by E R Eddison
Barganax: I think so. When you’re worth pleasing: and most of you are for a time.
Fiorinda: I think if I were a man I should not bother my head – or my heart – much about the temporary cases. After all, love is a bird easily caught, if one has the right bait and nets, but to keep it is what needs art.
Barganax: The art of keeping it: a new idea to me. I wonder where it came from? What’s the secret of that, do you think?
Fiorinda: For men or for women?
Barganax: For both.
Fiorinda: That one should find every morning and every night something span-new in the same person.
Barganax: A profound saying. Is it permissible to ask whether it is spoken from experience or merely from theorizing?
Fiorinda: Permissible to ask? Yes. But also permissible not to answer. I think it rather an impertinent question.
Morville clearly angry to find them together, and Fiorinda looking particularly lovely and ‘wrought up’ in a way he instinctively recognises but has never noted so strongly before, and the sight of her, so stirred, lights his jealousy in a terrible manner. He conceals it as well as he can, but becomes boorish and unpleasant. The Duke finally departs and they go home together in silence: Morville surly and melancholy, Fiorinda singing and ‘walking on flowers’.
THE ARGUMENT SUMMARIZES THE BEHAVIOUR OF FIORINDA, MORVILLE, AND BARGANAX DURING THE FIRST THREE WEEKS OF JULY 775 AZC:
The lady, with every exasperation of mockery, elusiveness, and unbearable provocation, holds him on a string, but at arm’s length. Morville, a simple and stupid man fatally conjoined to a wife whom he can neither win nor hold nor satisfy nor understand nor be worthy of, is wrung with jealousy, while Barganax is almost driven out of his wits by a love which he can neither fulfill nor yet tear himself away from.
HIS MANUSCRIPT SHEETS ARE UNDATED, BUT EDDISON WROTE DETAILED NOTES ABOUT THE ACTIONS OF THESE THREE CHARACTERS DURING THE FIRST THREE WEEKS OF JULY 775 AZC:
After this (from Wednesday July 1 onwards), the Duke is daily with Fiorinda in Reisma or in Memison or meeting on rides, etc. (except only that on Fridays he has to be – and always is – in Zayana).
Scandal begins to grow. Fiorinda more and more, as she feels her power on him (and his on her), torments and plays with him, never of course to make a fool of him, but in a way that on the whole draws him daily deeper in her enchantments: so that now he has the heavenly certainty that she will let him have her; now again is dashed from such hopes; and the bitterness cured by some adorable new turn which draws him once more. Sometimes he is angry beyond controlling. In one of these moments he composes (and sends her) his poem (Dorine’s in fact) ‘The Dampe’. (But even in these extreme moments of resentment and half despair his nobleness of heart keeps him from any blasphemy or grossness – such as Baias or Morville are betrayed into at times of similar exasperation.)
Morville, after about a fortnight (i.e., by July 13th or 14th) is stung into a violent scene with Fiorinda. Neither of them mentions Barganax, but Morville lets out in a spate of recriminations all his self-pity, etc., all these distresses he, of the of his nature, blames on her – trying by bitterness and injustice and railing to reduce her to tears which will enable him to regain some degree of ascendency in his own eyes, and make (as he thinks) a reconciliation and new start possible. But Fiorinda is not readily to be bullied into tears: she retires into her hard shell. Finally, when Morville instances his own single-eyed faithfulness, she retorts that an unfaithful husband is infinitely more tolerable than a jealous. He leaves her in a fury.
On Monday July 20 (Barganax having on the previous day been a little too possessive in his attitude, and having sent her the next morning – i.e. this Monday morning – his insolent poem ‘The Dampe’), Fiorinda keeps him waiting nearly an hour attending her leisure in a gallery, then has him shown in – only to find it is a three-cornered party with Morville! Barganax behaves unexceptionally – very nice to Morville, in strong contrast to Morville’s surliness and veiled hostility. Without a single sign in all the interview giving a clue to either of them what is on her mind, Fiorinda does in her heart, definitely and irrevocably this evening at last, fall in love with Barganax and resolve to take him as her lover – i.e., recognises Him with Her Olympian insight through his Zimiamvian dress, for who in truth He is. On saying goodnight She says privately to Barganax, no use coming tomorrow evening – she is going away – doesn’t know for how long. Well, may be back in a week: provisional appointment for Saturday August 1. But Barganax himself goes home in despair (in the Ninfea di Nerezza mood – A Fish Dinner in Memison, Chapter IX), determined to be off to Zayana next day and break with her or good and be no longer dragged, an unsatisfied spaniel-dog, at her apron strings, but have his freedom again. She is an enchantress, he thinks, and high time to be out of her toils. Morville, in a boorish way, refuses to [ … ] her and they retire to bed in their respective rooms, unreconciled. She for the first time realizes the nonentity of Morville. It is Astarte, or [? … Hecate … ] (not yet – not until 10 or 11 a.m. on the morrow – 21 July, Tuesday, after Morville’s final blow and ‘salt bitch’ outburst – seated in her throne) that is tossing and turning in Fiorinda’s bed in Reisma that night.
XXXIII
APHRODITE HELIKOBLEPHAROS
IN ZIMIAMVIAN TIME, THE OPENING OF THIS CHAPTER FOLLOWS BY MOMENTS ONLY THE CONCLUSION OF CHAPTER X OF A FISH DINNER IN MEMISON. ON 28 JANUARY 1945, EDDISON DRAFTED A WORKING VERSION FOR THE CONVERSATIONS OCCURRING IN REISMA ON THE MORNING OF MORVILLE’S STRIKING OF FIORINDA:
ANTHEA and Campaspe (a little after 11.00 a.m., Tuesday, July 21st, 775 [AZC])
Anthea: Had you not better go up to her ladyship? She will want you to do her hair.
Campaspe: She has not rung yet.
Anthea: No. It is late. The more need to go. I liked not the look of the bull-fly when he flung out of the house just now.
Campaspe: Thank god he’s away from home tonight.
Anthea: Yes. The Admiral sent for him to ride north, meet the King in Rumala, and tomorrow south again. His serene highness is for Sestola. I hope Morville will break his neck. There’s the bell: run you little flitterjack.
(Campaspe goes upstairs: finds Fiorinda sitting, in her hair and in one underfrock without sleeves, before the mirror. Campaspe is frightened at the expression of her face – Terror Antiquus – in the looking glass: sees the mark of Morville’s glove stroke on her flushed face. Seeing Campaspe, her expression changes: she is her Olympian Aphrodisian self again – reaches out her hand. Campaspe kneels and kisses it, and buries her face a moment in her mistress’s lap.)
Fiorinda: Put up my hair, little warbler of mine.
Campaspe: (doing so) His lordship is gone, madam. (Fiorinda says nothing, but her whole posture is like an opening rose after a storm.)
Campaspe: What will your ladyship do today?
Fiorinda: Wait. (Rings for Anthea) Anthea, go you to Memison. Find out what the Duke is about and bring me word at once.
(Exit Anthea)
(The mark has faded now as Campaspe shows her the back view with a hand-mirror.) No. I’ve changed my mind. Low on my neck, as it was this morning before breakfast. (Stretches her arms and leans back: the flashes of ‘black lightning’) And see you put out for tonight my new dress of red sendaline: the one I’ve never worn. I’ve been keeping it for a purpose.
Campaspe: (wide eyed) Yes, beloved madam.
Fiorinda: The clock has struck.
Campaspe: Will your ladyship wear with it the new silk cutwork undergarments I made?
Fiorinda: ’Twill be hot today. I’ll wear no undergarment.
Campaspe: No, madam.
(Re-enter Anthea)
Anthea: His grace is set forth, baggage and all, for Zayana.
Fiorinda: ’Las, has he taken me at my word then, when I told him to go this morning? How strangely will men mistake one. Saw you him set forth?
Anthea: Yes.
Fiorinda: In what fashion went
he, then? At a herd’s gallop? He is a hasty man in all he undertakes. Galloped he, then?
Anthea: At a walking pace. And to the tune, methought, of ‘Loth to depart’.
Fiorinda: You must overtake him: fetch him back again.
Anthea: What must we say to him?
Fiorinda: That I request his company at supper tonight, here in Reisma. And inform him – not as from me, but in kindness as from yourselves: lightly, as upon an afterthought: that her ladyship sleeps alone tonight, the lieutenant being from home.
THE ARGUMENT FOR THIS CHAPTER GIVES FACTS WHICH ARE FULLY NARRATED IN CHAPTERS XI AND XII OF A FISH DINNER IN MEMISON:
On 21 JULY, foully insulted and struck across the mouth by Morville upon the false (or at least, premature) accusation of being the Duke’s mistress, she takes the Duke for her lover indeed. Morville, guilty of further threats and outrage, is destroyed by Anthea in her lynx dress.
EDDISON INTENDED TO NARRATE THE KILLING OF MORVILLE IN THIS CHAPTER. ON 30 JANUARY 1945, HE DRAFTED THE SCENE:
Morville walking distraught in the woods near Reisma, raging in himself: ‘Yes, I’ll kill them both …’
Anthea (in her own shape appearing from behind a tree) ‘Good morrow, for the second time today, my lord Morville. Is it safe for you, think you, to wander in these woods alone and unarmed? You are a great striker of women. I know. You struck my Lady yesterday morning, an act that requires your death. And you struck me betwixt midnight and dawn with your riding-whip. So, upon that great count and this small one (yet to me of itself sufficient) I have tracked you forth and mean now to rid you of your life.’
Morville becomes numb and with clumsy fingers draws forth his dagger.
Anthea: ‘You have not the power to murder me (the dagger drops from his fingers), but the will to do it so courts, if the cup of your iniquities were not already full. You have been tried and found wanting. I hate such horrified cattle as you should walk upon middle earth: but there’s one thing yet you can do: your flesh shall make me a breakfast.’
Morville: ‘Witch, deviless, I’ll slay you with my hands, and then your mistress, and then her vile leman. Then at last I’ll die happy.’
Leaps upon her. She, suddenly in her lynx-dress, fastens her teeth in the great veins of his throat: tears him bloodily in pieces, eats her fill, takes her shape again and, beautiful and virginal, returns to Reisma.
AFTER DUELLING WITH MORVILLE (A SCENE NARRATED IN CHAPTER XII OF A FISH DINNER IN MEMISON), BARGANAX RETURNS WITH FIORINDA TO THE SECRET CHAMBER WHOSE DOOR CAN BE REVEALED ONLY THROUGH DOCTOR VANDERMAST’S MAGIC. ON 29 JANUARY 1945, EDDISON MADE NOTES ABOUT THE EVENTS OF 22 JULY 775 AZC:
Barganax and Fiorinda waking (for 2nd time) about 9–10 a.m., in Reisma on Wednesday morning July 22:
Barganax wakes and sees her asleep. The ‘peace of her beauty’. The soul asleep in her face, but in the beauty of her naked body (the clothes thrown off and piled on the floor) the sleepless spirit awake, argus-eyed, as if returning her lover’s gaze. She had fallen asleep in the crook of her arm, her cheek resting upon his heart. The black hair in deep confusion all over the pillows and bed: the white line of the parting, under his eye as he looks down on her, straight and undeviating as the right road of true love. He softly kisses it: her eyes open and she puts up her lips as though there had never been since world’s beginning an awakening upon which these two had not so kissed good-morning.
That same afternoon Duke Barganax rode south to Zayana in preparation for certain knotty questions to be dealt with on Friday at his weekly presence, then, with promise to be back by Saturday. For upon Saturday his mother had appointed to give a fish dinner in the King’s honour in Memison to but eight guests besides: the Vicar, the Admiral, the Chancellor, and the Duke, and for ladies, besides Fiorinda, the Princess Zenianthe, Anthea, and Campaspe. As he rode southward, he found men’s mouths full of talk: how that the Lord Morville had been eat up with wild beasts in the woods near Reisma: but no word of another truth which might have tasted yet saucier to some of these blabbers, namely that a duel had been fought in Reisma in the midnight hours betwixt Morville and the Duke: neither hurt, but Morville worsted: spared by the Duke, but departed unreconciled and loudly menacing murder against both the Duke and my lady Fiorinda. Of her the Duke was not spared the hearing of much dishonest talk that day: as that she rustled in unpaid-for silks, lived very disorderly, married but to unmarry herself by running away or, the better to unencumber herself of a husband, take a resolution to have him murdered. Such talk, uttered in Barganax’s presence, mixed so ill with memories in his mind and veins of the forenight, that not two but three men’s blood was shed by him in that journey in [ … ] for such slander talk: two in duels; the third but seized and flung against a wall, to so good effect as dash his brains out, so that he never again spoke word.
THE REST OF THE ARGUMENT FOR THIS CHAPTER SUMMARIZES THE GROWING RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN FIORINDA AND BARGANAX:
The course of true love for Barganax and Fiorinda never runs smooth: their natures are too fierce, hazardous, and passion-ridden, for that. But it runs always deeper and stronger and with mounting superlatives, and always morning-new. He repeatedly urges her to become Duchess of Zayana, but she as steadfastly refuses; knowing, by an insight which (in common with all her qualities) reaches perhaps beyond the strain of mortality, that it is in the core of his nature to set supreme store by unsafeties and uncertainties, dangerous elysiums, the bittersweet: And these things she gives him, unfailably, often almost unbearably, and with both hands.
THE FISH DINNER AND ITS AFTERMATH
NOTE ON TRANSITION TO CHAPTER XXXIV AND ON CHAPTER XXXV AS YET UNWRITTEN.
ON 25 July, the Duchess entertains privately at a fish dinner in Memison the King, the Vicar, Barganax, Jeronimy, Beroald, Fiorinda, Anthea, Campaspe, and the King’s niece Zenianthe.
The talk turns to divine philosophy, and so to questions of Time and Creation: If we were Gods, what manner of world would we choose to make? To this question, raised by the King, most of the company answer, in effect: This actual world (that is to say, of course, Zimiamvia). But my Lady Fiorinda, in a dangerously irresponsible and contrary mood tonight, and speaking as if the King were in sober truth the Almighty and she herself Aphrodite Herself, for whom this and all conceivable worlds are made, asks him to make for her a strange mechanical hitherto undreamed-of world which she describes at large.
What followed, upon this request, probably none of the company but the two pairs of lovers (the King and Amalie, Barganax and Fiorinda) fully understood. Certainly, all present, the King and Fiorinda alone excepted, had forgotten by next morning.
The fact was this: Speculation merged into action: the King, sitting there at supper, did in very truth create, to her specification, this world we ourselves live in and belong to, so that they saw it evolve, a large teeming bubble, as this whole material universe might present itself under the eyes of the Gods, its miniature aeons passing beneath Their immortal gaze, as millions of years condensed into, say, half an hour. More than this: the King and the Duchess, Barganax and Fiorinda, in a desire to know this new world from within, entered it and so lived out a life-time here (in our own century), while to the other guests they merely seemed to sit gazing in a rapt attention for a few minutes on a monstrous bubble poised before them on the supper-table. Then the company, returning to reality, began to break up for bed. Fiorinda, in her most languefied luxuriousness lazying on Barganax’s arm, having understandably had more than enough of this not very admirable world, snuffed it out for ever as though it had never existed, by idly pricking the bubble with a bediamonded hair-pin idly drawn from her hair as she passed. In that moment the Duke, looking in Her face, which is the beginning and the ending, from all unbegun eternities, of all conceivable worlds, knew perhaps (momentarily, and with as much certainty as is good for him) Who in very truth She was.
(This theme [of our present world as a misconceived and, were it not for its nightmarish unreality and tran
sience, unfortunate episode in the real life of the Gods] is the subject of another book, A Fish Dinner in Memison. In The Mezentian Gate that ground is not gone over again, but sufficient indications are allowed to appear of the nature and outcome of the proceedings at supper-table to enable a reader to realize the cosmic repercussions of Aphrodite’s sudden ‘unfledged fancy’ and to be prepared for their effect upon the mind of the King. It is to be noted, that he and Fiorinda alone remember next morning (and thereafter) what took place at the fish dinner after talk had passed over into action.)
This brings us to August 775. Chapter XXXIV (The Fish Dinner: First Digestion), dealing with the effect of the fish dinner upon the minds of the Duchess and of Barganax, is already written. The as yet unwritten Chapter XXXV (Diet a Cause), covering the next six months or so, deals with the effects upon the King and the Vicar.
The effect on the King, of this taste in Himself of omniscience combined with omnipotence in practice, is partly disclosed in a scene between him and Vandermast.
On the Vicar, who smells a subtle change in his great master which he is at an utter loss to define or understand but which he finds profoundly disturbing, the effect is to determine him to take all further precautions against the possibility that the King may die and he himself be left to fight for his place in the sun. By all covert means the Vicar begins to build up his armed strength in Rerek to such a pitch that, if it should come to a trial of mastery between himself and Styllis, he shall prevail, even though the united forces of Fingiswold and Meszria be brought to bear against him.
The grand finale of the book (Chapters XXXVI–XXXIX: Rosa Mundorum, Testament of Energeia, Call of the Night-Raven, and Omega and Alpha in Sestola) is already written.
E. R. E.
BOOK SEVEN
TO KNOW OR NOT TO KNOW
XXXIV