Charles Newman - In Partial Disgrace

The Count was not surprised when his hosts expressed little anxiety about a potential conflict. Indeed, the attitude of everyone he had talked with, including his ministers, seemed to be one of inevitability, even enthusiasm. When he mentioned that the Russians might be drawn into an invasion, Ainoha said only, “Well, let them.”

As he took his leave, Count Zich asked Felix to use his influence with the gentry to prevent them from withdrawing funds from the savings banks. Should a war ultimatum be necessary, he would ask him to journey to Malaka and make his independent judgment available to King Peveny.

“This thing could be started by a bird’s chirp,” he confided. The grays fairly tore down the drive.

That evening, abed in Mother’s suite, Felix felt gaseous as lightning struck about his heart. But the thought of summoning Dr. Pür and being in his debt was too much to bear, and indeed, the small stroke he suffered seemed to calm him for the morning’s horrific discovery, when he found his white book wound tight about the blackened whale ribs of his estate.

After organizing our battalions of woe to run down his papers, Felix locked himself in the den for a month, admitting only Öscar with victuals, drink, ink, twine, and the daily quota of rescued manuscript. He leafed back through his Chronik and did the sums. Count Zich was quite right of course: there was not a liquid farthing to his name, and even after deducting advertising and meals, the training project, begun so innocuously with the advertisement in the Sunday Tagblatt a year ago, had through its cash drain forced him into general default. He asked himself what god, what madness had brought him to Cannonia, but did not have the strength to actually write this in the margins.

As one should know by now, blows of fate had the opposite effect upon Father as on most people. His mountains did not blow their tops, but rather fell ruined into themselves. His reaction was a sort of reverse hysteria, a chilling focus and self-control, the eerie calm of the sniper, and his abandoning of projects was most meticulous. He studied the Chronik for some days, arriving at a fair value for Semper Vero and all its dependencies, and detailing each asset, put the sheaf in the secret drawer holding the burnt-edged half-scraps of the Professor’s partially discarded lucubrations.

He then began a maniacal cleanup, discarding books and journals he would never read again, dusting, scrubbing, polishing, and painting, as if his rooms were a yacht. So when the Professor entered, ducking under the reams of stained and drying manuscript, he beheld a chamber nearly devoid of its old charm and eccentricity. On the large cherry table, once piled high with papers and indescribable objects of every sort, there was now only some perfectly coiled telegraph wire, a green accountant’s shade, and a pistol. There were also three large bronze-lipped vessels, one filled with Charbah Negra, one with golden water from the Mze, and a middle one, empty. These limpid, liquid pools flung discs of reflected light about the newly whitewashed ceiling. The black velvet curtain had been drawn together to a fraction of its former breadth, revealing a new set of empty, gilded cubbyholes to memorialize the lost transitions of the manuscript, but in its dark folds I was to discover later the first new quote, I think from The Aeneid :

But now commit no verses to the leaves

Or they may be confused, shuffled and whirled

By playing winds: chant them aloud, I pray.

A gleaming bronze telescope and its tripod had been placed on the balcony, the only place now free of the rustle of warped paper. Across the bitter river, a file of Astingi were moving, not en masse but in an endless single column, streaming beautifully as the Mze once did.

“Have a look,” Father said, adjusting the telescope so the Professor could glimpse a few of their faces close-up: hollow-cheeked with emerald eyes and unkempt hair, aquiline jawbone, nose and brow decisively but delicately finished, the Ur-Goyim departing. What struck one was neither their military nor sportive rituals, but the ultimate distinction of their manners in looks and bearing, their reckless tempo and lack of fuss, their almost preposterous patrician mien, which made even the most elegant modern courtier seem hopelessly gloomy and plebeian in our spoilt eyes.

“Sometimes,” Father mused, “I think they are the last real people left on the face of the earth.”

The Professor did not take the bait, and believing he had achieved a kind of trump with ownership of the royal chows, began tentatively, hoping to break the ice.

“Is it a book then. . that you’re working on?”

“I wouldn’t call it a book, really.” Felix replied evenly, his knuckles white on the balcony railing.

“But through all our talks, you’ve never once mentioned it!” the Professor, now truly hurt, blurted mournfully. “How can that be?” Then the question authors dread above all others:

“Pray, what’s it about?”

Father pointed silently across the river at the column heading East.

“A fine spektakel, no doubt, but do not you think it a waste of time to write about barbarians doomed to disappear?”

“Exactly what Marcus Aurelius thought upon this very spot, dear Doktor.”

“On the edge of the ancient world, you choose to write about the only people without a history?”

“They lost their written language some time ago,” Felix said softly without turning. “I aim to give it back to them before they depart.”

“But surely this is a project that with. . fresh capital. . might best be finished in southern France, or even Italy.”

“I moon not for your vie méditerranée ,” Father said without edge. “Oxen and wainwrights could not drag me away from here. I appreciate you playing the fool the other day, but despite your ineffectual gallantry, you’re still not ready for a Chetvorah.”

“Not ready,” the Professor said sarcastically, “or not deserving, Councilor?”

“Ah, always the justiz business, eh, Herr Doktor?”

The Professor let this pass with a superior glance, and Felix felt his self-control slipping away.

“I find it passing strange, Herr Doktor, that of all the girls in the world, you would attach yourself to this, this brace of chowlets from the uncircumsized East.”

The Professor was unperturbed. “That’s quite the point: the Prinzessin traces them back to the eleventh century BC. They are the true ancestors of the basic breed, migrated from the Arctic Circle. They joined us in our time of troubles, the glacial age, when hair was hair.”

“I see that the Princess has been reading Popular Dogs ,” Father enjoined. “But how far back must we go, Herr Doktor? Could we just for a moment climb out of prehistory and concentrate, say, on something more admissible? Their parentage, for example?”

“Lun and Jofi,” the Professor announced, “are of the Tartoum line.” And he handed over the pedigree papers like a military messenger under artillery fire.

“Tartoum?” Father interjected. “British stock!” Then, placing his pale hand on Professor’s shoulder, he made preparations for a long, soft soliloquy. “Let us go and do some lineage work,” and they passed directly across the library, now shaded by a huge tree of manuscript fluttering in the breeze. Felix offered nothing by way of hospitality, and the Professor’s usual martial walk became tentative. He suspected that he was not adventuring that day, but trespassing. The chows’ violence had released some unspeakable aura into the air. Father sat him down behind his desk as he scanned the dogs’ papers.

“One shouldn’t make too much of this, but I can tell you now that these dogs will never get along. There are forces here, a jealousy say, that is well beyond our control, and you are going to have to choose between the two. But let’s defer that. You seem to forget that in this part of the world we have a certain sensitivity to visits from the East, and that your fondness for the Ice Age neglects the somewhat more contemporary fact that it was precisely these dogs, with their black tongues and stiff gait, who accompanied the Tartars on their raids. And so, for hereabouts, they are the veritable symbol of Asiatic carnage. I’m surprised that they weren’t shot right out of your carriage. If word got around, I could have my whole kennel poisoned. So I must ask you to remove. . I forget their names — the girls — by darkfall, and to return without them.”