The Devil in Detail, page 9
“Lacroix didn’t really want to play either, probably because he wasn’t entirely convinced that it was a good idea to play cards with a man like Jack Dupree, even if you were his host—but Dupree had known Lacroix for a long time, and deep down, the two of them were birds of a feather, so he contrived to talk him round. If he was surprised at my lack of reluctance, he didn’t show it; he was too eager to be suspicious.
“At any rate, the eventual result of Dupree’s secret scheming was that the four of us sat down on the veranda one evening after dinner, with a couple of bottles of what claimed to be Cognac between us, ready to make a night of it. Lucile was eager to watch, not because she was interested in the esthetics of gambling, but because it gave her an opportunity to gaze longingly at me. I’d been absent in the city for most of the previous forty-eight hours, and her poor amorous eyes were feeling starved.
“I had no objection at all to playing, of course; I’ll even admit to being enthusiastic—but what I was enthusiastic about was the prospect of a duel of wits with Jack Dupree. Like him, I regarded the other two as neutrals, not targets. Unlike the pirate, I had no intention of cheating—as I said before, I never tell lies, although I do admit to running the occasional double bluff, telling the truth in order to be disbelieved—but I had every intention of using my superior skill and mathematical acumen to demonstrate to him that cheats sometimes lose, and that there’s no safety in dishonesty, even in honest company.
“Had I wanted to, I could have ensured that the cards fell in a certain way without employing any actual sleight of hand, but I wouldn’t have dreamed of doing so. I’m a sportsman; I was fully committed to letting hazard take its course, however wayward it might be. I was even prepared to lose, if that happened to be the way things turned out. Not only am I a sportsman, but I know that you can sometimes gain more in the greater game by losing in the trivial ones—and vice versa.
“As chance would have it, with a little help from some rather inept double-dealing, Dupree did start out winning. So did I, without any assistance but skill. Lacroix lost a little, but most of the loss was taken by Cardingly—who was, I have to say, by no means a serious student of probability. Dupree was far better, and could have wiped the floor with him in an honest game—but that wasn’t Dupree’s objective, and although he took the money, he became increasingly irritated because he wasn’t winning it from the right source. I think that he would actually have started cheating on Cardingly’s behalf as well as his own, if it hadn’t been for the force of his own greed, and the fact that Lacroix began cheating too.
“All three of them were, of course, very aware of the fact that Lucile was watching, and all three of them were paying as much attention to her as to the game—unwisely, in Cardingly’s case, although he probably wouldn’t have been doing much better if he were fully focused, Dupree’s primary objective—a stupid one, needless to say, even if I had been only human—had been to inflict heavy losses on me in order to make it necessary for me to leave the house, but he had also hoped to humiliate me in Lucile’s eyes while making himself look good. He could see readily enough that he was failing all round in that respect; not only was I not on my way to humiliation, but his winnings weren’t impressing Lucile in the least. How could they, when she only had eyes for me?
“As for Lacroix, he could see that Dupree was cheating, and even though he could see that he wasn’t the intended victim, he didn’t want either of his other guests to be robbed by a pirate while they were under his roof, and therefore thought it incumbent on him to fight Dupree’s fire with fire of his own. That made the situation even more amusing, and the fact that Lacroix’s cheating was aimed specifically at Dupree actually made it easier for me to continue winning by playing honestly—but it also increased the rapidity of Cardingly’s losses, initiated by sheer incompetence but now made worse by increasing desperation.
“Had the game gone on long enough, I think that the tide might have turned, and that Lacroix and I between us might have contrived to divert at least some of Dupree’s winnings back in his direction. Cardingly, alas, didn’t have that kind of patience. He was kind of person who believed that luck somehow owed him a rapid opportunity to redeem his losses by means of his own reckless betting.
“In the next phase of the game, with the combined effects of my skill and Lacroix’s sharping, Dupree was only holding his own. He wasn’t losing, but he wasn’t winning either, and he was beginning to realize that his plan had gone awry, and that he was going to have to come up with another. Lacroix was only winning back what he’d previously lost. The only one materially increasing his fortune was me…and Cardingly was still losing.
“Perhaps I should have paid more heed to the warning when Cardingly growled at me that I had ‘the Devil’s own luck’ when he lost yet another hand on a stupid bet, but I was still focused on Dupree, waiting for a chance to take him down. So it came as a complete surprise when Cardingly suddenly stood up, driven beyond the limits of his endurance by emotional tension and overindulgence in Cognac, and accused me of cheating.
“For a moment, I actually thought that he was talking to Dupree, having spotted the pirate’s manipulations, but he wasn’t. I saw Dupree laugh, genuinely amused by the fact that the idiot cousin had actually accused the only one of his opponents who wasn’t cheating, rather than either of the two who were—and I also saw him smother the laugh immediately, because he understood even better than Cardingly what the effects of that stupidity were bound to be, and knew that it was diplomatically necessary to hide his smug sense of triumph.
“Cardingly did understand, of course; he had no excuse of ignorance. Callow Northerner he might be, but he knew enough about Southern mores to know that he’d just made it inevitable that he and I would have to fight a duel. He wasn’t, of course, hoping to kill me in the duel, but he was probably harboring some faint hope of my being obliged to leave thereafter, while he, as a family relative, might be able to stay. That was a delusion, but perhaps an understandable one. The primary reason for his rush of blood was, however, the same as Dupree’s reason for cheating: he wanted to diminish me in Lucile’s eyes. His judgment of women was as poor as his judgment of cards.
“‘Come now, Monsieur Cardingly,’ I said, softly, ‘You don’t really mean that.’
“‘I most certainly do,’ he said, probably lying—not that it mattered. The die was cast. He would never have made such a bet with his head, but his heart…the heart is essentially foolish; it has no regard for the calculus of probability in the short term or the long.
“What could I do? It didn’t seem to me that I had any choice.
“‘In fact,’ I said, casually, ‘I wasn’t cheating. Monsieur Dupree was, but I wasn’t.’ Obviously, I didn’t mention my host’s dereliction; I always tell the truth, but not always the whole truth. Nobody’s perfect—except Him, allegedly, and I have my doubts about Him.
“If Cardingly’s declaration had caused a shock, mine more than redoubled it. They all knew, after all, that I was no idiot, and must have calculated my words exactly. Dupree’s expression of restrained satisfaction disappeared, but it was replaced by a predatory gleam in his eye: that of a raptor which has spotted an opportunity. Dupree was a pirate; he fancied himself a swashbuckling swordsman and a ruthless one.
“‘Oh dear,’ I added, mildly, when no one said a word. ‘It seems that I’ll have to fight you both, doesn’t it? We seem to have a slight shortage of seconds, but I’m sure that we can overlook that formality with a view to a rapid resolution. As the insulted party, Monsieur Cardingly, I believe that I have the choice of weapons for our encounter. Do you have a pair of épées, Monsieur Lacroix?’
“‘Of course,’ said Lacroix.
“Cardingly was bewildered by the pace at which things were moving, but he consented to be led out to the lawn in front of the house. We were indeed direly short of seconds, but not of an audience. When the word spread through the house that two of the Master’s guests were about to have at one another with unbuttoned foils, it only took a matter of moments for a huge ring of black faces to form on the outskirts of the lawn—and Lacroix didn’t instruct his overseers to chase them away. He wanted witnesses, just in case he needed to be let off some kind of hook.
“The first duel posed no real difficulty; my one and only priority was to give Dupree the impression that, although I was a better swordsman that the woefully inept Abraham Cardingly, I wasn’t nearly as good as him. I know how to hold back, though, and had enough skill to look clumsy while taking no real risks. I spun the fight out for four minutes—four minutes is a long time in a fencing match—to make sure that the lesson went home.
“When I eventually wounded Cardingly in his right forearm, making it impossible for him to continue the fight, I made it look as if had been aiming for his shoulder and missed. I even pretended to be weary, and that nothing but pride was urging me on to fight Dupree immediately. He had the choice of weapons, of course, and thought he was being cunning in putting on a show of negligent generosity is saying that we might as well use the same ones.
“Lucile was still watching, of course, and Dupree knew as well as I did that her admiration for me had only increased thus far, but his new plan was to turn that advantage on its head in spectacular fashion, and perhaps to give me an ugly wound in the process. He too was gambling with his heart rather than his head—an unforgivable error in a man of his dark stripe.
“It probably took Dancing Jack all of ten seconds to realize that he had made a terrible mistake, once he had seen me parry two swift lunges—at which point he became mortally afraid for his life. He had begun the duel intending to play the dandy and the dancer, and eventually to wound me as I had wounded Cardingly, if a little more seriously, but once he realized that he might well be outclassed as a fencer, he attacked with all his might and desperation, trying to kill me. Again, it was not a bet hat he would have made with his head, but he was all heart now, and more thoroughly doomed than before.
“I never even considered killing him. I’m not a murderous person, although I claim no moral credit for that. Who knows better than I how much more torment there is on the real Earth than there is in the imaginary Hell, for a man who has suffered defeat, humiliation and the frustration of his desires? I’m not a murderous person, but I’m not a merciful one either.
“After five minute of cat-and-mouse, I carefully wounded the rapidly-tiring pirate in the leg, not fatally, but badly enough to put his career as a sea-raider in jeopardy and efficiently enough to make sure that he could never again describe himself as ‘Dancing Jack’ without occasioning hilarity.
“After that, of course, none of us could decently stay in Jacques Lacroix’s house. Protocol demanded that we all pack our bags and leave, not because there was the slightest possibility of our being arrested for dueling, but simply because it was the decent thing to do.
“I apologized to my host profusely for the disturbance I had occasioned, but he forgave me readily enough, knowing what I had not said as well as what I had—and knowing, too, that I had done the world a favor in denting Jack Dupree’s reputation, and making sure that he would never again seek to take advantage of his old acquaintance to claim hospitality at the Lacroix House.
“It wasn’t until I had made my discreet exit from the house—the first to leave because I had no need of medical attention—that the ultimate consequence of my capitulation with the inevitable materialized. I could have foreseen it; perhaps I had, but had simply avoided thinking about it.
“Lucile Lacroix followed me out into the darkness of the night, and begged me to take her with me. She confessed her love—an infatuation boosted to fever pitch by the two duels I had just fought, and which she had imagined, not entirely without reason, to have been fought for her, against two avid suitors whose attentions she had been anxious to avoid.
“‘Child,’ I said to her, with perfect calm of mind, ‘you should not do this. You should not surrender to passion in this way, offering yourself so wholeheartedly to a person you do not know; it is a path that can only lead you, without a long delay, to ignominy and disappointment. You should use your head, your intellect, to fight temptation courageously; your heart will always betray you, will always surrender to foolishness. I am embarked upon my own road, and you should not follow me even if you could.’
“Can anyone imagine, even for a minute, that she would listen to such reason? She begged me; she implored me; she threatened to kill herself if I rejected her. She might even have meant it. She was seriously overwrought.
“What could I do? What, in all conscience, could I do?
“I gave her what she wanted, and took her a little way along the road of eternity. When I left her, without a long delay, to ignominy and disappointment, I tried to do so as gently as unhumanly possibly. I am, as I have said, a bad person—but I appeal to you with, as a person with a level head, who might yet bet against me and win, in that regard: could you, or any unfallen angel, have done any better?”
CHAPTER IX
Why was the Devil telling me that story? Obviously, I listened to it, hanging on his every word, but I never lost sight of that fact that the most remarkable thing about it was the fact of his telling it to me.
I suppose the more fundamental matter was that fact that he was there at all, given that he didn’t exist, with the corollary fact that he was sitting there in an extremely good imitation of the flesh drinking actual Pinot Noir left over from my last day trip to Auchan in Boulogne out of a actual glass with an apparent contentment, but I simply had to take that for granted.
Obviously, I was hallucinating, because I’d overdosed on the haunting-juice matured in the bindings and pages of the black books from Glofeydd Diafol while they’d been in storage. Because I’d stubbornly insisted, as only a Yorkshireman can, in taking all the books out of the boxes and opening them one by one to look at their incredibly uninteresting title-pages I’d taken aboard a vastly greater dose than Martin had absorbed while starting the unpacking, which had only given him a creepy sense of alien presence.
The fact that it had taken twenty-four hours to take effect was a trifle peculiar, but probably only signified that my brain had taken time to adapt fully to the alien presence in my blood. As the Devil had kindly pointed out, the overlap in my states of consciousness had actually begun much earlier.
At any rate, he was there, and questions of speculative biochemistry could probably be shelved. The more urgent question was not whether or not he existed but why. What was his paradoxical existence-in-spite-of-non-existence trying to communicate to me—because, quite obviously, it was trying to communicate something to me, albeit in a glib, elliptical, narrative fashion.
Obviously, he was not just the Devil, eternal and unsleeping as he might be, but also my Devil. He was a writer’s Devil…and, even more specific than that, a science fiction writer’s Devil…and, even more specific than that, a quirky science fiction writer’s devil, with a distinct pataphysical twist.
Like any hallucination, he was a product of the unconscious mind: both the collective unconscious stocked with the general apparatus of the Cosmic Mind, but my own personal unconscious, warped by my idiosyncratic experiences. The psychotropic produce of Glofeydd Diafol had, however, given him a much greater substance than the normal stuff of my dreams, which were ephemeral, nonsensical and doomed to be soon consigned to oblivion, to an even greater extent than my mortal flesh. As the Devil had said himself, he was not a product of sleep—quite the opposite.
We all know, nowadays, that the matter we can actually see and touch—the matter that lives up to our usual, somewhat deceptive, standards of reality—is only a tiny fraction of the matter that actually exists, most of the substance of the universe consisting of dark matter. We have known for somewhat longer, although we could not initially take advantage of the analogy, that the same is true of the mind: that the fraction of the mind of which consciousness consists, and which therefore seems to us to be “real” in the sense that it is manifest as thought, emotion and reason, is only a tiny fraction of our mentality, most of the directive force of our desires, urges and impulses originating in the dark mind of the unconscious.
In much the same way that physicists have difficulty characterizing dark matter, because our categories of characterization evolved from our understanding of baryonic matter, and hence do not apply to it, psychologists have had difficulty characterizing dark mind, which lies, by definition, beyond consciousness and hence beyond the apparatus that we use to depict and characterize consciousness: the stuff of logic and calculation. It is not easy for reason to get to grips with the irrational.
Perhaps, in the final analysis, it is literally impossible, and we can never obtain any understanding of ourselves beyond the understanding of the tiny, artificial, ephemeral, discontinuous fraction that is our waking, thinking self. But we have resources that can and do help us to achieve insights into the mysteries of the unconscious, because the unconscious does cast shadows, echoes and reflections of various kinds into the conscious mind. Those irruptions can be apprehended, contemplated, and perhaps even partially understood when they take, or can be adapted to, the form of dreams, hallucinations, and, perhaps most important of all, stories.
Stories are the most important way in which the conscious mind tries to adjust and adapt to its juxtaposition with and connection to dark mind. Myths attempt to makes some kind of metaphorical sense of the existence and configuration of the world. Legends attempt to make sense of the relationship between the present and the past. Anecdotes and jokes attempt to take possession of the essential irony and bizarrerie of everyday existence. Fables, parables, apologues, contes philosophiques and the entire apparatus of fiction, naturalistic and heterocosmic alike, struggle to grasp and synthesize meanings that make the mere surge of happenstance into an esthetic pattern.
