by E R Eddison
"This is fun,' said Fanny. 'I like this.'
'Next thing, both standing up; then walk away together, the fellow damned angry, blustering away, but as if under marching orders, in front, scowling and snapping over his shoulder: Edward as if treading on his heels to make him go a bit faster. By God, I said, I'm going to see this through. Left the women, and tooled along behind, keeping out of sight not to annoy Edward; but just in case. They went straight through a kind of passage there is, direction of the Palace of the Popes, till they land up at that hotel—what was it? Silver Eagle or something— and a porter in uniform standing at the door: quiet street, no one about. Poor old bruiser chap hurrying along as if he didn't know why, and didn't quite like it, but just had to: marched off like a pickpocket. The Edward says to the porter, "You know me?" "Oui, monsieur." "Do you see this man?" he says. "Oui, monsieur." "Very well. You're a witness." And he says to the chappie, "You insulted a lady in my presence," he says, "and you insulted me. And when I told you to apologize, you insulted me again. Is that true?" That gets the fellow's rag out proper: wakes him out of his trance. "Yes it is," he says, making a face at him like a hydrophobia pig, "yes it is, you blanky blanking blanker, and I'll blanky well blank you up the blanking blank blank": rush at him, try to kick him, the way those blackguards do; but before you could say knife, Edward grabs him somehow —too quick to see; too dark—but in about one second he has him off his feet, throws him bodily against the wall—plonk! And there he dropped.'
'Threw him? do you mean threw him through the air?' said Fanny incredulously.
'Yes, like a cat. Chap weighed twelve stone if he weighed an ounce. For a minute I thought he was dead: looked damned like it. Nasty mess—'
'O thank you,' Mary said, ‘we can leave out the decorations.'
Five minutes later, showing Eric his room, she said, 'I ought to have told you about Fanny. She's dropped the Mrs.’
'What do you say? Dropped? O Lord, I made a gaff, did I? Can't be helped. What happened?'
'A great many things that had better not'
‘Fellow turn out bad hat?'
'About as bad as they make them.'
'Marriage of first cousins, wasn't it? and parents disapproved. Quite right too. Divorce, or what?'
'Yes.'
'Quite in the fashion. Damned fool. She's a fine woman. Most people are damned fools, one way or another. I wonder what's become of that nice brother of hers, Tom Chedisford?'
Mary was silent.
'Look here, my dear Mary,' he said suddenly: ‘you see a lot more of Anne these days than I do. Is everything going as it should there? You know what I mean.'
'Absolutely, I should have said. Why?'
That fellow Charles. Does he treat her properly?'
‘Dotes on her. Always has.'
'He's a dull dog. You think they're happy together?'
Mary laughed. 'Good heavens, I don't know why you ask me these things. Of course they are.'
'A bit hum-drum.'
'Most of us get a bit hum-drum as the years go by.'
'Most of us may, but some of us don't.'
'Perhaps some people get on better that way. One can't lay down a Code Napoleon for happy marriages.'
‘You think she's got what she wants?'
'I certainly think so. If she hadn't we certainly couldn't give it her.'
Eric wrinkled up his nose and shot out his lips. 'What I don't like to see is the dear girl getting to look more and more like a spinster: kind of unattached look. Better never have married the fellow if the effect of him is to turn her into a maiden aunt Edward hasn't done that to you. Nor I to Jacqueline.'
'O dear, we're getting painfully personal. Hadn't we better stop?'
'Just as you like, my dear. But before we leave the subject I may as well tell you that you and Edward are the only married people I've ever known who always seem as if you weren't married at all, but were carrying on some clandestine affair that nobody was supposed to have wind of but yourselves. And you keep young and full of beans on it, as if you would always go on growing up, but never grow old. Arid if you ask me which of you deserves the honours for that, I'm inclined to think it's honours easy: between the two of you. And you can tell him from me, if you like, that that's my opinion.'
It was past eleven o'clock, the same night. Lessingham was in the library among a mass of papers, books, maps, statistics, and cigar-smoke. 'You'd better turn in now, Jack: be fresh for the morning. We've got most of the stuff taped and sorted now. I'll go on for a bit: get my covering memorandum into shape: that's the ticklish part of it, what the whole thing stands or falls by, and I can do it best by myself. You've got the annexes all off the roneo now, have you?'
'All but Annex V,' said Milcrest.
'You'll have lots of time to finish up before lunch. You're certain they're not going to let us down about that aeroplane?'
'Certain, sir. I got the general's promise from his own mouth. Confirmation in writing too: he rummaged among the papers on the table and produced it.
'Capital. David will run you over to the aerodrome. He'll have to be back in good time to go with me to Carlisle: I start at seven o'clock sharp. All right about my sleeper?'
'Yes.'
'And they know at Carlton House Terrace to expect me for bath and breakfast on Tuesday morning, and that you sleep there Monday night?'
'Yes.'
'I may have to go straight on to Paris: can't tell till after Tuesday's meeting. If so, I'll want you with me. Make all arrangements on that assumption.'
'Right, sir.'
'Off you go to bed, then. We've done a rattling good day's work. Good night.'
Lessingham, left to himself, lighted a cigar, threw up his legs on the sofa, and for a quarter of an hour sat thinking. Then he sprang up, went to the writing-table, and set to work. Two o'clock struck, and still he wrote, tossing each sheet as it was finished onto the floor beside him. At three he put down his pen, stretched his arms, went over to the side-table where, under white napkins, cold supper was appetizingly set out: chicken in aspic, green salad with radishes, and things ready for making coffee. By twenty past he was back again at work. Day began to filter through the curtains. It struck five. He drew the curtains: ate a sandwich: opened a bottle of Clicquot: collected the sheets off the floor, and sat down to go through them: checking, condensing, a rider here, a rider there, here three pages reduced to one, there an annex brought up into the body of the memorandum, or a section of the memorandum itself turned into an annex, this transposed, that deleted, the whole by pruning and compression brought down from about seven thousand words to three. Eight or nine pages, perhaps, of open-spaced typing: three foolscap pages, three and a half at most, the Foreign Office printer would make of it; apart from the annexes, which contained the real meat, the factual and logical foundation upon which the whole proposal rested. But which nobody would read, he said in himself as he snapped to the self-locking lid of the dispatch-box over the completed whole. What are the facts and what is logic? Things to play with: make a demonstration: dress your shop window with. Facts and logic can make a case for what you please. The vast majority of civilized mankind are, politically, a mongrel breed of sheep and monkey: the timidity, the herded idiocy, of the sheep: the cunning, the dissimulation, the ferocity, of the great ape. These facts are omitted in the annexes, but they are the governing facts; and policy will still be based upon them, and justified before the world as embodying the benevolent aspirations of the woolly flock together with the cleverness of the bandarlog. And the offspring of such a policy will be such as such a world deserves, that was mid-wife to it: a kind of bastard Egyptian beast-god incarnate, all ewe-lamb in the hinder parts with a gorilla's head and the sphinx's claws of brass; likely to pass away in an ungainly and displeasing hara-kiri: head and claws making a bloody havoc of their own backside and puddings, and themselves by natural consequence perishing for lack of essential organs thus unintelligently disposed of.
It was nearl
y half past nine when he rang the bell for Milcrest. "There it is, in the box. I don't want to see it again. Pull off copies for circulation: I rely on you to check it: wake me if there's any real doubt on any point, otherwise don't. Leave me two copies in my pouch: take the rest personally to 2 Whitehall Gardens without fail this evening. The sooner the better.' He yawned and stretched. 'I'm a fool,' he said: 'kicking against the hard wall.'
Dog-tired suddenly, he went upstairs and, without enough energy to undress, flung himself on his bed just as he was. His brain had been working at full pressure for twenty-two hours on end. In less than a minute he was fast asleep. Mary peeped in at the door: came in softly: put an eider-down over him, and went out again, closing the door soundlessly behind her.
He woke late in the afternoon, had a bath, came down to tea, settled Eric's problems for him, and by seven o'clock was well on the way to Carlisle. Old David's heart was in his mouth, between the terrifying speed and the cool control of Lessingham's driving.
Summer night wheeled slowly above the out-terraces of Memison: the moon up: Venus in her splendour like a young moon high in the west. The King said, 'He is returned to Acrozayana, to hold tomorrow his weekly presence. That is well done. And you shall see there is a back-bias shall bring him swiftly here again.'
Vandermast stroked his beard.
The King said, 'I am troubled in a question about God. Omnipotence, omnipresence, omniscience: having these three, what hath He left to hope for? By my soul, did I find in myself these swelling members grown out of form,—to do all, to know all, to be all,—I swear I'd die of their tediousness.'
Vandermast said, 'Your serene highness may yet consider that the greater the power, or the pleasure, the greater needeth to be the discipline.'
The King said, 'You mean that the Omniscient and Omnipotent must discipline Himself and His own power and His own knowledge, treading, as upon a bridge of two strained ropes above the abysses, at once the way of reason and the way of sensuality?'
Vandermast said, 'Yes. Within which two ways and their permutations shall be found two million ways wherein a man may live perfectly, or a God. Or two million million ways. Or what more you will. For who shall limit God's power, or who Her beguilings, The king said, 'What Is the end then? What is the end and aim of life in this world we live in?'
Vandermast said. 'She is the end. Though the heaven perish, She shall endure. A man is unmanned if he level at any lower mark. God can reach no higher.'
The King said, 'But what of that dictum of the sage, Deus se ipsum amore intellectuali infinite amat: God loves His own Self with an infinite intellectual love? And is not that a higher mark?''
Vandermast said, 'It is a good point of philosophy: but your serenity hath left out of the reckoning the ultimate Duality in Oneness of the nature of God. The Self hath its being,—its cause material, its cause formal, its cause efficient and its cause final,—wholly in that which it loves. And yet, by unresolvable antinomy, remains it of necessity other than that which it loves. For in love there must needs be ever both a selfsameness and an otherness.'
The King said, 'Who are you, old man? winding up stars to me out of the unbottomed well of truth, as it were myself speaking to myself, and yet they are mysteries I never scarce cast a thought upon until now?'
Vandermast said, "The self, as we have said, hath its being wholly in that which it loves.'
And the King said, under stars in Memison, 'And She too, by like argument, awful, gold-crowned, beautiful Aphrodite, loving Herself and Her own perfectnesses, loves them, I suppose, not for their own sake but because of Him that loves Her and by Her is loved.'
Vandermast said, 'That is undoubtable. And it is the twofold anchor-cable of truth and truth. And thus in Her and because of Her, is the supreme infinitude of formal limits whereby the dead unformed infinite of being and becoming is made to live.'
The King said, slowly, as out of a slow deep study, 'So that, were it to be God: then, may be, through the mind of this horse, this fish, this slave, this sage, this queen, this conqueror, this poet, this lover, this albatross, as He or She, to open Our eyes here and there: see what manner of world this is, from inside it. And, for interest of the game, drink Lethe before so looking: be forgetful awhile of Our Olympian home and breeding. Even to look,' he said after a minute's silence, 'through many windows at once, many pairs of eyes. As, spill quicksilver: many shining bodies, every one outwardly reflecting all other but shut off by its own skin from all other, inwardly secret to itself: yet will join together again at the full close.'
Vandermast held his peace. The King, gazing into the eyes of that old man, gazed into profundities of night: of Night, that is sister to death, but mother also of desire and mother of dreams, and between the pillars of her bed are the untravelled immensities of the interstellar spaces.
It was nineteen twenty-three, the first week in February, a gloomy sodden-souled day colourless with east wind. Mary reined up her horse at the edge of Kelling Heath. 'We'd better keep to the road,' she said over her shoulder to Anne Bremmerdale who had halted a yard or two behind her. 'Rather dangerous, with all these old trenches. They ought to fill them up.'
'Useful for the next war,' Anne said.
They waited a minute, looking northwards and seawards over the heath. Mary turned in the saddle for a sweep of the eye over the country inland. All was brown and bare now and the trees unleaved; but near at hand the may-bushes were beginning to show signs of waking with their dark intricacy of thorns and their myriad tiny stars: green little balls, the first swelling of the buds, in a criss-cross twiggy heaven. No buttercups this time of year, no meadowsweet, dew-pearled, creamy and heavy-scented, no lovely falling note of the peggy-whitethroat nor lark's song mounting and mounting more golden than gold to salute the lady dawn; and yet, in this wide heathland and the turbulent sky above it, a fifteen-year-old echo of these things, and of those galloping hooves that had been as flying darkness under the morning, with muffled rollings in the heart of darkness like distant drums. ‘Do you think we get older?' Mary said, as they drew back into the road and at a walking-pace turned inland. 'Or do you think we are like the audience at a cinema, and sit still and watch the thing go by?'
The proud lines of Anne's face hardened to a yet closer likeness to her brother Edward's. 'I think we grow older,' she said. 'Most of us.'
The wind seemed to think so too. Grow older and die. Sometimes die first. Mary said, ‘I think we get more awake.'
And yet: to untell the days and redeem those hours? Ah, if it were possible. That had been the day of the last of those cricket matches that there used to be every year for so many years, against Hyrnbastwick. Poor Hugh, blinded in the war: at least he had his wife: probably the right one. And Lady Southmere was there, did Anne remember? Of course she did: gone long ago, both those old people. And Mr. Romer, whom Jim admired so and was so fond of up at Trinity: a great favourite of Edward's too: a man eminent in spheres usually incompatible, both as don and as man of the world: an education in itself to have known him. He died in 'fifteen. So many of those people caught by the war: Jack Bailey, killed: Major Rustham, Hesper Dag-worth, Captain Feveringhay, killed, killed, killed: Norman Rustham, that delightful little boy, gone down with the Hawke. Nigel Howard, killed: poor Lucy. And her brother married to that—well, we won't use Edward's word for her. And Tom Chedisford, of all people, drinking himself to death, it seems: incredible: appalling. 'What does Janet Rustham do now-a-days?' said Mary.
'Good works.'
'And those awful Playter girls?'
Anne smiled. 'One turned nun: the other's in some government job. Cuthbert Margesson captained your side that year, didn't he? I can't bear to think of Nell's never to this day knowing what became of him: too ghastly, that "reported missing".'
'It was worse for Amabel,' Mary said, 'having Nicholas murdered under her nose by those brutes in Kieff. They let her go, because she was English. But you're being dreadfully gloomy: almost making me cry, with this ug
ly wind and all. Remember, there have been some happy things: Tom Appleyard, an Admiral now and quite undamaged: Rosamund a full-blown marchioness: you and Charles: Edward and me: dear Jim, the salt of the earth, I don't think doomsday could change him; and Uncle Everard and Aunt Bella: and Father, so hale and hearty, though he is getting on for seventy.'
'Getting on for seventy. And lonely,' Anne said in her own mind.
'Lonely.' To some unclothing quality in that word, the rude wind seemed to leap as to a huntsman's call, taking her breath, striking through her thick winter clothes to raise gooseflesh on her skin. She shivered and put her horse to a trot. For a while they rode in silence, each, for friendship, with the other's private ghosts for company: for Mary, Anne's dead brothers, Fred and Will Lessingham, and the only other sister, Margaret, who married that eccentric explorer man and died of yellow fever in the basin of the Orinoco; and for Anne, all Mary's three brothers, all gone: eldest and youngest killed in the war, and Maxwell, the middle one, years before that in a hunting accident. Ghosts of the past, dank and chilling. But not actively menacing as was this secret one, present to Lady Bremmerdale alone, which all the time held its ground undisturbed by her other thoughts that came and went It held its ground with a kind of mock obsequiousness and paraded its obedience to her will: an incipient ghost, grey, obscuring with its breath the windows of the future: a ghost without distinct form, except that, like the comic man in old-fashioned pantomimes, it seemed to be perpetually removing yet another waistcoat. And at each removal, the effect was not a revealing, but an effect of ever more unmistakable and ever bleaker emptiness.
As they walked their horses up out of the dip towards Salthouse Common, she said, 'Here's a general knowledge question for you, Mary dear: a point that's been teasing me a good deal lately. Would you say it was possible for two people to live successfully simply as friends? married people, I mean: so to say, a Platonic marriage?'
Mary inclined her head as if weighing the matter before she answered. 'I think I would apply there Dr. Johnson's saying about the dog walking on its hind legs: it is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.'