— Everything else has gone wrong, but not money. Everything, everything is spoiled, halved, rotted, robbed of grace and splendor. Our cities are vanishing from the face of the earth. Big chunks of nothing are taking up the space once occupied by houses and palaces.
— You are very serious, she said.
— Money precludes mercy.
— Did you have money and lose it? Jesu would not mind that.
— I have always been poorer than the poor.
Attendants had come to take the man Fomich back to his cell. He was saying terrible things about man’s sexuality, so that the woman beside me stopped her ears. I could hear something about the hot haunches of goats and wild girls in Arcadia kissing something and something mad with music.
If I could talk again with Olympia, she would tell me. She would know.
IS IT NOT preposterous that a shoe would go the journey of a foot?
AND ON A fine English day in the high Victorian year 1868, the year of the first bicycle race and the Trades Union Congress at Manchester, of The Moonstone and The Ring and the Book and of the siege of Magdala, four men gathered at Ashley House in London, a house leafy with Virginia creeper, its interior harmoniously dark and bright, like an English forest, dark with corners and doors and halls, with mahogany and teak and drapes as red as cherries, bright with windows, Indian brass, and lamps like moons, Lord Lindsay pollskepped with the hatchels of a cassowary, Lord Adare whose face looked like a silver teapot, and the galliard Captain Wynne.
They stood Englishly around a bandy-legged Scot with a thrummy beard. His name was Home. Daniel Douglas Home.
— Tack a wheen heed, he said, throwing back his neck and arms as if throttled by an angel from above.
In contempt of gravity, then, he raised his left leg and his right, and lay out flat on the empty air.
— Stap my vitals! swore Captain Wynne. The bugger’s floating!
Lord Lindsay held up Lord Adare, Lord Adare Lord Lindsay.
— Meet me, gasped the horizontal Scot, in the tither room.
With a hunch to get started, he slid forward before their paralyzed gaze, jerking a whit on the first slide, and then floated smoothly, silently out the window.
A distant chime of church bells: which no one heard.
— I think I shall cat, said Lord Lindsay.
— I have peed myself, said Lord Adare.
The feet of D. D. Home appeared in the next window: he had turned right. His sturdy Glaswegian trousers next, his plaid waistcoat, his arms hanging down slightly, fingers spread, his heroic Adam’s apple, eyes staring upward.
His shadow three stories below flowed over rose bushes, over rolled grass as level as water, a sundial, the body of a gardener who had looked up, commended his soul to God, and passed out.
Lords and captain bestirred themselves, dashed into each other, and ran down the hall on uncooperative legs. Only the door to a room on the other side of the house was open, and into this they stumbled, breathing like rabbits. Adare screamed as he saw Home entering the window feet first, calm as a corpse.
Midroom he hung in the air, chuckling.
Then he tilted downward and stood as proud as Punch.
— Bewitched, by the Lord! said Captain Wynne. We are all bewitched.
Lord Lindsay’s hair had turned white.
Yet all three signed depositions that they had witnessed a human Scot float out the window of Ashley House and in again from the other side.
Home died soon after.
— And now, I said to Herr Rufzeichen, how shall we ever know otherwise?
— Englishmen, said Rufzeichen, of all people! Sort of thing that goes on every day in India, I believe?
AT THE BENJAMENTA INSTITUTE I was like a cuckoo in a nest of wrens. I had failed at just about everything and the other students of the art of butlering had failed only predestination, and even that wasn’t certain, for we were told daily that Joseph was a butler in Egypt and Daniel one in Babylon. Their slain and risen god was Dick Whittington. The rotten stockings they darned in the evenings were Whittington’s, their cold beds were Whittington’s, their slivers of soap, their piecemeal and unmatching shoe laces, their red ears and round shoulders.
A feature of failure is having to do over again what the successful sailed through once. My adolescence has been waiting for me when my feet hit the floor every morning these seventy years. My God, what a prospect! An education, a job, a wife, daughters to admire, sons to counsel, vacations at Ostend, retirement, grandchildren, banquets in my honor, statesmen and a mountain of flowers at my funeral, my sepulcher listed in the tourist guide to the cemetery.
And in middle age I was enrolled in a school for butlers.
The dormitory was upstairs, a long room with too many beds too close together. It was neither military in its effect nor schoolish, neither neat nor messy. It was a picture of despair and of making do.
I remember it all as a dream in which confusion had seeped into the grain of reality. I remember yellow-haired Hans, and defeated Töffel, of the bitten fingernails and wetted bed, the clever Kraus and his intolerable and boring cynicism, the flippant and windy Fuchs who cried under the covers at night. We all led secret lives in full view of each other.
Herr and Frau Benjamenta, accomplished frauds, came and went like attendants in a hospital. All day we heard homilies and half-finished sentences from retired Gymnasium teachers and had lessons in ironing trousers and setting tables. We heard Scripture at dawn and before bedtime. Of all this I made my novel Jakob von Gunten, a new kind of book, and except for a few of the essays I wrote for newspapers, essays written with Olympia’s full gaze upon my back, the best thing that I leave the world. Mann stole it, and Kafka stole it, and
