The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov Part 34

"Theoretically, you are luring me into a clumsy trap," said Falter, shaking slightly, as another might do when laughing. "Actually, it would be a trap only if you were capable of asking me at least one such question. There is very little chance of that. Therefore, if you enjoy pointless amus.e.m.e.nt, fire away."

I thought a moment and said, "Falter, allow me to begin like the traditional tourist-with an inspection of an ancient church, familiar to him from pictures. Let me ask you: does G.o.d exist?"

"Cold," said Falter.

I did not understand and repeated the question.

"Forget it," snapped Falter. "I said 'cold,' as they say in the game, when one must find a hidden object. If you are looking under a chair or under the shadow of a chair, and the object cannot be in that place, because it happens to be somewhere else, then the question of there existing a chair or its shadow has nothing whatever to do with the game. To say that perhaps the chair exists but the object is not there is the same as saying that perhaps the object is there but the chair does not exist, which means that you end up again in the circle so dear to human thought."

"You must agree, though, Falter, that if as you say the thing sought is not anywhere near to the concept of G.o.d, and if that thing is, according to your terminology, a kind of universal 't.i.tle,' then the concept of G.o.d does not appear on the t.i.tle page; hence, there exists no true necessity for such a concept, and since there is no need for G.o.d, no G.o.d exists."

"Then you did not understand what I said about the relationship between a possible place and the impossibility of finding the object in it. All right, I shall put it more clearly. By the very act of your mentioning a given concept you placed your own self in the position of an enigma, as if the seeker himself were to hide. And by persisting in your question, you not only hide, but also believe that by sharing with the sought-for object the quality of 'hiddenness' you bring it closer to you. How can I answer you whether G.o.d exists when the matter under discussion is perhaps sweet peas or a soccer linesman's flag? You are looking in the wrong place and in the wrong way, cher monsieur, that is all the answer I can give you. And if it seems to you that from this answer you can draw the least conclusion about the uselessness or necessity of G.o.d, it is just because you are looking in the wrong place and in the wrong way. Wasn't it you, though, that promised not to follow logical patterns of thought?"

"Now I too am going to trap you, Falter. Let's see how you'll manage to avoid a direct statement. One cannot, then, seek the t.i.tle of the world in the hieroglyphics of deism?"

"Pardon me," replied Falter, "by means of ornate language and grammatical trickery Moustache-Bleue is merely disguising the expected non as an expected oui. At the moment all I do is deny. I deny the expediency of the search for Truth in the realm of common theology, and, to save your mind empty labor, I hasten to add that the epithet I have used is a dead end: do not turn into it. I shall have to terminate the discussion for lack of an interlocutor if you exclaim 'Aha, then there is another, "uncommon," truth!'-for this would mean that you have hidden yourself so well as to have lost yourself."

"All right. I shall believe you. Let us grant that theology muddies the issue. Is that right, Falter?"

"This is the house that Jack built," said Falter.

"All right, we dismiss this false trail as well. Even though you could probably explain to me why it is false (for there is something queer and elusive here, something that irritates you), and then your reluctance to reply would be clear to me."

"I could," said Falter, "but it would be equivalent to revealing the gist of the matter, that is, exactly what you are not going to get out of me."

"You repeat yourself, Falter. Don't tell me you will be just as evasive if, for instance, I ask you: can one expect an afterlife?"

"Does it interest you very much?"

"Just as much as it does you, Falter. Whatever you may know about death, we are both mortal."

"In the first place," said Falter, "I call your attention to the following curious catch: any man is mortal; you are a man; therefore, it is also possible that you are not mortal. Why? Because a specified man (you or I) for that very reason ceases to be any man. Yet both of us are indeed mortal, but I am mortal in a different way than you."

"Don't spite my poor logic, but give me a plain answer: is there even a glimmer of one's ident.i.ty beyond the grave, or does it all end in ideal darkness?"

"Bon," said Falter, as is the habit of Russian emigres in France. "You want to know whether Gospodin Sineusov will forever reside within the snugness of Gospodin Sineusov, otherwise Moustache-Bleue, or whether everything will abruptly vanish. There are two ideas here, aren't there? Round-the-clock lighting and the black inane. Actually, despite the difference in metaphysical color, they greatly resemble each other. And they move in parallel. They even move at considerable speed. Long live the totalizator! Hey, hey, look through your turf gla.s.ses, they're racing each other, and you would very much like to know which will arrive first at the post of truth, but in asking me to give you a yes or no for either one or the other, you want me to catch one of them at full speed by the neck-and those devils have awfully slippery necks-but even if I were to grab one of them for you, I would merely interrupt the compet.i.tion, or the winner would be the other, the one I did not s.n.a.t.c.h, an utterly meaningless result inasmuch as no rivalry would any longer exist. If you ask, however, which of the two runs faster, I shall retort with another question: what runs faster, strong desire or strong fear?"

"Same pace, I suppose."

"That's just it. For look what happens in the case of the poor little human mind. Either it has no way to express what awaits you-I mean, us-after death, and then total unconsciousness is excluded, for that is quite accessible to our imagination-every one of us has experienced the total darkness of dreamless sleep; or, on the contrary, death can be imagined, and then one's reason naturally adopts not the notion of eternal life, an unknown ent.i.ty, incongruent with anything terrestrial, but precisely that which seems more probable-the familiar darkness of stupor. Indeed, how can a man who trusts in his reason admit, for instance, that someone who is dead drunk and dies while sound asleep from a chance external cause-thus losing by chance what he no longer really possessed-again acquires the ability to reason and feel thanks to the mere extension, consolidation, and perfection of his unfortunate condition? Hence, if you were to ask me only one thing: do I know, in human terms, what lies beyond death-that is, if you attempted to avert the absurdity in which must peter out the compet.i.tion between two opposite, but basically similar concepts-a negative reply on my part would logically make you conclude that your life cannot end in nothingness, while from an affirmative you would draw the opposite conclusion. In either case, as you see, you would remain in exactly the same situation as before, since a dry 'no' would prove to you that I know no more than you about the given subject, while a moist 'yes' would suggest that you accept the existence of an international heaven which your reason cannot fail to doubt."

"You are simply evading a straightforward answer, but allow me to observe nevertheless that on the subject of death you do not give me the answer 'cold.' "

"There you go again," sighed Falter. "Didn't I just explain to you that any deduction whatsoever conforms to the curvature of thought? It is correct, as long as you remain in the sphere of earthly dimensions, but when you attempt to go beyond, your error grows in proportion to the distance you cover. And that's not all: your mind will construe any answer of mine exclusively from a utilitarian viewpoint, for you are unable to conceive death otherwise than in the image of your own gravestone, and this in turn would distort to such an extent the sense of my answer as to turn it into a lie, ipso facto. So let us observe decorum even when dealing with the transcendental. I cannot express myself more clearly-and you ought to be grateful for any evasiveness. You have an inkling, I gather, that there is a little hitch in the very formulation of the question, a hitch, incidentally, that is more terrible than the fear itself of death. It's particularly strong in you, isn't it?"

"Yes, Falter. The terror I feel at the thought of my future unconsciousness is equal only to the revulsion caused in me by a mental foreview of my decomposing body."

"Well put. Probably other symptoms of this sublunary malady are present as well? A dull pang in the heart, suddenly, in the middle of the night, like the flash of a wild creature among domestic emotions and pet thoughts: 'Someday I also must die.' It happens to you, doesn't it? Hatred for the world, which will very cheerfully carry on without you. A basic sensation that all things in the world are trifles and phantasmata compared to your mortal agony, and therefore to your life, for, you say to yourself, life itself is the agony before death. Yes, oh yes, I can imagine perfectly well that sickness from which you all suffer to a lesser or greater degree, and I can say one thing: I fail to understand how people can live under such conditions."

"There, Falter, we seem to be getting somewhere. Apparently, then, if I admitted that, in moments of happiness, of rapture, when my soul is laid bare, I suddenly feel that there is no extinction beyond the grave; that in an adjacent locked room, from under whose door comes a frosty draft, there is being prepared a peac.o.c.k-eyed radiance, a pyramid of delights akin to the Christmas tree of my childhood; that everything-life, patria, April, the sound of a spring or that of a dear voice-is but a muddled preface, and that the main text still lies ahead-if I can feel that way, Falter, is it not possible to live, to live-tell me it's possible, and I'll not ask you anything more."

"In that case," said Falter, shaking again in soundless mirth, "I understand you even less. Skip the preface, and it's in the bag!"

"Un bon mouvement, Falter-tell me your secret."

"What are you trying to do, catch me off guard? You're crafty, I see. No, that is out of the question. In the first days-yes, in the first days I thought it might be possible to share my secret. A grown man, unless he is a bull like me, would not stand it-all right; but I wondered if one could not bring up a new generation of the initiated, that is, turn my attention to children. As you see, I did not immediately overcome the infection of local dialects. In practice, however, what would happen? In the first place, one can hardly imagine pledging kiddies to a vow of priestly silence lest any of them with one dreamy word commit manslaughter. In the second place, as soon as the child grows up, the information once imparted to him, accepted on faith, and allowed to sleep in a remote corner of his consciousness may give a start and awake, with tragic consequences. Even if my secret does not always destroy a mature member of the species, it is unthinkable that it should spare a youth. For who is not familiar with that period of life when all kinds of things-the starry sky above a Caucasian spa, a book read in the toilet, one's own conjectures about the cosmos, the delicious panic of solipsism-are in themselves enough to provoke a frenzy in all the senses of an adolescent human being? There is no reason for me to become an executioner; I have no intention of annihilating enemy regiments through a megaphone; in short, there is no one for me to confide in."

"I asked you two questions, Falter, and you have twice proved to me the impossibility of an answer. It seems to me useless to ask you about anything else-say, about the limits of the universe, or the origin of life. You would probably suggest that I be content with a speckled minute on a second-rate planet, served by a second-rate sun, or else you would again reduce everything to a riddle: is the word 'heterologous' heterologous itself."

"Probably," agreed Falter, giving a lengthy yawn.

His brother-in-law quietly scooped his watch out of his waistcoat and glanced at his wife.

"Here's the odd thing, though, Falter. How does superhuman knowledge of the ultimate truth combine in you with the adroitness of a ba.n.a.l sophist who knows nothing? Admit it, all your absurd quibbling was nothing more than an elaborate sneer."

"Oh well, that is my only defense," said Falter, squinting at his sister, who was nimbly extracting a long gray woolen scarf from the sleeve of the overcoat already being offered to him by his brother-in-law. "Otherwise, you know, you might have teased it out of me. However," he added, inserting the wrong arm, and then the right one in the sleeve, and simultaneously moving away from the helping shoves of his a.s.sistants, "however, even if I did browbeat you a little, let me console you: amid all the piffle and prate I inadvertently gave myself away-only two or three words, but in them flashed a fringe of absolute insight-luckily, though, you paid no attention."

He was led away, and thus ended our rather diabolical dialogue. Not only had Falter told me nothing, he had not even allowed me to get close, and no doubt his last p.r.o.nouncement was as much of a mockery as all the preceding ones. The following day his brother-in-law's dull voice informed me on the telephone that Falter charged 100 francs for a visit; I asked why on earth had I not been warned of this, and he promptly replied that if the interview were to be repeated, two conversations would cost me only 150. The purchase of Truth, even at a discount, did not tempt me, and, after sending him the sum of that unexpected debt, I forced myself not to think about Falter any more. Yesterday, though.... Yes, yesterday I received a note from Falter himself, from the hospital: he wrote, in a clear hand, that he would die on Tuesday, and that in parting he ventured to inform me that-here followed two lines which had been painstakingly and, it seemed, ironically, blacked out. I replied that I was grateful for his thoughtfulness and that I wished him interesting posthumous impressions and a pleasant eternity.

But all this brings me no nearer to you, my angel. Just in case, I am keeping all the windows and doors of life wide open, even though I sense that you will not condescend to the time-honored ways of apparitions. Most terrifying of all is the thought that, inasmuch as you glow henceforth within me, I must safeguard my life. My transitory bodily frame is perhaps the only guarantee of your ideal existence: when I vanish, it will vanish as well. Alas, with a pauper's pa.s.sion I am doomed to use physical nature in order to finish recounting you to myself, and then to rely on my own ellipsis....

SOLUS REX.

AS ALWAYS happened, the king was awakened by the clash between the predawn watch and the midmorning one (morndammer wagh and erldag wagh). The former, unduly punctual, would leave its post at the prescribed minute, while the latter would be late by a constant number of seconds, not because of negligence, but probably because somebody's gouty timepiece was habitually slow. Therefore those departing and those arriving always met at one and the same place-the narrow footpath directly under the king's bedroom window, between the rear wall of the palace and a tangled growth of dense but meagerly blooming honeysuckle, under which was scattered all manner of trash: chicken feathers, broken earthenware, and large, red-cheeked tin cans that had contained "Pomona," a national brand of preserved fruit. The meeting would invariably be accompanied by the m.u.f.fled sound of a brief, good-natured tussle (and it was this that awakened the king), as one of the predawn sentries, being of a roguish bent, would pretend he did not want to surrender the slate bearing the pa.s.sword to one of the midmorning men, an irritable and stupid old codger, veteran of the Swirhulm campaign. Then all would grow still again, and the only audible sound would be the businesslike, now and then accelerating, crepitation of rain, which would systematically fall for precisely 306 days out of 365 or -6, so that the weather's peripeties had long since ceased to trouble anyone (here the wind addressed the honeysuckle).

The king made a right turn out of his sleep and propped a big white fist under his cheek, on which the blazon embroidered on the pillowcase had left a chessboard impression. Between the inside edges of the brown, loosely drawn curtains, in the single but broad window, there seeped a beam of soapy light, and the king at once remembered an imminent duty (his presence at the inauguration of a new bridge across the Egel) whose disagreeable image seemed inscribed with geometric inevitability into that pale trigon of day. He was not interested in bridges, ca.n.a.ls, or shipbuilding, and even though after five years-yes, exactly five years (826 days)-of nebulous reign he really ought to have acquired the habit of attending diligently to a mult.i.tude of matters that filled him with loathing because of their organic sketchiness in his mind (where very different things, in no way related to his royal office, were infinitely and unquenchably perfect), he felt depressingly aggravated every time he was obliged to have contact not only with anything that demanded a false smile from his deliberate ignorance, but also with that which was nothing more than a veneer of conventional standards on a senseless or perhaps even nonexistent object. If the inauguration of the bridge, the plans for which he did not even remember though he had no doubt approved them, struck him as merely a vulgar festival, it was also because n.o.body ever bothered to inquire whether he was interested in that intricate fruit of technology, suspended in midair, and yet today he would have to ride slowly across in a l.u.s.trous convertible with a toothy grille, and this was torture; and then there was that other engineer about whom people had been telling him ever since he had happened to mention (just like that, simply to get rid of someone or something) that he would enjoy doing some climbing, if only the island had a single decent mountain (the old, long-dead coastal volcano did not count, and, furthermore, a lighthouse-which, incidentally, did not work either-had been built on its summit). This engineer, whose dubious fame thrived in the drawing rooms of court ladies and courtesans, attracted by his honey-brown complexion and insinuating speech, had proposed elevating the central part of the insular plain and transforming it into a mountain ma.s.sif, by means of subterranean inflation. The inhabitants of the chosen locality would be allowed to remain in their dwellings while the soil was being puffed up. Poltroons who preferred to withdraw from the test area where their little brick houses huddled and amazed red cows mooed, sensing the change in alt.i.tude, would be punished by their having to spend much more time on their return along the newly formed escarpments than they had on their recent retreat over the doomed flatland. Slowly the meadows swelled; boulders moved their round backs; a lethargic stream tumbled out of bed and, to its own surprise, turned into an alpine waterfall; trees traveled in file cloudward and many of them (the firs, for instance) enjoyed the ride; the villagers, leaning on their porch railings, waved their handkerchiefs and admired the pneumatic development of landscape. So the mountain would grow and grow, until the engineer ordered that the monstrous pumps be stopped. The king, however, did not wait for the stoppage, but dozed off again, with barely time to regret that, constantly resisting as he did the Councilors' readiness to support the realization of every harebrained scheme (while, on the other hand, his most natural, most human rights were constricted by rigid laws), he had not given permission for the experiment, and now it was too late, the inventor had committed suicide after patenting a gallow tree for indoor use (thus, anyway, the spirit of slumber retold it to the slumberer).

The king slept on till half past seven and, at the habitual minute, his mind jolted into action and was already on its way to meet Frey when Frey entered the bedroom. That decrepit, asthmatic konwacher invariably emitted in motion a queer supplementary sound, as if he were in a great hurry, although haste was apparently not in his line, seeing he had not yet got around to dying. He lowered a silver basin onto a taboret with a heart design cut out in its seat, as he had already been doing for half a century, under two kings; today he was waking a third, for whose predecessors this vanilla-scented and seemingly witch-charmed water had probably served an ablutionary purpose. Now, however, it was quite superfluous; and yet every morning the basin and taboret appeared, along with a towel that had been folded five years before. Continuing to emit his special sound, the old valet admitted the daylight in its entirety. The king always wondered why Frey did not open the curtains first, instead of groping in the penumbra to move the taboret with its useless utensil toward the bed. But speaking to Frey was out of the question because of his deafness, that went so well with the snow-owl white of his hair: he was cut off from the world by the cotton wool of old age, and, as he went out with a bow to the bed, the wall clock in the bedroom began to ticktack more distinctly, as if it had been given a recharge of time.

The bedroom now came into focus, with the dragon-shaped crack traversing its ceiling and the huge clothes tree standing like an oak in the corner. An admirable ironing board stood leaning against the wall. A thing for yanking one's riding boot off by the heel, an obsolete appliance in the shape of a huge cast-iron stag beetle, lurked under the border of an armchair robed in a white furniture cover. An oak wardrobe, obese, blind, and drugged by naphthalene, stood next to an ovoid wickerwork receptacle for soiled linen, set on end there by some unknown Columbus. Various objects hung at random on the bluish walls: a clock (it had already tattled about its presence), a medicine cabinet, an old barometer that indicated remembered rather than real weather, a pencil sketch of a lake with reeds and a departing duck, a myopic photograph of a leather-legginged gentleman astride a blurrytailed horse held by a solemn groom in front of a porch, the same porch with strained-faced servants a.s.sembled on its steps, some fluffy flowers pressed under dusty gla.s.s in a circular frame.... The paucity of the furnishings and their utter irrelevance to the needs and the tenderness of whoever used this s.p.a.cious bedroom (once, it seems, inhabited by the Husmuder, as the wife of the preceding king had been dubbed) gave it an oddly untenanted appearance, and if it were not for the intrusive basin and the iron bed, on the edge of which sat a man in a nightshirt with a frilly collar, his strong bare feet resting upon the floor, it was impossible to imagine that anyone spent his nights here. His toes groped for and found a pair of morocco slippers and, donning a dressing gown as gray as the morning, the king walked across the creaking floorboards to the felt-padded door. When he subsequently recalled that morning, it seemed to him that, upon arising, he had experienced, both in mind and in muscles, an unaccustomed heaviness, the fateful burden of the coming day, so that the awful misfortune which that day brought (and which beneath the mask of trivial boredom stood already on guard at the Egel bridge), absurd and unforeseeable as it was, thereafter seemed to him a kind of resolvent. We are inclined to attribute to the immediate past (I just had it in my hands, I put it right there, and now it's not there) lineaments relating it to the unexpected present, which in fact is but a bounder pluming himself on a purchased escutcheon. We, the slaves of linked events, endeavor to close the gap with a spectral ring in the chain. As we look back, we feel certain that the road we see behind us is the very one that has brought us to the tomb or the fountainhead near which we find ourselves. Life's erratic leaps and lapses can be endured by the mind only when signs of resilience and quagginess are discoverable in anterior events. Such, incidentally, were the thoughts that occurred to the no longer independent artist Dmitri Nikolaevich Sineusov, and evening had come, and in vertically arranged ruby letters glowed the word RENAULT.

The king set out in search of breakfast. He never knew in which of the five possible chambers situated along the cold stone gallery, with cobwebs in the corners of its ogival windows, his coffee would be waiting. Opening the doors one by one, he kept trying to locate the little set table, and finally found it where it happened least frequently: under a large, opulently dark portrait of his predecessor. King Gafon was portrayed at the age at which he remembered him, but features, posture, and bodily structure were endowed with a magnificence that had never been characteristic of that stoop-shouldered, fidgety, and sloppy old man with a peasant crone's wrinkles above his hairless and somewhat crooked upper lip. The words of the family arms, "see and rule" (sa.s.sed ud halsem), used to be changed by wags, when referring to him, to "armchair and filbert brandy" (sa.s.se ud hazel). He reigned thirty-odd years, arousing neither particular love nor particular hatred in anyone, believing equally in the power of good and the power of money, docile in his acquiescence to the parliamentary majority, whose vapid humanitarian aspirations appealed to his sentimental soul, and generously rewarding from a secret treasury the activities of those deputies whose devotion to the crown a.s.sured its stability. Kingcraft had long since become for him the flywheel of a mechanical habit, and the benighted submissiveness of the country, where the Peplerhus (parliament) faintly shone like a bleary and crackling rushlight, appeared as a similar form of regular rotation. And if the very last years of his reign were poisoned nevertheless by bitter sedition, coming as a belch after a long and carefree dinner, not he was to blame, but the person and behavior of the crown prince. Indeed, in the heat of vexation good burghers found that the one-time scourge of the learned world, the now forgotten Professor ven Skunk, did not err much when he affirmed that childbearing was but an illness, and that every babe was an "externalized," self-existent parental tumor, often malignant.

The present king (pre-accessionally, let us designate him as K in chess notation) was the old man's nephew, and in the beginning no one dreamed that the nephew would accede to a throne rightfully promised to King Gafon's son, Prince Adulf, whose utterly indecent folkname (based on a felicitous a.s.sonance) must, for the sake of decorum, be translated "Prince Fig." K grew up in a remote palace under the eye of a morose and ambitious grandee and his horsey, masculine wife, so he barely knew his cousin and started seeing him a little more often only at the age of twenty, when Adulf was near forty.

We have before us a well-fed, easygoing fellow, with a stout neck, a broad pelvis, a big-cheeked, evenly pink face, and fine, bulging eyes. His nasty little mustache, resembling a pair of blue-black feathers, somehow did not match his fat lips, which always looked greasy, as if he had just finished sucking on a chicken bone. His dark, thick, unpleasantly smelling, and also greasy hair lent a foppish something, uncommon in Thule, to his large, solidly planted head. He had a penchant for showy clothes and was at the same time as unwashed as a papugh (seminarian). He was well versed in music, sculpture, and graphics, but could spend hours in the company of dull, vulgar persons. He wept profusely while listening to the melting violin of the great Perelmon, and shed the same tears while picking up the shards of a favorite cup. He was ready to help anyone in any way, if at that moment he was not occupied with other matters; and, blissfully wheezing, poking, and nibbling at life, he constantly contrived, in regard to third parties whose existence he did not bother about, to cause sorrows far exceeding in depth that of his own soul-sorrows pertaining to another, the other, world.

In his twentieth year K entered the University of Ultimare, situated at four hundred miles of purple heather from the capital, on the sh.o.r.e of the gray sea, and there learned something about the crown prince's morals, and would have heard much more if he did not avoid talks and discussions that might overburden his already none too easy anonymity. The Count, his guardian, who came to visit him once a week (sometimes arriving in the sidecar of a motorcycle driven by his energetic wife), continually emphasized how nasty, disgraceful, and dangerous it would be if any of the students or professors learned that this lanky, gloomy youth, who excelled as much at his studies as at vanbol on the two-hundred-year-old-court behind the library building, was not at all a notary's son, but a king's nephew. Whether it was submission to one of those many whims, enigmatic in their stupidity, with which someone unknown and mightier than the king and the Peplerhus together for some reason troubled the shabby, monotonous, northern life, faithful to half-forgotten covenants, of that "ile triste et lointaine"; or whether the peeved grandee had his own private scheme, his far-sighted calculation (the rearing of kings was supposed to be kept secret), we do not know; nor was there any reason to speculate about this, since, anyway, the unusual student was busy with other matters. Books, wallball, skiing (winters then used to be snowy), but, most of all, nights of special meditation by the hearth, and, a little later, his romance with Belinda-all sufficiently filled up his existence to leave him unconcerned with the vulgar little intrigues of metapolitics. Moreover, while diligently studying the annals of the fatherland, it never occurred to him that within him slumbered the very blood that had coursed through the veins of preceding kings; or that actual life rushing past was also "history"-history that had issued from the tunnel of the ages into pallid sunlight. Either because his subject of concentration ended a whole century before the reign of Gafon, or because the magic involuntarily evolved by the most sober chroniclers seemed more precious to him than his own testimony, the bookman in him overcame the eyewitness, and later on, when he tried to reestablish connection with the present, he had to content himself with knocking together provisional pa.s.sages, which only served to deform the familiar remoteness of legend (that bridge on the Egel, that blood-spattered bridge!).

It was, then, before the beginning of his second college year that K, having come to the capital for a brief vacation and taken modest lodgings at the so-called Cabinet Members' Club, met, at the very first court reception, the crown prince, a boisterous, plump, indecently young-looking charmeur, defying one not to recognize his charm. The meeting took place in the presence of the old king, who sat in a high-backed armchair by a stained-gla.s.s window, quickly and nimbly devouring those tiny olive-black plums that were more a delicacy than a medicine for him. Even though Adulf seemed at first not to notice his young relative and continued to address two stooge-courtiers, the prince nevertheless started on a subject carefully calculated to fascinate the newcomer, to whom he offered a three-quarter view of himself: paunch-proud, hands thrust deep into the pockets of his wrinkled check trousers, he stood rocking slightly from heels to toes.

"For instance," he said in the triumphant voice he reserved for public occasions, "take our entire history, and you will see, gentlemen, that the root of power has always been construed among us as having originated in magic, with obedience conceivable only when, in the mind of the obeyer, it could be identified with the infallible effect of a spell. In other words, the king was either sorcerer or himself bewitched, sometimes by the people, sometimes by the Councilors, sometimes by a political foe who would whisk the crown off his head like a hat from a hatrack. Recall the h.o.a.riest antiquity and the rule of the mossmons" (high priests, "bog people"), "the worship of luminescent peat, that sort of thing; or take those ... those first pagan kings-Gildras and, yes, Ofodras, and that other one, I forget what he was called, anyway, the fellow who threw his goblet into the sea, after which, for three days and nights, fishermen scooped up seawater transformed into wine.... Solg ud digh vor je sage vel, ud jem gotelm quolm osje musikel" ("Sweet and rich was the wave of the sea and la.s.sies drank it from seash.e.l.ls"-the prince was quoting Uperhulm's ballad). "And the first friars, who arrived in a skiff equipped with a cross instead of a sail, and all that business of the 'Fontal Rock'-for it was only because they guessed the weak spot of our people that they managed to introduce the crazy Roman creed. What is more," continued the prince, suddenly moderating the crescendos of his voice, for a dignitary of the clergy was now standing a short distance away, "if the so-called church never really engorged on the body of our state, and, in the last two centuries, entirely lost its political significance, it is precisely because the elementary and rather monotonous miracles that it was able to produce very soon became a bore"-the cleric moved away, and the prince's voice regained its freedom-"and could not compete with the natural sorcery, la magie innee et naturelle of our fatherland. Take the subsequent, unquestionably historical kings and the beginning of our dynasty. When Rogfrid the First mounted, or rather scrambled up onto the wobbly throne that he himself called a sea-tossed barrel, and the country was in the throes of such insurrection and chaos that his aspiration to kinghood seemed a childish dream, do you recall the first thing he does upon acceding to power? He immediately mints kruns, half-kruns, and grosken depicting a s.e.xdigitate hand. Why a hand? Why the six fingers? Not one historian has been able to figure it out, and it is doubtful that Rogfrid even knew himself. The fact remains, however, that this magical measure promptly pacified the country. Later, under his grandson, when the Danes attempted to impose upon us their protege, and he landed with immense forces, what happened? Suddenly, with the utmost simplicity, the anti-government party-I forget what it was called, anyway, the traitors, without whom the whole plot would not have come into existence-sent a messenger to the invader with a polite announcement that they were henceforth unable to support him; because, you see, 'the ling' "-that is, the heather of the plain across which the turncoat army was to pa.s.s to join with the foreign forces-" 'had entwined the stirrups and shins of treachery, thus preventing further advance,' which apparently is to be taken literally, and not interpreted in the spirit of those stale allegories on which schoolboys are nourished. Then again-ah, yes, a splendid example-Queen Ilda, we must not omit Queen Ilda of the white breast and the abundant amours, who would resolve all state problems by means of incantations, and so successfully that any individual who did not meet her approval would lose his reason; you know yourselves that to this day insane asylums are known among the populace as ildehams. And when that populace begins to take part in legislative and administrative matters, it is absurdly clear that magic is on the people's side. I a.s.sure you, for instance, that if poor King Edaric found himself unable to take his seat at the reception for the elected officers, it was certainly not a question of piles. And so on and so forth-" (the prince was beginning to have enough of the topic he had selected) "-the life of our country, like some amphibian, keeps its head up amid simple nordic reality, while submerging its belly in fable, in rich, vivifying sorcery. It's not for nothing that every one of our mossy stones, every old tree has partic.i.p.ated at least once in some magical occurrence or other. Here's a young student, he is reading History, I am sure he will confirm my opinion."

As he listened seriously and trustingly to Adulf's reasoning, K was astounded to what extent it coincided with his own views. True, the textbook selection of examples adduced by the talkative crown prince seemed to K a bit crude; did not the whole point lie not in the striking manifestations of witchcraft but in the delicate shadings of a fantastic something, which profoundly, and at the same time mistily, colored the island's history? He was, however, unconditionally in agreement with the basic premise, and that was the answer he gave, lowering his head and nodding to himself. Only much later did he realize that the coincidence of ideas which had so astonished him had been the consequence of an almost unconscious cunning on the part of their promulgator, who undeniably had a special kind of instinct that allowed him to guess the most effective bait for any fresh listener.

When the king had finished his plums he beckoned to his nephew and, having no idea what to talk to him about, asked how many students there were at the university. K lost countenance-he did not know the number, and was not alert enough to name one at random. "Five hundred? One thousand?" persisted the king, with a note of juvenile eagerness in his voice. "I'm sure there must be more," he added in a conciliatory tone, not having received an intelligible answer; then, after a reflective pause, he went on to inquire whether his nephew enjoyed riding. Here the crown prince b.u.t.ted in with his usual luscious unconstraint, inviting his cousin for an outing together the following Thursday.

"Astonishing, how much he has come to resemble my poor sister," said the king with a mechanical sigh, taking off his gla.s.ses and returning them to the breast pocket of his brown frogged jacket. "I am too poor to give you a horse," he continued, "but I have a fine little riding whip. Gotsen" (addressing the Lord Chamberlain), "where is that fine little riding whip with the doggie's head? Look for it afterwards and give it to him ... an interesting little object, historical value and all that. Well, I'm delighted to give it to you, but a horse is beyond my means-all I have is a pair of nags, and I'm keeping them for my hea.r.s.e. Don't be vexed-I'm not rich." ("Il ment," said the crown prince under his breath and walked off, humming.) On the day of the outing the weather was cold and restless, a nacreous sky skimmed overhead, the sallow bushes curtseyed in the ravines, the horsehooves plapped as they scattered the slush of thick puddles in chocolate ruts, crows croaked; and then, beyond the bridge, the riders left the road and set off at a trot across the dark heather, above which a slim, already yellowing birch rose here and there. The crown prince proved to be an excellent horseman, although he had evidently never attended a riding school, for his seat was indifferent. His heavy, broad, corduroy-and-chamois-encased bottom, bouncing up and down in the saddle, and his rounded, sloping shoulders aroused in his companion an odd, vague kind of pity, which vanished completely whenever K glanced at the prince's rosy face, radiating health and sufficiency, and heard his urgeful speech.

The riding whip had come the previous day but had not been taken: the prince (who, by the way, had set the fashion of using bad French at court) had called it with scorn "ce machin ridicule" and contended that it belonged to the groom's little boy, who must have forgotten it on the king's porch. "Et mon bonhomme de pere, tu sais, a une vraie pa.s.sion pour les objets trouves."

"I've been thinking how much truth there is in what you were saying. Books say nothing about it at all."

"About what?" asked the prince, laboriously trying to reconstruct which stray theory he had been expounding lately in front of his cousin.

"Oh, you remember! The magical origin of power, and the fact-"

"Yes, I do, I do," hastily interrupted the prince and forthwith found the best way to have done with the faded topic: "I didn't finish then because there were too many ears around. You see, our whole misfortune lies today in the government's strange ennui, in national inertia, in the dreary bickering of Peplerhus members. All this is so because the very force of the spells, both popular and royal, has somehow evaporated, and our ancestral sorcery has been reduced to mere hocus-pocus. But let's not discuss these depressing matters now, let's turn to more cheerful ones. Say, you must have heard a good deal about me at college? I can imagine! Tell me, what did they talk about? Why are you silent? They called me a libertine, didn't they?"

"I kept away from malicious chatter," said K, "but there was indeed some gossip to that effect."

"Well, hearsay is the poetry of truth. You are still a boy-quite a pretty boy to boot-so there are many things you won't understand right now. I shall offer you only this observation: all people are basically naughty, but when it is done under the rose, when, for instance, you hasten to gorge yourself on jam in a dark corner, or send your imagination on G.o.d knows what errands, all that doesn't count; n.o.body considers it a crime. Yet when a person frankly and a.s.siduously satisfies the appet.i.tes inflicted upon him by his imperious body, then, oh then, people begin to denounce intemperance! And another consideration: if, in my case, that legitimate satisfaction were limited simply to one and the same unvarying method, popular opinion would become resigned, or at most would reproach me for changing my mistresses too often. But G.o.d, what a ruckus they raise because I do not stick to the code of debauchery but gather my honey wherever I find it! And mark, I am fond of everything-whether a tulip or a plain little gra.s.s stalk-because you see," concluded the prince, smiling and slitting his eyes, "I really seek only the fractions of beauty, leaving the integers to the good burghers, and those fractions can be found in a ballet girl as well as in a docker, in a middle-aged Venus as well as in a young horseman."

"Yes," said K, "I understand. You are an artist, a sculptor, you worship form...."

The prince reined in his horse and guffawed.

"Oh, well, it isn't exactly a matter of sculpture-a moins que tu ne confondes la galanterie avec la Galatee-which, however, is pardonable at your age. No, no-it's all much less complicated. Only don't be so bashful with me, I won't bite you, I simply can't stand lads qui se tiennent toujours sur leurs gardes. If you don't have anything more interesting in view, we can return via Grenlog and dine on the lakeside, and then we'll think up something."

"No, I'm afraid I-well-I have something to take care of-It so happens that tonight I-"

"Oh, well, I'm not forcing you," the prince said affably, and a little farther, by the mill, they said good-bye.

As many very shy people would have done in his place, K, when forcing himself to face that ride, foresaw an especially trying ordeal for the very reason of Adulf's pa.s.sing for a jovial talker: with a mild, minor-mode person it would have been easier to establish the tone of the outing beforehand. As he prepared himself for it, K tried to imagine all the awkward moments that might result from the necessity of raising his normal mood to Adulf's sparkling level. Moreover he felt obligated by their first meeting, by the fact that he had imprudently concurred with the opinions of someone who therefore could rightfully expect that both men would get along just as nicely on subsequent occasions. In making a detailed inventory of his potential blunders and, above all, in fancying with the utmost clarity the tension, the leaden load in his jaws, the desperate boredom he would feel (because of his innate capacity, on all occasions, for watching askance his projected self)-in tabulating all this, including futile efforts to merge with his other self and find interesting such things as were supposed to be interesting, K also pursued a secondary, practical aim: to disarm the future, whose only force is surprise. In this he nearly succeeded. Fate, constrained by its own evil choice, was apparently content with the innocuous items he had left beyond the field of prevision: the pale sky, the heath-country wind, a creaking saddle, an impatiently responsive horse, the unflagging monologue of his self-complacent companion, all fused into a fairly endurable sensation, particularly since K had mentally set a certain time limit for the ride. It was only a matter of seeing it through. But when the prince, with a novel proposal, threatened to extend this limit into the unknown, all of whose possibilities had once again to be agonizingly appraised (and here "something interesting" was again being forced upon K, requiring an expression of happy antic.i.p.ation), this additional period of time-superfluous! unforeseen!- was intolerable; and so, at the risk of seeming impolite, he had used the pretext of a nonexistent impediment. True, as soon as he turned his horse, he regretted this discourtesy just as acutely as, a moment ago, he had been concerned for his freedom. Consequently, all the nastiness expected from the future deteriorated into a doubtful echo of the past. He thought for a moment if he should not overtake the prince and consolidate the foundation of friendship through a belated, but hence doubly precious, acquiescence to a new ordeal. But his fastidious apprehension of offending a kind, cheerful man did not outweigh his fear of obviously being unable to match that kindness and cheerfulness. Thus it happened that fate outwitted him after all, and, by means of a last furtive pinp.r.i.c.k, rendered valueless that which he was prepared to consider a victory.

A few days later he received another invitation from the prince, asking that he "drop in" any evening of the following week. K could not refuse. Moreover, a sense of relief that the other was not offended treacherously smoothed the way.

He was ushered into a large yellow room, as hot as a greenhouse, where a score of people, fairly evenly divided by s.e.x, sat on divans, ha.s.socks, and a deep rug. For a fraction of a second the host seemed vaguely perplexed by his cousin's arrival, as if he had forgotten that he had invited him, or thought he had asked him for a different day. However, this momentary expression immediately gave way to a grin of welcome, after which the prince ignored his cousin, and neither, for that matter, was any attention paid to K by the other guests, evidently close friends of the prince: extraordinarily thin, smooth-haired young women, half a dozen middle-aged gentlemen with clean-shaven, bronzed faces, and several young men in the open-necked silk shirts that were fashionable at the time. Among them K suddenly recognized the famous young acrobat Ondrik Guldving, a sullen blond boy with a bizarre gentleness of gesture and gait, as if the expressiveness of his body, so remarkable in the arena, were m.u.f.fled by clothes. To K this acrobat served as a key to the entire constellation of the gathering; and, even if the observer was ridiculously inexperienced and chaste, he immediately sensed that those gauze-dim, delectably elongated girls, their limbs folded with varied abandon, who were making not conversation but mirages of conversation (consisting of slow half-smiles and "hms" of interrogation or response through the smoke of cigarettes inserted in precious holders), belonged to that essentially deaf-and-dumb world that in former days had been known as "demi-monde" (all curtains drawn, no other world known). The fact that, interspersed among them, were ladies one saw at court b.a.l.l.s did not change things in the least. The male group was likewise somehow h.o.m.ogeneous, despite its comprising representatives of the n.o.bility, artists with dirty fingernails, and young roughs of the stevedore type. And precisely because the observer was inexperienced and chaste, he immediately had doubts about his initial, involuntary impression and accused himself of common prejudice, of trusting slavishly the trite talk of the town. He decided that everything was in order, i.e., that his world was in no way disrupted by the inclusion of this new province, and that everything about it was simple and comprehensible: a fun-loving, independent person had freely selected his friends.

The quietly carefree and even somehow childish rhythm of this gathering was particularly rea.s.suring to K. The mechanical smoking, the various dainties on gold-veined little plates, the comradely cycles of motion (somebody found some sheet music for somebody; a girl tried on another girl's necklace), the simplicity, the serenity, all of it denoted in its own way that kindliness which K, who himself did not possess it, recognized in all of life's phenomena, be it the smile of a bonbon in its goffered bonnet, or the echo of an old friendship divined in another's small talk. With a frown of concentration, occasionally releasing a series of agitated groans, which would end in a grunt of vexation, the prince was busy trying to drive six tiny b.a.l.l.s into the center of a pocket-size maze of gla.s.s. A redhead in a green dress and sandals on her bare feet kept repeating, with comic mournfulness, that he would never succeed; but he persisted for a long time, jiggling the recalcitrant gimmick, stamping his foot, and starting all over again. Finally he tossed it on a sofa, where some of the others promptly started on it. Then a man with handsome features, distorted by a tic, sat down at the piano, struck the keys with disorderly vigor in parody of somebody's way of playing, and right away rose again, whereupon he and the prince began arguing about the talent of a third party, probably the author of the truncated melody, and the redhead, scratching a graceful thigh through her dress, started explaining to the prince the injured party's position in a complicated musical feud. Abruptly the prince consulted his watch and turned to the blond young acrobat who was drinking orangeade in a corner: "Ondrik," he said with a worried air, "I think it is time." Ondrick somberly licked his lips, put down his gla.s.s, and came over. With fat fingers, the prince undid Ondrik's fly, extracted the entire pink ma.s.s of his private parts, selected the chief one, and started to rub regularly its glossy shaft.

"At first," related K, "I thought that I had lost my mind, that I was hallucinating." Most of all he was shocked by the natural quality of the procedure. Nausea welled within him, and he left. Once in the street, he even ran for a while.

The only person with whom he felt able to share his indignation was his guardian. Although he had no affection for the not very attractive Count, he resolved to consult him as the sole familiar he had. He asked the Count in despair how could it be that a man of Adulf's morals, a man, moreover, no longer young, and therefore unlikely to change, would become the ruler of the country. By the light in which he had suddenly seen the crown prince, he also perceived that besides hideous ribaldry, and despite a taste for the arts, Adulf was really a savage, a self-taught oaf, lacking real culture, who had appropriated a handful of its beads, had learned how to flaunt the glitter of his adaptive mind, and of course did not worry in the least about the problems of his impending reign. K kept asking was it not crazy nonsense, the delirium of dreams, to imagine such a person king; but in setting those questions he hardly expected matter-of-fact replies: it was the rhetoric of young disenchantment. Nevertheless, as he went on expressing his perplexity, in abrupt brittle phrases (he was not born eloquent), K overtook reality and had a glimpse of its face. Admittedly, he at once fell back again, but that glimpse imprinted itself in his soul, revealing to him in a flash what perils awaited a state doomed to become the plaything of a prurient ruffian.

The Count heard him out attentively, now and then turning on him the gaze of his lashless vulturine eyes: they reflected a strange satisfaction. A calculating and cool mentor, he replied most cautiously, as if not quite agreeing with K, calming him down by saying that what he had happened to catch sight of was acting upon his judgment with undue force; that the only purpose of the hygiene established by the prince was not to allow a young friend to waste his strength on wenching; and that Adulf had qualities which might show themselves upon his ascension. At the end of the interview the Count offered to have K meet a certain wise person, the well-known economist Gumm. Here the Count pursued a double purpose: on one hand, he freed himself of all responsibility for what might follow, and remained aloof, which would do very nicely in case of some mishap; and on the other hand, he was pa.s.sing K over to an experienced conspirator, thus beginning the realization of a plan that the evil and wily Count had been nursing, it seems, for quite a time.

Meet Gumm, meet economist Gumm, a round-tummied little old man in a woolen waistcoat, with blue spectacles pushed up high on his pink forehead, bouncy, trim, giggly Gumm. Their meetings increased in frequency, and at the end of his second year at college, K even sojourned for about a week in Gumm's house. By that time K had discovered enough things about the crown prince's behavior not to regret that first explosion of indignation. Not so much from Gumm himself, who seemed always to be rolling somewhither, as from his relatives and entourage, K learned about the measures which had already been tried to subdue the prince. At first, people had attempted to inform the old king about his son's frolics, so as to obtain parental restraint. Indeed, when this or that person, after gaining, through the thorns of protocol, access to the king's kabinet, depicted frankly those stunts to His Majesty, the old man, flushing purple and nervously pulling together the skirts of his dressing gown, displayed greater wrath than one might have hoped for. He shouted that he would put an end to it, that the cup of endurance (wherein his morning coffee stormily splashed) was overflowing, that he was happy to hear a candid report, that he would banish the lecherous cur for six months to a suyph.e.l.lhus (monastery ship, floating hermitage), that he would-And when the audience had come to a close, and the pleased official was about to bow his way out, the old king, still puffing, but already pacified, would take him aside, with a businesslike confidential air (though actually they were alone in the study), and say, "Yes, yes, I understand all that, all that is so, but listen-quite between us-tell me, if we look at it reasonably-after all my Adulf is a bachelor, a gay dog, he's fond of a little sport-is it necessary to get all worked up? Remember, we also were boys once." That last consideration sounded rather silly, for the king's distant youth had flowed with milky tranquillity, and afterwards, the late queen, his wife, treated him with unusual severity till he was sixty. She was, incidentally, a remarkably obstinate, stupid, and petty-minded woman with a constant propensity for innocent but extremely absurd fantasies; and very possibly it was owing to her that the habitus of the court and, to a certain extent, of the state acquired those peculiar, difficult-to-define features, oddly blending stagnation and caprice, improvidence and the primness of nonviolent insanity, that so much tormented the present king.

The second, chronologically speaking, form of opposition was considerably deeper: it consisted of rallying and fortifying public resources. One could scarcely rely on the conscious partic.i.p.ation of the plebeian cla.s.s: among the insular plowmen, weavers, bakers, carpenters, corn-mongers, fisherfolk, and so forth, the transformation of any crown prince into any king was accepted as meekly as a change in the weather: the rustic gazed at the auroral gleam amid the c.u.mulated clouds, shook his head-and that was all; in his dark lichenian brain a traditional place was always reserved for traditional disaster, national or natural. The meagerness and sluggishness of economics, the frozen level of prices, which had long since lost vital sensitivity (through which there is formed all at once a connection between an empty head and an empty stomach), the grim constancy of inconsiderable but just sufficient harvests, the secret pact between greens and grain, which had agreed, it seemed, to supplement each other and thus hold agronomy in equipoise-all this, according to Gumm (see The Basis and Anabasis of Economics) kept the people in languid submission; and if some sort of sorcery prevailed here, then so much the worse for the victims of its viscous spells. Furthermore-and the enlightened found therein a source of especial sadness-Prince Fig enjoyed a kind of s.m.u.tty popularity among the lower cla.s.ses and the petty bourgeoisie (between whom the distinction was so wobbly that one could regularly observe such puzzling phenomena as the return of a shopkeeper's prosperous son to the humble manual trade of his grandfather). The hearty laughter invariably accompanying talk about Fig's pranks prevented them from being condemned: the mask of mirth stuck to one's mouth, and that mimicry of approval could no longer be distinguished from the real thing. The more lewdly Fig romped, the louder folks guffawed, the mightier and merrier red fists thumped on the deal tables of pubs. A characteristic detail: one day when the prince, pa.s.sing on horseback, a cigar between his teeth, through a backwoodsy hamlet, noticed a comely little girl to whom he offered a ride, and notwithstanding her parents' horror (which respect barely helped to restrain), swept her away, while her old granddad kept running along the road until he toppled into a ditch, the whole village, as agents reported, expressed their admiration by roars of laughter, congratulated the family, reveled in surmise, and did not stint in mischievous inquiries when the child returned after an hour's absence, holding a hundred-krun note in one hand, and, in the other, a fledgling that had fallen out of its nest in a desolate grove where she had picked it up on her way back to the village.

In military circles displeasure with the prince was based not so much on considerations of general morals and national prestige as on direct resentment suscitated by his att.i.tude toward flaming punch and booming guns. King Gafon himself, in contrast to his pugnacious predecessor, was a "deeply civilian" old party; nonetheless the army put up with it, his complete noncomprehension of military matters being redeemed by the timorous esteem in which he held them; per contra, the Guard could not forgive his son's open sneer. War games, parades, puff-cheeked music, regimental banquets with the observation of colorful customs, and various other conscientious recreations on the part of the small insular army produced nothing but scornful ennui in Adulf's eminently artistic soul. Yet the army's unrest did not go further than desultory murmurs, plus, maybe, the making of midnight oaths (to the gleam of tapers, goblets, and swords)-to be forgotten next morning. Thus the initiative belonged to the enlightened minds of the public, which sad to say were not numerous; the anti-Adulfian opposition included, however, certain statesmen, newspaper editors, and jurists-all respectable, tough-sinewed old fellows, wielding plenty of secret or manifest influence. In other words, public opinion rose to the occasion, and the ambition to curb the crown prince as his iniquity progressed became considered a sign of decency and intelligence. It only remained to find a weapon. Alas, this precisely was lacking. There existed the press, there existed a parliament, but by the code of the const.i.tution the least disrespectful poke at a member of the royal family must result in the newspaper's being banned or the chamber's dissolved. A single attempt to stir up the nation failed. We are referring to the celebrated trial of Dr. Onze.

That trial presented something unparalleled even in the unparalleled annals of Thulean justice. A man renowned for his virtue, a lecturer and writer on civic and philosophical questions, a personality so highly regarded, endowed with such strictness of views and principles, in a word, such a dazzlingly unstained character that, in comparison, the reputation of anyone else appeared spotty, was accused of various crimes against morals, defended himself with the clumsiness of despair, and finally acknowledged his guilt. So far there was nothing very unusual about it: goodness knows into what furuncles the mamillae of merit may turn under scrutiny! The unusual and subtle part of the matter lay in the fact that the indictment and the evidence formed practically a replica of all that could be imputed to the crown prince. One could not help being amazed by the precision of details obtained in order to insert a full-length portrait in the prepared frame without touching up or omitting anything. Much of it was so new, and individualized so precisely the commonplaces of long-coa.r.s.ened rumor, that at first the ma.s.ses did not realize who had sat for the picture. Very soon, however, the daily reports in the papers began to stir up quite exceptional interest among such readers as had caught on, and people who used to pay up to twenty kruns to attend the trial now did not spare five hundred or more.

The initial idea had been generated in the womb of the prokuratura (magistracy). The oldest judge in the capital took a fancy to it. All one needed was to find a person sufficiently upright not to be confused with the prototype of the affair, sufficiently clever not to act as a clown or a cretin before the tribunal, and, in particular, sufficiently dedicated to the case to sacrifice everything to it, endure a monstrous mud bath, and exchange his career for hard labor. Candidates for that role were not available: the conspirators, most of them well-to-do family men, liked every part except the one without which the play could not be staged. The situation already looked hopeless-when one day, at a meeting of the plotters, appeared Dr. Onze dressed entirely in black and, without sitting down, declared that he put himself completely at their disposal. A natural impatience to grasp the occasion hardly allowed them time to marvel; for at first blush it surely must have been difficult to understand how the rarefied life of a thinker could be compatible with the willingness to be pilloried for the sake of political intrigue. Actually, his was not such an uncommon case. Being constantly occupied with spiritual problems, and constantly adapting the laws of the most rigid principles to the most fragile abstractions, Dr. Onze did not find it possible to refuse a personal application of the same method when presented with the opportunity of performing a deed that was disinterested and probably senseless (and therefore still abstract, owing to the utmost purity of its nature). Furthermore, one should remember that Dr. Onze was giving up his chair, the mollitude of his book-lined study, the continuation of his latest opus-in brief, everything that a philosopher has the right to treasure. Let us mention that he was in indifferent health; let us emphasize the fact that before submitting the case to a close examination he had been obliged to devote three nights to delving in rather special works dealing with problems of which an ascetic could know little; and let us add that not long before he took his decision, he had become engaged to a senescent virgin after years of unexpressed love, during which time her fiance of long standing fought phthisis in distant Switzerland until he expired, hence freeing her of her pact with compa.s.sion.

The case started by that truly heroic female's suing Dr. Onze for allegedly luring her to his secret garconniere, "a den of luxury and libertinism." A similar claim (the only difference being that the apartment surrept.i.tiously taken and fitted by the conspirators was not the one which the prince used to rent at one time for special pleasures but faced it on the opposite side of the street-which