The Zimiamvia Trilogy

by E R Eddison

  Mary smiled. ‘Marlowe,’ she said: ‘when he was like to die, “being persuaded to make himself ready to God for his soul, he answered that he would carry his soul up to the top of a hill, and run God, run devil, fetch it that will have it.” I could hug him for that.’

  ‘So could I. They were far too deep in love with their job to bother about themselves as doers of it. They knew the stature of their own works, of course: Beethoven’s saying of the cavatina (wasn’t it?) in Op. 130, “It will please them someday”; but that is worlds apart from the solemn self-satisfaction of these one-sided freaks, not men but sports of nature. How would you like Shelley for your inamorato?’

  ‘I think I should bite his nose,’ Mary said.

  Something danced in Lessingham’s eye. He painted swiftly for a minute in silence. ‘Just as I know,’ he said, taking up the thread of his thought again ‘(better than I know any of your what people call accepted scientific facts) whether a picture of mine is right when I’ve finished it, or whether it’s worthless. It’s one or the other: there’s no third condition. When I’ve finished it. Till then, one knows nothing. This one, for instance: heaven knows whether it will come off or not. My God, I want it to.’

  ‘Yes. You used to slash them into pieces or smudge them over when they were half finished. Till you learnt better.’

  ‘Till you taught me better. You, by being Mary.’ He stood quickly back, to see sitter and portrait together. ‘You are the most intolerable and hopeless person to paint I should think since man was man. Why do I go on trying?’

  ‘You succeeded once. Perhaps that is why. The appetite grows with feeding.’

  ‘The Vision of Zimiamvia portrait? Yes. It caught a moment, out of your unnumerable moments: a perfect moment: I think it did. But what is one among the hundreds of millions? Besides, I want a perfect one of you that the world can see. That one is only for you and me and the Gods. O, the Devil’s in it,’ he said, changing his brush: ‘it’s a lunacy, a madness, this painting. And writing is as bad. And action is as bad, or worse.’ He stepped forward to put a careful touch on the mouth: stepped back, considered, and corrected it ‘Est-ce que vous pouvez me dire, madame, quelle est la différence entre une brosse à dents et un écureuil?’

  Mary’s response was the curiousiest of little inarticulate sounds, lazy, mocking, deprecatory, that seemed, as a sleepy child might if you stroked it, or a sleepy puppy, to stretch itself luxuriously and turn over again, hiding its nose in the downy deep contentment of many beloved absurdities: how stupid you are, and yet how dear you are to be so stupid, and how cosy us two together, and how absurd indeed the world is, and how amusing to be you and me.

  ‘Do you know the answer? His eyes were busy.

  ‘No,’ she said, in a voice that seemed to snuggle deeper yet into that downiness of honey-scented pillows.

  ‘Quand on les mit tous les deux en dessous d’un arbre, c’est celui qui le grimpe qui est l’écureuil.’

  ‘O silly riddle!’

  ‘Do you know what you did then?’ said Lessingham, painting with sudden extreme precision and certitude. ‘You did a kind of pussy-cat movement with your chin, as though you were smoothing it against a ruff. I know now what this picture wants. Have you got a ruffle? Can’t we make one? I can see it: I could do it out of my head. But I’d like to have it in the flesh, all the same.’

  ‘Angier can make one by tomorrow. I can show her.’

  ‘Tired?’

  ‘No.’

  He put down palette and brushes. ‘Anyhow, let’s knock off and have a rest. Come and look at it. There. Aren’t I right?’

  Mary, standing beside him, looked at it awhile in silence. ‘Not one of those enormous ones,’ she said, ‘like a peacock’s tail.’

  ‘Good heavens, no.’

  ‘Nor the kind that swaddles one up to the chin in a sort of white concertina, as if one hadn’t any neck.’

  ‘No, no. I want it quite narrow: not more than two inches deep, like Isabella d’Este’s in our Titian in the music-room at home. But much longer, of course, following the opening of your dress.’

  ‘When you designed this dress,’ said Mary, ‘did you mean it to be a Zimiamvian dress?’

  ‘Pure Zimiamvian. It clothes, but does not unduly conceal: adorns, but is not silly enough to try to emulate: displays, but does not distort.’

  ‘On the principle of Herrick’s Lily in Crystal.’

  ‘Exactly. It’s a Zimiamvian principle, isn’t it? Up to a point.’

  ‘Or rather down.’

  ‘I should have said, down. There again: another of these antinomies at the heart of things. Every experience of pure beauty is climacteric; which means it gathers into its own being everything that has led on to it, and, conversely, all that leads on to it has value only because of that leading on. You can’t live on climaxes alone.’

  ‘Words!’

  He was busy selecting new brushes and setting his palette for the green. ‘I stand rebuked. A concrete parallel, then. Think of the climax, like all the morning stars singing together, worked up in those terrific tremolo passages towards the end of the Arietta in Op. 111. Played by itself, what is it but just a brilliant and extraordinarily difficult display of technique? But play it in its context, coming after the self-destroying Armageddon and Ragnarok of the Allegro con brio ed appassionato, and after those early unfoldings of the Arietta itself—’

  ‘Ah, that little simple beginning,’ said Mary, ‘like little farms all undesecrated, and over there the sea without a blemish; and all the fields full of tiny speckets, lambs in spring.’

  ‘And so gradually, gradually, to the empyrean. Which is itself simply the ultimate essence crammed with the implications of all these things. White hot with them.’

  ‘Or a great mountain,’ she said. ‘Ushba, as we first saw him from those slopes of the Gul glen above Betsho, facing the dawn. Take away the sky: take away the roots of the mountain: the Suanetian forest about the roots – crab-apples, thorns, rowan, sweet brier and rhododendron, hornbeam and aspen and beech and oak, those monkshoods higher than your head as you rode by on horseback, and great yellow scabious eight feet tall, and further up, that riot of poppies and anemones, gentian, speedwell and ranunculus, forget-me-not geraniums, and huge Caucasian snowdrops: take these trimmings away, you lose the size and the wonderfulness and the living glory of it, and have nothing left but a lump of ice and stone.’

  ‘The unrelated climax. Dead. Nothing.’

  Mary was studying the picture on the easel. ‘You’ve started the hair, I see.’

  ‘Just roughed it in.’

  ‘It ought to be black. Jet-black.’

  ‘Ought it?’

  ‘Oughtn’t it? And scarlet dress?’

  ‘Because I’ve captured the Queen of Spades mood about the mouth?’

  ‘Well, of course. Why should she be tied down to red-gold and green? She doesn’t like it. Has to put up with it in this stodgy world; but, when you can paint like that, it’s most unkind not to give her her own outsides sometimes. After all, she is me, just as much as I am myself. You painted her in your Valkyrie picture, but I’ve always felt that as fancy dress. I can’t wear poppy-red, or yellow or even honey-colour. But I itch to wear them: will, too, someday. For (you and I know) there will be days there, won’t there?’

  ‘Days. And nights. How could you and I get along without them?’

  ‘Why should we be expected to? – Well,’ she said, ‘I’m ready. An hour yet before it will be time to change for dinner.’

  ‘Head’s free now,’ said Lessingham as he settled her pose again: ‘I’m only on the dress. I can’t alter this now,’ he said, returning to his easel. ‘And the truth is, I couldn’t bear to. But I’ll do the spit image of it, if you like – same pose, same everything, but in Dark Lady form – as soon as this is finished.’

  ‘And a self-portrait too, perhaps,’ said Mary, ‘on the same principle?’

  ‘Very well.’

  ‘She’d
like it. Personally, of course, I prefer my King suited in black rather than red. But when she gets the upper hand – and remember, she is me—’

  Lessingham laughed. ‘It’s a mercy that these Jekyll–Hyde predilections of ours don’t lead to promiscuity on both sides. How is it they don’t?’

  ‘Because when longing aches you for La Rose Noire, it is still me you ache for. The empty body, or with someone not me behind it: what would you give for that?’

  ‘O madonna mia, who sent you into this world, I wonder?’

  ‘Who sent us?’

  Lessingham painted for a while without speaking. The clock ticked, while slowly on the canvas inert pigments ground in oil gradually, through innumerable subtle relationships of form and colour, took life: gradually and painfully, like the upthrusting of daffodil blades through the hard earth in spring, became to be the material witness to the vision, seen through Lessingham’s eyes, of Mary’s warm and breathing body clothed in that dress which from throat to hips, like a fifteenth-century coat-hardy, fitted like a skin. Still painting, he began to say, ‘What happens when we get old: twenty, thirty, forty years hence? To lovers, I mean. Get old, and powers fail: blind, deaf, impotent, paralysed? Is memory enough? Even that fails. Bad to think of: a going down into fog and obscurity. All the things of the spirit belong so entirely to the body. And the body is (in our experience) matter. Time dissolves it away. What remains?’

  Mary made no answer: only sat there, breathing, beautiful, desirable, while the clock ticked on.

  ‘Some Absolute? Some universalized Being? The Self resumed like a drop of water into a river, or like the electric lamplight into the general supply of electrical energy, to be switched on again, perhaps, in new lamp-bulbs? Surely all these conceptions are pompous toys of the imagination, meaning the same thing – Death – from the point of view of the Me and You: from the point of view, that is to say, of the only things that have ultimate value. Futile toys, too. Abstractions. Unrealities.’

  ‘Futile toys,’ Mary said, under her breath.

  ‘“Love is stronger than Death,”’ Lessingham said. ‘How glibly people trot out these facile optimisms, till the brutal fact pashes them to pieces. “The spirit lives on”: orthodox Christian ideals of love. Well,’ he said, ‘goodness counts.’ He painted in silence for a time. ‘And, in this world, goodness fails.’

  Mary half opened her lips. ‘Yes. It does,’ she said at last, in a voice that seemed to go sorrowful over sea-streams to oblivion.

  Lessingham’s words came slower as the tempo of his painting became faster, his brushwork surer and more triumphant. ‘The tragedy,’ he said, ‘is in the failure of other people’s goodness: to see someone you love suffer unjustly. No good man cares a snap about his own goodness’ failing. Probably because, seen from inside, it is not such a good goodness after all.’

  Mary said, ‘I think we all see truest from outside.’

  ‘I hope we do.’

  After a silence, while the splendour of the picture grew together swiftlier and swiftlier on the canvas, he began to say, ‘The ideal of the non-attached. It’s a compromise ideal. A sour-grapes ideal. A spiritless weak negation, to reject the goods of this world, the heaven of the senses. Sensual delight by itself is an abstraction, therefore worthless. But in its just context, it folds in the whole orb of the world: it becomes the life-blood, the beatific vision.’

  Mary said, ‘That is pure truth, mon ami.’

  ‘It is the arch-truth,’ he said; ‘and of it is born the great truth of conflict and contradiction. But it is not a truth of this life. Look at the two good characters of perfection: the static and the dynamic. You must have both. But, in this life, that is just what you can’t have. Evanescence in itself; the sunrise, a sheet of trembling shell-pink blossom at midday, bare twigs and fallen petals by evening: sunset light on the Sella (do you remember?): human birth, flowering time, decay, and death: the kitten becoming a cat: night giving place to day, day to night: all the uncertainnesses and unknownness of the future. Are not all these part of the very being of perfection? The Ever-Changing: the bitter-sweet: that which cannot be reversed: that which will never come back: that which says “never again”. But so also, the imperishable laughter: the sun that never sets: the night that stands still for lovers: the eternal eyes of the Gods: the Never-Changing.’

  Mary said, ‘Ever-Changing: Never-Changing. You had it engraved in my alexandrite ring.’

  ‘But how reconcile them?’ He squeezed out more paint. ‘Can you and I?’

  ‘Only Omnipotence can do it.’

  ‘And Omnipotence is a fraud if it doesn’t?’

  ‘Dare we say that?’

  ‘With our last breath, we must. Or be blasphemers.’

  After a moment’s silence, ‘Where does that come,’ Mary said: ‘God’s adversaries are some way His own; and that ownness works patience?’ Then, after another silence, ‘I am sometimes so taken with astonishment,’ she said, ‘at the unspeakable blessedness of some passing minute, that I could not have the heart to be unthankful even if I knew for certain there was nothing besides: nothing before that minute and nothing after it, for ever and ever and ever. And that minute, nothing too, as soon as it was over.’

  ‘And my answer to that,’ said Lessingham, very slowly, ‘is that in the pure goodness and perfectness that bred those words out of your mouth this moment, burns a reality that blows to the wind in ashes the doubt those words plead for.’

  She watched him painting while he spoke. ‘And so, you believe it?’ she said at last.

  Lessingham said, ‘Because of you.’

  ‘Literally believe it, as sober matter of fact? So firmly as to be able to die in that belief?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said: ‘as firmly as that.’

  ‘Even at the risk of its being a false belief? And (as you used so often to say to me) how can we tell?’

  ‘Don’t you think a belief so strong that you can die in it is too strong to be false? Must it not, of its mere strength, be true?’

  ‘I would say yes. But if it were the other to die. If you had me here dead this minute. What then?’

  Lessingham painted swiftly. ‘Compromise,’ he said, ‘is a virtue in an imperfect world: it is the virtue of statesmanship. But in philosophy, compromise is abdication of the sovereign mind within us, and a fogging of the issue. Our love, yours and mine, is native to a perfect world, where spirit and flesh are one: where you can both eat your cake and have it. Isn’t that true?’ After a pause he said, very low, ‘And when it comes to dying, I had actually rather you went first. Not long first, I should hope; but first.’

  Their eyes met.

  Mary said, ‘I know. And I know why. And, for the very same “why” I had rather, myself, have it the other way.’

  She watched him awhile in silence: the Olympian grace and strength of him, the singular marriage of his bodily frame of north with south, the gyr-falcon lights in his eyes, the sensitive powerful hand that guided the brush as he painted, the great black beard. Presently he stepped back to survey his work. From half-finished portrait to original his eyes leapt, and there stayed held. Utterly unselfconscious Mary seemed, sitting there, all turned outward to the world; yet with that unselfconsciousness that accepts admiration, which is its natural atmosphere, as a flower accepts sunshine; as of course. Her hair was done low on the back of her neck, plaited so that the plaits gave a tesselated effect with ever varying shades of gold and copper and red in the tight-wound gleaming surfaces; and at the side, upon the neck behind the ear, the growth of the extreme hairs, delicate as single threads of the silkworm, rose exquisite in intricate variety of upward curve, as the lines of fire or of a fountain’s upward jet blown sideways in the wind. ‘You say it is credible because of me,’ she said softly. ‘I suppose that must always be so: easy to see the Divine shine through in the person one loves: quite impossible to see or imagine it in oneself.’

  Suddenly, by a short-circuiting of the electric current, the light wen
t out. Neither he nor she moved.

  ‘That was a strange effect,’ Lessingham said out of the blackness. ‘My eyes were filled, I suppose, with the green of your dress, so that when the light went I still saw, for a flash, clear cut on the darkness, that dress, but flaming scarlet.’

  He struck a match.

  ‘Well, here I am,’ Mary said, ‘still in my right complexion. But why scarlet?’

  ‘The complementary colour.’

  ‘Very appropriate too, mon ami, after what we were talking about?’

  XIV

  THE FISH DINNER: PRAELUDIUM

  MEAN time in lovely Memison (if indeed, betwixt here and yonder, there could be other than mean time), the Lady Fiorinda, pleasuring her senses with the balm-sweet breathings of the air in that Zimiamvian garden, walked, with none but her own most unexperimented thoughts for company, in the tented glory, wide-rayed, cloudless, golden, serene, of the slow July sun descending. Here, upon the Duchess’s birthday, but a month ago, had she lazed herself, beneath these poplars, beside this lily-pond, but then under heat of noon: a month ago only and a day. And now, like a refrain to bring back with its presence the preluding music of that midsummer night, there came through the trees the lord Chancellor Beroald, gorgeously apparelled in doublet and hose of gold-broidered brocade.

  ‘Good evening, good brother. Are these your mourning weeds, for your late brother-in-law?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Are these yours, for your late husband?’

  ‘Now I think on’t, they will serve.’ She looked down at her coat-hardy, woven of thousands of tiny margery-pearls and yellow sapphires, skin-close, clinging like a glove, and her velvet skin, black as the raven, fastened low about the hips with a broad girdle laid over with branches of honeysuckles of fine flat gold and cloudy strawberry-coloured tourmalines. ‘I have evened accounts with you now,’ she said, meeting with mockery in her eyes his haughty outwardness of ironic calm. ‘You put on your ruffians to ease me from the first bad card you dealt me: not out of any undue study of my convenience, but because you thought you knew a likelier to serve your purpose. And now I have turned your likelier second (almost of the same suit) with the deuces and treys out of the deck.’