by E R Eddison
Amalie's eyes, resting in the King's, read there, clear as if his lips had spoken: Yes, madonna. These words are your words: Yours to Me, even just as they are Hers to Him.
But the Duke, paler now than grass in summer, rose up, thrust back his chair, taking his stand now a little behind the King his father and his lady mother, he leaned against the bole of a strawberry-tree. Here, out of the lights, himself but hardly to be seen, he could sideways over their shoulders behold her: that mouth unparagoned, the unhealable plague of it, dark characters which who can uncypher? that moon-chilled imperial pallour of cheek and brow: all those provocations, heats, enlurings, and countermatchings, tiger's milk and enlacements of black water-snakes, which (when she turned her head) nakedly and feelingly before his eyes lay bound where, in the nape of her delicate neck, the black braids crossed and gleamed and coiled upwards: last, (and unspeakable uniting together of all these), ever and again an unmasking of her eyes to meet, conscient, the burning gaze of his, constant upon her out of the shadow of darkness.
'Speak on,' said the King, to Fiorinda, but his eyes always with Amalie. 'All this is true and just and condition absolute of all conceivable worlds. Now to particulars.'
'I will desire of you, here and now,' replied that lady, 'such a world as never yet was nor was thought of. And for first principle of its foundation, it shall be a world perfect and sufficient unto itself.'
'Well,' said the King. 'What shall we frame it of?'
'You shall frame it,' answered she, 'of the infinities: of Time without beginning and without ending; and of Space without centre and without bourne.'
'Of what fashion shall it be?'
'O I will have it of infinite fashions. But all by rule.'
'But how, if you will have it of these infinities, shall it be perfect? Perfection reasoneth a limit and a bourne.'
That is easily answered. It shall be of Time and in Time: not Time in it. And in Space and of Space: not Space in it.' '
'So that these infinities stand not part of your world,' said the King, 'but it, part of them: as this bread was made of wheaten flour, yet there's wheaten flour enough and to spare, and was and shall be, other than what this bread containeth, and of other shapes too?' He dipped a piece in the gravy, and gave it to his great dog to eat that sat beside him. 'Well, I have it so far,' he said: 'but is, so far, yet but the shadow of a world: but empty space and time.'
She said, ‘I will desire your serene highness fill it for me.'
'And what to fill it withal?' ,
'O, with an infinity of little entities, if you please: so tiny, a thousand at once shall dance upon the point of a needle. And even so, betwixt and between them where they dance, shall be room and to spare for another thousand.'
'Another thousand? No more than so?'
'Oh, if you will, infinitely more: until you, that are tireless, tire. Crowd, if you will, infinities betwixt infinities till thought swoon at it.'
Presently, 'It is done,' said he. 'And yet remaineth, spite all this multitudinousness, a dull uniformity of a world. What then?'
'Then (with humility) is't not for you, Lord, to lay to your hand: devise, continue? Have not I required it to be of infinite fashions? And must I instruct you, the great Artificer, what way you shall do your trade?'
'You must. Nay, mistress, what is the whole matter but some upstart fancy of your own? Nay, I'll read you your mind, then. You would have me set 'em infinite dances, infinite steps and figures. Behold, then: though every dancer be like as every other, the figures or patterns of their dancing are infinitely various. Of a pavane, look, I make you gold: of a coranto, air: of a bourree, granite: brimstone, quicksilver, lead, copper, antimony, proceed but each out of his several figure of this universal dance, yes, and the very elements of fire and water, and all minerals that compose the earth's natural body; even to this, which I have made for you of the allemande: this iron, which is the archaean dreamless soul of the world. Well?' he looked piercingly at her.
She, superciliously smiling, and with a faint delicate upward backward motion of her head, answered him, 'So far, I'll allow, Lord, 'tis not so greatly amiss.'
'Pshaw! it is a dead world,' he said. 'A dead soul.'
'Nay, then, let it teem with life,' said she, 'if needs must. And that horribly.'
'And what,' said the Duchess, 'is life?'
Bending with a fastidious daintiness above her plate, Fiorinda selected and held up to view upon her fork a single globule of the caviar. ‘In such a world,' she answered, offering to her nearer inspection upon the fork's prong the little jellied fish-egg, 'what else would your grace desire it to be, if not some such trash as this?'
'A fish-like world!' said the King.
'Nay, but here's a most God-given exquisite precision in it,' Fiorinda said. 'Life! But a new dance only, but in more complicated figures, enacted by your same little simplicities. Sort but the numbers aright, time but their steps aright, their moppings and mowings, their twirl-ings, curvets and caprioles—'tis done. Out of dead substance, living substance: even such a little nasty bit of sour jelly as this is. And, for the more mockery, let it arise from the sea: a very neoterical Anadyomene, worthy the world it riseth on.'
The King's hands, beautiful to watch in the play of their able subtle strength, were busied before him on the table. Presently he opened them slowly apart. Slowly, in even measure with their parting, the world of his making grew between them: a thing of most aery seeming substance, ensphered, glimmering of a myriad colours where the eye rested oblique on it, but, being looked to more directly, all mirk, darkling, and unsure. And within it, depth beneath depth: wherein appeared as if a seething and a churning together and apart continual of the dark and the bright. 'Well, I have given it life, as you bade. Life only. Not living beings.'
Fiorinda, considering it awhile in silence, nodded a soft assent. All else gazed upon it with eyes expressionless, unseeing, as though encountered, sudden out of light, with a void or a darkness: all save the Duchess only. Her eyes, beholding this toy, were wide with the innocent wonder of a child's.
'Well?' said the King of Fiorinda. 'Is your ladyship content, then?'
'Your highness hath been sadly badly served of your intelligencers if you conceive I should ever be content. Generality of life, thus as you present me withal, is life indeed, but 'tis not enough.'
The Duchess looked at it closely. 'You have given it life, you think?' she said very softly. 'What is life?'
'It is,' answered he, 'as you may perceive, in this world of our devising, a thing compact but of three ingredients: as, first, to feel, to wince, to answer to each intrusive touch of the outward world: second, to grow: third, to engender and give birth, like from like.' His gaze, unfastening itself from her, came back to that Dark Lady, and so again to Amalie. 'You,' he said to both: 'You, that wast with Me in the beginning of My way, before My works of old: what next?'
Fiorinda, still curiously beholding it, gave a little silent laugh. But the Duchess, shivering suddenly in the warm night air, leant back against King Mezentius as for warmth.
'I will,' said the Lady Fiorinda, and each honeyed word seemed as a kissing or a handling lickerously of some new-discovered particularity of her thought: 'I will that you so proceed with it, now from this beginning, as that even out of such contemptible slime as this is, shall be engendered all myriads of living creatures after their kind: little slimy polyps in the warm seas: little sea-anemones, jelly-fishes, worms, slugs, sand-hoppers, water-fleas, toadstools, grass and all manner of herbs and trees which grow. Run through all the lewd forms of them: fishes, birds, beasts even to human kind.'
'Even to human kind? what, men and women, as we be?' said the Duchess.
Fiorinda, as not having marked the question, but continued; but slowlier: ‘I will,' said she, 'that this shall be the life of them, of every thing that breatheth the breath of life in this new world of ours: to be put part of the waters as it were of a whirlpool, wherein is everything for ever neither
produced nor destroyed, but for ever transformed: the living substance for ever drawn in, moulded to some shape of life, and voided again as dead substance, having for that span of time yielded its strength and purpose to that common sink or cesspool of Being. So in this, my world, shall all proceed, self-made, self-sought, out of one only original: this little spittly jelly.'
'A world,' said the King, 'of most infinite complication.'
'Nay, but I give it simple laws to work by, for makeweight.'
'What laws, then?'
'First, (to order perfectly my perfect world, as perfect in action), this law: that at each succeeding moment of its existence the sum and totality of my world, and all that in it is, shall be determined reasonably and inevitably by that which was the moment before.'
'Sensible chaos, yet grounded in an infinite order.'
‘Which is,' said that lady, 'the strainable force of destiny. No chanceableness. Nor no meddling finger of God neither, to ruffle the serenity of my world's unfolding. As a rose-bud discloseth itself and spreadeth abroad, so shall its processions be: as inevitable as one and one is two, one and two is three, and so on for ever, ad infinitum. The general forms, constant, unchangeable, un-transformable; but all else changing as oft as weathercock in wind. Truly a world most exquisitely well fitted to be comprehended by a man of law?' She glanced at the Lord Beroald, who, for answer, but smiled his unbelieving smile.
'But no world, sure,' said the lord Admiral, 'for the living beings that must live in it. What manner freedom have they, where all must be predetermined and like a clock-work?'
There was a cruel look of that lady's lips and teeth, daintily eating up the little piece of caviar. She turned upon the King eyes over the balls of which suddenly a film seemed to be drawn, as they had been the eyes of an empoisoned serpent. ‘I think,' she said, ‘I will tease them a little with my laws. They shall seem indeed to themselves to have freedom; yet we, who look on, know 'tis no such matter. And they shall seem to themselves to live; yet if, 'tis a life not their own. And they shall die. Every one that knoweth life in my world shall know also death. The little simplicities, indeed, shall not die. But the living creatures shall. Die, and dissipate as children's castles in sand when the tide takes them, but the sand-grains abide. Is it not a just and equal choice? either be a little senseless lump of jelly or of dead matter, and subsist for ever; or else be a bird, a fish, a rose, a woman, 'pon condition to fade, wax old, waste at last to carrion and corruption?'
'Men and women, as we be?' said the Duchess. 'O, you have answered me! Or is it,' she said under her breath, 'that Myself hath answered Myself?' And again the King's gaze, unfastening itself from Fiorinda's, rested curiously on his Amalie. She was staring, as fascinated, into the teeming inwardness of the sphered thing which, motionless save for a scarce perceptible rhythmic expanding and contracting of its translucent envelope from with-inward, remained balanced as it had been some heavy bubble, a foot, may be, in diameter, upon the table betwixt her and the King. There was silence for a minute, while, under the eyes of those feasters, miniature aeons trained their untermed texture of death and birth within the artificial confines of that cosmos.
Presently Fiorinda spoke, 'As we be? I question that, (saving your grace). How were that possible, out of this? Is there mind in this?' Lovelier than the argent limb of the cold moon, the curve showed of that lady's arm as, chin propped on hand, she leaned pensive over the table. 'Unless, indeed,' she said, and the slowed music of her voice sounded to new deeps: 'unless, indeed, We Ourselves will go in and enter it. Know it so. Go down—'
'Undergrope it so from within,' said the King. 'For a moment, We might. To know.'
The Duchess trembled. It was as if, in the stillness, she had suffered his mind and thought to enter so deep into her own, that she tasted, in her inmost being and without necessity of communication, the inwardness of his: tasted how, as one awakening in a strange bed sinks back into sleep again and the place of visions, he beheld now in the baseless clearness of a dream, a meadow grey with the rime of hoar-frost that sparkled with many colours as the sun made and unmade stars of the tiny crystals. A sycamore-tree was shedding its golden leaves in a slow shower in the nearly windless air: two or three at a time it shed them, translucent gold against the rising sun, and at the foot of the tree they made a carpet of darker gold where they fell. And in that necessity of dreams, that binds together as of course things which in waking life are severed and unrelated, he perceived, in the falling of each particular leaf in that bounteousness and Danae's shower of beauty, the falling away of something that had been his. His ancient royal palace and seat-town on two-horned Rialmar, his fleets, armies, great vassals, princes and counsellors and lords of the Three Kingdoms, his queens, mistresses, children, alive or dead, they of his courts and households afar or near, under his hands: all his wide dominions welded and shaped to his will, of Meszria, Rerek, and Fingiswold: lovely Memison itself, whose balm was in his nostrils, the turf of whose garden was soft here beneath his feet: very Amalie herself, sitting and breathing now beside him: the whole of his life, this actual world he lived in, fluttered downward, unregarded, severed, golden, through that cold still air in the bright beams of the clear sun: floating scraps of memory, every one of which, even while the mind strove to grasp it, was dissipated and gone to spread deeper the bed of gold at that tree's foot.
Fiorinda but flickered an eyelid. 'It moves,' she said presently. 'It amuses me. Always it moves. Always it - changes. Yet, for all its changing, is never much the better. Nor much the worse.' She paused. In the beholding of her face, thus pensive and stilled, was such unquiet pleasures as the sight of the stars gives. Then, "This amuses me, too,' she began to say again: 'to note how, by merest clockwork, is a kind of perfection created, brought to maturity, maintained in being.' The scaled familiar gathered itself at her mouth's corner, intent, like as a lizard that espies a fly. 'Amuses me to regard, as in some crooked mirror, this perfection which wanteth but one jot to be a master-work, and that jot'—
'That it be truth,' said Barganax, out of the thick shadow.
It was as if a frozen blast went suddenly about that garden, come and gone in a moment of time behind the flower-sweet darknesses and the candles' soft and comfortable radiance.
Barganax and Fiorinda beheld the Duchess Amalie's hand fasten over the King's hand at her side upon the table: beheld her beauty gather itself like a serpent coiled, as she sat, level-browed, level-eyed, some high-descended Queen dreadless on the brink of fate. 'The game's too much in earnest,' she whispered in the King's ear. 'Stay for me. You and I,' she whispered: 'we are noosed: we are limed. We are in it.'
XVII
In What a Shadow
IT WAS OCTOBER NOW, of that same year nineteen hundred and twenty-three: the nineteenth of October. Night shut down on Nether Wastdale in a great rain without wind: rain steadily falling out of the premature darkness of rain-cloud that covered the sky without a gap. There was nothing to hear but the rain: nothing to see but the appearance of trunks and leafage picked out, chalky and unsubstantial, where the glare of headlights struck the holm-oaks west of the house; these, and the rain that the cold twin beams made visible, and a feebler, more distant, luminosity as of another car waiting in the road below the drive gates.
Jim Scarnside pressed the door-bell and waited. He pressed it again: waited again: then set his thumb hard upon it and kept it there, may be for thirty seconds, while he listened to the shrill metallic whirr far away within. Then lights went up in the porch: steps sounded in the hall: turn of a key, drawing of bolts, and the door stood ajar on the chain, with old Ruth's face peering through the opening. With a little inarticulate apology, she closed the door to shoot the chain, then opened it wide. They stood silent a moment, she in the doorway, Jim over against her on the doorstep. Her face showed a death-like pallour: eyes dull and puffy.
'Master at home?' he said. He saw that her cheeks were stained with the lashing of tears.
'We don't exp
ect him till to-morrow, at earliest.'
‘Nonsense. What's the car doing at the drive gates, then?'
She looked helplessly at Jim's own car, her hands, with their swollen joints and wrinkled skin, twitching at her apron.
'At the drive gates. Out in the road. It's his car. Empty, and lights on.'
She brought her hand up to her mouth. 'O, not that too. Please dear God, not that. And yet,' she said, with a kind of sob—
'All right,' said Jim. 1 expect he made better time than he expected.' He pulled up the collar of his mackintosh: began to run down the steps. At first step he turned. 'Any man in the house?'
She shook her head: 'No but me and the girls. We were shutting up for the winter, when Mr. Edward comes back all sudden-like (you know his ways, sir), and starts to, packing up and I don't know what; and then, Tuesday it was: that telegram—' she choked. 'And then. Then he went,' she said. 'No, no man in the house. Only old David, sir, and he took David, so as he was to wait, mind the car at Dover, while the master went across to—' she broke down. 'O, Mr. James, sir. Her ladyship: that telegram: it can't be true, sir: not killed: God couldn't permit it. And my Miss Janet and all. God couldn't—'
'Look here, Ruth,' he said, very kind but firmly, taking her by the arms, ‘you and I have got to see about this: no good crying. Is the master's room ready? fires? he'll want some dinner. You get on with it: I'll be back in a few minutes.'
'Yes, Mr. James, sir. That's right, sir,' she said with a gulp: 'that's right.' Both her hands fastened on Jim's right, squeezing it. Suddenly the squeeze became tighter. He turned, looking where she looked. Their hands disengaged. Lessingham was in the porch beside them: bareheaded, in his travelling-clothes, seemingly soaked to the skin with rain.