The Catalans: A Novel (13 page)

“It was bound to end the way it did. One day he tried me too far and I gave him a clout that did my heart good. It was a great relief, but it was the beginning of the end. I think now that however tried he may be, a man should not knock children about. It had an excellent effect at the time: that day and the next we made more progress than we had for weeks. Then the stimulus wore off, and he relapsed until I clouted him again—another spurt, but shorter this time: and so it went on, from bad to worse. It was true that he learned a good deal: but at what a price. It was formal beatings now, and they were more and more frequent. There never was a lesson without tears and shouting; yet although he loathed a bad day and dreaded a beating, still he would keep to his affectations: to the very end he would lisp, he would feign to misunderstand and he would trail out his words, he would mumble when he was reading aloud, and he would push me to the very edge of final exasperation with a truly incredible persistence.

“Well, I beat him and I knocked him about. I justified myself in many ways—Solomon, my father’s example: he beat me, you know, with no justification at all, or on a trumped-up charge neither of us believed in, and yet it never did me much harm. But there was the necessity for justification; and although there was justification at hand (in passing, I may say now that I do not think any other method could have got him up to the required standard in time) it could not outweigh the fact that I was struck with shame on the rare occasions when someone came into the room while I was in full cry, or passed by the window. I had suffered so much from bullying—from mental assault much more than from beating, which I took as it came—so much from the atmosphere of domestic tyranny when I was a boy, that I had a very particular loathing for the character of a tyrant: and yet here I was, ranting and bawling at the boy . . . My motive was good: and I did not try to batter down his self-respect, nor humiliate him; but to an outsider the difference between my conduct and a tyrant’s would have needed a good deal of explanation. There
was
an essential difference; but there was also a strong, if superficial, similarity, and I felt it keenly.

“Then I went too far. Repeated exasperation made me more irritable than ever: the very sight of that beastly yellow spelling book made my temper seethe, and lessons began in a hopeless atmosphere. And repeated punishment made Dédé stupid—a superadded stupidity—and weakened his resistance so that he took to crying with no direct cause. Yet still that child remained very nearly as affected as he was at the beginning. In the last months, quite sickened by the wreck that I had made of it, I swore to God that I would never touch him again; and I never did. His progress stopped almost completely, the lisp came back to its full extent and with it the head-on-one-side smirk when he made some conscious little-boy remark.

“But I did not care: he was ready for school, and right heartily glad I was when I could pack him off—as glad as he was to go, because he never trusted me not to break out again. Poor little boy: I was so sorry for him when he was not there; and then the moment he appeared I longed for him to go away.

“I tell you Alain, there is a great deal said and written nowadays about parents and children—how badly parents bring their children up, how they domineer, tyrannize, maltreat them psychologically. But there is precious little said on the parents’ side; nobody speaks of the oppression of the parents by the children. That little boy fairly poisoned my days; he baited me with the cunning and persistence of a grown woman, and he felt more malice than I should ever have supposed a child could contain. Every second novel nowadays has a sensitive young man who was badly used by his father: I would cut a pretty figure in a book like that—I might almost have been made for the role of the villain. But believe me, there is a great deal, a very great deal, to be said on the other side.

“I used to dislike my father. I still do. But now I remember how often I irritated him, and now I know far more clearly the standards by which his mind worked; I know the corrupting influence of unchecked power and continual vexation, and I dislike him much less. Perhaps it is that in justifying myself I must to some extent justify my father; but it is more than that, I am sure. But that aside: what I wanted to show was not merely that my attempt at loving, liking, feeling affection for these two beings was a complete failure (and much the same applies to my resolution of more general benevolence) but that in the event it was bound to be so. In the case of Dédé it was impossible to like him and remain honest: no clear-thinking man could know that child as I knew him and still find anything likable there. And after all, the animal approach of ‘my son, therefore excellent’ is not worth much, is it?

“Now that was a terribly long digression. I am boring you cruelly, I know, Alain, cruelly and unwarrantably; but you will bear with me this once. It is a good action.”

Poor shrunken Alain. He had been comfortable, warm, contemplative once; but that was years ago. Now he was hunched over his cold and trembling stomach, and now even the stars he watched with his dull, extinguished eye were pale. Pale? Yes, they were pale in the lightening sky: there was still night down there where they were setting, but on the left hand there was the green of dawn. And now Xavier was asking him to bear with him. Alain made the inarticulate consenting noise that civility required—“Oh, not at all. By all means. Please go on.”

In the fig tree a bird was singing. His eyes, tired and flickering though they were, could see the color of the leaves now. It was wonderful how the light increased, a duck’s-egg green that spread right over the bowl of the sky, ethereally pure colors, then the real blue down there. For a moment there was day on the one hand and night on the other, balanced, with the vast luminous dayspring in between: then the day won. It was an event of huge importance: birds sang: the air moved—a dry rustle from the palm fronds—and in the sky flamingo banners took form and color. Pointing up into the luminous air there came the rays of the sun; the eastern horizon, the taut line of the sea, glowed incandescent; the rays swept lower, touched the stony mountain on the right, crept down, and then the rim of the sun heaved up, the first white, blinding glimpse of the day.

Xavier would not acknowledge the dawn. The day would oblige him to turn and look at Alain, which he could not do and continue: and yet he had so much still unsaid. He wished to make it clear,
clear
: a logical exposition of the whole case, if he could accomplish it, would be of such enormous value, a corroboration for himself, a clearing of his mind.

He must hurry: he had wanted to elaborate so many points that he must now skim over if ever he was to have the time to resume all the lines of great importance and present a clear summing-up. Alain gazed hopefully at the sun: soon its rays would be down in the garden, bringing warmth, and perhaps they would thaw the rigid cold out of him; it seemed unlikely that anything could ever do that again, but perhaps the sun might succeed; if it did, he could bear anything.

“So, do you see,” Xavier was saying urgently, “I saw the whole pattern reforming; myself dying, Dédé’s uneasy delight and then a little later, when more sense or experience had come to him, the first chilling doubt in his mind about his own decency, followed by the same catastrophic self-examination, or by an equally catastrophic lack of it: in either case, the consciousness, more or less acute, according to his powers of self-deception, the consciousness and certainty of death.”

The sun was on him now, but still he shivered: there was warmth in the sun, however.

“But still, but still,” Xavier cried passionately, “this, all this, is only my exordium. What I wanted to show you, what I have failed to show you, except in a dull, imperfect fashion, was the state of a mind with no power of affection left in it, and the state of that mind when it is certain that the consequence of that paralysis is death. That self-induced or inflicted paralysis, or both, that wicked and blasphemous paralysis of love, whose consequence is death of the soul in life and damnation after it to all eternity. Damnation as certain as
that
,” he cried, hitting the table savagely. “Think of that mind, man, try for God’s sake to enter it, and then say what that mind must feel when for the first time it is conscious of a spontaneous jet of affection, the new, saving, healing, vivifying, humanizing feeling of love. . . . What? What is it? Oh what is it in God’s name, woman?”

Unmoved by the trembling harshness in her master’s voice or his lined and drawn face jerked over on one shoulder toward her, she said righteously, “Seeing that you and Monsieur Alain were up already, I thought you would like your coffee brought out on to the terrace.”

CHAPTER FIVE

T
HE CONVERSATION
could never recover from this brutal interruption. Xavier, sitting there silent and haunted, was obviously in the throes of a violent reaction: he had been wound up emotionally to the highest pitch and now the tension was released so suddenly that his spirits were all abroad. Alain, a little revived by two bowls of scalding coffee, thought of the simile of a man running at great speed and tripping, being hurled flat by some trifling obstacle that would never have hindered him at all but for the speed of his running. After a moment’s thought he repeated the idea to Xavier. He must contribute something, he felt, toward making the atmosphere possible again, and any remark about the freshness of the air, the color of the sky, anything obviously alien to the subject, would be dreadfully discordant. But for the moment Xavier could not respond. “Yes, yes,” he said, in a vague tone; then, imperiously, “More coffee?” He turned his face to Alain as he spoke; there was an inimical look upon it, and his next remark, “Shall we go down and watch the boats come in?” had no friendliness, and the words came out unnaturally.

There was nothing in the world that Alain wanted more than a hot bath, hot enough to send the warmth right into the middle of his body, and then the cool sheets of his bed, the firm but yielding pillow. He would have given in to Xavier’s suggestion not many years before, but now he said, “No. I’m going to have one more bowl of coffee, then I’m going to bed. A bath first.”

Xavier sniffed. “You’re very welcome to a bath, but it is not worth going to bed. We have an appointment with Cazeilles at eleven.”

“Who?”

“Cazeilles. Aspullabalitris.”

“Oh, him. Couldn’t we put him off?”

“You will feel perfectly well after a cold shower,” said Xavier. He lit a cigarette, and Alain noticed that his hand, the hand holding the match, was trembling so much that it took him as long to light it as a cigar. “Very well,” he said internally, “if you wish to regain your composure by domineering a little, I have nothing to say. But it is not very amiable.”

Xavier went in while Alain was still drinking his coffee, and out there in the garden Alain could hear his loud, rather harsh voice in the house: he was complaining of something.

“Poor devil,” said Alain.

And “Poor devil,” he said, lowering his tired body into the deep luxury of the bath.

He had been profoundly moved, and although the strength and the shock of his first impression were now overlaid with tiredness, still under the trivialities of his current thoughts there remained a great quantity of amazement at this revelation of an unknown, unsuspected man, and a very great deal of pity for him. “And yet,” he thought uneasily, after a long while, “does he not overestimate the amount of affection there is in the world?”

The servants were clanging up and down the passage now: he had stayed far too long in the water, and his hands were wrinkled like a washerwoman’s.

“I wonder how much every man’s heart hardens as he goes farther and farther from his boyhood,” he thought, sitting on the edge of the bath while the water sucked and gurgled away, and he thought of the tenderness of his own heart once, and how, a very young man new to the East, he had wept so bitterly for Li Fu-jen, the daughter of the scholar of Mô.

“And yet,” he said to himself, “it is less sympathy for Xavier himself than consternation or dismay at the existence of the situation, and sorrow that
any
man, rather than one specific man, should be in it.”

They had already got into his room and they were sweeping and banging the windows when he went back for his razor: it took him five minutes to get them out, and then they went straight into the bathroom. How very unlike Chinese servants, he thought, running his hand over his cheek; however, it did not really matter.

Now that they had just done the room it seemed indecent to get into the bed, so he lay on it for a while. He was tired, but the pints of strong coffee and his bath had done away with sleep, and when he heard the irregular staccato of a typewriter somewhere in the house his mind went running along on that line.

So there she was in the house, typing. Yes, it was today that she was due back: Aunt Margot had told him, but he had forgotten. Unless it was that miserable old clerk. No, he could never manage more than one finger at a time, and this was the trained, machine-gun stutter of an expert. It was the young woman, without any doubt. He felt a strong curiosity to see her, and when he had lain there a little longer, thinking, he dressed and went downstairs. He had taken the decision, remarkable for him, to walk into the room where she was without any disguise or pretense. It was not delicate, not delicate at all, he had reflected, but every sort of misconduct has two sides at least—adultery is a heinous tragedy to the cuckold, but dashing and doggish to the seducer; prying is ignoble and sordid to the detached observer, but a peccadillo, quite permissible to the curious.

The decision wavered, however, when he stood outside the door: it was really too gross to burst in like that. And as he stood, hesitating before going away, the door opened, and Xavier was there, looking unnaturally tall with the light behind him.