The Zimiamvia Trilogy

by E R Eddison

  On the steps before the front door stood old Ruth: installed now as housekeeper at this manor house of Nether Wastdale, but still wearing cap and apron, as from years ago she had done, when she had had charge, as nurse, of Lessingham and of all his brothers and sisters before him.

  ‘Well, Ruth,’ giving her the key of his suitcase which had gone round to the back door, ‘you got my telegram?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Any news from her ladyship?’

  ‘No, sir. Nothing so far.’

  ‘She’ll be here tomorrow. Miss Janet asleep?’

  ‘Ay, she is: heavenly lamb. Jessie’ll put out your things, in the dressing-room as soon as I just unlock the lobby door upstairs, sir. Everything’s ready there according to standing orders.’

  ‘No, I’ll not sleep there tonight. The small room at the end of the west gallery tonight. O and, Ruth,’ he called her back. ‘You understand – they all understand, do they? Not a word to her ladyship when she arrives, about my being here first.’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Don’t let there be any mistake about it.’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Right. I’ll dine in the Refuge.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ The old woman hesitated. Something, some obscure throbbing perhaps in the air about him of that gay hunting-music, obviously eased her mind. ‘Please sir, if so happen her ladyship puts me the straight question, will you have me to tell her ladyship a falsehood, Mr Edward, sir?’

  ‘What you’ve got to do, my dear Ruth, is not to let on and spoil the game. If you can’t do that much, without telling a downright fib, you’re not the woman I’ve known you for.’

  ‘Mr Edward was always one to have his joke,’ she said to David later.

  ‘Ay, and her ladyship’s a one too, bless her. But what beats me’s his rampaging round with them there dang’d aeroplanes: hating and cursing ’em like he do, it’s a caution. If he goes and breaks his neck one of these days, I’d be right sorry.’

  ‘What’d you do then, David?’

  ‘Reckon I’d have to find a new situation.’

  ‘Like this?’

  ‘Ay.’

  ‘Is there one, think you?’

  ‘May be not.’

  ‘Back to Mr Eric’s at Snittlegarth?’

  ‘Not at my time of life! Mr Edward’s a bit rough-like sometimes. But Mr Eric, when he’s in his tantrums, they do say as these days he’s nobbut a stark staring madman.’

  ‘Where’d you go, then, David?’

  ‘To that there Jackson Todd’s.’

  ‘That’s good! Why, he’s dead now, be’n’t he?’

  ‘Another like him, then. That’s your gentleman nowadays. Got the brass, all right: but no better ’n a regular black card. I’ve see’d him at a shoot, over on them moors far side of Mungrisdale, afore Mr Eric took ’em over. Did himself main well over his lunch, he did: had about a quart of champagne, he did. And there he were, a-yawkening and a-bawkening like a regular black card.’

  The same night Lessingham, in his way to bed, paused at the top of the wide staircase. With his master-key, that lived under the bezel of the ring on his left hand, he unlocked the lobby door on the right there, and went in. At the end of the lobby another doorway, doorless and heavily curtained, led into the Lotus Room: a room forty or fifty feet in length, newly built out upon the east wing of this old house. At the ends, west and east, were tall windows, and high-mantled open fire-places between them. Since its building, three years ago, few had set eyes on this bedchamber, or on the porphyry and onyx bathrooms or the dressing-room or Lessingham’s great studio, upon which a door opened in the north wall, to the left of the bed: a four-posted bed, spread wide and of great magnificence, with hangings and coverlets of heavy bay-green figured silk and sweet-smelling pillars of sandalwood inlaid with gold. Candles, by scores, stood ready for lighting, upon tables and mantelshelves and in sconces on the walls; but at present the only light in the room was of electric bulbs, concealed in the chandeliers of crystal that, like clusters of gigantic globular fruits, hung from the ceiling.

  Pausing in the doorway, he leisurely overwent the room with his eyes, as a man might some matter which he partly disbelieves. The ring, key exposed, was still in his hand: Mary’s wedding-present, of massive gold having no alloy in it, in the shape of a scaled worm, tail in mouth, and the head of the worm the bezel of the ring, a ruby of great age and splendour: the worm Ouro-boros, symbol of eternity, the beginning of which is also the end, and the end the beginning. And now, coming to the fire-place over against the bed, he unlocked with that key the doors of a cabinet set in the chimney-breast above the mantel and, gently, needfully, as an artist traces a curve, opened them left and right. Backing a few paces, he sat down on the sofa at the bed’s foot and considered the picture thus disclosed.

  And so it was presently, as if the picture spoke. As to say: In me, a portrait, constructed by you, upon canvas, with pigments ground in oil, some limited perduration is in a shorthand way, given to a fleeting moment. Looking at me, remember in your eye, in your ear, in your nostril, in your secret blood, what was present in that moment; and then, by all these senses under the might that is in you forced together, remember what was not present, nor shall be. Never present. Ever on the doorstep – L’Absente de tous bouquets.

  To Lessingham now, sitting so in his contemplation, it was as if in the edge of his field of vision the carved lotuses of the frieze, under the hot flame of that picture bared, stirred slightly. The rude hunger of the flesh was become, as wind at night sets stars a-sparkle, the undistinguishable integument of some spiritually informing presence: of a presence which, so in the picture as in life, with a restful deep unrest underlay each perfection of the body. And in a strange violent antinomy, the alone personality of Mary, that, serene and unalterable, queened it in every feature of the face – more, in the whole deep indwelling music of body and limb – seemed, by some fiery intermarriage of incompatibles, to take into this particular self that universal, which unhorizoned as sea-spaces at morning or as the ocean of cloud-waves overseen from on high in the faint first incarnadine of a new dawn, rested its infinity in these nakednesses of breast, of flank, of somnolent exquisite supple thigh, and in these sudden mindblinding dazzlements of curled hair shadowing the white skin. All which unspeakable whole, out of the paint and out of the awaked remembrance, said: Would you have Me otherwise? Me, always here? given you without the sweat and the agony and the birth-pang of the mind? – No, my friend. Not in Elysium even.

  For, said the picture (and said the painter, to himself, out of himself), passivity is not for you: not for any man. – For a woman? Well, a species of passivity: the illusion, perhaps, of stillness, as at the maelstrom’s center. A passivity that rests in its own most deep assurance of queenship over all overt power. A queenship that subsists even in its vertiginous climacteric of self-surrender:

  A quiet woman

  Is a still water under a great bridge;

  A man may shoot her safely.

  Mary, from her sleeping-carriage, arrived like day on the little lonely platform at Drigg about half past six the next morning: the sun in her eyes, sea-swallows’ voices in her ears, and heady northern sea-smells salt in her nostrils. ‘Leave it in the office, Tom. They’ll come and fetch it this afternoon.’

  ‘Yes, your ladyship,’ said the porter, putting her things on his barrow. He, and in turn the station-master who took her ticket, and the girl doing the steps at the inn, for each of whom she had a happy familiar word as she passed, stood a moment to gaze after her with the estranged look of woodland creatures in whose faces a fire has been brandished suddenly out of the dark.

  It was a sweet morning: fields still wet, and lanes smelling all the way of wild roses and honeysuckle, with now and then heavier luscious wafts from the meadowsweet and sometimes the pungent breath of the golden whin-flowers. So she walked home, seven or eight miles or so, swinging her hat in her hand for pleasure of the air.

&nb
sp; Schooled, doubtless, to these ways, a well ordered household respectfully abstained from telling her that he was there first, and in fact now in his bath. And Mary for her part reading, doubtless, Ruth’s too readable eyes, asked no questions. Only she remarked (falsely true) that the master had missed his train on Saturday morning, and would, it was to be feared, not be home till tomorrow. And so, resignedly, ordered her breakfast in the Refuge with Sheila. And was, resignedly, eating it when Lessingham came down.

  And he, doubtless no less ready to take his cue, watched her for a minute, himself unseen, as, bending her white neck, she rested, chin in hand, in a beautifulness, so self-sufficing, a contemplation so remote and so chill, as it had been some corruptless and timeless divinity, having upon Her (since spirit must corporal be) the habit of woman’s body, and for a small moment come down so.

  IX

  NINFEA DI NEREZZA

  IT was high morning beside Reisma Mere, of Tuesday the twenty-first of July, with the shadows yet long, and with heavy dews that made lace shawls of the gossamer-spiders’ weavings on hedge and wayside plant. Doctor Vandermast, walking his alone, came at unawares in a turn of the path upon the Duke his master. The Duke’s back was towards him; he was in riding gear, and sat, facing away from Reisma, on a trunk of a fallen ash-tree, his horse grazing untethered in the brake near at hand. He was bare-headed, and the sun lighted a smoulder as of copper heating to redness in his short crisp-waved hair. Upon the doctor’s good-morrow he turned with a black look that relented in the turning.

  ‘Your grace is become since but one short month to be as lean and as melancholic as a stag in autumn.’

  ‘Instance, then, of like effects worked by direct opposite causes.’

  Vandermast sat him down on the trunk, not too close but so he might at ease observe Barganax when he would: countenance and bearing. ‘It is but in the merest outwards and superficies that the effects are like. Inwardly, as is sufficiently demonstrated in the treatise De Libertate Humana, Propositio XXX, the mind, in so far as it understandeth itself and its body sub specie aeternitatis, to that extent hath it of necessity an understanding of God, scitque se in Deo esse et per Deum concipi: knoweth itself to exist in God, and to be conceived through God. And so, by how much the zenith standeth above the nadir, by so much more excellent is it to be a man unsatisfied than a four-footed beast satisfied.’

  The Duke let out a bitter laugh. ‘I must call you mad, doctor.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘If you hope to reason with a madman. And, seeing you are mad, and safe so to talk nothings to, here’s a piece of madman’s wisdom came to me out of the suffocations that serve ’stead of air in these suburbs of hell, woman-infected watersides of Reisma, which ’cause I’m mad I turn from but still to return to, as the moth do the candleflame—

  Answere me this You Gods above:

  What’s lecherie withouten Love?—

  A thinge less maym’d (They answer’d mee)

  Than maym’d were Love sans lecherie.’

  ‘In a mad world,’ said the doctor, ‘that should be accounted madness indeed. For, albeit not so well declared as a great clerk can do, yet hath it the reach of unmutable truth; which is whole ever, and of that wholeness paradoxical, and of that paradoxicalness ever a thing that rides double. But the mad will ne’er content till he shall have patterned out to his own most mathematical likings the unpeerable inventions of God, which are the fundament and highest cornerstones of the world universal, both of the seen and of the unseen.’

  ‘Invent some business shall make it needful I go home today to Zayana.’

  Vandermast noted the proud and lovely face of him: haggard now and unspirited, as if he had watched some nights out without sleep. ‘If your grace hath a will to go, what (short of the King’s very command) shall stay or delay you?’

  ‘My own will, which will not will it, unless forced by some outward urgence. I will yet will not. Unforced, I’ll not go: not alone.’

  They sat silent. Vandermast saw the Duke’s nostril widen and a strained stillness of intention overtake the bended poise of his head and face. He looked where the Duke looked. Upon a head of lychnis, that flaming herb, a yard or more beyond Barganax’s foot above a bed of meadowsweet, a butterfly rested, in a quivering soft unrest, now opening now closing again her delicate wings. White and smooth were her wings, as ivory; and ever and again at their spread-eagling set forth to the gaze panther-black splashes exquisitely shaped like hearts. It was as if into the sunshine stillness of morning a heat welled up, out of the half-uncased tremulous beauties of that creature and out of the flower’s scarlet lip, open, amid leaves and so many frislets of tangled fragrancies.

  ‘You in your time, I in mine,’ said the doctor after a while, ‘have wandered in the voluptuous broad way, the common labyrinth of love. We have approved by experiment the wise lesson of the Marchioness of Monferrato, when with a dinner of hens and certain sprightly words she curbed the extravagant passion of the King of France.’

  ‘A dinner of hens?’

  ‘Signifying per allegoriam that even as the so many divers and delectable dishes set before him were each one of them (save for variety of sauces and manner of presentation) nought but plain hen, so, in that commodity, all women are alike. It were well to be certified that it be not but that thing come up again. As the poet saith—

  Injoy’d no sooner but dispised straight,

  Past reason hunted, and, no sooner had,

  Past reason hated, as a swollow’d bayt

  On purpose layd to make the taker mad;

  Mad in pursuit and in possession so;

  Had, having, and in quest to have, extreame;

  A blisse in proofe, and, prov’d, a very wo;

  Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dreame.’

  Barganax, elbow on knee, chin in hand, lips compressed, sat on so when Vandermast had ended, as if weighing it, tasting it profoundly: all very still. When at length he spoke it was softly, as to his own self retired into the secretary of his heart. ‘Truth’s mintage,’ he said: ‘that’s most certain. But that’s but the reverse side. Turn the coin, so: the obverse—

  Here, where all else is fair, I call thee fairest:

  Were the rest foul, foulest of all thou’dst be:

  So faithfully Love’s livery thou wearest,

  Which art of all the rest the epitome.

  Virtues deifical, devils’-milk of wit,

  Eye-bite, maidenly innocence demure—

  No proud and lovely quality but it

  Jewels thine enchantments with its essence pure.

  O best of best, that else were worst of worst,

  Love’s prelibation is to kiss thee first.

  – And the obverse,’ he said, rising to his feet to stand staring over Vandermast, like a leopard at gaze, toward Reisma and the clear-faced morning, ‘is where the principal design is struck.’ He looked down: met the doctor’s eye upon him. ‘Well?’

  Vandermast shook his head. ‘Nay, I find I have trained up your grace to be so good a metaphysician, there’s no step further in the argument. Thesis and antithesis, these be the leaved doors of truth. Philosophy can but show us them: unlock them; may be, set them open for us; but, that being done, it is for ourselves, each soul of us alone, to pass through and see, each for himself, without all guide or perspective-glass to clear the eye if it be purblind. What should a man do with a weapon,’ he said after a moment’s pause, ‘that knoweth not how to use it? There is a He and a She, and a habitude of Them both, which we would have called the love, the union, or the kindness of Them. As Their rule is infinite, Their pleasures are unconfined.’

  The Duke whistled his mare: she left feeding, whinnied, and came to him, delicately over the dew-bedangled grass. In the saddle he paused, then with some tormenting imp of self-mockery dancing in his eye, ‘You have done me no good,’ he said holding out a hand to the learned doctor: ‘left me where I was. O Vandermast,’ he said, gripping the hand of that old man, ‘I am p
lagued to bursting. To bursting, Vandermast.’

  The aged doctor, looking up at him against the blue, beheld how the hot blood suffused all his face with crimson: beheld the hammering of it in his temples and in the great veins of his neck. ‘And blackness,’ said the Duke betwixt his teeth, ‘is the badge of hell.’

  He shook his reins and rode off, a kind of unresolved unwilling pace: not the road to Zayana.

  My Lady Fiorinda was abroad too that morning a-horse-back. At the footbridge by the lake, where six days ago the learned doctor had talked with his water-rat, she came face to face with the Duke. She had walked her horse down to the edge of the stream to water it: he upon the western bank did the like. Three yards of stilled water parted them, and their horses drank at the same stream.

  ‘Fortunately met. I was come to give your ladyship the farewell.’

  ‘Farewell fieldfare?’ said she upon a little eloquency of declension of her head. ‘But is not this an odd up-tails-all procedure: farewell at meeting?’

  ‘No: at parting.’

  She rejoindered with but a satirical flicker of the nostrils.

  ‘I purpose this day,’ he said, ‘to go home to Zayana.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear it.’

  ‘Let’s talk truth for a change.’

  ‘Pray your grace begin, then. It will amuse me to mark a difference.’

  ‘Truth is, I begin to change my mind as touching your ladyship.’

  ‘Excellent. For indeed I feared you were settling so heavily into one mind on that subject as you should be in danger to become tedious to me.’

  ‘And I do begin to think, madam, that you do think overwell of yourself.’ The mere bodily fact of her retorted back the words in his teeth: lily-proud poise of head and neck; smooth sea-waved blackness of parted hair which from under the bediamonded back-turned edge of her riding-bonnet overlay her brow; hands crimson-gloved, resting lightly one on the slacked rein at her horse’s withers, the other on the crupper; swell and fall, as upon an undermotion of two silver apples of unvalued price, of the satin bosom of her dress; green eyes full of danger; lips that seemed apt in many a quaint unused way to play at cherry-pit with Satan; all the gems of gentleness and tiger-nursed soft graces of her, each where woman may be kissed. ‘I mean,’ he said, ‘as for leading me in a string. But I,’ in a sudden gust of rage, seeing her little silent laugh, ‘am not for ever to be fubbed off with lip-work.’