Down the breastbone of the Swan he treads, keeping his feet close together because of the narrowness of the catwalk. Through the openings under his feet he looks for signs of the Kentish coast coming up, a sight he saw many times during the War. There is still only the sea with the afternoon sun slanting across it. He is unable to banish a certain image from his thoughts, that of the English girl in the lounge with her head bent toward her lover. Some old Dane in the Dark Ages must have bequeathed her that red hair, those freckles, the ungainly way her body is joined. There were girls like that in Leipzig when he was a lad in school; he remembers them now with an ache of nostalgia. He is attracted to her blemishes as much as to her graces. Her elongated face, her aloofness, her coltish way of rising from a chair and walking as though each of her bone-joints is a sensuous nexus. You are no beauty, mein Schatz, he tells her in his mind. But there are spots even on the sun.
Life is not easy for people like Günther. He knows that he is no beauty either; his face is round and red, his nose is comic, his fingers blunt (but they come alive by magic when he touches the piano), his eyes too small and too close together. Neither has he had the social advantages of some people. His father was a hide-dealer in Leipzig, his mother a peasant out of a Breughel painting. If you are born a Junker like Von Plautus, it doesn’t inevitably make you happy but it certainly paves the way. He imagines the boyhood of Von Plautus on a Prussian estate: a large house full of books, private tutors, cultivated conversation, a name with Von in it to carry out into the world as a badge or privilege. He becomes a Zeppelin commander; he passes through the War unscathed when others are killed. And with all these advantages, what does he do? He spurns the gentle sex and flirts with sailors. Of course his mother was French. That accounts for a great deal.
Günther does not dislike Von Plautus, instead he feels an odd kind of brotherhood for him. They are both German officers, the last remnants in the industrial world of the old medieval chivalry. Of course it is to industry, he reflects as he treads down the catwalk, that we owe Zeppelins. Another one of his symbolic insights strikes him: suppose they had Zeppelins in the time of Wotan and Siegfried. They would have seemed perfectly natural, another intrusion of magic into the world on a heroic scale. A fish-shaped castle which descends to carry off the hero, like the Swan Boat in Lohengrin. He imagines a knight in white armor in the control car looking forward through the windscreen, his sword held before him with its point resting on the aluminum deck. On the breast of his armor is a black Maltese cross. At his command, his minions guide the Carp Castle across the sky.
As though catching a fever, Günther’s mind generates more and more fanciful images of this palace in the air: aluminum walls hung with tapestries, hearths with burning logs, oxen turning on spits, trumpets sounding fanfares, diademed contraltos, Heldentenors with horned helmets, and a teeming warren of supernumeraries: gnomes, trolls, dwarfs, Undines, foresters, albino triplets, magical blacksmiths, troubadours and Meistersingers, poisoners, assassins, and pilgrims; a whole Wagnerian pageant. In some rooms monks at aluminum desks are writing on parchment, in others maidens twist aluminum wire into tunics for heroes. Intrigues, plots, romances. The palace soars off toward a Grail visible in the clouds, toward the apotheosis of the Hero, who stands in the control car with his sword erect before him.
Günther imagines changing bodies with Von Plautus if for only an hour, donning the immaculate armor of his flesh while Von Plautus puts on his clown-suit. Then he might appear before the English girl shining and tall with his helm gleaming in the sun. But she has eyes only for her scar-faced student, the one with the sunken cheeks; a metaphysician he is said to be. Metaphysics, thinks Günther, setting one foot and then another on the narrow silver rail, is the study of non-existent entities. It turn its back on all that is real in the world; earth, air, fire, and water; tools, weapons, the bodies of women, forges, the hardness of stone, the precision of micrometers. He himself is occasionally tempted by the invisible, but he remembers that his loyalty is toward things that are solid. He has spent his life seriously trying to master one thing and one thing only, his profession of engineer, to understand engines as others, professors and scholars, understand the Upanishads or the economic history of the Hanseatic League. And yet he is sensitive too to all that is evanescent and beautiful in the living world. Imagine a Von Plautus playing Schumann or thinking of a Carp Castle. It is he, Günther, who has created the airship. It is the marriage of engineering and poetry, his two specialties.
He comes to the engineering station about midway down the hull. Here his sub-officer sits in a tiny hutch staring at his dials. He rises to bow to his superior officer, and Günther nods stiffly in return. Opposite the engineering station is a hatch through which Günther has a view of one of the four engine gondolas. It is the size of a small automobile, hanging from the hull on struts. At its nose is the spinning propeller. Inside it is the twelve-cylinder Maybach engine, along with a mechanic to tend it, lubricate it, and obey the commands from the control car by adjusting the throttle or throwing the propeller into reverse. The mechanic is part of the mechanism of the dirigible just as the engine is; a space has been provided for him in the gondola that is just large enough for him and no larger. His white face peers out through a porthole. Günther stares back at him for a moment and then goes on to inspect the other three engines.
The mechanic in the gondola, Siggi Loewenthal, is twenty-two years old and comes from Munich. He is bored by the noise, the stench of oil, and the vibration. As soon as the engineer’s face has disappeared from the hatch in the hull of the dirigible, he gets out his book again and goes on reading it. It is a much-thumbed greasy paperback book with the corners turned over, a treatise by an obscure Austrian politician who wrote it in prison. It was published only a year ago, but Siggi is the twelfth person to have read this copy. It is called Mein Kampf. Siggi is not a reader by nature and has to concentrate to keep his mind focussed on the page. He reads: “Nature has not reserved the soil of Europe for the future possession of any particular nation or race; on the contrary, this soil exists for the people which possesses the force to take it.”
Under the League of Nations passes a rock with surf breaking on it, then a lighthouse, then a chalky cliff with a beach at its feet: the Kentish coast near Folkestone. The passengers in the lounge rush to see it; on the other side of the dirigible the waiters look out from the windows of the salon. Eliza too is gazing down at this odd sight of her native land. Romer, taking advantage of the moment when all the other passengers are at the windows, slips the small-jeweled wristwatch from his pocket and drops it into the bowl of marbles on the piano.
Only a few others aboard the airship ignore the landfall, or are unaware of it. In the galley the assistant cook scrapes plates into the garbage barrel to be removed at Croydon, while the messmen scrub the forty copper molds in which the galantine of pheasant was made. Aunt Madge Foxthorn makes her way down a corridor on the lower deck. At the end of it she presses a button, and the door is opened by a silent steward who examines her as though he were admitting her into an American speakeasy. She passes into a small windowless room thick with smoke; she can barely see the three figures sitting in armchairs with little tables before them. They are Cereste Legrand, Joshua Main, and the German engineer, whom she has never met. She takes her seat in one of the armchairs.
The others examine her curiously to see what she will smoke. She rummages in her reticule, comes out with a box of Spanish cigarillos, and lights one with a match from the box on the table. Because of the hydrogen aboard, matches are not allowed in any part of the League of Nations except the smoking room. In the galley the stoves are electric, and members of the crew are searched for smoking materials when they come on board. The steward standing by the door would pounce on any of them who attempted to leave the smoking room with a match.
Günther is smoking a cheroot and Cereste Legrand a Havana. Günther looks with amusement at the black-clad old woman and inquires, “Ameri
can?”
Aunt Madge Foxthorn takes out her cigarillo, as though to show it to him, and says, “Spanish.”
“No, I mean are you American.”
“English.”
“Much the same thing.”
She smiles.
Joshua Main is smoking a cheap stogie and has brought a bottle of Irish whisky with him which he offers roguishly to the others; Cereste Legrand accepts but the engineer declines. Aunt Madge Foxthorn points her egg in the direction of the drinkers, but says nothing.
In the lounge the passengers look down on the rolling Kentish downs, the whitewashed farm buildings, the strangely-shaped oast-houses for drying hops, like whitewashed dunce-caps. Here and there a white face stares up at the airship. A ploughman brings his horse to a stop and looks up at it with his fists on his hips, turning as it passes like a sunflower following the sun. In the town of Sevenoaks a group of children in the High Street catch sight of it and wave. It is late afternoon; the shadow of the dirigible advances over the countryside ahead of it like a slow and methodical oval foot, climbing up over a church-tower, splaying to descend into a dell. The Captain looks out through the windscreen with his binoculars, trying to catch a glimpse of the flashing light at the Croydon aerodrome. From a compartment near the tail, four crewmen pull up the immense silken banner; the heart-shaped world disappears into the hull.
FIVE
In a dressing room of the Albert Hall in London Moira is preparing herself for her séance. The event is an important one; never before has she appeared in such a large hall before so large an audience. Tonight the many-colored threads of her past are to be twisted into a single point before they radiate out again into her unique and invisible destiny. With her in the dressing room are Aunt Madge Foxthorn, a Vestal to serve as her dresser, and Cereste Legrand, who is charged with the lighting, atmosphere, and special effects of the séance.
Cereste Legrand is well prepared for his task, since he spent many years as a circus impresario in Europe. The Albert Hall, in fact, has a certain resemblance to a circus tent. It has a large oblong domed roof, and its seats are laid out like those in a circus, arranged radially around the stage. The seats behind the stage are valued by music lovers, who can see the musicians from the rear and, almost, read their scores while they play. These seats are cordoned off with velvet ropes and will remain empty tonight, like all those that do not face directly toward the plinth where Moira will stand in her aureole of green light. No one will see her from the rear or the side. Under Cereste Legrand’s supervision the lamp that holds the five green letters has been hung with fine wires from the ceiling of the hall. It is a box of tin painted black, and the wires too are black, so that they are invisible in the dim lighting of the hall. Set into the front of the box are the five letters cut from the finest Chinese jade, so thin that light passes through them as it would through colored glass. When light passes through a jewel it acquires a special force, the power to bind souls in thrall. It was a friend of Moira, a friend who lives in this very city, who taught her this secret of the phenomenal world.
Moira takes off her street clothes and stands for a moment in her underwear. Cereste Legrand has seen her thus many times, and it affects him no more than a half-clothed Blessed Virgin in a painting would. She holds up her arms while the green gown embroidered with M’s is slipped over her head. The Vestal fastens around her the braided belt ending in a knot at her groin, and Aunt Madge: Foxthorn brushes her hair. In place of the headband of the Vestals she wears a simple diadem of gold set with emeralds, an ornament that came from a museum in Provence and once adorned the effigy of some saint in a medieval church. She lifts her feet, first one and then the other, while the Vestal fits onto them her slippers of gold lamé. It is not possible to sit down while wearing the embroidered gown; it is too stiff. Aunt Madge Foxthorn, putting her finger into a little pot of kohl, darkens the lids of her closed eyes. She wears no other cosmetics. Her golden hair, her pale skin, and the magnetic power of her eyes are the raiment of a sibyl and require no ornament. The Vestal trembles as she touches Moira to adjust the gown. Moira, chattering to the others only a few moments before, has become calm and radiant. She turns and embraces Aunt Madge Foxthorn, so that the protuberance in her friend’s forehead almost touches her own brow.
In the great hall the lighting is dim and an Egyptian gloom fills the air. Moira, with Aunt Madge Foxthorn at her elbow, steals down an underground corridor and goes up a short flight of stairs. She comes up just at the side of the plinth. No one sees her until she emerges into the green glow which, beginning as an almost invisible glimmer, has grown gradually brighter as Cereste Legrand, concealed in the orchestra pit, turns a rheostat. The murmur of voices in the hall stops and there is a kind of sigh, as though coming from the air itself. The faces in the hall are all turned in the same direction, pale and tinted like spring leaves by the light radiating on them. A strange aroma floats in the air, weak and almost undetectable, with a tang of the orient, a hint of the occult. This is frankincense, sprayed from an atomizer in the ceiling, a scent forgotten since the Middle Ages except by a handful of perfumers. It is a few moments before Moira speaks. Time stops. The hall is silent except for the very faint sound of people breathing. Her voice, metallic and silky, fills the corners of the hall even though she seems to speak only in a normal tone.
“My friends, beloved ones, Children of Love, the hour approaches that we have awaited for so long, the hour we have prepared with our devotion and our vision, our abstinence from the pleasures of the world, the hour of the voyage to Gioconda …”
Even in her childhood Moira made up stories to herself about magical places, distant kingdoms, and far-away places with kings and queens, knights, perils, and romances. She had a strong pictorial imagination, and by concentrating her mental forces she was able to see these scenes and characters in her mind with great clarity. She could spend hours composing for herself, and at the same time watching, elaborate pageants in which these colorful shapes made love and quarreled, plotted crimes, seized thrones, played at being shepherds, and embarked in gilded boats for islands in the sea. The pictures appeared at the top of her field of vision, so that they were like something seen out of the corner of the eye, except upward instead of to the side. They were as clear as photographs, but if she tried to see them with more accuracy by looking upward they moved higher and remained at the edge of her vision. She thus had to guess a little at what they portrayed; but she became very good at guessing. She learned in time to evoke not only pictures but sounds; she could call up the different voices of girls and women, the barking of dogs, the plash of ripples at the bow of a boat, so clearly that they rang in her real ears and echoed from the walls of the room. It was as though whenever she wanted she could open a closet door in her mind and gaze at a beautiful play that was performed there, and there were hundreds of closets.
She never told anyone about her pictures, knowing that they would not be understood and she would only be considered odd, and they remained her secret all through her childhood. Her parents hardly knew what to make of her; she seemed happy and independent, asking nothing of them, enclosed in a private world they could not penetrate. Her redeeming quality was her beauty; even as a child she drew gasps of admiration from those who saw her for the first time. She had golden hair, green eyes, and a pale Irish complexion, so pale that she would have seemed unwell if she had not been so vivacious. Her features were perfectly formed, and the fragility of her small hands and feet lent her a grace that seemed fairy-like.
Her family, which was well-to-do and prominent in the Irish contingent of Boston society, sent her to an excellent finishing school in Connecticut. She did well in school, learning French, German, and elocution, and she was trained to walk with a book on her head which gave her a stately grace that lasted the rest of her life. The school had an orchestra which was run by the aged music teacher, Mr. Paumunker. Each girl who applied for it had to select an instrument. Moira rejected the ladylike violin,
and the ignominious triangle-and-wood-block, the choice of the ten-thumbed and tone-deaf. The instrument that attracted her was the trumpet, shiny and polished, with an arcane shape so that it was impossible to see how all the turnings and bends connected to one another and where they went when they disappeared into the center. Every part of it fascinated her: the shiny brass coils, the three smoothly oiled pistons, the flaring bell that narrowed into the mystery of the dark passages inside, the small cup at the other end that fitted the lips like a kiss. The sound it made was the fanfare of kings bearing gifts; it could be modulated from the sweet and insinuating to the brassy and clangorous. You spat into it and out the other end came the voice of Gabriel. The trumpet was chaste like a lover; it belonged to only one person and could be used by another only after much wiping with a handkerchief for revirginification. The liquor of your body was projected into its entrails, and after that it belonged to you.
During her four years in school Moira kept the nerves of her fellow students in a frayed state by playing the trumpet at all hours in her room. She became adept at the most intricate passages in the music Mr. Paumunker passed out in the orchestra room, and she went on to even more difficult pieces which she found in the school library. She was able to transpose passages from one key to the other, or to play on the trumpet pieces originally written for the clarinet or harpsichord. In time she became interested in the mysterious relations of one note with another. Why was it that, when a certain two notes were played together, a deeply satisfying thrumming filled the air, while another combination of notes produced only the sound of a fingernail on a blackboard? Why were there only seven notes, and why did they go on repeating themselves endlessly to the top of the scale? And why did they have letters on them and not numbers?
Moira got a piece of paper and wrote on it: MOIRA. Then she wrote out the seven notes from A to G in a line, and began another line with the next seven letters of the alphabet, and so on.
The Carp Castle Page 16