People of the Book

by David Stacton

  Since flesh might not endure, but rest must wrath succeed,

  And force the fight to fall to play in pasture where they feed,

  So noble nature can well end the work she hath begun,

  And bridle well that will not cease her tragedy in some …

  Some stand aloof at cap and knee, some humble and some stout,

  Yet are they never friends indeed until they once fall out:

  For how can we live in a world without heroes? They are the sacred meaning of the race. Without them we could not survive the utter weariness of man’s fate: “In going to my naked bed as one that would have slept/ I heard a wife sing to her child, that long before had wept.”

  *

  Hannale was happy here; but something perplexed her. It had happened as soon as they arrived. A woman then left them, walking through the inner courtyard rapidly, and under an arch whose shadow snuffed her out. But the echoes of her footsteps could still be heard. She had moved brusquely. She had been a campaign woman.

  And then the courtyard was empty. It stayed empty. She had never come back.

  “They live there,” Mysendonck had said, and led them in to where they were to live.

  These rooms in the Renaissance screen had not been designed to be inhabited. They had been blocked in but not finished. The stairwell ceilings were complete to their plasterwork, but the rooms, opening each from the one before it, salon fashion, were not. Mysendonck had the two nearest the stairwell. The outer contained such treasures as he had salvaged, which did not look much. The inner was where he slept. Beyond these two, they might ask what they liked. He got his gang to bring furniture up from the cellars.

  Built into the brick were withdrawing rooms and private passages. Lars put Hannale in one of these small chambers, and kept the large one off which it opened for himself.

  He liked none of it. But just as Hannale had missed her harmless childhood of kitchen women, so he had missed the world of familiar men, and Mysendonck meant well, you could tell that from his full-lipped, perfect, and uncertain mouth. Only it was odd: who really lived here? You were aware of something, pushing you away.

  Looking out from the window, Hannale saw a pretty lady walking across the outer court.

  She thought it was Manglana. Instead, when she got down to the court, she found a stranger in a long stiff gown, her hair combed back to two plaits curled on either side of her head, severe, cool, and concealed. It was Manglana, rushing Selina toward an appointment with the night, in terror of her own extinction; but Selina would not be rushed.

  She moved gravely always. There was always the stateliness about her, and the utter sadness, of boats being moved down to the reach by the harbor master. Their sails billow, with the canvas eagerness of ships to depart. Heavy-laden they wait, in the reach, release, yet seem to hate to leave the sight of shore. Last to be hoisted on deck is the milch cow, a sling around its stomach and its legs paddling the air, as the noose that holds it swings and twirls…. The most beautiful ships in the world, the long sleek runners to the slave coast, are poised for sea-gull departure. They are the eternal excitement and going away of man, you may read their proud names in gold gilt lettering: the Missing, the Late on Arrival, and the Presumed Lost, out of what port whose name we do not know. It is indecipherable. Man’s fate is nothing but the mournful hover and hungry screech of gulls; for a little garbage they will go far, far out, past the creaking of the buoy, the exchange bell, and that green putty where the land sea resists the pressures of the seas of time, past the final glimpse of land. Then, a prisoner of the lapping days, one is afloat, one pulls with a tug away from shore. In some port of the north once, Rostock, Danzig, there may once have been a ship Selina.

  Hannale appeared before her, obstructing her passage. She recognized her; it was the child.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Selina.”

  Hannale drew up into herself at once. For though children forget the imaginary playmate, they never forget, when it is mentioned, the syllables of the endangered name. Dispassionately, Hannale considered, made comparisons, and decided no.

  Selina had never been challenged before. She stopped like a doll run down against a wall, and desperately felt for the back buttons of her dress, for the Magician, like Mysendonck, had learned that the posture our clothes force upon us is what we are then.

  “I am Selina,” she said, and with some trouble turned herself and went back the way she had come.

  “You aren’t. You aren’t. You aren’t my Selina.”

  “I am nobody’s Selina. I am my father’s child,” said Selina, and, terrified, she began to hurry.

  Hannale gave it up, and raising her eyes, saw Mysendonck staring down at her from the open landing of the stairwell.

  She did not like Mysendonck, because he stood between her and her brother. She had felt that at once. And even a small girl is an incipient woman, who cannot bear men to be in their own world where she cannot go. She will tolerate it if she feels secure, but she does not like it. For men know more about women than women know about men, and they may talk among themselves, who is to be sure?

  Sensing that Selina was not a real woman but something made up by men, Hannale drew away, confused. The name was that of her imaginary friend, but the nature was not.

  *

  Mysendonck had become house proud. He showed them everything but the Manuel and the inner schloss. Opening a door on a back corridor, trying to find a way out, Hannale gasped, and the boys came rapidly up behind her.

  She had found a disused and abandoned service stair winding through darkness, with the high risers put in such places so the servants might mount the more quickly to their betters. On the steps sat a crowd of white marble busts, ranked solid around the turn in both directions, facing out with watching heads and blind eyes: Pompey, Caesar, Sophocles, Homer, medieval Virgil, the Magician, Caracalla, Brutus, Antony, Roman usurers, long-dead Alexandrian librarians of no particular mien, a Bacchus, Julius, Claudius, Tiberius, Gaius, Trajan, Nero; Great Augustus, patient and resigned, without a tremor of human feeling, depending on how much you knew; Agrippa with his tortured look—formed ranks and descended majestically into the dark. There were even Babelhausen with a scrap of toga and a brooch, the inhuman mask of Diana, and the muses of history complete. When the light hit them they seemed to smile, their eyes opened. They had been crowded out, and put there for safekeeping no doubt. But there they were, on a winding stair, with dignity and no bodies, packed solid; it was impossible to move among them.

  Mysendonck, as startled as Hannale, bracing himself in the door-jamb, began to kick at them. A head bounced over the one in front of it and, scattering others, disappeared around the bend, hitting heads they had not seen and would never see, among the echoes of a dead skittles game. They waited for the game to stop, but it did not stop. It went on and on, deeper down into the snail’s shell. Mysendonck kicked again and again. Lars pulled him back and shut the door. But even with the door shut, they could still hear the heads rolling.

  Mysendonck looked frantic. He knew where those stairs and those heads went. But he did not say so.

  Who had put them there? Presumably a directed servant, bending each time a step lower to add to those above him, down and down, and was there a way out at the bottom somewhere?

  “The cellars are deep,” said Mysendonck, still feeling Lars’ hand on his arm to drag him off, from something he could not possibly know was down there. It had been a long time since he had felt any human touch. They explored no more that day.

  *

  Happening, in passage, with the sun in his eyes, to glance down into the inner courtyard where there was a wellhead, ornamented with figures, the Magician saw a towheaded gangling boy drawing up an oak-staved bucket. He stopped stock-still. He could not have moved had he wanted to.

  It was Mysendonck’s friend, he assumed. The robbers were not allowed to come here. But … but …

  Orpheus with his lute made trees

/>   And the mountain tops that freeze

  Bow themselves when he did sing….

  Everything that heard him play,

  Even the billows of the sea,

  Hung their heads and then lay by …

  Killing care and grief of heart

  … or hearing die.

  And stopping his mouth with his fist, he waited until the courtyard was empty. At supper he was thoughtful. Behind him soared with a rustle the enormous wings of disturbed hope, and he looked at Selina without seeing her, while his whole dead soul sat up and shouted “Suppose …”

  But it could not be. It was impossible. It was begotten by despair.

  *

  Mysendonck, like most of us, had evolved from experience his own religion out of the one he had been given, and longed for an apostle’s love. He wanted to give Lars something. So now he showed Lars his treasures. These were few, for Mysendonck was a leader, not a ruffian, and so tended to be austere. His treasures were odd filched things that wouldn’t mean much to anyone but him, which he puzzled over by himself, trying to figure out what.

  Glamour is a charm of the eyes. We may be bewitched by somebody else or by something else, but we cannot cast a spell on our own eyes. The most we can do is go bewitch a mirror, but since his plot to stand bold among men had failed, Mysendonck, feeling neither dead nor alive, could not see himself in mirrors any more, and was so wretched he was not aware of the glamour he cast. Mostly he thought he looked as wretched as he felt.

  Lars had given him back elder brother, a small boy’s devotion, and Earl Haakon again. But though Lars was a small boy in his best ways, as men always are, in other ways he was not. This Mysendonck had overlooked.

  Here were treasures, symbols of power rescued from dead men: a pair of white steel jointed gauntlets, with flexible fingers, brass rivets, and the ghost of a leveret lining; the gold shoulder chain of a person of importance, worn by commanders into battle, and by means of which they were sometimes yanked down to their deaths. Somewhere he had come upon an Order of the Golden Fleece, which seems always to hang from an invisible tree, in invisible Iberia, and has horror in it. It is the sun. He had a few jewels in the shape of flowers, saved because they were in the shape of flowers, little brilliants like trapped dew set on enameled leaves, and a cairngorm, a topaz full of eddying smoke, set in cut steel. There were those leather hunting suits he liked to wear.

  Lars accepted, reluctantly, a small brooch for Hannale. He did not like other people to give Hannale things, but it would please her.

  What would please him? What is it of mine that I could give him, that he would want? Mysendonck covertly watched.

  It seemed to be—they were now down to the small arms, Spanish pistols so elaborately mounted as to be sure to misfire, powder horns like pilgrim shells from Compostela, serviceable pouches, daggers, knives and dirks—a short but massy dagger in an ebony sheath with silver mountings, with a yellowed ivory hilt elaborately swirled and carved.

  Lars drew it out and held it in balance. It was exactly devised: it seemed to coax from the hand a swift movement of its own creating. It drew one on. All these things drew one on.

  Watching his face, Mysendonck smiled and said, “Take it.”

  Lars took it. It was the first given weapon he had owned, another temptation, and like the first, had come from Mysendonck. For though he had had knives—you could not get through a day without them—this was a different thing, and for a different purpose, and full of a steel content.

  Mysendonck was pleased.

  *

  The Magician was reciting Greek to himself, as though repeating prayers. He was restless. After supper he had drawn sugary notes from his vielle; it is not an old man’s instrument, but his hands were steady. He would have preferred a watery lute with notes held as lingeringly, as self-indulgently, as Dowland’s. But there was not a lute in his room. He had gone—it was unlike him—early to the tower.

  In his forties he had traveled much. He had been to Italy and Greece. He had fallen into wistful notions. For if we are going to live a long time, the forties are a kind of second maturity, during which we are reminded of the dreams of our second youth, our thirties. In a man who is to suffer interminable longevity, and whose eyes have not died, these two decades alternate in a self-renewing series to the grave. There have been men of ninety capable of keeping the dreams of their eighties alive. Such youthfulness is rare, but it occurs. It is an Orphic quality.

  Somehow, in my centuries, we managed to pull back into Christianity, as through a hole broken in a wall, certain things of a better world we wished to save, smuggled the names in, took them for saints. It is possible to worship youth. It is an amelioration. One gathers up the lost children and gives them shoes.

  Though Orpheus built the walls of Thebes, made the enchanted stones to dance, charmed the underworld into a bargain, brought Eurydice back from Hades, lost her with a look, and was torn apart by Maenads, the truth of him has nothing to do with Eurydice or with the Maenads, who tear apart such truths. He belongs among the constellations. We look for him in the spring sky. And curiously, he is not there, not visibly. One can sense only the fresh odor of his passage as, in rising airs, a star danced.

  He is twin brother to Hermes Psychopompos. It is not in the legends, but it is true. Trust the Greeks to make a young man out of that death of which we have made an old one. The grave black intelligent one conducts us down to the sulphur shades. Rippling but no less serious-minded or compassionate for that, blond Orpheus harps us back. The Greeks knew chthonic things, but sensibly left them underground, where they belong. We live, like the best of them, in a late time, and for us a late theogony is better.

  These two young men are the chorophoi, the one torch up, the one torch down.

  So come, Orpheus, let us walk among the stars. I am your uncle, perhaps your father. I trust you. You know my voice and will not look back, so I need not go back to hell this time. And watching the set of your shoulders, your chiton (an Orphic euphemism for the body), and your fine calves, I am encouraged to stumble out of my dark night.

  It is perhaps not Christian, but then, what Christian is? There must be many a theologue in our Germanies who has these dreams, and heterodox is orthodox enough, if one be sane.

  And besides (it was autumn: there was a nip in the air; the forest smelled of winesaps), the motives of men fall as silently as snow, which has yet its perceptible whirr, pile in drifts, and bury us ten feet deep. Nothing is cleaner than snow, but while it falls, we can see nothing else. It weighs down the boughs. A few trees are springy enough to bounce it off. It falls the length of a Christmas morning: deep snow; silent snow; blue snow; snow flickering like diamond flames.

  Then we come out in the crisp of dawn, into a world white with the motives of men, and ski swiftly, it is a northern sport, downward and over their hills to our own destination, we could not get there so swiftly, did we not glide over the motives of men. The world is still, and empty, and full of beauty, and the younger firs, a foot tall, have pockets around them, where they have kept off the snow. Immense above us rears the yellow peak no man can climb, the Gottesberg, and yet, from long acquaintance with the avalanche, we have come to know it well.

  *

  Above the Magician the stars were another kind of constantly falling snow, invisible except where it caught the light, a relentless but amiable bombardment, designed to conceal behind moving curtains the Coal Sack. One star of a pale and tender blue winked at him. Beauty looks soft, but is hard and dangerous. That does not matter; beauty is always so, and for the dimpling simpers of mindless prettiness no wise man has any use.

  In this age of our first science, we have not yet learned to forget beauty, counting the stars rich and dark and strange, not by magnitude or number. Yet some few of the pioneers among us have forgotten the divinity of number, and even so soon as my day, in advance of everyone, mutter its names without understanding its nature, as the rest of us mutter the name of God. Like God
, number has nothing to do with us, and like Him, controls us. We do far better to walk among the stars than merely to count them.

  It is perhaps a shame that man is too self-constricted to do both.

  All through all universes there endlessly descends the silent, continuous, soft snowfall of possibility, of number, of stars. When we look back we find that it has covered our tracks. We are lost in the stars, but have no feeling of being lost, for we are here.

  We look around us, in the midst of beauty. That it will surely kill us does not signify. The chill seems warm: we shall die in the snow. On all the worlds, inhabited and uninhabited, it falls alike. We look up at a few large furry delayed flakes of the possible, flickering down from a pale blue sky. How sad we are not there.

  And now, at last, when one thought one had looked everywhere and had grown used to nothing, out of the insubstantial curtains, visible, invisible, there comes walking a boy, unconcernedly about his own affairs, who does not even see us. Carrying a well bucket, and balancing himself with his free arm, he walks right through us, visible, invisible. It is Orpheus. His passage through us burns like snow.

  Looking down at himself (we can know no more of our heads than the tip of our noses, and that badly), the Magician dissolved into a flurry of fiery particles, an atomy, a column of fireflies hovering at dusk, but with a less sluggish motion than that of luceoles.

  He has quickened me, thought the Magician ruefully, and with a glow in which there was no heat, felt himself begin to disappear.

  *

  A robber, coming up drunk from the cellars and glancing toward the tower, saw shimmering on the battlements above him an inconstant bush of flame, which leapt and wavered, vanished and reappeared. Crossing himself, he fled indoors.

  The next day there came for Mysendonck, Lars, and “the little girl” an invitation to dine at the schloss.

  “What does he want?” Earl Haakon asked Manglana, who had got a message through to him, a hand note given him by Selina, with a disdainful look.