The Nice Old Man and the Pretty Girl (7 page)

There followed a number of exclamation marks to bring out the difficulty of the task the moralist had set himself. How would it be possible for him to convince old men that it was their duty to look after like daughters, girls whom, if they were allowed, they would take as lovers? Experience taught that old men would show a heartfelt interest only in the fate of girls who had already been their mistresses. It was necessary to prove that it was not essential to pass through love in order to reach affection.

This was more or less the line taken by the old man’s thought. Till now he had smiled at it, because he held that, as his methodical inquiry proceeded, he would be able to see the details of the problem more clearly.

He tried to draw his nurse into his work. All he wanted her to do was to listen to him. At his first words she flew into a passion: “So you are still thinking of that woman?”

Clearly any theory must die strangled if you begin by calling the girl who was its true mother that woman.

Then he tried the doctor. Apparently he liked the theory. The doctor noticed a real improvement in the old man’s condition, and therefore could not fail to like a theory which he found useful. But it was hard for him to accept it in itself. He, too, old though he was, since he was in good health, looked at life with the keen desire of a person of intelligence and refused to admit that he was shut out from any of its manifestations.

“At bottom,” he said to the old man, “you want to give us too much importance. We are by no means so very seductive.” He looked at the old man and then he looked at himself in the glass.

“Yet we do seduce,” said the old man, secure in his own experience.

“When that happens no great harm is done,” remarked the doctor, smiling.

The old man also tried to smile, but the effort ended in a grimace. He, on the contrary, knew that a lot of harm was done.

Then the doctor remembered that he was first of all a doctor and stopped discussing the theory, that is to say the medicine which he himself considered
to be important. He even wanted to help the theory, to play a part in it, but it was natural that his touch should destroy the old man’s illusions. “If you like,” he told the old man, “I will get you a book called
The Old Man
. Old age is treated in it as a disease, it is true, but one which does not last long.”

The old man argued: “Old age a disease? A part of life a disease? Then what can youth be?”

“I believe that youth is not complete health either,” said the doctor, “but that is another matter. Youth often catches diseases, but they are generally diseases without complications. In the case of an old man, however, even a cold is a complicated disease. This must have some significance.”

“It proves merely that an old man is weak. In fact,” cried the old man triumphantly, “he is only a youth grown feeble.” He had found it. This discovery would have its place in his theory and would help it enormously. “Therefore, to prevent his weakness becoming a disease, the old man needs a thoroughly sound morality.” Modesty prevented him from saying that his work would supply this morality, but that was what he thought.

This conversation with the doctor, which had proved so helpful to him, should have encouraged him to continue. But one day the doctor betrayed what he really thought so clearly that the old man realised that they had nothing in common.

One day, in the course of working out his ideas, the old man found himself obliged to go into the
question of what rights old age had over youth. Great Heavens, the Bible had not been written for nothing. Did youth owe obedience to age? Respect? Affection?

The doctor began to laugh, and when he laughed he liked to reveal his inmost thoughts. “Obedience? Instant, because old men must not be kept waiting. Respect? All the young girls in Trieste on their knees to make it more easy to choose them. Affection? The good, solid kind, arms round the neck, or somewhere else, and lips pressed to lips.”

In fact the poor old man had no luck. He had not found a kindred spirit. He did not realise that, as the doctor had not experienced the great attack of angina, he was not an old man like himself.

But even this discussion bore fruit, if only of a negative kind. Several pages already written were put in quarantine by the old man inside a white sheet of paper on which he wrote: “What does youth owe to age?”

Sometimes the theory got into a tangle and it was difficult to go on. Then the old man felt really ill. He had laid aside the work, thinking that a little rest would bring him the clearness he wanted, but the days ran emptily on. Suddenly death came nearer. Now the old man had time to feel the unsteady beating of his heart and to listen to his breathing, tired and noisy.

It was during one of these periods that he sent and asked the girl to come to see him. He hoped that seeing her again would be enough to reawaken his
remorse, which was his chief incentive to write. But he failed to get the expected help, even from that quarter.

The girl had continued to develop. Smartly dressed, as on her last visit, she had evidently expected to be received with kisses. The old man was not very severe, not from embarrassment this time, but from indifference. By now he loved all youth of both sexes, including the dear girl in old clothes and even this doll, so proud of her dresses that she would talk about them in front of a looking-glass.

Indeed, she had developed to such an extent that she complained that the money was no longer enough and asked him to increase her allowance.

This called up the old man’s business instinct. “What makes you think I owe you money?” he asked, smiling.

“Was it not you who seduced me?” asked the poor girl, doubtless carrying out the instructions she had been given.

The old man remained calm. The rebuke did not really affect him in the slightest. He argued the point, saying that it needed two to make love, and that for his part he had used neither force nor cunning.

She gave way at once and did not insist. Probably she was sorry and annoyed that she had spoken as she did, she who had always done her best not to appear mercenary.

To put her into a better frame of mind and in the hope of experiencing once again even a little of the old emotion, he told her that he had remembered her in his will.

“I know and thank you,” she said. The old man did not point out the strangeness of the fact that she believed that she knew about his will, which had been kept secret, and accepted her thanks.

The talk was such a disillusion to him that he thought of making a fresh will and leaving the rest of his property to some charitable institution.

He did nothing simply, simply because theorisers are very slow when it comes to acting.

That is how the old man found himself alone, face to face with his theory.

Meanwhile the very long preface to his work was finished and was to his mind a magnificent success, so much so that he was always reading it over as a stimulus to further efforts.

In the preface he had only set out to prove that the world needed his work. Though he did not know it, this was the easiest part of his treatise. In fact every work that proposes to build up a theory consists of two parts. The first is devoted to demolishing previous theories, or, better still, to criticizing the existing state of affairs, whereas to the second falls the difficult task of building up things on a new foundation, and this is far from easy. It has been the fate of a theorist
to publish in his lifetime two whole volumes to prove that things were thoroughly bad and unjust. The world was out of joint and refused to mend itself even when his heirs published the third posthumous volume, the object of which was to show it the way it should go. A theory is always complex and in developing it it is impossible to see it at once in all its bearings. Theorists appear preaching the destruction of a particular animal, cats, for instance. They write and write and do not at first notice that round their theory, as a necessary corollary, rats spring up wholesale. It is a long time before the theorist stumbles against this difficulty and asks in despair: “What am I going to do with these rats?”

My old man was still a long way from these troubles. There is nothing nicer or more fluent than the preface to a theory. The old man found that youth in this world lacked something which would make it even more attractive, a healthy old age to love it and help it. Plenty of work and thought had gone into the preface, because there he had to state the problem in all its aspects. So the old man began with the beginning, like the Bible. Old men—when they were still not so very old—had reproduced themselves in the young with great ease and some pleasure. As life was passed on from one organism to another, it was difficult to be sure whether it had been raised or improved. The centuries of history behind us were too short to give us the necessary experience. But after
reproduction there might be spiritual progress if the relations between old and young were perfect, and if a healthy youth could lean for support upon a thoroughly healthy old age. Hence the aim of the book was to prove the need of health in old men for the good of the world. According to the old man the future of the world, that is, the power of the young who were to make this future, depended upon the aid and the instruction of the old.

There was also a second part to the preface. If he had been able, the old man would have divided it into many parts. The second tried to prove the advantage that would accrue to an old man from a pure relationship with the young. With his own children purity was easy, but his relations must not in any circumstances be impure with the companions of his children. The old man, if pure, would enjoy a longer and healthier life, which, in his view, would be of the utmost utility to society.

The first chapter was also a preface, for, of course, he must describe the actual state of things. Old men misused youth and youth despised old men. Young men passed laws to prevent old men remaining at the head of affairs, and on their side old men promoted laws to prevent the rise of young men when they were too young. Does not this rivalry imply a state of affairs harmful to human progress? What had age to do with appointments to office?

These prefaces, of which I give only the kernel, brought a good deal of trouble and a good deal of health to the poor old man for several months. Then there were other chapters which went easily enough and gave him no trouble, in spite of his weak state, the polemical chapters. One was devoted to showing that old age was not a disease. The old man thought he had been particularly happy in that chapter. How was it possible to believe that old age was a disease, when it was only the continuation of youth? Some other element must intervene to change health into disease, something which the old man failed to discover.

Then, according to the old man’s plan, the work was to be divided into two parts. One was to treat of the manner in which society must be organised if it was to have healthy old men, the other dealt with the organisation of youth in such a way as to regulate its relations with old age.

Here, however, at every step the old man found himself interrupted in his work by the invasion of the rodents. I have already spoken of the sheets he had laid aside, wrapped in a piece of paper, meaning to begin work upon them again when some of his doubts had been cleared up. Many batches of other sheets had afterwards been sent to join them.

Thus he never forgot that money had played an important part in his adventure with the girl. For some days he wrote that money, which usually belongs
to the old, ought to be confiscated to prevent its being used for purposes of corruption and it is astonishing how many hours elapsed before he realised how painful it would be for him to be deprived of his own money. Then he stopped writing on the subject and laid these pages aside in the expectation of receiving more light.

On another occasion he thought of insisting that even in the first class in the elementary school it should not be forgotten that the purpose of life is a healthy old age. When youth sins it does not suffer and it causes less suffering. Then the sin of an old man is equal to about two sins of a young man. It is a sin quite apart from the example he sets. Hence, according to our theorist, from the very first children should study how to grow old healthily. But then he felt that with such reasoning the path to virtue was not clearly blazed. If a young man’s sin were so light a matter, where was the education of the old man to begin? And on the paper in which he buried these sheets he wrote: Must consider when the education of the old man is to commence.

There were pages in which the old man endeavoured to prove that, if old age was to be healthy, it must be surrounded with healthy young people. The system of setting aside sheets instead of destroying them helped the growth of contradictions which escaped the author’s notice. These last pages revealed in the writer a certain amount of ill-feeling against
youth. On the whole it was true that, if youth had been healthy, old age would not have been able to sin. Its greater physical strength already protected it from violence. On the sheet that enclosed so much philosophy was written: “With whom must morality begin?”

And the old man went on piling up his doubts with the idea that he was building something. But the effort was really too much for his strength, and with the return of winter the doctor also noticed a further physical decline in his patient. He made inquiries and ended by guessing that the theory which had done him so much good was now doing harm. “Why don’t you change the subject?” he asked him. “You should put this work on one side and take up something else.”

The old man would not take him into his confidence, and declared that he was just playing with the subject as a pastime. He feared the critic’s eye, but he thought he would fear it only until he had finished the work.

This time the doctor’s intervention did not have a good effect. The old man meant to settle seriously down to the work, solving one doubt after another, and began by returning to the question of what the old should expect from the young. For several days he wrote in growing excitement, then for several days he sat at his desk reading what he had written over and over again.