A Fish Dinner in Memison - Zimiamvian Trilogy 02

by E R Eddison

  It was nearly half past nine when he rang the bell for Milcrest. "There it is, in the box. I don't want to see it again. Pull off copies for circulation: I rely on you to check it: wake me if there's any real doubt on any point, otherwise don't. Leave me two copies in my pouch: take the rest personally to 2 Whitehall Gardens without fail this evening. The sooner the better.' He yawned and stretched. 'I'm a fool,' he said: 'kicking against the hard wall.'

  Dog-tired suddenly, he went upstairs and, without enough energy to undress, flung himself on his bed just as he was. His brain had been working at full pressure for twenty-two hours on end. In less than a minute he was fast asleep. Mary peeped in at the door: came in softly: put an eider-down over him, and went out again, closing the door soundlessly behind her.

  He woke late in the afternoon, had a bath, came down to tea, settled Eric's problems for him, and by seven o'clock was well on the way to Carlisle. Old David's heart was in his mouth, between the terrifying speed and the cool control of Lessingham's driving.

  Summer night wheeled slowly above the out-terraces of Memison: the moon up: Venus in her splendour like a young moon high in the west. The King said, 'He is returned to Acrozayana, to hold to-morrow his weekly presence. That is well done. And you shall see there is a back-bias shall bring him swiftly here again.'

  Vandermast stroked his beard.

  The King said, 'I am troubled in a question about God. Omnipotence, omnipresence, omniscience: having these three, what hath He left to hope for? By my soul, did I find in myself these swelling members grown out of form,—to do all, to know all, to be all,—I swear I'd die of their tediousness.'

  Vandermast said, 'Your serene highness may yet consider that the greater the power, or the pleasure, the greater needeth to be the discipline.'

  The King said, 'You mean that the Omniscient and Omnipotent must discipline Himself and His own power and His own knowledge, treading, as upon a bridge of two strained ropes above the abysses, at once the way of reason and the way of sensuality?'

  Vandermast said, 'Yes. Within which two ways and their permutations shall be found two million ways wherein a man may live perfectly, or a God. Or two million million ways. Or what more you will. For who shall limit God's power, or who Her beguilings, The king said, 'What Is the end then? What is the end and aim of life in this world we live in?'

  Vandermast said. 'She is the end. Though the heaven perish, She shall endure. A man is unmanned if he level at any lower mark. God can reach no higher.'

  The King said, 'But what of that dictum of the sage, Deus se ipsum amore intellectuali infinite amat: God loves His own Self with an infinite intellectual love? And is not that a higher mark?''

  Vandermast said, 'It is a good point of philosophy: but your serenity hath left out of the reckoning the ultimate Duality in Oneness of the nature of God. The Self hath its being,—its cause material, its cause formal, its cause efficient and its cause final,—wholly in that which it loves. And yet, by unresolvable antinomy, remains it of necessity other than that which it loves. For in love there must needs be ever both a selfsameness and an otherness.'

  The King said, 'Who are you, old man? winding up stars to me out of the unbottomed well of truth, as it were myself speaking to myself, and yet they are mysteries I never scarce cast a thought upon until now?'

  Vandermast said, "The self, as we have said, hath its being wholly in that which it loves.'

  And the King said, under stars in Memison, 'And She too, by like argument, awful, gold-crowned, beautiful Aphrodite, loving Herself and Her own perfectnesses, loves them, I suppose, not for their own sake but because of Him that loves Her and by Her is loved.'

  Vandermast said, 'That is undoubtable. And it is the twofold anchor-cable of truth and truth. And thus in Her and because of Her, is the supreme infinitude of formal limits whereby the dead unformed infinite of being and becoming is made to live.'

  The King said, slowly, as out of a slow deep study, 'So that, were it to be God: then, may be, through the mind of this horse, this fish, this slave, this sage, this queen, this conqueror, this poet, this lover, this albatross, as He or She, to open Our eyes here and there: see what manner of world this is, from inside it. And, for interest of the game, drink Lethe before so looking: be forgetful awhile of Our Olympian home and breeding. Even to look,' he said after a minute's silence, 'through many windows at once, many pairs of eyes. As, spill quicksilver: many shining bodies, every one outwardly reflecting all other but shut off by its own skin from all other, inwardly secret to itself: yet will join together again at the full close.'

  Vandermast held his peace. The King, gazing into the eyes of that old man, gazed into profundities of night: of Night, that is sister to death, but mother also of desire and mother of dreams, and between the pillars of her bed are the untravelled immensities of the interstellar spaces.

  It was nineteen twenty-three, the first week in February, a gloomy sodden-souled day colourless with east wind. Mary reined up her horse at the edge of Kelling Heath. 'We'd better keep to the road,' she said over her shoulder to Anne Bremmerdale who had halted a yard or two behind her. 'Rather dangerous, with all these old trenches. They ought to fill them up.'

  'Useful for the next war,' Anne said.

  They waited a minute, looking northwards and seawards over the heath. Mary turned in the saddle for a sweep of the eye over the country inland. All was brown and bare now and the trees unleaved; but near at hand the may-bushes were beginning to show signs of waking with their dark intricacy of thorns and their myriad tiny stars: green little balls, the first swelling of the buds, in a criss-cross twiggy heaven. No buttercups this time of year, no meadowsweet, dew-pearled, creamy and heavy-scented, no lovely falling note of the peggy-whitethroat nor lark's song mounting and mounting more golden than gold to salute the lady dawn; and yet, in this wide heathland and the turbulent sky above it, a fifteen-year-old echo of these things, and of those galloping hooves that had been as flying darkness under the morning, with muffled rollings in the heart of darkness like distant drums. ‘Do you think we get older?' Mary said, as they drew back into the road and at a walking-pace turned inland. 'Or do you think we are like the audience at a cinema, and sit still and watch the thing go by?'

  The proud lines of Anne's face hardened to a yet closer likeness to her brother Edward's. 'I think we grow older,' she said. 'Most of us.'

  The wind seemed to think so too. Grow older and die. Sometimes die first. Mary said, ‘I think we get more awake.'

  And yet: to untell the days and redeem those hours? Ah, if it were possible. That had been the day of the last of those cricket matches that there used to be every year for so many years, against Hyrnbastwick. Poor Hugh, blinded in the war: at least he had his wife: probably the right one. And Lady Southmere was there, did Anne remember? Of course she did: gone long ago, both those old people. And Mr. Romer, whom Jim admired so and was so fond of up at Trinity: a great favourite of Edward's too: a man eminent in spheres usually incompatible, both as don and as man of the world: an education in itself to have known him. He died in 'fifteen. So many of those people caught by the war: Jack Bailey, killed: Major Rustham, Hesper Dag-worth, Captain Feveringhay, killed, killed, killed: Norman Rustham, that delightful little boy, gone down with the Hawke. Nigel Howard, killed: poor Lucy. And her brother married to that—well, we won't use Edward's word for her. And Tom Chedisford, of all people, drinking himself to death, it seems: incredible: appalling. 'What does Janet Rustham do now-a-days?' said Mary.

  'Good works.'

  'And those awful Playter girls?'

  Anne smiled. 'One turned nun: the other's in some government job. Cuthbert Margesson captained your side that year, didn't he? I can't bear to think of Nell's never to this day knowing what became of him: too ghastly, that "reported missing".'

  'It was worse for Amabel,' Mary said, 'having Nicholas murdered under her nose by those brutes in Kieff. They let her go, because she was English. But you're being dreadfully gloomy: a
lmost making me cry, with this ugly wind and all. Remember, there have been some happy things: Tom Appleyard, an Admiral now and quite undamaged: Rosamund a full-blown marchioness: you and Charles: Edward and me: dear Jim, the salt of the earth, I don't think doomsday could change him; and Uncle Everard and Aunt Bella: and Father, so hale and hearty, though he is getting on for seventy.'

  'Getting on for seventy. And lonely,' Anne said in her own mind.

  'Lonely.' To some unclothing quality in that word, the rude wind seemed to leap as to a huntsman's call, taking her breath, striking through her thick winter clothes to raise gooseflesh on her skin. She shivered and put her horse to a trot. For a while they rode in silence, each, for friendship, with the other's private ghosts for company: for Mary, Anne's dead brothers, Fred and Will Lessingham, and the only other sister, Margaret, who married that eccentric explorer man and died of yellow fever in the basin of the Orinoco; and for Anne, all Mary's three brothers, all gone: eldest and youngest killed in the war, and Maxwell, the middle one, years before that in a hunting accident. Ghosts of the past, dank and chilling. But not actively menacing as was this secret one, present to Lady Bremmerdale alone, which all the time held its ground undisturbed by her other thoughts that came and went It held its ground with a kind of mock obsequiousness and paraded its obedience to her will: an incipient ghost, grey, obscuring with its breath the windows of the future: a ghost without distinct form, except that, like the comic man in old-fashioned pantomimes, it seemed to be perpetually removing yet another waistcoat. And at each removal, the effect was not a revealing, but an effect of ever more unmistakable and ever bleaker emptiness.

  As they walked their horses up out of the dip towards Salt-house Common, she said, 'Here's a general knowledge question for you, Mary dear: a point that's been teasing me a good deal lately. Would you say it was possible for two people to live successfully simply as friends? married people, I mean: so to say, a Platonic marriage?'

  Mary inclined her head as if weighing the matter before she answered. 'I think I would apply there Dr. Johnson's saying about the dog walking on its hind legs: it is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.'

  'I doubt, myself, whether it is possible,' said Anne. 'Surely it ought to be. Not that there's any particular virtue in it: it's so obviously a matter of taste. But tastes count for a good deal when you're considering a pair of Siamese twins. I fancy differences of taste on a point like that can be unsurmountable barriers, don't you?'

  Mary looked at her, but Anne's face was averted. 'I don't think I ever really thought about it. Unsurmountable is a big word. I should have thought if they were fond of each other they might hit upon some modus vivendi.'

  'But there might be people, of course, with such poles-asunder ideas.'

  'If they really cared,' said Mary, 'I shouldn't think ideas ought to matter much.'

  'Ideas about love, I meant. What it is.'

  'Well, if they loved each other?'

  'But might it not be that, just because they do love each other, and their ideas are so different (or ideals), they settle down to a modus vivendi that evades these controversial ideas? And will not that lead to living on the surface: shirking the deep relationships? If you're colourblind you can't expect to be very amusing company for someone whose whole interest is taken up with colour schemes based on red and green.'

  Mary said, 'I wonder? Surely, when one marries one undertakes to play the game according to certain rules. Both do. It seems a bit feeble to give it up because, for one or other or for both, the rules happen to make it specially difficult.'

  Anne was silent for a while. Then she said, 'You speak as a born mistress of the game, my beloved. I was thinking of less gifted, less fortunate, bunglers.'

  'Perhaps it's hard for you and me to put ourselves in their shoes,' said Mary.

  'Perhaps it is.'

  'What I'm quite sure of,' said Mary, 'is that if there is friction of that sort, it's much better that, of the two, the woman should be the less deeply in love.'

  Anne said, after a pause, 'You don't believe in cutting Gordian knots, then?'

  'No. I don't,'

  ‘Never?'

  'Never for people in the particular kind of muddle we're thinking of.'

  'But why never? I'd like to know why you think that.'

  Mary seemed to ponder a minute, stroking her horse's neck. 'I expect really it is because I believe we are put into this world simply and solely to practise undoing Gordian knots.' She looked at Anne, then away again: concluded very gently, 'To practise undoing them: not sit down on them and pretend they aren't there.'

  Lady Bremmerdale sighed. ‘I should imagine the real trouble comes in a case where the players have themselves made the game about ten times more unplayable than it ever need have been: spoilt it, perhaps, right at the beginning, by pulling the knot into a jam there's no undoing. And then, if there is no undoing, the choice is to sit tight on the tangle and pretend it isn't there (which I think dishonest and destructive of one's self-respect), or else be honest and cut it. Or chuck it away and have done with it.'

  'I certainly shouldn't sit on it, myself,' said Mary. "Very galling, I should think, to the sitting apparatus! But as for cutting, or throwing away,' she said with a deeper seriousness, '—well, my darlin', that's against the rules.' Anne said nothing: looked steadily before her. 'Besides,' said Mary, ‘I don't see how you can ever, in real life, say in advance: Here's a tangle there's no undoing.'

  After a long pause Anne said, 'Jim takes exactly the same line as you do.' She looked round, into a pair of eyes so easy to rest in, it might have been her own eyes regarding themselves from a mirror.

  'O, Jim has been tried on the general knowledge paper, has he?'

  'The two people I know in the world fit to be asked their opinion on such a subject.'

  'People talk to Jim, because he talks to nobody. I'm glad he agrees with me. Leaving out present company, I think Edward qualifies for third on your list.'

  ‘I don't count him,' said Anne. 'He hardly counts as another person.'

  Mary's silence, clearer and gentler than words could have said it, said, 'I understand.'

  'Edward says cut it and be damned to it.'

  ‘I would agree with that,' said Mary, 'if there were a tertium quid: the vulgar triangle. There usually turns out to be, of course. Practically always. But in this hypothetical case, I gathered there was not?'

  'In this hypothetical case I can promise you there isn't'

  'Well then,—'

  It was getting late. They had fetched a circle round by Glandford and the Downs and so through Wiveton and Cley with its great church and windmill and up onto the common again and were now riding down the hill above Salthouse. The broad was alive with water-fowl. Beyond the bank they saw the North Sea like roughened lead and all the sky dark and leaden with the dusk coming on and a great curtain of cloud to northward and a sleet-storm driving over from the sea. Mary said, 'I should think Charles's view might be valuable.'

  Lady Bremmerdale's handsome face darkened. ‘I haven't consulted Charles,' she said, after a pause.

  They came riding into Salthouse now, level with the bank. Thev saw how a flieht of brent geese, a score or more, swept suddenly down steeply from that louring sky like a flight of arrows, to take the water: a rushing of wings, black heads and necks arrow-like pointing their path, and white sterns vivid as lightning against that murk and beginnings of winter night.

  Anne said slowly, 'But I think I’m inclined to agree with you and Jim.'

  'And we, madonna, are we not exiles still?

  When first we met

  Some shadowy door swung wide.

  Some faint voice cried,

  —Not heeded then

  For clack of drawing-room chit-chat, fiddles,

  glittering lights, Waltzes, dim stairs, scents, smiles of other women—

  yet,

  'Twas so: that night of nights. Behind the hill Some light that does not set
Had stirr’d, bringing again New earth, new morning-tide.

  'I didn't mean that seriously, years ago when I wrote it,' Lessingham said: 'that night you were such a naughty girl at Wolkenstein.' He was working on a life-size portrait of Mary in an emerald-green dress of singular but beautiful design, by artificial light, between tea and dinner that same afternoon, in the old original Refuge at Anmering Blunds. 'I mean, I felt it but I hadn't the intellectual courage of my feelings. Strange how the words can come before the thought,' he talked as if half to her, half to himself, while he worked: 'certainly before the conscious thought. As if one stuck down words on paper, or paint on canvas, and afterwards these symbols in some obscure way have a power of coming to life and telling you (who made them) what was in fact at the back of your mind when you did it; though you never suspected it was there, and would have repudiated it if you had.'

  Mary said, ‘It opens up fascinating possibilities. On that principle you might have an unconscious Almighty, saying, as He creates the universe, Moi, je ne crois pas en Dieu.'

  'I know. I can't see why not An atheistical Creator is a contradiction. But is not reality, the nearer you get to the heart of it, framed of contradictions? I'm quite sure our deepest desires are.'

  Tm sure they are.' A comic light began to play almost imperceptibly about the corners of Mary's lips. 'Really, I think I should find an atheistical Almighty much more amusing to meet than an Almighty who solemnly believed in Himself. Can you imagine anything more pompous and boring?'

  Lessingham was silent a minute, painting with concentrated care and intention. Then he stopped, met her eye, and laughed. 'Like an inflated Wordsworth, or Shelley, or Napoleon: prize bores all of them, for all their genius. You can't imagine Homer, or the man who was responsible for Njal's Saga, or Shakespeare, or Webster, or Marlowe, thinking like that of themselves.'

  Mary smiled. 'Marlowe,' she said: Svhen he was like to die, "being persuaded to make himself ready to God for his soul, he answered that he would carry his soul up to the top of a hill, and run God, run devil, fetch it that will have it." I could hug him for that'