Zimiamvia: A Trilogy

by E R Eddison

  'The stillness of the trunk,' she said, 'Incessant little movements in the top branches. Do you think the world has its roots in heaven, and its branches spread out earthwards?'

  Lessingham sat himself down on a rock at her feet.

  'What a blessing,' she said, 'to have you real lazy, for once. The first proper lazy holiday we shall have had, for over three years. Never since Egypt, that last winter before Janet was born.'

  'We've not done badly. Honey-moon in Greece, nineteen hundred and eight Caucasus, nineteen-nine: pure laze—'

  He looked up at her: the Grecian profile, sweet serene forehead, very slight depression between brow and nose: eyebrows sweeping upward from the nose, then levelling: nose finely modelled, straight, pointed, with an almost imperceptible tilt up rather than down: cheekbones just sufficiently showing their presence to bring strength to the dove-like contours of her cheek: chin firm, throat and neck lithe, tender and strong: lips like the lips of a Goddess, tranquil and cool, yet of a most quicksilver mobility to fit every thought, mood, and feeling, as now a kind of satirical merry luxury of self-pleasuring comedy that blesses where it strikes, as she said, 'The indolence of it, that Caucasus expedition! Nothing at all to show for it—except Ushba, of course, and about five virgin peaks!'

  'Well and then next year, nineteen-ten,' he said, 'in the yacht to Lofoten in the early summer—true, I did dart across to Stockholm about those statues they wanted me to do for them. But, on the whole, pure lazes, both that and the month on the Italian lakes in the autumn. Still, I'll promise to be bone-lazy now for a bit. First instalment: I wrote and told brother Eric the other day (from Paris) to go to the devil, about the Parliament question. Too many jobs that want doing without that'

  'OI am so glad!' said she.

  'And I didn't give him an address. I'm very fond of Eric, and very fond of Jacqueline; but really we don't want them butting in again like that on our voyage to Kythera, as they did at Avignon.'

  They went on again, Mary ahead; maintaining for the best part of an hour a companionship of silence in which, the deeplier for no word spoken, presence quiveringly underfelt presence. From the top of the pass a ten minutes' pull up over steep grass and scree brought them to a shoulder of flowerclad alp, whence, out of sight of the path, you look east to the square-cut Towers of the Sella and west, further away beyond the hollow of the pass, to the rose-coloured wild fantastical spires and ridges of the Langkofel massif; Langkofel, Plattkofel, and Fiinffingerspitze: a spectacle at first blush unbelievable, unveiling at that moment above breaking clouds in the broad unreached sky.

  'Like nectar!' she said, taking in through eye and deep-drawn breath the thing before her. 'Don't you Jove to get up?'

  'Up to a point.'

  'Where would you stop?'

  'Here.'

  Mary drank the air again, standing tip-toe in an eagerness and poise liker to some creature of the woods and hills that is so fitted to its bodv that every changing motion expresses wholly and subtly, as music, the inward mood. Such a carriage, may be, had those swan maidens, king's daughters, flown from the south through Mirkwood to fulfil their fates; whom Weyland Smith and his brethren surprising at their upland bath, stole the swan-skin dresses of, and caught them so, and wedded them, and for a time sat in peace so. 'O I would not stop. I would go always higher. Wouldn't you come with me?'

  'Would I, do you think?'

  'Have to!'

  ‘Well, but, say, twenty thousand feet: that might stop us. Heights above that, I've climbed at in the Himalaya. Can't breathe properly, lose your strength, can't sleep. And an awful depression: the sense of something watch, watch, watching you, always from behind. Like an oyster might feel, if it has an imagination, when the cook opens the shell with an oyster-knife and looks at it.'

  ‘I know. But we'd choose to be creatures that can enjoy it.—I'd like to be that,' she said, pointing, as a party of choughs, glossy black plumage and yellow beaks, glided, dived, and soared below the edge of the hill, balancing on air, uttering their soft rippling cries.

  She came and sat beside him: began to investigate and spread out the lunch which Lessingham produced from his rucksack. 'Mass of eggs: I hope they've ducked them in cold water so that they'll peel properly. Rolls with ham in them. Chicken: I asked for that instead of veal to-day. All these snippety bits of sausage. Peaches., Plums—O you've squashed them! with your great coarse camera jabbing against them! A great wodge of butter.—Shall we ever grow old?' she said, as they began eating.

  'No.'

  'We shall. I'm twenty-six to-day. You'll be thirty-two in November. We'll have to start being middle-aged. Thirty-three is a generation.'

  'You haven't given me my birthday present yet.' Lessingham said, when they had finished and buried the remains.

  'Do you want it?'

  'It's part of the bargain.'

  'O stupid bargain.'

  1 like to go on with it. I like outward and visible signs.'

  'So do I. But this part of it—I mean the taking off— has lost its meaning. My dear, my dear, it has. The first time: even the second: but after that—'

  'Well, you must think it a kind of exercise—for me. Come. Only once a year.'

  'Very well.' She took off her wedding-ring and gave it him.

  ' "Ours",' he said, examining it: reading the Greek cut deeply on the inside of the ring. 'HMETEPA. Feminine singular. Neuter plural. Mine, and yours.'

  Their eyes, turned together, rested in each other a minute, grave, uncommunicative, as with the straining between them of some secret chain in nature.

  'Suppose,' said. Lessingham after a long pause, 'one of us were to die. Do you think then there could still be any question of "ours"?'

  It was as if dogs howled on the shore. Mary looked away: across to the pale precipices of the Langkofel, rearing skyward above fans of scree that opened downward to the vast scatter of fallen boulders which fills the hollow below, called the Steinerne Stadt. 'What makes you say that?' she said.

  To hear you say Yes. I wish I could say credo quia absurdum, as you can.'

  'I don't. I do believe. But not because it's absurd.'

  Between Langkofel and Plattkofel, lower but more venomous to look at than either, with its knife-edged reddish pinnacles, stands the Funffingerspitze. 'I climbed that thing twice; before I had a Mary,' he said. 'Alone, both times, like a lunatic. By the Schmidt Kamin. Deserved to be killed. No, it's not absurd,' he said: ‘what we were talking about. But it's not believable. Not to me.' He ground his nailed boot into the earth. 'And the alternative,' he said, ‘is, unfortunately, not asburd. And I find it unbearable: the mere thought, unbearable.'

  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 tomorrow.'

  ‘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 underage 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 that 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 peacockly 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 upturned 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.