The Manticore

But, och! it hardens a' within,

And petrifies the feeling.

"You are a particularly gentle boy," he said (and I was startled and resented it); it would not take many bad experiences to scar your feelings over and make you much less than the man you may otherwise become. If you seduced my daughter, I should be very angry and might hate you; the physical injury is really not very much, if indeed it is anything at all, but the psychological injury – you see I am too much caught up in the modern way of speaking to be quite able to say the spiritual injury – could be serious if we all parted bad friends. There are people, of course, to whom such things are not important, and I fear you have had a bad example, but you and Judy are not such people. So be warned, David, and be our friend always; but you will never be my daughter's husband, and you must understand that now."

"Why are you so determined I should never be Judy's husband?" I asked.

"I am not determined alone," said he. "There are many hundreds of determining factors on both sides. They are called ancestors, and there are some things in which we are wise not to defy them."

"You mean, I'm not a Jew," I said.

"I had begun to wonder if you would get to it," said Dr. Wolff.

"But does that matter in this day and age?" I said.

"You were born in 1928, when it began to matter terribly, and not for the first time in history," said Dr. Wolff. "But set that aside. There is another way it matters which I do not like to mention because I do not want to hurt you and I like you very much. It is a question of pride."

We talked further, but I knew the conversation was over. They were planning to send Judy to school abroad in the spring. They would be happy to see me from time to time until then. But I must understand that the Wolffs had talked to Judy, and though Judy felt very badly, she had seen the point. And that was that.

It was that night I went to Knopwood. I was working up a rage against the Wolffs. A question of pride! Did that mean I wasn't good enough for Judy? And what did all this stuff about being Jews mean from people who gave no obvious external evidence of their Jewishness? If they were such great Jews, where were their side-curls and their funny underwear and their queer food? I had heard of these things as belonging to the bearded Jews in velours hats who lived down behind the Art Gallery. I had assumed the Wolffs and the Schwarzes were trying to be like us; instead I had been told I wasn't good enough for them! Affronted Christianity boiled up inside me. Christ had died for me, I was certain, but I wouldn't take any bets on His having died for the Wolffs and the Schwarzes! Off to Knopwood! He would know.

I was with him all evening, and in the course of an involved conversation everything came out. To my astonishment he sided with Louis Wolff. But worst of all, he attacked Father in terms I had never heard from him, and he was amused, and contemptuous and angry about Myrrha.

"You triple-turned jackass!" he said, "couldn't you see it was an arranged thing? And you thought it was your own attraction that got you into bed with such a scarred old veteran! I don't blame you for going to bed with her; show an ass a peck of oats and he'll eat it, even if the oats is musty. But it is the provincial vulgarity of the whole thing that turns my stomach – the winesmanship and the tatty gallantries and the candlelit frumpery of it! The "good talk", the imitations of Churchill by your father, the quotations from The Rubaiyat. If I could have my way I'd call in every copy of that twenty-fourth-rate rhymed gospel of hedonism and burn it! How it goes to the hearts of trashy people! So Myrrha matched verses with you, did she? Well, did the literary strumpet quote this -

" 'Well,' murmured one, 'Let whoso make or buy,

My Clay with long Oblivion is gone dry:

But fill me with the old familiar Juice

Methinks I might recover by and by.'

Did she whisper that in your ear as Absalom went in unto his father's concubine?"

"You don't understand," I said; "this is a thing French families do to see that their sons learn about sex in the right way."

"Yes, I have heard that, but I didn't know they put their cast mistresses to the work, the way you put a child rider on your safe old mare."

"That's enough, Knoppy," I said; "you know a lot about the Church and religion, but I don't think that qualifies you to talk about what it is to be a swordsman."

That made him really furious. He became cold and courteous.

"Help me then," he said. "Tell me what a swordsman is and what lies behind the mystique of the swordsman."