A Fish Dinner in Memison - Zimiamvian Trilogy 02

by E R Eddison

  So, of all these bubbles the slow last. At its touch, the glasslike ceiling trembled: tore like a garment: opened like a flower to a heaven unascended and unsullied of sunwarmed snows; and in the midst as it were a black flame to shine down the sun, and sweep up all senses in a moth-like wind-rushing blindness against that unspectable glory.

  Wide awake, he leapt from his bed, flung open the green shutters, let in the white floods of sunshine. His watch on the chest of drawers said ten. He rang for his bath and, while it was getting ready, put the final touches to some lines he had written last thing before going to bed, on a half sheet of paper that lay on the top of a pile of manuscript and notes which he had been working over up till about three that morning.

  Twenty minutes, and he had bathed and dressed. Then his eye fell for the first time on the envelope that lay on the bedside table. Her writing. He had slept late, and it was not his door that had been locked. Nether Wastdale paper: this morning's date, twenty-fifth of June:

  Mon ami,

  I've told Herr B. that we may or may not be back in a few days: meanwhile to keep the rooms. If you happened to be serious in the compliment you paid me yesterday on the Sella Pass, asking me to marry you, you know where to look for

  Your Mary,

  Lessingham, holding that letter in his hand, wore for one fleeting instant the aspect of a dog whose teasing mistress has made the motion to throw him the ball to run for, but has in fact teasingly retained it concealed in her hand. Next moment, in an up-bursting of volcanic mud-springs of black anger, his fist leapt up. He checked it in mid-air, and stood leaning his whole weight upon clenched hands on the table top: motionless, silent, only that once he growled like the Wolf fettered. The audience to whom alone these naked antics were uncurtained—the four walls of that room, clothed in their wallpaper of unaspiring design, the round-seated bent-wood chairs, the harmless table, the floor-boards having in their faint smell of soap a certain redolence of conscious respectability, the plain green rug by the bed, the green and white striped one by the wash-stand, and the innocent morning sunshine that pleasantly companioned them all—looked on with comfortingly unseeing gaze.

  He sprang erect, the look in his eye a boy's look on a hunting morning; locked away the writing materials in his portmanteau, and kicked it back under the bed: laughed silently at himself in the looking-glass: flung a few things together into a suitcase; and went leisurely down to breakfast. Within an hour he was driving down the valley to Waidbruck. And all the way, not to be shaken off, now dim, now loud, now lost for an instant, now near again, and wild hunting-music, winding and swelling in secret woods and heady-scented unpathed darknesses, led the hunt through marrow and veins. He caught the train at Waidbruck; and about five o'clock that evening, thanks to his native mastery in sweeping away difficulties, to the inspired resourcefulness of Herr Birkel, and to a reckless use of telegraph and telephone, took off from Verona in a private aeroplane belonging to Jim's brother-in-law, Nicholas Mitzmesczinsky.

  With neither train nor boat connexions to hamper him, nor delays of Sunday services, he landed, less than twenty-five hours after his start from Verona. His man David, instructed by telegram, was waiting with the car: coachman in the family like his father and grandfather before him, with (of late, under protest and because needs must) part-time transformations to chauffeur. Lessingham took the wheel. It was—for a driver reckless and violent—two hours' drive home.

  Evening, as the car swung in at the drive gates, was beginning with a spring-like freshness in the air after a showery day. The Wastwater Screes, purplish black, stood against a confusion of grey-brown rain-clouds which blundered pell-mell southeastwards overhead. Riding higher than these and with a less precipitate haste, billowy masses of a pale indigo hue swept over from the west and north; and, like windows in heaven, rifts opened and widened one after another to quiet sublimities of white cumulus far above the turmoil and, above these again, of the ultimate sky itself; rain-washed to a purity of most limpid and tender azure: windless, immeasurably remote.

  On the steps before the front door stood old Ruth: installed now as housekeeper at this manor house of Nether Wastdale, but still wearing cap and apron, as from years ago she had done, when she had had charge, as nurse, of Lessingham and of all his brothers and sisters before him.

  Well, Ruth,' giving her the key of his suitcase which had gone round to the back door, 'you got my telegram?' 'Yes, sir.'

  'Any news from her ladyship?'

  ‘No, sir. Nothing so far.'

  'She'll be here to-morrow. Miss Janet asleep?'

  'Ay, she is: heavenly lamb. Jessie 'I’ll put out your things, in the dressing-room as soon as I just unlock the lobby door upstairs, sir. Everything's ready there according to standing orders.'

  ‘No, I'll not sleep there to-night. The small room at the end of the west gallery to-night. O and, Ruth,' he called her back. 'You understand—they all understand, do they? not a word to her ladyship when she arrives, about my being here first'

  ‘No, sir.'

  ‘Don't let there be any mistake about it' 'No, sir.'

  ‘Right I'll dine in the Refuge.'

  'Yes, sir.' The old woman hesitated. Something, some obscure throbbing perhaps in the air about him of that gay hunting-music, obviously eased her mind. 'Please sir, if so happen her ladyship puts me the straight question, will you have me to tell her ladyship a falsehood, Mr. Edward, sir?'

  ‘What you've got to do, my dear Ruth, is not to let on and spoil the game. If you can't do that much, without telling a downright fib, you're not the woman I've known you for."

  'Mr. Edward was always one to have his joke,' she said to David later.

  'Ay, and her ladyship's a one too, bless her. But what beats me's his rampaging round with them there dang'd aeroplanes: hating and cursing 'em like he do, it's a caution. If he goes and breaks his neck one of these days, I'd be right sorry.'

  ·What'd you do then, David?'

  'Reckon I’d have to find a new situation.'

  'Like this?'

  'Ay.'

  'Is there one, think you?' 'May be not.'

  ‘Back to Mr. Eric's at Snittlegarth?'

  ‘Not at my time of life! Mr. Edward's a bit rough-like sometimes. But. Mr. Eric, when he's in his tantrums, they do say as these days he's nobbut a stark staring madman.'

  'Where'd you go, then, David?'

  ‘To that there Jackson Todd's.'

  That's good! Why, he's dead now, be'n't he?'

  'Another like him, then. That's your gentleman now-a-days. Got the brass, all right: but no better 'n a regular black card. I've see'd him at a shoot, over on them moors far side of Mungrisdale, afore Mr. Eric took 'em over. Did himself main well over his lunch, he did: had about a quart of champagne, he did. And there he were, a-yawkening and a-bawkening like a regular black card.'

  The same night Lessingham, in his way to bed, paused at the top of the wide staircase. With his master-key, that lived under the bezel of the ring on his left hand, he unlocked the lobby door on the right there, and went in. At the end of the lobby another doorway, doorless and heavily curtained, led into the Lotus Room: a room forty or fifty feet in length, newly built out upon the east wing of this old house. At the ends, west and east, were tall windows, and high-mantled open fire-places between them. Since its building, three years ago, few had set eyes on this bedchamber, or on the porphyry and onyx bathrooms or the dressing-room or Lessingham's great studio, upon which a door opened in the north wall, to the left of the bed: a four-posted bed, spread wide and of great magnificence, with hangings and coverlets of heavy bay-green figured silk and sweet-smelling pillars of sandalwood inlaid with gold. Candles, by scores, stood ready for lighting, upon tables and mantelshelves and in sconces on the walls; but at present the only light in the room was of electric bulbs, concealed in the chandeliers of crystal that, like clusters of gigantic globular fruits, hung from the ceiling.

  Pausing in the doorway, he leisurely overwent the roo
m with his eyes, as a man might some matter which he partly disbelieves. The ring, key exposed, was still in his hand: Mary's wedding-present, of massive gold having no alloy in it, in the shape of a scaled worm, tail in mouth, and the head of the worm the bezel of the ring, a ruby of great age and splendour: the worm Ouro-boros, symbol of eternity, the beginning of which is also the end, and the end the beginning. And now, coming to the fire-place over against the bed, he unlocked with that key the doors of a cabinet set in the chimney-breast above the mantel and, gently, needfully, as an artist traces a curve, opened them left and right. Backing a few paces, he sat down on the sofa at the bed's foot and considered the picture thus disclosed.

  And so it was presently, as if the picture spoke. As to say:—In me, a portrait, constructed by you, upon canvas, with pigments ground in oil, some limited perduration is in a shorthand way, given to a fleeting moment. Looking at me, remember in your eye, in your ear, in your nostril, in your secret blood, what was present in that moment; and then, by all these senses under the might that is in you forced together, remember what was not present, nor shall be. Never present. Ever on the doorstep.— L'Absente de tous bouquets.

  To Lessingham now, sitting so in his contemplation, it was as if in the edge of his field of vision the carved lotuses of the frieze, under the hot flame of that picture bared, stirred slightly. The rude hunger of the flesh was become, as wind at night sets stars a-sparkle, the un-distinguishable integument of some spiritually informing presence: of a presence which, so in the picture as in life, with a restful deep unrest underlay each perfection of the body. And in a strange violent antinomy, the alone personality of Mary, that, serene and unalterable, queened it in every feature of the face—more, in the whole deep indwelling music of body and limb—seemed, by some fiery intermarriage of incompatibles, to take into this particular self that universal, which unhorizoned as sea-spaces at morning or as the ocean of cloud-waves overseen from on high in the faint first incarnadine of a new dawn, rested its infinity in these nakednesses of breast, of flank, of somnolent exquisite supple thigh, and in these sudden mindblinding dazzlements of curled hair shadowing the white skin. All which unspeakable whole, out of the paint and out of the awaked remembrance, said:— Would you have Me otherwise? Me, always here? given you without the sweat and the agony and the birth-pang of the mind?—No, my friend. Not in Elysium even.

  For, said the picture (and said the painter, to himself, out of himself), passivity is not for you: not for any man.—For a woman? Well, a species of passivity: the illusion, perhaps, of stillness, as at the maelstrom's center. A passivity that rests in its own most deep assurance of queenship over all overt power. A queenship that subsists even in its vertiginous climacteric of self-surrender:

  A quiet woman

  Is a still water under a great bridge;

  A man may shoot her safely.

  Mary, from her sleeping-carriage, arrived like day on the little lonely platform at Drigg about half past six the next morning: the sun in her eyes, sea-swallows' voices in her ears, and heady northern sea-smells salt in her nostrils. 'Leave it in the office, Tom. They'll come and fetch it this afternoon.' 'Yes, your ladyship,' said the porter, putting her things on his barrow. He, and in turn the station-master who took her ticket, and the girl doing the steps at the inn, for each of whom she had a happy familiar word as she passed, stood a moment to gaze after her with the estranged look of woodland creatures in whose faces a fire has been brandished suddenly out of the dark.

  It was a sweet morning: fields still wet, and lanes smelling all the way of wild roses and honeysuckle, with now and then heavier luscious wafts from the meadowsweet and sometimes the pungent breath of the golden whin-flowers. So she walked home, seven or eight miles or so, swinging her hat in her hand for pleasure of the air.

  Schooled, doubtless, to these ways, a well ordered household respectfully abstained from telling her that he was there first, and in fact now in his bath. And Mary for her part reading, doubtless, Ruth's too readable eyes, asked no questions. Only she remarked (falsely true) that the master had missed his train on Saturday morning, and would, it was to be feared, not be home till to-morrow. And so, resignedly, ordered her breakfast in the Refuge with Sheila. And was, resignedly, eating it when Lessingham came down.

  And he, doubtless no less ready to take his cue, watched her for a minute, himself unseen, as, bending her white neck, she rested, chin in hand, in a beautifulness, so self-sufficing, a contemplation so remote and so chill, as it had been some corruptless and timeless divinity, having upon Her (since spirit must corporal be) the habit of woman's body, and for a small moment come down so.

  IX

  Ninfea di Nerezza

  IT WAS high morning beside Reisma Mere, of Tuesday the twenty-first of July, with the shadows yet long, and with heavy dews that made lace shawls of the gossamer-spiders' weavings on hedge and wayside plant. Doctor Vandermast, walking his alone, came at unawares in a turn of the path upon the Duke his master. The Duke's back was towards him; he was in riding gear, and sat, facing away from Reisma, on a trunk of a fallen ash-tree, his horse grazing untethered in the brake near at hand. He was bare-headed, and the sun lighted a smoulder as of copper heating to redness in his short crisp-waved hair. Upon the doctor's good-morrow he turned with a black look that relented in the turning.

  'Your grace is become since but one short month to be as lean and as melancholic as a stag in autumn.'

  'Instance, then, of like effects worked by direct opposite causes.'

  Vandermast sat him down on the trunk, not too close but so he might at ease observe Barganax when he would: countenance and bearing. 'It is but in the merest outwards and superficies that the effects are like. Inwardly, as is sufficiently demonstrated in the treatise De Libertate Humana, Propositio XXX, the mind, in so far as it understandeth itself and its body sub specie aeternitatis, to that extent hath it of necessity an understanding of God, scitque se m Deo esse et per Deum concipi: knoweth itself to exist in God, and to be conceived through God. And so, by how much the zenith standeth above the nadir, by so much more excellent is it to be a man unsatisfied than a four-footed beast satisfied.'

  The Duke let out a bitter laugh. 'I must call you mad, doctor.'

  ‘How so?'

  'If you hope to reason with a madman. And, seeing you are mad, and safe so to talk nothings to, here's a piece of madman's wisdom came to me out of the suffocations that serve 'stead of air in these suburbs of hell, woman-infected watersides of Reisma, which 'cause I’m mad I turn from but still to return to, as the moth do the candleflame—

  Answere me this You Gods above:

  What’s lecherie withouten Love?

  — A thinge less maym'd (They answefd mee)

  Than maym'd were Love sans lecherie.'

  ‘In a mad world,’ said the doctor, 'that should be accounted madness indeed. For, albeit not so well declared as a great clerk can do, yet hath it the reach of unmutable truth; which is whole ever, and of that wholeness paradoxical, and of that paradoxicalness ever a thing that rides double. But the mad will ne'er content till he shall have patterned out to his own most mathematical likings the unpeerable inventions of God, which are the fundament and highest cornerstones of the world universal, both of the seen and of the unseen.'

  Invent some business shall make it needful I go home to-day to Zayana.'

  Vandermast noted the proud and lovely face of him: haggard now and unspirited, as if he had watched some nights out without sleep. If your grace hath a will to go, what (short of the King's very command) shall stay or delay you?'

  'My own will, which will not will it, unless forced by some outward urgence. I wilL yet will not. Unforced, I'll not go: not alone.'

  They sat silent. Vandermast saw the Duke's nostril widen and a strained stillness of intention overtake the bended poise of his head and face. He looked where the Duke looked. Upon a head of lychnis, that flaming herb, a yard or more beyond Barganax's foot above a bed of meadowsweet, a butt
erfly rested, in a quivering soft unrest, now opening now closing again her delicate wings. White and smooth were her wings, as ivory; and ever and again at their spread-eagling set forth to the gaze panther-black splashes exquisitely shaped like hearts. It was as if into the sunshine stillness of morning a heat welled up, out of the half-uncased tremulous beauties of that creature and out of the flower's scarlet lip, open, amid leaves and so many frislets of tangled fragrancies.

  'You in your time, I in mine,' said the doctor after a while, 'have wandered in the voluptuous broad way, the common labyrinth of love. We have approved by experiment the wise lesson of the Marchioness of Monferrato, when with a dinner of hens and certain sprightly words she curbed the extravagant passion of the King of France.'

  'A dinner of hens?'

  'Signifying per allegoriam that even as the so many divers and delectable dishes set before him were each one of them (save for variety of sauces and manner of presentation) nought but plain hen, so, in that commodity, all women are alike. It were well to be certified that it be not but that thing come up again. As the poet saith—

  Injoy'd no sooner but dispised straight,

  Past reason hunted, and, no sooner had,

  Past reason hated, as a swollow'd bayt

  On purpose layd to make the taker mad;

  Mad in pursuit and in possession so;

  Had, having, and in quest to have, extreame;

  A blisse in proofe, and, prov'd, a very wo;

  Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dreame’

  Barganax, elbow on knee, chin in hand, lips compressed, sat on so when Vandermast had ended, as if weighing it, tasting it profoundly: all very still. When at length he spoke it was softly, as to his own self retired into the secretary of his heart. 'Truth's mintage,' he said: that's most certain. But that's but the reverse side. Turn the coin, so: the obverse—