Love in a Bottle

by Antal Szerb

  “My friend Mr Smith,” declared Dowson, and blushed furiously. “Mr Smith is in bicycles.”

  His connection with the newfangled sport bestowed a certain prestige, and Tyrconnel improvised a couple of highly interesting stories about the problems of the cycle trade, gazing all the while at the girl with friendly admiration.

  He was thinking of the Trojan elders—the moment they set eyes on the Fair Helen they knew that the war was justified. Yes, Dowson was absolutely right. It was perfectly logical that a man who counted recent admirals and foreign secretaries among his long line of forebears should revert, in matters of taste, to the earth from which he had sprung.

  This Miss Higgins was your typical English country lass, with bulging muscles, the ripe bloom of an apricot on her cheeks and the stereotypical blonde hair that is the especial pride of the Anglo-Saxon race. Her glance was as amiably expressionless as the face of one of the larger domestic animals, and nothing Tyrconnel said was met by the least glimmer of understanding or produced the slightest spark of interest.

  They rose soon afterwards, and left. As they crossed London Bridge Tyrconnel filled his friend in on his future plans. The idea of a weekly magazine delighted Dowson, and he promised to be extremely diligent and write a poem for every second number, or at least every third. Moreover, he knew Johnson’s address. They piled into a two-wheeled cab and set off, with the coachman’s white top hat lighting up the London night from the dizzy heights of his seat behind them.

  They found Johnson at home. He was sitting at his desk, in his dressing gown. Its subtle resemblance to a monk’s cowl was tactfully offset by its sheer elegance, as if to deprecate any such suggestion.

  “I’m sorry I can’t offer you port or cigars, but I don’t keep that sort of thing in the house. But I came by an excellent Devonshire cider the other day.”

  The cider was decidedly of the first rank. Johnson did not have any himself. He seemed rather to look on it with disdain.

  Meanwhile Tyrconnel was explaining his plans to him, this time in rather more colourful terms. They were standing on the threshold of a new literary movement. The time had come to bring the Symbolist cause to public attention, and only they, the Esotericists, could do this.

  Johnson listened with an expression of profound understanding. When Tyrconnel finished, he placed his hands together on his chest and began an even longer exposition.

  “My young friends,” he declared—inter a great many alia—“you always concern yourself with the mere Form. But the problem is, what is really important? Naturally I am not thinking here of the fashionable problems of the day—housing conditions in the slums, the origin of species, the still-unclear role of woman and other such trumped-up issues. What we need is a return to the time-honoured questions. Our real concern in the journal must be that great conundrum, never yet properly addressed in the West, the Conflict of Universals. We must give a fresh hearing to the Realists, who established that general propositions do exist in reality, and equally to the Nominalists who regard them as just so many words, flatus vocis—pure wind—as they so delicately put it. We must pave the way for a New Scholasticism.”

  There was much more in this vein. It got deeper and cleverer as he went on. But by now his two companions were utterly lost. They had not the slightest idea what to think about Abelard, or why the conclusions of St Thomas Aquinas were so definitive, or where the otherwise so immensely gifted Duns Scotus had gone astray, or indeed why the system proposed by Grosseteste was untenable in the light of the fiendishly clever attacks on his thinking by William of Ockham.

  Johnson rose, and took a few steps towards the doorway.

  “And then, of course, there’s St Anselm of Canterbury…”

  At that precise moment he collapsed and lay stretched out motionless on the floor.

  Filled with unspeakable terror, Tyrconnel and Dowson dashed over to him. As they leant over him, they caught a strong whiff of brandy. He was completely drunk.

  *

  The Kabbalistic cards lay in the drawer of the writing desk, each in its individual leather case. Tyrconnel had been given them by his friend Russell, who wrote under the pseudonym A E. He was considered a leading expert on all things occult, and his crystal-clear verses remain splendidly impenetrable to this day. But Tyrconnel left the cards where they were. He didn’t even glance at them. He had come to regard his mysticism as no more than the sort of passing phase in his development he should put behind him, now that he had discovered his true self. Even so, to ensure that the time he had spent on it had not been wasted—though a dreamer he was also extremely ambitious—he composed a deeply symbolic narrative poem for the journal about the hardships faced by an Irish sea monster called Manannán. The only bit really dear to his heart was the creature’s name—Manannán.

  A day or two later there was a knock at his door. It was the famous seer and mystic Mary Spottiswoode, one of the glories of Russell’s little circle. And there she was, fluttering down the vestibule as if on wings, with the air of someone about to swoon. She looked particularly winsome that morning, with her feathered hat, enormous boa and parasol.

  “She looks like some kind of bird,” Tyrconnel thought to himself (no doubt with a goose in mind).

  “The cards,” she whispered. Her face was interestingly pale, with the desolate world-weariness of someone who is forever losing things.

  “Let me get you some water,” Tyrconnel suggested.

  “Do you still have those cards?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Quick, quick…”

  And she sank into the depths of an armchair.

  “Which one?”

  “Give me the fifteenth, now, quickly. The one with the Greek letter Tau and the picture of a little bull… I mislaid it… it went missing from my pack, I’ve no idea how.”

  “What do you need it for?” he asked. He knitted his brow earnestly, in keeping with the occasion. But he had no idea what any of this was about.

  “Oh,” the Mystic Goose replied, blushing deeply. “How can I explain? It’s not important, really. I just wanted a word with my late husband, about his will. There’s a question about some of his bank deposits.”

  “Mary, you’re not telling me the truth,” Tyrconnel hazarded.

  “How do you know? But why do I ask? You know everything. All the same… don’t be too sure of yourself.”

  “My dear Mary, once a person such as myself has ascended to the lunar plane, he takes no further interest in the vanities of the world… a calm and comforting melancholy fills his soul, and a profound sense of love.” (If only I knew what this is all about! he thought.)

  “I knew you wouldn’t take advantage of my situation. I’m a poor, defenceless woman. That is why I came to you. But tell me… last night, from thirteen minutes past one onwards… were you perhaps looking at the card with the Tau and the little bull?”

  “I was, indeed,” he exclaimed. (One way or another, he just possibly might have been.)

  “And… oh, my God… what did you see?”

  “What did I see?” A host of possibilities raced through his brain: a swan, an apple tree, a lighthouse… But then a rather different inspiration came to him.

  “Oh, Mary,” he murmured, taking care to choke briefly. “What did

  I see, Mary? It was you, you…” “I knew it!” the Mystic Goose spluttered. The curve of her neck was lovely and white. “And I saw you!—the whole night long. The workings of Fate…”

  And she burst into tears.

  “Don’t cry, Mary. We would struggle against this in vain. At any rate, perhaps you should take off your hat. A swan sang in my soul all night, a wild swan from the reed beds of Coole, pure white… and how white your face is… do take off that boa… there we are. And I watched them, chasing each another across the face of the moon, with a ceaseless rhythmic motion, back and forth, back and forth—the lines of fate. How lovely your hand is! There are moments in life that rise up before us like a beacon of
light in an ocean of mystery. Permit me to unbutton your blouse, Mary. You weren’t wearing one last night.”

  “What was I wearing?”

  “It was a sort of magical, pendulous dewlap, it was like… like… a shirt… and the clouds were flying beneath the moon, till I no longer knew whether it was the clouds that were moving or the moon itself… but don’t be afraid of me, Mary. There’s nothing wrong in this… somewhere out there, on the cosmic mountain tops, our souls have cast aside every veil and are yielding to their mutual caresses… forgive me… I just need your girdle… yes, that’s it… someone who can foretell the future… oo! oh!… the unspeakable sadness before the moment of possession… oh, you!… but sometimes the stars bring us unimaginable happiness… and then one has no right… no… no right to hold out… against the future… just abandon yourself to the waves of destiny… here, Mary, beside me… on the bearskin… yes… yes… yes…”

  A few weeks later he met Lionel Johnson again, for the last time. It was just after the arrest of Oscar Wilde—not on account of the stable boys and hotel flunkeys but, more surprisingly, at the instigation of the blond young aristocrat’s father. Public opinion in England, as always on these occasions, had taken a united stand against their former favourite, and people who dared take his side in pubs were beaten senseless.

  At this point Johnson called on Tyrconnel, bringing Dowson with him. Dowson was even more hypersensitive and silent than usual. Johnson declared grandiloquently that they simply had to do something for Oscar. To decide what that might be, they took themselves off to a small but well-known restaurant.

  Tyrconnel ordered a white Bordeaux and poured a glass for everyone. Johnson knocked his back in one go, and promptly poured himself another…

  “Well, it no longer matters, now,” he sighed. But he did not explain his remark.

  For as long as the meal and the wine bore them up, one great plan for Wilde’s rescue followed another.

  “We’ll produce a pamphlet in which we set out the merits of his writing, under twelve separate points, and have it signed by all the leading writers in England and France,” Tyrconnel suggested.

  “I think, on the contrary, we should approach the Queen and propose that she offer Oscar her protection—she has such a motherly heart,” said Dowson. They also thought of enlisting the Prince of Wales’ support, urging the Irish representatives in Parliament to protest, and inciting the colonial regiments to mutiny. Lionel Johnson rather fancied the idea of shooting old Lord Douglas, who had brought the case. After all, St Thomas Aquinas considered assassination permissible in the case of tyrants, and indeed the Jesuit Mariana made it a requirement if the tyrant happened to be a Protestant.

  But when dinner was over, the coffee drunk, and they had moved on to the cognac, certain misgivings, and a mood of dejection, took hold. They began to feel like kings in exile—as does anyone who has drunk a great deal of brandy—and the futility of it all became apparent. The stark vision rose up before them of an uncomprehending age, the base multitude, and the obtuse moralising tendency of the British public. In their misery they consumed ever more cognac. Lionel Johnson seemed to cope with this surprisingly well.

  Wilde’s fate slowly faded before their own unspoken sorrows.

  “Poor Oscar,” said Tyrconnel. “But properly speaking, he was never a really good poet. His work was always too highly polished, too wilfully classical and brilliant. He never understood the importance of what is left unsaid. Never quite attained the elegant pointlessness of true art.”

  “The reason for that,” affirmed Dowson, “was his unfortunate upbringing. I hear that the best families in Dublin would have nothing to do with the Wildes. Oscar was equally a parvenu among words. He liked to caress them the way the nouveau riche like running their fingers through their money.”

  “And the Church has condemned his crime even more strongly than the civil authorities,” Johnson added. “If he does end up in prison, it’ll give him the opportunity to repent his sins and start his life afresh.”

  As night and the cognac weighed ever more heavily down upon them, they began to give increasing vent to their own long-suppressed personal grievances. Tyrconnel was the first. It was easier for him, not being English. He described his desperate, sometimes feverish struggles for self-expression, the battle to liberate his work from the merely prosaic. He told them how bleak his life really was, behind the free-flowing phrases; how there were times when he could think of nothing serious to say at all; and how, in point of fact, whatever he knew about love was simply taken from books. He had become deeply embittered, and found the whole struggle hopeless. (At that stage he had no idea that he would in time become a world-famous poet, and be awarded the Nobel Prize in his old age.)

  “Oh, poetry,” said Dowson. “That’s not the problem. I’m like a tree torn up by the roots, or some such thing.”

  It transpired that Miss Higgins had been unfaithful to him. The trouble began when the girl was suddenly and incomprehensibly seized with literary ambition. She poured out religious and patriotic verses, and ballads about the great English seafarers. Dowson, being so very discreet by nature, had never quite managed to reveal that he was a man of letters. Somehow he had also kept it hidden that his father was an Admiral of the Fleet and that his ancestors had fought against the Armada. He had always declared, rather evasively, that he worked in the flax and hemp business and was expecting a rise in salary “very soon”. Gradually the girl came more and more to despise him as an ignorant, common sort of man. The end result was that she ran off with the deputy chief sports reporter of a provincial newspaper. “The soul is what matters,” she declared. “I could never love the sort of man who is interested only in flax and hemp.”

  “Oh, love,” said Johnson, with a dismissive wave of the hand, “and oh! to everything else in this world, and that includes all your great and sanctified ideas. In the final analysis there is only one true reality, and that is poverty.”

  “Between ourselves, what do you know about poverty?” Tyrconnel asked irritably.

  “A great deal more than you think. All this time I’ve been living on my capital. I’ve never invested a penny in anything, because I’m not a man of business. And anyway, the medieval Church expressly condemned investment for profit,” he went on, placing his hands together on his chest. “Catholicism has lost a great deal of its lustre since it quietly condoned usury. Anyway, I’ve always funded my spending from my capital, and this is the precise moment when it finally runs out. I shall pay the bill for my meal, and after that I shan’t have a penny in the world. At the very most, the honoraria for my poems, but we’d better not talk about that.”

  “And what will you do?”

  “I’ve no idea. I’ll give it some thought tonight. But in point of fact, it isn’t just my capital that’s finished. The game’s up with me too. I’ve already done everything I wanted to do, and had to do. I shall never write anything better than I already have. I won’t, because it can’t be done. I’ve come to the end of what is possible in the English language. I’ve written poetry as fine as Shakespeare’s and Keats’s. But I don’t want to brag about that, because it doesn’t amount to very much. The limits to human expression are in the end very narrow. I can’t progress any further, and I’m afraid of falling back. The only logical solution would be suicide. But the Church prohibits nothing so strongly as self-slaughter,” he said, and once again placed his hands together on his chest.

  After the restaurant closed they spent the remainder of the evening in Tyrconnel’s lodgings. Dowson lay on the rug in front of the fireplace, Tyrconnel sprawled across the divan, and Johnson sat at the writing table. The more he drank, the more monkish his appearance and manner became. The facial features of the other two seemed to blur—his had grown sharper, as in death.

  Tyrconnel turned off the light and they sat like damned souls in the eerie flickering light of a tall candle, deep into the night. They all had the feeling that something was coming to an
end, something truly sublime, now beyond all helping.

  “Only they are happy,” murmured Tyrconnel, “who, like Cuchulain, come across the Invisible People dancing in the moonlight and lie entranced in a clearing in a great wood, somewhere far, far away…”

  “With the help of a little opium, perhaps,” Dowson interjected.

  “Most probably. Even I think that now,” Tyrconnel replied. “I used to think I had no need for such chemical and scientific aids to free my soul from time and place. For example, I have those Kabbalistic cards…”

  “Tell me, Tyrconnel,” Johnson suddenly asked. “Have you ever actually tried them?”

  Tyrconnel replied rather shamefacedly that he hadn’t.

  “Then why don’t we try them now?” Johnson returned, rising to his feet. There was a strange excitement in his voice. “I know the Church rigorously condemns the use of magic, but it does to some extent condone the Christian Kabbalah—because it can’t be used to conjure up the devil, or those evil spirits who bring mortal souls into danger. So where are these cards, then?”

  With some hesitation Tyrconnel drew them from the leather cases in which they had been silently skulking.

  “So, what do you do with them?” asked Dowson, as in a dream.

  “Everyone picks a card, takes it home and studies it. The diagram or symbol shown on it will inspire a vision that holds the hidden solution… at least, according to George Russell. I won’t presume to guarantee that this will happen. But if we really are going to put it to the test, let’s each take the same symbol. Then, according to Russell, we should all see the same vision. Tomorrow we can report back to one another, or we could all three of us work our revelations up into separate poems. It’d be interesting to see how they differed.”

  “To hell with the individual differences,” said Johnson. “Give us the cards, and let’s be off. It’ll put an end to this very long night.”

  “Look, here are four identical cards, for example, all number eights, with a full moon, signifying Love. Here are three with the symbol for Marriage. And three with the Death symbol. Which one shall we choose?”