh, Frau Mann gripping her beer mug firmly, laughing and talking loudly.
One evening, seated in his favourite café on the King, Felix on entering had seen instantly, but refused to admit it to himself, a tall man in the corner who, he was sure, was the Grand Duke Alexander of Russia, cousin and brother-in-law of the late Czar Nicholas—and toward whom in the early part of the evening he steadfastly refused to look. But as the clock hands pointed twelve, Felix, (with the abandon of what a mad man knows to be his one hope of escape, disproof of his own madness) could not keep his eyes away, and as they arose to go, his cheeks now drained of colour, the points of his beard bent sharply down with the stiffening back of his chin, he turned and made a slight bow, his head in his confusion making a complete half-swing, as an animal will turn its head away from a human, as if in mortal shame.
He stumbled as he got into his carriage. ‘Come,’ he said, taking the child’s fingers in his own. ‘You are cold.’ He poured a few drops of oil, and began rubbing Guido’s hands.