Her face betrayed not the least preparedness to concede, to give up her role.
“We are all actors and actresses, Mr. Urfe. You included.”
“Of course. On the stage of the world.”
She smiled and looked down. “Be patient.”
“Willingly. I couldn’t imagine anyone I’d rather be more patient with. Or credulous about.”
Our eyes met. Once again she let the mask slip; for a fraction of a moment; a sincerity that begged.
“Not for me. For Maurice.”
“And for Maurice.”
“I will help.”
“Me? To do what?”
“To understand.”
“Then I certainly promise to obey the rules.”
Our eyes still met.
There was a sound from the table. She reached out and took my arm. We turned. Conchis was standing there. As we came towards him, her arm lightly but formally in mine, he gave us both his little interrogatory headshake.
“Mr. Urfe is very understanding.”
“I am glad.”
“All will be well.”
She smiled at me and sat down and remained thoughtfully for a while with her chin resting on her hand. Conchis had poured her a minute glass of crème de menthe, which she sipped. He pointed to an envelope he had put in my place.
“The manifesto. It took me a long time to find. Read it later. There is an anonymous criticism of great force at the end.”
29
“I still loved, at any rate still practiced, music. I had the big Pleyel harpsichord I use here in our Paris flat. One warm day in spring, it would have been in 1920, I was playing by chance with the windows open, when the bell rang. The maid came in to say that a gentleman had called and wished to speak to me. In fact, the gentleman was already behind the maid. He corrected her—he wanted to listen to me, not speak to me. He was such an extraordinary-looking man that I hardly noticed the extraordinariness of the intrusion. About sixty, extremely tall, faultlessly dressed, a gardenia in his buttonhole…”
I looked sharply at Conchis. He had turned and, as he seemed to like to, was looking out to sea as he spoke. Lily swiftly, discreetly raised her finger to her lips.
“And also—at first sight—excessively morose. There was beneath the archducal dignity something deeply mournful about him. Like the actor Jouvet, but without his sarcasm. Later I was to discover that he was less miserable than he appeared. Almost without words he sat down in an armchair and listened to me play. And when I had finished, almost without words he picked up his hat and his amber-topped stick…”
I grinned. Lily saw my grin, but looked down and refused to share it, as if to ban it.
“…and presented me with his card and asked me to call on him the next week. The card told me that his name was Alphonse de Deukans. He was a count. I duly presented myself at his apartment. It was very large, furnished with the severest elegance. A manservant showed me into a salon. De Deukans rose to greet me. At once he took me, with the minimum of words, through to another room. And there were five or six harpsichords, old ones, splendid ones, all museum pieces, both as musical instruments and as decorative objects. He invited me to try them all, and then he played himself. Not as well as I could then. But very passably. Later he offered me a collation and we sat on Boulard chairs, gravely swallowing marennes and drinking a Moselle that he told me came from his own vineyard. So began the most remarkable friendship of my life.
“I learnt nothing about him for many months, although I saw him often. This was because he had never anything to say about himself or his past. And discouraged every kind of question. All that I could find out was that his family came from Belgium. That he was immensely rich. That he appeared, from choice, to have very few friends. No relations. And that he was, without being a homosexual, a misogynist. All his servants were men, and he never referred to women except with contempt and distaste.
“De Deukans’s real life was lived not in Paris, but at his great chateau in eastern France. It was built by some peculating surintendant in the late seventeenth century, and set in a park far larger than this island. One saw the slate-blue turrets and white walls from many miles away. And I remember, on my first visit, some months after our first meeting, I was very intimidated. It was an October day, all the cornfields of the Champagne had long been cut. A bluish mist over everything, an autumn smoke. I arrived at Givray-le-Duc in the car that had been sent to fetch me, I was taken up a splendid staircase to my room, or rather my suite of rooms, and then I was invited to go out into the park to meet de Deukans. All his servants were like himself—silent, grave-looking men. There was never laughter around him. Or running feet. No noise, no excitement. But calm and order.
“I followed the servant through a huge formal garden—Lenôtre had laid it out—behind the château. Past box-hedges and statuary and over freshly raked gravel, and then down through an arboretum to a small lake. We came out at its edge and on a small point some hundred yards ahead I saw, over the still water and through the October leaves, an Oriental teahouse. The servant bowed and left me to go on my way alone. The path led beside the lake, over a small stream. There was no wind. Mist, silence, a beautiful but rather melancholy calm.
“The teahouse was approached over grass, so de Deukans could not hear me coming. He was seated on a mat staring out over the lake. A willow-covered islet. Ornamental geese that floated on the water as on a silk painting. Though his head was European, his clothes were Japanese. I shall never forget that moment. How shall I say it—that mise en paysage.
“His whole park was arranged to provide him with such décors, such ambiences. There was a little classical temple, a rotunda. An English garden, a Moorish one. But I always think of him sitting there on his tatami in a loose kimono. Grayish-blue, the color of the mist. It was unnatural, of course. But all dandyism and eccentricity is more or less unnatural in a world dominated by the desperate struggle for economic survival.
“Constantly, during that first visit, I was shocked, as a would-be socialist. And ravished, as an homme sensuel. Givray-le-Duc was nothing more or less than a vast museum. There were countless galleries, of paintings, of porcelain, of objets d’art of all kinds. A famous library. A really unsurpassed collection of early keyboard instruments. Clavichords, spinets, virginals, lutes, guitars. One never knew what one would find. A room of Renaissance bronzes. A case of Breguets. A wall of magnificent Rouen and Nevers faience. An armory. A cabinet of Greek and Roman coins. I could inventory all night, for he had devoted all his life to this collecting of collections. The Boulles and Rieseners alone were enough to furnish six châteaux. I suppose only the Hertford Collection could have rivaled it in modern times. Indeed when the Hertford was split up, de Deukans had bought many of the best pieces in the Sackville legacy. Seligmann’s gave him first choice. He collected in order to collect, of course. Art had not then become a branch of the stock market.
“On a later visit he took me to a locked gallery. In it he kept his company of automata—puppets, some almost human in size, that seemed to have stepped, or whirled, out of a Hoffman story. A man who conducted an invisible orchestra. Two soldiers who fought a duel. A prima donna from whose mouth tinkled an aria from La Serva Padrona. A girl who curtseyed to a man who bowed, and then danced a pallid and ghostly minuet with him. But the chief piece was Mirabelle, la Maltresse-Machine. A naked woman who when set in motion lay back in her faded four-poster bed, drew up her knees and then opened them together with her arms. As her human master lay on top of her, the arms closed and held him. But de Deukans cherished her most because she had a device that made it unlikely that she would ever cuckold her owner. Unless one moved a small lever at the back of her head, at a certain pressure her arms would clasp with vice-like strength. And then a stiletto on a strong spring struck upwards through the adulterer’s groin. This repulsive thing had been made in Italy in the early nineteenth century. For the Sultan of Turkey. When de Deukans demonstrated her ‘fidelity’ he tu
rned and said, ‘C’est ce qui en elle est le plus vraisemblable.’ ‘It is the most lifelike thing about her.”
I looked at Lily covertly. She was staring down at her hands.
“He kept Madame Mirabelle behind locked doors. But in his private chapel he kept an even more—to my mind—obscene object. It was encased in a magnificent early medieval reliquary. It looked much like a withered, dusty sea cucumber. De Deukans called it, without any wish to be humorous, the Holy Member. He knew, of course, that a merely cartilaginous object could not possibly survive so long. There are at least sixteen other Holy Members in Europe. Mostly from mummies, and all equally discredited. But for de Deukans it was simply a collectable, and the religious or indeed human blasphemy it represented had no significance for him. This is true of all collecting. It extinguishes the moral instinct. The object finally possesses the possessor.
“We never discussed religion or politics. He went to mass. But only, I think, because the observance of ritual is a form of the cultivation of beauty. In some ways, perhaps because of the wealth that had always surrounded him, he was an extremely innocent man. Self-denial was incomprehensible to him, unless it formed part of some aesthetic regimen. I stood with him once and watched a line of peasants laboring a turnip field. A Millet brought to life. And his only remark was: It is beautiful that they are they and that we are we. For him even the most painful social confrontations and contrasts, which would have stabbed the conscience of even the vulgarest nouveau riche, were stingless. Without significance except as vignettes, as interesting discords, as pleasurable because vivid examples of the algedonic polarity of existence.
“Altruistic behavior—what he termed le diable en puritain—upset him deeply. For instance, since the age of eighteen I have refused to eat wild birds in any form at table. I would as soon eat human flesh as I would an ortolan, or a wild duck. This to de Deukans was distressing, like a false note in a music manuscript. He could not believe things had been written thus. And yet there I was, in black and white, refusing his pâté d’alouettes and his truffled woodcock.
“But not all his life was to do with the dead. He had an observatory on the roof of his château, and a well-equipped biological laboratory. He never walked out in the park without carrying a small étui of test tubes. To catch spiders. I had known him over a year before I discovered that this was more than another eccentricity. That he was in fact one of the most learned arachnologists of his day. There is even a species named after him: Theridion deukansii. He was delighted that I also knew something of ornithology. And he encouraged me to specialize in what he jokingly called ornithosemantics—the meaning of birdsound.
“He was the most abnormal man I had ever met. And the politest. And the most distant. And certainly the most socially irresponsible. I was twenty-five—your age, Nicholas, which will perhaps tell you more than anything I can say how unable I was to judge him. It is, I think, the most difficult and irritating age of all. Both to be and to behold. One has the intelligence, one is in all ways treated as a grown man. But certain persons reduce one to adolescence, because only experience can understand and assimilate them. In fact de Deukans, by being as he was—certainly not by arguing—raised profound doubts in my philosophy. Doubts he was later to crystallize for me, as I will tell you, in five simple words.
“I saw the faults in his way of life and at the same time found myself enchanted. That is, unable to act rationally. I have forgotten to tell you that he had manuscript after manuscript of unpublished music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A paradise. To sit at one of the magnificent old harpsichords in his musicarium—a long rococo gallery in faded gold and pomona green, always in sunlight, as tranquil as an orchard… such experiences, such happiness, always gives rise to the same problem: of the nature of evil. Why should such complete pleasure be evil? Why did I believe that de Deukans was evil? You will say, Because children were starving while you played in your sunlight. But are we never to have palaces, never to have refined tastes, complex pleasures, never to let the imagination fulfill itself? Even a Marxist world must have some destination, must develop into some higher state, which can only mean a higher pleasure and richer happiness for the human beings in it.
“And so I began to comprehend the selfishness of this solitary man. More and more I came to see that his blindness was a pose and yet his pose was an innocence. That he was a man from a perfect world lost in a very imperfect one. And determined, with a monomania as tragic, if not quite so ludicrous, as Don Quixote’s, to maintain his perfection. But then one day—”
Conchis never finished his sentence. With an electrifying suddenness a horn clamored out of the darkness to the east. I thought immediately of an English hunting horn, but it was bronzier, harsher, more archaic. Lily’s previously wafting fan was frozen, her eyes on Conchis. He was staring out to sea, as if the sound had turned him to stone. As I watched, his eyes closed, almost as if he was silently praying. But prayer was totally foreign to his face.
The horn broke the tense night again. Three notes, the middle the highest. The player was in the trees, somewhere near the place where I had seen Foulkes.
I said to Lily, “What is it?”
She held my eyes for a moment, and strangely. I had an odd feeling that she thought I knew. But then she raised her closed fan to her lips and looked down. The lamplight, the waiting silence. Conchis had not moved or opened his eyes. I let a few seconds pass, then whispered to her.
“What the devil’s happening?”
She lifted her eyes momentarily to mine.
“Apollo has come.”
“Apollo!”
“My brother.”
“Your brother!”
I smiled, and she smiled back; but my face was full of uncertainty and hers of knowledge. Her mouth was incredibly like that of the stone statue. Again the horn was sounded, but at a higher pitch.
She said, “I am called. I must go.”
We rose together. She held out her hand.
“But where?”
“Where I came from.” Her eyes impressed some hidden significance into mine. Then she began to walk away. I looked quickly at Conchis, still with his oblivious face, and strode after her, stopping her at the door.
“Look, for goodness’ sake…”
Her eyes were down, avoiding mine. “Please let me pass.”
“Are you coming back?”
Again the horn sounded, more urgently, closer, near the edge of the trees. She looked up at me. A quick oblique look at Conchis’s dark figure. Then for a moment she seemed to drop the pretense. At any rate she dropped her voice.
“Go and watch. Over there.” Her mouth curved unexpectedly into a smile that hovered between mischief and sympathy. “And pretend to believe.” I could have sworn that one of her eyelids fluttered; the ghost of a very contemporary wink. But she was gone so quickly that I was left only the more confused.
I went to the parapet that faced east. The gravel, and then across the clearing, the trees. I could see nothing unusual. Darkness and stillness. I listened for the sound of her footsteps downstairs, but there was silence there too. Then the sound came again. It echoed faintly from some steep hillside inland, its primitive timbre seeming to wake the landscape and the trees, to summon from some evolutionary sleep. Another long silence. Then suddenly there was a movement in the pines.
A dim figure stood out in the starlight some fifty or sixty yards away. I had an impression of whiteness. Then from beyond the cottage there was a beam of light; not very strong, as a hand-held torch might give. With a shock I realized that the figure was that of an absolutely naked man. He raised the horn he was carrying and again came the call. He was near enough for me to see, with the aid of the weak beam of light, dark pubic hair and the pale shape of his penis. He was tall, well built, well cast to be Apollo. On his head I made out a crown of leaves; the glint of golden leaves, laurel leaves. The light made his skin even paler, so that he stood out like marble against the black trees
. He was facing the house, facing me, the horn in his right hand.
Suddenly there was a new sound, even stranger, of a woman or a boy, I couldn’t tell, calling from where the track out of Bourani disappeared into the trees. It was a chanted sound, a triphthong hauntingly prolonged, an echo of the horn’s echo. Eia. Eia. The man dropped his arm and turned and went a pace or two to the north. I saw him raise his yard-long horn, a narrow crescent with a flared end. He called back; and the other call came back at once, so that the echoes of the two calls intermingled. Eia. Eia.
Like the man I was watching the trees to the north, the dark tunnel where the track disappeared.
A running girl appeared; and I thought at first by the apparent whiteness of her skin—the torch did not shift to her—that she was also naked. I thought too, with increasing shock, that it was Lily. If she had gone very quickly round the back of the house… but then I could distinguish a white chiton, and dark hair. A wig? The girl had a slim body, the right height. She ran towards the sea, between Apollo and myself on the terrace. Then a third figure appeared behind her. Another man, running from out of the dark tunnel through the trees. The girl was being chased. I flashed a look round. Conchis sat exactly as before, as if he disapproved sternly of this interruption.
The nymph-girl ran through the beam of light that shone on Apollo and had almost reached the seaward side of the clearing when several things happened. Apollo blew his horn again, but this time it was a single wild note, sustained then abruptly ended. He struck a new pose, his hand pointing at the satyr-man, who stopped at the sound. Simultaneously a much stronger beam shone out from directly underneath me. Someone else was standing under the colonnade. The beam moved, caught up the still-running figure of the girl, her white back and her black dishevelled hair and her seemingly near-exhausted legs, as she plunged into the trees. She disappeared. The light went out for two moments. And then, in a brilliant coup de théatre, it went on again, and standing there, exactly in the place where the first girl had disappeared, a place where the ground rose a little, was yet another, the most striking figure of all. It was Lily, but metamorphosed.
The Magus Page 19