The bread was stale, the sausage rather horsey and spiced with garlic; but Mr. Cardan, who had had no tea, ate with a relish. Still more appreciatively he drank. In a little while he felt a little more cheerful. Such are the little crosses, he reflected philosophically, the little crosses one has to bear when one sets out to earn money. If he got through the evening without falling into a ditch, he’d feel that he had paid lightly for his treasure. The greatest bore was these mosquitoes; he lighted a cigar and tried to fumigate them to a respectful distance. Without much success, however. Perhaps the brutes were malarial, too. There might be a little of the disease still hanging about in these marshes; one never knew. It would be tiresome to end one’s days with recurrent fever and an enlarged spleen. It would be tiresome, for that matter, to end one’s days anyhow, in one’s bed or out, naturally or unnaturally, by the act of God or of the King’s enemies. Mr. Cardan’s thoughts took on, all at once, a dismal complexion. Old age, sickness, decrepitude; the bath-chair, the doctor, the bright efficient nurse; and the long agony, the struggle for breath, the thickening darkness, the end, and then—how did that merry little song go?
More work for the undertaker,
’Nother little job for the coffin-maker.
At the local cemetery they are
Very very busy with a brand new grave.
He’ll keep warm next winter.
Mr. Cardan hummed the tune to himself cheerfully enough. But his tough, knobbly face became so hard, so strangely still, an expression of such bitterness, such a profound melancholy, appeared in his winking and his supercilious eye, that it would have startled and frightened a man to look at him. But there was nobody in that deepening twilight to see him. He sat there alone.
At the local cemetery they are
Very very busy with a brand new grave . .
He went on humming. ‘If I were to fall sick,’ he was thinking, ‘who would look after me? Suppose one were to have a stroke. Hemorrhage on the brain; partial paralysis; mumbling speech; the tongue couldn’t utter what the brain thought; one was fed like a baby; clysters; such a bright doctor, rubbing his hands and smelling of disinfectant and eau-de-Cologne; saw nobody but the nurse; no friends; or once a week, perhaps, for an hour, out of charity; ‘Poor old Cardan, done for, I’m afraid; must send the old chap a fiver—hasn’t a penny, you know; get up a subscription; what a bore; astonishing that he can last so long. . . .’
He’ll keep warm next winter.
The tune ended on a kind of trumpet call, rising from the dominant to the tonic—one dominant, three repeated tonics, drop down again to the dominant and then on the final syllable of ‘winter’ the last tonic. Finis, and no da capo, no second movement.
Mr. Cardan took another swig from his bottle; it was nearly empty now.
Perhaps one ought to have married. Kitty, for example. She would be old now and fat; or old and thin, like a skeleton very imperfectly disguised. Still, he had been very much in love with Kitty. Perhaps it would have been a good thing if he had married her. Pooh! with a burst of mocking laughter Mr. Cardan laughed aloud savagely. Marry indeed! She looked very coy, no doubt; but you bet, she was a little tart underneath, and lascivious as you make them. He remembered her with hatred and contempt. Portentous obscenities reverberated through the chambers of his mind.
He thought of arthritis, he thought of gout, of cataract, of deafness. . . . And in any case, how many years were left him? Ten, fifteen, twenty if he were exceptional. And what years, what years!
Mr. Cardan emptied the bottle and replacing the cork threw it into the black water beneath him. The wine had done nothing to improve his mood. He wished to God he were back at the palace, with people round him to talk to. Alone, he was without defence. He tried to think of something lively and amusing; indoor sports, for example. But instead of indoor sports he found himself contemplating visions of disease, decrepitude, death. And it was the same when he tried to think of reasonable, serious things: what is art, for example? and what was the survival value to a species of eyes or wings or protective colouring in their rudimentary state, before they were developed far enough to see, fly or protect? Why should the individuals having the first and still quite useless variation in the direction of something useful have survived more effectively than those who were handicapped by no eccentricity? Absorbing themes. But Mr. Cardan couldn’t keep his attention fixed on them. General paralysis of the insane, he reflected, was luckily an ailment for which he had not qualified in the past; luckily! miraculously, even! But stone, but neuritis, but fatty degeneration, but diabetes. . . . Lord, how he wished he had somebody to talk to!
And all at once, as though in immediate answer to his prayer, he heard the sound of voices approaching through the now complete darkness. ‘Thank the Lord!’ said Mr. Cardan, and scrambling to his feet he walked in the direction from which the voices came. Two black silhouettes, one tall and masculine, the other, very small, belonging to a woman, loomed up out of the dark. Mr. Cardan removed the cigar from his mouth, took off his hat and bowed in their direction.
‘Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita,’ he began,
‘mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
che la diritta via era smarrita.’
How lucky that Dante should also have lost his way, six hundred and twenty-four years ago! ‘In a word,’ Mr. Cardan went on, ‘ho perso la mia strada—though I have my doubts whether that’s very idiomatic. Forse potrebbero darmi qualche indicazione.’ In the presence of the strangers and at the sound of his own voice conversing, all Mr. Cardan’s depression had vanished. He was delighted by the fantastic turn he had managed to give the conversation at its inception. Perhaps with a little ingenuity he would be able to find an excuse for treating them to a little Leopardi. It was so amusing to astonish the natives.
The two silhouettes, meanwhile, had halted at a little distance. When Mr. Cardan had finished his macaronic self-introduction, the taller of them answered in a harsh and, for a man’s, a shrill voice: ‘There’s no need to talk Italian. We’re English.’
‘I’m enchanted to hear it,’ Mr. Cardan protested. And he explained at length and in his mother tongue what had happened to him. It occurred to him, at the same time, that this was a very odd place to find a couple of English tourists.
The harsh voice spoke again. ‘There’s a path to Massarosa through the fields,’ it said. ‘And there’s another, in the opposite direction, that joins the Viareggio road. But they’re not very easy to find in the dark, and there are a lot of ditches.’
‘One can but perish in the attempt,’ said Mr. Cardan gallantly.
This time it was the woman who spoke. ‘I think it would be better,’ she said, ‘if you slept at our house for the night. You’ll never find the way. I almost tumbled into the ditch myself just now.’ She laughed shrilly and more loudly, Mr. Cardan thought, at greater length, than was necessary.
‘But have we room?’ asked the man in a tone which showed that he was very reluctant to receive a guest.
‘But you know we’ve got room,’ the feminine voice answered in a tone of child-like astonishment. ‘It’s rough, though.’
‘That doesn’t matter in the least,’ Mr. Cardan assured her. ‘I’m most grateful to you for your offer,’ he added, making haste to accept the invitation before the man could take it back. He had no desire to go wandering at night among these ditches. Moreover, the prospect of having company, and odd company, he guessed, was alluring. ‘Most grateful,’ he repeated.
‘Well, if you think there’s room,’ said the man grudgingly.
‘Of course there is,’ the feminine voice replied, and laughed again. ‘Isn’t it six spare rooms that we’ve got? or is it seven? Come with us, Mr. . . . Mr. . . .’
‘Cardan.’
‘. . . Mr. Cardan. We’re going straight home. Such fun,’ she added,
