by E R Eddison
Barganax smiled. ‘There be some things ought best to be little. Othersome, best big.’
‘As for instance birds,’ said she. ‘For myself, I would desire always little birds, never big ones. But dogs, always big.’
‘And men?’
‘Truly that is a kind of cattle I find myself strangely disinclined to overbusy myself with. Of late. In their plurality. Your grace laughs?’
‘Some little shrubs of pride and vanity I have in me take comfort at that “plurality”.’
‘Be not too confident.’
‘Faith, I am not. Should a beggar be a jetter? And yet—’
‘And yet? it is better kiss a knave than to be troubled with him?’
‘Ah, not that. I can tell true coin from false.’
‘And yet? in an undue manner the Devil coveted highness that fell not for him?’
‘His hopes were dasht, then. And serve him right. Nay but the “and yet” was mine. And, not to fall in open disobedience to your ladyship’s command, it shall wait.’
In soft lazy accents that wrought in the blood beyond all love-cups and enchantments, ‘’Tis a good “and yet”,’ she said, ‘an amiable Devil, to wait so civilly. Let it not be despaired.’
For a while now they ate and drank in such silence as wild hearts’ desires will lie joined in, in closer lapped embraces than spoken word could tire them to: Fiorinda at every other while casting her eyes upon him, inscrutable under their curtain of long dark lashes; and he, so tall of his person, of so careless a repose of settled power in his magnificency, and with all his wilfulness and self-liking of ungoverned youth charmed asleep now, under the lynx’s hot stare, and under the star of his lady’s presence thus goldenly and feelably sitting before him in warrant of what transcendent fare to come.
Presently, ‘This is a strange wine, madam,’ he said, ‘as never in all my days I tasted. Of what sort is it? From the outlands?’
‘No, it comes of the grape about Reisma.’
‘It is such as might be looked for at your ladyship’s table. A moment ago, limpid, transparent, and still: now, restless with bubbles. Blood-red, to suit your lips, if I hold the goblet so. Then, hold it so, snake-green, seaish. Then, against the light, all paly gleams and with changing bands of colour that go and come within it as I let it swirl in the glass. How call you its name?’
‘For make-believe,’ said she as they pledged each other, ‘say it is nectar.’
‘I could in sober truth believe that,’ he said. Her arm, of a lily-like smoothness and a lily-like paleness, was laid idly across the table, darkly mirrored in the polished surface, idly toying with the cup. ‘For make-believe,’ he said, sudden out of the silence, ‘say you are my Duchess in Zayana. Say you love me.’
Some fire-worm of mockery stirred in her eyes. ‘But surely to say that, were a raw weak undurable and soon souring make-believe? My own I am. I stand untied.’
‘I too.’
‘You too?’
‘Yes. And I am an incorrigible person, that will not be ordered.’
She gathered herself sweetly back in her chair, but her eyes were unrelenting flint. ‘You think this is a play, then?’
‘How can I tell?’
‘How can I either?’ said she. ‘Say it is a play, then; and that, in the play, you and I have forgotten, my friend, that this is the wine we drink always, you and I. And forgotten that he that drinks it with me shall return to me for ever, never altogether finding, but never altogether losing.’ She began to fondle the lynx and hold its head in her lap deliciously. ‘Is it not a play indeed, my moppet? See: riches come, and the man is not satisfied. Will he expect that freshly roasted larks shall fall into his mouth? Or is it, think you, that he came into the house but an hour ago meaning by force to ravish me, when as prevailed not, these weeks past, his fawning toys and suing tales?’
The beast fuffed at Barganax like a cat.
He laughed. ‘When your ladyship speaks to this lapcat it is, I suppose, in some dumb-beast tongue of its own? I understand not a word of it.’
Fiorinda had bent her head, caressing softly with her cheek the lynx’s fur. The bloom of her skin had an olive tinge, pallid as fields that spread their night-dews under the morning. And for apparentest outward seal of all perfections was the spider-thread fineness of her hair, seen in the prettily ordered growth of it at the temples, behind the ears, and at the nape of her neck, where it rested? Coiled upon itself, a closely woven knot, superb sleek and disturbing as some sweet black hunting-beast coiled upon itself in sleep. Barganax’s eyes were darkened so beholding her and his throat dried.
When she looked up again, he saw her eyes filled with tears. ‘There’s a blindness upon me,’ she said in answer to his look, ‘now that I have come so far.’
‘A blindness?’
‘I know not well whether. Comed so, to the parting of two ways at night. How can I know? Talking, may be, tomorrow with your carousing toss-pot. Meszrian friends: a sweet tale, somewhat hot of the spice too, of the cozening doctor, the crafty Chancellor, and puss his sister. Indeed and indeed I could wish your grace had not gone beside your purpose: were walking even now amongst your orange-trees in Zayana. I wish you’d a stayed there. Wish most, I’d ne’er set eyes on you.’
Barganax said, ‘This is damnable false doctrine.’ He came and knelt beside her, one hand on the chair-back, but not to touch her.
‘Is it?’ She was crying now, with little sobs, sometimes held back, sometimes coming miserably in a huddle together. ‘My handkerchief.’ She found it: a square of cambric edged with bone lace of silver, scarce big enough to cover the width of Barganax’s hand. ‘I have seen an ugly sight. The ugly face of Nothing,’ she said, drying her eyes.
‘But when?’
‘This morning. This Tuesday morning of this instant July. No, no, no: not when you were there. Without you, I could not, O my friend, I could not, I think go on being.’ She avoided his eye: still stifling at every now and again a convulsive sob, while with her left hand she feverishly stroked the lynx’s long back. Barganax very gently laid his cheek on her other hand which, resting on the table’s edge, held her poor handkerchief, now screwed up in the fist of it like a child’s; and very gently, as though it had been a child’s indeed, kissed it.
A minute, so. Then she began, still trembling a little, with her finger-ends of the left hand to move caressingly over his short-cut coppery curly hair; then lapped her lovely arms about his head. And Barganax’s face, as by star-leap received up into that heaven, rested, unseen, unseeing, where, as it had been two doves, her breasts sat throned, ivory-smooth through the silk, violet-sweet, proud, and Greek.
Without word spoken, they stood up from the table.
The lynx watched them from its chair out of eyes that danced with yellow fires.
That left-hand door opened upon a lobby. Fiorinda locked it behind them. At the end of the lobby they came to another doorway, doorless, curtained with rich and heavy curtains, and so to a room with tall windows at the ends west and east and, at either end between the windows, a fire-place, and the heat and movement and sweetness of fires burning of sweet cedar-logs. Scores of candles stood alight in great branched candlesticks beside the bed, and on tables and mantel-shelves and in golden sconces on the walls. The great canopied bedstead was of pure gold, throwing back fire-glitter and candlebeam, and its hangings and coverings of cramoisie silk were befringed all with gold and worked in gold thread with representations as of gryphons and manticores and flying fire-drakes and many unused shapes and semblances besides, but half-divined amid the folds of the costly hangings. The floor was strewn with beast-skins, of wolves, bears, and deep-voiced mountain-lions, upon a carpet honey-coloured, very soft to walk on, silent as sleep. The walls seemed to be of a pale green marble, but with a glistening in the body of it as of gold-dust and dust of silver, and with myriads of little gems inlaid in the veins of the marble like many-coloured sparkles of fire. Betwixt wall and ceiling ran a frieze carved w
ith lotuses, which seemed in the wobbling candlelight and the glow of the logs, now a-smolder, now shooting up tongues of flame, to swing and circle, rise and sink, as upon slumbrous slow eddies and backwashes of their native streams.
But the Duke, little regarding these marvels, regarded but his Fiorinda, standing there so close, into his hand, beautiful as golden flowers. So regarding her, surely his living self was drunk down as into the heat of a pool, deep, black-watered, full of sliding lotus-limbs: of the lotus, which yet floats so virginal-cool on the surface of the surface of the water.
As the turning of the starred sphere of night, that lady turned her head where it lay back now on his shoulder, till his eyes, close-ranged in a nearness of focus that shut out all else, rested upon her green eyes, clear-lidded, stilled, seen a little sideways: upon her nostril, which had transiently now in its cool contours an aspect most arresting, most melting, of undefended innocence: upon her cheek, firm, smooth, delicate-bloomed: last, upon her lips. It was as if, in this slowing of Time upon contemplation, Fiorinda’s lips put off all particular characters which in daylight life belonged to them, as to instruments of speech, vehicles of thought, of wit, and of all self-pleasuring fierce subtle colours and musics of their mistress’s mind; until, disclothed of all these, the perils and loveliness of her mouth lay naked: a vision not long tolerable in its climacteric. The tickle of her hair against his eyelids stirred his blood to ichor. Her hand, in an unbodiliness fluttering upon his, shepherded it down by small and small till it paused at the tie of her girdle. ‘Kiss me again,’ she said: ‘kiss the strength out of me.’ And then, the voice of her speech becoming as the fanning of a moth’s wings, felt sooner than heard: ‘Unknit me this knot.’
Silence swirled to down-sucking sea-floods of its own extreme, itself into itself. And Barganax, flesh and spirit as by anvil and fire-broil forged to one, beheld how She, tempering first to the capacity of mortal senses the acme and heat of the empyreal light, let slide down rustling to Her ankles Her red corn-rose dress and in the mereness of Her beauty, that wastes not neither waxeth sere, stood naked before him.
At that striking of the hour, Time, with its three-fold frustration of Past which is dead, of Future which is unborn, and of Present which before it can be seized or named is Past, was fallen away. Not as for sleepers, to leave a void: rather, perhaps, as for God and Goddess, to uncover that incandescent reality in which true things consist and have their everlastingness: a kind of flowering in which the bud is neither altered nor gone but endures yet more burningly in the full-blown rose: a kind of action which still sweeping on to new perfections retains yet the prior perfection perfect: an ecstasy that is yet stable in itself: a desire that lives on as form in the material concrete of its fulfilment. And while each succeeding moment, now as honey-fall, now thunder-shot, folded in under the hover of its wings the orb of the earth, it was as if She said:
I am laid for you like starlight.
As white mists
Dispart at morning with touch of the sun,
Look, I wait you:
Look, I am yours:
Secrets before unpublisht.
A God could take no more.
I am a still water:
Come down to me.
I am falling lights that glitter. I am these darknesses
Panther-black,
That scorch and unsight
At the flame of their unspher’d pride.
Make sure of me how you will.
Take me in possession.
First, kiss me, so.
Parting my sea-waved sea-strange sweet-smelling hair
So, left and right.
I am utterly yielded, untiger’d, unqueen’d:
Have I not made me
Softer and tenderer for you than turtle’s breast?
Ah, tender well my tenderness:
Life in me
Is a wing’d thing more aery than flies hemerae:
This beauty of me
More fickle and unsure
Than the rainbow’d film of a bubble, hither and gone,
On some tall cataract’s lip.
Yet, O God!
Were you God indeed,
Yet, of my unstrength,
Under you, under your lips, under your mastery,
I am Mistress of you and Queen:
I hold you, my king and lord,
The render’d soul of you bar’d in my hand
To spare or kill.
God were ungodded,
The world unworlded,
Were there no Me.
Into the other and may be less perdurable Lotus Room, the night after that race home from Austria, dawn was already now beginning to creep between the curtains of the high eastern window, and the note of a blackbird in Lessingham’s garden boded day. Downstairs in the Armoury the great Italian clock struck four. And Mary, between sleeping and waking turning again to him, heard between sleep and waking his voice at her ear:
‘O lente, lente, currite noctis equi!
O run slow, run slow, chariot-horses of Night!’
XII
SALUTE TO MORNING
ANTHEA in the mean time, left to follow her devices in that western gallery at Reisma, took her true shape, sat daintily down in her mistress’s chair, and began to make her supper of the leavings. Leisurely, delicately, she ate, but playing with the food between-whiles after a fashion of her own: now pouring the wine from glass to glass and balancing the glasses perilously one upon another, Ossa upon Olympus, and upon Ossa, Pelion; now chasing a faun hither and thither over the polished table with her finger; again, tearing a quail to pieces and arranging the pieces in little patterns, then a sudden sweeping of them all together again in a heap and begin a new figure. So, with complete contentment, for hours. At length, while she was trying her skill at picking out with her teeth special morsels from the nicely ordered mess she had made, as children play at bob-cherry, her disports were interrupted by the entrance of Doctor Vandermast.
Like a silver birch-tree of the mountains in her kirtle of white satin overlaid with network of black silk, she rose to greet him as with staid philosophic tread he came the length of the long gallery and so to the table. He kissed her brow, white as her own snows of Ramosh Arkab. ‘Well, my oread?’ he said, touching, as a lapidary might the facets of a noble jewel, with fingers more gentle than a woman’s the aureate splendours of her hair which she wore loosely knotted up and tied with a hair-band of yellow topazes. A little shamefaced now she saw his gaze come to rest on the results of her table-work, but, at the twinkle in his eye when he looked from that to her, she sprang laughing to him, hugged him about the neck and kissed him.
‘Have you supped, reverend sir?’
Vandermast shook his head. ‘It is nearer breakfast-time than supper-time. Where is her ladyship?’
‘Where the Duke would have her. In the chamber you made for them.’
‘It were best seal the doors,’ said Vandermast; and immediately by his art both those doors, the left-hand and the right, were changed to their former state, parts of the panelling of the inner wall. He stood silent a minute, his hawk-nosed face lean in the candlelight ‘It is a place of delights,’ he said. ‘Ex necessitate divinae naturae infinita infinitis modis sequi debent: out of the necessity of the Divine nature, Her infinite variety. And now he, to the repossession of his kingdom. But let him remember, too, that She is fickle and cannot be holden against Her will.’ He stood at the window. ‘The moon is set two hours since,’ he said. ‘The night grows to waste.’
‘My lady sent away her servants. Paid ’em all off, every Jack and Jill of ’em.’
‘Yes, she intends, I think, for Memison,’ said the doctor. ‘And the Lord Morville, ridden with the cavalcade to Rumala.’
Anthea bared her teeth. ‘Pray Gods he break his neck. There’s a lust upon me for a taste of hornified cattle-flesh, after supping on these kickshaws. O I could handle him with rough mittens: leave but guts and sinews for the kites. Can you think of
him and not be angry as I am?’
‘Yes. For God, according to His impenetrable counsel, hath made it a virtue in you to be angry; but making of me, He cooled that humour with a cooler thing more meet for it in me: I mean with the clear milk of reason which in a philosopher should ever overmaster passion. The unmistrusting man, thinking no evil, a man of common earth and clay, endued with a soul not yet unmortal, how should he wed with a great comet or blazing star, or breathe in Her heights? Doubt not that, from the beginning, he, in the opinion of his own insufficiency, poisoned the very sap should have nourished him at root, and so was become, long ere the Duke took a hand in it, but the simulacrum of a live tree, all dead touchwood or tinder within. And blasted now, under Her devilish effects, with the thunderstroke of his own jealousy.’
‘Why should such dirt live?’
‘The egg’ answered Doctor Vandermast, ‘is a chicken in potentia.’
‘But this was addled ere it was hatched.’
The learned doctor was sat down now in Barganax’s chair. Anthea came and sat sweetly on an arm of it, swinging one foot, her elbow propped on his shoulder, smiling down at him while with immemorial ancient gaze he rested in her cold classic beauty, so strangely sorted with lynx’s eyes and lynx’s teeth. ‘And my Campaspe?’ he said, after a little.
‘She is yonder in the leas. Some of her rattishnesses tonight, I think. Your eyes grow heavy, reverend master. Why will you sit so late?’
‘Ah,’ said he, ‘in this house nowadays I need not overmuch repose:
Here ripes the rare cheer-cheek Myrobalan,
Mind-gladding fruit, that can unold a man.
And tonight, of all nights, I must not be to seek if her ladyship haply have need of me, or if he do. What of you, dear snow-maiden?’
‘O it is only if I swaddle me in my humanity too thick that I grow sleepy,’ said she. ‘Besides, my lady bade me watch tonight. How were it if we played primero?’
‘Well and excellent,’ said the doctor. ‘Where are the cards?’
‘In the chest yonder.’ She fetched them, sat down, and with two sweeps of her hand cleared the remains of supper off the table and onto the floor. ‘The bull-fly can pick it up for himself tomorrow,’ she said. ‘We shall be gone.’
