The Baron nodded. He was troubled. ‘My family is preserved because I have it only from the memory of one single woman, my aunt; therefore it is single, clear and unalterable. In this I am fortunate, through this I have a sense of immortality. Our basic idea of eternity is a condition that cannot vary. It is the motivation of marriage. No man really wants his freedom. He gets a habit as quickly as possible—it is a form of immortality.’
‘And what’s more,’ said the doctor, ‘we heap reproaches on the person who breaks it, saying that in so doing he has broken the image—of our safety.’
The Baron acquiesced. ‘This quality of one sole condition, which was so much a part of the Baronin, was what drew me to her; a condition of being that she had not, at that time, even chosen, but a fluid sort of possession which gave me a feeling that I would not only be able to achieve immortality, but be free to choose my own kind.’
‘She was always holding God’s bag of tricks upside down,’ murmured the doctor.
‘Yet, if I tell the whole truth,’ the Baron continued, ‘the very abundance of what then appeared to me to be security, and which was, in reality, the most formless loss, gave me at the same time pleasure and a sense of terrible anxiety, which proved only too legitimate.’
The doctor lit a cigarette.
‘I took it’, the Baron went on, ‘for acquiescence, thus making my great mistake. She was really like those people who, coming unexpectedly into a room, silence the company because they are looking for someone who is not there.’ He knocked on the cab window, got down and paid. As they walked up the gravel path he went on: ‘What I particularly wanted to ask you was, why did she marry me? It has placed me in the dark, for the rest of my life.’
‘Take the case of the horse who knew too much,’ said the doctor, ‘looking between the branches in the morning, cypress or hemlock. She was in mourning for something taken away from her in a bombardment in the war—by the way she stood, that something lay between her hooves —she stirred no branch, though her hide was a river of sorrow; she was damned to her hocks, where the grass came waving up softly. Her eyelashes were gray-black, like the eyelashes of a nigger, and at her buttocks’ soft centre a pulse throbbed like a fiddle.’
The Baron, studying the menu, said, ‘The Petherbridge woman called on me.’
‘Glittering God,’ exclaimed the doctor putting the card down. ‘Has it gone as far as that? I shouldn’t have thought it.’