“Oh, by the way,” Brentford said abruptly, retrieving the blank calling card from his coat pocket. “This was on your doorstep.”
The swarthy face paled this time, and the subdued agitation Brentford had earlier remarked in the man now came to the fore. Count McGregor trembled. He snatched the blank card and ran to the hall, where he passed it over the flame of the Tibetan lamp. He changed colour, trembled more violently, and in two strides, took up his greatcoat and flew out of the room, as if expelled by a charm.
Moina and Brentford found themselves alone. They stared at each other for an embarrassing while. She looked troubled, but he could also see that she had no intention of mentioning what had just happened. She closed over the secret like an oyster over a pearl, but in that silence, he could hear, somewhere at the back of the house, a door banging shut.
“I’ll be on my way, madame,” Brentford said with a bow. “It was a pleasure and an honour to meet you and your husband.”
Moina looked at him absent-mindedly, then quickly refocussed.
“If you want to come back for beginner-level tattva lessons, I suppose it’s not important that you are not a 0=0 brother.”
“That’s very generous of you,” Brentford said noncommittally, because he had no idea what a 0=0 brother was. He was close to the altar, where, he noticed, Mathers had left the card. He picked it up before Moina could move. Quickly, he made out, typed in fading blue ink:
fr. lux e septentrione.
Light from the North. “FR” must be Frater, “brother.”
He turned towards Moina, and could see her struggling to appear calm, so that Brentford might suppose that the card was nothing out of the ordinary.
“But there is nothing on this card,” he said, to let her off the hook, and indeed the inscription had now evaporated. “I apologize for my curiosity. I was worried for Monsieur le Comte.”
“Thank you for your concern,” Moina said unconvincingly. “The Count will be perfectly fine.”
But as soon as Brentford was out the door, instead of going back to the avenue Mozart, he turned right, towards the rue de la Source, where he estimated the sound of the banging door had come from. And sure enough, there was, as he had deduced, another entrance to the villa. Mathers had disappeared but not, as the phrase goes, “without a trace.”
“There’s something to be said for snow,” Brentford thought as he started the chase.
The tracks led through more sleepy, deserted streets, until they turned south along the sturdy arcades of the Circular Railway. Then, at the Auteuil station, they turned again, this time westward, into the Bois de Boulogne. The footprints were becoming less distinct, and Brentford almost missed them as they veered north again, along what looked like an abandoned racetrack. There was but one path to follow, and once or twice Brentford thought he caught a glimpse of the Highland hierophant in front of him. He forced himself to be more prudent.
The path reached the Upper Lake, where its water usually fell below to the Lower Lake via a picturesque cascade. But the cascade was frozen now, and the Upper and Lower Lakes were each an expanse of mirror-like ice that shone in the moonlight like spilled mercury. The ice must have been thick, too, for a tall man with a top hat stood in the middle of the Upper Lake wrapped in a greatcoat, a cane in his hand and a packet under his arm. Mathers was on his knees before him.
Brentford crouched at the edge of the treeline, but he was too far away to hear what they were saying. However, he saw, or thought he saw, Mathers fold and twist as if suffering great pain. The conversation did not last very long, in any case: the tall man forced Mathers to his feet to take the packet from him, and Mathers turned away, moving in a cautious, uncomfortable-looking walk across the ice, reaching the shore just a few steps away from where Brentford was hiding. By the time he got to solid ground he was running more than walking, the packet held tightly to his chest, and as he passed, Brentford thought he saw his nose bleeding purple in the moonlight, although Brentford hadn’t seen him being hit.
And so Mathers faded into the night, while the other man hadn’t budged an inch. He held still for a very long time before walking calmly back to the shore, the ice squeaking under his feet.
He came to a stop immediately opposite where Brentford hid in the trees, and casually took out a cigarette from a case.
“Excuse me, sir,” his voice boomed out, “would you happen to have a light?”
Brentford felt pinned where he was like a chloroformed butterfly. The man approached slowly, less out of caution, Brentford thought, than to make an impression. It worked rather well.
Brentford rose from his crouch and reluctantly stepped out from cover. “Sorry, no,” he said, faintly hoping these were not his last words.
Reaching into his greatcoat, the man brought out a silver lighter. “It is fortunate that I always carry a light,” he said with a curious laugh. In the lighter’s yellow flare, his inclined, malevolent face finally appeared and remained suspended in the flame.
Lucifer, Brentford thought with a shiver.
“Nothing of the sort. Lyonel Owain Savnock, at your service,” Lord Lodestone said calmly.
“Brentford Orsini,” Brentford heard himself answering. “How …”
“How do I know what you were thinking? Because it was written on your face. And because I put it there myself. I gave you a single, fleeting image, and for a while it triggered in you something you could not quite master.”
Brentford had regained his breath. He still had trouble reconciling the man in front of him with one of the Seven Sleepers. He felt torn in half: ready to fight the man for his life, but wanting to ask for his autograph first.
“This little magic show,” he said, “is what you do to Mathers, I suppose?”
Lord Lodestone didn’t seem to take offence. He was clearly a man confident enough not to feel threatened by mere words.
“For one thing, it’s not magic,” he replied. “Magic is just an excuse for failure. As for Mathers, he does it to himself. He always has exaggerated physiological reactions during our little audiences. But given the choice, you can rest assured that he would not want it any other way. It makes him feel important, and that is exactly why he chooses to believe in me. If you always wondered what sort of idiot would sell his soul to the devil, you just met the ideal type.”
It took a while for Brentford to realize that perhaps Lord Lodestone was actually merely interested in having a chat. But whether that was true or not, the obvious course to avoid was to take him for a dimwit. Sincerity and openness, he gathered, would be appreciated, and perhaps even rewarded with clues about his plans.
“He thinks you’re one of the … Secret Chiefs?”
For a second, Brentford thought he had committed a faux pas. “You are of an inquisitive nature, Mr. Orsini,” Lodestone answered quietly.
But, again much to Brentford’s surprise, Lodestone seemed more interested in chatting.
“Such an inquisitive nature is, to my mind, a precious quality among human beings,” he went on. “It is, truly, what makes us what we are. Since we ate of that damned fruit in Eden, it has been our curse to gather knowledge—it is even, perhaps, our mission. I cannot but congratulate you on your curiosity, and you will not find me a man to shy away from the truth—within, of course, certain practical limits. So to answer your question: he does think I’m one of the Secret Chiefs, or Unknown Superiors. I rather like him, nevertheless. His business is a hard one. There is more magic in money than there is money in magic. A simple piece of paper is worth more than the philosopher’s stone, these days.”
Brentford let this piece of wisdom sink in.
“There are no Secret Chiefs, then?”
“Well, as a matter of fact, now that you ask, I do happen to be a kind of Secret Chief—but that has nothing to do with this conversation … unless, perhaps, you are the man who dined yesterday at Thélème with Alexandre Vialatte.”
Brentford expected his confirmation to be followed by a
thundering: “What were you trying to get out of him?” perhaps accompanied by a few lightning bolts. But Lodestone simply replied, “Clever fellow. And efficient. Do you find him agreeable?”
“Why yes, very much so …”
“That is fortunate.”
At a simple gesture from Lodestone, they had started to walk towards the north end of the park. Brentford had the feeling that, if he didn’t say anything, silence would not be a problem. He had begun to imagine Lodestone as a solitary man, in search of understanding, yet he also sensed that this was probably just another disguise—perhaps even a trap.
“I am surprised that you recognized me,” he ventured, as their steps crunched simultaneously in the snow. On their left, the frozen cascade hung out of time.
“An honest face in Paris? It would be harder to forget it,” Lodestone answered. “So where all does this honesty lead you? I would say not very far, but I wish I were wrong.”
“No, you’re right, Milord. It hasn’t led me as far as I wish to go, currently.”
“Is this why you are interested in the Golden Dawn?”
“Indirectly, yes. I have, shall I say, developed an interest in inner vision.”
“Only an idiot would not be interested in the workings of his mind. But do you think these people of the Golden Dawn, for all their comedic virtues, will really be of any help to you?”
“I admit I doubt it. I was raised a mathematician, and grew up an engineer. I usually have little patience for this sort of abracadabra. Recently, however, things have happened to me for which I haven’t found my grounding very helpful. Though I doubt that, were such things happening to them, those mystics would find their grimoires very useful either. Knowledge comes from experience, not the other way round.”
“It is perhaps more complicated than that, but you state it very clearly,” Lodestone commented appreciatively.
Brentford felt encouraged to go further. “But still, they seem to be of some use to you?” he asked. But, once again, his bravery, such as it was, went unnoticed. Lodestone, no doubt, expected it.
“Oh, these occultists have many great qualities. For one thing, they save from oblivion and ignorance a tradition that is truly rather precious, even if they seem to have an innate inability to tell the wheat from the chaff. Then too, they have a sound sense of ritual and symbolism, an art that is unfortunately being lost, and a very powerful one at that. And last, but not least, few as they are, their networks are intricate and far-reaching. They cover the whole globe and have nerve endings in the highest places. I have found that you can achieve surprising results if you know how to use them.”
“You mean that they have a real power?”
“They try to make it appear that they do, certainly. They have plans for the world. For Mankind. There is a lot of politicking done in the astral, these days. A lone occultist is little more than a fool. But the quack who gets the ear of a king or an emperor is a very dangerous animal. These kinds of networks are blueprints for the politics of the century to come. Sooner or later, their schemes will come to fruition, and I can tell you, we shall be glad to live far away from them, somewhere that they can’t reach us.”
Brentford appreciated the “us,” though he supposed that it referred to the Sleepers.
“And how do you use this network?”
“I have a hand in it. The left one, that is.” He lifted it, and for the first time Brentford saw the lion at the knob of his cane, though it wasn’t exactly a lion: more like one of those slightly clownish Tibetan snow lions, with a wavy mane and big square teeth.
“I give them objects or information,” he went on, “in exchange for the same, or for contacts. For I, too, you see, have plans for the world and mankind. I admire tradition, I appreciate the use of symbols and rituals. The difference is that I am a businessman and a politician. I know how to get money, and I actually do like to get things done. I’m sure that, as an engineer, you can understand that.”
Brentford could, even if the type that Lodestone incarnated, part magus, part robber baron, was more of a prototype. But he was, without doubt, the kind of man it took to get a thing like New Venice done.
They were now close to the Porte de Passy. Brentford felt it was time to say goodbye. Lodestone shook his hand quite cordially at first, but then Brentford felt the pressure of the grasp increasing, until it was more a threat than any sort of Masonic sign.
“Mr. Orsini,” Lodestone said, “before we part, I would like you to take both a very deep breath of this fresh air and a look at the multitude of stars above your head. Aren’t they beautiful tonight? Isn’t this air wonderfully bracing? Isn’t it, in a word, extremely pleasant to be alive?”
“It is, indeed,” Brentford said, after he had fulfilled each of his curious directives.
“It will be, I hope, all the more pleasant for you if you were to know that if I hadn’t seen you with Monsieur Vialatte at the Thélème Abbey, you would now be dead under the ice of the Upper Lake. I suppose it is unnecessary to add that if I ever see you in my path a third time, it would be much better if it were for a very good reason.”
“Thank you for adding that, Milord. I wish you a very good night,” said Brentford, with a slight quaver in his voice, before hurrying off to the Passy-Hôtel de Ville Omnibus to queue in front of the station. It was only as he arrived that a restrospective fear shook him and drenched him in cold sweat.
It was a stern warning that he had just received, but at least Lodestone had not ruled out the possibility that there might be a good reason for their meeting again. Brentford was inclined to think that his own reasons were excellent. Whether they could be explained as such to Lord Lodestone was an altogether different problem.
The English tourist walked out of his hiding place, a tree that would have had to grow another dozen years before it could entirely conceal his embonpoint. But the tourist had no intention of waiting for so long. He felt exhausted, his feet ice-cold from the walk in the snowy woods. He watched the tramway clang by and, farther off, a man with a cane walking back towards the obscure treeline of the woods. “So,” he said to himself, “That must be the man.”
IV
The Silent Theatre of Snow
It had been a long, maddeningly slow trip, but the Théàtre-Salon was well worth it on its own picturesque merits. With its two large angels hovering above the orchestra, and its tiny boxes lined with iron railings above dark gothic paneling, the place looked more like a chapel than a theatre. Its gloomy solemnity proved a fitting jewel case for Snow, the play that had already started when Gabriel and Vassily arrived—if started was the right word, which Gabriel doubted.
The backdrop was a projection of plates from a Reynaud’s praxinoscope. It depicted, in a naïve, vapourous, wholly artificial, but—to Gabriel’s still hasheeshed eyes—singularly luminous way, a wintry mountain landscape and a wood of skeletal tree stumps sprinkled with holly. At first the scene was touched by the faintest glow of sun. But by and by, through a rather amteurish optical illusion, the edge of the mountains became a reclining nude woman, an immense idol lazily floating in the blue. Then, all claws out, a golden-maned lion attacked her, drawing long streaks of blood that trailed like clouds in the sky. Next, an old woodsman and his wife, doing their best to look poor and burdened by unbearable tasks, trudged by, when suddenly the man got a stone in his clog. Act II ended on this cliffhanger.
In Act III, the family trudged back miserably in the other direction, but this time with a child in tow, then ate bread and chopped wood in insufferable pantomine. Gabriel was starting to wonder if he could borrow the axe to massacre everyone, but then something actually happened in the next tableau: the clouds opened and the Woman raised herself and stood on the ground. Two flamelike lights, one red and one purple (Like Od! Gabriel thought), scintillated off her fingertips, and in these lights, figures were starting to move: in the red lights, there were plump, nude women, a Boucher avalanche of pink flesh; in the purple, devilish, priapic men. So
this was to be a spectacle for adults, after all. The two lights spilled over each other, and the figures blended in unspeakable antics, so violently that blood dripped down towards the earth. But then, hermaphroditic angels (and Gabriel of course had a spasm of homesickness, thinking of the gorgeous Elphinstone twins) glided from the tree trunks and harvested the blood in ruby cups, from which they drank in ecstasy. Then the figures paled, the angels glided back into the trees, and so ended the fourth act.
Compared to the play’s beginning, Act V was positively hectic. On the stage there were now two young lovers, draped in black capes, frolicking and kissing, with a kind of stupid amorous joviality that made the lonesome Gabriel wish that one of them would step on the teeth of a rake. Act VI, however, dampened their enthusiasm. A thick snow started to fall (and the cotton balls, as they drifted down, instilled in Gabriel a sense of childish wonder and wonderful well-being), until by and by it buried the lovers and the family, and all that remained of the scene was the tops of the trees.
The epilogue was equally cruel: the moon shone down on the desolate scene for a while and then was extinguished as the Woman burst into laughter in the darkness. So the Universe is just a cold, dark night lit by chaotic flares of cruel desires. Thanks for the news, thought Gabriel, as a volley of applause erupted, as thunderous as twenty half-asleep people could make it.
As the curtain fell one last time, Gabriel felt as if he had been released from a cage. That said, he felt privileged, too, as if he had just witnessed the birth of an art: one that would have no future anywhere, except in the phantascopic, phantasmagoric phantasies staged in the Circus of Carnal Knowledge, in New Venice, Northwasteland. He was almost surprised not to see d’Ussonville here, scouting for new ideas.
“You know the man we saw yesterday at Mallarmé’s, the one that Fénéon brought? D’Ussonville?” Gabriel whispered to Vassily. “I should invite him here. I am sure he would be interested.”
New Venice 02 - Luminous Chaos Page 31