A Fish Dinner in Memison - Zimiamvian Trilogy 02

by E R Eddison

  The painter shrugged his shoulders. 'Wants a psychoanalyst to understand it.'

  'A kind of sublimation?'

  'A kind of excrement.'

  'Of the mind? That's an attractive idea.'

  'By the Lord, I'm not sure it isn't true. Aristotle's katharsis. Always thought it rather an inadequate account of the Agamemnon, to compare it to a dose of calomel. But our friend Daldy Roome's abortions you were talking of—

  'I'm convinced it's true,' said Ronald Carwell. 'Not the effect on the audience though, (which Aristotle meant when he talked about purging the emotions): the effect on Roome.'

  'Well; I don't see he need hire a gallery to inflict them on the public, then.'

  'Nor I, Michael. Except that the public will every time and all the time admire what they're told they ought to

  admire. So that there's money in it. And we artists have to earn our living.'

  'So he prostitutes his art because that's what the public wants—or what Willie and the rest of 'em teach them they ought to want?'

  'Not a bit of it. Roome's an artist. He hasn't the ghostliest idea why he does it. O yes, he's a very fine artist, Ronald, I assure you, as far as that goes. He's done one or two lovely things.'

  'Then why doesn't he do them always, instead of this pathological stuff?'

  ‘I don't know. No more does he.'

  'Doesn't know himself?'

  ‘Not a bit,' said the painter. 'Look at Matisse, now: the nude's rather a test case, I think. Exquisite line in the abstract. But trouble is, art isn't abstract: it's concrete. Take a hundred of Matisse's nudes: I should say you'd find twenty from that point of view very much in the same boat as Roome's: another seventy, say, suffering in some degree from inappropriate distortion. Then, in the remaining ten, you'll find one or two masterpieces. As good as the best. As good as Lessingham's.'

  'Human form divine. If divine, why distort it?'

  'To show we're cleverer than God Almighty.'

  The painter shook his head. 'It isn't always "divine", you know. Even Phryne, probably, if you'd seen her in the flesh, wasn't quite as divine as the Aphrodite of Knidos.'

  ‘ "Divine"? What's the standard? A female woodlouse would be diviner than either, to a woodlouse; or, if you take a vote of negresses, a pot-bellied blubber-lipped nigger.'

  'There is no standard—of beauty.'

  'Then,' said Carwell, 'what do you judge by? For, by saying what you said about the Aphrodite of Knidos, you admit distortion of some kind (meaning by distortion, variation from the norm). Take your Lessingham, or take your Matisse.'

  'When I come to the word "beauty",' said Otterdale, 'I put down the book. It's a perfectly infallible symptom.' 'Of what?'

  'Tosh. Tripe. Absence of grey matter.' 'How engagingly juvenile you are, to be so frightened by a word.'

  'Well, it's true I'm two years younger in sin than you, Peter; but even my dawning intelligence of twenty-three summers can tell the difference between words that mean something and words that are just hot air. They don't frighten me: merely give me a pain in the tummy.'

  ' "Crede experto—trust one who has tried",' said the painter, 'one word goes about as near as another to explaining this business of beauty. Beauty in nature: beauty in art. It's magic. Pure magic, like the witch-doctor's. And that's all there is to it.'

  'So that's that.'

  'Hullo, Willie, back again?'

  'Quite a galaxy of the great and good exercising their parasitical functions here to-night. Biggest noise, that— what's-his-name?—Lessingham. We saw him, didn't we, Frank? a few minutes ago, stalking about by himself: larger than life and about half as natural: typical nose-in-air haw-dammy look about him—'

  'Shut up, Willie. There he is.'

  They watched. When he had passed there was a curious silence, perhaps for half a minute.

  Michael Otterdale broke it, like a mosquito. 'That was a good close-up. Never seen him before, not to get a proper look at him. What is he really, Willie?'

  'An aristocratical plutocratical self-obtruding dilettante.'

  'He's a bit more than that,' said Ronald Carwell, still chain-smoking with cigarettes.

  'How do you account for all the experts accepting him as master in their own particular line? Soldiers, as a top-notch fighting man—I heard General Sterramore at dinner only the other night letting himself go on that subject: called Lessingham the finest tactician in irregular warfare since Montrose. Your artist cracks him up as an artist, your writer as a writer. And so on. It's a fact. And it's extraordinary.'

  'And what good has he ever done? Damn all.'

  'A damned sight more than you ever will.'

  'Depends on what you call good.'

  ‘I suppose you know he had more than any other living soul to do, behind the scenes, with the busting up of Bela Kun's tyranny in August 'nineteen? I know. I was correspondent in Buda-Pesth at the time.'

  'The East African campaign, too: that fastened his reputation as a soldier.'

  'And what about that amazing guerilla fighting, only two years ago, in the Rif?'

  'O, an adventurer. No one denies he's a big man in a way.'

  'And all the while, for years, as a kind of sparetime recreation I suppose, that colossal work on the Emperor Frederick II: out last spring. The Cambridge pundits will tell you there's been nothing in the same street with it since Gibbon. And a kind of philosophy of history in itself, too, into the bargain.'

  'There was some sort of a romance, wasn't there? I seem to remember—'

  'Yes. Before the war. Almost before you were born, Willie. Married Anmering's daughter: a famous beauty. She died, some accident I think: that must have been ten or twelve years ago. Burnt his house down after her death: never settled down anywhere permanently ever since.'

  "Burnt his house? A bit of Hollywoodish,~what?'

  ‘Great house up in Cumberland: full of treasures. The kind of man you can't predict his acts.'

  'They say he destroyed all his wife's pictures after that,' said the painter: 'every likeness of her he could get hold of. Masterpieces of his own among them: the famous Green Dress and all. Ten years ago: nineteen twenty-three: I was a student in Paris a year or two later: remember the sensation it made even then. A wicked thing to do.'

  'Couldn't stick her, I suppose?'

  'I don't know at all, my dear Michael.'

  There was a pause. Carwell resumed: 'Funny: I can't have been more than ten: nineteen-eight, it was. This'll interest you as a Freudian, Willie. First time I consciously realized what was meant by—well, by beauty,—in a woman—'

  'Look out! you've shocked me and you've shocked our Willie. Don't use that word. You must say sex-appeal.' '

  'I shall say Beauty. The illustrated papers were full of her at the time; and people talking, you know. Lady Mary Scarnside, she was then. Something about the name, seemed extraordinarily lovely: God knows why— Virgin Mary, Our Lady, I don't know if it's anything to do with that kind of association. Any way, I remember surreptitiously cutting out a full-page picture of her, in her riding-habit, out of the Illustrated London News and keeping it for months hidden away somewhere: I'd have died with shame if anyone had—'

  'Dear me, Ronald! what a precocious little lounge lizard you must have been!'

  ‘Be quiet, Michael. I want to hear this.'

  'Well then at Lords—I was taken because I'd a brother in the Eton Eleven that year—I saw her: quite close, in the tea tent. And, my God, Peter, I knew it was her from the pictures and I can tell you I've never seen from that day to this—All your Venuses: any other woman I've ever seen: simply not to be spoken of beside it. And, so charming too. So lovely. Classic if you like, but not cold. A kind of wildness. A kind of—swift-rushing Artemis. I never ^ saw her again, but the impression was terrific. And permanent. Like branding. Shut my eyes, I can see her again to-day. Every detail.'

  'Sounds an unusual experience.’

  'A propitious start for you, Ronald. No. I'm not ragging.'
>
  'Extraordinarily interesting. At that age.'

  'It's a possession I wouldn't willingly give up,' Car-well said simply.

  'And the celebrated Mr. Lessingham, sitting at his table over there, looking like Sir Richard Grenville,—'

  'Or like an up-to-date Sicilian brigand,—'

  'Like a God exiled from wide Heaven,' said the painter.

  'How bloody romantic!'

  'I'm quoting his own book.'

  'And all the time, quite conceivably the identical same image in his mind as in yours, Ronald.'

  'And much more likely, quite a different one. They say he's a regular sailor. Wife in every port.'

  'Blast the fellow! he looks it Must admit, takes the gilt off the romance a bit!'

  Who knows?'

  A long pause: nearly a minute. 'Look there—'

  With a lovely swift swaying walk, a lady was threading her way towards Lessingham's table. She was tall: black hair, slanty eyes, white fox-fur stole or collar, black hat, black dress: exquisite, vital, strong, and with a strange infection of excitement in her every motion as though she trailed like a comet, behind her as she walked, a train of fire.

  Lessingham rose to greet her: kissed her hand. They sat down at his table. 'You had given me up?' 'No, signora, I knew you would come.' 'How did you know, when I did not myself even?' ‘I wanted you.'

  She looked swiftly in his face, then as swiftly away again. 'Your words are suited to your eyes,' she said, out of a tense little hushed silence.

  'Words should say what they mean, neither less nor more. I have trained mine: good hounds: open not but where they find. You prefer vino rosso? or bianco?' He signalled to the waiter.

  'The crimson rose or the gold one? O I think the crimson for to-night.'

  'I had thought so too, as you observe,' Lessingham said as he ordered it, taking for her at the same time from a jar on the table a rose, dark as blood, that bowed down its head as with the very weight of its own sweetness. 'Do you, in addition to your other accomplishments, read the Greek, signora?—

  'I heard the flowery spring beginning.'—So softly she echoed the words, it might have been the red rose that spoke, not her red lips as she scented it. 'But this is autumn with us, not spring,' she said, pinning it to her dress. 'Or do you as a great man of authority command the seasons as your subjects? a forcer of them to your pleasure?'

  The two tables were out of ear-shot, but within easy eye-reach. Peter Sherrill was watching that lady with his gannet-like eyes: As, upon a movement, her fur stole fell open, unapparelling the beauties of her neck and hair, he snatched the menu-card and, from his pocket, a piece of chalk: began swiftly to draw. Carwell, for his part, had all this while been staring at her as if he had forgotten where he was: like a man in a dream.

  'But the advantage of complete scepticism,' Lessingham was saying, as he lighted a fresh cigar, 'is that, having once reached that position, one is free: free to believe or unbelieve exactly what one pleases.'

  'As for example?'

  'As for example, madame, that you and I were sitting in this piazza twenty-five years ago—here, in Verona, almost this very table, I think—criticizing the ways of God with men.'

  Twenty-five years ago! that is not a very charmant compliment to me?'

  'Private heavens are the only solution.' She was silent.

  'You are not yourself yet twenty-five?' ‘I am nineteen, signor.'

  'You are immeasurably older. You are older than the world. Older, I think, than Time.' 'A strange fancy.' 'Is it not true?'

  ‘It does not sound to me very like a truth.'

  Lessingham watched her for a minute, in profile: this umegarding, unattached, contemplative pose: these beauties beyond the Greek, yet, in high cheek-bone and in modelling of eyelash and lip, and in the wing of the nose, something of a more rough and sharp taste, to strain the tongue; and the turning up of her hair at the nape of her neck, like a smooth beast of night coiling itself, fold upon fold, self-lovingly upon some hidden privity and unboundedness of its own desires and somnolent luxury of its own secretness. ‘I am not a commodity,' she said, very low: 'not for any man.'

  ‘I regard women,' said he, 'not as commodities, but as dresses of Hers.'

  'And who is "She"?'

  ‘Never mind. I have known Her. Intimately. For years and years. If you were She, signora, would you visit this earth?'

  He saw something twist and elongate itself like a self-pleasing cat, in the region of her mouth and nostrils, as she replied, 'Perhaps. Sometimes. If it amused me. Not often.'

  'And does it amuse you? "Ca m'amuse": did you not say that? twenty-five years ago?—'

  'How should I know if I said it before I was born?'

  ‘—This clockwork world, this mockshow, operated by Time and the endless chain of cause and effect? And the second law of thermodynamics to assure us that in time, a few million or billion years, may be, but still in time, the whole thing will have come to an end. Not dead; for to be dead implies a condition called Death, and Death itself will have ceased to be. Not forgotten either; for there will be nobody to do the forgetting. Neither forgotten nor remembered. The end laid down by the great law of entropy: the- impregnable vacuity of ultimate Nothing.— Ca vous amuse, madame?'

  With an almost imperceptible, half-mocking, half-listening, inclination of her head she answered, 'Pour le moment,—oui, monsieur. Ca m'amuse.'

  'Pour le moment? And next moment, drop it: bored with it: away with it and try something else. Ah, if we could.'

  'It is easy.'

  'Pistol, or over-dose of veronal?' ‘But I think that way too easy.'

  'Needs courage. Courage of a gambler. Perhaps if people knew, beyond quibble or doubt, what was through the Door the world would be depopulated? Death, so easy, so familiar and dreadless, to a believer?'

  'Does anyone, to say, know?'

  'What is "know"? Do I know whether my hotel is still where I left it after dinner?'

  'Have you sometimes thought, we may have forgotten?'

  1 have thought many things. Tell me, signora: when all this becomes boring, have you never thought suicide might be commendable?'

  She looked at him with her green eyes: slowly smiled her secular smile. 'God is not like a bee, which when she has stung cannot sting again. Also I think, Signor Lessingham, (in my present mood), that I would desire you to play the game according to its strict rules.'

  'And we can take nothing out of the world. Is not that true?'

  'Is it not rather that we can take everything worth the taking?'

  ‘I wonder. For me, what was most worth taking is gone already. And yet, how shall I unlove this world, that has been my bosom-darling so long? And yet—this is talk, signora. Who are we, to talk? What am I? You cannot answer; if indeed you are really there to answer. For all I know, you are not there. I am, myself: but you—why, like all this, these people, this place, the times: you fly through my hands like wind ungropable, or dreams.'

  ‘Perhaps, signor, we do not sufficiently, and as much as we ought, trust the heavens with ourselves.'

  ‘You have forgotten,' said Lessingham. 'Then must I remember you of what you forget: how, when long ago I told you "Je ne crois pas en Dieu", you approved of that: called it a regrettable defect of character (in a young man) to believe in God. I am not yet an old man, signora: but I know more than in those days I did. And have borne more.

  ‘Does that, too, amuse you?' he said suddenly: 'You that go still tripping through the world in your proper form, armed and unguled?'

  'Yes. Very much,' she said, lifting up her chin and steadily meeting his gaze. The unfillable desire of Her, with the force as of some wind and sea-gate, seemed to set the body of night athrob.

  It is past ten o'clock,' said Lessingham, after a minute, leaning nearer across the table. 'Will you do me the honour, signora, to take supper with me in my rooms at the hotel that overlooks the river and the Ponte Vecchio? We can review better there the details of the portrait
I am to paint of you.'

  May be it was not, for that moment, the eagly eyes, steel-grey and speckled, of Lessingham that she looked in; but more troublous, more faunish eyes, brown, talking directlier to the blood: eyes of Zayana. Slowly, unsmilingly, her eyes yet staring into his, she bent her head. 'Yes,' she answered. 'Yes.'

  Dawn was on Verona. Lessingham, in his dressing-gown of wine-dark brocaded silk, watched from his balcony the pink glow along the brickwork of those eared battlements of the Ponte Vecchio: watched, beneath him, the tumbled waters of the Adige ceaselessly hastening from the mountains to the sea. A long while he remained there with the dewy morning lapped in the lap unspeakable of memories of the forenight: latest of all, of her sleeping face and body, as in the morning of life: of the unmasked miracle, for ever new, of he and she: the impersonality, the innocence, and the wonder, of a sleeping woman: and, as the reed-like music of swans' wings, flown high, unseen in the mist, the old riddles of sleep and death.

  But She, when the time came, departed at but one step from Italian autumn to summer in Zimiamvia: from this room that looked upon the Ponte Vecchio and the golden-slippered dawn, to the star-proof shade of strawberry-trees where Duke Barganax, still a silent spectator at that now silent supper-party, waited alone.

  The Duke did not move: did not look at her: said but, under his breath, 'Is this the dream? or was that?'

  'What will you think, my friend?' The faint mockery that undersung the accents of that lady's voice seemed as a forewalker of things not of this earth.

  ‘What will you suppose I should think of?' answered he. He felt for her in the dark: found her: drew her close.

  Come—sweet with all that beauty you mad me with!'

  Her waist yielded to his arm as the young night yields, drawn by sunset down to that western couch, and opens her beauties with the evening star. 'You burn me,' he said, 'O you of many gifts.'

  She laughed, so, under Her servant's lips. And he, as She laughed, became aware of the music in Her laughter, that the hush of it seemed to darken sight, as with the lifting of some coverlet that had covered till now the unknowable inner things of darkness; and he was alone with those things, through Her and through that music, in their unspeakable blessedness. And, while he so held Her, the blessedness seemed to spread from the nadir up to the sightless zenith, and the heart of darkness seemed to beat faster, as, in an earthly night, the east pales in expectation of the unrisen moon; until, high beyond the dimmest ultimate scarce suspected star, the strains of that unaltering, unhastening, secret music flew and shone as sounds made visible in their white ecstasy of fire. With that, a crash went from darkness to darkness like the trumpet of God, as if the foundations of hell and heaven thundered together to fling down the shadows and blow away the times. So the eternal moment contemplates itself anew beside the eternal sea that sleeps about the heavenly Paphos.