“We are in need of a success,” the Professor intoned. “This woman, who can have anything she wants, is desperately alone.”
“In my experience, friend, privileges are more difficult to overcome than abuses. I trust you have arranged for the fee. Avanti!” And with a wave of his hand, Father gestured across the river. “We will work the high ground first, to see how she behaves when she knows her mistress is not watching after her. We must take care to never use any words she is likely to hear from others. And please remember, Professor, hallooing spoils the sport.”
Then he strode off, singing an old Venetian ditty:
Three golden horses
taken from the heathen.
A marvelous fair pair of
gallows made of alabaster.
So the Duke himself
might see the punishment at hand.
The ladies disrobed quickly, like schoolgirls, in the great hall of gray vibrating radiators. As the suits remained wet, they decided to swim in their chemises, and as they galloped down the path to the bathing beach, they could make out Father and the Professor traversing the shallows upstream, with a recalcitrant but unleashed Topsy following them by leaping from one slick stone to another.
“Have no fear of the diving board,” Mother announced over her shoulder. “It was left over from the piano lumber, good Cannonian pine used to line the trenches in the Balkan Wars, blasted with shrapnel and blood, and therefore incapable of splitting or further mischief.” This was something of an exaggeration, but our board was huge indeed, jutting fourteen feet out into a lagoon entirely concealed by reeds and anchored with a clutch of welded cannon balls. Ainoha sprung immediately to the end of the board, and without hesitation accomplished her patented half-gainer, disappearing into the Mze without so much as a fleck of foam. When she resurfaced and shook her golden mane, she saw the Princess follow her with only slight trepidation, though she held both her nose and mouth when she jumped, producing a fine geyser. They floated on their backs spitting modestly and scrunching their toes. Then, on a shawl, upon the weedy beach, as their crinolines conformed to their wet bodies, they regarded themselves intently as they turbaned their wet locks.
“My husband,” the Princess offered as an icebreaker, “is a disgusting fellow.”
The swimming hole marked the edge of the first Stone Age settlement in 6000 BC. At that time a riverine ledge extended completely across the Mze, a natural ford and the future site of a Roman bridge. But the attraction here for the mentality of mankind’s first predatory age was not the crossing so much as the whirlpools just beneath the ledge, which churned up vast amounts of nutrients and attracted carp, tench, loach, pike-perch, and sturgeon. The votaries discovered in this settlement’s burial pits were human heads with fish lips, as well as cave paintings depicting trained dogs diving into the tawny river to retrieve live fish, as they believed the whirlpools to be bottomless. The river and their dogs gave them everything. There was no need to bait a hook, cast a net, or sharpen a spear. The Mze washed away every little miserable existence, and its banks provided water chestnuts, sloes, field pears, rose hips, cornel cherries, wild plum, and crab apple. Yet the site was soon abandoned, and it was this ledge, now exposed at low water for the first time in anyone’s memory, that Topsy and her pedagogical duo traversed until they came to the Roman central arch, where the remainder of the ledge had been blasted away in the early nineteenth century for massed boat traffic. From the broken arch, a slatted rope bridge enjoined the far cliffs, and Father carried Topsy this final third.
From my vantage on the chapel promontory, I could see far downstream, across the ledge and bridge, past the bathing beach, and well onto the old mill where the Mze bent double and disappeared. There I was taken aback to spy my Waterman, lying beside the drying riverbed, leaning secretly, silently, invisibly upon his elbow. His hair was matted, and runnels of water ran from the hem of his green overcoat into the disappearing Mze, like muddy tributaries to the sea. In the streaming weeds and waters of his face, he was smoking one of Father’s innumerable lost and waterlogged pipes, with an acrobat’s smile. And in his lapel, a bright green leaf sprouted from his gray, storm-broken trunk.
The Mze was ebbing away. The Mzeometer, a calibrated Roman well at the old mill, could have confirmed this, but we disdained even this most elemental of scientific measures. The river was doing its best to flood, to no avail. The pastures were no longer striped. Where streamlets, subterranean aquifers, and proud torrential brooks once entered the river, now were only baked gulches, deep and narrow as saber cuts. The effervescent runnels in the banks had quit, and the receding waters revealed tin pots and the carcass of a laced boot, as well as rusty culverts discharging waste from god knows where. The true self-forgetfulness granted by the contemplation of water was no longer possible. There was not enough left to pray to.
High above the ladies, cresting the bluffs on the far side of the river, the two men strode through grass up to their waists. At first submerged, Topsy started to leap up dolphin-like from the sea of lime, until they reached the bald, which had been cut through with gravel allées to an abandoned folly, slippery for men and painful for animals — another French idea. Suddenly a cold breeze had come up.
“The time has come to transfer the lines of force, my friend,” Felix said. He slipped the cord and passed it behind his back to the Professor’s clumsy hands, and the two figures staggered out upon the bald like a hung-over couple who just met at a New Year’s party and cannot decide whether to go to a hotel or a coffeehaus. Topsy did not test him out of pity, and the Professor was reluctant to press what seemed an overly tactile advantage, recalling with embarrassment his ineptness at vivisection and even the most cursory minor surgery.
“Stocks and bonds,” Father said, “that’s how you must learn to think about this. We’re the bond boys: we decide when to leave the house and when to return. But once underway, the animal is free to lead or lag. We can move in opposite directions for a while, but we can never be decoupled, even if we wanted it. That is what is so hard for human beings to understand. We are tethered not to our own, whom we abandon on a whim, but to animals, as to the market, by an unknown sentiment.”
The Professor at first was silent. He did not mind Felix acting like he had an ace up his sleeve, but he did not like him acting like God himself had put it there.
“Can it be that nature is so bourgeois?” he asked.
“Ah, how many times have you invoked that phrase, Herr Doktor? Let us not, if you please, rush to the cupboard of concepts so quickly. Dear friend, the bottled members of the bourgeois are more difficult to grasp than the profoundest of geniuses. It’s much easier to deal with a Franz Schubert, than, say, that ‘cheese of a man’ over there. And what is the essence of bourgeois thinking?” Felix wagged his finger. “Preparing for the eventuality when the romance is over. The dog does not anticipate that he will lose his love. On the other hand, he behaves because the friendship might end. He is aware that it can end at any moment, yet he makes no contingency plans. So with animals, the foolish human cycle of romance, rejection, and reconciliation is collapsed to a workable order. There is no forgiveness after the fact, which is just as bad as punishing after the fact — bad with men and catastrophic where females are concerned. But this is what gives us room for movement and maneuver, and upon which we must now capitalize!”