by Beech, Mark
Each summer, the Company would make a point of visiting this effigy, as much for the sound of the spring water splashing forth from its stone mouth, as to stare fascinated at its features. It had a sense of permanence that created an allure, so that at night, they would be visited in dreams by diverse manifestations of this head. Sometimes the dreams would be accompanied by strange and eloquent music, such as you might hear in any provincial or city concert hall; music that told its story by evoking images of the countryside and of the mountains and of the vitality of the lakes and rivers that formed and flowed. For Florian and Karel in particular, well, they seemed to share this musical affinity with the dream and the image of the head, as if the splashing of the water was symbolic of the birth of spring and the promised fecundity of summer and yet Anton and Dietrich would seem to find the music and the dreams redolent of autumn and of winter, where Dietrich would find a special and wondrous transportation of his senses and his mind to the very borderlands where green transforms itself into ochre and gold with the beauty of age like a sacred garland about his neck. And for Anton, well the effigy in his dreams bred the long and preying stasis of winter silence with the head manifest and festooned in the harshest hoar frost and the flow of the water held captive in the air like a defiant tongue of ice against all the other gods! In Anton’s mind, he knew he could not hear music but told the others that he did. Florian was prone not to believe everything Anton said, not because he suspected him of deceit, the idea would be anathema to all, but that he knew that Anton’s experience of life was not like his, even though he was the youngest, and perhaps not like the others. Florian had a nascent swaggering arrogant and self-assurance unbecoming in one still immature; the immeasurable swagger of the seasoned traveller, perhaps learned through close observance and the long and languid kiss of indolence.
Anton’s father had travelled long around the world and his skill as an architect and craftsman had taken him on many privileged journeys to study and to marvel at the past. He had especially enjoyed his travels down the mistral-kissed Adriatic coast and into the treasures of Macedonia and down to the burnished glories of Greece. In those far off days when Anton’s father was abroad, many letters would come home for Anton to be opened with eager and youthful fingers. His father was a skilled draughtsman and artist too and in one particular letter that came home from Greece, enclosed within it was a delicate sketch of a stone head. To such an unassailably impressionable boy as Anton, this sketch was an entrancing delight. It told a story for him in one static image, wrought so delicately and beautifully by his loving father, who knew that Anton was a boy alone even when surrounded by his compatriots at school. Anton kept the sketch tightly and securely in his notebook and would wander the hills above the town and bring out this sketch, which would flutter and be caught by the upland breezes. Anton was a cautious boy and would never let his enthusiasm take over when there were storm clouds or the impending threat of rain in the sky above. He would lie awake at night and imagine the droplets of rain falling upon this exquisite pencil sketch, turning the precision of those graphite lines into the tarnished blurs of wash, as if there was a sadness to the elements. The rain would beat upon his window in nocturnal storms of great vehemence and within the room, lit only by a single oil lamp, there was the communion of the boy and his idol, the image on the handmade paper, the head that now resided in its hoary splendour behind the house.
Anton had begged his father, but not begged too hard, for one of his masons to hew some fine stone and bring this head to life! Anton’s father had thought long and hard about this, sitting in his chair by the window, sipping claret, at one with his thoughts and the pageant of his own memories, where gulls circled tall masts and where the supreme dust of the splendour of old monuments would caress his body like a second skin. And so it was to be.
Florian would sit sometimes on his own at the back of the house, in this special ornamental garden staring into the eyes of this effigy and listen to the cadence and purity of the flow from its mouth. To Florian, the water signified something uplifting and almost as if to annoy Anton, he would sit there in complete silence, save for the sound of the water and he would sketch this effigy with as much profound skill as his late father. Florian would sit with his tongue delicately between his lips to signify the earthing of his concentration and he would bring forth the most vigorous and vital representations of this head, that anyone could think to have composed. Some of these sketches eventually lay scattered about the breakfast room courtesy of the dancing draughts and breezes that inhabited this most excellent of chambers when the windows were raised, while others stood upright on the mantelpiece next to the delicate vases of dried lavender and the miniatures of Anton’s family. In this position, the head took on a different kind of status and emphasis. It had entered the house through the agency of a youngest gentleman that scarcely cared less for the effect that it would have upon the son of the architect both of the house and of the head itself.
Summer days come and go, but they come in with a measured pace and they seem to fade away with a respectful dissipation on the night air, as if the day has succeeded in drawing out its full worth and that there is no more to be done, save to savour its memory and to retire to bed. Karel had walked with Anton one full circuit of the lake that afternoon as the swifts accompanied them above and as the barely discernible clouds made their way back to their maker across the forehead of the mountains, as if in some ritual procession from ancient times. The mountains seemed so very remote on this day as if they were being viewed through a distant window from some greater house or indeed as if they were being remembered from a slumber, where mountains become gods in the mind. Karel had recounted to Anton that he had once dreamed of being in the fabled mountains of Tibet and that he had wandered amidst the glittering summits until the sacred and lofty imposing façade of Mount Kailash had come into view and then his dream had collapsed into a congeries of storms and images of unloving gods falling into ruin and water. Anton thought that it was unusual for Karel to be describing something that was of a darker hue, but Karel did it with an open and glad heart, as if it had been a privilege unrivalled to see such a sight. Anton cared not for distant mountains where the recently discovered gods resided, but listening to him had helped his circuit of the lake, while his mind was filled with the images of the delicate hand of Florian on the paper and the emergent image of the effigy complete with the fecundity of its water spout, upon the page, as if Florian was drawing forth the essence of this head.
Karel often watched Anton staring up at the mountains above the lake trying to discern his thoughts and would sometimes wake in the early morning, perhaps even before the dawn’s darting tongue of fire had crept over the lips of these hilltops knowing that Anton had abandoned his bed and with a determination that he knew was all his, had made his way down out of the house and past the lake until he was but a speck seen from the windows of the breakfast room, making his way ever higher into the embrace of the hilltops, the distant gentle mountains if you will, until the speck became an impression, a pinpoint and then no more. Anton would be suddenly lost as if erased by the hand of nature and by the unheard of sounds of goats and the breezes of the uplands, through the furze and through the aridity of the gorse, festooned with ragged ancient pelt fibres and the brittle certainty of being old. Anton, for his part would look back at stages and see what he took to be Karel, perhaps joined by Diet-rich at the window of the breakfast room and at every backward turn, he would see encroaching abstraction, until even the glisten of the windows of his father’s house were mere slate impressions of something from a picture book.
And when Anton was alone amidst the hilltops, these gentle mountains, he was alive, and cared not for the distant solitary paradise of the bottom of the lake or the certainty of the house, or the frothing agility of the effigy. He was alive and alone save for the goats and the sheep, his mind awake with the sounds of their bells, even though they had none. The upland breezes played many t
ricks upon his mind in this lonely location where one could be closer to the old gods. He would sit upon an ancient tumulus decaying with its wooden memorial and his mind would wander with the quality of the air, so he could contemplate his isolation, thinking of how Karel and Dietrich would have finally retired from studying his miniscule form, back into the interior of the house. He was not sad to be alone; on the contrary, it gave him an inner strength and a resolution that to be alive was a blessed thing. He would banish thoughts of the interior world of the lake and wander about these hilltops as if he were their lord, seizing at his clothing, letting it become loose to the winds and to the impulses and stimulations of the gorse and the furze. He imagined that he was a shepherd from ancient times and that perhaps he had emerged from the harsh stillness of winter, in the prospective joy of spring. He hardly in his excited and abandoned state imagined for one minute that he would find himself not to be so alone.
In the house, Florian was setting about preparing the base of a grand log fire that would soon be licking felicitously up the sides of the vast inglenook, filled to the brim with the impedimenta of the true woodsman. Florian found great comfort in these tasks, detached as he was and as he liked it, from the daily round, and would perform them with great alacrity and steely independence, so that each of the company knew not to disturb him in this sacred act. The logs were dense—Ash perhaps—and sang with great joy as the flames would penetrate their outer mantles and retaliate with spectacular and baleful retorts and spits and taunts from within the vast grate! Tongues of fire captivate any audience and for the Company, each fire was an occasion and an act of worship both to build and to countenance.
There is no control in fire, there is only the spectrum of abandonment and power and the nuance of elemental force and then the certainty in the crying embers of death and rebirth.
The company, encouraged by Karel and Dietrich in particular, for Florian was not prone to subjectivity, would stare into the fire to see what images and tricks they could conjure from the flames and from their minds. They were intelligent enough to know that the mind was in itself a vast and sacred chamber of rooms, where manifold secrets and mysteries were played out. They knew that the flames were but a vehicle for drawing forth the powerful spume of mystery and wonder before their eyes and into the room. Their engraved claret glasses or rather the engraved claret glasses of Anton’s late father were charged without the worthy son being there, against the heat of the room, for he was still up in the rooftops of the hills beyond, even as the strongest of suns began its formidable descent into the other sacred hemispheres below.
There come strange sensations and impressions when the time of twilight arrives. It is an intangible time, as hard as capturing water in the hand or imprisoning the sunbeams of the late sun upon your face. It makes the familiar become unfamiliar as the gradients of light ascend and descend allowing texture to take on extra dimension and distance to be restated as expansively as one could imagine. For any person descending from a gentle mountain or hilltop, they will find that the path they took to get there has been rolled up and put away for the night with no amends made for any replacement. Distinctiveness becomes a watercolour wash left on the easel and the precision of the eye becomes all but redundant. And then of course, there is the impressionability of the mind that elevates the consciousness to new states of anxiety or alarm or heightened states of ecstatic learning or piquant experience. Vast hilltops and deep depressions that lead to dewponds become as intangible as old grails talked about round the fire in winter or spied in the great painting of the masters, semi-hidden or overflowing. Landscape becomes the countryside of the dream and the dreamer where valleys have no sides, only mystery rolling in subtle gradients of shade and depth. The inhabitants of the natural world delight in this transition, in this double-sided daily season, complete with its companion, the dawn. But Anton was not an inhabitant of the natural world; he was a gentleman alone and in the abandonment of the natural world, brought on by the subtlety of the crucible of the heights, where tongues of breeze found their way into and around his very being, as the sheep and the goats watched in their stoicism and their ancient intransigent wisdom; the place where the past meets the present at its own eternal crossroad.
When you look into the eyes of a goat from the mountains and then you stare at its horns, you are perplexed at its ‘otherness’. It cannot be anything else but otherwise.... its eyes will engage with you but only in that the eyes are bound to be brought together with yours; but there is no congruence within the gaze, merely an acknowledgement that there is something there in the landscape. There is within that acknowledgement a definite impression of distance and something that oscillates between arrogance and aloofness and something far deeper that only the beast itself can understand or appreciate, as it sits within the scrub engaging itself in thoughts most private. There is that impulse and characteristic that allows the eyes to linger and the silence to be broken only by the breeze or perhaps a movement from other of its kin as they make their chaotic descent into the darkening vales of landscape that fold and enfold and become one at the twilight hour. Why does such a beast hold the sun upon its back so well and why in paintings does the artist take such care over the lines of light and mottled matted hair that covers its nakedness? In the darkness that descends with the dying breath of twilight, the natural world begins its second sleepless day of dreamless abandon. The landscape and the sky and the elements become one with themselves and with each other and flood the senses with that inevitable sense of ‘otherness’. When you are nothing and the dark is descending into the folds of the landscape, then you have to dig deeply inward into the secret seam of the self to find that ‘something’ that connects with this ‘otherness’. Maybe it was already there making Anton linger in the appreciation of this ‘otherness’.
Anton could picture in his mind’s eye, his companions back at the house, preparing for an evening lit by elaborate candles and the certainty of the crackle of a generous fire. Anton could picture Klaus and and Dietrich perhaps contemplating closing up the shutters so that the effect of the generous fire would be to suggest on the rear of these shutters as they closed in on the room that the fire was itself all about the room in some elemental dance, proclaiming that it above all and especially above the water beyond, was the very king of the elements.
And so it was that as Anton descended into the darkness making his way into the invisible folds below his feet, the evening back in the house was about to commence.
Anton became aware of the sound of his footfall on the damp furze and gorse that had been anointed by the characteristic twilight. It was the only perceptible sound and as he proceeded, it produced in him a sense of alarm and quiet panic, as if the sound of his footfall might bring from its slumbers a sign that he was no longer alone. A chaotic impulse overtook the measured mind of Anton as if perhaps remembering something from this afternoon beyond the sight of the house where he touched the presence of the sky and beyond. The moon played with its own presence as if it were to Anton moving about at random above him, like a pendulum... something from a child’s dream. It was the reflection on the steely surface of the lake below, long and jagged lines of iridescent light breaking the surface and then disappearing with the movement of the breeze that struck him, appearing again at will with the elements in tune with the moon’s eternal diurnal impulse. Anton stopped and as he stopped to stare up at this glistening orb, crusty with the texture of ancient lore, so the story-telling at the house began.
It was a custom, a regular custom of the Company of the Lake that they would incarcerate themselves inside the house for one long evening of story-telling and thus tonight, they had broken with tradition and begun without Anton. Perhaps it was the evening for broken traditions.... Florian had initiated it and with a keen eye for the ironic had sat in the chair by the shuttered window that was the territory of Anton’s beloved late father. The flames ignited and lit the pleasure in Florian’s face, as if he were himse
lf attempting to invoke the spirit of the architect of this house by the lake. Dietrich had been at the door, awaiting the return of Anton, for he knew that he would return; wonderful redoubtable Anton, and yet all he saw were the rays of the moon upon the surface of the lake and the incoming of night about the house. There was no sound save for the faintest hint of the water emerging from the sculpted head at the rear of the house and the doughty and certain crackle of the fire. The redoubtable housekeeper now retired for the night, always ensured that a substantial burden of Ash logs were ready for the Company. The flames evoked the elemental spits and snaps and rasps upon the logs and the tongues of flame sought their worship higher and higher from the ornate grate, illuminating the eyes of the portraits around the room, so it seemed that the Company had silent and ancient imprisoned companions within their canvasses and so perhaps they did.
Above the fireplace was the portrait of Anton’s father; a sympathetic study in oil that stared across to Florian in the sitter’s chair, resplendent himself in an evening attire of scarlet and gold. And so the story-telling began.....
Florian had a tale to tell and called it “The Companion of the Road”. He claimed to have made it up that afternoon, but who was there to doubt him or to raise their hand and say “no”. And in this new tale there is a solitary road and the sense that the teller of this tale is bathed in moonlight. In his hand is a lantern lit and reflecting its rays on the motley glass, sending shadows across the ruts in the track and the dense hedges and hollows that were either side of the traveller. And on the road, the traveller becomes emboldened to ask of the kindly darkness for it to send forth a companion for him, to share the moonlight and to assist him on his way back to the village. For a second, all is silent and as it should be and the moon stares down upon this traveller with a beneficence all its own. Again, the traveller asks the kindly darkness about him to send forth a companion for him, be it male or female or spirit and that he grows impatient with his own dull company. Against the silence of the countryside at midnight, the traveller might be mistaken for thus taking certain strange sounds or impressions for the work of wild animals or sheep or goats, perhaps breathing heavily in the absolute dark or rubbing up against a post perhaps to give succour to the multitude of lice tenanting their hides. The sound of coughing at midnight on the open road in the middle of the countryside is a thing to behold, for sure, particularly when it is not emanating from one’s own throat, which is in itself already quite dry with the tension. And so the Companion of the Road appears from the gate and asks the traveller if he might join him and show some humanity in a gentle stroll back to the village, where he too resides. The Companion of the Road, so thinks the traveller, is like you or me or any listener of tales and seems a reasonable man, if man he be. He makes forth from the gate and immediately falls in with the traveller as he walks, complimenting him on his good taste in tunic and hat and that he must have the finest of taste and also a sense of modesty. The moon itself has sought the refuge of the clouds and has for modesty hidden her features, all pitted and dainty and capricious and so there is but darkness to lead the way upon the road with the cough of the Companion and the pulsing of the heartbeat of the traveller as they come to the edge of the lake near the village.