Росс Макдональд - The Dark Tunnel

I bit back my anger and said, “I suppose I did fly off the handle. I must be getting the professorial habit of resenting contradiction.”

Dr. Schneider produced an artificial laugh which bounced twice against the roof of his mouth and fell flat.

“Not contradiction, sir. Merely disagreement,” Peter said. “We are probably using different words to mean the same thing.”

I let even that pass.

Dr. Schneider got out of his chair and said, “It’s some time before we’re due at the station, Dr. Branch. Would you care to look over my house?”

I said I would and Peter excused himself. A moment later I heard his light feet go up the stairs two or three at a time. His father showed me the library with its shelf of first editions, the copper-screened back porch overlooking the lights of Arbana, the small, warm conservatory opening off the porch, and even the utility room where the furnace sat drinking oil and glowing contentedly. Dr. Schneider became quite amiable again after Peter left us, and he waxed lyrical over his radiant heating system which kept the floors warm enough to sleep on all winter. He seemed to love his house better than he loved his son.

I listened enough to answer when I had to, but material possessions bore me, especially when they belong to other people. I pricked up my ears, though, when he offered to show me the salle d’armes. A special room for fencing seemed incongruous in the house of a man of Dr. Schneider’s age and weight.

“I’m rather interested in fencing,” I said. “Do you fence?”

“When I was a student, I indulged in some sabre-play.” He touched his left cheek, which was seamed with scars. “But I have not fenced for thirty years. Peter is a considerable fencer, I believe.”

“Really? I did some intercollegiate fencing when I went to college, but I’ve never competed with the sabre. We used foils and epee, with masks, of course. I’ve got no scars to show for it.”

“Our sabre-fencing at Heidelberg was a crude and bloody business,” Dr. Schneider said with an emotion that surprised me. We moved out of the utility room under the staircase into the central hall, and I noticed Peter coming down the stairs. “Since my Heidelberg experiences I must confess I have detested fencing, and especially the sabre. It is a butcher’s implement.”

Peter was at the foot of the stairs now, and he stood there listening.

“If that’s the way you feel,” I said, “it’s surprising that you have a fencing salle in your house.”

“It was part of the house when I bought it, and I left it as it was. Peter sometimes uses it when he is here, and, of course, it lends a certain touch to the house.”

“The manorial touch,” I said. “Your establishment is on a feudal scale, Dr. Schneider. I’d like to see your fencing room.”

As we went down the hall, Peter joined us and said, “My father has been maligning the sabre, Dr. Branch. It is the most beautiful of weapons, and the most difficult.”

“The Italian sabre has its points, certainly. I’ve played around with it but I never really learned it.”

We went on discussing the sabre as we entered the salle d’armes, but after Dr. Schneider switched on the light my mind wasn’t on what I was saying. It was wondering where Peter Schneider had picked up the smudge of lipstick on his cheek. I hadn’t seen it there before he went upstairs, and Frau Shantz, the middle-aged housekeeper, didn’t look as if she used lipstick or as if Peter Schneider could conceivably kiss her.

Dr. Schneider pointed at a row of long, narrow cases on a table at the end of the room and said, “There are the foils, Dr. Branch, if you are interested.”

When I went to look at them, Dr. Schneider spoke in an angry whisper which I couldn’t catch. When I turned around, the lipstick had disappeared from Peter’s cheek and he was casually tucking a handkerchief into his breast pocket.

“I’m afraid it’s the least interesting room in the house,” Dr. Schneider said.

“On the contrary. It brings back very pleasant memories, probably because I won a round-robin once and this recalls the scene of my former triumph. It was the only thing I ever got a letter for in school.”

To anyone but a fencer the room would have been less interesting than an average hotel room with nobody living in it. It was a large, square, empty room on a rear corner of the house, with tall windows on two sides. There were crossed sabres over the door, and a few wire masks and pads hung on the white plaster walls. A corrugated rubber mat ran across the exact center of the room.

But the black rubber mat and the faint memory of old sweat along the walls excited me for a minute. I took a foil out of its case and moved it in the air.

Peter stood beside his father watching me. I looked at him and his mouth moved into a smile like soft rubber, but under the rosy flesh the strong and passionate bones of his skull were fixed in a durable, clenched grin. His blonde hair looked senescent in the white light.

“Would you care to play with the foils a little, Dr. Branch, since you do not affect the sabre?”

“I’d like to,” I said, “if you’ll be forebearing. I’m years out of practice.”

Peter clicked his heels and bowed and started to take off his coat. I started to take off mine.

“I’m sorry to interfere with your sport,” Dr. Schneider said, “but there’s hardly time, I’m afraid.”

I looked at my watch. “It’s not eight-thirty,” I said.

Peter spoke to his father in low, intense German. He must have thought that I didn’t know enough colloquial German to understand him, because what he said was, “Hold thy noise, thou doddering fool.”

Dr. Schneider said nothing, but he turned green like old bronze. He turned and walked stiffly out of the room.

“We’d better skip it,” I said. “Your father seems to object.”

“Of course not. There is plenty of time. My father is a wet blanket. Do you care to select a foil and a mask?”

“If you wish.”

We put on masks, faced each other on the rubber mat, and saluted with our foils. The blunt, harmless blades crossed and disengaged. He lunged and I parried and lunged. He moved away very quickly and parried and lunged.

If you have once learned to swim, your muscles never forget what to do in the water. Though I had not fenced for years, my muscles remembered the parries and ripostes that had been trained into them. My footwork was slow but the foil lightly held in my fingers followed their direction like an extension of my hand. I touched Peter three times while he touched me twice.

He laid down his foil and took off his mask and I took off mine.

“You are quite an expert fencer, Dr. Branch.” He spoke with what used to be called old-world courtesy before the old world lost its manners. But his fair skin was strained tight over the bones of his face.

“Hardly,” I said. “I’ve probably spent more time with the foils than you have.”

“No doubt you have. The sabre is my weapon. The foil is a pretty toy but the sabre is an instrument of war.”

He moved quickly to the doorway and took down the two sabres from over the door. He thrust the hilt of one towards me and said, “Just feel it, Dr. Branch, the weight and balance and versatility.”

While he stood opposite me on the mat and made his sabre whistle in the air, I looked at the one he had given me. It was not an Italian fencing-sabre with truncated point and blunted cutting-edge. It was a cavalry sabre, heavy and long, pointed like a pen and sharp enough to cut bread or throats. It was an instrument of war, all right.

Peter said, “On guard,” and I looked up to see him giving me the fencer’s salute with the other sabre. His blade whirled in the air and leveled out towards my bare head. Fear came down on me like a cold shower but there was exhilaration in it, too. My blade sprang up almost without my willing it to keep my skull from being split, and I parried the cut.