In Partial Disgrace. Charles Newman
ill at ease in the great out-of-doors—a woman, he surmised, who either suffered from sleeping sickness or had been traumatized by giving life. The Professor’s attitude toward them all was at once devoted, exacting, and absent, and for Father too they quickly disappeared from his mind forever.
“Welcome, welcome to the land of the three wishes.”
Mother had appeared on the veranda in all her golden glory, hair falling about her shoulders, a welcome tray of raspberry-colored spritzers in her hands. Entranced, the Professor dropped the rope and dreamily advanced up the curving stair, clearly disoriented but homing in on Mother’s golden bee. She said something sweetly inaudible, and his right hand came up to his heart as he bowed. Felix was gazing into Scharf ’s eyes, the Professor into Ainoha’s. The other women held onto one another. The air was full of incipient disaster. But as the Professor toasted his hostess and greedily drank his spritzer, walking downstairs backward to regrasp the rope which Felix had held for him, Ainoha realized at once, as so many times before, that she had rendered the other women invisible and must immediately deal with the consequences. She set down the tray, descended the stair and pried the dour child’s hand from her mother’s. Then she took the dazed wife’s arm as a man might at a cotillion, and matching the fierce stare of the red-helmeted mother, escorted them all to the grove, where Cherith’s Brook careened around its stony corners, exposing the gnarled roots of horse chestnut trees and providing sufficient grottos and ladders for the least inquisitive of animals.
No word had yet passed among the men; it was as if we were in a silent film running backward. The three of us stood alone with Scharf in the courtyard. The animal read my father immediately, rolled over and over, twining the rope about his neck so as to strangle himself, and in the process jerked the Professor to his knees. The men took each other’s measure, and the courting began. Father crouched to wind up the coils of rope and, laying one hand on the Professor’s knee while the other rested even more gently across the animal’s foam-flecked mouth, inquired with a dry laugh:
“And what seems to be the problem, Herr Doktor Professor?”
From his knees, the Professor twisted his huge head to one side and came right to the point:
“He won’t mind.”
Felix stepped across Scharf ’s tummy, his four legs were now rigid and pointing to the heavens. “Ah, yes,” he murmured, “there appears in his makeup a great distance from the lip to the cup.” Then he pointed out that Scharf was apparently a cross between the rare stickelhäar and the now extinct Polish sea-hound, a point of origin which seemed to hold no interest for his client.
“How did you come by this animal?” Felix inquired.
The Professor shrugged. “My daughter. She wanted an orphan. She picked him out at the doghaus.”
“And this is your first family pet?” A question to which he already knew the answer, so didn’t listen to the reply.
The Professor had raised himself up, and dusting off his knees, emitted a huge sigh. “He’s turned out to be . . . a kind of joke!” he blurted.
“A tragical joke, it seems,” Felix added, taking the coil of rope softly from his client’s hands.
“Exactly. Though I confess I’ve developed a sort of strange affection for the animal and his perversities.”
Scharf ’s paws were now milling in the air as he dug a furrow of gravel with his skull.
“Does he make you feel safer in your home?”
“On the contrary,” the Professor said candidly, “the entire house has been arranged in his defense.” Then, more softly, “If the truth be told, he spends most of the day in the children’s beds.”
Felix nodded gravely. He had seen many similar cases among those reared in the doghaus, he explained—a particular form of neurasthenia in which the animal took to bed in the prime of life, choosing a soft landing when he ought to be charging through the park and challenging everything that moves. Lacking human stimulation in his early youth, he went on wearily, the dog becomes equally unresponsive to love or fear.
“This dog has thrust himself between the legs of your life, forcing his way into your heart, and there he proclaims, if you even think of dislodging him, if you say so much as ‘go out and play,’ that he will kill himself!”
“Extortion by defenselessness?” the Professor queried.
“You are on the right track. You see, he doesn’t want to get any better, because that might mean losing what little he has.” And he looked down with pity at the bland criminal groveling upside down in his drive.
“The dog does virtually nothing,” Felix went on, “yet you say he does not mind. There is, if you will permit me, a contradiction here.”
The Professor was rapidly warming to the role of the interrogated. “Well, yes, go on, then.”
“Does the animal in question prefer any of you?”
The Professor seemed at a loss.
“Your daughter, perhaps?”
The Professor reflected at length, then, folding his arms: “He prefers my daughter’s . . . bed.”
Felix stared kindly at him. “The animal in question does not love you,” he said softly, “and this is an affront.”
The Professor nodded. “There is no dignity . . .”
“He doesn’t give a fig for dignity!” Felix interrupted. “What is worse, if I may say so, is not so much that he is ill, but that the illness bores you!”
The Professor was fidgeting, shifting from foot to foot. “It is true,” he muttered, “that in this animal there is not a great deal to admire.”
“So the problem, really, is whether this ‘joke,’ as you put it, will become even more tragical. Or perhaps more interestingly, how much tragedy a joke can stand.”
“You put it well, although I fear we have left poor Scharf behind in the richness of the diagnosis.”
“That should be the clue that there was not much there to begin with.”
“No one is suggesting that he promised more.”
“Scharf is an open book, Herr Professor. He is neither a rebel nor a saint. He is not even suffering in the strict sense, or rather, he suffers from a vagueness of personality, a deficit of character. Upon this you can project nothing, and so nothing comes back. Like the lumpenproletariat, you wonder why he does not rebel against his circumstances, and when you are not wondering about that, you are wondering why he does not thank you for your charitable impulse to keep him alive.”
“This may all be true,” the Professor stiffened, “but hoping for a small progress is a human frailty, which you apparently ridicule. Perhaps we ought to take our leave.”
Felix commenced a shrug, but then apparently thought better of it, and put his arm warmly around his client’s rigid shoulders.
“Do not fear my candor, sir. My friends are well-known and legion, for only the most decent people can put up with me. Let us, you and I, have a confession couleur, a conversation galante.”
Then, before the Professor could object, Felix told him straightaway that Scharf was a hopeless case that only the most intensive treatment and objective stimulation would make an even remotely palatable companion, and that a cure, in any accepted sense of the word, was impossible.
This seemed to intrigue his client as much as it appalled him. But Felix, always conscious of giving value for money, nevertheless tried to put the animal through some paces. He grasped the rope like a lunge line on a recalcitrant pony, and with a flick of his wrists sent long ripples along the rope, which thudded like soft Papuan waves into Scharf ’s vagus nerve. Rather than pulling on the animal, he was sending energy out. It was a trick he had learned from working with horses, and while it worked much