A Fish Dinner in Memison - Zimiamvian Trilogy 02

by E R Eddison

  She shivered a little, still looking at those mountains. 1 don't think we really know what we mean,' she said, very low, ‘when we speak of Death.'

  ‘I don't think we do,' said Lessingham. 'But all philosophizing on that subject comes back to an earth of wretchedness and of darkness. The Red King's dream in Alice. Go out—bang!—just like a candle.'

  'I don't like it when you talk like that.'

  1 used not to mind. Now I do.'

  They sat silent. He began considering the ring once more, turning it about in the sun, fitting it on his little finger first of his right hand then of his left: it would not pass the second joint. At last, offering it to her with a grave courtliness of manner, 'Senorita,' he said, ‘will you accept it back again?'

  But Mary was stood up now, against the sky, looking down on him from above. And now, that minor diabolus twisting in its sleep there near her mouth's corner as if in the sweet unbusked luxury of some naughty dream, she replied, 'No. I shall not. By your own stubbornness you've unmarried yourself. I'll think it over in cooler blood: possibly answer your proposal to-morrow.'

  ‘I’ll come for the answer to-night,' he said.

  ‘You'll find the door locked.'

  'I'll get in at the window when you're asleep.'

  'You won't. I'll scream: create an appalling scandal-ismos! No, I mean it.'

  'You're a cruel wicked girl.'

  'If you're not nice to me, it'll be the day after tomorrow.'

  He stood up, safely pocketing the ring. 'Well. Couldn't I even have a kiss?'

  Sideways, tentatively, as she was used to do in the days before the era of grace, Mary submitted a very sweet but very Artemisian cheek. His lips nearly cornered the little horned thing in its bed; but Mary jumped away. And now as they stood and laughed at each other, the thing said privately to Lessingham: 'Yes. A cruel wicked girl. Unpardonable. But what poverty of riches if she wasn't!'

  It was ten of the clock in the forenoon, of Wednesday the fifteenth of July, in the lieutenant's house at Reisma. The master of the house was from home. The home-men and women were out in the fields along the lakeside, making hay. Under the sun's heat the house stood deserted, save only for its mistress, lazing herself on a bench of precious asterite stone under the cool of an open trellis of vines before the fore-court. Cushions made soft the bench for her reclining. Campaspe sat at her feet, holding up to her a mirror framed in pale mountain-gold garnished with sparks of small diamonds, sparks of aquamarines, and sparks of emeralds. Anthea, sitting sideways on the back of the bench, was fanning her mistress with a fan of white peacock-feathers which, at every to and fro, altered their sheen like a halo about the moon. The fingernails of Anthea tapered to claws: her hair seemed as lighted from within with a sun-like glory: white-skinned she was, of a classic cold perfection of form and feature, yet with eyes the pupils of which were upright slips opening to some inside hotness of fire, and with scarlet hps which disclosed, when she smiled, teeth of a mountain lynx. Behind Campaspe, there leaned against a pillar of the trellis-work that ancient doctor, resting, as in the contemplation of things of a higher strain than earth's, his regard upon the lady of the house.

  'Signor Vandermast,' said she, 'it is now well onward in summer, and the days are hot and long. The Duke of Zayana, his eyes over-gazed in my excellencies, ceases not to solicit me in the unlawful purpose. My jealous husband sleeps dog-sleeps. Cool me a little, I pray you, with your unemptiable fountain of wisdom, and tell me why must I (being that I am) be teased with these inconveniences?'

  ‘Why will your ladyship ask me such a question?' replied the doctor, 'to which You (being that you are) are Yourself the alonely one and unsoilable answer.'

  'That answer,' said she, ‘I could have had at any time this fortnight past, and without the asking: from his grace, who, as my true lover and humble servitor un-guerdoned, is become to be as melancholy as a gib-cat But I will not have lovers' answers, nor courtiers' answers, but an answer in philosophy.'

  'Mine was an answer in philosophy, madam; not sus-tentable, indeed, in the very point of logic, but as by fingerly demonstration: as we term it, a probation ostensive. And it is the only answer.'

  ‘Which, being unhooded, is to retort the whole upon poor me?' She reached an idle hand to pluck one of the moonlight-coloured feathers from Anthea's fan; considered curiously for a minute its shifting sheen. 'O wherefore hath nature made the lawful undelightful?'

  There,' replied the learned doctor, 'I can none other-ways but reject your major premise, which is but the empiric's judgement of imperfect laws, imperfect delights. When we have justly conceived the infinite nature or being of the Godhead—infinitam Die atque Deae existentiam—conceived it, that is to say, sub specie deternitatis, we see that it doth altogether transcend this nice and frivolous distinction of the good and the beautiful. In this world, the good is that which serves the beautiful. And if there be any world where it is not so, then that is a bad world.'

  'I could imagine such a world,' she said, stroking the feather to and fro softly across her knees. 'You, signor, who are reputed perfect in your knowledge of all sciences and disciplines, able by your wisdom to unwrap the hid causes of things, and are besides a severe man, eschewing all sensual pleasures,—can you unriddle me this: why must I, being that I am, have a body?' The silence hovered, listening to a bee's intermittent buzz and stillness among the jessamine blooms.

  'I can answer but with the same answer again; desiring your ladyship but look yourself again in your self-loving glass. Some there be that have fantasied philosophical probabilities of a certain prima materia or brute matter, wherein (as they feign) do all corporeal beings consist, and of a spirit able to inform or transhape that matter to significant being. But far be it such under-age arguments should intrude themselves into God's divine mysteries; the key whereunto, to shut and unshut, is in the blessed endless duality in onehead of substance and Godhead, whereby Beauty and Omnipotency are paired together.'

  'Omnipotency: Beauty,' said she, turning the feather this way, that way, in her fingers, watching its coruscations of pallid many-coloured fires in an ever changing changelessness glimmer and fade and gleam again: 'Substance: Godhead: Duality: Matter: Spirit. A jargle of words to cast up dust betwixt us and things true and perfect, as the sun shines through white clouds, unclear. Signifying, (I suppose, if you will come to the point), that God Himself is not self-perfect, and therefore He made Me?'

  The doctor regarded her for a minute in silence. 'Yes,' he said. 'Schoolmen use these terms of generality as a kind of shorthand, to bear us in mind that large expression whereby it were partly possible the works of God might be comprehended in man's wit or reason. Your ladyship and that Other,—He, the great Father of All— have so many countenances in Your variety that a man should as well seek to fit a garment to the moon as to set forth by enumeration of particularities the infinite nature of Gods. For instance, we speak of the Quesmodian Isles: say, "There be nine little islands on a row". "Islands": it is but a pointer only: a plucking of you by the sleeve, in order that you may consider them together and severally in their manifold, unique, and undividable verity: this birch-tree, this twig, this bird on the twig, this white cloud, this breath of wind that brushes the marrams like hair, this dew-snail, this bubble in this well-spring, this grain of sand, unlike all other, and yet bearing likeness to all other. Even so, in a more august generality, we speak of Beauty; comprehending under that style all that, on this orbicular ball, is affined with your ladyship, or derived from your ladyship, or conducing to your ladyship's pleasure.'

  Fiorinda nodded: scarce discernible, the very shadow of a nod. 'And therefore He made Me?' Her voice, suffering itself to vanish down the silence as down slow irrevocable unpathed waters of Lethe, seemed to leave on the air a perfume, a breath, a deep assurance, redolent of all lost loved things since time began, or the stars of heaven were made and the constellations thereof. 'Me, created so consummately perfect that nought there is in earth or heaven tha
t He thinks worthy to suit Me (being so superfine) but alone to reign?—Well, it was commendable!'

  The stillness waited again on the bee in the jessamine flowers. ‘I would dearly like,' she said, ‘to be eavesdropper at some of your discourses with the Duke your master. Have you taught him the things a prince ought to eschew? as doting of women?' -

  'My Lady Fiorinda,' Vandermast replied very soberly, 'I have taught him this: to know the perfect when he shall see it.'

  'So that his coming hither but yesterday, most pea-cockly strained to the height of your philosophy and at an undue hour of eleven o'clock in the night (my husband being from home), was with purpose, I suppose, to have grounded me in that same lesson?—Mew!' she said, 1 sent him away with no other book to read in than my unclasped side. Did I well so?'

  'Everything that your ladyship does or ever shall do, is done well. You cannot, of your nature, do other.’

  Her mouth sweetened and hardened again as she considered herself: first, reflected in Campaspe's looking-glass, the image of her face; next in the reposure of most soft content sweetly stretched along that couch, the rest. 'What a hell of witchcraft lies in woman's body,' she said. 'Body and head together, I mean. As aqua fortis by itself, nor vitriol by itself, hath no virtue against gold; but mix them, you have aqua regia. And that hath a virtue to consume and dissolve away even very gold itself.'

  'Yet do I know a man,' said the doctor, 'compact of such metal as even Your alkahest, madam, shall not dissolve nor consume. As the ruby, which, when it cometh out of the fire uncorrupt, becometh and remain-eth of the colour of a burning coal.'

  'And I,' said that lady, and again in the honey-sweet cadence of each slowed word an echo sounded, faint, uncertain, full of danger, bitter-sweet: sea-sounds from a timeless shore: 'And I do begin to know him, I think, too: a man who is fingering for more of me than God allows him. And, I do almost begin to think,' said she, 'one who will gang till he gets it."

  Shadows were lengthening when Lessingham and Mary turned for home. It was the time of day when the sun, no longer using the things of earth as things to be trod under and confounded in a general down-beating of white light from above, inclines instead almost to a companionship with them. In that mood, the sun had now singled out, like treasures each by itself, each tree, each broad-eaved weather-browned chalet, each fold or wrinkle of the hillside, each bend of each goat-track, each stone, each littlest detail of the far-reared mountain faces, each up-turned flower; until each, washed in golden air, rested picked out as a thing both perfect in itself and making up with all things else in the landscape a more large perfection: perfection bearing but this spot, endemic in all perfections of earth, that in time they pass.

  They came down by a track that kept high in the sunshine under the cliffs of the Sella, then dropped steeply through woods to join their path of the morning a few minutes above the inn at Plan. The barn where, on their way up, hearing the thud of wooden flails, they had seen a young man and a girl at work threshing, stood empty now; but the dusty smell hung yet about it of corn and husk. The white walls of the inn were gay with paintings of flower-shapes and shell-shapes and, between the windows above the porch, of the Virgin and Child and holy men. A fatal accident that morning, the girl at the inn told them, on the Fiinffingerspitze: a herr and his guide: in the Schmidt Kamin. The bodies had been brought down to Canazei, the far side of the pass. She had heard about it from Hansl Baumann, the chamois hunter. Herr Lessingham would remember him: had they not hunted together, a year, two years, since? Lessingham, as they went on again, felt Mary's arm twine itself in his.

  Evening drew on apace. Their path crossed the bridge and joined the road, down which in a straggling slow procession cows were coming back from the alp: a dwindling procession; for at each house or turning, as they drew near the village, one or another would drop out of line of her own accord and leisurely, of her own accord, come home for milking. The goats too, undriven, came taking each her own way home. Evening was sweet with the breath of the cows, cool after the heat of the day, and full of music: a many-pitched jangling music of cow-bell and goat-bell in a hundred indeterminate drowsy rhythms. At one of the corners a child, three years old perhaps, stood expectant. A goat stopped came to him: paused while he gave her a hug with both arms about her neck: then, still in that embrace, turned with him down the path to a little poor house beside the river. Lessingham and Mary, lingering to enjoy this idyll, saw how a girl, littler even than the little boy, came from the house, staggering under the load of an open wooden box or trough which she carried in her arms and set down at last for the goat to eat. While she was eating, both these children hugged and kissed her.

  Urgently, like something lost, Mary's hand felt its way into his.

  ‘What, my darling?’

  'What you said this morning: about feeling double inside.' 'Yes?'

  To change suits? I believe that's part of it, don't you think?'

  'Change suits?'

  'Colours. King of Hearts: Queen of Spades. How silly that we can't, well—change dresses.'

  'Queen of Spades? Good heavens, I would never change you!'

  'O yes. You'd give your soul for it sometimes. Instead of Le Lys Rouge, La Tulipe Noire. When you are in that frame of mind.'

  'My darling, that is not me.'

  'Don't be too sure. Somebody else in your skin, then. O yes; and when I'm in the mood, indeed I prefer that somebody else to you, my friend!'

  Lessingham was silent. Turning to go, they lingered yet a minute or two to watch the sunset on the Sella: a transformation at once more theatrical and more unearthly than that illusion of immaterial substantiality which the mountain had produced at breakfast-time. Hardly credible it seemed, that here was but, as in Alpine sunsets, an illumination of the rocks from without. Eyesight was witness against it, watching the whole vast train of storeyed precipices transformed to a single fire-opal, transparent, lighted from within by a quivering incandescence of red fire.

  In a few minutes it was gone: swallowed up, as in the rising tide of a dead sea, by the rising shadow of night. Lessingham said, 'Do you remember sailing up to the Westfirth, past Halogaland, those sunsets on the Sound-way? Not this burning inside. But they stayed.'

  'For a time. But they went. They went at last.' The pallours that are between sunset and nightfall lay ashen on Mary's face, as on the face of the Sella. 'Even the Sella,' she said, 'must not even that go at last? Though we ourselves go too soon and too quickly to notice it.'

  'Gods, I suppose, might notice it: see it, as we see the sunset go. If there were such a thing as Gods. Yes, it goes. All goes. And never comes back,' he said. Adding, with a sudden tang of waspish-headed discordous humour in his voice, 'How dull and savourless if it were otherwise!'

  He looked round at her: saw, through the dusk, a faint lifting, like the wings of a sea-swallow in flight, of her eyebrows, and a faint mockery which, dragonflyish, here and away, darted across her lips. It was as if night and all the dark earth rose to her, upon a hunger of unassuageable desire.

  Lessingham next morning opened his eyes to a greenish luminosity: spears of radiance and spears of shadow-mess, all of a geometrical straightness, here vertical, there horizontal, there bent at obtuse angles and extending themselves away out of sight over his head: all very still. And all very quiet; except for a continuous under-sound, like rain or like running water, saying to him, deliriously, lullingly, almost as with articulate speech: 'Do not think. Do not know in what bed and in what room you are waking, or in what country. Do not wake. Shut eyes again. Snuggle the bed-clothes up round your ears: burrow your cheek into the pillow. So, with all senses abandoned to the touch of the owl-feathered wings of sleep, which, moving hoverly about you, wake what thoughts will be wakened and lull the rest, your self may taste for a while, unstrung, inert, unattached, the pure sensual beatitude of its own slumber.

  'Slumber of the spirit, green and still. From depths deeper than these light-beams can wade, every now and then a bubble
is released, floats upward, distinct and perfect, touches the glasslike ceiling, bursts, and is gone. So: in irregular slow procession, like cows at evening. This Tyrolean dance, gay mountain-bred, dancing to the blood: danced, it is quite true, "to saucily" by these dancers from Vienna. Madame de Rosas rising through it, effacing it, Spanish and statuesque, upon a long tremolo of castanets: Mary listening, watching: Mary at Anmering: Mary under the pine-tree, and across her face, tesselated patterns weaving and unweaving of white sunshine and luminous jewelled shadows: grasshoppers on the hot slopes under the Sella, uttering—for whom if not for her?—their lily-like voice. Thunder-smoke of Troy burning:

  The day shall come when holy llios shall fall,

  And Priam and the folk of Priam of the good ashen spear:

  the slack weight in your arms beside the Struma: poor old Fred: like you, born for a fighter, beserk taint, brothers in blood: "Strike thunder and strike loud when I farewell": thud of shells bursting, whining of them in the air: but the thinness, the shrivelled lack of actuality— was it all for this?—of the actual fact: of the end: trying to say something: bubbling of red froth between his front teeth: rattle of machine-guns—peas in a pig's bladder: no, castanets. Castanets, and the red camellia in that woman's hair: sense-maddening colubrine slow swaying and rolling of her hips: white of her eyes: smoothness of her hair: peace. Peace, in the velvet night of this single sapphire that carries in its dear unrest all these things and their swaying rhythms. It goes. All goes. All except Mary. Mary: always on the point to be caught, but never quite. Her galloping hoof-beats: like castanets. Kelling Heath and the awakening earth taking life from her life. The morning of life: the entry, upon pizzicato throbs, of that theme (which is Mary) of the Grand Variation in the C sharp minor quartet, Queen of Queens, unutterable treasure of all hearts: things deep in time crowding to her, forming new earths to take their arms about her, new earths to be born and gone again and forgotten again at each throb of her footsteps.— "Perhaps my answer is sufficient, sir, if I say 'Because it amuses me'?" The crimson of her mouth: crimson gloves: her white skin: that same matter which, asleep or awake, resides near the corner of Mary's mouth: Mary, but with this blackness: Ninfea de Nerezza—'