A Fish Dinner in Memison - Zimiamvian Trilogy 02

by E R Eddison

  Lessingham looked round, quickly enough to catch the half mocking, half listening, inclination of her head as her lips closed upon the lingering last syllable of that private 'm'amuse'. The words had been addressed, it was clear, to nobody, for she was alone at her table: certainly not to him: not even (curiously) to herself: to velvet-bosomed Night, possibly, sister to sister: to the bats, the inattentive stars, this buzz of Latin night-life; little white tables with their coffee, vino rosso, vino bianco, carafe and wine-glass, the music and the talk; wreaths of cigar-smoke and cigarette-smoke that hung and dissipated themselves on airs that carried from the flower-beds of the mid piazza a spring fragrancy and, from the breathing presences of women, wafts of a more exotic and a deeper stirring sweetness. Over all, the tremendous curved facade of Diocletian's amphitheatre, ruined deep in time, stood desolate in the glare of electric arclights. In Lessingham's hand arrested on the table-top, the cigar went out Into the stillness all these things—amphitheatre, electric lights, the Old and the New, this simple art of living, the bat-winged night, the open face of the dark—seemed to gather and, with the slow upsurging might of their rise, to reach to some timeless moment which seemed her; and which seemed as fixed, while beyond it life and the hours streamed unseizable as the unseizable down-streaming spray-motes into which water is dissipated when it falls clear over a great height— Ca m'amuse.

  Then, even as in the andante the processional secular throb of the arpeggios, so Time seemed now to recover balance: catch breath: resume its inexplicable unseizable irreversible way. Not to be explained, yet upon that echo illuminated: not to be caught, yet (for that sudden) unprecedentedly submitting itself within handreach: not to be turned back, yet suddenly self-confessed as perhaps not worth the turning. She looked up, and their eyes met.

  'Vous parlez francais, madame?'

  'O, depende dello soggetto: depende con cui si parla. To an Englishman, English.'

  ‘Mixed with Italian?'

  ‘Addressed to a person so mixed. Or do I not guess aright?'

  Lessingham smiled and replied: ‘You pay me a doubtful compliment, signora. Is it not a saying: "Inglese Italianato e Diavolo incarnato"? And as for the subject,' he said, 'if the signora will permit a question: is there then a special fitness to be amused, in French?'

  'Simply to be amused,—perhaps, No. But to be amused at this,—Yes.'

  'And this is?—'

  Her hand, crimson-gloved, on which till now her cheek had been resting, traced, palm-upwards, a little half circle of disdain indicative of the totality of things. 'There is a something logical: a something of precision, about the French, which very well fits this affair. To be polite to it, you must speak of it in French: it is the only language.'

  "There is in Latin, equally, a precision.'

  'O but certainly: and in a steam roller: but not altogether spirituel. Il faut de l'esprit pour savourer nettement cette affaire-la'; and again her hand delicately acknowledged it: this clockwork world, this mockshow, operated by Time and the endless chain of cause and effect. Time, if you consider it,' she said, ‘works with so ingenious a simplicity: so perfect a machine. Like a clock. Say you are God: you need but wind it up, and it proceeds with its business: no trouble at all.'

  'Until,' said Lessingham, ‘you have to wind it up again?'

  The lady shrugged her shoulders.

  'Signora,' he said, 'do you remember M. d'Anquetil, at that enjoyable unrestrained supper-party in La Rotisserie de la Reine Pédauque? "Je vous confierai que je ne crois pas en Dieu."'

  'And permit me, sir,' said she, to continue the quotation from that entertaining book: "Pour le coup, dit l'abbe, je vous blâme, monsieur." And yet I am glad; for indeed it is a regrettable defect of character in a young man, to believe in God. But suppose, sir, that you in fact were—shall I say?—endowed with that authority: would you wind it up again?'

  He paused before answering, held by the look of her: the passivity of her lips, that was like the swept silences of the sky expectant of dawn, or like the sea's innumerable rippled stillness expectant of the dark after sunset: an assuredness, as native to some power that should so far transcend omnipotence as that it needs no more but merely to be and continue in that passivity, and omnipotence in action must serve it, like the oblique wide circle of a swift's flight, down and round and up again, between earth and sky, the winged moment swung: now twenty years backwards into earliest childhood: the tennis lawn, of a June evening, of the old peelhouse where he was born, youngest of seven, of a great border family, between the Solway and the Cumberland hills: church bells, long shadows, Rose of Sharon with its sticky scent: Eton: then, at eighteen (getting on for eight years ago now), Heidelberg, and that unlucky episode that cut his studies short there. Then the Paris years, the Sorbonne, the obsessed concentration of his work in Montmartre studios, ending with the duel with knives with that unsavoury Jew musician to whose Spanish mistress Lessingham, with the inexperienced ardour and quixotism of youth, had injudiciously offered his protection. And so, narrowly escaping imprisonment, to Provence and his Estremaduran Amaryllis: in a few weeks their parting by mutual consent, and his decision (having overspent his allowance, and in case his late adversary, again in hospital, should die, and that be laid at his door) to enlist in the Legion Etrangere under an assumed name. His desertion after some months, disillusioned with such a school but pleased with the experience for the power it gave him), and escape through Morocco in Egypt. Arrival penniless at the British Agency: news that his father, enraged at these proceedings, had stopped allowances and cut him out of his will. So, work his passage home as a stoker on a P. & O.: upon his twenty-first birthday, the twenty-fourth of November, 1903, land at Tilbury, and (by his mother's means, that queen of women, seconding friendship and strong argument of flesh and blood) at one again with his father before Christmas; and so a year in England, his own master and with enough money to be trusted to do what money is meant for: look after itself, and leave its owner free. Then east, mainly India: two seasons exploring and climbing, Eastern Himalaya, Karakoram. Journey home, against official advice and without official countenance, dangerously through Afghanistan and Persia: then nearly the whole year 1906 in Greece, on horseback, sailing among the islands, studying in Athens. Then—the nineteenth of December, 1906. Sixteen months ago.

  The nineteenth of December: Betelgeuze on the meridian at midnight, his particular star. The beginning: dinner at his sister Anne's, and on with her party to that historic ball at the Spanish Embassy. Queer composition, to let the theme enter pianissimo, on muted strings, as it were; inaudible under such a blaring of trumpets. Curious to think of: towards the end of the evening, puzzling over his own scribble on his programme, 'Dijon-Fiammetta', against the next waltz, and recalling at last what it stood for: 'Fiammetta'—flame: red-gold hair, the tea-rose she wore in it, and a creamy dress like the rose's petals. Their dancing: then, afterwards, sitting out on the stairs: then, (as in mutual unspoken agreement to leave deserted partners to their devices in the glitter and heat of the ball-room, and themselves to savour a little longer this quiet), their sitting on, and so through two dances following. Whether Mary was tired, or whether minded to leave the ball of conversation to him, they had talked little. Dark girls were the trumpets in that symphony; and he had throughout the evening neither lacked nor neglected opportunity to store his mind with images of allures, Circean splendours, unstudied witty charms, manifested in several partners of that preferred complexion. The mockery! that on such hushed strings, and thus unremarked, should have been the entry of so imperial a theme. So much so, that the next morning, in idle waking recollection casting up the memories of the night before, he had forgotten her.

  And yet, a week later, Christmassing with Anne and Charles at Taverford Manor, he had forgot the others but begun to remember her: first, her talking of Wuthering Heights, a very special book-of his: then a saying of her own here and there: the very phrase and manner. She had been of few words that night, but those few
singularly as if her own yet not self-regarding: pure Maryisms: daffodils or stars of the blackthorn looking on green earth or out to the sun. As for instance this (comparing Highlanders and the Tyrolese): 'Mountain people seem all rather the same,—vague and butterflyish. If they lose something,—well, there it is. All ups and downs. I should think.' Or this, (of the smallness of human beings in an Alpine valley): 'What weasels we look!' Also, there had been near the corner of her mouth, a 'somewhat', that sometimes slept, sometimes stirred. He had wondered idly who she was, and whether these things took place as well by daylight. And then, next week, at the meet of the West Norfolk, his fresh introduction to her, and satisfying himself on both questions; and, as for the second, that they did.

  Then, six months afterwards. Twenty-fourth of June. That river-party: that well planned, well timed, confident proposal: its rejection: (a discomfiture in which he had not been singular; rather ninth or tenth; if talk were to be trusted). And, most devastating, something in the manner of her refusal: an Artemisian quality, quiver of startled hind, which stripped scales from his eyes to let him see her as never before: as the sole thing, suddenly, which as condition absolute of continuing he must have, let the world else go hang; and, in the same thunderclap, the one sole thing denied him. And so, that feverish fortnight, ending (thank heaven) with the best terms he might make (her cousin Jim Scarnside playing honest broker): burial of that black No, upon condition he should himself leave the country and not before fifteen months come back for his answer: eighteen months, as first propounded; which he would have shortened to August year (that is harvest time); but Mary would not give ground beyond Michaelmas: 'An omen too, if you were wise.—Vintage.'

  Vintage. Vindemiatrix: she who harvests the grape: the delicate star in whose house the sun sits at autumn, and with her mild beams moderates his own to a more golden and more tranquil and more procreative radiance.

  Nine months gone: Dahomey, Spain, Corsica. And April now: the twenty-second of April. A hundred and fifty-nine days to go.

  The back arrowed swoop of the moment swung high into the unceilinged future, ten, fifty, sixty years, may be: then, past seeing, up to that warmthless unconsidered mock-time when nothing shall be left but the memorial that fits all (except, if there be, the most unhappiest) of human kind: I was not. I lived and loved. I am not. Then (or was it a bat, of the bats that hawked there between the piazza lamps and the stars?) it swung near, flashing darkly past that Dark Lady's still mouth, at whose corner flickered a something: miraculously that which, asleep or awake, resided near the corner of Mary's mouth.

  Queen of Hearts: Queen of Spades: 'Inglese Italianato': the conflict of north and south in his blood; the blessing of that—of all—conflict. And yet, so easily degraded. As woman's beauty, so easily degraded. The twoness in the heart of things: that rock that so many painters split on. Loathsome Renoir, with his sheep-like slack-mouthed simian-browed superfluities of female flesh: their stunted tapered fingers, puffy little hands, breasts and buttocks of a pneumatic doll, to frustrate all his magic of colour and glowing air. Toulouse-Lautrec, with his imagination fed from the stews, and his canvases all hot sweat and dead beer. Etty's fine sensuality coarsely bitted and bridled by a convention from without, and starved so of the spirit that should have fed it to beauty from within. Burne-Jones's beauties, nipped by some frost: Rossetti's weighted with undigested matter: Beardsley, a whore-master, prostituting his lovely line to unlovely canker-buds. Even the great: even Titian in his Sacred and Profane Love, even Botticelli in his supreme Venus, were (he said in himself), by some meddling from within or without, restrained from the ultimate which I would have, and which as a painter I (Kapaneau's,—with God's will, or if not, against it) will attain. Did the Greeks, with their painted statues, Apelles with Phryne for his model, attempt it? Did they, attempting, succeed? We can never know. Do such things die, then? things of the spirit? Sappho's burnt poems? Botticelli's pictures of 'beautiful naked women' of like quality, perhaps, with his Venus and his nymphs of spring?— poor consolation that he was burnt that burnt them.

  Yes. They die— half brother to man-slaying Hector, and his charioteer; under the dusty battle-din before Bios, 'mighty, mightily fallen: forgetful of his horsemanship.' All time past, the conflict and the heartbreak (he looked at the amphitheatre, a skeleton lifted up to witness): frozen. He looked at her: her eyes were more still than the waiting instant between the flash and the thunder. No. Not frozen; for that is death. No death here: rather the tenseness of sinew that is in the panther before the leap: Can Grande's tomb, as this morning, in broad sunshine. Below, under the Gothic canopy carved in stone, the robed figure, lying in state, of the great condottiere, submissive, supine, with pious hands clasped upon his breast as in prayer, 'requiescat in pace?, 'Domine, in manus tuas', etc., weak childhood come back like a song's refrain, sightless eyes facing upwards. But above, high upon that canopy, the demonic equestrian figure of him in the April sap of his furious youth, helmed and harnessed, sword aloft, laughing on his caparisoned horse that seems itself to be informed with a secret kindred laughter, to say ha! ha! among the trumpets: a stirring together of the warring mights and glories, prides, overthrowings, and swiftnesses, of all worlds, to one flame; which takes on, of its mere eternity and only substantiality, as ice will scorch or fire freeze, the semblance of a death-like stillness.

  All this in a few seconds of time: apocalyptically. Lessingham answered her: 'Signora, if I were God Omnipotent, I should be master of it. And, being master, I would not be carried by it like a tripper who takes a ticket for a cruise. I would land where I would; put in to what ports I liked, and out again when I would; speed it up where I would, or slow it down. I would wind it to my turn.'

  'That,' she said, ‘would be a very complicated arrangement. One cannot deny it would be a pleasure. But the French precision, I fear, would scarcely apply itself so fitly, were that the state of things.'

  ‘You would hardly have me do otherwise?'

  Slowly drawing off her right-hand glove, she smiled her secular smile. ‘I think, sir, (in my present mood), that I would desire you, even so, to play the game according to its strict rules.'

  'O,' said Lessingham. 'And that, (if it is permissible to enquire), in order to judge my skill? or my patience?'

  Her fingers were busied about her little gold-meshed bag, finding a lira for her wine: Lessingham brought out a handful of coins, but she gracefully put aside his offer to pay for it. 'I wonder?' she said, looking down as she drew on her crimson glove again: 'I wonder? Perhaps my answer is sufficient, sir, if I say—Because it amuses me.' She rose. Lessingham rose too. 'Is that sufficient?' she said.

  Lessingham made no reply. She was tall: Mary's height to an inch as he looked down at her: incredible likenesses to Mary: little turns of neck or hand, certain looks of the eye, that matter of the mouth (a thing surely unknown before a living woman). Unlike Mary, she was dark: jet-black hair and a fair clear skin. 'Good night, sir', she said, and held out her hand. As if bred up in that gracious foreign courtesy, he bowed: raised it to his lips. Strangely, be made no motion to follow her; only as she turned away, watched her gait and carriage, inhumanly beautiful, till she was vanished among the crowd. Then he put on his hat again and slowly sat down again at his table.

  So he sat, half an hour more, may be: a spectator: looking at faces, imagining, playing with his imaginations: a feeling of freedom in his veins: that strange glitter of a town at night, offering boundless possibilities. In that inward-dreaming mood he was unconscious of the clouding over of the stars and the closeness of the air, until rain had begun in big drops and the whole sky was split with lightning which unleashed the loud pealing thunder. Hastening back drenched to his hotel with collar turned up and with the downpour splashing again in a million jets from the flooded pavement, he, as in a sudden intolerable hunger, said in himself: 'It is long enough: I will not wait five months. Home to-morrow.’

  She, in the mean while (if, indeed, as between World a
nd World it is legitimate to speak of 'before' and 'after'), had, in a dozen paces after Lessingham's far-drawn gaze had lost her, stepped from natural present April into natural present June—from that night-life of Verona out by a colonnade of cool purple sandstone onto a daisied lawn, under the reverberant white splendour of midsummer noonday.

  II

  Memison: King Mezentius

  COMING now beyond the lawn, that lady paused at the lily-pond under a shade of poplar-trees: paused to look down for a minute into depths out of which, framed between the crimson lilies and the golden, looked up at her, her own mirrored face. The curves of her nostrils hardened: some primal antiquity seemed suddenly to inform the whole presence of her, as if this youth and high summer-season of her girlhood were, in her, no season at all: not a condition, bearing in its own self its own destiny to depart and make place for future ripenesses, of full bloom, fading and decay; but a state unchanging and eternal. Her throat: her arm:^the line of her hair, strained back from the temples to that interweaving of darkness with sleek-limbed darkness, coiled, locked, and overlaid, in the nape of her neck: the upward growth there, daintily ordered as black pencillings on the white wings of a flower-delice, of tiny silken hairs shading the white skin; her lips, crystal-cold of aspect, clear cut, red like blood, showing the merest thread-like glint of teeth between; these things seemed to take on a perfection terrible, because timeless.

  The lord Chancellor Beroald, from his seat beneath an arbour of honeysuckle leftwards some distance from where she stood, watched her unseen. In his look was nothing of that worship, which in dumb nature seemed: rather an appraising irony which, setting profession beside performance, fact beside seeming, sucks from their antic steps

  not present entertainment only, but knowledge that settles to power.

  ‘Is your husband in the palace?' he said presently.