‘Does one enjoy herself?’ he asked.
‘Oh, absolutely.’
She leaned forward, she began removing the paint with the hurried technical felicity of an artist cleaning a palette. She looked at the Baron derisively. ‘Wir setzen an dieser Stelle über den Fluss—‘ she said.
Standing about a table at the end of the immense room, looking as if they were deciding the fate of a nation, were grouped ten men, all in parliamentary attitudes, and one young woman. They were listening, at the moment of the entrance of Felix and the Duchess of Broadback, to a middle-aged ‘medical student’ with shaggy eyebrows, terrific widow’s peak, over-large dark eyes, and a heavy way of standing that was also apologetic. The man was Dr. Matthew O’Connor, an Irishman from the Barbary Coast (Pacific Street, San Francisco), whose interest in gynaecology had driven him half around the world. He was taking the part of host, the Count not yet having made his appearance, and was telling of himself, for he considered himself the most amusing predicament.
‘We may all be nature’s noblemen,’ he was saying, and the mention of a nobleman made Felix feel happier the instant he caught the word, though what followed left him in some doubt, ‘but think of the stories that do not amount to much! That is, that are forgotten in spite of all man remembers (unless he remembers himself) merely because they befell him without distinction of office or title—that’s what we call legend and its the best a poor man may do with his fate; the other’, he waved an arm, ‘we call history, the best the high and mighty can do with theirs. Legend is unexpurgated, but history, because of its actors, is deflowered—every nation with a sense of humour is a lost nation, and every woman with a sense of humour is a lost woman. The Jews are the only people who have sense enough to keep humour in the family; a Christian scatters it all over the world.’
‘Ja! das ist ganz, richtig—‘ said the Duchess in a loud voice, but the interruption was quite useless. Once the doctor had his audience—and he got his audience by the simple device of pronouncing at the top of his voice (at such moments as irritable and possessive as a maddened woman’s) some of the more boggish and biting of the shorter early Saxon verbs—nothing could stop him. He merely turned his large eyes upon her and having done so noticed her and her attire for the first time, which, bringing suddenly to his mind something forgotten but comparable, sent him into a burst of laughter, exclaiming: ‘Well but God works in mysterious ways to bring things up in my mind! Now I am thinking of Nikka, the nigger who used to fight the bear in the Cirque de Paris. There he was, crouching all over the arena without a stitch on, except an ill-concealed loin cloth all abulge as if with a deep sea catch, tattooed from head to heel with all the ameublement of depravity! Garlanded with rosebuds and hack-work of the devil—was he a sight to see! Though he couldn’t have done a thing (and I know what I am talking about in spite of all that has been said about the black boys) if you had stood him in a gig-mill for a week, though (it’s said) at a stretch it spelled Desdemona. Well then, over his belly was an angel from Chartres, on each buttock, half public, half private, a quotation from the book of magic, a confirmation of the Jansenist theory, I’m sorry to say and here to say it. Across his knees, I give you my word, “I” on one and on the other, “can", put those together! Across his chest, beneath a beautiful caravel in full sail, two clasped hands, the wrist bones fretted with point lace. On each bosom an arrow-speared heart, each with different initials but with equal drops of blood; and running into the arm-pit, all down one side, the word said by Prince Arthur Tudor, son of King Henry the Seventh, when on his bridal night he called for a goblet of water (or was it water?). His Chamberlain, wondering at the cause of such drought, remarked on it and was answered in one word so wholly epigrammatic and in no way befitting the great and noble British Empire that he was brought up with a start, and that is all we will ever know of it, unless’, said the doctor, striking his hand on his hip, ‘you are as good at guessing as Tiny M’Caffery.’
‘And the legs?’ Felix asked uncomfortably.
‘The legs’, said Dr. O’Connor, ‘were devoted entirely to vine work, topped by the swart rambler rose copied from the coping of the Hamburg house of Rothschild. Over his dos, believe it or not and I shouldn’t, a terse account in early monkish script—called by some people indecent, by others Gothic—of the really deplorable condition of Paris before hygiene was introduced, and nature had its way up to the knees. And just above what you mustn’t mention, a bird flew carrying a streamer on which was incised, “Garde tout!” I asked him why all this barbarity; he answered he loved beauty and would have it about him.’
‘Are you acquainted with Vienna?’ Felix inquired.
‘Vienna,’ said the doctor, ‘the bed into which the common people climb, docile with toil, and out of which the nobility fling themselves, ferocious with dignity—I do, but not so well but that I remember some of it still. I remember young Austrian boys going to school, flocks of quail they were, sitting out their recess in different spots in the sun, rosy-cheeked, bright-eyed, with damp rosy mouths, smelling of the herd childhood, facts of history glimmering in their minds like sunlight, soon to be lost, soon to be forgotten, degraded into proof. Youth is cause, effect is age; so with the thickening of the neck we get data.’
‘I was not thinking of its young boys, but of its military superiority, its great names,’ Felix said, feeling that the evening was already lost, seeing that as yet the host had not made his appearance and that no one seemed to know it or to care and that the whole affair was to be given over to this volatile person who called himself a doctor.
‘The army, the celibate’s family!’ grinned the doctor. ‘His one safety.’
The young woman, who was in her late twenties, turned from the group, coming closer to Felix and the doctor. She rested her hands behind her against the table. She seemed embarrassed. ‘Are you both really saying what you mean, or are you just talking?’ Having spoken, her face flushed, she added hurriedly, ‘I am doing advance publicity for the circus, I’m Nora Flood.’
The doctor swung around, looking pleased. ‘Ah!’ he said, ‘Nora suspects the cold incautious melody of time crawling, but,’ he added, ‘I’ve only just started.’ Suddenly he struck his thigh with his open hand. ‘Flood, Nora, why sweet God, my girl, I helped to bring you into the world!’
Felix, as disquieted as if he were expected to ‘do something’ to avert a catastrophe (as one is expected to do something about an overturned tumbler, the contents of which is about to drip over the edge of the table and into a lady’s lap), on the phrase ‘time crawling’ broke into uncontrollable laughter, and though this occurrence troubled him the rest of his life he was never able to explain it to himself. The company, instead of being silenced, went on as if nothing had happened, two or three of the younger men were talking about something scandalous, and the ‘Duchess’ in her loud empty voice was telling a very stout man something about the living statues. This only added to the Baron’s torment. He began waving his hands, saying, ‘Oh, please! please!’ and suddenly he had a notion that he was doing something that wasn’t laughing at all, but something much worse, though he kept saying to himself, ‘I am laughing, really laughing, nothing else whatsoever!’ He kept waving his arms in distress and saying, ‘Please, please!’ staring at the floor, deeply embarrassed to find himself doing so.
As abruptly he sat straight up, his hands on the arms of the chair, staring fixedly at the doctor who was leaning forward as he drew a chair up exactly facing him. ‘Yes,’ said the doctor, and he was smiling, ‘you will be disappointed! In questa tomba oscura—oh, unfaithful one! I am no herbalist, I am no Rutebeuf, I have no panacea, I am not a mountebank—that is, I cannot or will not stand on my head. I’m no tumbler, neither a friar, nor yet a thirteenth-century Salome dancing arse up on a pair of Toledo blades—try to get any lovesick girl, male or female, to do that to-day! If you don’t believe such things happened in the long back of yesterday look up the manuscripts in the British Museum or go to the Cathedral of Clermont-Ferrand, it’s all one to me; become as the rich Mussulmans of Tunis who hire silly women to reduce the hour to its minimum of sense, still it will not be a cure, for there is none that takes place all at once in any man. You know what man really desires?’ inquired the doctor, grinning into the immobile face of the Baron. ‘One of two things: to find someone who is so stupid that he can lie to her, or to love someone so much that she can lie to him.’