A Fish Dinner in Memison - Zimiamvian Trilogy 02

by E R Eddison

  'Jim. Good. Wait while I get the car in.'

  Jim, noting the steady ring of Lessingham's voice, noted too, for all the uncertain light, as it were some glint, some poise of sinew or of lineament, in the iron-seeming face of Lessingham, that stayed the impulse to offer to go too: kept him obedient in the porch. After a few minutes they saw the lights stir and creep round at the foot of the drive; then presently met the full glare of them as the car rounded the last sweep past the strawberry-trees and swung out of sight behind the house towards the garage.

  'You'll be staying to dinner, sir?'

  Jim shrugged his shoulders. 'I don't know.'

  'You'd better, sir. It isn't good for Mr. Edward to be too much by his self, sir. Not just now it isn't.'

  'We'll see.'

  Lessingham's step returning, elastic and firm, crunched the gravel. 'Put your car in there if you like. Ruth will get us something to eat presently. I wish I could put you up, but I may not be staying myself to-night.'

  Jim checked himself. 'Right,' he said, and got into his car.

  'Well, Ruth,' said Lessingham. Their eyes met for a moment. 'I'm wet through, I think': he looked down at his rain-sodden coat and trousers and muddy waterlogged shoes as if he had but just discovered it.

  The luggage, sir? If you'll let me have the keys, Sally will put out your things in the dressing-room and get the bath ready and I'll be seeing about your dinner. I'll just unlock the lobby door for her, upstairs.'

  'No. Put the things in the Trellis Room. Here's the key of the suitcase': he took it off his chain. 'Lay for two.'

  'You'll have it in the dining-room?'

  'No. Lay it in the Armoury. A couple of bottles of the Lafite. Careful how you decant it.'

  'And letters, please, sir.' She handed them on the silver tray from the hall table. The tray shook a little in her hand as Lessingham rapidly went over the envelopes, took a particular one (her eye was on it, too) and put it unopened in his pocket. 'Let them wait.'

  The old woman put them back on the table. She hesitated for a moment, looking up at him with sad eyes like a dog's. 'Nothing fresh, I suppose, sir? over there? I suppose—?'

  'Nothing.'

  'Hope?' the word was almost inaudible.

  'Nothing. Except,' he said, 'I've seen—' his voice hardened, 'what there is to see. And that's enough for the purpose.'

  The hall door stood wide, lighting Jim up the steps as he returned: lighting the thin curtain of the rain. He could hear Lessingham's measured tread pacing the un-carpeted floor in the hall, the squelch of water at every foot-step. As he shut the door behind him, Ruth bustled in from the kitchen quarters with a tray: set it down on the table: tumblers, a syphon, and the curious purple bottle of Bristol glass that served as whisky-decanter. 'Bath ready in ten minutes, sir. You'd better have something to warm you inside, sir: that soaked as you are.'

  Lessingham poured out for both. His face was unreadable: like the great rock faces, lean north crags of Mickledore, two or three miles away, three thousand feet up, alone now in the lampless darkness and the rain that turned, up there, no doubt to sleet.

  As they drained the glasses, the emptiness of the house chilled Jim Scarnside's members: took hold as with claws at the pit of his stomach.

  They ate at first in silence made audible by the click of knife and fork, Ruth's quiet footsteps on the parquet floor, the faint rustle of her black dress as she came and went, the steadfast tick-tack of the great Italian clock above the door, and the crackle and hiss of the logs whenever a scutter of rain came down the chimney. Unshaded candles in Venetian silver candlesticks of the cinquecento lighted the table, and candles in sconces on the walls gleamed with sometimes a windy light on the arms and armour. Ugly shadows lengthened, shortened, trembled, or stilled themselves: shadows of these things on the walls: the pig-faced basinet dating from 1400 with its camail of chain mail: the Italian armet, late fifteenth century, an heirloom come down to Lessingham through his mother along with that morning-star beside it, plated and exquisitely damascened in gold and silver, which family tradition traced back to the Prince Pier Luigi, bastard of Pope Paul III and Cellini's best-hated oppressor—Signor Pier Luigi Farnese, whose portrait by Titian, in black armour, black-bearded, with a wolf in each eye and bearing on his forehead and in every line of his face the brand of archangel ruined, hung over the fire-place, frighteningly like (as Jim with a new vividness of perception saw now) to Lessingham. And here were maces, war-hammers etched and gilt, pole-axes, swords by the dozen—German, Italian, French, English, Spanish: pistols, arquebuses richly wrought, a dagger of russet steel (supposed Frangois Premier's) with gold inlaid and mother-of-pearl: the complete suit of war-harness for man and horse, a thing unique, given to Lessingham by that Arab sultan somewhere in the Middle East two or three years since, in memory of service rendered: and there, in a glass case, dark with age, notched and grown lean like a mummy, the viking sword dug up twelve years ago by Lessingham that summer they had spent carrying out excavations in Alsteno, far up the coast of Norway off Halogaland: Thorolf Kveldulfson's 'Alost'. Dug up, at the very spot which expert conjecture pointed to as the site of the old hall at Sandness: Thorolfs house, where more than ten centuries ago he fell defending his life at hopeless odds against the great King he deserved well of. It might, for all anyone knew, have been Thorolf Kveldulfson's sword: the date was near enough: his, or one of theirs that fought beside him while the burning house scorched them from behind and King Harald Hairfair and his three hundred men set on them from before. She had loved the slow sunshiny Arctic summer: the open-air life, the far-ranging mountains, the Norse country-folk and their ways of life (so effortless, her mastery of the language), the sailing, the long drawn out processions of sunset and sunrise, the unearthly sense as of Time's clock run down. But she—Jim swallowed his second glass at a draught: the fine claret, tasteless in his mouth, at least prevented the dryness of his throat from strangling him. He saw that though Lessingham ate, his glass stood untasted. Six weeks ago they had danced in this hall; a dozen couples, in the family mostly: the old Blunds tradition. Time never touched her: that divine and lovely gift of abiding youth, no older, only maturer; a little deepening and sweetening. Six weeks: what did it mean? Dead. Killed in that railway smash in France. He looked at Lessingham who, as if unconscious of his presence, was staring before him with a stare that seemed to be blunted and forced back upon itself: turned inward.

  Lessingham spoke. 'Well, Jim, how do you like our post-war politics?'

  'What, in this country?'

  'Europe. The world.'

  'The Ruhr, you mean? this morning's papers? I don't like them at all.'

  'Are you surprised at the way things are shaping?' 'Not much surprised. But sorry.'

  Tear, and stupidity. The two universal counsellors and path-finders of mankind. There's really nothing singular about it.'

  ‘I remember you saw it coming long since.' 'So did you.'

  'When you pointed it out to me. But I don't think I honestly believed it. Just as nobody believed what you said a year ago, when a hundred marks were worth about two-pence.'

  'What was it I said?'

  'That you wouldn't discount a million of them for sixpence on twelve months credit.'

  'Too optimistic, as things have turned out.'

  'What is it to-day? a hundred million or so to the dollar?'

  'You and I have to remember,' Lessingham said, 'that we were born and bred up in our early youth in reposed and peaceful times almost, I suppose, without example. That led us by the sleeve: showed us but a back-eddy only in the great stream of things. Made us apt to imagine that the war was something remarkable, when it was truly no more but a ripple on the stream. You remember James Bryce's saying about the Middle Ages: that never at any other time has theory, professing all the while to control practice, been so utterly divorced from it: an age ferocious and sensual, that yet worshipped humility and asceticism: never a purer ideal of love nor a grosser profligacy of lif
e. It is a great untruth. The description is just, but it fits all human history, not merely a particular age. And as for those unhappy five years, there was nothing new in them: unless, possibly, an unusual babblery of self-righteousness.'

  'I'm not sure,' said Jim. 'Possibly there might be something a little bit new underlying just that.'

  'What? "War to end war?" "World safe for democracy"? "A land fit for heroes to live in"? I wonder. I've more respect for old Clemenceau. He, at any rate, realized what company he was in in nineteen-nineteen, sitting between his "sham Napoleon and sham Christ".'

  'You're unfair to them. Even the catchwords do stand for something. That they should be said at all, is something.'

  'I agree. And to say "Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite" was something.' Lessingham toyed with his untasted glass, his hand closing round the stem of the delicate Murano goblet, between the body of it and the foot. 'A quite unimpeachable copy-book text. But (very amusingly) it turned in practice to the cutting off of people's heads with a mechanical slicer. You remember that wire puzzle made in Germany I used to bring out in school sometimes, when we were up to old Harry Broadbent in Middle Division? called The Merry Decapitation without Trousers?' He was smiling; but from under the smile suddenly came a sound of teeth gritted together. Jim averted his eyes: heard, as though across some solution of continuity, the ticking of the clock: then Lessingham's voice, toneless, even, and detached, resuming, as if upon an after-thought: 'Women's heads, in considerable numbers.' Then the clock again, intolerably loud and clear: once: twice. Then a crack, and something falling. Jim looked up quickly. The stem of the glass had snapped in Lessingham's grip and the great red stain spread wet and slow-oozing over the white cloth.

  'Careless of me. Never mind. Leave it. For my own inclinations,' he said after a pause, wiping his hand carefully on his dinner-napkin, 'I infinitely prefer Jenghiz Khan. But then I have always favored the great carnivora rather than the monkey tribe.'

  They were silent. Then Jim said, ‘I wish you'd ring for Ruth to get a bandage or something. Your hand—'

  Lessingham examined it. 'It's nothing.' He took out a clean handkerchief. 'Give me a hand with this: that'll stop it. I'm sorry,' he said, as Jim, finishing off the knot, sat back, very white. 'Go on: you must finish it up.' He pushed the decanter across. Jim filled, drank, and sat back once more, passing his hand with a light stroking movement from brows upwards over his forehead to the hair and so over to the back of his head. 'It's purely physical,' Lessingham said: like sea-sickness, or a bad head on mountains. My father, for instance: the toughest sailor you'd find in all England; and yet, stand him on a height, he'd feel nausea: vertigo: catch behind the knees. It's the same thing.'

  ‘I suppose it is.' Jim finished his glass: forced a smile. 'Makes one feel a damned fool, all the same. You, of course,—' he stopped.

  'Yes,' said Lessingham, his voice quiet and level, while Jim watched frame and feature gather by some indefinable transmutations to a yet closer likeness to the Titian on the wall: ‘I have. And enough, at any rate, to deaden the spice of novelty.

  'You're a comfort to me, Jim,' he said after a moment's silence. 'You are the most perfect Tory I ever met.'

  'And you, the most complete and absolute Whig.'

  'I? I have no politics.'

  'You are a Whig of the Whigs. Consequently (as I’ve told you before) your politics are (a) damnable, and (b) completely out of date.'

  ‘I have, it is true,' said Lessingham, 'an interest in politics: to observe them, survey them back again: note how, under every new suit of clothes, the same body, the same soul, live on unchanged. Apparently unchangeable. An amusing study, my dear Signor Giacomo. And Machiavelli is the one philosopher who had the genius and the honesty to write down the truth about politics.'

  ‘I know what you mean. It is a limited truth, though.'

  'Limited to this world. I hope so.'

  'I limit it more narrowly than that. Besides, I've never heard you applaud our modern practitioners who live by the gospel according to Machiavelli.'

  'As an artist, I have a certain regard for one or two of them: always (curiously, you may think) where the field of action has been comparatively small. In the Middle East I've come across it: in the Balkans: among the Arabs, here and there.'

  'Yes, and you've practised it.'

  'Well, I have ruled 'em for their own good now and then. On the right, small, human scale.'

  'But the real Machiavelli: on the grand scale. You haven't much regard for him in Russia, for instance.'

  'The fox in the lion's skin,' replied Lessingham, 'is admirable up to a point. But in the bellwether's skin, un-cured and beginning to putrefy, he is no longer an impressive sight; while the mixture of stinking fox and stinking carrion—' he stopped as if he had bitten on his tongue. Jim felt his own teeth click together and a chill steal from the back of his throat down his spine: a shivering-fit blown from France.

  'Mussolini?' he said quickly.

  Lessingham answered with a shrug: 'There is the better always, and there is the worse. But the mischief is more in the game than in the player. In mankind, not in particular men. The field, and the apparatus, are too much overgrown and sprawling.'

  'You know I don't wholly agree there,' said Jim. 'You and I never do wholly agree when it comes to fundamentals. I say the fault is in the players.'

  'I know you do. So do I. But not quite in the same way.' He pushed back his chair. 'Have some more wine? No? Come along then, we'll smoke in the library.'

  'Not in the Refuge,' Jim said in himself, rising to follow him. 'Thank God for that, at any rate.'

  Lessingham, as if retired on the sudden into some secret workings of his brain, stood motionless at the table, hands in pockets, head bent on his chest, but back and shoulders straight free and majestical as some Olympian God's. Presently he began to pace slowly towards the door, pausing here and again at a weapon or a piece of harness as he passed, inspecting it narrowly, tapping it with his finger-nail. With a hand upon the door-knob, he turned, head erect now, to overrun with swift, searching gaze all four walls of that armoury. Opening the door, he laid a hand on Jim's shoulder, swinging him round so that he too might survey these things. 'There's one example,' he said: 'death of all this. Gunpowder, the first mighty leveller.' He laughed in his great black beard, while the strength of his fingers, like an iron clamp, bit into Jim's shoulder. Jim sucked from the sheer pain of it a kind of comfort; as though such vicarious hurting should be able in some faint degree to ease Lessingham's own torment: in some faint degree dilute it (as ordinary communications could not) by sharing.

  'Letting go your orthodoxies and my Pyrrhonism,' Lessingham said, as they passed into the library, 'there does seem to be a kind of blindness or curse, endemic in all human affairs. A slow death. Never mind about the explanation: the facts are there, observable. After a certain stage, you see it begin: thenceforward technique, step by step as it advances, so correspondingly step by step you see it stultify itself. After a certain stage, you see dominion, as if by some inward necessity at each extension of its field, forced to take to itself more and more of what is not worth the having. So that the game becomes not worth playing. Not for a man.'

  'The machine age.'

  'It goes to more than that. The fallacy of material size and extent. Man is as unteachable a beast as can be. Take it in grand outline, the whole of human endeavour in this game of life as we know it—What will you have with your coffee, Jim? Old brandy? Grand Marnier? Kummel?'

  'Nothing, thanks.'

  'You must. Come: good for your digestion. Able to make exhalation, too, or smoke up into your brain. Distilled perfections of the orange: blossom and fruit.' Lessingham filled a glass for him. 'It used to be a ritual of ours, every time we dined on the train in France. Ever since the first: fifteen years ago.'

  Jim stared: durst not meet his gaze.

  'Come.'

  'Well, if you'll join me. You've drunk nothing yourself, the whole evening.'


  Lessingham filled the other glass, then offered his cigar-case. They're Partagas: your old friends. They go on, you see.'

  ‘I see they do.'

  There was silence while they lighted their cigars. Lessingham rose from his armchair. Jim watched him go to the writing-table, take up, without looking at it, Mary's photograph, rip it from its frame, tear it twice across,

  pitch it into the fire. As he sat down again, their eyes met. 'I have an objection,' Lessingham said, 'to what the Germans call ersatz'

  Jim swallowed the Grand Marnier at a gulp: poured himself out a second glass: drank that. His face was expressionless as wax.

  'What were we talking about?' said Lessingham. 'O yes: the grand fallacy of progress. The cold lechery of more and more. All human endeavour, as if to play cricket, so to speak, on a pitch a hundred yards long: with a ball the size of a football: a bat to hit it with as big as a Thames punt. Good. Then, one of two things: we must either alter the whole nature of the game, or else become giants. We cannot make ourselves giants (and if we could, we should soon wish it undone again; unless indeed at the same time we altered the whole material universe—organic and inorganic, macrocosm and microcosm and all—to fit our new proportions. And then, that done, we should be precisely in statu quo prius: indeed, being merely bigger creatures in a bigger world, I suppose we should be quite unconscious of any change at all.) And so, that door being locked, here we are busy altering, instead, the nature of the game. And in its altered nature, the game of life, the game of war, the game of politics, the game of ruling and being ruled, of merely subsisting, the whole material appurtenance and engine of our daily existence, becomes more and more a game not for men but for termites.'

  Jim's eyes began to smart, staring into the fire, where the last incandescent shreds of her photograph had finally disappeared. The silence hung heavy and bad-boding. 'What would you have?' he said at length.

  'The Greek city. I speak from experience, of course: have had it, and mean to again. Perhaps a little more; but that for the centre of your state. City and countryside: a polity the size of England—less, perhaps. And a population measured by a few tens of thousands. Beyond that, all becomes skimble-skamble.'