The Catalans: A Novel (12 page)

“But however that may be, I have always noticed that in general small and large vexations, but especially trivial ones, often make me so furious that I have to put my hands in my pockets and turn away not to make a fool of myself—and this when other men remain perfectly unmoved. I used to be secretly a little flattered at my sensitivity and at my ability to cover it; and although I was aware, very clearly aware, that a degree of sensitivity that causes a man to pass perhaps a third of his lifetime in a state of intense, though disguised, irritation is no very welcome gift, yet it was not until this time that I came to suspect it as a wickedness, a thing that corrupts the very source of affection.

“I resolved (oh with such a heart-felt resolution) not merely to curb my impatience—I had done that all my life—but to prevent its arising: and I resolved to cultivate a loving indulgence for my fellows, particularly those who vexed me. I knew that it would to a large extent be artificial at first, but I hoped that the quality would grow behind the pretense, like the face behind the mask in the story.

“It was not with enthusiasm that I began on this new course: enthusiasm has a sound of warmth and pleasure. No: it was more as a man seizes upon a lifeline: he does not seize it with enthusiasm but with—what? Not desperation, for there is hope. The word escapes me: but it was with this same kind of feeling that I began.

“During Georgette’s long illness Dédé had lived with Aunt Marinette, and they suggested that he should stay with them. There was a good deal to be said for the arrangement. I was very busy at that time, and in many ways Aunt Marinette’s house was more suitable for a child. But I thought it better to have him at home: he was backward, I knew, and Aunt Marinette, though kind, was not an ideal person to bring up a boy.

“I would find time, cost what it might, to see to his education, and I would bring him up with loving-kindness and indulgence tempered with good sense. He was my own son, my only son, and if I could not find a tenderness in my heart even for him, then indeed I was a monster. I knew that I was not fond of children in general, but this was not anybody’s child, it was my own, and I had little doubt of the success of my scheme.

“At the same time I bought a dog. Here again I knew that I was not what is called good with dogs, but I felt convinced that good will and common sense would make up for that.

“I was younger then. I should be less sanguine now, and now perhaps I might foresee disaster in such schemes: for disasters they both were, disasters.

“An unskillful man is generally unlucky as well, don’t you find? A man who is not a good driver is run into through no fault of his own, has a puncture every time he goes out, or some bizarre misadventure happens to him when it would not happen to anyone else. It was the same with me: I happened to fall on the child and the dog for whom ordinary, kind treatment was not suitable.

“I will tell you about the dog first. It was a young liver-colored dog with a pink nose that Côme found for me. I knew nothing of these things, and asked him: I had to bow to his choice, of course, but it seemed a poor-looking creature to me. I suppose that it is very usual to trust a man in his trade although you know him to be a fool in other respects: anyhow, although I always considered Côme a lecherous half-wit (and still do) I thought that as he was always hunting or shooting with the aid of dogs, always among them, he would act intelligently in this instance. However, the dog proved to be as much a fool as Côme. It was
said to be house-trained, but it was not, and that was a weari
some business. It was worse than that, for it started everything off on the wrong foot—it started with distaste and unkind feelings. It
was a dog, I should have said, with overabundant energy and
spirits, and at first it overflowed with indiscriminate, meaningless affection to such an extent that it was a nuisance. Unless it was restrained all the time it would break out into noisy excesses, grow overexcited and hysterical, take the wildest liberties. All the time it had to be checked or there was no peace, no possibility of obedience: kindness after restraint sent it off its head.

“It was unfortunate that the first beating I ever gave the dog had a wonderful effect: it encouraged me to think for a long time that that was the best way of teaching it. There was so much that it had to be taught, so much that ordinary dogs seem to know intuitively—or perhaps I am wrong in saying that; perhaps I am judging from trained dogs. This dog—its name was Pedro—had to be taught not to stray, roaming the streets and picking in the dustbins, not to make filthy messes in this house and in other people’s, not to jump up, not to tear up plants in the garden, not to dig holes—oh, an infinity of lessons: and it learned very slowly and stupidly, if at all. To the end it could never be stopped barking at everybody or straying and haunting the rubbish heaps with the village curs. It had a great deal of cur in it, although it was said to be so well bred: it was quarrelsome, aggressive with other dogs, but the moment they showed their teeth, Pedro would run howling. Oh, it was a disaster, that dog. Yet there was a time when I did have a certain weak fondness for it: even the worst dog has some pretty ways when it is young. Occasionally, too, it would try to learn something and I would be pleased with it. But then fatally the next moment it would do something maddening and I would have to speak to it sharply—unless it was instantly checked it would continue to behave badly; it was a dog that took advantage at once of weakness or indulgence. I would speak to it sharply and it would start to cower. That cowering, crawling on its belly: I believe it feigned half the time. Certainly it did it more when we were out than at home. I would call it: it would not come—it was busy eating filth. I would call it sharply, go back toward it, and at once it would start this creeping off, flat on the ground, leaving a piddling stream behind it, as if I habitually lashed it to bloody insensibility. I could never teach it to come, or to stay reliably in to heel; and once it was out of arm’s reach it would chase sheep, goats, hens, anything that would run: so it was no companion on a walk. Nor could I ever teach it not to hang about the kitchen day and night: so in the end, when it appeared that I had reduced it to a cowering, hysterical, incontinent, useless cur, and when it was clear that it had no affection for me whatever, only a guilty desire to get out of my way, I gave in, let it go into the kitchen for good (they had always encouraged it) and there it remained, grossly bloated, an ill-conditioned bawler to the end of its days, when it bit the woman who had fed it for nine years, bit her viciously, and she smashed in its skull with a pestle.

“Well, the parallel disaster of the child was not so dramatic; and it is not complete. Obviously, there is no comparison in the importance of the two (though it was surprising how that dog rested on my heart, for years and years) and obviously my hopes and efforts were far, far more important.

“I listed the bad qualities of that dog so much at random that I do not know whether I conveyed the chief fault—the chief fault from my point of view—that it was not to be taught by kindness, that kindness was not the key to its nature.

“It was the same with Dédé. He had been a long time with Aunt Marinette, as I have said, and for a long while before that I had not occupied myself with him very much: a man is out of place in a nursery. So he came home almost a stranger to me, and I was very much surprised to find what a nasty little boy he was. I do not suppose that I should ever have fully discovered it if it had not been for my new, imposed attitude of mild tolerance, and my attempt at helping with his education. He had been very badly spoilt in his babyhood, and he had just come from being abominably spoilt by Aunt Marinette, so a great deal of his nastiness was not to be imputed to him. In passing, I could say a great deal about women and the bringing-up of children, but I will not: I will just observe that I have met with precious few in the course of my life who were fit to be trusted with such a charge. Aunt Marinette was not one of them. But even making every allowance, he was a disagreeable little boy in his own right. No doubt I had an exalted idea of what my son ought to be like, far too exalted, but still I think at bottom I should have been satisfied with a manly boy, even if he had been affected, untruthful, hypocritical, unaffectionate, cruel, and of course grossly ill-mannered and undisciplined. During that first period I was able to look at him very thoroughly: believe me, Alain, a parent’s eye is not so blind as they say; when it is searching as desperately as mine was, it is as keen as an enemy’s. I looked into his shallow little soul, and I found that in addition to all those disagreeable qualities it had an epicene namby-pambyness that filled me with despair—it seemed to go through and through him, to be basic and ineradicable.

“Oh, those horrible lessons. I could not, even by the greatest economy of my working time, make more than two hours a day for him, one in the morning and one in the evening. It was a short enough time measured by the clock, but how it dragged on
and on and on. At first, when he found that I was not to be
feared, he would mince about showing off like a confident little ape, or he would give a performance of himself in the role of the arch, winning little boy, so quaint: it was a shocking indictment of the people he had been with, for it had evidently taken them in and pleased them. You know the kind of thing, head on one side, simper, saccharine expression. He would do this showing off for me alone—when there was no other audience but myself, I mean. Any child is liable to show off when there are many people there, particularly strangers, but surely it is very rare for a child to do it perpetually, even when there is only one person? It means that there is no possibility of any companionship, no human contact at all. And the ghastly thing was that what he wished to imitate was not an older child but a
younger
one. I cannot tell you how distasteful it was. However, I put it down to his spoiling, tried not to blame him for it, tried to wean him from it by whatever gentle means I could conceive, tried hard to like him in spite of it, and tried, quite vainly, to win his liking and his confidence.

“He was very backward, as I said, very backward indeed; and after a while I began to grow seriously worried. If I did not change my methods I should never be able to get him on so that he could compete with boys of his own age. Indulgence had not worked so far, and we did not have unlimited time in which to see whether it would ever work. In order to get him to learn at all it was essential to take a very different tone: and that I did. It was the pity of the world that there was no affection in him: if there had been, he might have tried to learn a little to please me. But he never did that.

“I had sat so long at that table with a fixed, tolerant smile, watching him go through his paces—you would not know, Alain, not having a child, how horribly wounding it is to see a thoroughly affected boy, a boy corrupted through and through with affectation so that there is no true boy left at all, no core of genuine being left inside the mass of affectation, how wounding it is to realize that that has happened to any child, and how triply wounding when that child is yours, part of you, identified with you—your continuity, in fact, your own physical survival and renewal. And it is all the more intimately, personally wounding—wounding to one’s vanity, if you like, but
wounding
—because in the child you see horrible glimpses of yourself. There is no forgetting that you are essentially implicated. I did not see very much—one is not well acquainted with one’s own superficial peculiarities, so I dare say that a good deal escaped my attention—but what I did see was the cruelest caricature; a very ingenious enemy could not have hurt me more. There was much more of his mother paraded before me: but never once did I catch any hint of her amiable qualities. Her weakness, silliness, and dishonesty of mind were there, as clearly reproduced as her long, pale, chinless face and pale, uncolored hair, but I could never find a trace of her loving heart, her earnest desire to please, her patience, or her generally kind and affectionate nature. She had been fond of birds—the fondness that expresses itself by shutting them up in cages for the term of their lives, but a genuine feeling of kindness nevertheless. Dédé with a living bird or any small creature in his power was a sight to make your heart sick. It is a natural childish phase, they say; but to
that
extent . . .

“However, I am wandering. It was a positive relief, I say, after a long stretch of this dreary exhibition, a positive relief to snap out a few hard words in a natural voice and put an end to it. I knew very well that it went on out of sight, but at least I did not see it so much, and that was something. My chief concern now was to get the boy on, bring him up to the standard for his age. I knew that Soulier was not doing anything with him—Soulier came to teach him during the daytime—and probably could not; and I felt very strongly that if I did not bring him on myself he would remain one of those permanently backward louts like Marcelin Py. If he went to school at all it would be to remain at the bottom of everything, the buffoon of the class—every class has one—until he was superannuated, a hairy hobbledehoy only capable of running after servant girls and dressing up. Though on second thoughts, Dédé would never run after servant girls; he is too lymphatic, and far too much of a snob. We were still at the elements, reading, writing, and arithmetic. For the first long weeks and months there was almost no progress at all: it was not until I began to impose some degree of discipline that he began to use his brain at all, and even then he was so unused to using it, and still so preoccupied with being the quaint wonder-child, that progress was agonizingly slow.

“This second, intermediate phase, did not last long. He understood that I would no longer stand gross foolery and idleness during lessons, and he very quickly found new ways of not working and, seeing that there was open hostility now, ways of irritating me. It was remarkable, really, to see how well a boy who was in most ways stupid and insensitive, could pick on just those affectations and cunning tricks that were best suited to vex. He had a damned lisp, quite fictitious, and a way of drawing out his words when he was reading that made me long to knock the book out of his hand—he knew it very well, too, and he knew that I would not do it. But worse than the lisp was the invincible conviction that it was quaint to be stupid. We would come up against a difficult word in reading: I would lead him toward its pronunciation by analogies, half a dozen of them: he would get them all right, and there I would be, all tense with the desire to plant the idea into his head, and tense with desire to hear the
right answer; and at the end of the chain of analogies, while my lips would be forming the right word for him, he would cock his head on one side, utter his ‘silvery laugh’ ha, ha, ha, ha, and say the word wrongly, with a complacent smirk on his pasty face.