by E R Eddison
'I doubt, myself, whether it is possible,' said Anne. 'Surely it ought to be. Not that there's any particular virtue in it: it's so obviously a matter of taste. But tastes count for a good deal when you're considering a pair of Siamese twins. I fancy differences of taste on a point like that can be unsurmountable barriers, don't you?'
Mary looked at her, but Anne's face was averted. 'I don't think I ever really thought about it. Unsurmountable is a big word. I should have thought if they were fond of each other they might hit upon some modus vivendi.'
'But there might be people, of course, with such poles-asunder ideas.'
'If they really cared,' said Mary, 'I shouldn't think ideas ought to matter much.'
'Ideas about love, I meant. What it is.'
'Well, if they loved each other?'
'But might it not be that, just because they do love each other, and their ideas are so different (or ideals), they settle down to a modus vivendi that evades these controversial ideas? And will not that lead to living on the surface: shirking the deep relationships? If you're colourblind you can't expect to be very amusing company for someone whose whole interest is taken up with colour schemes based on red and green.'
Mary said, 'I wonder? Surely, when one marries one undertakes to play the game according to certain rules. Both do. It seems a bit feeble to give it up because, for one or other or for both, the rules happen to make it specially difficult.'
Anne was silent for a while. Then she said, 'You speak as a born mistress of the game, my beloved. I was thinking of less gifted, less fortunate, bunglers.'
'Perhaps it's hard for you and me to put ourselves in their shoes,' said Mary.
'Perhaps it is.'
'What I'm quite sure of,' said Mary, 'is that if there is friction of that sort, it's much better that, of the two, the woman should be the less deeply in love.'
Anne said, after a pause, 'You don't believe in cutting Gordian knots, then?'
'No. I don't,'
‘Never?'
'Never for people in the particular kind of muddle we're thinking of.'
'But why never? I'd like to know why you think that.'
Mary seemed to ponder a minute, stroking her horse's neck. 'I expect really it is because I believe we are put into this world simply and solely to practise undoing Gordian knots.' She looked at Anne, then away again: concluded very gently, 'To practise undoing them: not sit down on them and pretend they aren't there.'
Lady Bremmerdale sighed. ‘I should imagine the real trouble comes in a case where the players have themselves made the game about ten times more unplayable than it ever need have been: spoilt it, perhaps, right at the beginning, by pulling the knot into a jam there's no undoing. And then, if there is no undoing, the choice is to sit tight on the tangle and pretend it isn't there (which I think dishonest and destructive of one's self-respect), or else be honest and cut it. Or chuck it away and have done with it.'
'I certainly shouldn't sit on it, myself,' said Mary. "Very galling, I should think, to the sitting apparatus! But as for cutting, or throwing away,' she said with a deeper seriousness, '—well, my darlin', that's against the rules.' Anne said nothing: looked steadily before her. 'Besides,' said Mary, ‘I don't see how you can ever, in real life, say in advance: Here's a tangle there's no undoing.'
After a long pause Anne said, 'Jim takes exactly the same line as you do.' She looked round, into a pair of eyes so easy to rest in, it might have been her own eyes regarding themselves from a mirror.
'O, Jim has been tried on the general knowledge paper, has he?'
'The two people I know in the world fit to be asked their opinion on such a subject.'
'People talk to Jim, because he talks to nobody. I'm glad he agrees with me. Leaving out present company, I think Edward qualifies for third on your list.'
‘I don't count him,' said Anne. 'He hardly counts as another person.'
Mary's silence, clearer and gentler than words could have said it, said, 'I understand.'
'Edward says cut it and be damned to it.'
‘I would agree with that,' said Mary, 'if there were a tertium quid: the vulgar triangle. There usually turns out to be, of course. Practically always. But in this hypothetical case, I gathered there was not?'
'In this hypothetical case I can promise you there isn't'
'Well then,—'
It was getting late. They had fetched a circle round by Glandford and the Downs and so through Wiveton and Cley with its great church and windmill and up onto the common again and were now riding down the hill above Salthouse. The broad was alive with water-fowl. Beyond the bank they saw the North Sea like roughened lead and all the sky dark and leaden with the dusk coming on and a great curtain of cloud to northward and a sleet-storm driving over from the sea. Mary said, 'I should think Charles's view might be valuable.'
Lady Bremmerdale's handsome face darkened. ‘I haven't consulted Charles,' she said, after a pause.
They came riding into Salthouse now, level with the bank. Thev saw how a flieht of brent geese, a score or more, swept suddenly down steeply from that louring sky like a flight of arrows, to take the water: a rushing of wings, black heads and necks arrow-like pointing their path, and white sterns vivid as lightning against that murk and beginnings of winter night.
Anne said slowly, 'But I think I’m inclined to agree with you and Jim.'
'And we, madonna, are we not exiles still?
When first we met Some shadowy door swung wide.
Some faint voice cried, —Not heeded then
For clack of drawing-room chit-chat, fiddles, glittering lights, Waltzes, dim stairs, scents, smiles of other women— yet,
'Twas so: that night of nights. Behind the hill Some light that does not set Had stirr’d, bringing again New earth, new morning-tide.
'I didn't mean that seriously, years ago when I wrote it,' Lessingham said: 'that night you were such a naughty girl at Wolkenstein.' He was working on a life-size portrait of Mary in an emerald-green dress of singular but beautiful design, by artificial light, between tea and dinner that same afternoon, in the old original Refuge at Anmering Blunds. 'I mean, I felt it but I hadn't the intellectual courage of my feelings. Strange how the words can come before the thought,' he talked as if half to her, half to himself, while he worked: 'certainly before the conscious thought. As if one stuck down words on paper, or paint on canvas, and afterwards these symbols in some obscure way have a power of coming to life and telling you (who made them) what was in fact at the back of your mind when you did it; though you never suspected it was there, and would have repudiated it if you had.'
Mary said, ‘It opens up fascinating possibilities. On that principle you might have an unconscious Almighty, saying, as He creates the universe, Moi, je ne crois pas en Dieu.'
'I know. I can't see why not An atheistical Creator is a contradiction. But is not reality, the nearer you get to the heart of it, framed of contradictions? I'm quite sure our deepest desires are.'
Tm sure they are.' A comic light began to play almost imperceptibly about the corners of Mary's lips. 'Really, I think I should find an atheistical Almighty much more amusing to meet than an Almighty who solemnly believed in Himself. Can you imagine anything more pompous and boring?'
Lessingham was silent a minute, painting with concentrated care and intention. Then he stopped, met her eye, and laughed. 'Like an inflated Wordsworth, or Shelley, or Napoleon: prize bores all of them, for all their genius. You can't imagine Homer, or the man who was responsible for Njal's Saga, or Shakespeare, or Webster, or Marlowe, thinking like that of themselves.'
Mary smiled. 'Marlowe,' she said: Svhen he was like to die, "being persuaded to make himself ready to God for his soul, he answered that he would carry his soul up to the top of a hill, and run God, run devil, fetch it that will have it." I could hug him for that'
'So could I. They were far too deep in love with their job to bother about themselves as doers of it. They knew the stature of their
own works, of course: Beethoven's saying of the cavatina (wasn't it?) in Op. 130, "It will please them someday"; but that is worlds apart from the solemn self-satisfaction of these one-sided freaks, not men but sports of nature. How would you like Shelley for your inamorato?'
‘I think I should bite his nose,' Mary said.
Something danced in Lessingham's eye. He painted swiftly for a minute in silence. 'Just as I know,' he said, taking up the thread of his thought again, (better than I know any of your what people call accepted scientific facts) whether a picture of mine is right when I’ve finished it, or whether it's worthless. It's one or the other: there's no third condition. When I've finished it. Till then, one knows nothing. This one, for instance: heaven knows whether it will come off or not My God, I want it to.'
'Yes. You used to slash them into pieces or smudge them over when they were half finished. Till you learnt better.'
'Till you taught me better. You, by being Mary.' He stood quickly back, to see sitter and portrait together. 'You are the most intolerable and hopeless person to paint I should think since man was man. Why do I go on trying?'
'You succeeded once. Perhaps that is why. The appetite grows with feeding.'
'The Vision of Zimiamvia portrait? Yes. It caught a moment, out of your unnumerable moments: a perfect moment: I think it did. But what is one among the hundreds of millions? Besides, I want a perfect one of you that the world can see. That one is only for you and me and the Gods. O, the Devil's in it,' he said, changing his brash: 'it's a lunacy, a madness, this painting. And writing is as bad. And action is as bad, or worse.' He stepped forward to put a careful touch on the mouth: stepped back, considered, and corrected it‘Est-ce que vous pouvez me dire, madame, quelle est la difference entre une brosse a dents et un ecureuil?'
Mary's response was the curiouriest of little inarticulate sounds, lazy, mocking, deprecatory, that seemed, as a sleepy child might if you stroked it, or a sleepy puppy, to stretch itself luxuriously and turn over again, hiding its nose in the downy deep contentment of many beloved absurdities: how stupid you are, and yet how dear you are to be so stupid, and how cosy us two together, and how absurd indeed the world is, and how amusing to be you and me.
'Do you know the answer? His eyes were busy.
‘No,' she said, in a voice that seemed to snuggle deeper yet into that downiness of honey-scented pillows.
'Quand on les mit tous les deux en dessous d'un arbre, c'est celui qui le grimpe qui est l'ecureuil.’
'O silly riddle!'
'Do you know what you did then?' said Lessingham, painting with sudden extreme precision and certitude. ‘You did a kind of pussy-cat movement with your chin, as though you were smoothing it against a ruff. I know now what this picture wants. Have you got a ruffle? Can't we make one? I can see it: I could do it out of my head. But Td like to have it in the flesh, all the same.'
'Angier can make one by tomorrow. I can show her.'
Tired?'
‘No.'
He put down palette and brushes. 'Anyhow, let's knock off and have a rest Come and look at it. There. Aren't I right?’
Mary, standing beside him, looked at it awhile in silence. 'Not one of those enormous ones,' she said, 'like a peacock's tail.'
'Good heavens, no.'
‘Nor the kind that swaddles one up to the chin in a sort of white concertina, as if one hadn't any neck.'
‘No, no. I want it quite narrow: not more than two inches deep, like Isabella d'Este's in our Titian in the music-room at home. But much longer, of course, following the opening of your dress.'
'When you designed this dress,' said Mary, 'did you mean it to be a Zimiamvian dress?'
'Pure Zimiamvian. It clothes, but does not unduly conceal: adorns, but is not silly enough to try to emulate: displays, but does not distort.'
'On the principle of Herrick's Lily in Crystal.'
‘Exactly. It's a Zimiamvian principle, isn't it? Up to a point'
'Or rather down.'
'I should have said, down. There again: another of these antinomies at the heart of things. Every experience of pure beauty is climacteric; which means it gathers into its own being everything that has led on to it, and, conversely, all that leads on to it has value only because of that leading on. You can't live on climaxes alone.'
‘Words!'
He was busy selecting new brushes and setting his palette for the green. ‘I stand rebuked. A concrete parallel, then. Think of the climax, like all the morning stars singing together, worked up in those terrific tremolo passages towards the end of the Arietta in Op.III. Played by itself, what is it but just a brilliant and extraordinarily difficult display of technique? But play it in its context, coming after the self-destroying Armageddon and Ragnarok of the Allegro con brio ed appassionato, and after those early unfoldings of theArietta itself,—'
'Ah, that little simple beginning,' said Mary, Tike little farms all undesecrated, and over there the sea without a blemish; and all the fields full of tiny speckets, lambs in spring.'
'And so gradually, gradually, to the empyrean. Which is itself simply the ultimate essence crammed with the implications of all these things. White hot with them.'
'Or a great mountain,' she said. ‘Ushba, as we first saw him from those slopes of the Gul glen above Betsho, facing the dawn. Take away the sky: take away the roots of the mountain: the Suanetian forest about the roots— crab-apples, thorns, rowan, sweet brier and rhododendron, hornbeam and aspen and beech and oak, those monkshoods higher than your head as you rode by on horseback, and great yellow scabious eight feet tall, and further up, that riot of poppies and anemones, gentian, speedwell and ranunculus, forget-me-not geraniums, and huge Caucasian snowdrops: take these trimmings away, you lose the size and the wonderfulness and the living glory of it, and have nothing left but a lump of ice and stone.'
The unrelated climax. Dead. Nothing.'
Mary was studying the picture on the easel. 'You've started the hair, I see.'
'Just roughed it in.'
'It ought to be black. Jet-black.'
'Ought it?'
'Oughtn't it? And scarlet dress?'
‘Because I've captured the Queen of Spades mood about the mouth?'
'Well, of course. Why should she be tied down to red-gold and green? She doesn't like it Has to put up with it in this stodgy world; but, when you can paint like that, it's most unkind not to give her her own outsides sometimes. After all, she is me, just as much as I am myself. You painted her in your Valkyrie picture, but I've always felt that as fancy dress. I can't wear poppy-red, or yellow or even honey-colour. But I itch to wear them: will, too, someday. For (you and I know) there will be days there, won't there?'
'Days. And nights. How could you and I get along without them?'
‘Why should we be expected to?—Well,' she said, 'I.m ready. An hour yet before it will be time to change for dinner.'
‘Head's free now,' said Lessingham as he settled her pose again: 'I'm only on the dress. I can't alter this now,' he said, returning to his easel. 'And the truth is, I couldn't bear to. But I’ll do the spit image of it, if you like—same pose, same everything, but in Dark Lady form,—as soon as this is finished.'
'And a self-portrait too, perhaps,' said Mary, 'on the same principle?'
'Very well.'
'She'd like it. Personally, of course, I prefer my King suited in black rather than red. But when she gets the upper hand—and remember, she is me—'
Lessingham laughed. 'It's a mercy that these Jekyll-Hyde predilections of ours don't lead to promiscuity on both sides. How is it they don't?'
'Because when longing aches you for La Rose Noire, it is still me you ache for. The empty body, or with someone not me behind it: what would you give for that?'
'O madonna mia, who sent you into this world, I wonder?'
‘Who sent us?'
Lessingham painted for a while without speaking. The clock ticked, while slowly on the canvas inert pigments ground in oil gradua
lly, through innumerable subtle relationships of form and colour, took life: gradually and painfully, like the upthrusting of daffodil blades through the hard earth in spring, became to be the material witness to the vision, seen through Lessingham's eyes, of Mary's warm and breathing body clothed in that dress which from throat to hips, like a fifteenth-century coat-hardy, fitted like a skin. Still painting, he began to say, 'What happens when we get old: twenty, thirty, forty years hence? to lovers, I mean. Get old, and powers fail: blind, deaf, impotent, paralysed? Is memory enough? Even that fails. Bad to think of: a going down into fog and obscurity. All the things of the spirit belong so entirely to the body. And the body is (in our experience) matter. Time dissolves it away. What remains?'
Mary made no answer: only sat there, breathing, beautiful, desirable, while the clock ticked on.
'Some Absolute? Some universalized Being? The Self resumed like a drop of water into a river, or like the electric lamplight into the general supply of electrical energy, to be switched on again, perhaps, in new lamp-bulbs? Surely all these conceptions are pompous toys of the imagination, meaning the same thing—Death—from the point of view of the Me and You: from the point of view, that is to say, of the only things that have ultimate value. Futile toys, too. Abstractions. Unrealities.'
'Futile toys,' Mary said, under her breath.
'"Love is stronger than Death",' Lessingham said. 'How glibly people trot out these facile optimisms, till the brutal fact pashes them to pieces. "The spirit lives on": orthodox Christian ideals of love. Well,' he said, 'goodness counts.' He painted in silence for a time. 'And, in this world, goodness fails.'
Mary half opened her lips. 'Yes. It does,' she said at last, in a voice that seemed to go sorrowful over sea-streams to oblivion.
Lessingham's words came slower as the tempo of his painting became faster, his brushwork surer and more triumphant. 'The tragedy,' he said, 'is in the failure of other people's goodness: to see someone you love suffer unjustly. No good man cares a snap about his own goodness' failing. Probably because, seen from inside, it is not such a good goodness after all.'