A Fish Dinner in Memison - Zimiamvian Trilogy 02

by E R Eddison

  Conversation, like a ballet of little animals (guests at Queen Alice's looking-glass party when things began to happen), tripped, paused, footed it in and out, pirouetted, crossed and returned, back and forth among the faces and the glasses and the dresses and the lights. For a while, about the head of the table, the more classic figures revolved under the direction of Lord Anmering, Mr. Romer, General Macnaghten and Mr. Everard Scarnside. Lady Rosamund Kirstead, on the skirts of this Parnassus, her back to the windows, tempered its airs with visions of skiing-slopes above Villars that February (her first taste of winter sports), and so succeeded at last in enveagling Anne and Margesson and Mr. Scarnside from those more intellectual scintillations (which Anne excelled in but Rosamund found boring) down to congenial common ground of Ascot, Hentley, Lord's, the Franco-British Exhibition, in prospect and retrospect: what to wear, what not to wear: August, September, grouse-moors and stalkers' paths of Invernesshire and Sutherland.

  Lessingham, further down on the same side of the table, held a three-cornered conversation with Amabel Mitzmesczinsky on his right and Fanny on his left: here the talk danced to merrier and stranger tunes, decking itself out as if the five continents and all past and present were its wardrobe. Into its vortex were drawn Tom Chedisford and Mrs. Bentham from across the table, till Jack Bailey sat marooned; for, while Mrs. Bentham, his rightful partner, who had hitherto displayed a most comforting interest in things within the grasp of his understanding, unfeelingly began to ignore him for the quattrocento, Lucy Dilstead on his other side conducted an esoteric conversation, not very vocal, with her. Fiancé. Jack, hearing at last in this loneliness a name he knew (of Botticelli's Primavera), took advantage of a lull in the talk to say, with honest philistine conviction, 'And that’s a nasty picture.' Jim and Hesper Dagworth experimented by turns, Hesper with his own Spanish, Jim with the lady's English, on Madame de Rosas, who thus became a distraction in the more serious discussions carried on by Bremmerdale, Colonel Playter, and Jim, on the subject of point-to-points. Appleyard with his funny stories kept the Playter girls in fits of boisterous laughter, till finally they took to bombarding him with bread-pills: an enterprise as suddenly ended as suddenly begun, under the horrified reproof of the parson's wife and the more quelling glare of the paternal eye upon them.

  At the foot of the table Mary, as hostess, seemed at first to have her hands full: with Hugh on her right, rather sulky, scenting (may be) an unfavorable climate for his intended proposal, and becoming more and more nervous as time went by; and, on her left, the breezy Admiral, flirting outrageously with Mrs. Dagworth who seemed, however, a little distrait, with her eye on Hesper and the de Rosas woman. But Mary's witty talk and the mere presence of her worked as lovely weather in spring, that can set sap and blood and the whole world in tune.

  Lessingham and Mary, breaking off from the dance as it brought them alongside the door, went out quickly and through the tea-room and so out from the music and the stir and the glitter to the free air of the terrace, and there stood a minute to taste it, her arm still in his, looking both into the same enbowered remoteness of the dark and the star-shine: the fragrant body of night, wakeful but still.

  Mary withdrew her arm.

  Lessingham said, 'Do you mean to make a practice of this? For the future, I mean?' ‘Of what?'

  ‘What you've been doing to me to-night?'

  'I don't know. Probably.'

  'Good.'

  Mary was fanning herself. Presently he took the fan and plied it for her. The music sounded, rhythmic and sweet, from the picture gallery. 'That was rather charming of you,' she said: 'to say "good".'

  'Extremely charming of me, if I was a free agent But you may have noticed, that I'm not'

  Mary said, 'Do you think I am?'

  'Completely, I should say. Completely free, and remarkably elusive.'

  'Elusive? Sometimes people speak truer than they guess.'

  'You've eluded me pretty successfully all the evening,' Lessingham said, as she took back the fan. The music stopped. Mary said, ‘We must go in.'

  "Need we? You're not cold?'

  ‘I want to.' She turned to go.

  ‘But, please,' he said at her elbow. ‘What have I done? The only dance we've had, and the evening half over—' 'I'm feeling—ratty.'

  Lessingham said no more, but followed her between the sleeping flower-borders to the house. In the doorway they encountered, among others, Glanford coming out. He reddened and looked awkward. Mary reddened too, but passed in, aloof, unperturbed. She and Lessingham came now, through the tea-room and the great galleried hall, to the drawing-room, where, since dinner, at the far end a kind of platform or stage had been put up, with footlights along the front of it, and in all the main floor of the room chairs and sofas arranged as for an audience. Shaded lamps on standards or on tables at the sides and corners of the room made a restful, uncertain, golden light

  'You've heard the castanets before, I suppose?' said Mary.

  'Yes. Only once properly: in Burgos.' 'Castanets and cathedrals go rather well together, I should think.'

  'Yes,' he said. 'I never thought of that before; but they do. A curious mix up of opposites: the feeling of Time, clicking and clicking endlessly away; and the other—well, as if there were something that did persist.'

  'Like mountains,' Mary said; 'and the funny little noise of streams, day after day, month after month, running down their sides.'

  Lessingham said, under his breath, 'And sometimes, an avalanche.'

  They were standing now before the fire-place, which was filled with masses of white madonna lilies. Over the mantel-piece, lighted from above by a hidden electric lamp, hung an oil painting, the head-and-shoulders portrait of a lady with smooth black hair, very pale of complexion, taken nearly full-face, with sloping shoulders under her gauzy dress and a delicate slender neck. Her forehead was high: face long and oval: eyebrows arched and slender: nose rather long, very straight, and with the faintest disposition to turn up at the end, which gave it a certain air of insolent but not unkindly disdainfulness. Her eyes were large, and the space wide between them and between lid and eyebrow: the lid of each, curving swiftly up from the inner corner, ended at the outer corner with another sudden upward twist: a slightly eastern cast of countenance, with a touch perhaps of the Japanese and a touch of the harsh Tartar.

  'Reynolds,' said Lessingham, after a minute's looking at it in silence.

  'Yes.'

  'An ancestress?'

  'No. No relation. Look at the name.'

  He leaned near to look, in the corner of the canvas: Anne Horton 1766.

  'Done when she was about nineteen,' said Mary. There seemed to come, as she looked at that portrait, a subtle alteration in her whole demeanour, as when, some gay inward stirrings of the sympathies, friend looks on friend. 'Do you like it?'

  On Lessingham's face, still studying the picture, a like alteration came. 'I love it'

  'She went in for fatty degeneration later on, and became Duchess of Cumberland. Gainsborough painted her as that, several times, later.'

  ‘I don't believe it,' he said. He looked round at Mary. 'Neither the fat,' he said, 'nor the degeneration. I think I know those later paintings, and now I don't believe them.'

  They're not interesting,' Mary said. 'But in this one, she's certainly not very eighteenth-century. Curiously outside all dates, I should say.'

  'Or inside.'

  'Yes: or inside all dates.'

  Lessingham looked again at Mrs. Anne Horton—the sideways inclination of the eyes: the completely serene, completely aware, impenetrable, weighing, look: lips as if new-closed, as in Verona, upon that private Ca m'amuse. He looked quickly back again at Mary. And, plain for him to see, the something that inhabited near Mary's mouth seemed to start awake or deliciously to recognize, in the picture, its own likeness.

  It recognized also (one may guess) a present justification for the Ca m'amuse. Perhaps the lady in the picture had divined Mary's annoyance at Glanford
's insistent, unduly possessive, proposal, at her own rather summary rejection of it, and at Lessingham's methods that seemed to tar him incongruously with the same brush (and her father, too, not without a touch of that tar): divined, moreover, the exasperation in Mary's consciousness that she overwhelmingly belonged to Lessingham, that she was being swept on to a choice she did not want to make, and that Lessingham unpardonably (but scarcely unnaturally, not being in these secrets) did not seem to understand the situation.

  Mary laughed. It was as if all the face of the night was cleared again.

  The room was filling now. Madame de Rosas, in shawl and black mantilla, took her place on the platform, while below, on her right, the musicians began to tune up. Lessingham and Mary had easy chairs at the back, near the door. The lamps were switched out, all except those that lighted the pictures, and the footlights were switched on. 'And my Cyprus picture over there?' Lessingham said in Mary's ear. 'Do you know why I sent it you?'

  Mary shook her head.

  'You know what it is?'

  'Yes: you told me in your letter. Sunrise from Olympus. It is marvellous. The sense of height. Windy sky. The sun leaping up behind you. The cold shadows on the mountains, and goldy light on them. Silver light of dawn. And that tremendous thrown shadow of Olympus himself and the kind of fringe of red fire along its edges: I've seen that in the Alps.'

  'Do you know what that is, there: where you get a tiny bit of sea, away on the left, far away over the ranges?'

  'What is it?'

  'Paphos. Where Aphrodite is supposed to have risen from the sea. I camped up there, above Troodos, for a fortnight: go up with my things about four o'clock every morning to catch the sunrise and paint it. I'll tell you something,' he said, very low: 'I actually almost came to believe that story, the whole business, Homeric hymn, Botticelli's picture in the Uffizi, everything: almost, in a queer way, when I was looking across there, alone, at daybreak. —But,' he said. The strings burst into the rhythm of an old seguidilla of Andalusia: the Spanish woman took the center of the stage, swept her shawl about her shoulders and stood, statuesque, motionless, in the up-thrown brilliance of the footlights. Lessingham looked up at her for a moment, then back at Mary. Mary's eyes had left picture for stage; but his, through the half-light, fed only upon Mary: the profile of her face, the gleam of the sapphired pendant that in so restful a sweet unrest breathed with her breathing. 'But,' he said, 'it was you.' The dusky sapphire stood still for an instant, then, like a ship from the trough of the sea, rose and, upon the surge, down again.

  It would be a foolish myth if it could have been anyone else but you,' he whispered. And the castanets began softly upon a flutter or rumour of sound, scarce heard.

  An Andalusian dance, done by a hired woman to please the guests at an English country house in this year of Our Lord 1908. And yet, through some handfasting of music with landscape and portrait painted and their embarking so, under the breath of secular deep memories in the blood, upon that warmed sapphire rocked on so dear a sea, the rhythms of the dance seemed to take to themselves words:

  Awful, gold-crowned, beautiful, Aphrodite— and so to the ending:

  Hail, You of the flickering eyelids, honey-sweet! and vouchsafe me in this contest to bear victory; and do You attune my song. Surely so will I too yet remember me of another song to sing You.

  The castanets, on a long-drawn thinness of sound, as of grass-hoppers on a hot hillside in summer, trembled down to silence. Then a burst of clapping: smiles and curtseys of acknowledgement from the platform: talk let loose again in a buzz and chatter, cleft with the tuning of the strings: under cover of which, Mary said softly, with her eye on the Cyprus picture, 'You didn't really believe it?'

  'No. Of course I didn't'

  'And yet perhaps, for a moment,' she said: ‘with that burning on the edge of the shadow? for a moment, in the hurry to paint it?'

  Lessingham seemed to answer not her but the mystery, in the half-light, of her face that was turned towards his. In mid speech, as if for the sweet smell of her, the living nearness of her, his breath caught and his words stumbled. 'I think there's part of one,'' he said, ‘believes a lot of queer things, when one is actually painting or writing.'

  'Part? And then, afterwards, not believe it any more?'

  In a mist, under his eyes the sapphire woke and slept again as, with the slight shifting of her posture, the musk-rose milk-white valley narrowed and deepened.

  She said, very softly, 'Is that how it works? with everything?'

  'I don't know. Wish I did.'

  V

  Queen of Hearts and Queen of Spades

  A HALF MILE north-east from the summer palace at Memison, out along the backbone of the hill, a level place, of the bigness of a tennis-court, overhangs like a kestrel's nest the steeps that on that side fall abruptly to the river-mouth of Zeshmarra, its water-meadows and bird-haunted marshlands. Here, years ago, when King Mezentius made an end of the work or raising about the little old spy-fortalice of Memison halls and chambers of audience, and lodging for twenty-score soldiers and for the folk of all degree proper to a princely court besides, and brought to completion the great low-built summer palace, with groves and walks and hanging gardens and herb-gardens and water-gardens and colonnades, so that there should be no season of the year nor no extreme of weather but, for each hour of the day, some corner or nook of these garden pleasances should be found to fit it, and gave it all, with patent of the ducal name and dignity, to Amalie, his best-beloved; here, on this grassy shelf, turning to that use a spring of clear water, he had devised for her her bath, as the divine Huntress's, in a shade of trees. A rib of rock, grown over with rock roses and creeping juniper, shut it from sight from the castle and gardens, and a gate and stairs through the rock led down to it. Upon the other side oaks and walnut-trees and mimosa-trees and great evergreen magnolias made a screen along the parapet with vistas between of Reisma Mere and, away leftwards, of the even valley floor, all cut into fields with hedgerows and rounded shapes of trees, clustering here and there to a billowy mass of coppice or woodland. And there were farmsteads here and there, and here and there wreathings of smoke, and all the long valley blue with the midsummer dusk, the sun being settled to rest, and the mountains east and north-east dark blue against a quiet sky. All winds had fallen to. sleep, and yet no closeness was on the air; for in this gentle climate of the Meszrian highlands, as there is no day of winter but keeps some spice of June in it, so is no summer's day so sun-scorched but some tang of winter sharpens it, from mountain or sea. No leaf moved. Only, from the inner side of that pool, the bubbling up of the well from below sent across the surface ring after widening ring: a motion not to be seen save as a faint stirring, as mirrored in the water, of things which themselves stood motionless: pale roses, and queenly flower-delices of dark and sumptuous hues of purple and rust of gold. In that perfect hour all shadows had left earth and sky, and but form and colour remained: form, as a differing of colour from colour, rather than as a matter of line and edge (which indeed were departed with the shadows); and colour differing from colour not in tone but in colour's self, rich, self-sufficing, undisturbed: the olive hue of the holm-oak, the green-black bosky obscurities of the pine, cool white of the onyx bench above the water, the delicate blues of the Duchess's bathing-mantle of netted silk; incarnadine purities, bared or half-veiled, of arm, shoulder, thigh; her unbound hair full of the red-gold harmonies of beechwoods in strong spring sunshine; and (hard to discern in this uncertain luminosity or gloam of cockshut time) her face. Her old nurse, white-haired, with cheeks wrinkled like a pippin and eyes that seemed to hold some sparkles blown from her mistress's beauty, was busy about drying of the Duchess's feet, while she herself, resting her cheek on her right hand with elbow propped upon cushions of dove-grey velvet, looked southward across the near water to the distant gleam of the mere, seen beyond the parapet, and to woods and hills through which runs the road south to Zayana.

  'The sun is down. Your grace will
not feel the cold?'

  'Cold to-night?' said the Duchess, and something crossed her face like the dance, tiny feathered bodies upright hovering, wings a-flutter, downward-pointing tails flirting fan-like, of a pair of yellow wagtails that crossed the pool. 'Wait till to-morrow: then, perhaps, cold indeed.'

  'His highness but goeth to come again, as ever was.'

  'To come again? So does summer. But, as we grow old, we learn the trick to be jealous of each summer departing; as if that were end indeed, and no summer after.'

  'In twenty years' time I'll give your beauteous excellence leave to begin such talk, not now: I that had you in cradle in your side-coats, and nor kings nor dukes to trouble us then.'

  'In twenty years?' said the Duchess. 'And I to-day with a son of two and twenty.'

  ‘Will his grace of Zayana be here to-night? Myrrha said, sitting on the grass at the Duchess's feet with Violante, ladies of honour.

  'Who can foretell the will-o'-the-wisp?'

  'Your grace, if any,' said the old woman; 'seeing he is as like your grace as you had spit him.'

  'Hath his father in him, too,' said the Duchess: 'for masterfulness, at least, pride, opinion and disdain, and ne'er sit still: turn day in night and night in day. And you, my love-birds, be not too meddling in these matters. I am informed what mad tricks have been played of late in Zayana. Remember, a spaniel puts up many a fowl. Brush my hair,' she said to the nurse: 'so. It is not we, nurse, that grow old. We but sit: look on. And birth, and youth, the full bloom, the fading and the falling, are as pictures borne by to please or tease us; or as seasons to the earth. Earth changes not: no more do we. And death but the leading on to another summer.'