In Other Words: Transpositions of

Philosophy in J.M. Coetzee's 'Jesus'

Trilogy Stephen Mulhall
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In Other Words
 In Other Words
Transpositions of Philosophy in
J. M. Coetzee’s ‘Jesus’ Trilogy

STEPHEN MULHALL
 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
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 Contents

Acknowledgements vii
Introduction 1

PART 1

Novilla: The Deviant Pupil 15

PART 2

Estrella: The Marionette 51

PART 3

Estrella: The Orphan 97

Bibliography 125
Index 127
 Acknowledgements

Part 1 of this book is a significantly expanded and revised version of my

‘Health and Deviance, Irony and Incarnation’, published in Hayes and
Wilm (eds), Beyond the Ancient Quarrel: Literature, Philosophy and
J. M. Coetzee (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), which benefited
from the responses of other contributors to that collection that were
offered at a conference arranged prior to its publication.
I would also like to thank three anonymous readers for Oxford
University Press, and Alice Crary, for their insightful and extremely
helpful comments on an earlier version of the present text.
 Introduction

J. M. Coetzee’s ‘Jesus’ trilogy begins with the arrival of two displaced

persons—a young boy and his adult companion and protector—at the
resettlement camp of a city called Novilla.¹ Neither remembers their lives
prior to the sea voyage to this new land during which they met; like every
other inhabitant of it,² their memories have been wiped clean of their
personal history, although they remember having had such histories, and
so know that there is something they don’t or can’t remember about
themselves. At the end of their voyage, they were deposited at a coastal
town called Belstar, and held at a reception camp for several weeks,
during which they were assigned names (David and Simón, respectively)
and approximate official ages (five and forty-five, respectively), and were
taught Spanish (the language of their new country). When they arrive at
Novilla, seeking a place to live and a means of earning a living, Simón
describes himself as David’s father, although there is no biological or
legal relationship between them; and he quickly embarks on another
quest—to find David’s mother, or more precisely, to find a mother for
David. Neither of them knows the name of David’s real mother, or even
whether she has also travelled to this land—a letter belonging to David
that might have held answers to these questions was lost on board their
ship; but Simón is convinced that he or David will recognize her imme-
diately when they see her. And soon after establishing themselves in
Novilla, they encounter a woman who stirs an obscure sense of famil-
iarity in Simón when she offers David a friendly greeting. He at once
arranges a meeting with her, and asks her to take David as her son; and

¹ The trilogy comprises The Childhood of Jesus (London: Harvill Secker, 2013), The
Schooldays of Jesus (London: Harvill Secker, 2016), and The Death of Jesus (Melbourne: Text
Publishing, 2019): hereafter ‘CJ’, ‘SJ’, and ‘DJ’, respectively.
² Coetzee’s text neither affirms nor excludes the possibility of new inhabitants being born
there.

In Other Words: Transpositions of Philosophy in J. M. Coetzee’s ‘Jesus’ Trilogy. Stephen Mulhall,

Oxford University Press. © Stephen Mulhall 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192869715.003.0001
2   

after a startlingly brief period of reflection, she (Inés) agrees to do so.

Their shared task of caring for and educating David—first in Novilla and
then for a longer period of time in another, more remote town called
Estrella—constitutes the core of the ensuing narrative.
This combination of collective memory loss and the construction of a
family on the basis of intuition and sheer will hardly sounds like the
premise of an exercise in fictional realism; and as we shall see, other
aspects of the basic shape and finer details of life in this land that are
disclosed as David’s newly constituted ‘family’ settle into it diverge
equally sharply from those governing our everyday existence. That
said, we shouldn’t deny the clear (if non-linear) correspondences
between this fictional world of displaced people, resettlement camps,
and erased personal history and the treatment of migrants in our con-
temporary world (in Australia, where Coetzee currently lives, but also on
the Mediterranean borders of Europe, the southern borders of the United
States, the south coast of the United Kingdom, and elsewhere).³ And
there is a difference between categorizing a text as a generic exercise in
literary realism and claiming it as one composed in what one might call a
realistic spirit—in which a relation to literary realism is maintained by
radically interrogating its generic conventions. This is the subject of an
explicit discussion in one of Coetzee’s earlier fictions, Elizabeth Costello;⁴
and in earlier work of mine on that text, I underlined the fact that that
discussion develops an understanding of realism that pivots on a dis-
tinction between embedding and embodying, around which Costello
(herself a novelist) and her narrator organize their thinking about how
the realistic impulse finds expression in modernist literature.⁵ Because
this commentary grows out of that earlier work, and assumes a signifi-
cant degree of continuity of concerns between Elizabeth Costello and
the ‘Jesus’ trilogy, a brief recounting of the main elements of that

³ Something emphasized by Tim Mehigan in his article ‘Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus and
the Moral Image of the World’ (in Rutherford and Uhlmann [eds], J. M. Coetzee’s The
Childhood of Jesus: The Ethics of Ideas and Things [London: Bloomsbury, 2017]).
⁴ London: Secker and Warburg, 2003—hereafter ‘EC’.
⁵ See Chapter 11 of my The Wounded Animal: J. M. Coetzee and the Difficulty of Reality in
Literature and Philosophy (Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009).
  3

understanding of realism might provide the reader with some helpful

preliminary orientation.⁶
In the first chapter or lesson of Elizabeth Costello, the protagonist’s son
John objects to her earlier use of the category of realism in a lecture,
which began by proclaiming the death of realism as a viable literary
enterprise and yet claimed as an exemplary exercise in realism Kafka’s
short story about an ape named Red Peter, who delivers a report to an
academy about his experiences as an animal forcibly inducted into
Western European society.

‘When I think of realism’, he goes on, ‘I think of peasants frozen in

blocks of ice. I think of Norwegians in smelly underwear . . . people
picking their noses. You don’t write about that kind of thing. Kafka
didn’t write about it.’
‘No, Kafka didn’t write about people picking their noses. But Kafka
had time to wonder where and how his poor educated ape was going to
find a mate. And what it was going to be like when he was left in the
dark with the bewildered, half-tamed female that his keepers eventually
produced for his use. Kafka’s ape is embedded in life. It is the embed-
dedness that is important, not the life itself. His ape is embedded as we
are embedded, you in me, I in you. That ape is followed through to the
end, to the bitter, unsayable end, whether or not there are traces left on
the page. Kafka stays awake during the gaps when we are sleeping, that
is where Kafka fits in.’ (EC, 32)

Kafka’s ape is not in a realistic situation; no real ape has been, or (we
think) could possibly be educated to the cultural level of an average
European. Nevertheless, having embedded his ape in European culture,
Kafka develops its consequences with a rigorous attention to the real
nature of the ape and of the culture he (impossibly) inhabits. A real ape
will have sexual and emotional needs; real human beings would try to

⁶ The present work has also been influenced, although less directly, by an interpretation of
Coetzee’s autobiographical trilogy (as well as of his writings on the theory and practice of life-
writing) that is laid out in Essay Two of my The Ascetic Ideal (OUP, 2021), entitled ‘Writing the
Life of the Mind’.
4   

satisfy them, in order to maintain their profits, and would care little
about the sanity of the mate they procure, or the potentially monstrous
consequences of their congress. Costello is in effect arguing that even a
tale which takes its starting point from a sheer impossibility (beyond
anything to be encountered in reality) might nevertheless count as a
contribution to the project of literary realism, insofar as the development
of that tale can be seen as a logically and emotionally rigorous unfolding
of the consequences of that unintelligible origin—an unsentimental
articulation of what the impossible embedding of one reality into another
might reveal about both.
Costello’s notion of embedding is itself embedded in a context that
associates it with two other notions, which together impart a reflexive
aspect to the discussion—confirming our sense that, as her son’s ques-
tion presupposes, her description of Kafka’s realism is also a self-
description. First, she compares Red Peter’s embeddedness in life with
her son’s embeddedness in her and hers in her son. The familiar com-
parison of literary creativity with human procreation is thereby given a
particular twist: for insofar as both Costello and her son function as the
term analogous to life on the ape side of the metaphorical equation, it
suggests that the fictional creation endows its creator with life as much as
the creator her creation. But when viewed from the vantage point of the
‘Jesus’ trilogy and its co-created unreal family, a further implication
becomes salient: that both children and parents constitute the primary
structures of reality for each other, and in that sense embed each other
in life.
The second notion Costello associates with realism is that of Kafka as
staying awake when we are sleeping. This partly specifies her sense of the
realist author as having a commitment to the real and its ineluctable
consequences that most human beings most of the time can neither
desire nor bear; but it also invokes a canonical cultural image of
philosophy—that of Socrates still awake, when all the other winers and
diners have collapsed into unconsciousness, as dawn breaks at the end of
Plato’s Symposium. As we shall see, Costello’s sense of literature’s
uncanny intimacy with philosophy, sharing its interest in moral edifica-
tion and in a genuine apprehension of the real (as the format of a lesson,
with its suggestion of taking instruction, already implies), finds a strong
  5

and persistent echo in the ‘Jesus’ trilogy, and not solely because of Plato’s
insistent presence within it.
By linking together or constellating these three notions (embedding,
pro/creativity, and wakefulness), Costello offers us a way of understand-
ing her own most famous fiction as an expression of what I would call
modernist realism. That fiction is entitled The House on Eccles Street, and
amounts to a recreation of Joyce’s Molly Bloom; and Costello declares
that her attempt to make something new from the material left over from
Joyce’s prodigal inventiveness was itself conditioned by a desire to
relocate Molly from Joyce’s realistically imagined bedroom (‘with the
bed with the creaking springs’) to the real sights and smells of the streets
of Dublin in 1904, as well as the particular cultural possibilities actually
open to Molly and Leopold alike at that historical moment. Otherwise
put: she showed how Joyce’s liberation of the sensual reality of women
from its prior literary confinement was itself confined, that Molly could
‘equally well be an intelligent woman with an interest in music and a
circle of friends of her own and a daughter with whom she shared
confidences’ (EC, 14).
One might, therefore, say that Costello plays off one kind of embed-
dedness against another: by exploiting the indebtedness of any literary
creation to its antecedents, she tries to embed the wholly fictional and yet
vitally real Molly more deeply into non-fictional human reality. She tries
to stay awake during the gaps when Joyce was sleeping—or rather, she
brings us to see his apparently seamless creation (its successful creation
of an impression of real femaleness in his Molly) as actually having gaps
in the light of her own, apparently more successful, fictional representa-
tion of real femaleness. Insofar as a prior fictional representation has any
reality to it—insofar as it aspires to, or anyway succeeds in, apprehending
something about reality—then attending properly to it in all its fiction-
ality, even if that process takes the form of creating another fiction, may
nevertheless bring us closer to what is real.
Where Costello chooses the term ‘embedding’, her narrator ultimately
arrives at the term ‘embodying’, at least when discussing the discomfort
created for literary realism by ideas—a challenge that is even more
pertinent for the ‘Jesus’ trilogy (with its unending sequences of conver-
sations about how best to comprehend everything from human waste to
6   

the music of the spheres) than it is for Elizabeth Costello. More precisely,
Coetzee’s narrator talks twice of the relation between his enterprise and
more familiar modes of realism, with the first such disquisition setting
the stage for the second’s focus on embodiment. This initial stage-setting
comes after a paragraph which describes Costello’s appearance in the
kind of pared-down way that will become (sometimes wearyingly) famil-
iar to any reader of the ‘Jesus’ trilogy:

The blue costume, the greasy hair, are details, signs of a moderate
realism. Supply the particulars, allow the significations to emerge of
themselves. A procedure pioneered by Daniel Defoe. Robinson Crusoe,
cast up on the beach, looks around for his shipmates. But there are
none. ‘I never saw them afterwards, or any sign of them,’ says he,
‘except three of their hats, one cap, and two shoes that were not
fellows.’ Two shoes, not fellows: by not being fellows, the shoes have
ceased to be footwear and become proofs of death, torn by the foaming
seas off the feet of drowning men and tossed ashore. No large words,
no despair, just hats and caps and shoes. (EC, 4)

On the one hand, Coetzee is associating his enterprise with that of

Defoe’s plainly denotative realism: supply some small and plain particu-
lars and the significations will emerge by themselves. On the other hand,
he is also dissociating himself from Defoe’s prolixity—his sense that an
unending profusion of such plain particulars is essential if the illusion of
reality is to be successfully created. For where Robinson Crusoe’s life is
conjured from a vast terrain of textual detail concerning his life on the
island, Elizabeth Costello comes to life for us (if she does) from a
comparatively meagre diet: the colour of her clothes and the greasiness
of her hair constitute Coetzee’s entire expenditure of particularity upon
her. This idea of moderation would seem exiguous even to Defoe’s
Puritanism of prose.
Moreover, the text in which or from which Costello emerges is further
attenuated by a series of interruptions. One kind is introduced by making
reference to scenes that take place in the world of the story, but which are
not simply omitted but positively skipped, by means of a sentence which
describes the speech act it is performing: ‘There is a scene in the
  7

restaurant, mainly dialogue, which we will skip. We resume back at the

hotel . . . ’ (EC, 7). Another involves the creation of a gap in the narrative,
which is represented not by a literal gap but by the insertion of the words
themselves (‘A gap’ [EC, 27, 28]) between two sentences that are straight-
forwardly part of the narrative. As we shall see, this idea of gaps or
breaks, cracks or holes, in an account will recur in the ‘Jesus’ trilogy; but
in Elizabeth Costello their occurrence never succeeds in dissolving our
interest in Costello and her vicissitudes. We might well wonder what
kind of havoc an author has to create to stop us receiving and retaining
an impression of reality, from which other literary effects can then be
generated.
In the specific case of Defoe, for example, even his exemplary restric-
tion of his prose to the barest of bare denotation does not prevent the
efflorescence of figurative significance. For when (in the passage
Coetzee’s narrator cites) he says that the two shoes were not fellows, he
means that they do not form a pair with each other, but he also thereby
invokes the two distinct fellow human beings from whom those shoes
were torn. His meaning outruns its literal bounds, and thereby exempli-
fies language’s refusal to restrict itself to the purely or absolutely literal—
its revelation of the true emptiness or irreality of any such notion of
literality. And by choosing just these particulars from Defoe’s text,
Coetzee appears to endorse Costello’s claim that realism of the familiar,
Defoe-like kind has itself suffered shipwreck—that individual elements
of its textual constructions might be reclaimed and embodied in new
reconstructions, but the central illusion on which it is based has been
shattered, and so can only survive in a radically revised form (such as
Kafka’s, such as Costello’s, such as Coetzee’s). And yet, readers continue
to believe in the drowning men and the foaming seas, in the novelist and
her son arguing about literature; even when these lines from Crusoe are
quoted in another story altogether, the lost sailors revive in our imagin-
ations, just as Costello takes life through the perfunctory notation of her
blue dress and greasy hair. Even here, then, we have not yet reached a
conventional minimum below which the impression of reality simply
will not be conveyed, will cease to take on form and body in our minds.
The second disquisition about realism picks up and inflects this idea of
embodiment, just after the narrator’s account of a conversation between
8   

John and another character named Wheatley about the notion of literary
merit:

Realism has never been comfortable with ideas. It could not be other-
wise: realism is premised on the idea that ideas have no autonomous
existence, can exist only in things. So when it needs to debate ideas, as
here, realism is driven to invent situations—walks in the countryside,
conversations—in which characters give voice to contending ideas and
thereby in a certain sense embody them. The notion of embodying
turns out to be pivotal. In such debates ideas do not and indeed cannot
float free: they are tied to the speakers by whom they are enounced, and
generated from the matrix of individual interests out of which their
speakers act in the world—for instance, the son’s concern that his
mother not be treated as a Mickey Mouse post-colonial writer, or
Wheatley’s concern not to seem an old-fashioned absolutist. (EC, 9)

Where Costello sees embeddedness as pivotal for realism after the

shipwreck of realism, Coetzee’s narrator privileges embodiedness.
Coetzee takes the premise that ideas cannot float free from the individ-
uals who articulate them (a premise that Plato’s choice of dialogue form
appears to acknowledge, even if so many of his dialogues variously aspire
to reorient our attention to a realm of pure ideas or forms), and then
pushes it further, by emphasizing their rootedness in the animality of the
human animal, its flesh and blood and all that it generates or engenders.
He literalizes the realist idea of embodiedness—sees the concrete reality
of living human bodies and freights images of the human body in all its
concreteness with a range of more or less abstract, obscure, and ultim-
ately unsynthesized significations. And he claims that this is how realism
can and must accommodate ideas—that this is what it is to treat them in
a realistic spirit.
That is not the same as being comfortable with them: but perhaps
discomfort with ideas is precisely what their real nature demands. For
Coetzee’s point is precisely that ideas discomfort us: they demand a
degree of abstraction from reality which challenges us, although in a
way that we—as genuinely rational animals—cannot dismiss; and their
fleshly origins—their rootedness in the particularities of individual
  9

cultures, minds, and bodies—revolt us, as they revolted Plato and con-
tinue to revolt the philosopher in every rational animal, at least some of
the time. Accordingly, any mode of realism that engages with ideas must
do so in a way that embodies that very discomfort, and so transmits it to
its readers. It accordingly cannot avoid running the risk of formal
shipwreck—in the case of this text, by radically attenuating concrete
descriptive detail, leaving gaps and skipping scenes, and interrupting
itself with reflections on these aspects of itself. It thereby embodies a
mode of evaluating ideas that runs contrary to our sense that such
evaluation can only take the form of impersonal, internally coherent
lines of argument and criticism that result in definitive conclusions of
universal application.
That there are such arguments, and that they are worthy of respect, is
not to be denied; but all such arguments are also embedded or embodied
in a variety of ways to which they should not be reduced, but by which
they are significantly conditioned, and often in tangled, mutually con-
flicting ways which complicate evaluation to the point of putting defini-
tive conclusions beyond our reach—asking of us a willingness to
contemplate or suffer the difficulty rather than attempting to solve or
resolve it. To deny the relevance of such embeddedness to any assess-
ment of the significance of lines of reasoning and the ideas they support
would be as unrealistic as to reduce such assessment to an exclusive
concern with their various embodiments. It is not hard to see why such a
conclusion is one with which philosophy might well be discomfited.
I said earlier that this lesson from Elizabeth Costello pivots on a
distinction between ‘embedding’ and ‘embodying’; but a properly realis-
tic treatment of their role in that text would have to acknowledge their
relatedness as well as their separateness. In the terms the text itself
provides, a realistic treatment of these ideas of embedding and embody-
ing must certainly acknowledge their ties to the speakers who enounce
them, which means acknowledging the specific differences between
Costello’s matrix of individual interests and that of her narrator. But it
must also allow room for the revelatory possibilities of impossible con-
junctions; and that means accepting not only that a character in a fiction
and the narrator of that fiction might nevertheless converse with one
another (for example about realism) but that their interlocutory
10   

perspectives on that topic might be convergent, each enriching the

other’s grasp on its subject.
We should therefore think of ‘embedding’ and ‘embodying’ as inflec-
tions of each other: as close as the spellings of the words embodying these
ideas, as different as the speakers into whose actions they are embedded.
And we might then consider picturing the general relation between ideas
and reality in the terms provided by the impossible conjunction of these
particular ideas—namely, as a matter of embedding-as-embodiment, or
embodiment-as-embedding. For if ideas must be embodied in things,
and yet can also be embedded in other things (call them contexts), then
they must be capable of being extracted from any of their particular
embodiments; so every embodiment of an idea is an embedding of it,
which means that no idea is fully absorbed into any of its possible
embodiments, and no embodiment is reducible to its ability to incorp-
orate a given (range of ) ideas. This would be a realistic acknowledgement
of the discomforting way in which ideas and reality depend upon, and
are independent of, each other.
Since texts are one kind of context, and ‘embodying as embedding’ is
the conjunction of two specific ideas, it would only be realistic to
acknowledge that they too can be extracted from the particular text in
which we first encounter them and embedded in other texts (particularly
those created later by the same author). But it would be unrealistic to
expect them simply to reappear in their original guise in those later
texts—even when such a text is also concerned with ideas and their
relation to reality, and so with philosophy and its relation to literature.
For each new context will inflect those ideas differently, bringing out
previously occluded aspects or dimensions of their significance and
occluding previously salient ones, and thereby enriching their meaning
as well as displaying meaning in general as always-already-to-be-
unfolded. And the claim around which this reading of the ‘Jesus’ trilogy
will pivot is that the idea around which it pivots, and which constitutes
its primary line of continuity with Elizabeth Costello’s pivotal idea(s), is
that of ‘translation’. In other words, ‘translation’ is what becomes of
‘embodying as embedding’ when it is embedded into and embodied by
the ‘Jesus’ trilogy. ‘Translation’ is another word for ‘embodying as
embedding’; it is what results when ‘embodying as embedding’ is
  11

translated from its original discursive context into the discursive context
of these three fictions. And this act of translation (Coetzee’s, and the
three attempts to characterize its nature that I just formulated and
ordered) brings out particular aspects or dimensions of the significance
of all three ideas, as well as of the broader discursive fields which are
thereby brought into conjunction.
The task of supplying a more substantial and detailed grounding for
this claim will occupy me later; but a few sketched-in points will, I hope,
suffice to give it some initial plausibility. To begin with, Simón and
David—like most of the inhabitants of their new land—have to learn
Spanish before they can be resettled; and this fundamental fact about
their exiled state, as well as their progress in meeting the challenge it
poses, is underlined by the persistent appearance in the text of untrans-
lated Spanish words and phrases (which reproduce for anglophone
monolingual readers a very minimal version of the discomfort felt by
the narrative’s protagonists). Two short passages of German poetry,
recited by David, also crop up early and late in the narrative: no explan-
ation for their presence is offered, but they are also untranslated, and (for
those equipped to recognize this) significantly distorted from their
originals.
The specifically artistic dimension of this traffic between languages,
cultures, and historical eras is epitomized in the sole piece of literature
David and Simón encounter during their residence: a copy of Cervantes’
Don Quixote, but in an illustrated children’s edition (hence presumably
both abridged and bowdlerized, and certainly as subject to distortion as
the German texts). Given its Spanish provenance, our encounters with
extended quotations from that text forcefully remind the reader that the
whole of life in this land is conducted in that language, and so leave us
uncertain exactly how much of the fiction we are reading is to be
understood as a translation into English (if that is the case with the
Cervantes adaptation, then it will be true of much of the reported speech,
and might even be true of increasing portions of the text’s reports of
Simón’s interior monologues).
But the relation between the Cervantes adaptation and its original
merely exemplifies the fact that translation is an ontological principle of
this fictional world more generally. Most obviously, it characterizes the
12   

relation between the old life of those who travel to this land and their new
life in it: to call them displaced or resettled is just another way of saying
that they have been translated from one life to another. Despite having
their memories of their past life wiped away, they know that they had
another life, and they know that the new life they currently lead is
nevertheless led by the same person who led that old life. In this respect,
their identity or integrity as individuals has mysteriously but undeniably
survived their displacement from one mode or kind of existence to
another—just as Don Quixote lives on in the children’s edition of
Cervantes’ work, and the sense of Cervantes’ words is held to survive
its transposition into languages other than his original Spanish.
Conjoining questions about identity of linguistic meaning (and its
distinctive modes of distortion, attenuation, or loss) with questions
about identity of fictional characters and real persons (each with their
distinctive forms of failure) might seem unduly forced. So it’s worth
pointing out that we don’t need to think of that conjunction as itself an
identity relation (at least, not if we think of identity relations as abso-
lutely binary, as if all such relations are essentially mathematical): it
might rather be that each is better understood as a translation of the
other. In which case, it might also help to note that the primary meaning
of the word ‘translation’ (according to the OED) is religious rather than
linguistic, and has to do with the transposition or displacement of
persons—understood both as occupants of specific roles or offices, and
as existing beyond such institutional constraints. Bishops and ministers
are translated from one see or parish to another; the remains of saints are
translated from one location to another (more appropriate) one; and
human beings are translated from earthly existence to a heavenly one. If
anything, then, our conceptions of continuity of sense across linguistic
boundaries (which underpin our very idea of identity of meaning, and so
of translation) are—etymologically speaking—translations of a complex,
context-sensitive constellation of the ways in which human identity
survives transposition from one metaphysical context or condition to
another (or fails to).
This brings us to another translation issue: the role and significance of
the name ‘Jesus’ in the titles, but not the fictional world(s), of these three
late Coetzee texts. On one level, it is a perfectly common first name in
  13

Spanish-speaking cultures; on another, it is now indissociably related to

an absolutely singular or unique person—Jesus Christ, the incarnate
deity of the Christian religion, and so the being in whom the principles
of embedding and embodying (of the divine in the human) impossibly
coincide. Although no one in Coetzee’s narrative is named ‘Jesus’, the
only person whose childhood, schooling, and death is recounted in that
narrative is David, and his real (that is, non-assigned) name remains
unknown to the end. And despite the thoroughgoing absence of religious
practices or institutions in this new land, so many elements of the Gospel
stories, and their broader biblical contexts, show up in these texts
(variously altered, transposed, and displaced) that Coetzee’s readers are
forced to ask whether in some way this trilogy might or must be
understood as a translation of that Christian narrative—in particular,
whether David, Simón, and Inés should be seen as an embodiment of the
Holy Family, or an embedding of that highly unorthodox trinity (virginal
mother, adoptive father, and divine son) into a resolutely secular form
of life.
If the relation between these texts and their titles presents itself as a
translation issue, (particularly insofar as ‘translation’ is seen as a con-
tinuation of the idea of ‘embodying as embedding’), then the same might
be said of the relation between the three texts that make up this trilogy.
On the level of narrative structure, whilst the first volume recounts what
results from embedding David and Simón into the peculiar context of
Novilla, the second and third volumes track the process of their transla-
tion from Novilla to Estrella (another peculiar town, but with its own
distinctive idiosyncrasies, amongst which is the fact that its name modu-
lates from the more diminutive ‘Estrellita’ without explanation between
the first volume and its successors). And at the level of thematic and
conceptual continuity, the reader is often brought to feel that ideas
introduced (sometimes very briefly) in early parts of the trilogy reappear
embedded in new contexts, where they acquire (sometimes radically)
modified meaning, and that this process of repeated translation is a
primary motor of the trilogy’s development. It’s as if the text’s expansion
is fundamentally driven not by individual psychology and character, and
not by the momentum of unfolding events, but by the desire to elicit
further significance from a small number of themes by constructing
14   

more or less extreme variations upon them (often by means of different

interweavings of them) which never quite lose contact with their original
forms.
One final, much more external or biographical, point might help to
reinforce the tenability of my claim that the notion of ‘translation’ is at
the heart of the ‘Jesus’ trilogy. The practice of translation has always been
a part of Coetzee’s artistic repertoire, and he has always shown great
interest in how his works are themselves translated. In recent years,
however, he has also shown an increasing disenchantment with the
global hegemony of American and British culture, and an increasing
desire to engage with what might be called ‘Literatures of the South’ in
ways that are not themselves determined by the cultural gatekeepers of
the metropoles of the North.⁷ That is why he has recently directed a
seminar series with that title at the National University of General San
Martín, in Greater Buenos Aires, to which he has invited writers from
Australia and Southern Africa. Against this background, it is perhaps
unsurprising that a recent book of his (a collection of seven tales) has
appeared in Spanish translation (under the title Siete cuentos morales), as
well as in Italian, French, and Japanese, with no publication in English
currently planned. But it was still startling (at least to this metropolitan
gatekeeper) to discover that the final volume of the ‘Jesus’ trilogy was first
published in Spanish translation (as La Muerte de Jesús), some six
months before the English original first appeared in Australia, with the
US and UK publication following some months later. In such circum-
stances, is it still entirely uncontroversial to view the text’s publication in
English as the moment when the original text finally appeared? However
that may be, Coetzee plainly went to some lengths to create the impres-
sion amongst those in the Anglo-American cultural world that the
English edition was somehow a belated translation of the Spanish edi-
tion, and thereby to give us the faintest flavour of what it was like for
Simón when he first stepped off his ship.

⁷ This point is elaborated in Derek Attridge, ‘The South According to Coetzee’, in Public
Books, 25 September 2019 (https://www.publicbooks.org/the-south-according-to-coetzee).
 PART 1
NOVILLA
The Deviant Pupil

I suggested at several points in the Introduction that the ‘Jesus’ trilogy

maintains Coetzee’s long-established interest in philosophy, and in the
often-fraught relations between philosophy and literature. I also claimed
that, in Elizabeth Costello, that interest finds expression in its exploration
of two more specific questions: the way in philosophy and literature treat
the question of the relation between ideas and reality, and the way in
which philosophy’s drive to apprehend the reality beneath or beyond
appearances finds its literary counterpart (and its competitor) in what
I called modernist realism. This interest finds a rather different, and yet
not unrelated, mode of expression in the ‘Jesus’ trilogy: throughout its
first volume, The Childhood of Jesus, which covers the full period of time
David’s family spend in Novilla, particular philosophical texts provide
very explicit points of reference to which Coetzee’s text repeatedly
returns, and in relation to which it seeks to provide a sustained response.
I shall concentrate on two—Plato’s Republic¹ (whose presence is hard to
miss), and Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations² (whose presence
is rather easier to overlook). The former is embodied in the context into
which David and Simón have been translated, whilst the latter funda-
mentally shapes what their joint presence embeds into that context.
However, it will also become clear that the significance of the orientation

¹ Trans. D. Lee (London: Penguin, 1987).

² Revised 4th edition by Hacker and Schulte, trans. Anscombe, Hacker, and Schulte (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2009)—hereafter PI.

In Other Words: Transpositions of Philosophy in J. M. Coetzee’s ‘Jesus’ Trilogy. Stephen Mulhall,

Oxford University Press. © Stephen Mulhall 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192869715.003.0002
16   

they provide (both singly and in impossible conjunction) is inseparable

from the relation in which they stand to two other texts: Don Quixote³
and the Bible.

1. The Just City

The city of Novilla is infused by ‘the spirit of the agora’ (CJ, 115),
manifest in a range of Platonic forms and content. Simón has several
philosophical dialogues with the city’s residents: Ana disputes the con-
nection between beauty, goodness, and sexual desire (CJ, 30–2); Elena
argues that desire is only a source of endless dissatisfaction (CJ, 63); and
the stevedores with whom Simón works are devotees of philosophy
classes about how ideas engender unity in the midst of diversity—for
example, how individual chairs participate in chairness, and so amount
to embodiments or realizations of the idea or form of a chair (CJ,
119–22).
Simón repeatedly resorts to this image of the role of ideas, thereby
unifying a diversity of concrete contexts. He tells David that Ana’s
reference to the bodily mechanics of sexual intercourse really concerned
the way one mind might force ideas upon another (CJ, 34); then he
inverts the image with Elena, arguing that the mother provides the
material substance of a child whilst the father merely provides the idea,
thereby presenting sexual intercourse as one concrete realization of
reality’s participation in ideas (CJ, 104). And against the stevedores, he
argues that without ideas there would be no universe because there
would be no being (CJ, 115). By this, he primarily means that there
would be no unified world of distinguishable existent things; but since his
preferred example of an idea is that of justice, he also invokes the internal
relation of ideas and ideals—models for how a currently unsatisfactory
world might be made otherwise, brought closer to its distinctive telos,
and so to itself. But invoking justice, understood as an aspiration to
realize a world in which honest toil brings due reward, points us more

³ By Miguel de Cervantes, trans. C. Jarvis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992)—

hereafter DQ.
 :    17

specifically towards Plato’s Republic and its initiating definition of justice

as a matter of giving each person what is due to them.
And Novilla’s way of life does indeed appear to embody the ideally just
city that Socrates builds out of his conversational exchanges with
Adeimantus and Glaucon. Its inhabitants happily endorse the
Republic’s advocacy of radical sexual equality (asked whether she has a
man in her life, Elena says that she has both male and female friends and
doesn’t distinguish between them [CJ, 55]), and the loosening of parent–
child bonds (Elena carefully distinguishes biological from emotional
parenting, arguing that the latter matters most and that both men and
women are equipped to provide it, thereby implying that Socrates’
envisaged separation of children from their biological parents is a per-
fectly reasonable proposal [CJ, 104]). More generally, Novilla’s inhabit-
ants have established a regime in which human desires are firmly under
the control of reason—a world from which storms of passion (whether
about sex or about food) have been exiled.
This is what most disturbs Simón, who yearns for sexual intimacy and
for a more varied, spicy diet ideally involving the consumption of juicy
animal flesh. But if he rejects the strictures of this Platonic Utopia, why
does he resort so persistently to one of the central metaphysical doctrines
underpinning it? Coetzean realism as I have defined it requires us to
relate these ideas to their embodying contexts—which in this case are
conversations with inhabitants of Novilla, in which Simón’s primary
concern is not to declare and defend his real beliefs but to further his
own interests in the face of his interlocutors’ hostility or incomprehen-
sion by deploying their own ideas against them. With the stevedores, he
wants to liberate himself from burdensome manual labour; with Elena,
he is defending his decision to hand over David to Inés; and with David,
he is attempting to mask Ana’s shaming exposure of his sexual designs
on her by recharacterizing them in terms that the child will have to
master if he is ever to become properly native to Novilla. In other words,
the contextual embodiments of these Platonic ideas as Simon enounces
them turn them to profoundly un-Platonic—even sophistical—purposes.
It’s also worth asking just how Platonic the Utopia embodied by
Novilla really is. Although Plato and Socrates both advocate reason’s
mastery over desire, Novilla’s repression of bodily satisfactions goes far
18   

beyond that required by either. So does Coetzee’s portrayal of Novilla as

an embodiment of Platonic ideals do Plato an injustice, offering caricature
rather than satire (what one might call—remembering David’s delight in
watching a television cartoon involving an animal character he calls
‘Plato’ rather than Pluto—a Mickey Mouse version of philosophy’s
founder)? If so, then the un-Platonic uses to which Simón puts Novilla’s
belief system offer no critical purchase on the real Plato.
There is, however, a point in the Republic at which social (and so
psychic) arrangements of the kind enforced in Novilla are explicitly
articulated, only to be apparently rejected in favour of a more sophisti-
cated level of human self-cultivation. This is at the beginning of book II,
after Thrasymachus’ departure, but before the full complexity of the
internal economy of Socrates’ just city—and in particular, its need for a
guardian class from whom the philosopher kings will ultimately evolve—
has been articulated. We might call this a gap during which many of
Plato’s readers fall asleep.
When Socrates asks how human society arises, his answer invokes
mutual need (the fact that humans are not individually self-sufficient)
and differences of aptitude, which generate a mode of communal life that
divides its members into five classes: producers, merchants, sailors, retail
traders and manual labourers. Such a society requires a bare minimum
of clothing, equally simple food (such as barley-meal, beans, nuts and
vegetables) and basic forms of shelter and furnishing; and its citizens lead
a peaceful and healthy existence, attain a ripe old age, and bequeath the
same form of life to their children. But Glaucon immediately calls this
a community of pigs, lacking all ordinary comforts: Socrates calls them
rather the luxuries of civilization. He reiterates that this society is the true
one for human beings, ‘like a man in health’, whereas Glaucon’s civilized
society is ‘one in a fever’; but he acknowledges that studying the latter
might be justified because in that new context it might be easier to
discover ‘how justice and injustice are bred in a community’ (R, 368–73).
This passage implies that what most view as Socrates’ ideal city (the
Utopia elaborated upon in the rest of the dialogue) is in fact his vision of
a diseased condition of society and its citizens. The true Socratic Utopia
is to be found in the first half of Book II: because it is internally
articulated, it is a possible matrix of justice, insofar as justice is—as
 :    19

Socrates and Adeimantus note—a matter of the proper relationship

between its elements; but because that articulation is so simple and
transparent, because it is inherently stable and transmissible between
generations, justice is not a complicated challenge but something self-
evident to all. The issue becomes bewildering only when our society’s
internal complexity expands to engender and satisfy desires that go
beyond life’s necessaries—a world consisting of those concerned with
domestic consumption (especially women’s dress and make-up); of
hunters, fishermen, swineherds and cattle-herders; and of artists.
So, Coetzee’s depiction of Novilla might really be an accurate portrayal
of the Utopia that Plato and Socrates advocate, and Simón might really
be a critic of philosophy’s founding ideal. Except for one thing—the
distinguishing form of Platonic philosophical prose: irony. Novilla’s
inhabitants are utterly devoid of irony, apparently lacking any concep-
tion of it: as Simón puts it, they ‘do not see any doubleness in this world,
any difference between the ways things seem and the way things are’
(CJ, 64). This is why the stevedore Alvaro has such trouble with the idea
of possible worlds, saying that the real world is the only world (CJ, 42),
why the idea of justice as an ideal in relation to which the actual world
might be found wanting is opaque to the Simón’s fellow-workers
(CJ, 115), and why that opacity leaves them sceptical of the reality of
change and so of history (CJ, 115–17). But Plato’s Socrates is a master of
irony, which operates in the space between seeming and being, appear-
ance and reality—the very gap that Plato’s theory of ideas opens up and
exploits to lead us out of the cave of illusion and up towards a genuine
understanding of reality.
Accordingly, Socrates’ opening distinction between a healthy society
and a feverish one may in fact be an ironic parody of contemporary
Greek theories of the simple life, designed to support Glaucon’s con-
junction of such simplicity with non-human animal life. After all,
Novilla’s philosophy—however apparently Platonic in content—is
employed by its residents to re-affirm their current arrangements: the
theory of reality as dependent upon its participation in ideas is used not
to reveal a gap between imperfect actuality and ideal reality that we
might close, but rather to identify the actual with the ideal, and so to
disavow any real distinction between seeming and being. Genuine
20   

philosophizing as the Republic understands it, the kind exemplified in the

conversational construction of that understanding between Socrates and
his interlocutors, is only called for by the circumstances of civilized
luxury that also call for art; for this enlargement of our circle of desires
requires guardians to protect society from external threats, and it is from
them alone that (when properly educated) philosopher kings can
emerge.
Coetzee is, of course, himself a master of irony; so he could plausibly
be imagined not only to stay awake during such moments of Socratic
irony but to identify himself with them—or at least to invent literary
equivalents. But then again: this anti-Utopia tends towards the
vegetarian—its well-balanced diet is almost entirely devoid of flesh and
fish. So when the creator of the vegetarian Elizabeth Costello invites us to
identify with Simon’s preference for salt and spice over bean paste, and
even with his lust for the juicy flesh of his fellow animals, is that just one
more ironic exploitation of the doubleness of things?

2. Child and Elder

When Coetzee embeds into Novilla’s embodiment of Platonism two new

arrivals who find its form of life profoundly alien, the friction thereby
engendered discloses issues of a kind in which Wittgenstein’s later
philosophy is particularly interested. One of his most famous remarks
is: ‘what has to be accepted, the given, is—one might say—forms of life’
(PI: PPF, 345). He means that forms of life cannot be given, and stand in
no need of, rational justifications of the kind philosophy traditionally
aspires to provide (and of which the Republic’s blueprint for soul and city
appears to be an exemplary instance); and since forms of life are plural,
both various and in principle capable of being otherwise, differences
between the forms of life inhabited by different individuals cannot be
adjudicated—weighed and found wanting or meritorious—from the
point of view of the universe. Wittgenstein’s texts are littered with
imaginary tribes whose ways of speaking and living diverge radically
from our own, in order to show both that our ways of speaking and living
are not fixed, and that none can claim to make better sense of things sub
 :    21

specie aeternitatis than others. So he imagines one tribe who respond

with compassion to those whose pain derives from visible injuries, and
with disdain to those who claim to suffer pain when there is no such
source (Zettel, 380⁴); another which charges for piles of wood according
to the surface area they occupy rather than their volume (Remarks on the
Foundations of Mathematics, I, 149⁵); and people who contemplate sell-
ing cheese by weight despite its tendency to vary randomly in size
(PI, 142).
Simón’s initial experiences in Novilla have a strikingly similar aspect
and affect. He quickly discovers that the inhabitants think that hospital-
ity to strangers means allowing them to build a shelter in your yard when
there is room in your house; that watching a game of football should be
free (unless a cake is needed to award to the victors of the championship
[CJ, 24, 169]); that sexual intercourse is of no particular emotional
significance, and the biological differences between men and women
have no complex implications for their social relationships; that using
technology to make work practices more efficient is not a good thing;
that libraries should be exclusively stocked with non-fiction of some
practical use (CJ, 151), just as further education should focus on practical
skills (CJ, 120–1); and that rats are not vermin (since they’re the most
obvious source of meat to eat [CJ, 36], and they play a helpful role in the
stevedore’s food storage practices [CJ, 112]), but pigs may be (since they
eat their own excrement [CJ, 170]). In other words, at every level at
which this culture makes sense of the human condition in the wider
world, the Novillan form of life is bewilderingly different to the one
which shaped Simón; it draws distinctions where no significant differ-
ence can be discerned and ignores distinctions that are obviously import-
ant, and so appears to lack coherence, rationality, and humanity.
Ultimately, however, he is forced to acknowledge that it makes perfect
sense to those inhabiting it, that from their point of view the distinctions
he wishes to draw or to ignore are as bewildering as theirs to him, and
that there is no available perspective from which one might adjudicate
impersonally between them.

⁴ Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981).

⁵ Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978).
22   

But the relation to Wittgenstein’s thought is even more specific. For

although one might well think that Simón’s and David’s unceasing
conversations about every topic under the Spanish sun amount to a
version of the Platonic model of Socratic dialogues, perhaps prompted
by Novilla’s more general Platonic tendencies, they more specifically
embody a variation on a figure that runs throughout the Philosophical
Investigations—that of the child, or rather that of the child and its elder,
the adult who is responsible for his education, for inducting the child
into his human community and its ways. Wittgenstein adopts this focus
from the passage of Augustine’s Confessions with which he begins his
text, in which Augustine describes himself as a child acquiring speech by
observing his elders’ ways of articulating their desires (and so without
their explicit aid, perhaps even despite their neglect). Wittgenstein’s child
follows a different trajectory, in which his education involves the explicit
attention, or at least the implied friendly or enabling presence, of an
adult: and as I note the major stations of that journey in the first 250 or so
remarks of the Investigations, I will register the corresponding episodes
in Coetzee’s narrative of Simón and David.
Wittgenstein’s child is first sent to buy apples (Simón is particularly
driven to find fruit for David, their first success being the discovery of a
shop that sells oranges [CJ, 34], although apples recur later when math-
ematics is at issue between them [CJ, 248]). He then becomes involved in
a game of building something with stones (Simón and David have to
build their first night’s shelter from sheets of roofing [CJ, 7]). At this
point, Wittgenstein also invokes images of a toolbox and the cab of a
locomotive (which recur in Coetzee’s narrative when Simón mends the
toilet and when David watches a cartoon involving a train [CJ, 127, 183]),
before examining how we play games of chess and football (David
plays the former with Alvaro [CJ, 43] and both watches and plays the
latter). Then comes the most extended Wittgensteinian treatment of a
child’s education, investigating how one learns to follow a simple math-
ematical rule; in so doing, he branches off into discussions of what is
involved in reading, and ends with a long investigation of the idea of a
private language; and throughout the adult teacher confronts what
Wittgenstein’s commentators have come to call a deviant pupil—one
whose responses to ordinary teaching practices diverge in a variety of
 :    23

ways from what is normal, each of which hinders his induction into the
culture by putting in question what counts as the right next step in
applying the rule, thereby placing pressure on the teacher’s authority
(his claim to represent that culture in his claim to know what the right
next step is, and on what he might claim to be justified or effective
responses to his pupil’s deviance). In perhaps the most widely noted
sequences in The Childhood of Jesus, David shows himself to be a literary
embodiment of Wittgenstein’s deviant pupil.
Simón’s difficulties in teaching David about numbers are initially laid
out in two sequences that are placed roughly midway through the book.
In the first (CJ, 145–51), David justifies his claim to know all the
numbers by naming them individually at random: ‘I know 134 and
I know 7 and I know . . . 462355 and I know 888 . . . ’; and Simón responds
by emphasizing two points that he takes to be interrelated: ‘Knowing the
numbers means being able to count. It means knowing the order of the
numbers—which come before and which come after.’ Only by appreci-
ating how the idea of a number order emerges organically from the
practical business of counting material objects, Simón claims, will
David later be able to master basic arithmetical operations, such as
addition and subtraction. David flatly denies this: and more specifically,
when Simón corrects his answers to two questions about the order of
particular numbers, he passionately rejects Simón’s corrections on the
grounds that ‘[y]ou have never been there!’—grounds Simón under-
standably finds bewildering.
The second sequence follows soon after (CJ, 175–8), and focusses on
Simón’s foundational idea of an endless sequence of rightly related
numbers. As Simón presents it, the idea of such a sequence presupposes
that the numbers in it are distinct: he describes that which distinguishes
each number from its immediate predecessor and successor as a gap, of a
kind that is part of the way things are, part of nature—and a good part of
it at that, since ‘if everything were packed tightly together, then there
would be no you or me or Inés. You and I would not be talking to each
other right now, there would just be silence—oneness and silence.’ But
what Simón presents as a gap, David sees as a crack—a void into which
we can disappear. Instead of numbers differentiated by their places in a
sequence which thereby establishes properly spaced gaps between them,
24   

David encounters cracks into which he and they might at any point fall:
given one number, it is an open question for him which comes next, or
indeed whether any come next, or whether the sequence in fact falls
apart, revealing its essential illusoriness. And despite Simón’s claim that
such cracks would amount to a break in the order of nature, and would
thus be entirely antithetical to the essence of numbers and things alike,
David reformulates his counter-vision by claiming that the stars are
numbers, and that—just like stars—numbers can fall out of the sky,
and so die.
Any reader of the Philosophical Investigations will recognize
David’s stance as essentially an extreme variant of the difficulty
represented by Wittgenstein’s deviant pupil, as he appears in section
185. Having apparently mastered the sequence of natural numbers
that is generated by adding 2 with numbers stretching into the
hundreds, this pupil then continues beyond ‘1000’ with the sequence
‘1004, 1008, 1012’; and when his error is pointed out, and his atten-
tion drawn to how he had previously been producing the sequence, he
responds by saying, ‘But I am going on in the same way!’ Having
conjured up this moment of mutual incomprehension, Wittgenstein
offers the following commentary:

It would now be no use to say ‘But can’t you see . . . ?’—and go over the
old explanations and examples for him again. In such a case we might
perhaps say: this person finds it natural, once given our explanations,
to understand our order as we would understand the order ‘Add 2 up
to 1000, 4 up to 2000, 6 up to 3000, and so on’.
This case would have similarities to that in which it comes naturally
to a person to react to the gesture of pointing with the hand by looking
in the direction from finger-tip to wrist, rather than from wrist to
fingertip. (PI, 185)

This may seem like a rather decorous and unthreatening mode of

deviance in comparison to David’s chaotic mythological extravagances,
since Wittgenstein’s pupil plainly retains the assumption that numbers
have a sequence, differing with us only about which it is; but such a
reaction would miss the full significance of the possibility the pupil
 :    25

embodies. To begin with, we should not be distracted by the fact that

Wittgenstein’s pupil deviates at a rather early, and so a very familiar,
point in the unfolding of the ‘add 2’ sequence (hence one at which we will
be very confident in the rightness of the teacher). For no matter how far
we have developed that sequence, there will always be a point beyond
which we have not yet gone; as David would put it, there will always be
some stretch of the sequence which we have not yet visited, to which we
haven’t yet been. Moreover, if a problem of this kind can be made to
emerge at all in the unfolding of the ‘add 2’ sequence, it can embody any
degree of deviance. For if this pupil’s deviant sequence is, on a certain
interpretation of our explanations and examples of the ‘add 2’ rule, in
conformity with them, then any list of numbers (even ones as random as
those David recites) could, on some suitably baroque interpretation,
count as the continuing application of that same rule. And that under-
mines the very idea of this, or any, rule as determining what counts as a
correct application of it (and what does not) at each stage in its devel-
opment, which amounts to undermining the very idea of numbers as
coming in ordered sequences.
The scholarly literature on Wittgenstein’s treatment of rule-following
commonly (and perfectly naturally) assumes that the problem raised by
this deviant pupil is what, if anything, determines that 1002 is the correct
answer when one is asked to add 2 to 1000; what, if anything, makes the
answer expected by the teacher the right answer, and the answer pro-
duced by the pupil the wrong one (or rather, one of an indefinite number
of wrong ones).
We are then obliged to identify Wittgenstein’s preferred solution to
that problem; and one popular proposal is that he invokes the commu-
nity: that is, he means to convince us that what makes a given step the
right one to take is its conformity with the way that the community is
inclined to go on. Since there is no pertinent standard of correctness
external to our form of life, the distinction between correctly and incor-
rectly applying it must be a matter of how the community draws it, and
teaching it is a matter of bringing the pupil into conformity with that
communal practice. This is why private rules are impossible, which is
why Wittgenstein’s discussion of rule-following throws up the famous
question of the possibility of a private language and provides the central
26   

basis for dismissing it. It is also why Wittgenstein is led to one of his most
famous images for the givenness of forms of life:

‘How am I able to follow a rule?’—If this is not a question about causes,

then it is about the justification for my acting in this way in complying
with the rule.
Once I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock,
and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: ‘This is simply
what I do.’ (PI, 217)

As Stanley Cavell has pointed out, such communitarian readings of

Wittgenstein on rule-following imply an ethics and a politics of teaching:
bringing our children into our human community is essentially a matter
of enforcing conformity—so that, if I ever have my pedagogical spade
turned by a pupil’s deviant responses, I am licensed to say to her, ‘You
simply must do whatever I am inclined to do.’⁶ The implied alternative to
such conformity is explicit in one of Wittgenstein’s earlier drafts of the
Investigations, when he says: ‘if a child does not respond to the suggestive
gesture [to the teacher’s indications of how to go on], it is separated from
the others and treated as a lunatic’ (The Blue and Brown Books, p. 93).⁷
Cavell’s point is that communitarian readings of Wittgenstein are on the
verge of embodying just such a spirit; we might say that they take this
remark of Wittgenstein’s literally, failing to hear its Swiftian tones, its
irony.
In fact, however, Wittgenstein’s remark about bedrock does not char-
acterize the pedagogical situation in Swiftian terms: what his teacher
envisages saying to his pupil is not that they must do as he does, but
rather ‘this is what I do, this is how I and my fellow grown-ups do things:
will you take me as exemplary, as an example you are willing to follow?’
And of course, Wittgenstein’s teacher doesn’t actually say this to his
pupil: he acknowledges an inclination to do so, but he doesn’t succumb
to it. And that is because what those words would convey is already

⁶ See chapter 2 of his Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome (Chicago: Chicago University
Press, 1990), in which Saul Kripke’s massively influential version of the communitarian view of
rule-following is under critical examination.
⁷ New York: Harper and Row, 1958.
 :    27

manifest in his stance towards his pupil—in his willingness to provide

whatever justifications he can, but to acknowledge when they run out by
resorting to showing rather than telling (certainly not to telling off or
separating off his pupil). Rather than demanding conformity, he presents
himself and his actions as no more but no less than an embodiment of
the sense his community finds itself able to make of these things we call
numbers, in the hope that his pupil will be attracted to it—will find it
possible to see themselves in their interlocutor.
Such a non-coercive or democratic model of teaching is not only truer
to Wittgenstein’s remarks about reaching bedrock but also more closely
attuned to the primary point of his introducing the deviant pupil in the
first place. For in section 185, Wittgenstein expresses no sceptical anxiety
about whether 1002 really is what results from adding 2 to 1000—as if
there is a genuine, deep philosophical problem here to which solutions
are needed. Rather, he points out that, even in the domain of pure
mathematical reason, explanations and justifications may run out—
may fail to convey understanding; hence when they succeed, that is not
because what is being conveyed is written into reality by Platonic forms,
or accessible through pure recollection by all rational beings (as Socrates
aims to demonstrate with the slave boy in the Meno), but rather because
teacher and pupil share a repertoire of natural reactions—the kind that
make it possible for human beings to teach one another effectively with
pointing gestures, but which prevent establishing such modes of inter-
action with cats. Put otherwise, the normative is embedded in, and so
dependent on, the natural—on human nature; so what we call ‘deviance’
is a manifestation of differences that are no more but no less than
natural, hence neither arbitrary nor beyond hope of overcoming. And
this really should alter our understanding of the authority that adults
bear as pedagogues—as individuals who aspire to induct the young into
their form of life.
Coetzee’s narrative of mathematical pedagogy in The Childhood of
Jesus enforces the difference between these two models of teaching by
assigning each to a different character. The coercive Swiftian model is
embodied in Señor León, the schoolteacher who reacts to David’s
numerical deviance by attempting to impose his community’s view, flatly
asserting that he can be the only authority in the classroom (CJ, 225) and
28   

separating David out for exile to the remedial school at Punto Arenas. By
contrast, having first reacted in a similar way, Simón begins to move
away from that model, by means of a process which involves a willing-
ness to acknowledge the internal coherence of David’s perspective—the
possibility that it embodies an alternative way of making sense of things,
of which he can make some sense—and thereby to allow his pupil to
teach him.
The transformation is put in train when he acknowledges that his
explanations are not passing David by, but are rather being absorbed and
rejected, and he allows this insight to lead him to ask why. His immediate
response implicitly rejects two obvious candidate answers: that David is
congenitally incapable of understanding counting and arithmetic, and
that he is perfectly capable of doing so, but is deploying that cleverness to
purely frivolous ends (for example, to make his teacher furiously angry).
Instead, Simón arrives at the suspicion that David is something more
than a very clever child, something for which at that moment he lacks a
word (CJ, 150–1). And the transformation ends when Simón finds not so
much a single word that he had hitherto lacked, but rather an articulated
field of such words. For in a late conversation with Eugenio during a car
journey, he tries to motivate David’s deviance from the inside, to see the
world through his eyes.

Put an apple before him and what does he see? An apple: not one apple,
just an apple. Put two apples before him. What does he see? An apple
and an apple: not two apples, not the same apple twice, just an apple
and an apple . . . Three men in a car heading for the East Blocks: who is
the singular of which men is the plural—Eugenio or Simón or our
friend the driver whose name I don’t know? Are we three, or are we one
and one and one? (CJ, 249)

Here, Simón haltingly begins to articulate a sense that David’s refusal to

regard counting as the inevitable precursor to arithmetic—his refusal to
abstract from particular countable things to the idea of countable units
(whether of a particular kind, such as apples or human beings, or of any
kind whatever)—results from an exceptional sensitivity to the sheer
individuality of every particular thing he encounters. Exactly the same
 :    29

sensitivity is on display when he encounters numbers: as we saw, his way

of rejecting Simón’s model of their ordered sequentiality amounts to
treating numerals as the names of things that are as distinct from others
of their kind as are one particular apple or one particular person; 462,
355 is as different from 88 as Simón is from Eugenio, and as one star is
from another.
But this perception of individuality in the realm of numbers is con-
joined with another:

[David] won’t take the steps we take when we count: one step two step
three. It is as if the numbers were islands floating in a great black sea of
nothingness, and he were each time being asked to close his eyes and
launch himself across the void. What if I fall?—that is what he asks
himself. What if I fall and then keep falling for ever? Lying in bed in the
middle of the night, I could sometimes swear that I too was falling—
falling under the same spell that grips the boy. If getting from one to two
is so hard, I asked myself, how shall I ever get from zero to one? From
nowhere to somewhere: it seemed to demand a miracle each time.
(CJ, 249)

Although many Wittgenstein scholars might deprecate the melodra-

matic tone of this vision, I don’t think they can deny that the
scepticism about rule-following that they derive from the deviant
pupil, and regard as a perfectly respectable philosophical problem,
engenders exactly the same anxiety about being asked to launch
oneself across the void whenever one takes a step from one number
in a rule-governed sequence to its successor. But what Simón’s
empathetic vision adds to this anxiety is twofold: an extension of
the anxiety to the beginning of the number series, and its articulation
in terms of a fear of falling. The step from zero to one is in a certain
sense not the beginning of the number series: zero is in fact a
relatively late arrival in the realm of numbers (it was unknown to
Plato), and it has induced a great deal of anxiety about its nature and
legitimacy (is it a natural number, even though it is not a positive
number? Is it even a number at all, since it denotes nothing?). But for
Simón, the step from zero to one primarily represents both the step
30   

into the conceptual system of numbers (and so into a mathematical

understanding of the world) and the step from nowhere to some-
where, the step into orientation by any conceptual system of thought.
The crucial point here is that both points of entry require steps to be
taken by the individual who wishes to enter: and this means that they
might not be so taken—they are not compulsory, being neither a
metaphysical nor a rational nor a communal necessity.
What about the fear of falling that Simón imputes to his son? This is
Simón’s way of making sense of their earlier discussion of the difference
between gaps and cracks; but the salience of the figure also reminds the
realistically minded reader to consider the context of its present enunci-
ation. For here, the figure has migrated from son to father, but it has
done so only in the aftermath of the father’s accident, when he is
knocked from the quay on which he is working and falls into the space
between it and the freighter they are unloading. It is hard to avoid the
conclusion that the night-time vision in his hospital bed is at once a
nightmare revisiting of that terrifying moment of falling and an unfore-
seen point of entry into his son’s view of the world. One might say that
his literal fall casts the spell under which he figuratively falls—the spell by
which his boy is already gripped.
That same reader might then be encouraged to look more closely at
the earlier exchanges between Simón and David in which the latter first
articulated his view of numbers. The core elements of that view include a
willingness to interpret gaps as cracks, an extreme sensitivity to indi-
viduality, and a willingness to identify stars with numbers; but their
appearance in these passages is in fact a reappearance. The idea of cracks
in reality is first adumbrated when Simón notices David ‘hesitating and
hopping to avoid cracks in the pavement’ (CJ, 35), thereby slowing their
progress on a walk, their ability to take efficient steps. The idea of the
individuality of numbers is aired by David immediately after he cites
Inés’ claim that he requires individual attention that he won’t get from
school (CJ, 149). And the idea of linking numbers to stars is first
introduced by Simón: he points out a constellation called the Twins,
and distinguishes its members from the evening star, which prompts
David to recount a story told by Inés about three brothers, the third of
whom turns into a star, which in turn prompts an argument about what
 :    31

makes a brother first, second, or third, and so initiates their first conver-
sation about numbers.
The finer details of this web of connections is less important than the
fact that David’s vision of counting, of numbers, and of their stellar status
is not created from nothing, not absolutely peculiar to him: it is rather an
original rearticulation or translation of ideas that in part originate with
him but largely derive from his parents. His contribution is to interweave
what he has learnt from them with what his experiences have taught him,
to embed their ideas into his own evolving world view in such a way that
they come to embody something neither teacher could have predicted
but for which both bear an ineliminable responsibility. Wittgenstein
might say that this balance between originality and indebtedness exhibits
the degree to which David’s repertoire of natural reactions diverges from
that of his parents whilst maintaining a basic attunement with them. His
responses to their explanations and examples are not those of most
young children, but they can be seen as intelligible responses to them
(unlike a cat’s complete lack of response to pointing gestures): they are
not sheerly chaotic or meaningless.
In this sense, even if Simón himself is only beginning to appreciate it,
he is—despite his worst fears—having a significant pedagogical impact
on his son. David really is learning from him, internalizing ideas that
Simón communicates to him: it’s just that what he has learnt is not
always what Simón meant to teach.⁸ And this tells us something about
pedagogy in general, whether familial or academic: that what we mean to
teach and what is learnt can sometimes radically diverge, for better and
for worse; that we can retain pedagogical authority even when we are
most convinced that we lack it; and that if we make the effort to respond
to apparent deviance in our pupils by inhabiting their perspective (by
attempting to treat it as a possible point of view on a shared world), we
might discover the means to re-establish mutual understanding, and so a
basis for continued community. But that amounts to a vision of true
pedagogical authority as a matter of being willing to suspend it rather

⁸ Cavell develops this line of thought further in his ‘Excursus on Wittgenstein’s Vision of
Language’, in The Claim of Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979)—hereafter ‘CR’.
32   

than to impose it, to contemplate its limits and its partiality, and to show
or display that to the person one is trying to teach.
I mentioned earlier that Wittgenstein’s discussion of rule-following
culminates in his massively influential critical examination of the idea of
a private language—one consisting of terms whose meaning is necessar-
ily accessible only to the one using it. It’s always possible for others not to
understand what we mean by our ordinary words and utterances, and for
us to take steps to keep our meaning private; but then it’s also possible for
us to disclose that meaning, to make ourselves understood to others.
With a (logically) private language, the idea is supposed to be that no
such efforts could conceivably succeed; and the question philosophers
were brought to consider by reading Wittgenstein’s remarks on the
matter was ‘Could there possibly be a private language?’ In so doing,
they followed Wittgenstein himself in taking one’s inner experiences,
moods, and sensations as prime candidates for the referents of the terms
in such a language, trading on our tendency to regard such phenomena
as lying beyond the reach of those not experiencing them, and so as
capable of transferring their metaphysical privacy to the meaning of the
words employed to pick them out by the individual whose experiences
they are.
The Childhood of Jesus ostentatiously follows the same path as the
Investigations in this respect: David’s exchanges with Simón move almost
seamlessly from deviant rule-following to the use of a private language.
After complaining about having to speak Spanish all the time, and being
told by Simón that it is a practical necessity in Novilla, he declares that he
wants to speak his own language, and begins to enunciate nonsense
syllables that he claims mean something to him. Simón’s confident
counter-enunciation of the view espoused by many readers of
Wittgenstein—that a private language is a nonsensical idea because any
genuine language must be communal—is then somewhat shaken by
David’s dismissive gesture, and his command that he look at him as he
speaks his ‘nonsense’:

He looks into the boy’s eyes. For the briefest of moments he sees
something there. He has no name for it. It is like—that is what occurs
to him in the moment. Like a fish that wriggles loose as you try to grasp
 :    33

it. But not like a fish—no, like like a fish. Or like like like a fish. On and
on. Then the moment is over, and he is simply standing in silence,
staring.
‘Did you see?’ says the boy.
‘I don’t know. Stop for a minute, I am feeling dizzy.’
‘I can see what you are thinking!’ says the boy with a triumphant smile.
‘No you can’t.’
‘You think I can do magic.’
‘Not at all. You have no idea what I am thinking.’ (CJ, 186–7)

Suppose that the something that Simón sees is the meaning of David’s
nonsense: then his image of a fish escaping one’s grasp is an attempt to
grasp what some of David’s private words mean to him as well as to
Simón; and it implies that both regard it as elusive (which may be one
reason why David thinks magic is involved). But it’s worth noting that
this fish only wriggles loose when one tries to grasp it: in this sense, it is
ungraspable, but the clear implication is that it only eludes you because
you try to grasp it, which leaves open the possibility that if you avoid
grasping it—if you adopt a less grasping attitude, cease attempting to
master or coerce it—it will not attempt to escape. Here it may help to
recall that the etymology of the words ‘concept’ and ‘comprehension’
(just like that of the German term for a concept, ‘Begriff ’) embodies the
idea of taking, getting a grip on, or seizing something—a kind of pillaging
of our experience or of the world. Little wonder that what we seek
thereby to master seeks to elude us; but what would happen if we adopted
a more receptive attitude—perhaps by allowing our experience to make
its own impression on us? What if Simón allowed the fish to rest on his
open palm, or even to stay in its own medium?
But the image of the fish is actually a secondary part of Simón’s
experience here: it arrives only when he uses it to complete the expres-
sion that first comes to him: ‘It is like . . .’, and the moment he does
complete it, he is led to reformulate the complete phrase recursively (it
isn’t like a fish, it’s like like a fish), which returns the emphasis to the idea
of likeness as such rather than to any particular likeness. This suggests
34   

that meaning in general is a matter of likeness relations—that word

meaning is constructed from perceptions of similarity rather than iden-
tity. That can lead us (as it led the young Nietzsche⁹) to the thought that
conceptualizing things is always a matter of falsifying them: if I call both
a carp and a salmon ‘fish’, I might seem to be positing an identity which
occludes or denies their many significant differences. But in truth, to say
that they are both fish is to say that they share certain properties that are
criterial for fishhood—that is, it specifies the respects in which they are
alike; and this doesn’t exclude—in fact it positively invites us to
consider—the possibility that they differ from each other in a range of
other respects. Simón’s image of the fish invited us to consider alterna-
tives to grasping experience conceptually; but his prior image of likeness
invites us to consider instead a non-grasping interpretation or transla-
tion of what it is to conceptualize experience. And, of course, such a non-
grasping conceptualization would satisfy David’s driving desire to
acknowledge the sheer individuality of every specific thing without
having to sacrifice the idea of mutual intelligibility.
And the context within which Simón achieves this insight is of course
one in which he and David do establish mutual intelligibility, although
by a process in which each occupies the other’s official position on the
matter, and which results in a significant reframing of our picture of
what mutual intelligibility is really like. Simón initially affirmed the
everyday availability of mutual understanding, but finds himself denying
his accessibility to David, as well as his own (real but admittedly bewil-
dering) access to David; and David’s initial affirmation of the privacy of
his language is undercut by his later claiming that Simón can see what his
own private words mean, and that he knows what Simón is thinking.
That last claim is at the very least not as quickly or absolutely
dismissible as Simon irritatedly asserts. It may be true that Simón was
not literally saying to himself, ‘My son can do magic’; but what if we take
David’s formulation figuratively, as capturing a likeness or similarity
relation between Simón’s ideas about David and David’s ideas about
himself—as a child’s translation of an adult perception? The idea of mind

⁹ ‘On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense’, in The Birth of Tragedy, trans. R. Speirs
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
 :    35

reading as magic seems a perfectly serviceable way for a child to charac-

terize the fact that the meanings he divines in others and in himself are
elusive but graspable, as opposed to always already determined by factors
beyond and before individual acts of communication (in the way his
father initially claimed). And if Simon began by thinking that under-
standing another’s words and inner life requires that that other use
words and ideas in precisely the way everyone does (call this a vision
of linguistic community as coercive identity, as the elimination of indi-
viduality), then what he just achieved in relation to David (which is what
David claims to have achieved in relation to him) could only be a kind of
magic—a spell from which his son is helping him to awake. Such an
interpretation of the meaning of the word ‘magic’ would be only one
example of the general truth that meaning is elusive but not ungraspable.
Understanding another’s words and thoughts is challenging, and may
become impossible if it is treated as an attempt at coercive mastery—in
which their way of taking responsibility for meaning what they say is
dictated in advance by communal rules; but if it is instead regarded as a
kind of Keatsian negative capability (as a willingness to dwell in uncer-
tainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and
reason), then one might come to see the whole of that other’s inner world
in the open palm of one’s hand.
Such a way of understanding the publicity of meaning and mind is
perfectly compatible with acknowledging the possibility of privacy and
individuality, a point that Wittgenstein has long been understood to be
making. In this respect, then, Coetzee and Wittgenstein agree: both are
attentive not just to the realities of human communication, but also to the
ways in which fantasies of privacy and publicity shadow those realities,
and often function to shield us from acknowledging our common subjec-
tion to both (by putting our unknownness to others and our knownness by
them beyond our control, and so outwith our individual responsibilities).

3. Benengeli’s Cave

Although Coetzee’s embedding of a twinned embodiment of

Wittgenstein into his Platonic polis plainly creates friction between
36   

these two philosophical registers, they harmonize with respect to their

relation to history. The inhabitants of Novilla lack a history, having been
washed clean of their previous lives, and both Plato and Wittgenstein fit
neatly into such a landscape: the former because the Republic conjures its
ideal city out of words, and thereby inaugurates philosophy as a subject
whose history lies before it; the latter because (as Cavell puts it¹⁰),
whereas some philosophers write according to the myth of having read
everything essential in the history of their subject, Wittgenstein writes
according to the myth of having read essentially nothing—as if philoso-
phy exists only insofar as it endlessly brings itself back into existence in
the present, from whatever materials happen to provoke the philo-
sopher’s bewilderment and consequent desire for reorientation. And
when literature in the form of the novel finally appears in Novilla, its
embodiment has a similar relation to the history of its enterprise; for the
book that Simón finds buried in Novilla’s local library is An Illustrated
Children’s Don Quixote—an abridged version of a novel with as good a
claim as any to have inaugurated the history of the novel as a literary
genre.
Simón is delighted to have discovered an enjoyable comedy in which
no one is drowned or killed, hoping that David will find it sufficiently
attractive to learn to read. But David’s response to Don Quixote’s fight
with the windmills quickly disabuses him; for his son assumes that the
Don’s identification of those windmills as giants is correct, and Simón
finds himself once again struggling to bridge a fundamental divergence
of responses:

‘David,’ he says, ‘Don Quixote is an unusual book. To the lady in the

library who lent it to us it looks like a simple book for children, but in
truth it isn’t simple at all. It presents the world to us through two pairs
of eyes, Don Quixote’s eyes and Sancho’s eyes. To Don Quixote, it is a
giant he is fighting. To Sancho, it is a windmill. Most of us—not you,
perhaps, but most of us nevertheless—will agree with Sancho that it is a

¹⁰ This New Yet Unapproachable America (Albuquerque, NM: Living Batch Press, 1989),
p. 19.
Another random document with
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cuttingly clear.
“Her slight lameness alone prevents her being placed in some
position of the greatest trust. That room only is sacred from all of
your rattle-headed social friends. I trust her implicitly.”
“I begin to understand you,” gravely said Vreeland.
“Under the guise of enjoying my life and living up to my prosperity, I
am to hide the momentous secret stock business carried on there.”
“Precisely,” soberly said Elaine Willoughby.
“The office business below?” he hesitatingly said.
“Ah! I have given up months to the study of this new arrangement,”
thoughtfully said the Queen of the Street. “You are to be master of
your own hours.
“Once a day, however, you are to show up at the downtown office.
Wyman knows that you will be busied at home a great deal. You will
have no awkward questions asked. Endicott will watch the downtown
affair.”
“The firm signature?” he said.
“Will never be used. You will sign ‘Harold Vreeland, Trustee,’ and the
securities handled daily will be delivered to me at the ‘Circassia,’ on
my list of purchases and sales. Your checks and my daily statements
are to correspond.”
“In other words, I am, as trustee, your hidden broker?” Vreeland said.
“Under my daily orders,” she gravely answered. “And you are not to
deny that you indulge in private speculations. You are not even to
avoid Hathorn’s nearest friends.
“Even if Mrs. Volney McMorris should steal into your breakfast room,
or a bevy of the gay young matrons, or—even a pretty anonyma—
your record as a ‘preux chevalier’ in gayest New York will not suffer.
You are to be a young man à la mode.” Vreeland bowed in a grave
silence.
That night, when he returned to New York City, to blindly obey his
strange patroness, Vreeland’s bosom was big with his happy
secrets.
“I am to hold the hidden fort ‘of the Sugar treasure.’”
He divined a bitter campaign against Hathorn. And he then dreamed
a strange, sweet, wicked dream. Alida Hathorn’s stolen visits—with
Justine, perhaps—as a dark-eyed devil laughing over the downfall of
his enemy’s wife.
“I will make my own little game,” he laughed.
 CHAPTER VII.

“PLUNGER” VREELAND’S GAY LIFE, “UNDER THE ROSE.”

Before the February snows were congealed into those dirty flakes of
ice and street mud which are an evidence of the “effectiveness” of
New York’s Street Cleaning department, the “top floor” of the Elmleaf
bachelor apartment was considered to set the pace for the gayest of
the bachelor apartments of Gotham. The hidden programme was
even literally carried out.
Outwardly, the daily life of that fortunate individual, Mr. Harold
Vreeland, had undergone little change. Once a day he duly occupied
his desk at the downtown office, using alternately the morning and
afternoon fraction.
He proved a very “tough nut to crack” for the local gossips, however.
There was a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde flavor of mystery clinging to the
audacious young “Westerner.” The slow trots of the “Locust” and the
old senile wiseacres of the “Sentinel” clubs wondered at his calm
demeanor, his easily acquired repose of the caste of “Vere de Vere.”
Vreeland was posing now as a “fixed star.”
Not even Bradstreet, or Dun, could seize upon any public
delinquencies to the detriment of his “business character,” and yet,
Harold Vreeland had rapidly acquired the reputation of a “devil of a
fellow.” He had, like Byron, his “hours of idleness.”
There was, too, an outward prosperous harmony in the busy office of
Wyman and Vreeland, now packed with clerks and forging to the
front as a house of unexampled strength.
There was a sober, quiet effectiveness in the firm, which shamed the
nervous “bucket shop” decadents, who were only noisy, screaming
gulls, clamoring over the financial sea for “any old thing” in the way
of floating pabulum.
It was undeniable that the hats went off to right and left, as Vreeland
paced the sacred precincts of Wall, Broad and Pine. A rising man—a
successful man—a man of mark!
“A safe man, sir! A wonderful young financier! A man whose outside
operations are enormous!” gravely said the cashier of the
Mineralogical Bank to his esteemed colleague, the cashier of Henry
Screws & Company.
“You see!” confidentially said the speaker, between two mouthfuls of
“hasty lunch,” “the house is bound not to speculate, but—Vreeland,
as an individual, is to-day, perhaps the heaviest single operator of all
the young men of New York.” The young man’s fame was duly
noised abroad.
“Where does he get all his backing?” grunted the other, as he
dashed down a tankard of “bitter.”
“He owns the half of Montana,” dreamily said the Mineralogical’s
Cerberus.
“And so, he is founded on the eternal rocks.”
It was not half an hour until this brilliant new canard was traveling
like a winged locust—and, it soon achieved the voyage—even to the
jungles of Harlem—and spread all over Gotham like the Canada
thistle attacking a poorhouse farm. A new financial Napoleon had
appeared.
The self-possessed Vreeland was astounded at the many offered
social honors, the crowding attractive business temptations, and all
the rosy lures now thronging his pathway. He knew not as yet the
whole force of a lie “well stuck to,” which often treads down the
modest and shamefaced truth.
And even the agnostic sneer of “parvenu” was spared him. He was
suave, careful, chary in making enemies, and strictly non-committal.
His conduct toward Elaine Willoughby absolutely disarmed even that
vigilant social scavenger, Mrs. Volney McMorris.
For, many other men were just as often seen on parade in Elaine’s
opera box. Senator Alynton, General Morehouse, U. S. A., Judge
Arbuckle, and other social heavy guns oftener pressed the cushions
of her victoria, or nestled under her sleigh robes.
The Lady of Lakemere’s dinners were always stocked with a half
dozen masculine “lions” of deep-toned and majestic growl. There
were also two or three society swells—“howling swells”—who
represented the “froth and foam,” and these young men, with
vacuous smiles and heaven-kissing collars, impartially formed the
“bodyguard” at theatre parties, and a gilded Spartan band, deftly
“cleaned up” the debris of the midnight spread in the Waldorf supper
room.
Elaine had a peculiar fashion of segregating the lions and dudes,
and sending each kind of social animal forth radiant with self-
satisfaction, after a happy five minutes passed with her alone—in the
pearl boudoir.
So, calm and serene, Harold Vreeland duly came and went. Men
wondered that he so freely stood back to let “other fellows take up
the running,” and Augustus Van Renslayer sagely summed up the
verdict of the younger “women hunters” of New York: “He is no
marrying man. He lives in an eternal picnic of his own—up there—in
the Elmleaf.” It was vaguely understood that Sardanapalus was
Vreeland’s patron saint, and Bacchus and Nero his household gods.
The charm had worked but too well.
And the women of Gotham, those bright-eyed heart-wreckers, were
all fain to agree with the catfish-eyed Van Renslayer. There was a
fatal impartiality in the easy gallantry of the wary Princeton graduate.
Liberal, dashing, mindful of all the petits agrémens, he was no
woman’s slave—and yet, all women’s friend. If no single heart
quivered at his master touch, still, there were many arms open to
him selon son métier. A fatal curiosity led many a pretty Columbus
on voyages of discovery to the Elmleaf—whereat Bagley duly
grinned.
That famous housewarming had been a marvel in its delicate
recognition of the monde ou l’on s’ennuie, and the judicious hilarity
of the Demi-Vierges.
For the return of Mr. James Potter, now finally severed from the
flagging firm of Hathorn & Wolfe, had furnished Vreeland with a
brilliant new idea.
There was a superb “First Part,” in which Mrs. Volney McMorris
lightly and amiably matronized the bravest ladies of the “swim”—who
had long been burning to inspect the splendors of the upper floor of
the Elmleaf.
Among the forty guests of the “official” programme, were such
undeniably good form clubmen as Potter, Wiltshire, Merriman, and
Rutherstone. They and their gilded brothers suggested the names of
willing goddesses, and so it was that Miss Katharine VanDyke
Norreys, the “staccato” Californian heiress—Mrs. Murray Renton, of
Cleveland—and several other detached, semi-detached, and
detachable women “of spotless reputation,” joyed with the host’s
convives, dipped their laughing, rosy lips in his Roederer, and
pattered with their lightly-treading feet over his airy domain of a
wondrously refined luxury.
It was nearly one o’clock when the grave Bagley had closed the last
carriage door and sent the two policemen away with “a heavenly
smile on their faces”—and a five-dollar bill clutched in each brawny
hand.
And then, on softly-rolling rubber wheels, came slipping along under
the shadows of clubhouse and virtuous mansions of drowsy
decorum, the pick of Cupid’s Dashing Free Lances—the very flower
of the Light Infantry of Love. This “Pickett’s charge” of these demure
Demi-Vierges was successful.
It was the solemn Bagley who marveled as he sped these “shining
ones” on their way up the stair at the struggling odors of “Y’lang
Y’lang,” “Atkinson’s White Rose,” “Wood Violets,” and “Peau
d’Espagne.”
For days, that scented staircase recalled the “informal visit” of the
regent moon, Miss Dickie Doubleday; the audacious Tottie
Thistledown, the fair queen of light heels; Nannie Bell, the mignonne
chanteuse, and several other disciples of the “partly” and, alas, the
“altogether.” The girdle of Venus was en évidence that happy night.
It is true that the glass globes automatically shrank up in affright
toward the ceiling, as these flashing-eyed birds fluttered in and burst
upon the gay banquet “mid the bright bowls.” The Elmleaf never
sheltered a lighter-hearted crew.
It was left to the imperturbable Bagley, next day, “to gather up the
fragments,” and headaches, heartaches, and visions of “woven
paces and waving arms,”—with sky-pointed toes and glimpses ne
quid nimis of clocked stockings and sleek tricots, were fairly divided
among the gallant swains who “did not go home till morning.”
It was in this jovial manner that Vreeland vindicated the public
character of un homme galant, which his strange feverish-hearted
patroness seemed to thrust upon him. And he wondered as he
obeyed—but, the game went bravely on.
There were some seriously tender interludes in the “evening’s
hilarity.” Miss Dickie Doubleday, in the empanchement de son âme
and, watchfully jealous of that dimpled star, Stella Knox, had quickly
effected a truce, of an amatory character, with the loved and lost
Jimmie Potter, who had lived to learn that her heart was “a bicycle
made for two”—if not more.
“After the ball,” Potter ostentatiously lingered to smoke a last weed
with Vreeland, who had opened for him alone the last unprofaned
corner of his domain—that Bluebeard chamber which was “strictly
business.” He knew that Potter was secret, safe, and gamely silent.
“Ah! my boy!” sighed Potter. “I see how you carry on your own
private plunging. What a fool Hathorn was—to quarrel with the
Willoughby!
“Now that I’m out I don’t mind to tell you that the old firm is going
downhill very fast. Hathorn lost his luck when he cut the golden cord.
“I can’t make him out. He has grown strangely reckless and haggard.
“And the wife is, to say the least, un peu insouciante. You know of
that little yacht racket?”—and he whispered a few telling words.
“Well! Alida Hathorn was the Veiled Lady. I have it from the man who
is to be the sailing master of the ‘Aphrodite’ next year.
“And the blinded Hathorn is obstinately shadowing Mrs. Willoughby,
still following up her game, digging up her past, and backing up all
his wife’s acidulated slanders.
“When I found this to be a truth, and saw these damned guttersnipe
Hawkshaws slipping in and out of his private office, I decided to
quietly withdraw—for a quieter and a gamer woman never drew
breath than Elaine Willoughby.
“I wish to God that I had married Alida,” burst out the honest reveler,
whose relaxed nerves had unsealed the fountains of truth. “For now,
I fear, she will be every man’s woman—if she don’t pull up. She’s left
all alone, and Hathorn’s one idea is revenge upon Elaine Willoughby.
“And for her sake, he bitterly hates you. Look out for him. For he has
lost all self-control. You are wise to play your outside game here in
safety. Hathorn would not hesitate to bribe your own people.
“I know he had that big lump of deviltry, Justine Duprez, in his pay.
He even took her over to Paris the summer Mrs. Willoughby went out
to Colorado. I’m glad I’m out of the stock business. You’ll tire of it,
and with your money why do you fool with it?”
The young Crœsus arose unsteadily, and said, “Come to breakfast
with me at the Union to-morrow—that is to say, to-day,” he chuckled.
“Well, let us have one hour’s poker—you and me—and with no limit
—just for fun.
“You owe me a revenge. Now, remember—I have warned you. Look
out that Hathorn don’t get onto your little game—dig a pit—and drop
you in it.
“He’s grown to be an ether drinker now, and his wife is as cold-
hearted an egoist as breathes. Just dead gone on herself—and her
own pretty bodily mechanism. If he ever gets in an ugly money
corner, she won’t give him a sou marqué.
“Now, Elaine Willoughby has ‘held up her end of the log’ against
some of the stiffest men in Wall Street. She is smarter than a whole
stack of Hathorns. I know in the outside companies that I am director
of, she has loads of the best paying permanent investments.
“And if she ever catches Hathorn nosing into her affairs, or yours, for
I know your firm does a part of her business, she will smash up Fred
Hathorn like the ‘Mary Powell’ going over a rowboat.”
With an affected unconcern, Vreeland saw his friend disappear in a
night hour club coupé, after swearing fidelity to the poker tryst.
But his heart was beating wildly, as he crawled upstairs in the gray of
the dawn. “That’s her game; defense and revenge! I wonder if
Hathorn really traced her out to Colorado, and has he an inkling of
Alva Whiting?
“He’s not above levying a blackmail. And I am in some strange way
her pawn in this veiled duel to the death, a duel between a man and
woman who may have often rested in each other’s arms with vows of
deathless love.
“It may be only self-protection that made her shove him off on Alida
VanSittart. How she hurried on that marriage?
“Was it jealousy, fear, or some of her craft? And I am used—used
and only half trusted.
“Wait! Lady Mine! If Justine only plays me fair, I will have got all your
game—and then I’ll be master of you, Lakemere and the money.
Once inside your lines, then you will never be able to throw me off.”
He was beginning to see the threads of the swift current now.
His own expression, “inside your lines,” haunted him through his
three hours’ sleep, his bath, and early breakfast. Vreeland had the
nerves of the Iron Duke, and he burned for a few words with Justine,
who was to seek him that very morning, at her nest in South Fifth
Avenue.
For there was a southward trip impending, and he wished to give his
one faithful spy her orders.
“If I could only get at the wires in her room! If I could only manage to
tap her talk and messages to old Endicott! For this woman here in
the office is surely her spy. Bagley may be.
“By Heavens! There is just one chance. And her mail! Justine may
help me. What can she not do?”
His heart burned with a dull jealousy of that past when Justine had
aided Hathorn on his upward way. “If she could only get around the
janitor of the ‘Circassia,’ and the letter carrier. What money can do, I
can aid her in, and she must do the rest—” He closed his eyes in a
fierce glow of sensual irritation, for the Parisienne had already forged
chains upon him which, with all his cold craft, he could not lightly
break away from.
“She is not to be resisted—if she plays her own game. First the trip,
then the other idea. But I could never handle this pale-faced St.
Agnes—this lame bundle of all the virtues. I must have some one
else here to watch Miss Mary Kelly—this convent-bred marvel.
“Why not find a smart woman to be my private stenographer and one
of the right kind? She could also keep an eye on Bagley and the little
dove-eyed devotee. Justine may help me to the right woman. I’ll tell
her all.” He began to see Lakemere moving toward him.
The gilded child of fashion was first at the tryst, and Justine Duprez
threw herself into her secret lover’s arms with a glad cry of triumph,
when ten o’clock brought her to the meeting place. “If I could only
come to you,” she fiercely sighed—“in your palace home!
“But wait—wait—till we have netted my lady. I have news now to
make your heart dance.”
The panting woman drew from her breast a scrawl of paper, on
which she had copied even the office marks. “This telegram came
this morning. You see that it is dated Washington.” Vreeland’s heart
bounded as he read the words: “Arlington—to-morrow. Don’t fail.”
Was it an appointment—a lover’s secret call?
He could have shouted with triumph, as he gazed on the signature,
“Alynton,” for a messenger had brought him a note at the moment of
his departure to meet Justine. His patroness had fallen into a snare.
“I am going to Pittsburg to-night. Come up and dine. I will give you
your orders for a week.”
He drew out the note, and glanced at the firm pen stroke. “Can
Alynton be the father of Alva Whiting?” he growled.
He dropped his head on the table, while Justine took off her hat and
wraps with the easy insouciance of a Camille. He was mad with
mingled greed and jealousy.
“Perhaps! Alynton’s father was an irascible magnate of enormous
wealth. They are about the same age. He may have feared his
father’s wrath, for he naturally should make a political marriage. Ah!
my lady, you have lied to me.
“If it is not the old secret of two guilty hearts, then there is the
gordian knot of the great Sugar intrigue in this.”
His thoughts thronged upon him with lightning rapidity, and as her
head lay on his arm, he gave the triumphant Frenchwoman her
orders.
“Our whole future hangs on your adroitness. You must find out what
goes on between them. In a hotel you have a far better chance than
in either of her two homes.”
Vreeland murmured that in her ears which made the vicious
woman’s cheeks redden.
“Bah! all we women are alike,” she sneered. “But if she slyly sends
me out?” There was a gloomy pause.
“I do not think that she suspects you,” finally answered Vreeland.
“Telegraph me here what you dare to.
“And bring me all the other news in person. Now, tell me all you
know of this very saintly young Mary Kelly.”
His voice had the ring of anxiety. “I have had the janitor and the
letter-carrier watch her. They are both friends of mine,” modestly
murmured Justine.
“She lives near us, on a side street, with her old mother. And never
goes out with a man, except Officer Daly. Daly, the Roundsman. A
beau garçon, too; but it may be only a flirtation Catholique à
l’Irelandaise.
“I have often followed her myself to church. And she comes once a
week to Madame. They always look over papers together.”
“And that smug devil Bagley,” cried Vreeland, “only comes to the
door, leaves me the pacquet of bills, and does not even see
Madame. He gets an order for the money, and then returns later with
the receipted bills.”
Justine was back at the Circassia before Vreeland left her rooms to
engage in his little joust at poker with Mr. James Potter, whose
morning diet of red pepper, cracked ice, and soda water had at last
brought him up to the normal, after several sporadic cocktails.
All through the quiet duel of cards, Vreeland was haunted by the twin
obstacles, Bagley and Miss Mary Kelly. “Bagley is a perfect servant,
and I can not get any excuse to rid myself of him. My secrets are not
kept where he can reach them,” mused Vreeland.
“The girl I surely dare not displace; but I can get around them both, if
I have the right kind of a woman here near me. I have the excuse of
my ‘outside correspondence’ and social affairs.
“Miss Kelly is sacred to the affairs of this cool-headed patroness of
mine. And even Elaine can not object.
“It would ‘give away’ her veiled espionage on me. Yes, that’s the
plan! I can advertise; pick one or two out of a hundred women and
then try them on,” he craftily smiled, “and only begin my real
operations when I have found the right one and the two young
women have struck up an intimacy.” He laughed. “My pretty spy shall
watch the placid young saint.”
Vreeland tossed upon his bed that night, and reflected upon the
singular methods of his covert business.
A list of stocks sent to him by messenger, or personally delivered by
Mrs. Willoughby, to be bought and sold, with seemingly no guiding
rule; all the checks signed only by him as “Harold Vreeland, Trustee,”
and all the securities daily deposited, after due receipt and tag, in
Mrs. Willoughby’s steel vault compartment at the Mineralogical Bank.
And she alone knew of gain or loss. He was only a gilded dummy.
But one great house guarded all these covert transactions, and the
deliveries to them, in case of sales, were always made by an order
on the cashier of the Mineralogical.
A dozen times the wily schemer had verified that Mrs. Willoughby
knew all the details of each purchase or delivery long before his own
daily report.
For when her account was actively moving, once a day the mistress
and her secret agent always met.
But never had Elaine Willoughby’s foot mounted the broad steps of
the Elmleaf, neither had the luxury-loving man ever dared to yield to
Justine’s mad desire to visit him in his splendid new home.
“It would be simply a financial suicide—our joint ruin!” he had
whispered.
“But wait—wait till I marry her!”
And then, their chiming laughter ended the daring woman’s
pleadings. For the time was to come when the fortune of the
generous dupe would be ruled by the victorious young Napoleon.
Harold Vreeland knew, in his heart, that the Queen of the Street was
aware of the wild daily life of the men in the Elmleaf.
For after rout-ball, opera, and theatre there were often stolen visits,
aided by the friendly mantle of darkness, and diamonds which had
gleamed but an hour before on calm and unsullied brows at the
opera glittered balefully in the crepuscular gloom of shaded rooms,
where at least one of the passionate lovers was far away from home.
The schemer had, from the first, avoided all intimacies with these
light-headed men.
He knew that each of his fellow locataires was a Don Juan, and that
tragedy and comedy, sweet sin with shame, were traveling fast upon
its heels and satiety stalking along; that aching brows upon rose-leaf
couches haunted the decorous interiors of this abode of hidden
pleasures. The Elmleaf was a Golgotha of reputations.
And only a fire or an earthquake could reveal the daringly desperate
liaisons, which, urged on by the delightful zest of danger, would have
made public, by any sudden disaster, a story far more ghastly than
the untold record of that hideous night when the Hotel Royal went up
in fire and flame.
It was in a dull resentment against Elaine, and spurred on by Potter’s
tipsy confidence, that Vreeland, now fearing nothing, drew Mrs. Alida
Hathorn aside as he met her by hazard once more in the reception
room of the Savoy. He was waiting for a momentary telegram from
Justine, when his eyes rested upon the alluring moonlight glances of
that provoking young beauty, Mrs. Fred Hathorn. When she had gaily
rallied him on the Sardanapalian splendor of his Elmleaf
establishment, he whispered in burning words: “Why do you not ever
come and see it?”
The costly fan trembled and snapped in her hand as she slowly said:
“I wanted to ask you something to-day! The time has come!”
“With Mrs. McMorris?” she whispered, vaguely pointing toward his
spider parlor.
“Without Mrs. McMorris,” the ardent pleading voice replied.
“I will tell you all. I will lay my life at your feet!”
Alida Hathorn pouted. “I will never find my way.” Her tone was that of
light raillery, but her cheeks were deadly pale. She was trembling on
the brink of her ruin.
And then, Vreeland, taking her hands in his, whispered to her words
whereat the busy familiar devil at his side laughed in glee.
“If you mean to say yes,” he murmured, “give me that red rose from
your breast.”
And when he raised his head, the rose in his hand was the pledge of
a dark tryst of the devil’s own making.
Before he slept, for his throbbing heart would not down in the
crowning victory of his revenge upon the desperate Hathorn, he tore
open a telegram which marked another milestone of his life.
“Victory!” he cried, for the words told him of Justine’s success.
“They dined to-day alone at the place named, and I have news for you. Coming
home, by Pittsburg.”

The overjoyed scoundrel cried: “Potter was right, after all. Everything
comes round to the man who waits.”
For a study of the great journals told him of a forthcoming report
fixing the policy of the Government upon the tariff.
“If she has the secret, she will surely act upon it,” he cried. “That ties
her to the great Sugar Trust’s secret service. Perhaps he trusts her
on account of the old love.
“Justine shall wrest the proofs from her by either fair means or foul.
And, as for to-morrow night—” His lips were parched and dry as he
thought of the light foot slipping up the stairway of the Elmleaf—“not
with Mrs. McMorris!” He seemed to be wrapped in a golden
whirlwind of success.
“If she comes once when she wishes to, she will come again when I
wish her to!” gloated the schemer, whose mind was now fixed upon
detaching Bagley upon some trumped-up errand and making such a
feast as “Rose in bloom” laid out when the hoodwinked “Shah
Jehan” was “away” at his palace of Ispahan.
“I now hold the cards, and I shall be the victor at last in this game of
life,” he swore, as he dreamed of those pleading moonlight eyes.
Harold Vreeland waited for two days in a fever of excitement for
some mandate from his artful patroness. “She is a sly one at heart,
after all, is Mme. Elaine,” he growled. “Her stay ‘at Pittsburg’ is only
to throw me off my guard, and perhaps Hathorn.
“She may have taken any one of a dozen short roads to steal back
from her rendezvous with her senatorial confidant. Friend or lover—
which?”
He groaned in helpless rage. His mean spirit, his hidden vicious
agnosticism, made him doubt every woman.
To him they were all the same! The biting words of that crooked,
malignant genius, Pope, came back: “Every woman is at heart a
rake.”
“By Jove! I have found them all to be living behind imitation fronts,”
he snarled.
He was seated in his office watching the pale-faced and silent Mary
Kelly, when a street messenger arrived with a card sealed in an
ordinary telegraph envelope.
It bore only these words, scrawled by the artful Frenchwoman:
“Come over to the room.”
Stealing a watchful glance at the silent girl in the office, Vreeland
hastened away. He had never been able to approach the slightest
intimacy with the gray-eyed Irish-American girl.
“Her convent shyness backs up her convent modesty,” sneered
Vreeland, who dared not covertly insult his patroness’ protégé.
Plaintively handsome, her steadfast eyes gleaming with a patient
resignation, the pale cheeks and slender form told of a life of semi-
invalidism. When not employed on her fashionable master’s
business, she was ever busied copying literary manuscripts or legal
documents.
“She’s another cool hand,” vulgarly imagined the upstart schemer.
“She knows that she is safe as long as Mrs. Willoughby is at the
other end of that private wire.
“But, perhaps this Daly, the Roundsman, may some day bring a glow
to those cheeks. They are all alike—mistress and maid—here in hot-
hearted, wicked New York.
“This one’s only a neat, sly little sneak, and a spy on me.”
Vreeland’s every nerve was tingling as he dashed up the stairs to
Justine’s nest on South Fifth Avenue.
Standing ready for instant departure, the excited girl told him of how
she had stolen away while her fatigued mistress slept.
“You will hear from her at once—probably to come up to-night. Now,
once for all, there is no love between them. I found my way as usual.
Only business—great business—money affairs—the play of the
stocks. He is to come up in a month and bring a new Senator from
the West.
“One of the secret friends; so, mon ami, you may soon have another
rival.”
Vreeland gnashed his teeth as the girl said: “They dined together—
alone—and talked for hours. Senator Alynton gave her a paper after
they had talked about the Government, about lawsuits and troubles,
and that I sewed up in her corset for her in her presence before we
left. Brother and sister they are, in friendship, but he never even
raised her hand to his lips. Elle est bien bête, trop bête, pour
l’amour!” was Justine’s parting fling.
“You and I must get that paper, or a copy of it. It’s our fortune!” he
cried. But, Justine had fled, only adding: “She saw no other man.
She only went there to meet Alynton. Now, back to your rooms. She
will soon call for you.”
Justine was a true prophetess, for while Vreeland sat in his rooms
immersed in the study of a dozen newspaper articles upon an
ominous flurry in the “Sugar” securities, the lame girl tapped at his
door. With a bow, she handed him the transcribed telephone
message: “Please come up at once. Very important.”
“Compliments, and say that I’ll leave instantly,” gravely replied
Vreeland, without lifting his head.
As he hurried on toward the Circassia, he endeavored to frame
some idea of the daring woman speculator’s plans.
There were rumors of unfavorable tariff action, of hostile legislation,
of adverse decisions of the courts to be expected, of a growing
agitation against the “Sugar Trust,” and even of the desire of the
great Standard Oil Company to force the value of “Sugar shares”
down by the pressure of their heavily-armed capitalistic secret
brokers, and to “gobble” a controlling interest, or at least the bulk of
the heavy holdings.
“This surely means a slaughter of the little fishes,” mused Vreeland.
Rumors of a reincorporation of the seventy-five million dollar
capitalized company in New Jersey, the threatened move to divide
its capital stock into common and preferred, were rife on the Street.
“Ah!” growled Vreeland, as he glanced over a tabulated statement of
the ratings since its organization. “This may either send the stock,
now at seventy, down to forty or fifty, or up to a hundred and twenty-
five. If I only knew?”
He laughed mockingly as he dismissed the subject. “It will only be
double or quits.”
“Double their wealth for the insiders—and quits for the poor devils
squeezed to the wall!” While he waited in the drawing-room for his
patroness, the woman whom he began to fear he never would make
his dupe or slave, he pondered over her real purposes in the vast
hidden speculations.
“Has she not already money enough?” he enviously thought, gazing
on the heaped-up splendors of costly taste around him. And then, he
remembered that he had never met any man, woman, or child in
New York City who had money enough.
“It’s the fashionable craze—money-getting, by hook or crook,” he
reflected.
“And once mixed up in the game, it’s hard for her to leave it,
especially if she is the go-between who links some of the nation’s
statesmen to the great insiders of the Trust.
“This home may be only a sham, Lakemere only a way station for
the friendly conspirators, and that paper may be a dangerous
document which neither side would dare to hold. And old Endicott,
too—what’s his rôle?”
He was the more interested as Justine had swept away all
suspicions of an amourette between the two whom he feared.
“Still there is the lost child. If I only knew how old the girl was,” he
fretted.
“It may be the child of the last decade, or the fruit of a girlish
marriage. That secret, and the paper, I must have.
“But, Justine must steal the one, and I have got to reach her line of
secret communications.”
As he met his calmly-smiling secret employer he could not divine the
revengeful purposes hidden under her gently-heaving bosom.
 CHAPTER VIII.

MISS ROMAINE GARLAND, STENOGRAPHER.

It was late that night when the excited Vreeland left the Circassia
and he was still somewhat in the dark as to the real object of his
veiled employment. He reasoned justly that there was not a grain of
sentiment now in the frankly defined relations between himself and
the Lady of Lakemere.
The money bond between them was only that cold one of employer
and employed, and the unmistakable dignity of Elaine’s business
manner held him decidedly aloof. Here was no lover’s thrall.
Not a single reference to her absence had escaped her lips. There
was no pleasant, social white-lying going on between them, and he
was still in the dark when he left, with the strictest orders to await
every moment between ten and three, her signal for the beginning of
stock operations of gigantic magnitude.
“This Sugar stock may pay twelve and seven per cent on common
and preferred in a year, or else be driven down to half price. We
must be wary,” she sighed. “No one can truly forecast the actions of
our courts, journals, electors or government,” she mused. “The very
principle of reckless instability is the one sure thing of all our
American doings.”
“And yet, you move along with the others, Madonna,” smilingly said
Vreeland.
“You shall see,” she laughed. “The stock market, the sea, and a
woman’s heart are never at rest. Always distrust the seeming calm.