Nightwood by Djuna Barnes Page A

meets a woman who is beast turning human. Such a person’s every movement will reduce to an image of a forgotten experience; a mirage of an eternal wedding cast on the racial memory; as insupportable a joy as would be the vision of an eland coming down an aisle of trees, chapleted with orange blossoms and bridal veil, a hoof raised in the economy of fear, stepping in the trepidation of flesh that will become myth; as the unicorn is neither man nor beast deprived, but human hunger pressing its breast to its prey.
    Such a woman is the infected carrier of the past: before her the structure of our head and jaws ache—we feel that we could eat her, she who is eaten death returning, for only then do we put our face close to the blood on the lips of our forefathers.
    Something of this emotion came over Felix, but being racially incapable of abandon, he felt that he was looking upon a figurehead in a museum, which though static, no longer roosting on its cutwater, seemed yet to be going against the wind; as if this girl were the converging halves of a broken fate, setting face, in sleep, toward itself in time, as an image and its reflection in a lake seem parted only by the hesitation in the hour.
    In the tones of this girl’s voice was the pitch of one enchanted with the gift of postponed abandon: the low drawling “aside” voice of the actor who, in the soft usury of his speech, withholds a vocabulary until the profitable moment when he shall be facing his audience—in her case a guarded extempore to the body of what would be said at some later period when she would be able to “see” them. What she now said was merely the longest way to a quick dismissal. She asked them to come to see her when she would be “able to feel better.”
    Pinching the
chasseur
, the doctor inquired the girl’s name. “Mademoiselle Robin Vote,” the
chasseur
answered.
    Descending into the street, the doctor, desiring “one last before bed,” directed his steps back to the café. After a short silence he asked the Baron if he had ever thought about women and marriage. He kept his eyes fixed on the marble of the table before him, knowing that Felix had experienced something unusual.
    The Baron admitted that he had; he wished a son who would feel as he felt about the “great past.” The doctor then inquired, with feigned indifference, of what nation he would choose the boy’s mother.
    “The American,” the Baron answered instantly. “With an American anything can be done.”
    The doctor laughed. He brought his soft fist down on the table—now he was sure. “Fate and entanglement,” he said, “have begun again—the dung beetle rolling his burden uphill—oh, the hard climb! Nobility, very well, but what is it?” The Baron started to answer him, but the doctor held up his hand. “Wait a minute! I know—the few that the many have lied about well and long enough to make them deathless. So you must have a son,” he paused. “A king is the peasant’s actor, who becomes so scandalous that he has to be bowed down to—scandalous in the higher sense naturally. And why must he be bowed down to? Because he has been set apart as the one dog who need not regard the rules of the house, they are so high that they can defame God and foul their rafters! But the people—that’s different—they are church-broken, nation-broken—they drink and pray and piss in the one place. Every man has a house-broken heart except the great man. The people love their church and know it, as a dog knows where he was made to conform, and there he returns by his instinct. But to the graver permission, the king, the tsar, the emperor, who may relieve themselves on high heaven—to them they bow down—only.” The Baron, who was always troubled by obscenity, could never, in the case of the doctor, resent it; he felt the seriousness, the melancholy hidden beneath every jest and malediction that the doctor uttered, therefore he answered him seriously. “To pay