The Mind Crimes of August Saint

Mutt and Jeff A little apart from the group and off to one side was Mutt the Priest. From the moment August Saint had first seen him, he knew he would meet him again, in here. That last decisive year in Brussels he had been "haunted" by the priest as if the latter were dogging in his footsteps. He had immediately recognized that the priest was an intimate, a "familiar." August had nicknamed him that from the start because the priest had all the misery of a beaten, nondescript dog-and because he seemed to play a grotesque Mutt to his own Jeff, a comic strip duo. In appearance bibulous, red-nosed, errant, face creased and squeezed together like a cauliflower, seedy in the now uncustomary black cassock, he shuffled along the streets of Brussels with painfully slow little steps, arms pressed motionless against his sides, head bentslightly as in humility, looking neither to left nor to right, gaze fixed a few feet ahead to the pavement. He moved through the crowd as though crushed by their surrounding pressure, himself pressing inward so as to occupy less room. Once, August followed the meager figure downtown: he stopped in front of a precision clock posted outside a shop-and for all of ten minutes he stood setting his watch to the second. When a man nearby glanced curiously at him, Mutt looked back very briefly out of the corner of his eye, a sly, shamed look. August tried to photograph him, and by some extraordinary luck (familiars don't photograph to well_ obtained a snapshot of his back. The priestly gown appears monumental, falling from the scrawny neck and shoulders in a cataract. And here he was again, half-expected, the episode of a guilty religious conscience, a conscience of ruins, labyrinthine. Mutt, of course, did not raise his eyes in the direction of the group of priests. He remained near the edge of the picture, part clownish, part sinister. August observed him with great interest as he shuffled off to the edge, and hurried to his feet and started after him. He knew from experience what valuable evidence might be obtained from such marginal figures. He was too late; the priest had already disappeared. The slight brittle frame, the hunched-in shoulders, had seemed to beg, if not for compassion, at least to be tolerated. August, who did not think of himself as pitiless, indeed was inclined to be sentimental, nevertheless regarded old Mutt with suspicion tinged with disgust, fascinated by him yet half-fearing to meet the cringing, fathomless glance. Why did he feel that the priest might somehow compromise him? He hesitated when he came to the edge, as to which route to take after the now vanished cleric.