“Well, if you can manage it——”
Nicholas Golwein made a gesture, shaking his cuff-links like a harness—“I can manage it,” he said, wondering what Nord was thinking.
“Of course it’s rather disgusting,” Nord said.
“I know, I know I should go out like a gentleman, but there’s more in me than the gentleman, there’s something that understands meanness; a Jew can only love and be intimate with the thing that’s a little abnormal, and so I love what’s low and treacherous and cunning, because there’s nobility and uneasiness in it for me—well,” he flung out his arms—“if you were to say to Nell, ‘He hung himself in the small hours, with a sheet’—what then? Everything she had ever said to me, been to me, will change for her—she won’t be able to read those French journals in the same way, she won’t be able to swallow water as she has always swallowed it. I know, you’ll say there’s nature and do you know what I’ll answer: that I have a contempt for animals—just because they do not have to include Nelly Grissard’s whims in their means to a living conduct—well, listen, I’ve made up my mind to something”—he became calm all of a sudden and looked Nord directly in the face.
“Well?”
“I shall follow you up the stairs, stand behind the door, and you shall say just these words, ‘Nicholas has hung himself.’”
“And then what?”
“That’s all, that’s quite sufficient—then I shall know everything.”
Nord stood up, letting Nicholas open the café door for him.
“You don’t object?” Nicholas Golwein murmured.