‘During the holidays, while the child was away, Petherbridge became “anxious"—that is the way she put it—as to whether or not the “young lady had a heart".’
‘And brought the child back to prove it?’ interpolated the doctor, casting an eye over the fashionable crowd beginning to fill the room.
‘Exactly,’ said the Baron, ordering wine. ‘I made an exclamation, and she said quickly: “You can’t blame me, you can’t accuse me of using a child for my own ends!” Well, what else does it come to?’
‘That woman’, the doctor said, settling himself more comfortably in his chair, ‘would use the third-rising of a corpse for her ends. Though’, he added, ‘I must admit she is very generous with money.’
The Baron winced. ‘So I gathered from her over-large bid for the portrait. Well, she went on to say that, when they met, the Baronin had so obviously forgotten all about her, that the child was “ashamed.” She said “shame went all over her". She was already at the door when she spoke the last sentence. In fact, she conducted the whole scene as though my room were a stage that had been marked out, and at this point she must read her final lines.
‘"Robin,” she said, “Baronin Robin Volkbein, I wonder if she could be a relative."
‘For a whole minute I couldn’t move. When I turned around I saw that Guido was ill. I took him in my arms and spoke to him in German. He had often put questions to me about his mother and I had managed always to direct his mind to expect her.’
The doctor turned to the Baron with one of his sudden illuminations. ‘Exactly right. With Guido, you are in the presence of the “maladjusted". Wait! I am not using that word in the derogatory sense at all, in fact my great virtue is that I never use the derogatory in the usual sense. Pity is an intrusion when in the presence of a person who is a new position in an old account—which is your son. You can only pity those limited to their generation. Pity is timely, and dies with the person; a pitiable man is his own last tie. You have treated Guido well.’
The Baron paused, his knife bent down. He looked up. ‘Do you know, doctor, I find the thought of my son’s possible death at an early age a sort of dire happiness, because his death is the most awful, the most fearful thing that could befall me. The unendurable is the beginning of the curve of joy. I have become entangled in the shadow of a vast apprehension which is my son; he is the central point toward which life and death are spinning, the meeting of which my final design will be composed.’
‘And Robin?’ the doctor asked.
‘She is with me in Guido, they are inseparable and this time’, the Baron said, catching his monocle, ‘with her full consent.’ He leaned down and picked up his napkin. ‘The Baronin’, he continued, ‘always seemed to be looking for someone to tell her that she was innocent. Guido is very like her, except that he has his innocence. The Baronin was always searching in the wrong direction, until she met Nora Flood, who seemed, from what little I knew of her, to be a very honest woman, at least by intention.’
‘There are some people’, he went on, ‘who must get permission to live, and if the Baronin finds no one to give her that permission, she will make an innocence for herself; a fearful sort of primitive innocence. It may be considered “depraved” by our generation, but our generation does not know everything.’ He smiled. ‘For instance Guido, how many will realize his value? One’s life is peculiarly one’s own when one has invented it.’
The doctor wiped his mouth. ‘In the acceptance of depravity the sense of the past is most fully captured. What is a ruin but Time easing itself of endurance? Corruption is the Age of Time. It is the body and the blood of ecstasy, religion and love. Ah, yes,’ the doctor added, ‘we do not “climb” to heights, we are eaten away to them, and then conformity, neatness, ceases to entertain us. Man is born as he dies, rebuking cleanliness; and there is its middle condition, the slovenliness that is usually an accompaniment of the “attractive” body, a sort of earth on which love feeds.’
‘That is true,’ Felix said with eagerness. ‘The Baronin had an undefinable disorder, a sort of odour of memory", like a person who has come from some place that we have forgotten and would give our life to recall.’
The doctor reached out for the bread. ‘So the reason for our cleanliness becomes apparent; cleanliness is a form of apprehension; our faulty racial memory is fathered by fear. Destiny and history are untidy; we fear memory of that disorder. Robin did not.’
‘No,’ Felix said in a low voice. ‘She did not.’
‘The almost fossilized state of our recollection is attested to by our murderers and those who read every detail of crime with a passionate and hot interest,’ the doctor continued. ‘It is only by such extreme measures that the average man can remember something long ago; truly, not that he remembers, but that crime itself is the door to an accumulation, a way to lay hands on the shudder of a past that is still vibrating.’
The Baron was silent a moment. Then he said: ‘Yes, something of this rigour was in the Baronin, in its first faint degree; it was in her walk, in the way she wore her clothes, in her silence, as if speech were heavy and unclarified. There was in her every movement a slight drag, as if the past were a web about her, as there is a web of time about a very old building. There is a sensible weight in the air around a thirteenth-century edifice’, he said with a touch of pomposity, ‘that is unlike the light air about a new structure; the new building seems to repulse it, the old to gather it. So about the Baronin there was a density, not of age, but of youth. It perhaps accounts for my attraction to her.’.
‘Animals find their way about largely by the keenness of their nose,’ said the doctor. ‘We have lost ours in order not to be one of them, and what have we in its place? A tension in the spirit which is the contraction of freedom. But,’ he ended, ‘all dreadful events are of profit.’
Felix ate in silence for a moment, then point-blank he turned to the doctor with a question. ‘You know my preoccupation; is my son’s better?’
The doctor, as he grew older, in answering a question seemed, as old people do, to be speaking more and more to himself, and, when troubled, he seemed to grow smaller. He said: ‘Seek no further for calamity; you have it in your son. After all, calamity is what we are all seeking. You have found it. A man is whole only when he takes into account his shadow as well as himself—and what is a man’s shadow but his upright astonishment? Guido is the shadow of your anxiety, and Guido’s shadow is God’s.’
Felix said: ‘Guido also loves women of history.’
‘Mary’s shadow!’ said the doctor.
Felix turned. His monocle shone sharp and bright along its edge. ‘People say that he is not sound of mind. What do you say?’
‘I say that a mind like his may be more apt than yours and mine—he is not made secure by habit—in that there is always hope.’
Felix said under his breath: ‘He does not grow up.’
Matthew answered: ‘The excess of his sensibilities may preclude his mind. His sanity is an unknown room: a known room is always smaller than an unknown. If I were you,’ the doctor continued, ‘I would carry that boy’s mind like a bowl picked up in the dark; you do not know what’s in it. He feeds on odd remnants that we have not priced; he eats a sleep that is not our sleep. There is more in sickness than the name of that sickness. In the average person is the peculiar that has been scuttled, and in the peculiar the ordinary that has been sunk; people always fear what requires watching.’