Nightwood (4 page)

'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.'

A sudden silence went over the room. The Count was standing in the doorway, rocking on his heels, either hand on the sides of the door, a torrent of Italian, which was merely the culmination of some theme he had begun in the entrance hall, was abruptly halved as he slapped his leg, standing tall and bent and peering. He moved forward into the room, holding with thumb and forefinger the centre of a round magnifying glass which hung from a broad black ribbon. With the other hand he moved from chair to table, from guest to guest. Behind him, in a riding habit, was a young girl. Having reached the sideboard he swung around with gruesome nimbleness.

'Get out!' he said softly, laying his hand on the girl's shoulder. 'Get out, get out!' It was obvious he meant it; he bowed slightly.

As they reached the street the 'Duchess' caught a swirling hem of lace about her chilling ankles. 'Well, my poor devil?' she said, turning to Felix.

'Well!' said Felix. 'What was that about, and why?'

The doctor hailed a cab with the waving end of a bulldog cane. 'That can be repaired at any bar,' he said.

'The name of that', said the Duchess, pulling on her gloves, 'is a brief audience with the great, brief, but an audience!'

As they went up the darkened street Felix felt himself turning scarlet. 'Is he really a Count?' he asked.

'Herr Gott!'
said the Duchess. Am I what I say? Are you? Is the doctor?' She put her hand on his knee. 'Yes or no?'

The doctor was lighting a cigarette and in its flare the Baron saw that he was grinning. 'He put us out for one of those hopes that is about to be defeated.' He waved his gloves from the window to other guests who were standing along the curb, hailing vehicles.

'What do you mean?' the Baron said in a whisper.

'Count Onatorio Altamonte—may the name eventually roll over the Ponte Vecchio and into the Arno—suspected that he had come upon his last erection.'

The doctor began to sing,
'Nur eine Nacht.'

Frau Mann, with her face pressed against the cab window, said, 'It's snowing.' At her words Felix turned his coat collar up.

'Where are we going?' he asked Frau Mann. She was quite gay again.

'Let us go to Heinrich's, I always do when it's snowing. He mixes the drinks stronger then, and he's a good customer, he always takes in the show.'

'Very well,' said the doctor, preparing to rap on the window. 'Where is thy Heinrich?'

'Go down
Unter den Linden
,' Frau Mann said. 'I'll tell you when.'

Felix said, 'If you don't mind, I'll get down here.' He got down, walking against the snow.

Seated in the warmth of the favoured café, the doctor, unwinding his scarf said: 'There's something missing and whole about the Baron Felix—damned from the waist up, which reminds me of Mademoiselle Basquette who was damned from the waist down, a girl without legs, built like a medieval abuse. She used to wheel herself through the Pyrenees on a board. What there was of her was beautiful in a cheap traditional sort of way, the face that one sees on people who come to a racial, not a personal, amazement. I wanted to give her a present for what of her was missing, and she said, "Pearls—they go so well with everything!" Imagine, and the other half of her still in God's bag of tricks! Don't tell me that what was missing had not taught her the value of what was present. Well, in any case,' the doctor went on rolling down his gloves, 'a sailor saw her one day and fell in love with her. She was going uphill and the sun was shining all over her back, it made a saddle across her bent neck and flickered along the curls of her head, gorgeous and bereft as the figure head of a Norse vessel that the ship has abandoned. So he snatched her up, board and all, and took her away and had his will; when he got good and tired of her, just for gallantry, he put her down on her board about five miles out of town, so she had to roll herself back again, weeping something fearful to see, because one is accustomed to see tears falling down to the feet. Ah truly, a pineboard may come up to the chin of a woman and still she will find reason to weep. I tell you Madame, if one gave birth to a heart on a plate, it would say "Love" and twitch like the lopped leg of a frog.'

'Wunderbar!'
exclaimed Frau Mann. '
Wunderbar,
my God!'

'I'm not through,' said the doctor, laying his gloves across his knees, 'someday I am going to see the Baron again, and when I do I shall tell him about the mad Wittelsbach. He'll look as distressed as an owl tied up in a muffler.'

'Ah,' exclaimed Frau Mann, 'he will enjoy it. He is so fond of titles.'

'Listen,' the doctor said, ordering a round, 'I don't want to talk of the Wittelsbach. Oh God, when I think back to my past, everyone in my family a beauty, my mother, with hair on her head as red as a fire kicked over in spring (and that was early in the eighties when a girl was the toast of the town, and going the limit meant lobster à la Newburg). She had a hat on her as big as the top of a table, and everything on it but running water; her bosom clinched into a corset of buckram, and my father sitting up beside her (snapped while they were riding on a roller-coaster). He had on one of those silly little yellow jackets and a tan bowler just up over his ears, and he must have been crazy, for he was sort of crosseyed—maybe it was the wind in his face or thoughts of my mother where he couldn't do anything about it.' Frau Mann took up her glass, looking at it with one eye closed—'I've an album of my own,' she said in a warm voice, 'and everyone in it looks like a soldier—even though they are dead.'

The doctor grinned, biting his teeth. Frau Mann tried to light a cigarette, the match wavered from side to side in her unsteady hand.

Frau Mann was slightly tipsy, and the insistent hum of the doctor's words was making her sleepy.

Seeing that Frau Mann dozed, the doctor got up lightly and tip-toed noiselessly to the entrance. He said to the waiter in bad German: 'The lady will pay,' opened the door, and went quietly into the night.

CHAPTER TWO
La Somnambule

Close to the church of
St. Sulpice,
around the corner in the
rue Servandoni,
lived the doctor. His small slouching figure was a feature of the
Place.
To the proprietor of the
Café de la Mairie du VI
e
he was almost a son. This relatively small square, through which tram lines ran in several directions, bounded on the one side by the church and on the other by the court, was the doctor's 'city'. What he could not find here to answer to his needs, could be found in the narrow streets that ran into it. Here he had been seen ordering details for funerals in the
parlour
with its black broadcloth curtains and mounted pictures of hearses; buying holy pictures and
petits Jésus
in the
boutique
displaying vestments and flowering candles. He had shouted down at least one judge in the
Mairie du Luxembourg
after a dozen cigars had failed to bring about his ends.

He walked, pathetic and alone, among the pasteboard booths of the
Foire St. Germain
when for a time its imitation castles squatted in the square. He was seen coming at a smart pace down the left side of the church to go into Mass; bathing in the holy water stoup as if he were its single and beholden bird, pushing aside weary French maids and local tradespeople with the impatience of a soul in physical stress.

Sometimes, late at night, before turning into the
Café de la Mairie de VI
e
, he would be observed staring up at the huge towers of the church which rose into the sky, unlovely but reassuring, running a thick warm finger around his throat, where, in spite of its custom, his hair surprised him, lifting along his back and creeping up over his collar. Standing small and insubordinate, he would watch the basins of the fountain loosing their skirts of water in a ragged and flowing hem, sometimes crying to a man's departing shadow: 'Aren't you the beauty!'

To the
Café de la Mairie du VI
e
he brought Felix, who turned up in Paris some weeks after the encounter in Berlin. Felix thought to himself that undoubtedly the doctor was a great liar, but a valuable liar. His fabrications seemed to be the framework of a forgotten but imposing plan; some condition of life of which he was the sole surviving retainer. His manner was that of a servant of a defunct noble family, whose movements recall, though in a degraded form, those of a late master. Even the doctor's favourite gesture—plucking hairs out of his nostrils—seemed the 'vulgarization' of what was once a thoughtful plucking of the beard.

As the altar of a church would present but a barren stylization but for the uncalculated offerings of the confused and humble; as the
corsage
of a woman is made suddenly martial and sorrowful by the rose thrust among the more decorous blooms by the hand of a lover suffering the violence of the overlapping of the permission to bestow a last embrace, and its withdrawal: making a vanishing and infinitesimal bull's eye of that which had a moment before been a buoyant and showy bosom, by dragging time out of his bowels (for a lover knows two times, that which he is given, and that which he must make)—so Felix was astonished to find that the most touching flowers laid on the altar he had raised to his imagination were placed there by the people of the underworld, and that the reddest was to be the rose of the doctor.

After a long silence in which the doctor had ordered and consumed a
Chambéry fraise
and the Baron a coffee, the doctor remarked that the Jew and the Irish, the one moving upward and the other down, often meet, spade to spade in the same acre.