by E R Eddison
The book, then, is a serious book: not a fairy-story, and not a book for babes and sucklings; but (it needs not to tell you, who know my temper) not solemn. For is not Aphrodite ---------"laughter-loving"? But She is also -------"an awful" Goddess. And She is --------- "with flickering eyelids," and ---------"honey-sweet"; and She is Goddess of Love, which itself is -------------------------"Bitter-sweet, an unmanageable Laidly Worm": as Barganax knows. These attributes are no modern inventions of mine: they stand on evidence of Homer and of Sappho, great poets. And in what great poets tell us about the Gods there is always a vein of truth. There is an aphorism of my learned Doctor Vandermast's (a particular friend of yours), which he took from Spinoza: Per realitatem et perfectionem idem intelligo: "By Reality and Perfection I understand the same thing." And Keats says, in a letter: "Axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses."
Fiorinda I met, and studied, more than fifteen years ago: not by any means her entire self, but a good enough shadow to help me to set down, in Mistress of Mistresses and these two later books, the quality and play of her features, her voice, and her bearing. The miniature, a photograph of which appears as frontispiece,* belongs to the Hispanic Society of America, New York: it was painted circa 1596 by El Greco, from a sitter who has not, so far as I know, been identified. But I think it was painted also in Memison: early July, A.Z c. 775, of Fiorinda (aet. 19), in her state, as lady of honour: the first of Barganax's many portraits of her. A comparison with Mistress of Mistresses (Chapter II especially, and - for the eyes - last paragraph but one in Chapter VIII) shows close correspondence between this El Greco miniature and descriptions of Fiorinda written and published more than ten years before I first became acquainted with it (which was late in 1944): so close as to make me hope the photograph may quicken the reader's imagination as it does mine. I record here my acknowledgements and thanks to the Hispanic Society of America for generously giving me permission to reproduce the photograph.
Now used, by courtesy of the Hispanic Society of America, as a basis for the drawing which appears as a frontispiece.
So here is my book: call it novel if you like; poem if you prefer. Under whatever label-
I limb'd this night-peece and it was my best.
Your loving brother,
E. R. E.
Dark Lane, Marlborough, Wiltshire.
Praeludium. Lessingham on the Raftsund
IT WAS mid July, and three o'clock in the morning. The sun, which at this time of year in Lofoten never stays more than an hour or two below the horizon, was well up, fingering to gold with the unbelievably slowed deliberation of an Arctic dawn first the two-eared peak itself and then, in a gradual creeping downward, the enormous up-thrusts of precipice that underpin that weight and bulk, of Rulten across the Raftsund. Out of the waters of that sea-strait upon its westerly side the mountains of naked stone stood up like a wall, Rulten and his cubs and, more to the north, the Troldtinder which began now, with the swinging round of the sun, to take the gold in the jags of then-violent sky-line. The waters mirrored them as in a floor of smoke-coloured crystal: quiet waters, running still, running deep, and having the shadow of night yet upon them, like something irremeable, like the waters of Styx.
That shadow lingered (even, as the sun drew round, seemed to brood heavier) upon this hither shore, where Digermulen castle, high in the cliffs, faced towards Rulten and the Troldfjord. The castle was of the stone of the crags on whose knees it rested, like-hued, like-framed, in its stretches of biind wall and megalithic gauntnesses of glacis and tower and long outer parapet overhanging the sea. To and fro, the full length of the parapet, a man was walking: as for his body, always in that remaining and untimely thickening dusk of night, yet, whenever he turned at this end and that, looking across the sound to morning.
It would have been a hard guess to tell the age of him. Now and again, under certain effects of the light, deep old age seemed suddenly to glance out of his swift eagly eyes: a thing incongruous with that elasticity of youth which lived in his every movement as he paced, turned, or paused: incongruous with his thick black hair, clipped short but not so short as to hide the curliness of it which goes most with a gay superfluity of vigour of both body and mind that seldom outlasts the prime, and great coal-black beard. Next instant, what had shown as the ravages of the years, would seem but traces of wind and tempest, as in a man customed all his life to open weather at sea or on mountain ridges and all desolate sun-smitten places about the world. He was taller than most tall men: patently an Englishman, yet with that facial angle that belongs to old Greece. There was in him a magnificence not kingly as in ordinary experience that term fits, but deeper in grain, ignoring itself, as common men their natural motions of breathing or heart-beat: some inward integrity emerging in outward shape and action, as when a solitary oak takes the storm, or as the lion walks in grandeur not from study nor as concerned to command eyes, but from ancestral use and because he can no other.
He said, to himself: "Checkmate. And by a bunch of pawns. Well, there's some comfort in that: not to be beaten by men, but the dead weight of the machine. I can rule men: have, all my life ruled them: seen true ends, and had the knack to make them see my ends as their own. Look at them here: a generation bred up in these five-and-twenty years like-minded with me as if I had spit 'em. Liker minded than if they had been sprung from my loins. And now?-the bright day is done, And we are for the dark. What can a few thousand, against millions? Even if the millions are fools. It is the old drift of the world, to drabness and sameness: water, always tending by its very nature to a dead level." He folded his arms and stood looking seaward over the parapet. So, perhaps, Leonidas stood for a minute when the Persians began to close in upon the Pass.
Then he turned: at a known step, perhaps: at a known perfume, like the delicate scent of the black magnolia, sharpened with spindrift and sea-foam and wafted on some air far unlike this cool northern breath of the Raftsund. He greeted her with a kind of laugh of the eyes.
"You slept?"
"At last, yes. I slept. And you, mon ami?"
"No. And yet, as good as slept: looking at you, feeding on you, reliving you. Who are you, I wonder, that it is the mere patent of immortality, after such a night, only to gaze upon your dear beauties asleep? and that all wisdom since life came up upon earth, and all the treasure of old time past and of eternity to come, can he charmed within the curve of each particular hair?" Then, like the crack of a whip: "I shall send them no answer."
Something moved in her green eyes that was like the light beyond the sound "No? What will you do, then?"
"Nothing. For the first time in my life I am come to this, that there is nothing I can do."
"That," said she, "is the impassable which little men are faced with, every day of their lives. It awaits even the greatest at last. You are above other men in this age of the world as men are above monkeys, and have so acted; but circumstance weighs at last too heavy even for you. You are trapped. In the tiger-hunts in old Java, the tiger has no choice left at last but to leap upon the spears."
"I could have told you last night," he said "(but we were engrossed with things worthier our attention), I've everything ready here: for that leap." After a pause: "They will not move till time's up: noon tomorrow. After that, with this new Government, bombers no doubt. I have made up my mind to meet them in the air: give them a keepsake to remember me by. I will have you go today. The yacht's ready. She can take you to England, or wherever you wish. You must take her as a good-bye gift from me: until we meet - at Philippi."
She made no sign of assent or dissent, only stood still as death beside him, looking across at Rulten. Presently his hand found hers where it hung at her side: lifted it and studied it a minute in silence. It lay warm in his, motionless, relaxed, abandoned, uncommunicative, like a hand asleep. "Better this way than the world's way, the way of that yonder," he said, looking now where she looked; "which is dying by inches. A pretty irony, when you think of i
t: lifted out of primaeval seas not a mountain but a 'considerable protuberance'; then the frosts and the rains, all the infinitely slow, infinitely repeated, influences of innumerable little things, getting to work on it, chiselling it to this perfection of its maturity: better than I could have done it, or Michael Angelo, or Pheidias. And to what end? Not to stay perfect: no, for the chisel that brought it to this will bring it down again, to the degradation of a second childhood. And after that? What matter, after that? Unless indeed, the chisel gets tired of it." Looking suddenly in her eyes again: "As I am tired of it," he said.
"Of life?"
He laughed. "Good heavens, no! Tired of death."
They walked a turn or two. After a while, she spoke again. "I was thinking of Brachiano:
On paine of death, let no man name death to me,
It is a word infinitely terrible-"
"I cannot remember," he said in a detached thoughtful simplicity, "ever to have been afraid of death. I can't honestly remember, for that matter, being actually afraid of anything."
"That is true, I am very well certain. But in this you are singular, as in other things besides."
"Death, at any rate," he said, "is nothing: nil, an estate of not-being. Or else, new beginning. Whichever way, what is there to fear?"
"Unless this, perhaps?-
Save that to dye, I leave my love alone."
"The last bait on the Devil's hook. I'll not entertain it."
"Yet it should be the king of terrors."
"I'll not entertain it," he said. "I admit, though," - they had stopped. She was standing a pace or two away from him, dark against the dawn-light on mountain and tide-way, questionable, maybe as the Sphinx is questionable. As with a faint perfume of dittany afloat in some English garden at evening, the air about her seemed to shudder into images of heat and darkness: up-curved delicate tendrils exhaling an elusive sweetness: milk-smooth petals that disclosed and enfolded a secret heart of night, pantherine, furred in mystery. - "I admit this: suppose I could entertain it, that might terrify me."
"How can we know?" she said. "What firm assurance have we against that everlasting loneliness?"
"I will enter into no guesses as to how you may know. For my own part, my assurance rests on direct knowledge of the senses: eye, ear, nostrils, tongue, hand, the ultimate carnal knowing."
"As it should rightly be always, I suppose; seeing that, with lovers, the senses are the organs of the spirit. And yet - I am a woman. There is no part in me, no breath, gait, turn, or motion, but flatters your eye with beauty. With my voice, with the mere rustle of my skirt, I can : wake you wild musics potent in your mind and blood. I am sweet to smell, sweet to taste. Between my breasts you have in imagination voyaged to Kythera, or even to that herdsman's hut upon many-fountained Ida where Anchises, by will and ordainment of the Gods, lay (as Homer says) with an immortal Goddess: a mortal, not clearly knowing. But under my skin, what am I? A memento mori too horrible for the slab in a butcher's shop; or the floor of a slaughter-house; a clockwork of muscle; and sinew, vein and nerve and membrane, shining - blue, grey, scarlet - to all colours of corruption; a sack of offals, to make you stop your nose at it. And underneath (when you have purged away these loathsomeness of the flesh) - the scrannel piteous residue: the stripped bone, grinning, hairless, and sexless, which even the digestions of worms and devouring fire rebel against: the dumb argument that puts to silence all were's, maybe's, and might-have-beens."
His face, listening, was that of a man who holds a wolf by the ears; but motionless: the poise of his head Olympian, a head of Zeus carved in stone. "What name did you give when you announced yourself to my servants yesterday evening?"
"Indeed," she answered, "I have given so many. Can you remember what name they used to you, announcing my arrival?"
"The Senorita del Rio Amargo."
"Yes. I remember now. It was that."
" 'Of the Bitter River.' As though you had known my decisions in advance. Perhaps you did?"
"How could I?"
"It is my belief," he said, "that you know more than I know. I think you know too, in advance, my answer to this discourse with which you were just now exploring me as a surgeon explores a wound."
She shook her head. "If I knew your answer before you gave it, that would make it not your answer but mine."
"Well," he said, "you shall be answered. I have lived upon this earth far into the third generation. Through a long life, you have been my book (poison one way, pleasure another), reading in which I have learnt all I know: and this principally, to distinguish in this world's welter the abiding from the fading, real things from phantoms."
"Real things or phantoms? And you can credit seeing, hearing, handling, to resolve you which is which?"
"So the spirit be on its throne, I can; and answer you so out of your own mouth, madonna. But I grant you, that twirk in the corner of your lips casts all in doubt again and shatters to confusion all answers. I have named you, last night, Goddess, Paphian Aphrodite. Was that a figure of speech? a cheap poetaster's compliment to his mistress in bed? or was it plain daylight, as I discern it? Come, what do you think? Did I ever call you that before?"
"Never in so many words," she said, very low. "But I sometimes scented in you, great man of action you are in the world's eyes, a strange capacity to incredibilities."
"Let me remind you, then, of facts you seem to affect have forgotten. You came to me - once in my youth, once in my middle age - in Verona. In the interval, I lived with you, in our own house of Nether Wastdale, lifted up and down the world, fifteen years, flesh of my heart of my heart. To end that, I saw you dead in Morgue at Paris: a sight beside which your dissecting-table villainy a few minutes since is innocent nursery prattle. That was fifty years ago, next October. And now you are come again, but in your black dress, as in Verona. For the good-bye." She averted her face, not to be seen. "This is wild un-talk. Fifty years!"
"Whether it be good sense or madhouse talk I am to know," he said, "before tomorrow night; or, in the alternative, to know nothing and to be nothing. If that |§ alternative, so be it. But I hold it an alternative little worthy to be believed."
They were walking again, and came to a bench of ........ "O, you have your dresses," he said, taking his seat her. His voice had the notes the deeps and the...... of a man's in the acme of his days. "You have your dresses: Red Queen, Queen of Hearts, rosa mundi; here and now, Black Queen of the sweet deep-curled lily-flower, and winged wind-rushing darknesses of hearts' desires. I envy both. Being myself, to my great inconvenience, two men in a single skin instead of (as should be) one in two. Call them rather two Devils in a bag, when they pull against one another or bite one other. Nor can I ever even incline to take sides with either, without I begin to wish t'other may win."
"The fighter and the dreamer," she said: "the doer, the enjoyer." Then, with new under-songs of an appasionate tenderness in her voice: "What gift would you've me give you, O my friend, were I in sober truth what you named me? What heaven or Elysium, what persons and shapes, would we choose to live in, beyond the hateful River?"
His gaze rested on her a minute in silence, as if to take a fresh draft of her: the beauty that pierced her dress as the lantern-light the doors of a lantern: the parting of her hair, not crimped but drawn in its native habit of soft lazy waves, as of some unlighted sea, graciously back on either side over the tips of her ears: the windy light in her eyes. "This is the old story over again," he said. "There is but one condition for ail the infinity of possible heavens: that you should give me yourself, and a world that is wholly of itself a dress of yours."
"This world again, then, that we live in? Is that not mine?"
"In some ways it is. In many ways. In every respect, up to a point. But damnably, when that point is reached, always and in every respect this world fails of you. Soon as a bud is ready to open, we find the canker has crept in. Is it yours, all of it, even to this? I think it is. Otherwise, why have I sucked the orange of this
world all my life with so much satisfaction, savoured it in every caprice of fortune, waded waist-deep in this world's violences, groped in its clueless labyrinths of darkness, fought it, made treaty with it, played with it, scorned it, pitied it, laughed with it, been fawned on by it and tricked by it and be-laurelled by it; and all with so much zest? And now at last, brought to bay by it; and, even so, constrained by something in my very veins and heart-roots to a kind of love for it? For all that, it is not a world I would have you in again, if I have any finger in the plan. It is no fit habit for you, when not the evening star un-nailed and fetched down from heaven, were fair enough jewel for your neck. If this is, as I am apt to suspect, a world of yours, I cannot wholly commend your handiwork."
"Handiwork? Will you think I am the Demiurge: builder of worlds?"
"I think you are not. But chooser, and giver of worlds: that I am well able to believe. And I think you were in a bad mood when you commissioned this one. The best I can suppose of it is that it may be some good as training-ground for our next. And for our next, I hope you will think of a real one."
While they talked she had made no sign, except that some scarce discernible relaxing of the poise of her sitting there brought her a little closer. Then in the silence, his right hand palm upwards lightly brushing her knee, her own hand caught it into her lap, and there, compulsive as a brooding bird, pressed it blindly down.
Very still they sat, without speaking, without stirring: ten minutes perhaps. When at length she turned to look at him with eyes which (whether for some trick of light or for some less acceptable but more groundable reason) seemed now to be the eyes of a person not of this earth, his lids were closed as in sleep. Not far otherwise might the Father of Gods and men appear, sleeping between the Worlds.
Suddenly, even while she looked, he had ceased breathing. She moved his hand, softly laying it to rest beside him on the bench. "These counterfeit worlds!" she said. "They stick sometimes, like a plaster, past use and past convenience. Wait for me, in that real one, also of Your making, which, i this world here, You but part remembered, I think, and will there no doubt mainly forget this; as I, in my other dress, part remembered and part forgot. For forgetfulness is both a sink for worthless things and a storeroom for those which are good, to renew their morning freshness when, with the secular processions of sleeping and waking; We bring them out as new. And indeed, shall not all things in their turn be forgotten, but the things of You and Me?"