by E R Eddison
They came down by a track that kept high in the sunshine under the cliffs of the Sella, then dropped steeply through woods to join their path of the morning a few minutes above the inn at Plan. The barn where, on their way up, hearing the thud of wooden flails, they had seen a young man and a girl at work threshing, stood empty now; but the dusty smell hung yet about it of corn and husk. The white walls of the inn were gay with paintings of flower-shapes and shell-shapes and, between the windows above the porch, of the Virgin and Child and holy men. A fatal accident that morning, the girl at the inn told them, on the Fiinffingerspitze: a herr and his guide: in the Schmidt Kamin. The bodies had been brought down to Canazei, the far side of the pass. She had heard about it from Hansl Baumann, the chamois hunter. Herr Lessingham would remember him: had they not hunted together, a year, two years, since? Lessingham, as they went on again, felt Mary's arm twine itself in his.
Evening drew on apace. Their path crossed the bridge and joined the road, down which in a straggling slow procession cows were coming back from the alp: a dwindling procession; for at each house or turning, as they drew near the village, one or another would drop out of line of her own accord and leisurely, of her own accord, come home for milking. The goats too, undriven, came taking each her own way home. Evening was sweet with the breath of the cows, cool after the heat of the day, and full of music: a many-pitched jangling music of cow-bell and goat-bell in a hundred indeterminate drowsy rhythms. At one of the corners a child, three years old perhaps, stood expectant. A goat stopped came to him: paused while he gave her a hug with both arms about her neck: then, still in that embrace, turned with him down the path to a little poor house beside the river. Lessingham and Mary, lingering to enjoy this idyll, saw how a girl, littler even than the little boy, came from the house, staggering under the load of an open wooden box or trough which she carried in her arms and set down at last for the goat to eat. While she was eating, both these children hugged and kissed her.
Urgently, like something lost, Mary's hand felt its way into his.
‘What, my darling?’
'What you said this morning: about feeling double inside.' 'Yes?'
To change suits? I believe that's part of it, don't you think?'
'Change suits?'
'Colours. King of Hearts: Queen of Spades. How silly that we can't, well—change dresses.'
'Queen of Spades? Good heavens, I would never change you!'
'O yes. You'd give your soul for it sometimes. Instead of Le Lys Rouge, La Tulipe Noire. When you are in that frame of mind.'
'My darling, that is not me.'
'Don't be too sure. Somebody else in your skin, then. O yes; and when I'm in the mood, indeed I prefer that somebody else to you, my friend!'
Lessingham was silent. Turning to go, they lingered yet a minute or two to watch the sunset on the Sella: a transformation at once more theatrical and more unearthly than that illusion of immaterial substantiality which the mountain had produced at breakfast-time. Hardly credible it seemed, that here was but, as in Alpine sunsets, an illumination of the rocks from without. Eyesight was witness against it, watching the whole vast train of storeyed precipices transformed to a single fire-opal, transparent, lighted from within by a quivering incandescence of red fire.
In a few minutes it was gone: swallowed up, as in the rising tide of a dead sea, by the rising shadow of night. Lessingham said, 'Do you remember sailing up to the Westfirth, past Halogaland, those sunsets on the Sound-way? Not this burning inside. But they stayed.'
'For a time. But they went. They went at last.' The pallours that are between sunset and nightfall lay ashen on Mary's face, as on the face of the Sella. 'Even the Sella,' she said, 'must not even that go at last? Though we ourselves go too soon and too quickly to notice it.'
'Gods, I suppose, might notice it: see it, as we see the sunset go. If there were such a thing as Gods. Yes, it goes. All goes. And never comes back,' he said. Adding, with a sudden tang of waspish-headed discordous humour in his voice, 'How dull and savourless if it were otherwise!'
He looked round at her: saw, through the dusk, a faint lifting, like the wings of a sea-swallow in flight, of her eyebrows, and a faint mockery which, dragonflyish, here and away, darted across her lips. It was as if night and all the dark earth rose to her, upon a hunger of unassuageable desire.
Lessingham next morning opened his eyes to a greenish luminosity: spears of radiance and spears of shadow-mess, all of a geometrical straightness, here vertical, there horizontal, there bent at obtuse angles and extending themselves away out of sight over his head: all very still. And all very quiet; except for a continuous undersound, like rain or like running water, saying to him, deliriously, lullingly, almost as with articulate speech: 'Do not think. Do not know in what bed and in what room you are waking, or in what country. Do not wake. Shut eyes again. Snuggle the bed-clothes up round your ears: burrow your cheek into the pillow. So, with all senses abandoned to the touch of the owl-feathered wings of sleep, which, moving hoverly about you, wake what thoughts will be wakened and lull the rest, your self may taste for a while, unstrung, inert, unattached, the pure sensual beatitude of its own slumber.
'Slumber of the spirit, green and still. From depths deeper than these light-beams can wade, every now and then a bubble is released, floats upward, distinct and perfect, touches the glasslike ceiling, bursts, and is gone. So: in irregular slow procession, like cows at evening. This Tyrolean dance, gay mountain-bred, dancing to the blood: danced, it is quite true, "to saucily" by these dancers from Vienna. Madame de Rosas rising through it, effacing it, Spanish and statuesque, upon a long tremolo of castanets: Mary listening, watching: Mary at Anmering: Mary under the pine-tree, and across her face, tesselated patterns weaving and unweaving of white sunshine and luminous jewelled shadows: grasshoppers on the hot slopes under the Sella, uttering—for whom if not for her?—their lily-like voice. Thunder-smoke of Troy burning:
The day shall come when holy llios shall fall,
And Priam and the folk of Priam of the good ashen spear:
the slack weight in your arms beside the Struma: poor old Fred: like you, born for a fighter, beserk taint, brothers in blood: "Strike thunder and strike loud when I farewell": thud of shells bursting, whining of them in the air: but the thinness, the shrivelled lack of actuality— was it all for this?—of the actual fact: of the end: trying to say something: bubbling of red froth between his front teeth: rattle of machine-guns—peas in a pig's bladder: no, castanets. Castanets, and the red camellia in that woman's hair: sense-maddening colubrine slow swaying and rolling of her hips: white of her eyes: smoothness of her hair: peace. Peace, in the velvet night of this single sapphire that carries in its dear unrest all these things and their swaying rhythms. It goes. All goes. All except Mary. Mary: always on the point to be caught, but never quite. Her galloping hoof-beats: like castanets. Kelling Heath and the awakening earth taking life from her life. The morning of life: the entry, upon pizzicato throbs, of that theme (which is Mary) of the Grand Variation in the C sharp minor quartet, Queen of Queens, unutterable treasure of all hearts: things deep in time crowding to her, forming new earths to take their arms about her, new earths to be born and gone again and forgotten again at each throb of her footsteps.— "Perhaps my answer is sufficient, sir, if I say 'Because it amuses me'?" The crimson of her mouth: crimson gloves: her white skin: that same matter which, asleep or awake, resides near the corner of Mary's mouth: Mary, but with this blackness: Ninfea de Nerezza—'
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 springlike 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 tomorrow. 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 room 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.