“It shall be easy; you have, I remark, a more clear pure English than I have met; and I am very intelligent. It shall not be difficult.”
Miriam hid her laughter by gathering up one of his books with a random question. But how brave. Why should not people admit intelligence?...... It was a sort of pamphlet, in French.
“Ah, that is most interesting; you shall at once read it. He is a most intelligent man. I have hear this lectchoor——”
“I heard, I heard,” cried Miriam.
“Yes; but excuse a moment. Really it is interstink. He is one of the most fine lecturours of Sorbonne; membre de l’Académie; the soobject is l’Attention. Ah it is better we shall speak in French.”
“Nur auf deutsch kann man gut philosophieren,” quoted Miriam disagreeing with the maxim and hoping he would not ask where she had read it.
“That is not so; that is a typical German arrogance. The French have some most distinguished p-sychologues, Taine, and more recently, Tarde. But listen.”
Miriam listened to the description of the lecture. For a while he kept to his careful slow English and her attention was divided between her growing interest in the nature of his mistakes, her desire to tell him that she had discovered that he spoke Norman English in German idiom with an intonation that she supposed must be Russian, and the fascination of watching for the fall of the dead-white, black-fringed eyelids on to the brooding face, between the framing of each sentence. When he passed into French, led by a quotation which was evidently the core of the lecture, she saw the lecturer, and his circle of students and indignantly belaboured him for making, and them for quietly listening to the assertion that it is curious that the human faculty of attention should have originated in women.
Certainly she would not read the pamphlet. However clever the man might be, his assumptions about women made the carefully arranged and solemnly received display of research, irritatingly valueless. And Mr. Shatov seemed to agree, quite as a matter of course.... “Why should he be surprised?” she said when he turned for her approval. “How, surprised,” he asked laughing, an easy deep bass chuckle, drawing his small mouth wide and up at the corners; a row of small square even teeth shining out.
“Ach-ma,” he sighed, with shining eyes, looking happily replete, “he is a great p-sycho-physiologiste,” and passed on to eager narration of the events of his week in Paris. Listening to the strange inflections of his voice, the curiously woven argumentative sing-song tone, as if he were talking to himself, broken here and there by words thrown out with explosive vehemence, breaking defiantly short as if to crush opposition in anticipation, and then again the soft almost plaintive sing-song beginning of another sentence, Miriam presently heard him mention Max Nordau and learned that he was something more than the author of Degeneration. He had written Die Conventionellen Lügen der Kulturmenschheit, which she immediately must read. He had been to see him and found a truly marvellous white-haired old man, with eyes, alive; so young and vigorous in his enthusiasm that he made Mr. Shatov at twenty-two feel old.