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 recognize 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
