Charles Newman - In Partial Disgrace

“My husband,” the Princess offered as an icebreaker, “is a disgusting fellow.”

The swimming hole marked the edge of the first Stone Age settlement in 6000 BC. At that time a riverine ledge extended completely across the Mze, a natural ford and the future site of a Roman bridge. But the attraction here for the mentality of mankind’s first predatory age was not the crossing so much as the whirlpools just beneath the ledge, which churned up vast amounts of nutrients and attracted carp, tench, loach, pike-perch, and sturgeon. The votaries discovered in this settlement’s burial pits were human heads with fish lips, as well as cave paintings depicting trained dogs diving into the tawny river to retrieve live fish, as they believed the whirlpools to be bottomless. The river and their dogs gave them everything. There was no need to bait a hook, cast a net, or sharpen a spear. The Mze washed away every little miserable existence, and its banks provided water chestnuts, sloes, field pears, rose hips, cornel cherries, wild plum, and crab apple. Yet the site was soon abandoned, and it was this ledge, now exposed at low water for the first time in anyone’s memory, that Topsy and her pedagogical duo traversed until they came to the Roman central arch, where the remainder of the ledge had been blasted away in the early nineteenth century for massed boat traffic. From the broken arch, a slatted rope bridge enjoined the far cliffs, and Father carried Topsy this final third.

From my vantage on the chapel promontory, I could see far downstream, across the ledge and bridge, past the bathing beach, and well onto the old mill where the Mze bent double and disappeared. There I was taken aback to spy my Waterman, lying beside the drying riverbed, leaning secretly, silently, invisibly upon his elbow. His hair was matted, and runnels of water ran from the hem of his green overcoat into the disappearing Mze, like muddy tributaries to the sea. In the streaming weeds and waters of his face, he was smoking one of Father’s innumerable lost and waterlogged pipes, with an acrobat’s smile. And in his lapel, a bright green leaf sprouted from his gray, storm-broken trunk.

The Mze was ebbing away. The Mzeometer, a calibrated Roman well at the old mill, could have confirmed this, but we disdained even this most elemental of scientific measures. The river was doing its best to flood, to no avail. The pastures were no longer striped. Where streamlets, subterranean aquifers, and proud torrential brooks once entered the river, now were only baked gulches, deep and narrow as saber cuts. The effervescent runnels in the banks had quit, and the receding waters revealed tin pots and the carcass of a laced boot, as well as rusty culverts discharging waste from god knows where. The true self-forgetfulness granted by the contemplation of water was no longer possible. There was not enough left to pray to.

High above the ladies, cresting the bluffs on the far side of the river, the two men strode through grass up to their waists. At first submerged, Topsy started to leap up dolphin-like from the sea of lime, until they reached the bald, which had been cut through with gravel allées to an abandoned folly, slippery for men and painful for animals — another French idea. Suddenly a cold breeze had come up.

“The time has come to transfer the lines of force, my friend,” Felix said. He slipped the cord and passed it behind his back to the Professor’s clumsy hands, and the two figures staggered out upon the bald like a hung-over couple who just met at a New Year’s party and cannot decide whether to go to a hotel or a coffeehaus . Topsy did not test him out of pity, and the Professor was reluctant to press what seemed an overly tactile advantage, recalling with embarrassment his ineptness at vivisection and even the most cursory minor surgery.

“Stocks and bonds,” Father said, “that’s how you must learn to think about this. We’re the bond boys: we decide when to leave the house and when to return. But once underway, the animal is free to lead or lag. We can move in opposite directions for a while, but we can never be decoupled, even if we wanted it. That is what is so hard for human beings to understand. We are tethered not to our own, whom we abandon on a whim, but to animals, as to the market, by an unknown sentiment.”

The Professor at first was silent. He did not mind Felix acting like he had an ace up his sleeve, but he did not like him acting like God himself had put it there.

“Can it be that nature is so bourgeois?” he asked.

“Ah, how many times have you invoked that phrase, Herr Doktor? Let us not, if you please, rush to the cupboard of concepts so quickly. Dear friend, the bottled members of the bourgeois are more difficult to grasp than the profoundest of geniuses. It’s much easier to deal with a Franz Schubert, than, say, that ‘cheese of a man’ over there. And what is the essence of bourgeois thinking?” Felix wagged his finger. “Preparing for the eventuality when the romance is over. The dog does not anticipate that he will lose his love. On the other hand, he behaves because the friendship might end. He is aware that it can end at any moment, yet he makes no contingency plans. So with animals, the foolish human cycle of romance, rejection, and reconciliation is collapsed to a workable order. There is no forgiveness after the fact, which is just as bad as punishing after the fact — bad with men and catastrophic where females are concerned. But this is what gives us room for movement and maneuver, and upon which we must now capitalize!”

And with that Father sat down upon a pink granite plinth, his head cocked slightly to one side to watch his charges. The man and dog moved tentatively across the bald.

“Loosen your gait, Professor. Heftig, wuchtig , you haven’t been drafted, you know. And this is no funeral!”

And indeed, as the Professor allowed his ankles to loosen, his spine to sway, Topsy picked up her feet with a bit more merriment. “Kraftig, nicht zu schnell!” They had reached the line where a graveled track crossed the grass. With their backs turned, they stopped and stared across the broken path as if it were a wild Russian river.

But they had stopped together, without so much as a tremor between them, and that was the point. Topsy sat down gently, her golden cape settling about her haunches, and the Professor’s shoulders seemed broader for a moment, almost athletic. Father nodded approvingly.

“Anything diagonal across the body relaxes it,” he said. Then the Professor’s hand dropped tremulously to Topsy’s muzzle.

“So schmart,” he crooned, “so very schmart .”

“ Cantabile , Professor, non troppo lugubre , if you please,” Father said. “Now turn and take care not to get tangled, sehr langsam .”

The Professor accomplished a cautious half-circle in front of her nose, and then as the couple headed back toward Felix, Topsy pirouetted on her butt and they moved as one, a perfect arc of affective slackness in the cord — arm in arm, so to speak.

“ Schmart , sie schmart ,” the Professor chanted softly, but then self-consciously he broke his stride, and the cord suddenly drew taut. Topsy resisted, and the grace note fell away flat. Both master and pupil looked mournfully to Father, who, walking quickly toward them and taking up the cord, took Topsy through a quick series of snappy turns, in order that she finish strongly. Then, as he released her to run, he said over his shoulder:

“Walk the walk, Professor, then talk the talk. It’s moves that make views, not the other way about.”

At the ford, a furtive, boney stag with a broken rack and patchy coat appeared, pawing at the water. But as he pricked up his ears and crossed, there were no splashings, no white-fringed wavelets about his fetlocks. Here was a river that could be stepped in twice and twice and twice again, the Heraclitian riddle broken: no flow, no flux, no exchange — only stasis. Left foot, right foot, still he could not step into the river, even once. I saw that my little aesthetic trick, my devotion to the precious pause and the language of omission, was a flimsy thing, for in this world the basic constant is not change, despite its many apologists. What goes unremarked is that, without any reason, things just stop. For nature loves to hide, and history is mostly stillness.