The owner finished his sausage, and felt in his pocket for a packet of cigarettes. There was one left in the crushed packet, and he broke it in half, placing one end in his mouth and the other he returned to the packet.
The cat moved on his lap, and lifting a leg above its head began to scratch, the irritation proceeding to his owner, who half consciously dug his nails under his left armpit and scratched in company.
‘You give me your fleas, you little filthy thing,’ he said, and the cat gazed up solemnly into his face, caring not at all. It was a big heavy cat and its breath smelt of fish.
There was a tap at the door later, and a fat, undersized boy came into the room, carrying a scuttle of coals. He had little round eyes at the top of his head, idiot’s eyes, and a silly, vacant smile. His hair was thick and curly.
The owner looked up from his notes. ‘What do you want, Gustav?’ he said. The boy put down his scuttle, giggling, and shuffled away towards the door.
‘I told you not to bring more than one scuttle a day,’ came the command. ‘Have you no idea of the price of coal? Do you want to ruin me?’
The boy said nothing, his eyes blinking foolishly.
‘Come here,’ said the owner. The boy advanced, his loose mouth drooping, and when he stood before the chair the man slapped him twice across the face. He smiled as he did so, liking the contact and the sting against the flesh, and because he liked it he slapped him again.
‘Get out,’ he said. ‘Get out.’
The boy crept from the room, sobbing loudly, and this little scene appeared to have given the owner fresh appetite, for he cut off another slice of sausage and another slice of cheese, and mashed them together with crumb of bread, and then, reaching for his wine, he poured some of it on top. In this way he could make a soup of his food.
After his meal he loosened his trousers, and settled before his fire, leaning forward first to grasp an old, greasy newspaper that was tucked away at the back of the scuttle. It was a week-old newspaper, torn across the middle, but this he did not seem to mind, for all news was alike to him, and he read in detail every scrap of printing that was upon this newspaper, from a speech in the Chambre des Députés to an advertisement for impotence.
Presently his grip on the paper relaxed, and his chin dropped; soon his head lolled at a foolish angle and his mouth hung open.
He slept for two hours perhaps, breathing heavily, snoring from time to time, and when he awoke his fire was out and darkness was beyond the windows. For a moment he was startled, his heart hammering in his chest; he did not know where he was or why he should be there.Was he alone, was he himself, had not there been a dream, and the sound of a voice, and a cry in the night? Was that the whisper of a flute in the air? Had someone tapped on the ceiling overhead, and were those footsteps echoing away, down the dark passage, lost and then hushed into silence?
A whimper escaped from him, and he fumbled at the table by his side for matches. When he struck a match and the feeble light showed him the room, and the drooping canary, and the sleeping cat, it was as though a finger laid itself on his brain and closed down a shutter. He was all right, he was home. He had been dreaming. He was reassured to find himself in safety, but as he groped down to the fire to blow at the fallen grey embers, he was aware of a dull blank pain in his side colder than the airless chill of the room, a pain that was born of an old longing and a dead thought. He knew that when he was asleep he did not suffer this pain, but walked in a land he had once known and which belonged to him.
It was soon after his seventy-second birthday that Julius Lévy fell victim to a stroke. Nobody knew how it had happened, but he was found one afternoon lying face downwards on the terrace, close to the door of the aviary. He must have been listening to the birds singing, so the gardener said - it was the gardener who found him there - and then been seized without warning, and stumbled and fallen without having the time to save himself or to utter a cry.
At first the gardener thought he was dead, but when he had summoned help and they had carried the great unwieldy body to his room, they found that he was still breathing.
The servants were flustered and very much afraid; nobody seemed to know what should be done for the best.Then a doctor was summoned, and as soon as he came into the house order reigned amongst the scattered staff, there was discipline where there had been confusion, a feeling of regularity was theirs, a return to normality after the madness of many years.
Nurses were in attendance night and day. The tone of the solitary, unkept mansion changed to a brisk hygienic atmosphere; it was like the sudden installation of a hospital, brisk and coldly efficient. Windows were flung open that had been closed now for so long, and the warm June sunshine poured into these lifeless rooms, bringing the scent of flowers and songs of birds, bringing also the distant clamour and movement that was Paris.
Julius Lévy stretched upon his bed felt none of this.The stroke had rendered him powerless and dumb. He would lie through the endless days and nights with his eyes closed, the breath coming through his open mouth harsh and loud. The doctors could not tell how long he would endure. It might be hours, they said, it might be years.
Because he was still living, he must be washed and fed, and tended regularly like a baby just born into the world; and he was as helpless as a baby now, as pitiful, as weak.
It was nearly three months after he received his stroke that Julius Lévy returned to partial consciousness.
One day the nurse found that he could open his eyes, a little later he was able to move his hands. Whether this was the sign of eventual recovery or whether this was the last flickering effort of life before the end, no one could tell. He remained in this state for several days. He noticed the faces round about him, the nurses who attended to his wants, and he smiled at them like a baby smiles, grateful for the nourishment they gave him, the gentleness of their touch, and for the security with which they took his body into their keeping.
It was supreme relaxation. It was a negation of life and a returning once more to the beginning.
One lovely summer’s afternoon they wheeled him on to the terrace so that he should feel the air blow upon his face and should sleep under the warm rays of the sun. He did not sleep, though; he was too interested in the colours of the garden, in the scents and sounds, in the movement of things. His eyes moved restlessly from side to side, and later - tired by all he had seen - he lay still again, his eyes turned upwards to the sky. He would watch the white clouds passing across the face of the sky. They seemed so near to him, surely they were easy to hold and to caress; strange moving things belonging to the wide blue space of heaven.
They floated just above his head, they almost brushed his eyelids as they passed, and he had only to grasp at the long curling fringe of them with his fingers and they would belong to him instead, becoming part of him for ever.
Not yet did he understand, for a puzzled look crept into his eyes, and he frowned his ancient baby frown of an old man, while from the innermost part of his being came the long-drawn pitiful wail that can never be explained, the eternal question of the earth to the skies: ‘Who am I? Where from? Where to?’ The sigh of the baby, the cry of the old man.
The first cry and the last.
He cried to them and they did not come. They passed away from him as though they had never been, indifferent and aloof; like wreaths of white smoke they were carried away by the wind, born of nothing, dissolving into nothing, a momentary breath that vanished in the air.
His last instinct was to stretch out his hands to the sky.
FINIS
Paris, January - Bodinnick, November
, 1931.