398
PARTISAN REVIEW
She crossed no-man 's-land to the dining room. They were
serious in there now. The subject was Chaplin's gestures.
In the living room Feingold despaired; no one asked him,
he began to tell about the compassionate knight. A problem of
ego, he said: compassion being super-consciousness of one's
own pride. Not that he believed this; he only thought it pro–
vocative to say something original, even if a little muddled. But
no one responded. Feingold looked up. "Can' t you light that
fire?" said a man. "All right," Feingold said. He rolled a paper
log made of last Sunday's
Times
and laid a match on it. A flame
as clear as a streetlight whitened the faces of the sofa-sitters. He
recognized a friend of his from the Seminary-he had what Lucy
called " theological " friends-and then and there, really very
suddenly, Feingold wanted to talk about God. Or, if not God,
then certain historical atrocities, abominations: to wit, the crime
of the French nobleman Draconet, a proud Crusader, who in the
spring of the year 1247 arrested all the Jews of the province of
Vienne, castrated the men, and tore off the breasts of the women;
some he did not mutilate, and only cut in two.
It
interested
Feingold that Magna Carta and the Jewish badge of shame were
issued in the same year, and that less than a century afterward all
the Jews were driven out of England, even families who had
been settled there seven or eight generations. He had a soft spot
for Pope Clement IV, who absolved the Jews from responsibility
for the Black Death. "The plague takes the Jews themselves," the
Pope said. Feingold knew innumerable stories about forced
conversions, he felt at home with these thoughts, comfortable,
the chairs seemed dense with family. He wondered whether it
would
be
appropriate-at a cocktail party, after alII-to inquire
after the status of the Seminary friend's agnosticism: was it
merely that God had stepped out of history, left the room for a
moment, so to speak, without a pass, or was there no Creator to
begin with, nothing had been created, the world was a chimera,
a solipsist's delusion?
Lucy was uneasy with the friend from the Seminary; he was
the one who had administered her conversion, and every encoun–
ter was like a new stage in a perpetual examination. She was
