The Carp Castle

by MacDonald Harris

  But there was nothing forward about him; she could see that he was not accustomed to this sort of thing and that it was not an act of audacity but an act of desperation. His name was John and he was a Londoner on a holiday. Why he had chosen this small Cornish seaport in the middle of winter for his holiday he didn’t explain. He worked as a clerk in a land agent’s office in Notting Hill, not five minutes from her own room in Bayswater. His parents lived in Leeds, and he himself spoke with the slightly burry accent of the north, which for some reason delighted her. He had a cup of tea and they sat together, talking only a little. Mostly they just looked at each other. He was shy and hesitated a moment each time before he spoke. When he asked her what she did, she said she lived on an annuity left her by her father. She didn’t go into the long odyssey of her illnesses. He told her anecdotes of his work in the land agent’s office. She told him about the spider in the bath in her lodgings in Bayswater, and they both laughed. When she told him the story it was transformed in her own mind; it became a story of valiant if slightly comic survival instead of the story of being haunted by the ghost of her father. When they left the fish-and-chips shop he opened the door for her, and outside, after a slight hesitation, he took her hand.

  There were not very many places to walk in the small seaport. It was after four o’clock now and already getting dark. They wandered through the jumble of narrow streets and quaint houses, they walked up the hill to look at the old church, and they went around a headland to the old town and the harbor. It was too cold now to walk hand-in-hand, and she put her hand around John and into his coat pocket on the other side, where it was warm and snug. He put his hand in her pocket. In a shop that was still open but about to close John bought her an opal the size of a bird’s-egg, polished and iridescent, with “St. Ives” on it in incised letters filled with gold. She put her hand around John again and into his pocket, and with the fingers of the other hand she felt the opal, which was a perfect oval, with ends neither too blunt nor too sharp, the shape of a pleasant thought.

  On the quay they sat down on two bollards and looked out at the gathering darkness. A fine mist was coming down. An old fisherman came along and sat down on the bollard next to Eliza’s. He looked exactly like the carved wooden fishermen sold in the souvenir shops, with chin-whiskers, a cap with a visor, and a pipe. He lit his pipe and glanced sideways at them.

  “Two young folk like you, in weather like this. Don’t you have a place to go?”

  They looked at each other and were shy.

  The fisherman wagged his head. “Many a winter have I fished off this coast and come back wet to the skin and chilled to the bone. But when I was the age of you two, there was always a maid who would take pity on me and let me in out of the rain. Of course, I tried to pay her back as best I could. They all seemed to think the bargain was a fair one.”

  Eliza felt herself blushing. John was silent. Why had they sat down on these bollards that were so far apart they couldn’t touch? They got up and walked away with their hands in each other’s pockets again. The old fisherman watched them. When Eliza looked around she could see the glow of his pipe in the darkening mist.

  They went up the hill toward the church again. Eliza didn’t ask why John was leading her that way. After a while they passed a place where the wall had broken down and a bramble had grown into it, sticking its prickly branches out over the pavement so that people had to walk around it. They heard a noise, a hissing and a crackle, and John caught sight of a pair of green eyes.

  It took him some time to free the cat from the bramble. He worked patiently, while the cat spat and scratched at him and the thorns prickled his hands. At last he pulled it out with his hands under its armpits, while the cat made a final screech at a thorn that held its foot. He set it down on the pavement and it fled away into the dark. Eliza felt a burst of affection for him. His patience and tenderness in untangling the cat from this impediment, and his disregard of his own comfort, was an avatar, a pre-enactment, she was sure, of his future disentanglement of her from her thorny virginity. They walked on up the hill toward his hotel.

  In the room they turned toward each other, both embarrassed. Then after a moment John took her in his arms. The only other man who had held her in this way was her father. The novel sensation filled her with a swarm of new feelings. In the center of her body, pressing against the place between her legs, was a large upright bone which puzzled her at first because it was so much larger than she had imagined it from her dreams, and from the examples offered by statues. She took it at first for some peculiarity of the male skeleton, then the truth struck her and made her blood tremble. It did not seem a part of John, instead something that John had brought along with him for the occasion, and without telling her. John released her and she removed her hands from his waist. They took off their overcoats and sat down on the bed.

  John tentatively put his arm around her. She turned her head and they kissed. Then John sat as though thinking. “I’ll have to go out for some Woodbines,” he said. He patted his pockets. “I’ll just be a while.”

  He put his overcoat on again and left the room. The door closed and Eliza was alone again. It was strange that he should go out for cigarettes at just such a time. But shy John, she suspected, was going out to look for some contraceptives and was not quite sure where to find them. She looked around. The room was a nice one. It had old dark-brown polished furniture and cretonne curtains, and the brass lamp was made to imitate a ship’s light. On the floor of planks, like a deck, was a brightly colored rag rug. Eliza thought of the strange sensation when they had embraced. It was a part of the body that changed size with the mood of its owner. No horror story, no strange German tale, could imagine such a thing. What kind of grotesque creature was it that could possess such a thing?

  Still sitting on the bed, she waited for the sound of John’s step on the stairs. A fit of coughing seized her. After a while an acrid salty taste formed in her mouth, and she went into the tiny lav, which had a W.C. and a washbasin in it. John had already used the hand towel; it was wrinkled and damp. She coughed into the basin and saw stretching red strings fall into it, with red globules clinging to them like berries. She coughed for some time, then she turned some water into the basin and rinsed it several times until the last of the pink had been washed away.

  She put on her overcoat, found her purse, and left the room, leaving the door unlocked. At Mrs. Mitthrush’s she packed her traveling bag, hurried through the frozen streets to the bus stop in the harbor, and took the bus to Penzance. But the last train had left, and she had to sit in the station all night. The next morning she got on the train and went to Plymouth. It didn’t seem very much like the other cities where she had stayed, either in England or on the continent, and she had no luck in finding a room to rent. Probably she was looking in the wrong part of town. She still felt a warm sensation between her legs where John’s body had touched her. The feeling seemed to come from walking; when she sat down it went away. She sat on a bench for a long time looking at the ships in the harbor, then she found a park on a knobby hill and spent the rest of the afternoon in it, watching the children play on the frozen gray grass. When night fell she had a bit of fried plaice in a fish-and-chips shop, then sat for an hour or more over her tea, looking out through the steamy window and half expecting John to come in through the door. The shop was exactly like the other one in St. Ives, even to the poster advertising stout (“Drink Guinness and Keep Your Pecker Up”) and the waitress in her checkered smock. She saw by the clock that it was seven-thirty and she got up and walked out into the dark.

  She saw no signs for rooms to let and she was still in the wrong part of town; she was on a broad street lined with churches and public buildings. In one of them, the door was open and she saw lights and people moving inside. She went in and sat down. At that moment, the door closed and the sound of talking quieted to a hush. Eliza was looking at a low dais at the front of the hall with a tapestry behind it. Then a woman appeared
, in a long green gown speckled with gold, and began talking. Because of her fatigue, and the cold that still chilled her to the bone in spite of the warm room she was now sitting in, she couldn’t follow the lecture. Over the woman’s head, floating in the air, was a strangely arranged shape of green light. It was a kind of light she had never seen before; it seemed to consist of the tiny particles of the air glowing in themselves. She recognized that the odd shapes of light were letters of the alphabet, but she didn’t bother to make out what they were. She heard a voice saying “inside yourself” and “secret power of the spirit.” She stood up, facing the glowing light. Then the woman in green, facing directly toward her, said, “Pain and the afflictions of the body are not real. Love is real. In Gioconda there is no sickness or pain, only Love.”

  Something very strange happened to Eliza. She felt someone take her left hand, then her right, and hold them in a soft embrace, but when she looked there was no one there. The green light, coming not from the five glowing letters in the air but from some magical point in the woman below them, leaped across the hall and entered Eliza through the eight openings of her body. It seeped into her like a divine ichor, flowing into every artery and organ. When it had penetrated to the last corpuscle she felt inside her something like a ghost or phantom of herself, coinciding with the shape of her mortal body down to the last hair and fingernail but separate from it, as wine might seep into a porous statue in the shape of a person; a green soul as fragile and as invulnerable as moonlight. All her illnesses fell away. With her eyes fixed on the glowing letters she embraced the Cosmos, feeling the boundaries of her body dissolve as she became one with it.

  *

  Eliza sits at a table in an airship over the English Channel and holds Romer’s hand under the tablecloth. She has almost forgotten her transitory encounter with John; or rather what she remembers of John, a powerful but sketchy set of emotions, has been extracted like a dead glove from the past and transferred into the real flesh-and-blood Romer that she now possesses. Romer is resourceful, priapic, and wise. He is a John who is a philosopher and not a land agent’s clerk, a John who is shy but knows where to buy contraceptives, a John who can invent a madcap nude chase through the woods instead of just sitting awkwardly on a bed. Satyr and nymph! The two of them conceal their secret, appearing to others in the world as two quite plain and ordinary people. Eliza is filled with warmth at the thought of her luck, of the good fortune that has fallen on her against all probability. Theirs is the love story never told in books, that of two ugly shy people who find each other. Moira’s approval, she knows, falls over this love and has even magically prepared the way for it.

  The same cannot be said for the approval of Aunt Madge Foxthorn. She is sitting at the next table, only a few feet away, and staring straight at them. Of course, there is no other place for her to stare, since that is the way her chair is placed, and neither can Romer avoid meeting her glance without craning his neck around in an unnatural way. The bump in Aunt Madge Foxthorn’s forehead is symmetrical, smooth, and self-contained, a perfect oval, even more perfect than the egg it resembles in size, since an egg is rounder on one end than the other. There is something about it that paralyzes the will and induces feelings of guilt, as though she carried in it something similar to Moira’s sixth power, but different from it and unique to Aunt Madge Foxthorn, a power not so much for looking into the hearts of others as for searching out infractions and disobedience. Moira rules by love, but love cannot rule entirely over a collection of imperfect and fractious human hearts, and even less over the meaner organs. But is it not the whole point of Moira’s message that everything is one? That there is no lust, sickness, evil, pain, or hatred, that these things are illusions caused by an incorrect way of looking at the world? How is it then that Aunt Madge Foxthorn is Moira’s assistant and closest companion? Has Moira divided herself into angel and demon, shuffling off her mortal envelope and leaving it behind in the shape of a tall woman with a frown? Eliza releases Romer’s hand and it falls away into the invisible space under the tablecloth.

  In the lounge a post-prandial torpor has fallen over the passengers. Most of them are tired of watching the English Channel move by underneath and have settled into the armchairs to chat. Günther seats himself at the baby grand piano, a Schiedemeyer especially built for the League of Nations out of aluminum, and plays some selections from the Kinderszenen, early Schumann and easy; finger exercises for little girls. Then a little Brahms, a sonata and part of a scherzo; he has forgotten the rest. Although his fingers are short and stubby, he plays with emotion and with sound technique, in a somewhat more romantic style than is popular now in the Twenties. The instrument responds to his fingers like a docile animal, like a lover. A fragment from Weber’s Freischutz, in his own transcription. A sonatina of Haydn. All Ayran composers of course; no Mendelssohn or Liszt. For Günther, German music is something unique in the art of mankind, deeply satisfying to his soul, holding a promise of his nation’s resurrection as the champion of culture in a polyglot and mongrel world. It moves him deeply in the blood. It is a force greater than love; it is equivalent to love; no, it is love, a love rooted in the earth and its chthonic mysteries and in the blood of the people. In the simple transition from one chord to another, in the resolution of a minor to a major, lies the ultimate secret of man’s fate in the universe and the figures who people his dreams: the Mother, the Hero, the Grail, the sexual union, the silent Boatman of the Styx. Even though it is one of the pieces dearest to his heart, he doesn’t play the love-duet from Tristan, as he did in the Bierstube in Frankfurt, because there are ladies present who might be disturbed by it. Günther’s sense of chastity goes hand-in-hand with his respect for the sensuous Powers of the Night. He chooses instead the Appassionata, the most poignant of all the piano sonatas of Beethoven, and only the slow movement, since people in the lounge seem so drowsy. The harmonies thrum in his bowels only a few inches from the vibrating wires. The Italian name of the sonata is a minor sin of Beethoven, an exotic note in this expression of the purest of all composers. An augmented passage slides into a diminished seventh, then rises blissfully to a major. Günther’s eyes are damp. He must struggle to control his fingers, his mind, against the very emotions the music is intended to elicit; the artist must stand away from his work, godlike and impassive, playing each note with the accuracy of a machine with a soul. A dissonant chord—Beethoven understood the imperfection of the world!—leads to a finale as perfect and moving as a rose.

  There is a polite patter of applause, all from one person from the sound of it. He looks around but can’t see who it is; the passengers are chatting and dozing, indifferent to the music, as though it were something like the buzzing of the engines. Günther suspects the red-haired English girl with freckles, the one who always has her head bent together with Moira’s metaphysician; if so the applause was probably ironic.

  Günther gets up, takes his officer’s hat which he has set on the piano and puts it on, and leaves the lounge with dignity. Strictly speaking, the lounge is for the use of passengers only and out of bounds to crew. But it would be ridiculous for anyone to object to the commander of an airship, or its chief engineer, entering those parts of it that are set aside for the social intercourse of ladies and gentlemen. As for his duties as engineering officer, he has assistants to take care of that. During ascensions and landings, his post is at the engineering station in the belly of the airship. For the rest, he makes occasional inspections to see that everything is running smoothly.

  He goes down a stairway to B-deck, and at the rear of the crew’s quarters he pushes open the aluminum door to the catwalk leading aft along the keel. Through openings in the skin of the airship—a man could slip and fall to his death through them—he catches glimpses of the sea below. All is going well. The huge machine is speeding exactly along its planned path. The crew in the control cabin is doing its job, and the mechanics are doing theirs. Günther is responsible for everything connected with the technical si
de of the airship, not only the engines but the trim and lift. Above him in the shadows are the enormous gas-cells, attached to the girders of the airship with a maze of cables. He knows that the airship will have used only about twelve percent of its fuel on the flight from Frankfurt to London, exactly balancing the loss of hydrogen seeping out through the permeable skin of the cells. With favorable winds, the ship could fly to Japan nonstop. In the passenger quarters is a motley assortment of religious fanatics: cross old Englishwomen, muscular but stupid young men, pockmarked metaphysicians.

  Günther, a reader of Nietzsche and Max Weber, is prone to see symbols everywhere in the world about him. At this moment he is having a revelation in which he sees the Zeppelin (he can’t help thinking of it as a Zeppelin) as a metaphor of the world in our time. Built by Germans out of the scraps of their old weapons, guided by Germans, it breasts courageously into the future. The passengers are carried along in it all unwitting, trusting in its high-flown name to carry them unscathed into a new era. The League of Nations! If he had been given a hand in naming it, he would have called it the Swan Boat, after the fabulous vessel in Lohengrin which carries off the hero in its prow. The strains of the finale ring in his head, the Wagner he forbade himself to play in the lounge because it was too revealing, it too nakedly exposed the yearnings of the National Soul. Music compensates Günther for a great deal. It nourishes his secret nature as a poet, more precisely a poet-engineer, one whose imagination and sensitivity mingle with his expertise at manipulating the machines of the new century. At the bottom he is a Wagnerian, seeing the world in poetic, magic, and heroic terms, as a battlefield, essentially, for the display of Teutonic virtue. His own name, quintessential Germanic, wearing its umlaut like a tiny crown, might be that of a Wagnerian hero.