Charles Newman - In Partial Disgrace

In advertising his reluctance to treat, the Professor had taken a page from the old diplomatists, who, knowing the governments they represented to be a sham, try to reach an accommodation based on decreasing confidence, a pact based upon the refusal to make any promises at all, and to buy time at all costs. Felix saw that in his abstracted way the Professor was reaching for that state of neutral grace between an animal and his trainer, when the unspoken bond is simply the understanding that there would be no concentration of willfulness without the other’s leave.

Now here was a man you didn’t have to talk to, and with whom you might one day really have a talk! Father resolved to trade learning for learning, acknowledging the Professor’s gesture with one from his own special repertoire of silences. He reflected for a time on which would be most suitable.

The most adaptable and engaging gesture in this world, more winning than sex or genius, is the puzzlement of perfect temperament, when a mistake or complication is greeted not with a snarl or shiver, but with the cocked, flipped-over ear of a pup, inquisitive and unsensational, asking only that you think through the hovering blow you are about to deliver. It is the one physical gesture from our stifflegged hounds worth learning, and while most of us for some reason almost always have an uncle who can wiggle his ears, Father, after hours in his shaving mirror, had mastered the discipline of cocking his left ear, then his right, which astounded his enemies and never failed to captivate women. It cut through formalities; expostulations were reformulated and put again more simply; even glances were more telling, as it elicited longer pauses but fewer hiatuses. It encouraged the other to articulate more accurately, and to sidestep small talk, or rather to make talk really small, as in italics, as if the great conversation of the ages could only be resumed when strong men asserted the feminine child within them. And so the Professor, though he was not prone to admit it, counted this session a great success when he saw his patient’s left ear rise and cock itself in his direction, asking for amplification. He responded with a sly half-wink, pulling shyly on his moustache, as they both blew smoke rings up into the æthers.

The two bearded men chatted on as if they were waiting in line at a customs house at a frontier, until with a glance at his watch the Professor concluded their appointment.

“Perhaps we will never find out what’s wrong with you, eh?” he said cheerfully, handing him a card for their next appointment, and they both admitted to themselves that they looked forward to the silences to come, as well as the session with Scharf a fortnight hence.

“Healing’s not pretty, Councilor,” the Professor concluded.

As he left the building, Felix suddenly felt cheated and abused, and had the overpowering urge to tell the quack off, which made him look forward as never before to his next appointment — until he realized after glancing at the card that it was a year away.

But as he sat stewing, he was aware of the muscles in his diaphragm relaxing, and for a brief moment felt that he was not fundamentally unlike everyone else in the world — a strange and disorienting experience for him.

This was the first trip the Professor had ever taken without a book. After hustling aboard an express at the glass-and-steel South Station and crossing the Hron by the Invaliden Bridge, he sat stupefied before the window, watching rearward as the endless gasflares, smokestacks, and open-pit furnaces of the industrial suburbs drifted past. Referred to as “The Tannery,” this blasted stretch never failed to make a dour impression, furnishing an unlimited portico of scenes for rich, recurrent nightmares. That people could take the local and actually get off and go to work in this hellish scene was beyond him.

The Monstifita station was located off a spur which terminated in a ruined cloister serving as a train shed. Here the restaurant car was decoupled and attached to a Belgian steam engine with a squat body and disproportionately large chimney. Men with grimy fingernails crowded the zinc counter for beer and cigarettes as the train moved out along the suspension railway toward the spa town of Sare.

As the little train traipsed along its miles of timbered superstructure, it sent up a pale feather of smoke. In the yellow fog of morning, the peonies were dropping their last petals and the lime trees were in flower.

Upon alighting, the Professor and his dog were surrounded by Skopje, gigantic yet fleshy Russians in black caftans who believe that Christ never died but wanders the earth in different forms, and will come again when the great bell of Uspenskisobor sounds. They offered him his choice of gigs: fan-tailed or tub-bodied; a chariotee, rockaway, or volonte; a stanhope, tilbury, or cabriolet; a victoria, barouche, or laundolet. Also available were a sedan chair, a hammer box, and a lineika (a six-wheeled Russian equatorial carriage), as well as an American invention, a three-wheeled gig with the third wheel in front in close connection to the shafts. The Professor chose an older, half-closed brougham with lemon sateen side-panels, a piebald mare who stared at his beard as if it were a new sort of hay, and the shortest and calmest of the drivers, who at six and a half feet could barely contain himself. His sallow skull was shaven in front, with flapping plaits fastened by clasps to his forehead, and his caftan embroidered with scrolls and flowers.

“And where can I take your Excellency?” he inquired in a high-pitched voice.

“To the river landing, if you please. The cost?”

“Whatever you like, your Excellency,” the coachman said as he whipped the beautiful fat bottom of the mare.

Gypsies fiddled, lepers begged, and drunks beat up one another as the brougham sped along polished cobbles, dodging a plentiful fall of steaming horseapples clotted with peppermint. Like phantoms in a fairy tale, they proceeded at a bone-jarring trot through the villages of Nask, Luda, and Zaza. Along the road, rain had eroded the soil a dozen feet down, and the Professor could make out traces of former roads passing through the valley, one on top of the other, Turkish gravel overlaying medieval slag overlaying heavy Roman paving stones. Once through the three-gated military border with its bevy of moneychangers and louche soldiers, King Pevney’s Royal Way opened before them into that degenerate forest of well-levers which bordered the Marchlands, where for twenty leagues the land had not changed in thousands of years. This was a remnant of a pre-settlement expanse, like those undulating plains which once spread from Kenya to Mozambique and Wisconsin to Texas — oak-studded savannahs intertwined with clumps of forest, wetlands, blowholes, and tallgrass prairie, cleansed by naturally occurring fires, pumped clean by slithering aquifers and artesian wells, a shimmering green carpet studded with wildflowers that popped up any time of year, usually after a fire or some mysterious subterranean lucubration.

For the first few miles, the Professor drowsily watched the coachman’s huge back and the lobes of the horse. After a few hours, though, he began noticing portions of the road sticking to the brougham’s wheels, as Homeric clouds gathered above. The next thing he knew, the carriage was driving up the bed of a tributary.

“Captain!” the Professor called out.

“Sir.”

“Don’t you think we shall be drowned?”

“Yes, sir, I do! May I offer your Excellency a cigar?” Which the Professor accepted as the coachman, making a desperate effort, succeeded in climbing the right bank. But then after a short jaunt cross-country, he drove straightaway into a lake.