Felix ordered a fine. The doctor smiled. ‘I said you would come to it,’ he said, and emptied his own glass at a gulp.
‘I know,’ Felix answered, ‘but I did not understand. I thought you meant something else.’
‘What?’
Felix paused, turning the small glass around in his trembling hand. ‘I thought’, he said, ‘that you meant that I would give up.’
The doctor lowered his eyes. ‘Perhaps that is what I meant—but sometimes I am mistaken.’ He looked at Felix from under his heavy brows. ‘Man was born damned and innocent from the start, and wretchedly—as he must—on those two themes—whistles his tune.’
The Baron leaned forward. He said, in a low voice, ‘Was the Baronin damned?’
The doctor deliberated for a second, knowing what Felix had hidden in his question. ‘Guido is not damned,’ he said, and the Baron turned away quickly. ‘Guido’, the doctor went on, ‘is blessed—he is peace of mind—he is what you have always been looking for—Aristocracy’, he said smiling, ‘is a condition in the mind of the people when they try to think of something else and better—funny,’ he added sharply, ‘that a man never knows when he has found what he has always been looking for.’
‘And the Baronin,’ Felix said, ‘do you ever hear from her?’
‘She is in America now, but of course you know that. Yes, she writes, now and again, not to me—God forbid—to others.’
‘What does she say?’ the Baron said, trying not to show his emotion.
‘She says,’ the doctor answered, “Remember me.” Probably because she has difficulty in remembering herself.’
The Baron caught his monocle. ‘Altamonte, who has been in America, tells me that she seemed “estranged". Once’, he said, pinching his monocle into place, ‘I wanted, as you, who are aware of everything, know, to go behind the scenes, back-stage as it were, to our present condition, to find, if I could, the secret of time; good, perhaps that that is an impossible ambition for the sane mind. One has, I am now certain, to be a little mad to see into the past or the future, to be a little abridged of life to know life, the obscure life—darkly seen, the condition my son lives in; it may also be the errand on which the Baronin is going.’
Taking out his handkerchief, the Baron removed his monocle, wiping it carefully.
Carrying a pocket full of medicines, and a little flask of oil for the chapping hands of his son, Felix rode into Vienna, the child beside him; Frau Mann, opulent and gay, opposite, holding a rug for the boy’s feet. Felix drank heavily now, and to hide the red that flushed his cheeks he had grown a beard ending in two forked points on his chin. In the matter of drink, Frau Mann was now no bad second. Many cafés saw this odd trio, the child in the midst wearing heavy lenses that made his eyes drift forward, sitting erect, his neck holding his head at attention, watching his father’s coins roll, as the night drew out, farther and farther across the floor and under the feet of the musicians as Felix called for military music, for Wacht am Rhein, for Morgenrot, for Wagner; his monocle dimmed by the heat of the room, perfectly correct and drunk, trying not to look for what he had always sought, the son of a once great house; his eyes either gazing at the ceiling or lowered where his hand, on the table, struck thumb and little finger against the wood in rhythm with the music, as if he were playing only the two important notes of an octave, the low and the high; or nodding his head and smiling at his child, as mechanical toys nod to the touch of an infant’s hand, Guido pressing his own hand against his stomach where, beneath his shirt, he could feel the medallion against his flesh, Frau Mann gripping her beer mug firmly, laughing and talking loudly.
One evening, seated in his favourite café on the King, Felix on entering had seen instantly, but refused to admit it to himself, a tall man in the corner who, he was sure, was the Grand Duke Alexander of Russia, cousin and brother-in-law of the late Czar Nicholas—and toward whom in the early part of the evening he steadfastly refused to look. But as the clock hands pointed twelve, Felix, (with the abandon of what a mad man knows to be his one hope of escape, disproof of his own madness) could not keep his eyes away, and as they arose to go, his cheeks now drained of colour, the points of his beard bent sharply down with the stiffening back of his chin, he turned and made a slight bow, his head in his confusion making a complete half-swing, as an animal will turn its head away from a human, as if in mortal shame.
He stumbled as he got into his carriage. ‘Come,’ he said, taking the child’s fingers in his own. ‘You are cold.’ He poured a few drops of oil, and began rubbing Guido’s hands.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Go Down, Matthew
‘Can’t you be quiet now?’ the doctor said. He had come in late one afternoon to find Nora writing a letter. ‘Can’t you be done now, can’t you give up? Now be still, now that you know what the world is about, knowing it’s about nothing?’ He took his hat and coat off without being asked, placing his umbrella in a corner. He came forward into the room. ‘And me who seem curious because no one has seen me for a million years, and now I’m seen! Is there such extraordinary need of misery to make beauty? Let go Hell; and your fall will be broken by the roof of Heaven.’ He eyed the tea-tray and, seeing that the tea-pot had long since become cold, poured himself a generous port. He threw himself into a chair and added more softly, as Nora turned away from her letter, ‘In the far reaches of India there is a man being still beneath a tree. Why not rest? Why not put the pen away? Isn’t it bitter enough for Robin that she is lost somewhere without receiving mail? And Jenny, what of her now? Taken to drink and appropriating Robin’s mind with vulgar inaccuracy, like those eighty-two plaster virgins she bought because Robin had one good one; when you laugh at the eight-two standing in a row, Jenny runs to the wall, back to the picture of her mother, and stands there between two tortures—the past that she can’t share, and the present that she can’t copy. What of her now? Looking at her quarters with harrowing, indelicate cries; burying her middle at both ends, searching the world for the path back to what she wanted once and long ago! The memory past, and only by a coincidence, a wind, the flutter of a leaf, a surge of tremendous recollection goes through her, and swooning she knows it gone. Cannot a beastly thing be analogous to a fine thing, if both are apprehensions? Love of two things often makes one thing right. Think of the fish racing the sea, their love of air and water turning them like wheels, their tails and teeth biting the water, their spines curved round the air. Is that not Jenny? She who could not encompass anything whole, but only with her teeth and tail, and the spine on her sprung up. Oh, for God’s sake! Can’t you rest now?’
‘If I don’t write to her, what am I to do? I can’t sit here for ever—thinking!’
‘Terra damnata et maledicta!’ exclaimed the doctor, banging his fist down. ‘My uncle Octavius, the trout-tickler of Itchen, was better, he ate his fish when he caught it! But you, you must unspin fate, go back to find Robin! That’s what you are going to do. In your chair should have been set the Holy Stone, to say yes to your yes, no to your no; instead it’s lost in Westminster Abbey, and if I could have stopped Brech on his way with it into Ireland and have whispered in his ear I would have said, “Wait” (though it was seven hundred years B.C.); it might have been passed around. It might have stopped you, but no, you are always writing to Robin. Nothing will curb it. You’ve made her a legend and set before her head the Eternal Light, and you’ll keep to it even if it does cost her the tearing open of a million envelopes to her end. How do you know what sleep you raise her from? What words she must say to annul the postman’s whistle to another girl rising up on a wild elbow? Can’t you let any of us loose? Don’t you know your holding on is her only happiness and so her sole misery. You write and weep and think and plot, and all the time what is Robin doing? Chucking Jack Straws, or sitting on the floor playing soldiers; so don’t cry to me, who have no one to write to, and only taking in a little light laundry known as the Wash of the World. Dig a hole, drop me in! Not at all. St. Matthew’s Passion by Bach I’ll be. Everything can be used in a lifetime, I’ve discovered that.’