A Fish Dinner in Memison - Zimiamvian Trilogy 02

by E R Eddison

  'I was so glad of your telegram,' said Mary. 'So all went well in Paris?'

  'In the end. Only way—wear them down. Thing wanted tidying up: two years now since poor Fred went, and still hanging about with loose ends. So I just had to hold their noses to it till they signed what I wanted: just to get rid of me. Quite as amusing as fighting the Bulgarians. Much more amusing than Berlin in nineteen-twelve.—Hullo, who's this?'—as a tiny white kitten clambered up the wooden balustrade and so onto Mary's lap.

  'Mitzi,' said she, handing it across the table to Lessingham. ‘—The fact is, you like to be in charge.'

  ‘I wrote to your father from Paris as soon as the thing was through; and to Jim, as your trustee. Told him there's two sums of twelve hundred thousand to go into trust: one under our marriage settlement, the other for you personally. Together, about a third of the whole. That's in case some day I go crazy with all this money business: take to high finance and burn my fingers. Do you think it's some Jew blood coming out?'

  Mary smiled. "There's never any telling! The Medici blood, reason enough, I should think.'

  'Sounds nicer. Still, if it has the same effect? You know, I wouldn't really like to spend my life money-grubbing.

  Not really,' Lessingham said, holding up the kitten in his right hand where it sat as if in an armchair, and bringing it nearer and nearer to his face. 'Not really, really, really.' Mitzi, as if mesmerized, kept very still, staring at him out of eyes of that dawn-like blue that belongs to the eyes of little kittens; then, when he was near enough, put out a hesitating velvety paw to touch Lessingham on the cheek. 'Have we the same room as then?' 'Haven't you been to look?'

  'Do you think I'd waste time on that, when they told me you were on the terrace?'

  'Well, we have,' she said. 'And your dressing-room next door.'

  'Do they blow the horn still at half past six, for them to open the doors for the beasts to go out to pasture?' 'Yes.'And one microscopic child to drive them!' 'Want your wuzz again?'

  She held out both hands: took the little creature. Lessingham lighted a cigar. They said no more for a few minutes; using perhaps the mountains, and the village life about them, and the bodily sight of each other sitting there, as a directer medium than overt speech.

  After a while, he spoke. 'Have you ever felt double inside?'

  'No,' she answered, upon a note part mocking part caressing in her voice, as though 'No' were washed with honey-water.

  'One half all Ambitioso: set the whole world to rights and enslave mankind. The other half, all Lussurioso and Supervacuo: makes me want to abduct you to some undiscovered south sea-island of the blest, and there, paint, write, live on sweetmeats: spend the whole course of everlasting time in the moving and melancholy meditation that man's life is as unlasting as a flower. Instead of either of which,' he said, getting up from the. table, 'how about taking our lunch up to the Sella Pass?'

  Doctor Vandermast, a learned man, present secretary and foretime tutor to the Duke of Zayana, was walking at break of day under Memison, by a trodden path southeastward along the lake's edge, a mile or so on the way toward Reisma. It was between three and four o'clock: the twentieth morning after that secret master-stroke of the King's in Rerek. Reisma Mere, smooth like polished steel, spread to cool distances veiled in mist. Water, meadow-land, oakwood and beechwood and birch and far-off mountain ranges showed as but varying depths of that indeterminate grey, having a tremulousness within it as of awakening blue, which filled the whole sky. Only in the north-east the great peaks began to shape themselves to a gradual crystalline sharpness and to take on a more cold and azured tinge as the sky behind them became streaked with saffron, and at length, above the saffron, one or two little clouds (invisible till now) began to show purple, and to burn underneath with fire of gold. A delicate primrose-coloured light began to infuse all the east and to mirror itself in the still lake; and now, for first voice of day, the cuckoo replied to the owl's last hoot. The learned doctor, alone with, the moment while other mortals slept, stayed it by his art: made it, as he walked, tarry for him awhile to his more perfect satisfaction and enjoyment.

  He had years on his back four score. And yet, being spare of build as a dragon-fly, all eyes and leanness, he carried himself erect and without old age's infirmity. Hollowed with thought were his eye-sockets under their bristling eaves, and wan and lanked with thought was his cheek, but not to take away the fire-edge of that spirit which burned in his eyes. His white beard fell to his girdle. He was clad in a flowing gaberdine, ginger colour, and upon his head a scarlet bonnet of linsey-woolsey. Suffering, by his art, time to resume its course, he paused at a footbridge across a stream that, grown up with waterweeds, barely trickled toward the lake. Under the further bank, where a thicket of alder overhung that stream, was a water-rat, sitting in a ball, holding in her little hands a bit of weed and eating it prettily, like a squirrel. The doctor bade her 'Good morrow, mouse'; and she, with a shy glance of beady black eyes set in her round head between small short rounded ears, greeted him again, in a tiny reed-like voice but with human speech.

  'Where is Madam Anthea?' said the doctor.

  'She passed by this way, reverend sir, about midnight on her way to the snows. Frighted me, me being in this dress and she in her teeth and claws.'

  'What, frighted of your sister? How shall we call this, but the most gross unknowing of God? She could not hurt you, my Campaspe, even if she would.'

  'It is not fit she should come in her dresses when I am in mine. Hers are too rough: mine, so easily torn.'

  'You can take your true shape.'

  ‘I like my little dresses. One must play and be merry a little: not duty and service all the time.' She whisked across from the weedy raft she had rested on and so up the bank, and sat there washing her face and ears. 'O we are all in our humours: grown a little restless, as you may conceive, sir, with all these doings.'

  Under Vandermast's nose the little nymphish creature changed in the twinkling of an eye her fur dress for feathers: for the silk-smooth brownish green dress, creaming to greenish buff in the under-parts, of a peg-gy-whitethroat: fluttered her wings, and was gone. From a hiding-place among the branches she ran him a descant, sweet falling notes of her woodland warble. His eye followed the sound to a flicker in the alderleaves; and there she was with her eyebrows. 'There's been double-dealings of late,' she said; 'where neither of them had seen the other, nor none of them knew other's person, nor knew of other's coming.' She hopped from twig to twig; daintily picked an insect or two. 'Tell me, who is this King then? And this son of his, this Duke?'

  'That question', said Vandermast, 'raiseth problems of high dubitation: a problem de natura substantiarum; a problem of selfness. Lieth not in man to resolve it, save so far as to peradventures, and by guess-work.'

  'And what is your guess?' She perched now in the tip-most leaves of the alder, bobbing and flirting her tail, looking down at him.

  'You must be content with your own guesses, my little lovebird: I with mine.'

  'Why?'

  She paused on the spray a moment; then flew down into the grass before his feet. 'Well, I will tell you my guess so far,' she said: 'that they are one and the same, even as She in Her shapes in one and the same; and yet other. And this world his world: even as it is the King's. And by Her giving.'

  All the whole arch of day above them widened and rose moment by moment to new infinitudes of dawn-washed golden light. That old man resumed his walk, slowly onward.

  She flew after him: settled on his finger. 'Shall I take my true shape?'

  'As you please. But you are very well suited thus.'

  'But I long to do as shall please you. You are so strange in your likes and dislikes. Why are you so?'

  'Well,' said Vandermast smiling, 'you must remember, for one thing, I am very orderly in years.'

  'Do you choose, then.'

  ‘Your little dresses? there's none prettier, I trunk, than my water-rat.'

  She ran along his
sleeve to the crook of his elbow and sat there eyeing him, while she washed her face with her paws. 'Why?'

  'In these matters, is but one answer why.'

  'Our Lady? She likes me thus?'

  'Surely.'

  'She likes me all ways. We are part of Her empiredom. Is it not so?'

  'Please Her,' said the learned doctor, 'it is so.'

  'There was a word in your mouth the other day: deificatio. What is that?'

  'It is,' answered the doctor, 'a term of art, signifying a condition we can sooner imagine than understand: the fusing and merging of God and the soul into each other,'

  'Why?' The mouse-like hand and arm of Campaspe, suddenly in her own shape now, gloved to the elbow with soft brown leather that gave out a sharp odour of water-plants under a hot sun, rested light as air on his sleeve. Her grown of pale satin wrought all over with carnation silk made, as she walked, little summer-noises as of wind coming and going among reeds and willows. 'Why?'

  Vandermast smiled and shook his head. 'Naiad: dryad,' he began to say, slowly: 'hamadryad: oread: nymphs of the woods and of gentle waters and of the kinless mountain, what can you learn by me? For you know all that is needful to know: know it as to the knowing born, without knowing that you know it: knowing it from within. Whereas I, that am but a looker on from withoutward—'

  Campaspe looked up into his face with her bead-like eyes. 'But who are you, then?' she said, and her hand tightened on his arm.

  As from a window in the clouds a shaft of sunlight passes over the cold sea, so seemed for a moment the thought-furrowed lean countenance of Vandermast. 'I am, I suppose,' answered he, 'an old man that am yet in love with youth.'

  ‘I had not thought of youth. Why with youth?' she said. 'What is youth?'

  But that learned philosopher, armed with so questionable a she-disciple, but came his way in silence.

  Mary, walking ahead up the pass (a practice grounded, by tacit agreement, in two sufficient reasons: to feed the eyes behind her, and to leave it to her to set the pace), paused now in the shortening shadow of a pine. They were by this time come up a thousand feet from the floor of the valley, to where the hollow mountain side is a maze of hills and dells, with wide turfy stretches starred all over with flowers, and on every hand little watercourses: some alive with beck or waterfall, some but dry beds where water comes down after rain. And at every turn, with the winding upwards of that intermittent and stony path, the cliffs of the Sella constantly changed their aspect, lying back in ever more and more forced distortions of perspective as the way led nearer their roots, and thrusting up in succession ever a fresh spur of foot-stool to eclipse by its nearness the loftier summits behind it, and, in a vast illusion of instability, lean out from the body of the mountain. Under the gathering power of the sun the whole hillside was alive with grass-hoppers both great and small, taking hither and thither their low criss-cross flights, some with scarlet wings some with orange some with blue, and filling the air with the hot metallic thrill of their chirping. Lessingham, halting a few paces below her in the open, shaded his eyes to see her where she stood looking upwards to the thin roof made by the pine-tree fronds. Air stirred in the branches, sending ever changing tesselated patterns of white sunshine and amethystine luminous shadow across Mary's upturned face: her beautiful fire-red hair, done in the beautiful Austrian way, gleamed where the sun caught it, like polished metal; and every loose tendril floating on the air was at one instant invisible, the next instant a trembling of flame.

  'The stillness of the trunk,' she said, 'Incessant little movements in the top branches. Do you think the world has its roots in heaven, and its branches spread out earthwards?'

  Lessingham sat himself down on a rock at her feet.

  'What a blessing,' she said, 'to have you real lazy, for once. The first proper lazy holiday we shall have had, for over three years. Never since Egypt, that last winter before Janet was born.'

  'We've not done badly. Honey-moon in Greece, nineteen hundred and eight Caucasus, nineteen-nine: pure laze—'

  He looked up at her: the Grecian profile, sweet serene forehead, very slight depression between brow and nose: eyebrows sweeping upward from the nose, then levelling: nose finely modelled, straight, pointed, with an almost imperceptible tilt up rather than down: cheekbones just sufficiently showing their presence to bring strength to the dove-like contours of her cheek: chin firm, throat and neck lithe, tender and strong: lips like the lips of a Goddess, tranquil and cool, yet of a most quicksilver mobility to fit every thought, mood, and feeling, as now a kind of satirical merry luxury of self-pleasuring comedy that blesses where it strikes, as she said, 'The indolence of it, that Caucasus expedition! Nothing at all to show for it—except Ushba, of course, and about five virgin peaks!'

  'Well and then next year, nineteen-ten,' he said, 'in the yacht to Lofoten in the early summer—true, I did dart across to Stockholm about those statues they wanted me to do for them. But, on the whole, pure lazes, both that and the month on the Italian lakes in the autumn. Still, I'll promise to be bone-lazy now for a bit. First instalment: I wrote and told brother Eric the other day (from Paris) to go to the devil, about the Parliament question. Too many jobs that want doing without that'

  'OI am so glad!' said she.

  'And I didn't give him an address. I'm very fond of Eric, and very fond of Jacqueline; but really we don't want them butting in again like that on our voyage to Kythera, as they did at Avignon.'

  They went on again, Mary ahead; maintaining for the best part of an hour a companionship of silence in which, the deeplier for no word spoken, presence quiveringly underfelt presence. From the top of the pass a ten minutes' pull up over steep grass and scree brought them to a shoulder of flowerclad alp, whence, out of sight of the path, you look east to the square-cut Towers of the Sella and west, further away beyond the hollow of the pass, to the rose-coloured wild fantastical spires and ridges of the Langkofel massif; Langkofel, Plattkofel, and Fiinffingerspitze: a spectacle at first blush unbelievable, unveiling at that moment above breaking clouds in the broad unreached sky.

  'Like nectar!' she said, taking in through eye and deep-drawn breath the thing before her. 'Don't you Jove to get up?'

  'Up to a point.'

  'Where would you stop?'

  'Here.'

  Mary drank the air again, standing tip-toe in an eagerness and poise liker to some creature of the woods and hills that is so fitted to its bodv that every changing motion expresses wholly and subtly, as music, the inward mood. Such a carriage, may be, had those swan maidens, king's daughters, flown from the south through Mirkwood to fulfil their fates; whom Weyland Smith and his brethren surprising at their upland bath, stole the swan-skin dresses of, and caught them so, and wedded them, and for a time sat in peace so. 'O I would not stop. I would go always higher. Wouldn't you come with me?'

  'Would I, do you think?'

  'Have to!'

  ‘Well, but, say, twenty thousand feet: that might stop us. Heights above that, I've climbed at in the Himalaya. Can't breathe properly, lose your strength, can't sleep. And an awful depression: the sense of something watch, watch, watching you, always from behind. Like an oyster might feel, if it has an imagination, when the cook opens the shell with an oyster-knife and looks at it.'

  ‘I know. But we'd choose to be creatures that can enjoy it.—I'd like to be that,' she said, pointing, as a party of choughs, glossy black plumage and yellow beaks, glided, dived, and soared below the edge of the hill, balancing on air, uttering their soft rippling cries.

  She came and sat beside him: began to investigate and spread out the lunch which Lessingham produced from his rucksack. 'Mass of eggs: I hope they've ducked them in cold water so that they'll peel properly. Rolls with ham in them. Chicken: I asked for that instead of veal to-day. All these snippety bits of sausage. Peaches., Plums—O you've squashed them! with your great coarse camera jabbing against them! A great wodge of butter.—Shall we ever grow old?' she said, as they began eating.


  'No.'

  'We shall. I'm twenty-six to-day. You'll be thirty-two in November. We'll have to start being middle-aged. Thirty-three is a generation.'

  'You haven't given me my birthday present yet.' Lessingham said, when they had finished and buried the remains.

  'Do you want it?'

  'It's part of the bargain.'

  'O stupid bargain.'

  1 like to go on with it. I like outward and visible signs.'

  'So do I. But this part of it—I mean the taking off— has lost its meaning. My dear, my dear, it has. The first time: even the second: but after that—'

  'Well, you must think it a kind of exercise—for me. Come. Only once a year.'

  'Very well.' She took off her wedding-ring and gave it him.

  ' "Ours",' he said, examining it: reading the Greek cut deeply on the inside of the ring. 'HMETEPA. Feminine singular. Neuter plural. Mine, and yours.'

  Their eyes, turned together, rested in each other a minute, grave, uncommunicative, as with the straining between them of some secret chain in nature.

  'Suppose,' said. Lessingham after a long pause, 'one of us were to die. Do you think then there could still be any question of "ours"?'

  It was as if dogs howled on the shore. Mary looked away: across to the pale precipices of the Langkofel, rearing skyward above fans of scree that opened downward to the vast scatter of fallen boulders which fills the hollow below, called the Steinerne Stadt. 'What makes you say that?' she said.

  To hear you say Yes. I wish I could say credo quia absurdum, as you can.'

  'I don't. I do believe. But not because it's absurd.'

  Between Langkofel and Plattkofel, lower but more venomous to look at than either, with its knife-edged reddish pinnacles, stands the Funffingerspitze. 'I climbed that thing twice; before I had a Mary,' he said. 'Alone, both times, like a lunatic. By the Schmidt Kamin. Deserved to be killed. No, it's not absurd,' he said: ‘what we were talking about. But it's not believable. Not to me.' He ground his nailed boot into the earth. 'And the alternative,' he said, ‘is, unfortunately, not asburd. And I find it unbearable: the mere thought, unbearable.'