Chapter Twenty-Nine
Mister Sanns, walking down the corridor, encountered a man whose name has not been—and will not be—recorded in this chronicle. The man moved a little closer to the wall, to allow Mister Sanns to pass. But Mister Sanns, for reasons best known to himself, chose to push the man, hard, in the side, against the wall.
“Oof!” said the man.
“What was that, sir?” asked Sanns.
“I merely emitted an exhalation born of your thrust of my person against this wall, sir!” retorted the man.
“Ah! Very good,” expressed Sanns with approval.
The man looked upon Sanns with some surprise. Sanns had proved, insofar as he’d been noticed at all, to be a meek and tired-looking individual. What, now, accounted for this sudden, unprovoked aggressiveness?
“You must be wondering how to account for my sudden, unprovoked aggressiveness,” observed Sanns, almost as if he could read his narrator’s thoughts.
“Well—yes, in a word,” answered the man.
“Fuck you!” spat Sanns, and pushed him again—into the very same wall!
“Stop it! Stop it this instant, or I—I—I shall strike you back!” complained the man, whose physical description has not been revealed, and, I vow, shall never be.
This protestation was met with a slap, clean across the cheek.
Curtis/Thaddeus chose this moment to stroll by.
“Man! My good man!” the man hailed him. “This gentleman”—indicating the giggling Sanns—“has shoved me, three times, and slapped me once—for no earthly reason!”
“That’s a lie!” shouted Sanns. He turned to appeal to Curtis/Thaddeus: “I only shoved him twice, plus, honour compels me to admit, the slap.”
Curtis/Thaddeus, screwing up his face into a repugnant caricature of deformity, thrust said face into that of the man. “Is this true, sir? Do you deny that he shoved you only twice?”
The gentleman, whose unidentified face bore still the taint of offended pride, performed a rapid mental reckoning, then admitted, “No—the gentleman is perfectly correct. He shoved me but twice—though for no reason at all!”
“Then let that be a lesson to you,” smirked Curtis/Thaddeus, “and to us all!—that this world has not yet degenerated so far toward damnation that precision of thought no longer makes a difference to our apprehension of its workings.” And he strode off, happy to have been of some assistance.
The gentleman, whatever his name may have been, shook his head in frustration and set off, away from Sanns. Sanns, with some regret, watched him walk away; for he knew that some connection, however slight, however transitory, and however unpleasant for both parties, had been made between the two of them. And was it to dissolve so soon? So soon?
He sprinted up and, with all his might, shoved the man in the back, knocking him to the ground. From the dingy carpet, the gentleman made all the usual protestations you can imagine, until Herr Voot happened to come upon them.
“Manager!” cried the gentleman from the floor.
“Yes, sir, how may I help?” asked Voot, his mind, frankly, on other matters, including, but not limited to, the erotic sap with which he was brimming over, with no tapper on the horizon to drain him. Until he was interrupted by this inane scene before him, in fact, he’d been hip-deep in a fantasy of profaning the, he suspected, untrespassed holies of Annette Godefroi’s body.
“He hit me!” Sanns screamed to Voot. “This disreputable gentleman struck me about my face, twice, then shoved me, for no intelligible reason!”
“That’s a lie!” cried the gentleman, too offended to rise from the corridor floor. “It is precisely the other way round, although, I must confess, so as not to repeat my previous error, he struck me but once, amidst a total of three shoves. All of them without purpose!”
“Gentlemen, gentlemen!” Voot sighed, the final cloudlet of Annette’s imagined shocked, ashamed but grateful snarl upon recognising she’d been completely undone by his unappeasable virility, which lengthened within her like the noontime shadow off a sundial, disintegrating before his eyes. “I have many issues of business to which to attend. I cannot be separating guests from each other like flies from cows’ rumps!”
“I object to that analogy!” declared Sanns.
“As do I!” agreed the man, who stood up, nodded at Sanns, and shook his hand. One took the other’s arm, and they proceeded down the lane, chatting amiably on all manner of topics; it turned out they were both enormous aficionados of cricket.