The Carp Castle

by MacDonald Harris

  His face sinks into his hands. When he raises his head again the lights have come on in the hall and Moira has disappeared. The glowing letters over her head are extinguished. The massed bodies in the hall “sit dumbstruck for a few minutes, then they stand up like sleepwalkers and begin trickling toward the exits. The Captain stands up too and puts his cap on, squaring it exactly over his forehead. A few people stare at him curiously. His uniform has brass buttons on the coat and four gold stripes on the sleeves. The cap is really a curious headgear. A stiff black band encircles his head, then blossoms out like a white cloud with a flat top. This cloud is held in shape by a steel spring on the inside. The short visor is not functional; it merely serves to distinguish his cap from the caps of enlisted men which have no visors. On the front of the cap is an enamel ornament in the shape of a world, the insignia of the Zeppelin Company. The Captain nods to the people who are staring at him, his sea-gray eyes reflecting nothing. Then he picks his way politely through them toward the exit of the hall.

  In the dressing room Moira, with Aunt Madge Foxthorn’s help, doffs her gown, slippers, and other regalia and quickly puts on her plain linen dress, throwing on a light raincoat over it. Where is her hat? She sets it square on her head and takes her umbrella.

  “May I accompany you?”

  “No.”

  “It’s late. And it may rain.”

  “I see my path. And it is safe from harm.”

  Outside in the Kensington Road she holds up the umbrella to flag a taxi. A few people who have attended the séance are still trickling out of the hall, but no one recognizes her. It has rained but now a dim moon slips through the clouds. She gets into the black hearse-shaped vehicle and the door shuts. The taxi spins along the wet street, circles the park, and threads its way through the traffic of Baker Street. In Prince Albert Road it turns off into the quiet street lined with trees. No one is about and the pavements are deserted. In the dark the house with its marble vestibule seems funereal; the spikes of the gate glow in the moonlight. The garden in the front is overhung with Edgar Allan Poe trees. Moira hurries through the gate, rings at the door, and is admitted.

  Annie is not alone, in spite of the lateness of the hour. The door is opened by the same brown man as always, strikingly handsome, with large honey-colored eyes. He is no longer young but still seems youthful; he has changed into an aged boy. There is a busty woman in a flowered dress, and another pair of women in what appear to be white nightgowns. Mr. Blaise is still there, shrunken away until he is hardly more than a smiling fencepost with a halo of white hair. Annie is standing to greet her; always before she has been sitting on the divan.

  “Moira, my dear. Blessed One.”

  “My dear Annie.”

  They embrace. Then Annie leads her away to the rear of the house, to her private study where Moira has never been. It is a small room full of oriental furniture, shawls, pillows, and incense burners. They sit down on the heaped pillows, and the brown man pours the usual Indian tea, in plain earthenware cups without saucers. Then he disappears.

  There is a low table heaped with books and manuscripts. Annie’s pen rests on the proofs of a book which she has half corrected. There are envelopes with foreign stamps, perfumed candles, and a small bronze of Isis in the form of a cat. Annie is wearing her snake ring; she fingers it absently.

  “You are much in the news these days, Blessed Moira. I saw a picture in the newspaper of your airship landing at Croydon.”

  Moira smiles. “It is called the League of Nations. I wonder if you wouldn’t like to come down to Croydon to see it.”

  “I seldom go out these days.”

  “I could come for you in a car.”

  It is a moment before Annie answers. “I wonder if you are a little too caught up in this new toy of yours, Blessed Moira. We live in a century of bustling factories and busy minds. In it the spirit is crushed. Men think only of making money and begetting offspring to do the same. The machine is our enemy, the enemy of the spirit. But you fly from Germany to England in an airship powered by great engines. You speak to reporters of a spiritual voyage which is to be accomplished in this terrible machine.”

  “Terrible?”

  “A poet speaks of great battles in the sky, of poison raining down on cities. This has already happened to us in London. I myself saw the bodies lying in the rubble of buildings. I heard the cries of dying children. No act of the spirit is possible in the presence of this hatred and destruction. Even inanimate stones do not kill children. Even dumb animals do not rain poison on cities.”

  “There is no poison in my airship.”

  “These things are made by men, Blessed Moira. Do you imagine that a hand of woman has touched that hard metal? We have talked of this before, you and I. The future of spiritualism, the elevation of all mankind to the Astral Plane, lies in the hands of half the human race. Only men make war. Only men fashion weapons of destruction. Only men stir together powders that blast the soul from the body and cause unimaginable suffering. Only men have made a religion of killing bulls, a sport of urging on dogs to tear foxes apart with their teeth, a solemn duty of hanging other men by their necks with ropes. We cannot rise to the Astral Plane in a machine made by men.”

  “We must love all mankind, Annie, not only our Sisters. Men can’t help it if they are lustful and violent. It’s a thing that courses in their blood. It’s a form of madness, a sickness which we must cure through love.”

  Annie fixes her with a penetrating glance. “You once caused the death of a man who was lustful, violent, and drunken.”

  “Death?”

  “You caused him to leave his body.”

  Moira pales. “How do you know that?”

  “Perhaps you told me and have forgotten. Perhaps I saw it in a Vision.”

  “I didn’t will to cause it. I only decided not to prevent it.”

  “That is the cunning of woman, Moira. We must be cunning, because the power is theirs. What you did was wrong by the laws of men, but you did it with a cunning that veiled it in the raiment of grace. Have you forgotten that there is no death, only change? The forms of life must pass away in order that life can move to higher planes. When we step in the meadow we crush grass, but the corruption of grass feeds the life of trees.”

  It takes Moira a moment to realize that she is still speaking of Jock and his pitiful end. “If anybody but you said that it would be called sophism.”

  Annie smiles. “Sophism, gluttony, thoughts of lust. I permit myself many things that I didn’t when I was younger. I’m old now, Blessed Moira. I won’t be in my body much longer.”

  She turns to embrace her, more fervently than she did in the hall; Moira feels the firm robust breasts press against her own. She is aware of the scent of patchouli and incense. Then Annie breaks away and reaches for something on the low table. The lamp goes out. There is still a little light in the room from some source; perhaps it penetrates the thick curtain on the window. As her eyes adjust Moira makes out a patch of wall across the room. Annie takes her hand and holds it tightly. “You must squeeze back. We must be joined together in bonds of iron.”

  Moira tightens the grip of her hand. Her fingers ache and she feels a moisture forming where the palms meet.

  “Madame,” Annie intones in a low voice.

  And again, “Madame.”

  Particle by particle, Moira sees forming on the wall the visage of a corpulent old woman. She is clad in black with a black hood over her head. She is resting her chin on her hands, and on her finger is the snake-ring set with an emerald. The tiny spot of green flares on the wall. Moira is transfixed by the old woman’s Medusa glance. There is something uncanny about her eyes; they seem to bulge, and the pupils almost touch the upper lids, even though she is staring straight ahead.

  Moira shudders. The old woman does not move. Then she begins to disappear again, piece by piece as she had appeared. The room is once more dark. Moira feels the touch of Annie’s hand, then the sensation of the serpe
nt-ring slipping gently onto her finger. It is the ring that a moment before was on the hand of the old woman in the apparition.

  “She was my mother,” says Annie. “Sometimes a terrible mother, but I owe my life in the spirit entirely to her. Her book set fire to my soul. And then I met her in the flesh, and I cannot tell you what happened then. She was a terrible woman, and a saint. A Goddess. She taught me that there are no mothers or daughters, only Sisters.”

  She presses a kiss onto Moira’s lips, one that lasts a little longer than the others. She says, “Go, Blessed Moira. Go into the sky with your terrible machine. Shantih.”

  Moira feels the arms about her slipping away. She gropes her way to the door and opens it. The light from the hallway comes into the room, and she looks behind her to see if there is a Magic Lantern, or a button on the table that Annie has pressed, but there is nothing.

  In the entrance hall the brown man, without a word, hands her her overcoat and her umbrella. A taxi appears as if by magic in the dark street, where a wind is setting the clouds scudding across the sky. It is late at night and the streets are empty. The small head of the driver is bent over his wheel. He seems a gnome or a figure from some frightening German story. Down Baker Street he goes to Moira’s hotel, which faces onto the Green Park. At the door of the hotel she gets out and passes a coin through the dark window to the driver. He has never turned his head and she didn’t get a very good look at him. She stares after the taxi until the red light disappears at the end of the street, then she enters the hotel and goes up to her room.

  It is a spacious suite with a sitting room, a bedroom, and a bath. She sets her umbrella in the stand and takes off her raincoat, then she holds up her hand to look at the ring in the light from the lamp. The serpent resembles a carving in a medieval church; it is more a man in serpent form than a real snake. The pupils of the eyes are formed of minute, almost invisible gems; she has not noticed this before. Oddly enough, she feels not a repugnance for the ring but an affection for it, as though it has always been hers.

  Her lips are still burning from Annie’s kiss. To cool herself she turns off the lamp and opens the window onto the park. Immediately she feels calm. The moon appears in a rift in the moving clouds. She thinks of the improbability of the moon, a large spherical object hanging in space thousands of miles away, yet clearly visible. In some way that she doesn’t entirely understand, it is held in its place by gravity. Newton considered gravity to be a divine force, the purest expression of Godly will. Since gravity controls the universe, it follows that the celestial bodies influence the organic and spiritual worlds in every manner and form. It seems to her, looking out into the quiet park in the moonlight, that she encompasses all nature, even though she would be unable to explain it in words and doesn’t even know what gravity is. Or electricity, or consciousness, or the force that drives the color into the flower.

  She thinks about the sinister old woman glowing on the wall. She was only an apparition, a trick of sparks on the retina. These newly discovered forces lend themselves easily to charlatanism. She herself knows the power of the jade letters that glow over her head in the séances. But the scientists have only found out a tenth of what is to be known about these things and the other nine tenths is still to be discovered. The doctors have already attached metal plates to people’s skulls and found that thinking produces minute currents that can be traced on paper. The fuel that drives the League of Nations through the sky is ignited by tiny sparks. Might not the same be true of the human soul? The day will come when sticks and stones are conscient, when animals have intelligence, and when men become gods. Before that there will be much struggle and much suffering. Machines will turn on their makers, seers will become witches, saints will have intercourse with Satan.

  The old woman’s eyes still haunt her. The glance was unsettling because it seemed to come from a source that was more than mortal. Did Annie want to frighten her out of her plan, her dreamed-of voyage to Gioconda? Or did Madame Blavatsky really appear to her, a presence from the beyond, to warn her of the temerity of her plan? It doesn’t matter; either way she is not dissuaded. She will follow her Vision. The truths she tells her followers are only half truths, fables for children. The children must grow up before they can be given the stories for adults. The moonlight gleams on the wet grass, sparkles in the diamonds of the trees. The warmth of her lips has spread now to her soul, and she feels a great ecstasy. She thinks with pleasure of the silken banner that streams from the airship when it is aloft. The world is a great heart, and its shape is the shape of love. Annie is nothing. Madame Blavatsky is nothing. She herself is nothing. There is only love.

  SIX

  In London, in their hotel in the Cromwell Road, Eliza shares a room with Joan Esterel and Romer shares one with John Basil Prell. To be together, they sit in a tea shop in South Kensington, but they can’t hold hands under the table because there are no tablecloths and it would be too conspicuous. There are various other creatures in the tea shop: two old ladies of a kind found only in London, in flowered print dresses and hats with veils; a retired military officer reading the Times, a pair of silly shop-girls, and a greasy individual with a long face, dressed entirely in black, who is perhaps an unfrocked clergyman. The tea is pallid and the spoons are not quite clean. Eliza would like to show her England to Romer in its best aspect but this is not an auspicious place to start.

  “If only we had a place to be alone together.”

  “Maybe we could go to another hotel where we could take a room of our own.”

  “They might ask us for a marriage certificate.”

  “Besides,” says Romer, “it’s Moira’s wish that we should stay in the hotel rooms she allots us.”

  An awe strikes them, as it always does when Moira’s name comes up, a kind of hushed respect for the power of change she has wrought in their lives. An emerald tinge, the color of Moira’s charisma, now fills the air for them, and has since the day they first encountered her. It is a feeling something like being in love; you may forget it from time to time, it may slip away to an unnoticed part of your mind, but it is still there and suddenly you remember: I’m in love! It’s a reservoir of bliss lying in your soul ready to be tapped at any moment. Thus the bond that binds them to Moira, who has spoken to the fundamental Self in each of them and left there a bliss imbedded in the particles of the blood. Neither one of them would knowingly do anything that was against Moira’s will. Romer still frets over their failure to greet her when she arrived in the League of Nations in Frankfurt, and to attend the séance that night. For her part Eliza attributes this to her wasp-stings and blames it on Romer. Yet she loves Romer. As much as she loves Moira? In a different way. It’s a different thing.

  “I don’t think it’s Moira who makes the hotel arrangements. It’s Cereste Legrand. And behind him is Aunt Madge Foxthorn, a horrible old puritan. In my opinion she’s the one who decides who’s going to room with whom. Moira doesn’t bother herself about such things.”

  “Exactly what I think.”

  “But everything that happens in the Guild is Moira’s will.”

  “Of course it is. We’ve talked about this before. Moira knows all about us. She has clairvoyance and clairaudience. She sees everything that happens. Even our picnic in the woods with wasps. She knew about that when it happened.” He thinks of telling Eliza about the jeweled watch he found in the grass, but decides not to. “It’s a part of her plan. She wants us to be happy.”

  “But Romer. Don’t we have free will? Don’t we choose what we do? How can she exert this—power over us if we decide what we’re going to do and then we go and do it? Like when we disobeyed her. Our walk in the dark that rainy night, and the café in the park.”

  Having got onto something he understands, a metaphysical question, Romer is happy to explain. “We choose what we’re going to do. But she knows that we’re going to do it. In that sense our actions are determined, since we can’t change that knowledge in her thoughts of what
we’re going to do. But we don’t know what we’re going to do until we decide, so we’re free to choose. It’s like the idea of God according to Augustine. He knows what you’re going to do next, but He doesn’t cause it. It’s you who decide to do it. He gives you free will so you can decide. It’s God’s will that men and women should mate. It’s necessary for His plan. It’s Moira’s will that we should be lovers. But it’s we who did it, that day in the woods.”

  “Oh, didn’t we!”

  All this talk of love is making Eliza feel amorous. They exchange glances and get up from the table. She pays for the tea, because she has the income from her small annuity. An idea strikes her. She still has her Bayswater bed-sitter; she has gone on paying the rent on it all these months. Without telling him where they are going, she leads him past the Victoria and Albert Museum, up the Gloucester Road, and across the park. It’s on the path of her old walks; they pass Dr. Bono’s office. The room is in a grubby street not far from Paddington. She hasn’t got her key with her —bad planning that—and she has to seek out the porter in the basement. He won’t give her a key, but he agrees to go up with the pair of them and unlock the door with his passkey. Then he disappears discreetly.