The dining-room was also large and bare. Four candles burned on the long
narrow table; their golden brightness faded in the remoter corners to
faint twilight; the shadows were huge and black. Entering, Mr. Cardan
could fancy himself Don Juan walking down to supper in the Commander’s
vault.
Supper was at once dismal and exceedingly lively. While his sister
chattered and laughed unceasingly with her guest, Mr. Elver preserved
throughout the meal an unbroken silence. Gloomily he ate his way through
the mixed and fragmentary meal which the old woman kept bringing in,
relay after unexpected relay, on little dishes from the kitchen.
Gloomily too, with the air of a weak man who drinks to give himself
courage and the illusion of strength, he drank glass after glass of the
strong red wine. He kept his eyes fixed most of the time on the
table-cloth in front of his plate; but every now and then he would look
up for a second to dart a glance at the other two—for a moment only,
then, fearful of being caught in the act and looked at straight in the
face, he turned away again.
Mr. Cardan enjoyed his supper. Not that the food was particularly good;
it was not. The old woman was one of those inept practitioners of
Italian cookery who disguise their short-comings under floods of tomato
sauce, with a pinch of garlic thrown in to make the disguise
impenetrable. No, what Mr. Cardan enjoyed was the company. It was a long
time since he had sat down with such interesting specimens. One’s range,
he reflected, is altogether too narrowly limited. One doesn’t know
enough people; one’s acquaintanceship isn’t sufficiently diversified.
Burglars, for example, millionaires, imbeciles, clergymen, Hottentots,
sea captains—one’s personal knowledge of these most interesting human
species is quite absurdly small. To-night, it seemed to him, he was
doing something to widen his range.
“I’m so glad we met you,” Miss Elver was saying. “In the dark—such a
start you gave me too!” She shrieked with laughter. “We were getting so
dull here. Weren’t we, Phil?” She appealed to her brother; but Mr. Elver
said nothing, did not even look up. “So dull. I’m awfully glad you were
there.”
“Not so glad as I am, I assure you,” said Mr. Cardan gallantly.
Miss Elver looked at him for a moment, coyly and confidentially; then
putting up her hand to her face, as though she were screening herself
from Mr. Cardan’s gaze, she turned away, tittering. Her face became
quite red. She peeped at him between her fingers and tittered again.
It occurred to Mr. Cardan that he’d be in for a breach of promise case
very soon if he weren’t careful. Tactfully he changed the subject; asked
her what sort of food she liked best and learned that her favourites
were strawberries, cream ice and mixed chocolates.
The dessert had been eaten. Mr. Elver suddenly looked up and said:
“Grace, I think you ought to go to bed.”
Miss Elver’s face, from having been bright with laughter, became at once
quite overcast. A film of tears floated up into her eyes, making them
seem more lustrous; she looked at her brother appealingly. “Must I go?”
she said. “Just this once!” She tried to coax him. “This once!”
But Mr. Elver was not to be moved. “No, no,” he said sternly. “You must
go.”
His sister sighed and made a little whimpering sound. But she got up,
all the same, and walked obediently towards the door. She was almost on
the threshold, when she halted, turned and ran back to say good-night to
Mr. Cardan. “I’m so glad,” she said, “that we found you. Such fun.
Good-night. But you mustn’t look at me like that.” She put up her hand
again to her face. “Oh, not like that.” And still giggling, she ran out
of the room.
There was a long silence.
“Have some wine,” said Mr. Elver at last and pushed the flask in Mr.
Cardan’s direction.
Mr. Cardan replenished his glass and then, politely, did the same for
his host. Wine—it was the only thing that was likely to make this dismal
devil talk. With his practised and professional eye, Mr. Cardan thought
he could detect in his host’s expression certain hardly perceptible
symptoms of incipient tipsiness. A spidery creature like that, thought
Mr. Cardan contemptuously, couldn’t be expected to hold his liquor well;
and he had been putting it down pretty steadily all through supper. A
little more and, Mr. Cardan was confident, he’d be as clay in the hands
of a sober interrogator (and Mr. Cardan could count on being sober for
at least three bottles longer than a poor feeble creature like this);
he’d talk, he’d talk; the only difficulty would be to get him to stop
talking.
“Thanks,” said Mr. Elver, and gloomily gulped down the replenished
glass.
That’s the style, thought Mr. Cardan; and in his liveliest manner he
began to tell the story of the grocer’s brother’s statue and of his
pursuit of it, ending up with an account, already more florid than the
previous version, of how he lost himself.
“I console myself superstitiously,” he concluded, “by the reflection
that fate wouldn’t have put me to these little troubles and
inconveniences if it weren’t intending to do something handsome by me in
the end. I’m paying in advance; but I trust I’m paying for something
round and tidy. All the same, what a curse this, hunt for money is!”
Mr. Elver nodded. “It’s the root of all evil,” he said, and emptied his
glass. Unobtrusively Mr. Cardan replenished it.
“Quite right,” he confirmed. “And it’s twice cursed, if you’ll allow me
to play Portia for a moment: it curses him that hath—can you think of a
single really rich person of your acquaintance who wouldn’t be less
avaricious, less tyrannous, self-indulgent and generally porkish if he
didn’t pay super-tax? And it also curses him that hath not, making him
do all manner of absurd, humiliating, discreditable things which he’d
never think of doing if the hedgerows grew breadfruit and bananas and
grapes enough to keep one in free food and liquor.”
“It curses him that hath not the most,” said Mr. Elver with a sudden
savage animation. This was a subject, evidently, on which he felt
deeply. He looked sharply at Mr. Cardan for a moment, then turned away
to dip his long nose once more in his tumbler.
“Perhaps,” said Mr. Cardan judicially. “At any rate there are more
complaints about this curse than about the other. Those that have not
complain about their own fate. Those that have do not, it is only those
in contact with them—and since the havers are few these too are few—who
complain of the curse of having. In my time I have belonged to both
categories. Once I had; and I can see that to my fellow men I must then
have been intolerable. Now”—Mr. Cardan drew a deep breath and blew it
out between trumpeting lips, to indicate the way in which the money had
gone—“now I have not. The curse of insolence and avarice has been
removed from me. But what low shifts, what abjections this not-having
has, by compensation, reduced me to! Swindling peasants out of their
artistic property, for example!”
“Ah, but that’s not so bad,” cried Mr. Elver excitedly, “as what I’ve
had to do. That’s nothing at all. You’ve never been an advertisement
canvasser.”
“No,” Mr. Cardan admitted, “I’ve never been an advertisement canvasser.”
“Then you can’t know what the curse of not-having really is. You can’t
have an idea. You’ve no right to talk about the curse.” Mr. Elver’s
harsh, unsteady voice rose and fell excitedly as he talked. “No right,”
he repeated.
“Perhaps I haven’t,” said Mr. Cardan mollifyingly. He took the
opportunity to pour out some more wine for his host. Nobody has a right,
he reflected, to be more miserable than we are. Each one of us is the
most unhappily circumstanced creature in the world. Hence it’s
enormously to our credit that we bear up and get on as well as we do.
“Look here,” Mr. Elver went on confidentially, and he tried to look Mr.
Cardan squarely in the face as he spoke; but the effort was too great
and he had to avert his eyes; “look here, let me tell you.” He leaned
forward eagerly and slapped the table in front of where Mr. Cardan was
sitting to emphasise what he was saying and to call his guest’s
attention to it. “My father was a country parson,” he began, talking
rapidly and excitedly. “We were very poor—horribly. Not that he minded
much: he used to read Dante all the time. That annoyed my mother—I don’t
know why. You know the smell of very plain cooking? Steamed puddings—the
very thought of them makes me sick now.” He shuddered. “There were four
of us then. But my brother was killed in the war and my elder sister
died of influenza. So now there’s only me and the one you saw to-night.”
He tapped his forehead. “She never grew up, but got stuck somehow. A
moron.” He laughed compassionlessly. “Though I don’t know why I need
tell you that. For it’s obvious enough, isn’t it?”
Mr. Cardan said nothing. His host flinched away from his half-winking,
half-supercilious gaze, and fortifying himself with another gulp of
wine, which Mr. Cardan a moment later unobtrusively made good from the
flask, went on:
“Four of us,” he repeated. “You can imagine it wasn’t easy for my
father. And my mother died when we were still children. Still, he
managed to send us to a rather shabby specimen of the right sort of
school and we’d have gone on to the university if we could have got
scholarships. But we didn’t.” At this Mr. Elver, on whom the wine seemed
quite suddenly to be making its effect, laughed loudly, as though he had
made a very good joke. “So my brother went into an engineering firm, and
it was just being arranged, at goodness knows what sort of a sacrifice,
that I should be turned into a solicitor, when pop! my father falls down
dead with heart failure. Well, he was all right rambling about the
_Paradiso_. But I had to scramble into the nearest job available. That
was how I came to be an advertisement canvasser. Oh, Lord!” He put his
hand over his eyes, as though to shut out some disgusting vision. “Talk
of the curse of not-having! For a monthly magazine it was—the sort of
one with masses of little ads for indigestion cures; and electric belts
to make you strong; and art by correspondence; and Why Wear a Truss? and
superfluous hair-killers; and pills to enlarge the female figure; and
labour-saving washing machines on the instalment system; and Learn to
Play the Piano without Practising; and thirty-six reproductions of nudes
from the Paris Salon for five bob; and drink cures in plain wrapper,
strictly confidential, and all the rest. There were hundreds and
hundreds of small advertisers. I used to spend all my days running round
to shops and offices, cajoling old advertisers to renew or fishing for
new ones. And, God! how horrible it was! Worming one’s way in to see
people who didn’t want to see one and to whom one was only a nuisance, a
sort of tiresome beggar on the hunt for money. How polite one had to be
to insolent underlings, strong in their office and only too delighted to
have an opportunity to play the bully in their turn! And then there was
that terrible cheerful, frank, manly manner one had to keep up all the
time. The ‘I put it to you, sir,’ straight from the shoulder business;
the persuasive honesty, the earnestness and the frightful pretence one
had to keep up so strenuously and continuously that one believed in what
one was talking about, thought the old magazine a splendid proposition
and regarded the inventor of advertisements as the greatest benefactor
the human race has ever known. And what a presence one had to have! I
could never achieve a presence, somehow. I could never even look neat.
And you had to try and impress the devils as a keen, competent salesman.
God, it was awful! And the way some of them would treat you. As the
damnedest bore in the world—that was the best you could hope. But
sometimes they treated you as a robber and a swindler. It was your fault
if an insufficient number of imbeciles hadn’t bought galvanic belly
bands or learned to play like Busoni without practising. It was your
fault; and they’d fly in a rage and curse at you, and you had to be
courteous and cheery and tactful and always enthusiastic in the face of
it. Good Lord, is there anything more horrible than having to face an
angry man? I don’t know why, but it’s somehow so profoundly humiliating
to take part in a squabble, even when one’s the aggressor. One feels
afterwards that one’s no better than a dog. But when one’s the victim of
somebody else’s anger—that’s awful. That’s simply awful,” he repeated,
and brought his hand with a clap on to the table to emphasise his words.
“I’m not built for that sort of thing. I’m not a bully or a fighter.
They used to make me almost ill, those scenes. I couldn’t sleep,
thinking of them—remembering those that were past and looking forward
with terror to the ones that were coming. People talk about
Dostoievsky’s feelings when he was marched out into the barrack square,
tied to a post with the firing party lined up in front of him and then,
at the very last second, when his eyes were already bandaged, reprieved.
But I tell you I used to go through his experiences half a dozen times a
day, nerving myself to face some inevitable interview, the very thought
of which made me sick with apprehension. And for me there was no
reprieve. The execution was gone through with, to the very end. Good
Lord, how often I’ve hesitated at the door of some old bully’s office,
all in a bloody sweat, hesitating to cross the threshold. How often I’ve
turned back at the last moment and turned into a pub for a nip of brandy
to steady my nerves, or gone to a chemist for a pick-me-up! You can’t
imagine what I suffered then!” He emptied his glass, as though to drown
the rising horror. “Nobody can imagine,” he repeated, and his voice
quivered with the anguish of his self-pity. “And then how little one got
in return! One suffered daily torture for the privilege of being hardly
able to live. And all the things one might have done, if one had had
capital! To know for an absolute certainty that—given ten thousand—one
could turn them into a hundred thousand in two years; to have the whole
plan worked out down to its smallest details, to have thought out
exactly how one would live when one was rich, and meanwhile to go on
living in poverty and squalor and slavery—that’s the curse of
not-having. That’s what _I_ suffered.” Overcome by wine and emotion, Mr.
Elver burst into tears.
Mr. Cardan patted him on the shoulder. He was too tactful to offer the
philosophical consolation that such suffering is the lot of nine-tenths
of the human race. Mr. Elver, he could see, would never have forgiven
such a denial of his dolorous uniqueness. “You must have courage,” said
Mr. Cardan, and pressing the glass into Mr. Elver’s hand he added:
“Drink some of this. It’ll do you good.”
Mr. Elver drank and wiped his eyes. “But I’ll make them smart for it one
day,” he said, banging the table with his fist. The violent self-pity of
a moment ago transformed itself into an equally violent anger. “I’ll
make them all pay for what I suffered. When I’m rich.”
“That’s the spirit,” said Mr. Cardan encouragingly.
“Thirteen years of it I had,” Mr. Elver went on. “And two and a half
years during the war, dressed in uniform and filling up forms in a
wooden hut at Leeds; but that was better than touting for
advertisements. Thirteen years. Penal servitude with torture. But I’ll
pay them, I’ll pay them.” He banged the table again.
“Still,” said Mr. Cardan, “you seem to have got out of it now all right.
Living here in Italy is a sign of freedom; at least I hope so.”
At these words Mr. Elver’s anger against “them” suddenly dropped. His
face took on a mysterious and knowing expression. He smiled to himself
what was meant to be a dark, secret and satanic smile, a smile that
should be all but imperceptible to the acutest eye. But he found, in his
tipsiness, that the smile was growing uncontrollably broader and
broader; he wanted to grin, to laugh aloud. Not that what he was
secretly thinking about was at all funny; it was not, at any rate when
he was sober. But now the whole world seemed to swim in a bubbly sea of
hilarity. Moreover, the muscles of his face, when he started to smile
satanically, had all at once got out of hand and were insisting on
expanding what should have been the expression of Lucifer’s darkest and
most fearful thoughts into a bumpkin’s grin. Hastily Mr. Elver
extinguished his face in his glass, in the hope of concealing from his
guest that rebellious smile. He emerged again choking. Mr. Cardan had to
pat him on the back. When it was all over, Mr. Elver reassumed his
mysterious expression and nodded significantly. “Perhaps,” he said
darkly, not so much in response to anything Mr. Cardan had said as on
general principles, so to speak, and to indicate that the whole
situation was in the last degree dubious, dark and contingent—contingent
on a whole chain of further contingencies.
Mr. Cardan’s curiosity was roused by the spectacle of this queer
pantomime; he refilled his host’s glass. “Still,” he insisted, “if you
hadn’t freed yourself, how would you be staying here—” in this horrible
marsh, he had almost added; but he checked himself and said “in Italy”
instead.
The other shook his head. “I can’t tell you,” he said darkly, and again
the satanic smile threatened to enlarge itself to imbecility.
Mr. Cardan relapsed into silence, content to wait. From the expression
on Mr. Elver’s face he could see that the effort of keeping a secret
would be, for his host, intolerably great. The fruit must be left to
ripen of itself. He said nothing and looked pensively into one of the
dark corners of the tomb-like chamber as though occupied with his own
thoughts.
Mr. Elver sat hunched up in his chair, frowning at the table in front of
him. Every now and then he took a sip of wine. Tipsily mutable, his mood
changed all at once from hilarious to profoundly gloomy. The silence,
the darkness funereally tempered by the four unwavering candles, worked
on his mind. What a moment since had seemed an uproarious joke now
presented itself to his thoughts as appalling. He felt a great need to
unburden himself, to transfer responsibilities on to other shoulders, to
get advice that should confirm him in his course. Furtively, for a
glimpse only, he looked at his guest. How abstractedly and regardlessly
he was staring into vacancy! Not a thought, no sympathy for poor Philip
Elver. Ah, if he only knew....
He broke silence at last. “Tell me,” he said abruptly, and it seemed to
his drunken mind that he was displaying an incredible subtlety in his
method of approaching the subject; “do you believe in vivisection?”
Mr. Cardan was surprised by the question. “Believe in it?” he echoed. “I
don’t quite know how one can _believe_ in vivisection. I think it
useful, if that’s what you mean.”
“You don’t think it’s wrong?”
“No,” said Mr. Cardan.
“You think it doesn’t matter cutting up animals?”
“Not if the cutting serves some useful human purpose.”
“You don’t think animals have got rights?” pursued Mr. Elver with a
clarity and tenacity that, in a drunken man, surprised Mr. Cardan. This
was a subject, it was clear, on which Mr. Elver must long have
meditated. “Just like human beings?”
“No,” said Mr. Cardan. “I’m not one of those fools who think that one
life is as good as another, simply because it _is_ a life; that a
grasshopper is as good as a dog and a dog as good as a man. You must
recognise a hierarchy of existences.”
“A hierarchy,” exclaimed Mr. Elver, delighted with the word, “a
hierarchy—that’s it. That’s exactly it. A hierarchy. And among human
beings too?” he added.
“Yes, of course,” Mr. Cardan affirmed. “The life of the soldier who
killed Archimedes isn’t worth the life of Archimedes. It’s the
fundamental fallacy of democracy and humanitarian Christianity to
suppose that it is. Though of course,” Mr. Cardan added pensively, “one
has no justifying reason for saying so, but only one’s instinctive
taste. For the soldier, after all, may have been a good husband and
father, may have spent the non-professional, unsoldierly portions of his
life in turning the left cheek and making two blades of grass grow where
only one grew before. If, like Tolstoy, your tastes run to good
fatherhood, left cheeks and agriculture, then you’ll say that the life
of the soldier is worth just as much as the life of Archimedes—much
more, indeed; for Archimedes was a mere geometrician, who occupied
himself with lines and angles, curves and surfaces, instead of with good
and evil, husbandry and religion. But if, on the contrary, one’s tastes
are of a more intellectual cast, then one will think as I think—that the
life of Archimedes is worth the lives of several billion of even the
most amiable soldiers. But as for saying which point of view is right—”
Mr. Cardan shrugged his shoulders. “Partner, I leave it to you.”
Mr. Elver seemed rather disappointed by the inconclusive turn that his
guest’s discourse had taken. “But still,” he insisted, “it’s obvious
that a wise man’s better than a fool. There _is_ a hierarchy.”
“Well, I personally should say there was,” said Mr. Cardan. “But I can’t
speak for others.” He saw that he had been carried away by the pleasures
of speculation into saying things his host did not want to hear. To
almost all men, even when they are sober, a suspense of judgment is
extraordinarily distasteful. And Mr. Elver was far from sober; moreover,
Mr. Cardan began to suspect, this philosophic conversation was a
tortuous introduction to personal confidences. If one wanted the
confidences one must agree with the would-be confider’s opinion. That
was obvious.
“Good,” said Mr. Elver. “Then you’ll admit that an intelligent man is
worth more than an imbecile, a moron; ha ha, a moron....” And at this
word he burst into violent and savage laughter, which, becoming more and
more extravagant as it prolonged itself, turned at last into an
uncontrollable screaming and sobbing.
His chair turned sideways to the table, his legs crossed, the fingers of
one hand playing caressingly with his wine glass, the other manipulating
his cigar, Mr. Cardan looked on, while his host, the tears streaming
down his cheeks, his narrow face distorted almost out of recognition,
laughed and sobbed, now throwing himself back in his chair, now covering
his face with his hands, now bending forward over the table to rest his
forehead on his arms, while his whole body shook and shook with the
repeated and uncontrollable spasms. A disgusting sight, thought Mr.
Cardan; and a disgusting specimen too. He began to have an inkling of
what the fellow was up to. Translate “intelligent man” and “moron” into
“me” and “my sister”—for the general, the philosophical in any man’s
conversation must always be converted into the particular and personal
if you want to understand him—interpret in personal terms what he had
said about vivisection, animal rights and the human hierarchy, and there
appeared, as the plain transliteration of the cipher—what? Something
that looked exceedingly villainous, thought Mr. Cardan.
“Then I suppose,” he said in a very cool and level voice, when the other
had begun to recover from his fit, “I suppose it’s your sister who has
the liberating cash.”
Mr. Elver glanced at him, with an expression of surprise, almost of
alarm, on his face. His eyes wavered away from Mr. Cardan’s steady,
genial gaze. He took refuge in his tumbler. “Yes,” he said, when he had
taken a gulp. “How did you guess?”
Mr. Cardan shrugged his shoulders. “Purely at random,” he said.
“After my father died,” Mr. Elver explained, “she went to live with her
godmother, who was the old lady at the big house in our parish. A nasty
old woman she was. But she took to Grace, she kind of adopted her. When
the old bird died at the beginning of this year, Grace found she’d been
left twenty-five thousand.”
For all comment, Mr. Cardan clicked his tongue against his palate and
slightly raised his eyebrows.
“Twenty-five thousand,” the other repeated. “A half-wit, a moron! What
can she do with it?”
“She can take you to Italy,” Mr. Cardan suggested.
“Oh, of course we can live on the interest all right,” said Mr. Elver
contemptuously. “But when I think how I could multiply it.” He leaned
forward eagerly, looking into Mr. Cardan’s face for a second, then the
shifty grey eyes moved away and fixed themselves on one of the buttons
of Mr. Cardan’s coat, from which they would occasionally dart upwards
again to reconnoitre and return. “I’ve worked it out, you see,” he
began, talking so quickly that the words tumbled over one another and
became almost incoherent. “The Trade Cycle.... I can prophesy exactly
what’ll happen at any given moment. For instance....” He rambled on in a
series of complicated explanations.
“Well, if you’re as certain as all that,” said Mr. Cardan when he had
finished, “why don’t you get your sister to lend you the money?”
“Why not?” Mr. Elver repeated gloomily and leaned back again in his
chair. “Because that blasted old hag had the capital tied up. It can’t
be touched.”
“Perhaps she lacked faith in the Trade Cycle,” Mr. Cardan suggested.
“God rot her!” said the other fervently. “And when I think of what I’d
do with the money when I’d made really a lot. Science, art....”
“Not to mention revenge on your old acquaintances,” said Mr. Cardan,
cutting him short. “You’ve worked out the whole programme?”
“Everything,” said Mr. Elver. “There’d never have been anything like it.
And now this damned fool of an old woman goes and gives the money to her
pet moron and makes it impossible for me to touch it.” He ground his
teeth with rage and disgust.
“But if your sister were to die unmarried,” said Mr. Cardan, “the money,
I suppose, would be yours.”
The other nodded.
“It’s a very hierarchical question, certainly,” said Mr. Cardan. In the
vault-like room there was a prolonged silence.
Mr. Elver had reached the final stage of intoxication. Almost suddenly
he began to feel weak, profoundly weary and rather ill. Anger, hilarity,
the sense of satanic power—all had left him. He desired only to go to
bed as soon as possible; at the same time he doubted his capacity to get
there. He shut his eyes.
Mr. Cardan looked at the limp and sodden figure with an expert’s eye,
scientifically observing it. It was clear to him that the creature would
volunteer no more; that it had come to a state when it could hardly
think of anything but the gradually mounting nausea within it. It was
time to change tactics. He leaned forward, and tapping his host’s arm
launched a direct attack.
“So you brought the poor girl here to get rid of her,” he said.
Mr. Elver opened his eyes and flashed at his tormentor a hunted and
terrified look. His face became very pale. He turned away. “No, no, not
that.” His voice had sunk to an unsteady whisper.
“Not that?” Mr. Cardan echoed scornfully. “But it’s obvious. And you’ve
as good as been telling me so for the last half hour.”
Mr. Elver could only go on whispering: “No.”
Mr. Cardan ignored the denial. “How did you propose to do it?” he asked.
“It’s always risky, whatever way you choose, and I shouldn’t put you
down as being particularly courageous. How, how?”
The other shook his head.
Mr. Cardan insisted, ruthlessly. “Rat’s bane?” he queried. “Steel?—no,
you wouldn’t have the guts for that. Or did you mean that she should
tumble by accident into one of those convenient ditches?”
“No, no. No.”
“But I insist on being told,” said Mr. Cardan truculently, and he
thumped the table till the reflections of the candles in the brimming
glasses quivered and rocked.
Mr. Elver put his face in his hands and burst into tears. “You’re a
bully,” he sobbed, “a dirty bully, like all the rest.”
“Come, come,” Mr. Cardan protested encouragingly. “Don’t take it so
hardly. I’m sorry I upset you. You mustn’t think,” he added, “that I
have any of the vulgar prejudices about this affair. I’m not condemning
you. Far from it. I don’t want to use your answers against you. I merely
ask out of curiosity—pure curiosity. Cheer up, cheer up. Try a little
more wine.”
But Mr. Elver was feeling too deplorably sick to be able to think of
wine without horror. He refused it, shuddering. “I didn’t mean to do
anything,” he whispered. “I meant it just to happen.”
“Just to happen? Yours must be a very hopeful nature,” said Mr. Cardan.
“It’s in Dante, you know. My father brought us up on Dante; I loathed
the stuff,” he added, as though it had been castor oil. “But things
stuck in my mind. Do you remember the woman who tells how she died:
‘_Siena mi fe’, disfecemi Maremma_’? Her husband shut her up in a castle
in the Maremma and she died of fever. Do you remember?”
Mr. Cardan nodded.
“That was the idea. I had the quinine: I’ve been taking ten grains a day
ever since I arrived—for safety’s sake. But there doesn’t seem to be any
fever here nowadays,” Mr. Elver added. “We’ve been here nine weeks....”
“And nothing’s happened!” Mr. Cardan leaned back in his chair and roared
with laughter. “Well, the moral of that,” he added, when he had breath
enough to begin talking again, “the moral of that is: See that your
authorities are up to date.”
But Mr. Elver was past seeing a joke. He got up from his chair and stood
unsteadily, supporting himself with a hand on the table. “Would you mind
helping me to my room?” he faintly begged. “I don’t feel very well.”
Mr. Cardan helped him first into the garden. “You ought to learn to
carry your liquor more securely,” he said, when the worst was over.
“That’s another of the evening’s morals.”
When he had lighted his host to bed, Mr. Cardan went to his appointed
room and undressed. It was a long time before he fell asleep. The
mosquitoes, partly, and partly his own busy thoughts, were responsible
for his wakefulness.
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