The Recognitions (Dalkey Archive edition) (117 page)

Basil Valentine had startled suddenly, as the cigarette between his fingers burned down to meet the skin. He looked round at his interlocutor, as though fully aware of him there for the first time.

—Eh? You all right? I was just about to say . . . what the devil
do you spose they’re doing up there? . . . The sounds of metal on metal had become more noticeable, an irregular and subdued clatter; still Basil Valentine did not move to go. —Eh? You don’t think that . . . good heavens no, why they couldn’t even get the mmph what-do-you-call-ems over his calves, over his ankles, don’t you know . . . the greaves I mean to say. Not my field, not my field at all. Though I did write a paper once, some occasion, what the devil was it . . . when I was studying, I suppose, eh? Some time ago, don’t you know, though one doesn’t just stop being a scholar, eh? like putting off Eton collars, eh? Good heavens no. Now that paper, what the devil was it . . . mmmpht. Oh yes yes yes . . . I was younger of course, it may sound a bit naive now, don’t you know, but it was a rather original bit of thinking, I was told so at the time, at any rate, rather fresh approach, don’t you know . . . but damn me if I can remember what it was . . .

And now, though very few faces turned to one side or the other, or up, to show they had noticed it, came the distraction of an even and metallic tread from above, and Basil Valentine turned his head slowly left, though he did not raise his face.

—Pfooo, the R.A. went over his glass, —yes, yes, here it is. The devil, wearing false calves, do you recall? Mephistopheles, don’t you know, in mffft that ponderous thing by Goethe. Good heavens yes, wearing false calves, don’t you know, to cover his cloven feet and his mphhht calves, yes. Well my thesis, don’t you see, was that these things weren’t simply a disguise, to fool people and all that sort of thing, but that some sort of mffft . . . aesthetic need you might say, some sort of nostalgia for beauty, don’t you see, he being a fallen angel and all that sort of thing, rather . . . unpleasantly different in his mphhht appearance from mphhht . . . The white-haired gentleman stopped, looking at Basil Valentine square for the first time and, apparently for the first time, realizing that Valentine was not listening to a word he said. —Mphhht . . . a long time ago all that, eh? There, that’s rather a nasty place you’ve got on your lip, eh? Going up like a balloon, eh? Good heavens . . .

Then, as Basil Valentine raised his hand to touch the broken swelling, his arm was pulled down.

—Ghood heavens! Ghood heavens! Ghood heavens! . . . D’you see? Here’s your lunatic come back again. Eh? Do you see him there by the foot of the stairs? . . . looks like he’s ready to . . . good heaven knows what . . . go up in flames, eh? Won’t do, won’t do at all . . . can’t hev this sort of thing, invading a private gathering, eh? A man’s home is his mphht what-d’you-call-it, don’t you know, eh? Popping in here from nowhere in that sort of a get-up, good heavens no, no reason at all to run around in two suits of
clothing, none that I recall at this moment at any rate, don’t you mpphhht . . . I say, my dear fellow do be a bit more careful, you’re spilling your drink all over me . . .

The member of the Royal Academy stepped back, brushing cognac from his sleeve, and spilling what was in his own glass as he did so; and his immediate vicinity quieted somewhat, there under the balcony and round the foot of the stairs, as he stopped speaking. Then a number of people stopped talking, others to talk more loudly, some to turn their attention, and some their backs, on this diverting visitor who stood looking feverishly round, holding up a handful of charred wood, whispering, —Where is he? . . . where is he? . . .

Basil Valentine had stepped back. His finger remained at his lip, and he pressed it; suddenly aware of acute pain there, he pressed harder, and blood reached his tongue.

—Brown!

That end of the room silenced. Several people stepped away from the foot of the stairs, and the figure standing there, looking among them. Some of them looked up, to the shuffling sound of metal on metal. He saw them looking there, and turned himself; but there was nothing to see but the bend of the stairs, and the polychromed wood figure exposing the coarse-grained scar of the arm amputated in benediction.

Out in the room, voices continued. Flames moved unhurriedly up over a black wild cherry log in the fireplace. Muffled caterwauling came from the radio.

—Brown!

The panoplied figure reached the landing in one fall, taking a long time, so it seemed afterward to those who saw it happen; and making a good deal less of noise than they might have expected, hitting head-on at the turn, attacked by shadows leaping to meet it, withdrawing as it dropped away from the wall and hung, for a moment when the whole room silenced and all the eyes were brought into one equation, the quick eyes stilled, and the still eyes of the wart hog, the face in the youthful portrait, the blind eyes of Valerian stretched on his rack and the all-seeing eyes of the pale underclothed figure in the middle of the low table, those and the eyes in the tapestry, turned in the other direction, alerted.

—There, of course. I disagree with Dante, came on a voice from the far end, restoring the unconscious balance, rescuing what was alive from what was not; and enough voices to deliver one another from the isolation of separate identity took up and spread in a slow wave toward the broken weight poised on the edge of the landing, whose clinging shadows leaped away as it moved, and repeated
their concerted attacks as it fell from one step to another, stifling it in their last embrace at the bottom.

—Good heavens! . . . they’ve knocked the thing down the stairs, d’you see? Heavier than one might have thought, eh? The white-haired gentleman approached. —Good heavens, I . . . daresay . . . there’s someone in it.

Behind him, Basil Valentine crossed himself quickly with the third finger of his right hand; then touched the bend of his forefinger to his lips as he approached.

Clattering down the stairs in his grotesque shoes, which looked like they’d been built especially for participation in some sport, possibly one on snow, or in marshland, or some such sodden surface, that grimpen, perhaps, where is no secure foothold, came M. Crémer, to plant those remarkably equipped feet among the Aubusson roses, and hold forth the broad-bowed thick-lensed glasses which his host had left behind. He was talking at a great rate, and in his own tongue, so no one stopped him, and no one paid him any attention.

Behind him, a tall unexaggerated man stood on the step holding a damp double-breasted suit coat; and there were others, crowding between this one and the polychrome amputee, as wide-open eyed, and as silent, a reticent concord which might have been mistaken for reverence but for the immoderate curiosity which had shone in the eyes of Saint John Baptist ever since he had first been put out in the weather some centuries before.

Then the tall woman reached up to catch a naked earlobe, and cry, —Oh! . . . I’ve lost my baby’s breath . . . a line which did attract some attention.

Resounding in the regions beyond the staircase, the crash had straightened Fuller up on his kitchen stool forthwith. It was a minute before he could get out, for the dog wanted to get out too. It commenced to trot up and down the room, nervously sensing something amiss with that intuition which Fuller knew all too well, and seeing it active now, became the more alarmed. As the dog scratched at the door leading to the hall and the great room, Fuller slipped out another, up the kitchen stairs to the second-floor halls, round to the balcony and out slowly to the front stairs, where he paused at the newel and looked back, abruptly aware of a vacancy. Then his eye caught the cigar, half-smoked and gone out but not before it had burned a long scar on the rosewood chest. He picked it up, licked his thumb and rubbed the burnt place but it did no good: and at that moment, from the corner of his eye he realized what was missing at the end of the balcony, and carrying the half-smoked
cigar he got to the stairs and almost fell in his hurry to get down them.

—Les pieds, voyez vous, les pieds de cette armure, il a trébuché vous savez . . . M. Crémer harangued his audience, so effectively that it grew moment by moment, as he waved the broad-bowed glasses in the air, and pointed with his other hand to the foot-pieces of the armor, —Et sans les lunettes alors . . . Les pieds? les pieds, voyez vous? des Boches, pas vrai? Voyez vous quelle gaucherie allemande . . .

—Good heavens, said the R.A. somewhere in the shadows there under the balcony, —all well and good he tripped over his feet because they were German, don’t you know, but how did he get into the damned thing to begin with? eh? eh? he demanded of no one.

Of all the figures gathered there beneath him, Fuller knew only two, meeting now over the headpiece where Basil Valentine knelt on one side to put forth a hand and withdraw it as quick, for the throat was covered with blood running from a corner of the mouth, though that was all of the face that could be seen, the throat, and the heavy chin, and a sagging corner of the small mouth. What had happened was, that in the fall one of the hooks which held the beaver in place had come undone; perhaps it was not fastened properly at the outset, or possibly it had not been fastened at all. And so the beaver of the helmet was knocked askew, and the visor above jammed even more tightly closed, as the figure still kneeling there when Valentine withdrew found out, trying desperately all of a sudden to get the thing open.

Fuller stared at Basil Valentine, down on one knee, the hand he’d pulled back from the unbroken throat resting now on the taces, those plates meant to afford a loose protection round the thighs where they clung now full and rigidly distended. The breastplate and the backplate had not been drawn together, though they were as tight as they could be, their gaps bulging with mounds of white shirting and a split side of the blue vest from which somehow the penknife had escaped, and lay there on the floor at Valentine’s foot. And one of the greaves had come half off too, and the broad foot-piece with it, exposing a small foot splayed in a silk sock, where the wrinkled white line of the clock on the black silk ridiculed the thickness of the ankle it covered, and it was there that Basil Valentine thrust two fingertips, waited a moment, shifted them and thrust them harder, behind the tendon there, waited again and withdrew them to figure a cross quickly at his chest as he stood away, taking a step back which Fuller repeated on the landing above; though both of them now were watching the figure still kneeling at the head, and both of them were in retreat, Fuller clutching the half-smoked
cigar, up the stairs, down the hall, and Valentine stepping backward, slowly at first, when he started to speak. Waving the charred fragments before him, he took a step over the head and stood above it.

—Wait! Wait! he cried. —Wait!

The sound of this voice again, and the sight of him, worked on them immediately. The pool around him emptied, and no sooner did it flood from the rest of the room than it emptied again, the fraud of what had seethed for so long there as undersea discovered as the stopper of the tank was pulled and they poured out in a continuous stream, while he stood over the broken hulk shouting them on, —Wait! Listen! Wait!

Basil Valentine still clung in the shadows, watching him.

—Like me to stick around for a bit, old man? Anything I can mphht do d’you spose, eh? Before the mmmp who-do-you-call-’ems come, eh? The R.A. stood at his elbow.

M. Crémer, on the other hand, was suddenly in a great hurry, but found time to say, —Il faut que je parte, je viens de me rappeler d’une . . . heh heh assignation vous savez, mais le Memlinc, voyez vous, le Memlinc, je veux l’acheter vous savez . . .

—Blasted little . . . mphht. Good heavens, eh? Probably willing to go as high as two and six at that . . .

—A n’importe quel prix, vous savez . . . Crémer cast back, being swept away now.

—Good heavens! the R.A. said, still at Valentine’s elbow, —begins to sound like he might go to three shillings. I say, if there’s nothing more I can do here but confuse things, don’t you know, I mphht get on my way I spose . . . You seem to be in pretty close touch with this . . . mphht our host laid out here, eh? Ring me up tomorrow, let me know what hospital they stick him in, eh? There’s a good fellow. Like to send along some flowers, don’t you know. And that mppht van der Goes canvas in there . . . mphht like to mpht come to some terms, eh? Yes, well ghood night, eh? Ghood night . . . goo night, goo night, goo night . . .

A number of people, in fact, suddenly recalled other engagements and hurried off to fill them. Though the tall woman, as she described it to her husband next morning, simply led him off “as meek as Moses”; the bearded young art reviewer paddled away on a crest of enchantment, already repeating the story to people who had not been here to enjoy it, squeezing the hot little hand folded deep in his own; and the sharkskinned Argentine, his black hair high in a dorsal fin cutting the spray around him, fled murmuring —I was not warned about this sort of thing in New York . . . turning his glassy eyes for a last look at the bold spectacle on the
floor, thankful, at least, that he was not, like M. Crémer, being hindered from leaving by the figure looming over it.

—Attention? eh? qu’est-ce que tu veux, alors! va donc . . . laisse moi passer . . .

—Yes, yes, yes . . . Crémer, yes. Yes, damn you. De l’argent, vous savez, damn you, il faut toujours en avoir sur soi . . .

—Eh bien, tu es fou, eh?

—Now listen, listen . . . the tone changed abruptly, —you’ve got to listen to me . . .

As the grip relaxed, Crémer wrenched away, brushing his neatly creased sleeve as he made for the door. There was some confusion at the large closet there, turned for this evening into a cloakroom; but M. Crémer emerged in short order wearing a voluminous camel’s hair coat, enough sizes too big for him so that he considered it a perfect fit, and a Hollywood label inside, as he discovered a block or so away.

While here and there, inside the great room, eyes vaguely approaching the door were still caught by the eyes of the youthful portrait hung there, and turned away with such unconscious abruptness that they usually fled back to the broken thing on the floor for confirmation, and as quick there to avoid the half-face found refuge in the gauntleted hand flung out, its delicate lines palm up and open, and looked back to the portrait for denial.