A Fish Dinner in Memison - Zimiamvian Trilogy 02

by E R Eddison

  kidneys, buttered eggs, devilled chicken-legs, steaming hot milk and the fragrancies of tea and coffee and new-made toast, came from the sideboard, where two yard-long 'sluggard's friends' of burnished copper kept warm these things and the piles of hot plates for helping them.

  No one else was down yet. Lessingham added first the salt then the sugar to his porridge, and was now drowning all with a rising ocean of cream, when Mary, still in her dark-green riding-habit, pattered on the glass of the garden door to be let in. 'Though why all round the house and in at the window,' he said, unbolting, opening, and standing aside to let her by, 'when nature provided a door from the hall—'

  'Hungry. Want feeding.' The Terpsichorean lilt in her step as she crossed the threshold smoothed itself to a more level, more swan-maiden motion. 'Look at the sun on those daffies!' she said, pausing over them a moment on her way to the sideboard. 'And I saw the tree-creeper out there on the big ash. It doesn't ever go up and down the tree without little screams.' As if in such mirrors the springs should be looked for of such an April morning and its pied and airy loveliness: a loveliness unfolding of itself from within, radiant ever outwards, with clear morning lids uplifted upon all but itself alone, and all eyes drawn to it, taking light from its light. As if in such broken mirrors, sooner than in Mary.

  'I suppose it's the touchstone of genius,' Lessingham said, while he lifted the covers one by one to show her what was underneath.

  "A scrappet of ham: just half of that littlest slab,' she said, pointing with her finger. 'And scrambled eggs.— What is?'

  He helped the dishes while Mary held out her plate. To do what no normal person ever dreamed of doing, but do it just so; so that, soon as see it, they think: How on earth could anyone have dreamt of doing it differently!'

  'Wanted just to see,' she said: 'see how you look from outside. Where are the others?'

  'Like Sardanapalus, in bed I suppose.'

  'Bed! How people can! this time of year.'

  'I'm not so sure about that. I seem to remember occasions—'

  'O well, that's different.—What are you thinking about?' she said, watching him with eyes in which the question reposed itself like the shimmer of the sun on rippled water, half bantering half serene, as they took their seats at the table.

  'Memories. And you, Senorita?'

  'Thinking.' The diamonds and emeralds blazed and slept again on her ring as she transfixed with her fork a little piece of buttered egg, applying to the action as much deliberation of raised eyebrows and exquisite precision of touch as an artist might bring to bear upon some last and crucial detail. 'Thinking of you and your methods.'

  They went on with their breakfasts in silence. After a while Lessingham said, out of the blue, 'Are you coming abroad with me?'

  'Abroad?'

  'Get away from it all for six months. Get into step again.'

  Mary opened her eyes wide and nodded three times. 'Yes, I am. When?'

  'The sooner the better. To-morrow. Tuesday. Wednesday.'

  'Very well.'

  'Where shall we go?' he said, keeping up the game. 'South America?' Glow-worm caves I'd like to have a look for, somewhere at the back of beyond in New Zealand? Iceland? a bit too early in the year, perhaps, for Iceland. What would you like? The world's free again, and we're free. Better choose. Anywhere except German East or France.'

  'Some island?'

  The Marquesas? We might found a kingdom in the Marquesas. I dare say the French Government are fond enough of me to stretch a point. Freehold, with powers of life and death. I king: you queen. Jim might be lord chamberlain: Anne second lady in the land, with title of princess in her own right: Charles, lord high admiral, I’ll put Milcrest on to dig out the details after breakfast'

  ‘Better be quick, or someone will find another job for you before we can get off. We've got to make up for these missed years.'

  'I was thinking just now,' said Lessingham: 'glad my dear knew the Dolomites before the rot set in. Five years ago this summer, that last time. One moment it seems a generation: another way about five minutes.'

  'And you've only been home about five days. And tomorrow, it's Rob's fourth birthday.'

  Lady Bremmerdale came in from the hall. 'Good morning, Mary,’ kissing her from behind: 'good morning, Edward. No, no, don't bother: ‘I’ll help myself. How long have you folks been up?'

  'Sunrise,' said Mary.

  'O come.'

  'Pretty nearly.'

  ‘Rode over to Wastdale Head,' said Lessingham. ‘Early service?' ‘Back to traditions.'

  Anne sat down. 'And here's my god-daughter.'

  Janet, on her best behaviour, embraced each in turn, and ensconced herself upon Anne's knee. 'I had scrambly eggs for my breakfast too. Do you know, auntie, I'd a most nasty dream. All about the most horrible, but alive, sort of wuffy snakes. And a huge great dragon: much bigger nor a house. And it had a face rather like a camel.'

  'Had it a long neck?' said Anne.

  ‘No. It was much more thick. A 'normous great green thing.'

  Lessingham said, 'What did you do with it?' Tried to eat it up.'

  'And what did it do with you?’ Janet was silent.

  'Anyhow, you did quite right. Always eat them up. I always do. They can't possibly hurt you then.'

  'Good morning everybody,' said Fanny Chedisford, very smart in her new grey tweed. 'Last as usual? Nol no Charles yet. Saved again.'

  Hty a short length,' said Charles Bremmerdale. ‘My dear Mary, I apologize.'

  'But you know Jim's poem: "Late for breakfast: shows your sense", and so on? a strict rule in this household.'

  Janet had a piece of paper which all the time she kept on folding and unfolding. 'Muwie, I've writed a story,' she said. 'It's for Rob's happy birthday present Shall I show it Father first?'

  'Yes, I should,' said Mary.

  Janet got down: brought it to Lessingham. 'Would you like to read me my story, Father? Will you read it aloud to me, please? Just you and me?'

  He received it, very conspiratorially, and read it in a whisper, his cheek against hers:

  'The Kitchen.—The cat has a baby kitten and the kitten is three weeks old. The parrot is grey with a red tail. "Oh dear" said the parrot. "I do wish cook wasn't out. "We are not sorry" said the cat and the kitten.— Tramp! tramp! tramp! "The cook" whispered the cat. "Bother" said the kitten. In came the cook. She had a large bundle in her hand. Suddenly, the cat got her temper up. She rushed at the parrots cage and tried to hurt the cook. At last she managed to drive the cook out of the kitchen. "Thank goodness" said the kitten. "Last year" said the cat. "I had six kittens, but the fool of a cook drowned them." "She really is the limit" said the kitten. "I tell you what" said the cat. "I'll eat the parrot of I can get him. Then the cat prounced on the parrot's cage got the door open and eat it.—The End.

  That's the stuff,' he said.

  'Do you like it? really?'

  ‘Yes, I like it,' he said, going over it again as if enjoying the after-taste of some nice dish.

  'Do you truly, Father? Really and truly you do?'

  'I like it There's style about it.'

  She laughed with pleasure. 'What's that mean?'

  ‘Never you mind.' He rang the bell with his foot. ‘I like the way they talk and the way they do things. And I like the finish. You go on writing like that, and you'll end somewhere between Emily Bronte and Joseph Conrad when you're grown up: a twentieth century Sappho.'

  ‘Who's Emily?'

  Tell Mr. Milcrest I want to see him,' he said to the servant: then to Janet, ‘No, not that Emily. A girl who wrote a story; and poems. Go on now, and read that to Sheila while we finish breakfast. Nothing from the post office, I suppose?' he said to the secretary.

  ‘No, sir, nothing.'

  ‘You're satisfied your arrangements will work properly in case anything should come?' ‘Absolutely.'

  ‘Good. Easter Day, just the moment they'd choose for some hurroosh. I'll be about the grounds all day,
in case. Any word from Snittlegarth?'

  ‘Yes, sir, I’ve just been on the phone. Mr. Eric got your letter last night. There are some matters he's anxious to talk over with you. He's riding over: started six o'clock this morning, and hoped to be with you before noon.'

  It'll certainly have to be the Marquesas, at this rate,' Lessingham said, with a comic look at Mary. Then to Milcrest 'Come in to the library, Jack: one or two things I want seen to.' He left the room, Milcrest following.

  ‘Eric. O my God,' said Bremmerdale sotto voce. His wife smiled at this undisguised feeling on the subject of her eldest brother.

  Mary smiled too. ‘Never mind, Charles. You and I will flee together.—Dear, will you feed these creatures and yourself,' she said to Anne. 'Ring for anything you want.' She collected Janet from the hearthrug and departed.

  Charles shook his head. 'Edward never seems to get a "let-up": how he goes on at this rate heaven knows I don't believe, until now, he's had four days together to call his own since the war started.'

  Anne said, 'Quite sure he hasn't. But Edward is Edward.'

  'I shouldn't be surprised if they sent him off to be the military governor again of one of these comic countries somewhere, before long. He'd like that.'

  'I never remember names,' said Fanny. 'Where was it he issued stamps with his own head on them, and the Foreign Office recalled him for exceeding his instructions?'

  'He always will exceed instructions,' said Charles. 'And the more honour to him for that. I only hope he won't kill himself with overwork before he's done.'

  Anne said, 'We Lessinghams take quite a lot of killing.'

  The world, at three hundred yard's range in all directions, was apprised of Eric Lessingham's arrival by the carrying-power of his voice. Not that it was a specially loud voice, but there was in it the timbre of sounding brass; so that his inquiry, in ordinary tones at the front door, for Lady Mary, reverberated past the long west wing round to the terraces above the river, causing a thrush there to drop her worm and take to flight. Despite crooked passages and double doors, Lessingham heard it plainly in the library. At the home farm the geese screamed in the paddock. Eastward in the water-gardens where, amid drifts of wild daffodil and water-blobs, the lake gives birth to the river Irt, Mary's eyebrows lifted in faint amusement and Charles Bremmerdale invoked his Maker.

  'Is it really to be a holiday this time?' Anne was saying.

  Mary graciously accepted a bunch of flowers presented by Lessingham's son and heir. ‘I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I've learnt not to count on anything. Make no plans, and you won't have to change them.—Yes, Rob, Muvvie does like primmy-roses.'

  'Anyhow, brother Eric won't upset anything?'

  'O dear no.'

  Rob said, 'We put some on the grave too, like those. The bat's grave what Ruth killed in the nursery last night. I cried when it was deaded. Father buried it. We put an emptaph on the grave. Father wrote it. I tolded Father what to write: 'This bat was small".'

  'Poor little bat.' said Mary.

  'I’d like to have had-ed it.'

  'Take care. We mustn't walk on those daffodils.'

  'No, no, no, we mustn't, must we. Mustn't walk on those,' he said, with great satisfaction and conviction.

  'But how the devil, my dear fellow,' Lessingham was saying to his brother as they came to the top of the three flights of steps that led down to the wild water-gardens, Was I to be expected to throw over my military and diplomatic responsibilities and come home to embark on a damned election campaign to please you? Be sensible.'

  'It's your duty: with all the money you've got and the brains you've got in a generation of fools.'

  'So you said before the war. And I told you then, that the only use of money as I conceive it is not to be a slave. And I'm not so innocent about modern politics as to want to go and get bogged in them.'

  Eric pushed back his hat from his broad and bony forehead and twirled his mustachios which he wore long like a viking's. For the rest, he was clean shaven. His face showed, in nose and brow and cheekbone and jawbone, a crag-like strength, and under the tan the colour came and went with every sway of his mood. His hair, darkish brown flecked with grey, was rather long at the back and about the ears: a vigorous curling growth: his ears rough and hairy. There was a demoniac twist in his eyebrows. A big man and a strong he was, of an easy six foot tall, heavy and somewhat clumsy of build, yet, for all his forty-seven years, with little sign of corpulence. He said again, 'It's your duty. If everyone with your abilities took up the attitude you do, where would the country come to?'

  Lessingham paused half-way down the second flight and laughed. ‘I don't know anyone with exactly my abilities, so your Kantian principle of the universal doesn't work very well here. As for my duty, I do it according to my lights. And I think, with respect, I'm rather a better judge of it than you are.'

  'Well and I think, with respect, you're a damned unsatisfactory hound.'

  Lessingham said nothing, but his nostrils hardened. Presently, as they walked on, he said quietly, with a tang of raillery in his voice that lightened the sting of the words, ‘I thought you'd something important to talk about. If you've only come over to quarrel with me you'd better go home again. I've enough eggs on the spit without a dog-fight with you into the bargain.'

  They were on the grass now, and the others coming up from the waterside to meet them. With the magnificence of a caballero Eric swept off his hat to his sister-in-law, bent to kiss her hand, then kiss her on both cheeks. ‘Bless you, dear Mary,' he said. ‘Make him do something. I can't If he'd gone into politics when I told him to, in fourteen, might have got some of our troubles straightened out before this. If he'd do it now (Hullo, Anne. Hullo, Charles, haven't seen you for years: Taverford still standing? Going to have any pheasants this autumn? Fll come and shoot 'em for you: if I’m invited, of course)—if he'd do it now,' he turned to Mary again, 'he'd be Prime Minister before he's many years older, damn him. Would myself, if I’d a wife like you.'

  "That's the essential qualification, is it? Really, where to hide my blushes, the way you flatter me.'

  'Pity is,' Eric said, 'I had been married three times already before you and I met. And if I hadn't, he'd have cut me out all the same, before I'd a chance to start the siege. That's the trick of these younger brothers. And he's youngest, and the worst. Look at the state of the country to-day,' he said: 'strikes all over the place, mines, railways, the Devil knows what. Damn the lot of 'em. They want a master.'

  'Why don't you give them one?' said Lessingham dryly.

  'It's what I'm trying to do. The trouble with your husband,' he took Mary's arm, 'you can take it from me, is that he was born about three hundred years too late.'

  Lessingham said, Three hundred and sixty, I've always thought. Get out before the Stuarts came in: I prefer that Tudor atmosphere. Or be born, say, six hundred years ago: have a dukedom in Italy: arts of peace and art of war, both in excelsis. War was part of the humanities as the condottieri waged it, until the French and the Spaniards came down over the Alps and showed them what. I should have enjoyed myself in the skin of our maternal ancestor, Frederick II of Hohenstaufen. Or go back a thousand years, to the days of our ancestor on the other side and your namesake: Eric Blood-axe. Or the Persian wars. Or Troy. But what does it matter, the time one is born in? A man can build his freedom in any age, any land. I can live as well to-day as I could have in Egil Skallagrimson's time, or Sir Walter Ralegh's. If I couldn't, I'd be a failure then too.'

  Eric snorted like a bull. 'I can't understand chaps like you. Hankering already for the next war, or a revolution.'

  'You certainly don't understand me,' said Lessingham very quietly.

  Charles shook his head. ' "There ain't going to be no" next war.'

  'Isn't there?' said Lessingham. 'Who's going to stop it?'

  'I don't know. But it's got to be stopped. Or alternatively, the whole show goes west. Don't you agree, Edward? What did you and I fight for?' />
  Lessingham made no reply for a moment: only a myriad most slight and subtle alterations charactered the eagle in him against mountain and sky. 'Fight for?' he said at last. 'The motive, you mean? or the accomplished fact? I suppose we went into it because we were fighting men, and had a mind to defend what we cared for. And in the event I think we'll find we've preserved England as a land for eunuchs to dwell in, and made the world safe for short-haired females.'

  'That's only superficial,' said Charles.

  Eric gave a great guffaw. 'Two distinct operations, ladies and gents; and yet, you observe, the product identical in both cases—Now I've shocked you, Mary. I do beg your pardon.'

  'Not in the least. Fm not shocked. It's simply that that sort of witticism doesn't frightfully amuse me. Shall we leave them to their argy-bargyings?' she said to Anne, and walked away with her toward the house.

  'Superficial, my dear Charles? May be,' said Lessingham. 'So too is the surface of the grass-growth, seen from an aeroplane, superficial; but yet you can tell by it where the buried cities lie, accurately, street by street, feet-deep under the earth, in Mesopotamia.'

  These are things that will pass. All part of the mess-up. But if they are to pass,—then, no "next war". Another war would put the lid on it.'

  'I see no early prospect of their passing,' said Lessingham. 'They have hardly begun. There's a promising future for them and for what they stand for.'

  Charles Bremmerdale grunted. ‘I don't deny the danger,' he said, very quiet and serious. 'I think nothing will do but a real change of heart. We've said that about the enemy till one's nauseated. Got to say it now to ourselves, and do it,—or else. I do what I can. I think one's got to.'

  Lessingham looked at him with a queer and uncustomed tenderness in his speckled grey eyes. "Forty-five million hearts to change over?' he said. 'And that's only a beginning. My dear Charles, what we're really up to is—if we can—to make the world safe for big business: for a new kind of slave state: that's the first deep current under the surface, evolution towards Hobbes's Leviathan and away from the individual. And your unhaired woman (they'll be as common as the cartway soon) and your unmasculated man, are part of the engine, worker ants, worker termites, neuters: worthless lives to themselves, which only exist to run the engine, which itself exists only to run. Until it runs down. And then sink with stink ad Tartara Termagorum.'