The Great and the Good

by Michel Déon

  ‘You mean the guy who does his dirty work for him?’ Porter exclaimed, a broad grin lighting up his round features. ‘Allow me, incidentally, to congratulate you on your knowledge of Père Joseph, which appears to show a genuine understanding of French history, for which we Americans have so little aptitude. Well, to be perfectly frank I would have loved to be another Père Joseph in my youth, but sadly the United States had no Cardinal Richelieu. However, I fear we’re going off on historical comparisons that despite your professors’ great skills lie beyond your current knowledge. We’ll have to come back to that later in the year.’

  The audience laughed and broke into applause. The speaker slipped his notes into a leather folder which the young man in the teal-blue suit took from him respectfully.

  Arthur did not meet Porter after the lecture. He was borne away by several professors who had no wish to see more questions from the floor turn the occasion into a political meeting. He had dinner with the dean and a few members of staff chosen from among the rare Republicans at a university known for its Democratic tendencies. Arthur regretted not having been able to exchange a few words, but the intervention of the athletic young man in the teal-blue suit and his seat in the front row reassured him that Porter had remembered him and intended to maintain their acquaintance. All in good time. The first term was already half over. However fluent his English was, Arthur sometimes felt lost. An entirely new language had come into being on this side of the Atlantic, and he had to assimilate its rambunctious vocabulary, its elisions and simplified grammar, and often its spelling. In the evenings he closeted himself away to fill in the gaps. The evening after the lecture, he was in his room when there was a heavy knock at his door. Concannon was leaning against the doorway, his face flushed, glassy-eyed.

  ‘May I come in?’

  ‘You bet! But I can only offer you coffee.’

  Concannon shrugged. He had not come for a social call. Arthur plugged in his kettle and the professor sat heavily on the edge of his bed, his embarrassing, oddly glazed-looking hands palm up on his thighs.

  A rumour had been going the rounds at Beresford since the start of the school year that Concannon was going downhill. For twenty summers he had been coming back from his vacations in Europe, and every fall he had pulled himself together and delivered a dazzling series of classes in modern history. But this year he seemed unable to get a grip on himself. As the weeks passed he had got worse. Gripping the lectern as if it were a life raft, his head wobbling, he would stretch out a trembling hand to the water jug and miss his glass; asking the class to excuse him for a moment, he would go outside and, without embarrassment, empty his bladder on the lawn outside the lecture theatre. It was reported that one afternoon, after yawning repeatedly, he had told his students, ‘This class is so dull that you’ll excuse me if I take a short nap. Wake me up when it gets interesting.’ Two porters had carried him back to his room. In the close world of a university like Beresford, news circulates too quickly for such a situation to be hushed up. Concannon would not be sacked, but he was to be sent to a rehabilitation clinic and when he came back his post would be filled. The teaching staff, predictably, did not care for him; the students, however, adored him and continued to do their best to protect him both from himself and others. Unsuccessfully, it seemed: he looked unlikely to be coming back the following term.

  Arthur offered him a cup of coffee, warning him that it was hot. Concannon carefully wrapped a cotton handkerchief around the cup, picked it up in both hands, and lifted it to his lips.

  ‘Wait!’ Arthur repeated.

  ‘I can’t tell the difference between hot and cold any more.’

  He drank most of the coffee in a single swallow. His complexion, already more red than pink, turned crimson and Arthur was afraid he might have a heart attack.

  ‘That’s very good,’ he said. ‘Kills the bugs … You have to … They’re everywhere … everywhere …’

  ‘You should come for a morning run with me on the cinder track. Nothing like it for getting rid of the bugs.’

  ‘By far the best way is to drown them before they learn to swim. But I interrupted you. You’re working. You’re an intelligent, ambitious lad. It’s a wonderful thing, ambition … You’ll succeed …’

  Arthur had a strong hunch that Concannon had not just come to pay him compliments.

  ‘You really don’t have anything to drink?’

  Arthur pointed at the framed regulations on the back of the door. Concannon shrugged.

  ‘That’s the theory. There’s a big difference between theory and practice. Your pal Getulio Mendosa’s worked it out.’

  ‘He could get himself expelled.’

  ‘You don’t get expelled for that. Especially if you’re as good an advertisement for us as he is. The great Brazilian martyr’s son! Our country is charged with a divine mission on this earth … and a paternalistic one: the education of the sons of kings. You may not be a king’s son … but someone saw a coming man in you, a new link to a cohort that will save humanity from the deluge.’

  ‘Someone.’

  ‘You know very well who.’

  Invigorated by coffee, Concannon straightened up and began to talk more articulately. He got to his feet, wavered for several seconds, then pointed, without touching it, to the hip pocket of his trousers.

  ‘Do I by any chance have a silver flask in there, filled with miraculous liquor?’

  There was nothing in his pocket.

  ‘Is it all that urgent?’

  Concannon sat down on Arthur’s chair, one elbow leaning on a table heaped with books and papers.

  ‘Urgent? No … Important, yes …’ he said, knitting his untidy bushy black eyebrows.

  ‘I’ll ask Getulio.’

  Along the hall he found Getulio playing poker with John Macomber and two others. Getulio jerked his chin in the direction of the wardrobe. Arthur discovered a flask filled with gin.

  ‘It’s for Concannon.’

  ‘I don’t think anyone thought it was for you.’

  Macomber said, ‘You know what? He already had his skinful by six tonight.’

  Arthur found the professor sitting in the same place, bending over the photo Arthur always kept in front of him: of St Mark’s Square on a luminous day before the war, and a couple holding hands, surrounded by pigeons fluttering around them. The woman was elegant in a provincial way, a little too respectable-looking for her age but charmingly innocent, her face lit up with happiness, dressed in a grey suit, undeniably pretty and above all fresh and regarding her companion admiringly as he offered bread to the pigeons in his open palm.

  ‘You should never touch pigeons. He should have worn gloves. Are they your parents?’

  ‘Nineteen thirty-three. Venice. The classic honeymoon. Apparently I was conceived in the city. I have no memory of the event and I’ve never been back.’

  ‘Nothing’s changed there,’ Concannon said, laughing. ‘Did you find anything?’

  ‘Some gin.’

  ‘Gin has no mercy. Fortunately I’m made of steel.’

  He took two gulps and returned the flask. Arthur screwed the top on and put it out of Concannon’s reach. He had not found himself in such an awkward situation before, face to face with a man drowning himself by degrees, a man who was now beyond rescue. And not just any man, but a brilliant contrarian intelligence in a world of conformists, a professor whose lectures, despite their eccentricity – especially because of their eccentricity! – had liberated cohorts of students from their social prejudices and academic assumptions. Physical strength had kept his decline at bay for a long while, but the time had come when, with the saddest demons of all riding on its back, decline was taking its revenge. He was no longer fighting it. He was succumbing. To look at him, you would have sworn that he was enjoying it, that he was ready to greet his own extinction with an enormous gust of laughter. Arthur put a hand on each shoulder and shook him, in the vain hope of bringing him back to earth.

  ‘Why
did you come? I can’t help you. I don’t even know what to say to you.’

  Concannon looked up at him out of a stricken face on which his exhaustion had scored deep, dark lines, like long-standing scars. Whitish lumps had congealed at the corners of his dried lips.

  ‘There is indeed nothing you can say to me, Morgan, but I need to say something to you. Be on your guard.’

  ‘Against who and what?’

  ‘What a foolish mistake it was to let yourself be sat in the front row with all the big shots at Porter’s lecture! Everyone assumes that you’re his protégé now, some kind of spy from Washington on his payroll. They remember him rooting for your application when they discussed the scholarship.’

  ‘We didn’t know each other then.’

  Whirling his arm, Concannon dismissed Arthur’s feeble protestation.

  ‘What about fate?’

  A historian by training, he had stopped believing in logic long ago and drew his scepticism, or, if you prefer, his disillusionment, from the amused observation that for centuries men have gone on attributing to their intelligence, reason, experience and wisdom what is actually the result of capricious happenstance and chance combinations of uncontrollable events.

  ‘There’s something else,’ Concannon said.

  A violent cough made him double up, his whole body shaken with spasms. When he finally raised his head, his eyes were full of water and he had to inhale and exhale several times to catch his breath enough to start speaking again.

  ‘Crisis time!’ he said, pulling a paper handkerchief out of his pocket. He blew his nose at length before studying the handkerchief with disgust and throwing it in the waste-paper basket.

  ‘Can I get you another coffee?’

  ‘It’s a pity you don’t have any Armagnac, or a drop of Calvados.’

  ‘There’s gin.’

  ‘No thank you.’

  ‘It would be good for you to go back to your rooms. I’ll come with you as far as your door.’

  Concannon dug two fingers cautiously into his right-hand jacket pocket and pulled out an envelope that he tossed quickly onto the table. Arthur read his own name, without recognising the handwriting. Doubled up again, the professor appeared determined not to help him, remaining completely absorbed in his elegant Italian shoes. Arthur put out his hand towards the envelope and then, after a hesitation, withdrew it.

  ‘I see what this is about!’ Concannon said, in an appallingly hoarse voice. ‘You aren’t willing to share, are you? One day you too will realise that the only thing a pretty woman wants from a man of my age is to play gooseberry … Can I have another coffee?’

  ‘You won’t sleep.’

  ‘Insomnia is the handmaiden of all knowledge.’

  What knowledge was he talking about? At this moment, in his present state, doubled up like a broken puppet, knowledge seemed little more than a desperate struggle to connect the fleeting visions that were all that remained of his fine, imaginative intelligence. At last he lifted his head, and Arthur saw a lost expression on his face, as if he had just come back from a long journey round the cosmos. It was an expression of a tragic admission of helplessness.

  Arthur cleared a pile of books off a stool and put the cup down.

  ‘I think,’ Concannon said, ‘I think …’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Oh, you know, it’s not really at all important now.’

  ‘I insist.’

  He drank his coffee in small sips, then put the cup down so clumsily that it fell off the stool and broke on the bare wooden floor. Arthur was about to squat down to pick up the pieces, but Concannon was quicker, and falling to his knees he swept them up into a handkerchief that he gave to Arthur.

  ‘I’m sorry. I hope it didn’t have any sentimental value.’

  ‘Only twenty cents. There’s nothing to be sorry about.’

  He helped Concannon stand up and, supporting him firmly under the arms, steered him towards the door.

  ‘I’ll take you back.’

  ‘No! Twenty years I’ve been in this shitty university, and you think I don’t know my way?’

  Just now you said, “I think, I think …”’

  Concannon raised himself to his full height and comically thrust out his broad chest.

  ‘I think … I think … in fact, I’m sure that love is a divine punishment … God hands us over to the Devil … That’s what I think … I swear it … It’s the truth.’

  ‘I’ll take you back.’

  ‘No farther than your front door. I don’t want you to know where I’m going.’

  ‘It’s a promise.’

  A light snowfall was flickering white in the pools of light cast by the lamps along the main avenue.

  ‘A mantle of purity,’ Concannon said as they reached the door, after a difficult negotiation of the staircase. ‘Why are we condemned to besmirch everything we touch?’

  He sat down on the first step, unlaced his shoes and pulled his socks off, comically wiggling his toes.

  ‘For the odd delicate gesture I have made I’ll be forgiven much in the final reckoning … I thank you for not warning me that I’ll catch cold walking barefoot in the snow. One should always avoid saying pointless things. One more thing … You know, I feel much better after that last coffee … one more thing … it was Augusta who slipped that note into the envelope that’s waiting for you on your table. She’s afraid that Getulio would recognise her handwriting in the mail … Say, Morgan, aren’t you scared of the Devil?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That’s good. Help me stand up.’

  Arthur put his hands under Concannon’s armpits and hoisted him upright with an exhausting effort. Swaying, Concannon leant against the frame of the door and wagged his finger at Arthur threateningly. ‘I forbid – FORBID – you to follow me.’ He filled his lungs with air, walked mechanically and hastily down the three steps and started off along the avenue, already covered with a fine sprinkling of snow that was the colour of butter where the lamps cast their cones of light. Arthur gazed after the comical silhouette of the professor hopping joyfully, like a child let out to play, shoes and socks held out in front of him, until he disappeared into a poorly lit area between two rows of houses whose curtains were drawn, their windows letting out only weak glimmers of light.

  Augusta wrote: ‘Arturo meu, think of me. I hope you miss me. See you soon! A.’

  A photograph fell out of the envelope. On the back he read, ‘This is Augusta Mendosa, aged eighteen, in her youth, three years ago, in Paris, on the Quai des Grands … Augustins (of course). Taken by her brother, a certain Getulio.’

  She was still wearing a plait. Behind her, a second-hand bookseller in a blue jacket and Landais beret was leaning into the frame. In the distance were the blurred towers of Notre-Dame. Arthur placed the photo next to the picture of the newly married couple in Venice. The two young women, of course, did not look anything like each other. The face of the new Madame Morgan shone with innocent happiness, while Augusta’s showed a put-on cheekiness and the knowledge that behind her a clown-like intruder was trying to get into the picture. Looking at the two of them, Arthur was aware of the infinite distance that separated them; and yet at a particular moment in their life they had felt, if only for a few seconds, the same joy, the joy of being young. Whenever his gaze lingered on the Venice photo, he was gripped by sadness. The young, attractive woman in the picture had known only a brief happiness in her life: it had been less than six years between marriage and the declaration of war. Afterwards she had been left alone with Arthur, too young to protect her or guide her or give her the confidence in life she had sorely lacked. Perhaps worst of all was that, for all the tenderness and passion she showed for her son, she was almost embarrassed when he tried to confide in her. She changed the subject, deflecting his confidences, destroying the intimacy he had hoped for. Even that expression of hers, ‘the great and the good’, of which she reminded him in every other letter, had become as annoying as i
t could be. What did she think? That he wouldn’t make the most of the opportunity offered by his Beresford scholarship? It showed how little she knew him. He worked hard, harder than the majority of students did, he refused attempts to distract him or get him to go out, and he still knew nothing of the America beyond the university campus. So when she wrote, ‘Uncle Eugène is offended that you haven’t sent him any news. Remember he’s your godfather,’ he tore the letter up. What could he say to an old bore who had spent his life behind a bank counter and now, in his eighties, smelling of piss, his grey beard stained with tobacco, sat by his wireless in his slippers listening to brain-rot panel games for twelve hours a day? Or worse still, when his mother kept telling him that ‘Our cousin, Sister Marie of the Victory, complains that you don’t write to her. When you were little, your letters used to make her laugh till she cried. She would read them to the other nuns, who all enjoyed them, and she would very much like to know what she should think about America.’ The thought of all those dear nuns listening thoughtfully as Sister Marie read out his letters at the end of their frugal supper in their glacial refectory decorated only with a Sulpician image of the Holy Virgin above a bouquet of artificial arum lilies, sitting motionless on their hard chairs and nodding their starched headdresses approvingly at the contents of the newspaper or a letter that ‘was of interest to the community’, the thought paralysed him as soon as, softened by his mother’s words, he felt himself about to give in and compose a few lines to send to Sister Marie.

  He drew back his curtain a few inches. The snow was still falling. How could he have obeyed Concannon’s order so easily and let him go alone out into the night, hopping down the empty avenue, arms spread wide like a tightrope walker? What if the poor man had fallen down? He wouldn’t be able to get up. Arthur took the stairs two at a time, and stopped at the front door. The snow was starting to cover Concannon’s hesitant steps. He must have walked, legs wide apart, to an asphalted central reservation where the snowflakes melted as soon as they touched the ground. To Arthur’s right and left were rows of bungalows, used mostly as accommodation for professors and administrative staff. They were all quiet, already sunk in the night’s muffled silence. Arthur could not identify Concannon’s bungalow among them. He was about to try to read the names on the doors when the lights on campus went out, as they did every night at midnight. There was snow melting in his hair, a trickle of icy water was running down the back of his neck, and his loafers were filling up with water. Feeling his way in the silent, icy darkness, he managed to get back to the fraternity house, where the door was still open. He walked upstairs; the timer on the light was set so short that students had to run upstairs if they didn’t want to be plunged into darkness before they got to the first floor. On the landing, as the light went off, he bumped into Getulio.