‘I was not thinking of women at all,’ the Baron said, and he tried to stand up.
‘Neither was I,’ said the doctor, ‘sit down.’ He refilled his glass. ‘The fine is very good,’ he said.
Felix answered, ‘No, thank you, I never drink.’
‘You will,’ the doctor said. ‘Let us put it the other way, the Lutheran or Protestant church versus the Catholic. The Catholic is the girl that you love so much that she can lie to you, and the Protestant is the girl that loves you so much that you can lie to her, and pretend a lot that you do not feel. Luther, and I hope you don’t mind my saying so, was as bawdy an old ram as ever trampled his own straw, because the custody of the people’s ‘remissions’ of sins and indulgences had been snatched out of his hands, which was in that day in the shape of half of all they had and which the old monk of Wittenberg had intended to get off with in his own way. So, of course, after that, he went wild and chattered like a monkey in a tree and started something he never thought to start (or so the writing on his side of the breakfast table would seem to confirm), an obscene megalomania—and wild and wanton stranger that that is, it must come clear and cool and long or not at all. What do you listen to in the Protestant church? To the words of a man who has been chosen for his eloquence—and not too eloquent either, mark you, or he gets the bum’s rush from the pulpit, for fear that in the end he will use his golden tongue for political ends. For a golden tongue is never satisfied until it has wagged itself over the destiny of a nation, and this the church is wise enough to know.
‘But turn to the Catholic church, go into mass at any moment—what do you walk in upon? Something that’s already in your blood. You know the story that the priest is telling as he moves from one side of the altar to the other, be he a cardinal, Leo X, or just some poor bastard from Sicily who has discovered that pecca fortiter among his goats no longer masses his soul, and has, God knows, been God’s child from the start—it makes no difference. Why? Because you are sitting there with your own meditations and a legend (which is nipping the fruit as the wren bites), and mingling them both with the Holy Spoon, which is that story; or you can get yourself into the confessional, where, in sonorous prose, lacking contrition (if you must) you can speak of the condition of the knotty, tangled soul and be answered in Gothic echoes, mutual and instantaneous—one saying hail to your farewell. Mischief unravels and the fine high hand of heaven proffers the skein again, combed and forgiven!’
‘The one House’, he went on, ‘is hard, as hard as the gift of gab, and the other is as soft as a goat’s hip, and you can blame no man for anything, and you can’t like them at all.’
‘Wait!’ said Felix.
‘Yes?’ said the doctor.
Felix bending forward, deprecatory and annoyed, went on: ‘I like the prince who was reading a book, when the executioner touched him on the shoulder telling him that it was time, and he, arising, laid a paper-cutter between the pages to keep his place and closed the book.’
‘Ah,’ said the doctor, ‘that is not man living in his moment, it is man living in his miracle.’ He refilled his glass. ‘Gesundheit,’ he said; ‘Freude sei Euch von Gott beschieden, wie heut’ so immerdar!’
‘You argue about sorrow and confusion too easily,’ Nora said.
‘Wait!’ the doctor answered. ‘A man’s sorrow runs uphill; true it is difficult for him to bear, but it is also difficult for him to keep. I, as a medical man, know in what pocket a man keeps his heart and soul, and in what jostle of the liver, kidneys and genitalia these pockets are pilfered. There is no pure sorrow. Why? It is bedfellow to lungs, lights, bones, guts and gall! There are only confusions, about that you are quite right, Nora my child, confusions and defeated anxieties—there you have us, one and all. If you are a gymnosophist you can do without clothes, and if you are gimp-legged you will know more wind between the knees than another, still it is confusion; God’s chosen walk close to the wall.’
‘I was in the war once myself,’ the doctor went on, ‘in a little town where the bombs began tearing the heart out of you, so that you began to think of all the majesty in the world that you would not be able to think of in a minute, if the noise came down and struck in the right place; I was scrambling for the cellar—and in it was an old Breton woman and a cow she had dragged with her, and behind that someone from Dublin, saying “Glory be to God!” in a whisper at the far end of the animal. Thanks be to my Maker I had her head on, and the poor beast trembling on her four legs so I knew all at once that the tragedy of the beast can be two legs more awful than a man’s. She was softly dropping her dung at the far end where the thin Celtic voice kept coming up saying, “Glory be to Jesus!” and I said to myself, “Can’t the morning come now, so I can see what my face is mixed up with?” At that a flash of lightning went by and I saw the cow turning her head straight back so her horns made two moons against her shoulders, the tears soused all over her great black eyes.
‘I began talking to her, cursing myself and the mick, and the old woman looking as if she were looking down her life, sighting it the way a man looks down the barrel of a gun for an aim. I put my hand on the poor bitch of a cow and her hide was running water under my hand, like water tumbling down from Lahore, jerking against my hand as if she wanted to go, standing still in one spot; and I thought, there are directions and speeds that no one has calculated, for believe it or not that cow had gone somewhere very fast that we didn’t know of, and yet was still standing there.’
The doctor lifted the bottle. ‘Thank you,’ said Felix, ‘I never drink spirits.’
‘You will,’ said the doctor.
‘There’s one thing that has always troubled me,’ the doctor continued, ‘this matter of the guillotine. They say that the headsman has to supply his own knife, as a husband is supposed to supply his own razor. That’s enough to rot his heart out before he has whittled one head. Wandering about the Boul ‘Mich’ one night, flittering my eyes, I saw one with a red carnation in his buttonhole. I asked him what he was wearing it for, just to start up a friendly conversation, he said, “It’s the headsman’s prerogative,"—and I went as limp as a blotter snatched from the Senate. “At one time", he said, “the executioner gripped it between his teeth,” at that my bowels turned turtle, seeing him in my mind’s eye stropping the cleaver with a bloom in his mouth, like Carmen, and he the one man who is supposed to keep his gloves on in church! They often end by slicing themselves up, it’s a rhythm that finally meets their own neck. He leaned forward and drew a finger across mine and said, “As much hair as thick as that makes it a little difficult,” and at that moment I got heart failure for the rest of my life. I put down a franc and flew like the wind, the hair on my back standing as high as Queen Anne’s ruff! And I didn’t stop until I found myself spang in the middle of the Musée de Cluny, clutching the rack.’