The Baron was abstracted, but he smiled out of politeness. He suggested dining in the Bois. The doctor was only too willing, and at the sudden good news, he made that series of half-gestures of a person taken pleasantly unaware; he half held up his hands—no gloves—he almost touched his breast pocket—a handkerchief; he glanced at his boots, and was grateful for the funeral; he was shined, fairly neat; he touched his tie, stretching his throat muscles.
As they drove through the Bois the doctor went over in his mind what he would order—duck with oranges, no—having eaten on a poor man’s purse for so many years, habit had brought him to simple things with garlic. He shivered. He must think of something different. All he could think of was coffee and Grand Marnier, the big tumbler warmed with the hands, like his people warming at the peat fire. ‘Yes?’ he said, and realized that the Baron had been speaking. The doctor lifted his chin to the night air and listened now with an intensity with which he hoped to reconstruct the sentence.
‘Strange, I had never seen the Baronin in this light before,’ the Baron was saying, and he crossed his knees. ‘If I should try to put it into words, I mean how I did see her, it would be incomprehensible, for the simple reason that I find that I never did have a really clear idea of her at any time. I had an image of her, but that is not the same thing. An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties. I had gathered, of course, a good deal from you, and later, after she went away, from others, but this only strengthened my confusion. The more we learn of a person, the less we know. It does not, for instance, help me to know anything of Chartres above the fact that it possesses a cathedral, unless I have lived in Chartres and so keep the relative heights of the cathedral and the lives of its population in proportion. Otherwise it would only confuse me to learn that Jean of that city stood his wife upright in a well; the moment I visualize this, the deed will measure as high as the building; just as children who have a little knowledge of life will draw a man and a barn on the same scale.’
‘Your devotion to the past’, observed the doctor, looking at the cab metre with apprehension, ‘is perhaps like a child’s drawing.’
The Baron nodded. He was troubled. ‘My family is preserved because I have it only from the memory of one single woman, my aunt; therefore it is single, clear and unalterable. In this I am fortunate, through this I have a sense of immortality. Our basic idea of eternity is a condition that cannot vary. It is the motivation of marriage. No man really wants his freedom. He gets a habit as quickly as possible—it is a form of immortality.’
‘And what’s more,’ said the doctor, ‘we heap reproaches on the person who breaks it, saying that in so doing he has broken the image—of our safety.’
The Baron acquiesced. ‘This quality of one sole condition, which was so much a part of the Baronin, was what drew me to her; a condition of being that she had not, at that time, even chosen, but a fluid sort of possession which gave me a feeling that I would not only be able to achieve immortality, but be free to choose my own kind.’
‘She was always holding God’s bag of tricks upside down,’ murmured the doctor.
‘Yet, if I tell the whole truth,’ the Baron continued, ‘the very abundance of what then appeared to me to be security, and which was, in reality, the most formless loss, gave me at the same time pleasure and a sense of terrible anxiety, which proved only too legitimate.’
The doctor lit a cigarette.
‘I took it’, the Baron went on, ‘for acquiescence, thus making my great mistake. She was really like those people who, coming unexpectedly into a room, silence the company because they are looking for someone who is not there.’ He knocked on the cab window, got down and paid. As they walked up the gravel path he went on: ‘What I particularly wanted to ask you was, why did she marry me? It has placed me in the dark, for the rest of my life.’
‘Take the case of the horse who knew too much,’ said the doctor, ‘looking between the branches in the morning, cypress or hemlock. She was in mourning for something taken away from her in a bombardment in the war—by the way she stood, that something lay between her hooves —she stirred no branch, though her hide was a river of sorrow; she was damned to her hocks, where the grass came waving up softly. Her eyelashes were gray-black, like the eyelashes of a nigger, and at her buttocks’ soft centre a pulse throbbed like a fiddle.’
The Baron, studying the menu, said, ‘The Petherbridge woman called on me.’
‘Glittering God,’ exclaimed the doctor putting the card down. ‘Has it gone as far as that? I shouldn’t have thought it.’
‘For the first moment’, the Baron continued, ‘I had no idea who she was. She had spared no pains to make her toilet rusty and grievous by an arrangement of veils and flat-toned dark material with flowers in it, cut plainly and extremely tight over a very small bust, and from the waist down gathered into bulky folds to conceal, no doubt, the widening parts of a woman well over forty. She seemed hurried. She spoke of you.’
The doctor put the menu on his knee. He raised his dark eyes with the bushy brows erect. ‘What did she say?’
The Baron answered, evidently unaware of the tender spot which his words touched: ‘Utter nonsense, to the effect that you are seen nearly every day in a certain nunnery, where you bow and pray and get free meals and attend cases which are, well, illegal.’
The Baron looked up. To his surprise he saw that the doctor had ‘deteriorated’ into that condition in which he had seen him in the street, when he thought himself unobserved.
In a loud voice the doctor said to the waiter, who was within an inch of his mouth: ‘Yes, and with oranges, oranges!’
The Baron continued hastily: ‘She gave me uneasiness because Guido was in the room at the time. She said that she had come to buy a painting—indeed, she offered me a very good price, which I was tempted to take (I’ve been doing a little dealing in old masters lately) for my stay in Vienna—but, as it turned out, she wanted the portrait of my grandmother, which on no account could I bring myself to part with. She had not been in the room five minutes before I sensed that the picture was an excuse, and that what she really wanted was something else. She began talking about the Baronin almost at once, though she mentioned no name at first, and I did not connect the story with my wife until the end. She said, “She is really quite extraordinary. I don’t understand her at all, though I must say I understand her better than other people.” She added this with a sort of false eagerness. She went on: “She always lets her pets die. She is so fond of them, and then she neglects them, the way that animals neglect themselves."
‘I did not like her to talk about this subject, as Guido is very sensitive to animals, and I could fancy what was going on in his mind; he is not like other children, not cruel, or savage. For this very reason he is called “strange". A child who is mature, in the sense that the heart is mature, is always, I have observed, called deficient.’ He gave his order and went on, ‘She then changed the subject—’
‘Tacking into the wind like a barge.’
‘Well, yes, to a story about a little girl she had staying with her (she called her Sylvia); the Baronin was also staying with her at the time, though I did not know that the young woman in question was the Baronin until later—well anyway it appears that this little girl Sylvia had “fallen in love” with the Baronin, and that she, the Baronin, kept waking her up all through the night to ask her if she “loved her".