The Catalans: A Novel (10 page)

Xavier wrote in pencil on the margin, added; drummed his fingers and shuffled back through the pages.

Now Alain was thinking along another line, wondering what there could be that was sympathetic in the man on the other side of the table: was it anything more than custom that sat them down opposite to one another, and kept them talking of their common affairs? Custom and mutual interest? Was there any degree of voluntary friendship, free association? It would be interesting to ask Xavier what he thought: he would not return a sentimental answer, at all events.

Xavier looked up suddenly; there was a rare, benevolent look on his face, and as he took off his glasses his eyes lacked their usual stony glint. The suddenness of his regard and its unexpected cordiality threw feelings of surprise and guilt into Alain’s mind: he returned the smile with a certain effort.

“I should say offhand,” said Xavier, “that it has made no difference at all. I cannot commit myself to a definite opinion, of course, but that is my general impression. There were a few more Chasselas, but there were rather less on the Grenaches. The trouble is that there are so many imponderables: old Joanole did not have his heart in the experiment, for one thing. He said, from the first, that it was madness to try to change the ways of our fathers. It might have been different if he had brought more good will to the task.”

“Oh, it was in no way a scientific experiment. For that we should have established controls, and it would have to go on over a period of years. No, it was only an idea. But I shall remain convinced that the earth itself is improved. Have you the figures there for the new plantation?”

“Yes, I have,” he replied with some hesitation. “But I must admit to a certain . . . I must confess that I cannot give you any clear interpretation of them. The typing here appears to have lost all system. From the end of page seven I cannot understand what the figures mean at all.”

At the word
typing
a consciousness came over Alain: he could not tell whether it was shared by Xavier, who was silent now, apparently absorbed in the figures.

“Alain,” said Xavier, again with that kind look, “you have been here a week, and you have never mentioned this business, this personal affair of mine: I appreciate it very much.”

Alain was not going to let him go with that. “I will not pretend to misunderstand you,” he said. “And I will not be such a hypocrite as to pretend that I am not brimming over with curiosity: the family have been filling me with strange tales these six months past.”

“As long as that? You surprise me. I will not embarrass you by asking what they have said.” There was a pause, and then Xavier said, “Shall we sit in the garden? It is stifling in here.”

The garden was older than the house: its present form dated from the time when the Roussillon was a part of Spain. Spaniards had built the high, secret, enclosing wall; Spaniards had planted the enormous fig tree that filled the night with its animal scent and that was heaving the flagstones of the patio with a slow, desperate effort that had begun a hundred years before.

Alain and Xavier settled in long chairs on the second of the three descending terraces of the garden; they had brought the decanter, their glasses, the cigars, and the tourron by the light of the lamp, for it was black velvet night already; but now Alain had put it out for fear of the moths, and they sat in the starlight. He had thought of slipping upstairs for his dressing gown; but it would be madness to risk an interruption like that. Anyhow, it was not necessary: the heat rose still from the stones; the faint breeze was warm on his forehead; and from every tree the cicadas, drunk with warmth, strummed in a choir so uniform and unceasing that in five minutes it was inaudible.

“I have always envied you your profession, Alain,” he said, after a long pause. “It must be a very real satisfaction to a man to know that what he is doing is good: to be able to say at the end of his life that he has spent his time accountably.”

“It is a profession that can be easily idealized,” said Alain, feeling disappointed and let down.

“But even so, surely there must be a deep—not exactly contentment, a sense of fulfillment rather, in using all the knowledge that a doctor has nowadays for unselfish ends? After all, there are so many activities, innumerable activities that a man can engage in and hardly know at the end of the count whether the balance is this way or that: negative trades, to say the best. With medicine at least you know that what you do is right.”

“Yes, there is that aspect. And perhaps it would count for a great deal in the life of a man in general practice: he has opportunities enough, God knows. Though I have a strong feeling that once he starts pluming himself on his moral worth all his merit has left him. For myself, I don’t know. The satisfaction in research is little more than the satisfaction of puzzle-solving raised to its highest degree. No: it
is
more than that. Just before I came away I finished a long series of experiments—brought them to a firm, distinct conclusion. The conclusion was that the vaccine on which I had been working was useless. But that in itself was an addition to the sum of knowledge: no other bacteriologist will ever have to spend a year of his life to solve that particular question again, and I remember the kind of self-approbation I experienced as I recorded my findings—a little priggish, perhaps, but a feeling that nothing else in the world could give you.” He took a sip of his cognac, let it run slowly down his throat, and went on.

“Still, I think it is certainly a mistake to attribute very high motives or very high merit to researchers: it is true that the work is unselfish in that no immediate personal gain is in prospect (though the idea of personal glory is there quite often), but it is undertaken from interest in the subject, from a desire to
know
, regardless of values, and it is persisted in from obstinacy; laudable obstinacy, no doubt: but that is not the same thing as a clear-cut desire to serve one’s fellow men.

“I don’t wish to be extreme: I dare say that bacteriologists as a class do think very kindly of mankind as a whole when it occurs to them to think of it at all; but I think their guiding motive is curiosity rather than humanity. And I know that with regard to their fellow men as individuals they are neither much better nor much worse than the rest of the world: they certainly do not conspicuously overflow with love for their neighbors or their colleagues. And I am sure of this, that the popular idea of bacteriologists as wise white-coated angels yearning day and night is so much nonsense: many of them are disagreeable men, some not even of average intelligence. And any bacteriologist who gives countenance to this ‘dedicated servant’ notion is guilty of abominable cant. I hate cant.”

“Yes. But cant and sentimentality aside, I still envy you. Compare medicine with the law. In spite of everything that can be said against doctors, nobody has ever felt called upon to elaborate any long, sophistical argument to prove that medicine is an honorable calling: nor do they trouble to show that rich men have a better time than poor men. But it has been demonstrated over and over again, logically and conclusively, that the lawyer is all that is admirable and that poverty is in every way preferable to wealth. Yet the world’s mind is unaltered: men still flee poverty and loathe lawyers.”

“The concept of justice is very noble, surely?”

“Justice? Oh yes. The concept of cleanliness is very fine, too; but we do not cherish the emptiers of dustbins or the men who look after the sewers.”

“You are determined to think ill of your trade, I find.”

“Yes. It is a dirty, dirty business. I have never known anyone come in contact with the law, as winner, loser, or lawyer without taking some of the taint of it.”

If I had studied psychology instead of bacteria, thought Alain, I might know what all this portends: if anyone had attacked the law on my last leave Xavier would have downed him with three or four sharp arguments and a dozen quotations: he would have been out of the house in a very short time, and he would never have been allowed in again.

Xavier was in a high, mounting state of nervous tension: all the time Alain had been talking he had noticed the end of Xavier’s cigar glowing with his continual, restless drawing on it. Now the stump curved away in a long comet-flight that ended in a burst of sparks on the lower terrace, and at once Xavier lit another.

In the flare of the match his face stood out in exaggerated light and shade, gaunt, cadaverous, desperately unhappy.

“I’ll tell you what it is, Alain,” he said, in an odd, continuing voice, as if he had been speaking for some time. “Every day I see damnation just in front of me, and it terrifies me.”

He was silent, and Alain, with the shock of surprise and embarrassment, could make no comment. This was delicate: but his continuing silence might have the air of repulsive, cold indifference—disinclination to speak so intimately. In a neutral voice he repeated the word damnation.

“Yes. Damnation.”

“What do you mean by it?”

“Every sort of damnation. The devils-with-pitchforks damnation, the fiery hell, the icy hell, the silent hell of darkness and expectation, a waiting horror: everything. But specifically for me
a kind of living death; damnation on two legs. Look here, Alain—”
he was leaning forward in the urgency of his speech; Alain could feel his nearness—“do you know what I mean by the death of the soul?”

“No.”

“I will tell you what I mean by the death of the soul. When you no longer have the power to love, when there is no stir of affection anywhere in your being, then your soul is dead. That is the death of your soul. Your soul is dead, and you are damned: you are dead walking, and you are in hell in your own body.”

By day, in other surroundings, Alain might have discounted these big words: here, with the night around him, they moved him inexpressibly.

“What you say troubles me very much, Xavier,” he said, after a long pause.

“Does it? It is a queer thing to spring on a man,” he said, in a ghastly parody of his ordinary conversational voice, “but you must bear with me, Alain. You are the perfect confidant, you know: you will be thousands of miles away very soon, so I can speak with as much freedom as if you were a stranger in a train; yet I do not have to explain the background.”

Alain made an assenting murmur.

“I suppose you think I am mad?”

“No. No, I don’t think that at all. But I will say that I am surprised that your idea of damnation is so immediately real. You mean it literally, if I understand you rightly?”

“Of course I do. It is as real and immediate as this table. I mean nothing figurative: but of course it surprises you: with your nature and your manner of life I do not suppose that you have ever been face to face with it in all your days. I envy you, as I was saying just now.” He was fiddling nervously with a match, grinding its stub on the table with a noise that set all Alain’s teeth on edge. “What I do not understand,” he said, snapping the match in two, “is how I come to be in this position. You may say that I have gained the whole world and lost my soul. Well, it is true that I have been a successful man: I have accomplished every material ambition that I set out to accomplish. I have not got a home or a family, but I have everything else. But all the time I have been honest; quixotically honest sometimes: I could have been a rich man ten years ago if I had chosen to be no more than a little supple.

“No; that does not make sense or justice. Sometimes I have thought that it is merely an affair of temperament—glandular secretion, isn’t it?—and that it never was within my control. X has a sanguine temperament; Y has a melancholy temperament: one sees that every day. But to be damned for having a cold, phlegmatic nature—no, that is utterly repugnant to all doctrine or sense of equity.

“I wish I could point to some dramatic treachery on my part; some clear-cut gross offense against my own integrity, a crime even—I mean a legal crime—that would justify this present state. I could repent of that. But there is nothing. Nothing but a lifelong course of small, unloving selfishness; and how can a man repent for a million trifles, for a habit of mind? I do not know that you could call me an unusually selfish man now: I do not think so, for upon my word I am not very fond of myself. But I certainly was when I was an adolescent. I passed through my period of mysticism then. Even then I was frightened of damnation; and I was told (and thoroughly believed) that a man’s first duty was to save his soul—his primary, imperative need. There may be a more selfish doctrine, but I do not think that I have ever met with one. No doubt I misinterpreted it, but it seemed to me to mean Save yourself, save yourself above all things, and let the rest go to the devil and to everlasting torment . . .”

A
LAIN
: Xavier, I can’t hear you.

X
AVIER
: Oh, I beg your pardon. I was wandering—mumbling to myself about the origin of . . . I was trying to trace it back. But I will tell you, Alain, how it came to strike me first so terribly hard. You did not see much of Georgette: you were abroad nearly all the time of our marriage. If you had been here more you would have gathered that it was an unexceptionable marriage, reasonably happy in a quiet, uneventful way: and you would have thought that the sudden breaking of it in a few years would have been terribly painful for me—you did think so, indeed, to judge from the very kind letter you sent me. Well, it was not. The only pain I experienced was at the absence of my pain. The only emotion that I felt was irritation: I felt that she could have recovered if she had tried (poor thing, poor thing; she had little cause to try) and that now I should be exposed to all the fuss of the burial, and then to the inconvenience of living without someone to look after the house and the child. No: that was not the only emotion; but it was the only unpleasant emotion. I also felt relief, and it was not without a real pleasure that I looked forward—even at that moment, sitting by her bed—to my quiet, solitary evenings again, and my walks in the country; the one without the consciousness of someone sitting there being quiet, and the other without having to walk slowly or choose suitable, easy paths.