Nightwood by Djuna Barnes Read Free Book Online Page A

departing shadow: “Aren’t you the beauty!”
    To the
Café de la Mairie du VI e
he brought Felix, who turned up in Paris some weeks after the encounter in Berlin. Felix thought to himself that undoubtedly the doctor was a great liar, but a valuable liar. His fabrications seemed to be the framework of a forgotten but imposing plan; some condition of life of which he was the sole surviving retainer. His manner was that of a servant of a defunct noble family, whose movements recall, though in a degraded form, those of a late master. Even the doctor’s favourite gesture—plucking hairs out of his nostrils—seemed the “vulgarization” of what was once a thoughtful plucking of the beard.
    As the altar of a church would present but a barren stylization but for the uncalculated offerings of the confused and humble; as the
corsage
of a woman is made suddenly martial and sorrowful by the rose thrust among the more decorous blooms by the hand of a lover suffering the violence of the overlapping of the permission to bestow a last embrace, and its withdrawal: making a vanishing and infinitesimal bull’s eye of that which had a moment before been a buoyant and showy bosom, by dragging time out of his bowels (for a lover knows two times, that which he is given, and that which he must make)—so Felix was astonished to find that the most touching flowers laid on the altar he had raised to his imagination were placed there by the people of the underworld, and that the reddest was to be the rose of the doctor.
    After a long silence in which the doctor had ordered and consumed a
Chambéry fraise
and the Baron a coffee, the doctor remarked that the Jew and the Irish, the one moving upward and the other down, often meet, spade to spade in the same acre.
    “The Irish may be as common as whale-shit—excuse me—on the bottom of the ocean—forgive me—but they do have imagination and,” he added, “creative misery, which comes from being smacked down by the devil, and lifted up again by the angels.
Misericordioso!
Save me, Mother Mary, and never mind the other fellow! But the Jew, what is he at his best? Never anything higher than a meddler—pardon my wet glove—a supreme and marvellous meddler often, but a meddler nevertheless.” He bowed slightly from the hips. “All right, Jews meddle and we lie, that’s the difference, the fine difference. We say someone is pretty for instance, whereas, if the truth were known, they are probably as ugly as Smith going backward, but by our lie we have made that very party powerful, such is the power of the charlatan, the great strong! They drop on anything at any moment, and that sort of thing makes the mystic in the end, and,” he added, “it makes the great doctor. The only people who really
know
anything about medical science are the nurses, and they never tell; they’d get slapped if they did. But the great doctor, he’s a divine idiot and a wise man. He closes one eye, the eye that he studied with, and putting his fingers on the arteries of the body says: ‘God, whose roadway this is, has given me permission to travel on it also,’ which, Heaven help the patient, is true; in this manner he comes on great cures, and sometimes upon that road is disconcerted by that Little Man.” The doctor ordered another
Chambéry
and asked the Baron what he would have; being told that he wished nothing for the moment, the doctor added: “No man needs curing of his individual sickness; his universal malady is what he should look to.”
    The Baron remarked that this sounded like dogma.
    The doctor looked at him. “Does it? Well, when you see that Little Man you know you will be shouldered from the path.
    “I also know this,” he went on: “One cup poured into another makes different waters; tears shed by one eye would blind if wept into another’s eye. The breast we strike in joy is not the breast we strike in pain; any man’s smile would be consternation on another’s mouth. Rear up,