The Connoisseur leapt up and poured another glass of rosewater and sherbet for each of us.
‘We made our way to those farmhouse lodgings for the night, with a borrowed lantern and the blessings of Arioch Woodley, craftsman and visionary. In many ways, that was not the only light he had lent us for our journey. We were full of the marvels of his gilded bestiary, and of the things we thought we had seen as we rode in that high, shadowy room. Yet: I am not sure that his work is altogether without peril, as he seeks further and further for stranger and stranger encounters. And I am a little fearful for those future visitors to his workshop. But, after all, he is learned in what he does: and which of those he chooses, anyway, would decline the wonders of the ride for fear of what it might reveal?’
The Secret Stars
‘You may think I have had more than my share of encounters with the extraordinary,’ observed The Connoisseur, on one of my visits to his rooms in a quiet byway of the old cathedral city, ‘you may even sometimes suspect me of a certain literary embroidery in my account of these events: but the truth is not that I have seen so much but that I have seen so very little. What we seek, and what we also half-fear, is all around us, always, had we the necessary calm intentness to discern it. I do not have this, but for certain rare glimpses: yet I believe I have known others who have drawn closer, much closer.’
He paused here, then reached into his quaintly carved escritoire, and added: ‘Take this book and see if it helps you to follow my meaning.’ He handed me an elegant volume bound in green morocco with a silver clasp. Thoughtfully, he continued: ‘I suppose you may feel free to copy out and publish the passages I have taken from the letters she sent to me.’ I opened the book and found that it consisted of manuscripts in a fine, rather spiked hand, written in dark ink on ash-grey paper: jagged extracts had been pasted onto the thick soft pages of the album. I was about to question my friend about the book, but found that he had turned away and was lost in his own reflections.
I think I can do no better than follow his suggestion and set out below, in the same order, some of the writing he had so carefully preserved.
***
‘I seem to find that so many things here are the simulacra, the echo or murmur of other possibilities. I hold a cold stone in the palm of my hand and at once it makes me think of it as an amulet that gives entrance to an elsewhere that I can hardly define. It is a dim dun pebble in which thin streaks of quartz almost seem to compose the paths on a chart of an unknown, unrecognisable terrain. Or I find a bleached spar of driftwood and it suggests to me the whittled limb of some form still only a potentiality, some as yet uncreated being. The thick webs of seaweed are to me the spoor of a vast, dark shifting thing, so vast that it cannot be witnessed. Tussocks of the harsh grass are the green hair of half-buried alien maidens. And the torn tamarisks haunt the shore with their bitten, brittle, whispering presence.’
***
‘They say there are hidden stars that even the mightiest telescope cannot see and those who know where these secret shining ones are concealed in the heavens may gaze upon the place and will find they achieve in reverie a dark illumination: thus it is said.
‘Also, it seems to me that there are gates and portals in the air of this world which we may pass through all unknowingly and, looking about us, will find our eyes see certain things differently, subtly altered from their usual shape, and we may then pass out again, hardly knowing what has befallen us. I am sure this has happened to me out there, sometimes.
‘The cawing of crows—have you noticed how often it is accompanied by a strange silence, a watchful hush? Listen to the croaks they make, count them, notice their duration and tone, and in time you will know what it is they foretell. I believe the seagull’s keening, thus understood, might have the same property.
‘This winter room, looking out onto sereness and shadow, is yet pervaded by the scent of sunkindled roses.
‘How to tell you of the salmon’s-leap of the heart when the infinite intricacy, intimacy, mystery of stark, sealed, simple things is seen, seen, seen. A stone, a twig, water falling, the significance of the very grit, even, on the old hearthslab, all can seem slowly, dizzyingly intense.
‘There is an old hare in the thicket who whistles, when the moon has risen, a quick sweet summoning tune: but to what, to whom?
‘I have read somewhere that those secret stars have names, such as Mesomede, Aravoth, Chigir, Kolo and Sapphacelo: and sometimes I am moved to call them by these names as I stare at the spaces in the sky where they must be; but I do not know if these are merely man-made names, and whether they might have true names that we would not understand.
‘It takes time to strip down my mind, that’s the problem; time, stillness, staring, to pare away what must be shed; even so simple a thing as to see, to really see, the twilight sky, the far hill at dawn, the trees as they gently assent to the wind, to impress these upon my understanding, not to grasp at them, but to see them sideways, cautiously, that is the work of uncounted moments.
‘And each day is a cruel athanor, considering what we must endure before we are able at last to seek out a single evanescent droplet of the essence, which vanishes even as we try to preserve it. We are vials where a dim remembrance of some long-ago attar still hovers, beautiful and elusive, while we search for its source always, in the emptiness and dust.
‘And perhaps the rarest perfume dwells in the frailest flowers …’
***
‘The taste of the crust of the crudest bread is rare and good to me now: a draught of well water is the juice of a bursting crystal fruit.
‘I must also watch the moon when it floats high and opaline in a singing sky. I must watch to see where the shadows fall, for they may be dark finger-posts.
‘The green-limbed dryads disport for my pleasure. Lust and innocence, fused.
‘See how eagerly I search and scrape for the calyx that lies on the surface of the world, dull residue of what great working?
‘The hawthorn trees; strange gnarled harps for the witches of the wind to pluck. Their music, and the wild sighing of the sea and the hissing of the sedge-weeds, are surely for other ears than ours.
‘Some of the big recumbent stones on the hill above the headland have hollows like craving palms. After rain they are full of darkened water and from a distance the glinting, the sudden sparks of light even on an overcast day, are quite unnerving, as if the rocks are signalling. I tell myself these calices are there for no other purpose than to collect the black light, which is cast by the secret stars.
‘Everything has its emanation, its smoke, sap, dew, scent, spray, breath. Even the stones, you see, glisten with their own secretions; even the sand respires, so, so softly. If the grosser substance of all things was formed from fire and mineral, then surely the essence came from elsewhere, from rarer elements in further dimensions, the reluctant gift of the sheathed stars, the ones we do not see: the traces of this distillation haunt us still. And so I seek at night for the attainment to those stars, the communion that alone is worth our time on this earth.
‘They said I should search the shore for carnelian, for the droplets of burnished red that can sometimes be found; or for the white shells, delicate as ancient lace. Impossible to explain that I can see an infinitude of such glowing gems, since every stone possesses its own radiance; and that every wan stalk and withered leaf has the poised grace of the finest filigree.
‘A sheaf of shards: that is what I gather. A clustering of fragments from the secret stars. Paradise dispersed. We must seek for it where we may.
‘Lighting a candle, holding a streaked pebble, listening to the wind and the waves, touching with the fingertips a limb of old whitened wood, hearing the stirring in the scrub, staring at the flames, these are enough. Yet I must go out to behold them, the senders of all these things. On the stony mound on top of the headland, lying there after vigil and fast and lustration and preparation, eyes widened, all fleshly things chastened and attenuated, an edge
of brittle chill in the air, the sky a hard blue-black, silence, my mind, and all the inmost of me, surges into the high and uttermost, into those silver citadels of spirit, the veiled stars. I am anointed; I am censed; I am arrayed; I am hailed: I am exalted. Returning, I feel the night dew on my flesh as if I had bathed in myrrh, and the salt scent of the sea reaches me as if from some fuming thurible; the air is keenly fresh upon me; the far cry of a gull sounds in my ear; I am quickened with shivering, as if a delicious fever is fast descending upon me.’
***
I handed the book back to my friend in silence: he took it, touched it pensively, and nodded. I wanted to ply him with the plenitude of questions that had come to me as I read, but I sensed that these would not be welcome. Instead, I simply asked, ‘What happened to her?’
The Connoisseur shrugged slightly, fingering the book still. ‘One cannot stand on a wintry sea-heath, staring at the stars, half-starved, half-garbed, night after night for very long without suffering hard for it …’
He bit his lower lip. ‘If I had known—if I had gone there sooner …’ He straightened, set the book down, and stared into the fire.
The Hesperian Dragon
‘It is only necessary for you to know by way of background,’ began the young man, ‘four things. My name is Gabriel Larkland: I am the author of The Anarchist in Victorian and Edwardian Literature, or at least I shall be when it is completed; I entertain a great esteem for a young woman I met at the Octagon Library, though I have exchanged barely forty words with her; and I have been plunged unwittingly into a most curious conspiracy which is perplexing me a great deal. That is why I have come to elicit your assistance. It will be necessary, no doubt, for me to recount precisely what has befallen me before you can proffer any advice.’
The Connoisseur bowed briefly and placed a glass of eglantine wine by the young man’s side, which he dismissed with a gesture of negation and then sipped from with all outward signs of gusto for the remainder of his visit, even though his host replenished it frequently. Larkland brushed the nap of his bronze velveteen jacket absently, adjusted his white cuffs, which were elegantly held together by moonstone clasps, and, as we waited in respectful silence, composed himself for his narration, which began with:
The Adventure of the Blue Jar
‘I was in the Octagon Library some weeks ago, researching my book, when, rising too hurriedly in my zeal to pursue a reference, I encountered the young lady to whom I have already alluded. Indeed, I was so precipitate that I knocked from her grasp a pile of books she was carrying. Naturally, I apologised at once, and helped her to retrieve them. I was about to dash off to look up my footnote, when it was suddenly borne in upon me that here was a woman of quite considerable charm. She had the most picquant, gleaming hazel eyes, and her hair curved in the shape of a Roman helmet of shining white-gold around rather puckish ears. There was a nimbleness about the limbs, and …’
There was a slight rustling of The Connoisseur’s throat. The young man looked startled, as one who wakes from a reverie, before resuming, with a slightly abashed air,
‘Yes: well, I detained her a little while longer with what was, no doubt, foolish prattle, and I don’t mind confessing that I was somewhat distracted for the remainder of my period of study that day.’
Mr Larkland emitted what he no doubt hoped might pass for a lover’s sigh.
‘Though I cannot say that I had ever previously observed the young woman, thereafter it seemed to happen that our visits to the library coincided, and, as we browsed amongst the shelves, chance often brought us face to face. I was affable enough, I hope, though I did not think it quite right to evince any too obvious interest in her, given our venerable surroundings. Nevertheless, I found myself at times glancing across at her rather than down at my books, though I contrived somehow to continue with my researches. At length, I decided that I must bring the matter to a head, and—since courtships and dalliance are not unreasonably frowned upon in the hallowed chamber of the library itself—I decided to catch a word or two with her outside.
‘I was too slow, however, to observe her preparations for departure and she was fairly out of the doors before I had even returned my volumes to the issue desk. Nevertheless, the agonisingly slow attentions of the assistant complete, I bounded after her and was rewarded with a distant view of her form retreating into an old passageway which wends between the backs of two rows of Georgian houses, now somewhat fallen. I quickened my step after her, but she kept ahead of me and, after I was momentarily distracted by the elegant symmetry of a balcony upon one of the houses, she vanished from view.
‘I advanced with even more determined tread, but all at once I was brought up sharp by a gate which opened outwards from the walled courtyard of a house to the left. It was wedged firm across the narrow path and would not permit of any passage beyond. I spent a good few minutes trying to prise it away, but without success. Then I confess I raged up and down a little while. I could, I suppose, have scaled it, or have thrust my way inch by inch through the little gap between the edge of the gate and the wall opposite: but really, I had my notebooks with me, and one of my finer waistcoats… .
‘No: I determined instead to ask the occupants of the house if they would attend to the gate, to permit me to pass. And I entered the courtyard with this plan in mind. It was, by now, dusk, and I picked my way carefully forwards. At the end of the courtyard a dim light was just discernible through a pair of paned, veiled doors. As I approached these, a most strident keening, a single shaft of silvery sound, ascended to my ears, and I naturally paused. It was followed by waves of shimmering echoes which seemed to eddy out into the courtyard.
‘There was silence for a few moments and I then heard a voice declaiming clearly: “Great Cinnabar is the Winnower!” and then the wind carried some words away and I just caught the final phrase, which was something about “the Grain Within”. I retreated a few steps so as to be ready to make a hasty exit, but knocked against a tall blue-and-white garden pot, rather like a giant ginger jar, which wobbled alarmingly. I steadied it quickly and stole a glance at the doors, where I fancied I heard a flurry of movement and saw the rising of shadows against the veils. Then, another voice stole out over the space between, and it seemed to say something like, “As the dew is drawn by the Golden Crow, so shall we go . . .”
‘Well, what would you have done? I became convinced all at once that I was the unwitting eaves-dropper in some curious ceremony or indeed conspiracy, and I thought it hardly likely that the participants would wish to be overheard. Yet I was also eager to know more about what was in train, and this appetite for adventure, fuelled, I have no doubt you will say, by my studies in the anarchists of Victorian and Edwardian literature, led me to wish to linger.
‘I looked about for a place of concealment, but the courtyard was nearly bare and, observing again signs of movement at the obscured door, I decided I must either retreat altogether or try to remain unseen. Curiosity, and my concern at a possible connection with the vanishment of the young woman in the library, took precedence. So I slid aside the lid on the great bulbous jar, peered inside to ensure it was not too grubby—my waistcoat, you know—and climbed stealthily in. I so manœuvred the lid that it left a little slot, to let me listen more easily. Unfortunately, in doing so, the scraping intruded a little over the next pronouncement, so that I only heard the words “and three cranes fly over the evening sky”. Then there was another silence, which to my alerted senses had an edge of brittleness about it, the sort of silence that ought to be overseen by a scimitar moon. But indeed there was no moon that night, just a very clustering, violet darkness, and occasional gusts of wind that were like a prestidigitator’s flourishing in the air.
‘I crouched tensely in the belly of the blue jar, waiting for the next words to come, and trying furtively, through the gloom, to make pencilled notes in my pocketbook of what I had heard. I must have been concentrating too hard upon this, or the footfalls were very soft, for the next thin
g I knew was a sudden ingress of the dim light of the dusk, as an unseen form caused the raising of the lid. I stared upwards nervously, and saw a masked face loom in the aperture. I braced myself against the sides of the jar and made ready to lunge upwards. The face removed itself and there was a pause distinguished only by a quiet clinking sound, and I wondered whether some subtle weapon was being made ready.
‘Then there descended through the gap at the top of the jar, held by a slender arm, bare at the wrist, a delicate saucer-dish supporting a finely funelled vessel giving off the fumes of a fragrant tea. After I had recovered from my astonishment, I accepted this, bemusedly, as one would, and rose carefully to my feet, balancing the offering, so that my head, shoulders and upper torso emerged from the blue jar. Then, perhaps influenced over-much by the inbred duties of the guest, I sipped appreciatively at the ethereal tea and inclined my head in thanks, all unmindful of the possibilities of poison. I saw before me, in the shadows of twilight, a figure in the garb of a Chinese houseboy, clad in a plum satin tunic, loose-fitting trousers and a kind of tall smoking-cap, and wearing a dark felt vizard across the eyes. Thin black arching eyebrows and a little smudge of moustache also graced the face. With a stately beckoning, this figure indicated that I should follow them into the house.
The Collected Connoisseur Page 8