Free Auto-da-fé by Elias Canetti Page A

might perhaps have forgiven George his good looks, they were congenital, he was not to blame. He could never have forced himself to undergo a plastic operation in order to escape the injurious results of so much beauty; his was unhappily a weak character. How weak was clear from the fact that he had abandoned the special branch of medicine which he himself had first chosen in order to pass with flying colours into the realms of psychiatry. It was alleged that he had done some good work in this field. In his heart he had remained a gynaecologist. Loose living was in his blood. Eight years before, indignant at George's vacillation, Peter had abruptly broken off all correspondence with him and had subsequently torn up a whole series of anxious letters. He was not in the habit of answering letters which he had torn up.
    His marriage would make the best possible occasion for resuming relations with him. Peter's suggestions had first awakened in George his taste for a career oflearning. It would be no disgrace to ask for his advice on a subject which lay within the domain of his real and natural branch of medicine. What was the right way to treat this timid, reserved creature? She was no longer young and took life very seriously. The woman who sat opposite was certainly a great deal younger, but she already had four children; Thérèse had none. 'Children last.' That sounded straightforward enough, but what did she really mean by it; She probably wanted no children; neither did he. He had never thought about children. For what purpose had she said that? Perhaps she took him for a person of no morals. But she knew his life. For eight years she had been aware of all his habits. She knew that he was a man of character. Did he ever go out at night? Had a woman ever called on him, even for a quarter of an hour? When she had first taken up her post with him, he had most emphatically explained to her that he received no visitors on principle, male or female, of whatever age, from infants in arms to octogenarians. She was to send everyone away. 'I have no time!' Those had been his very words. What devil had got into her? That shameless cobbler, perhaps? She was an innocent ingenuous creature; how otherwise, uneducated as she was, could she have acquired so great a love for books? But that dirty fellow's pantomime had been all too obvious. His gestures were self-explanatory; a child, without even knowing the reasons for his movements, would have understood that he had a woman in his arms. People of that kind, capable of losing control of themselves in the open street, ought to be segregated in asylums. They induce ugly thoughts in hard-working people. She was a hard-working woman. The cobbler had insinuated ideas into her head. Why else should children have occurred to her? It was not impossible that she might have heard something about such things. Women talk among themselves. She had perhaps been present at a birth, when she was in some other service. What did it signify if she did indeed know all there was to know? Better perhaps than if he had to explain it to her himself: There was a certain bashfulness in her expression; at her age it was faintly comic.
    I never thought of asking anything so vulgar of her; it did not cross my mind. I have no time. I need six hours sleep. I work until twelve, at six o'clock I get up. Dogs and other animals may do such things by day. Perhaps she expects something of the kind from marriage. Hardly. Children last. Fool. All she meant was that she knew what was necessary. She knew the chain of circumstances whose conclusion is the perfected child. She was trying to explain herself gracefully. She took the occasion of this little incident, the children were importunate, the words were apt, but her eyes were fixed on me alone; it did for a confession. Most understandable. Such admissions are naturally painful. I married because of the books; children last. That means nothing at all. I remember her saying