by E R Eddison
‘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? Kümmel?’
‘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.’
‘The Greeks made a nice mess of it.’
‘Because they choked themselves trying to swallow a cherry, seems a poor reason why we must guzzle down the whole pie-dish at a mouthful.’
‘It is an infinitely finer achievement to govern a modern state.’
‘I do not think so. It is not practicable, on any self-respecting interpretation of the word “govern”. You might as well call it a finer achievement—’
‘I said “nobler”,’ said Jim.
‘—to skate on a pond when the ice doesn’t bear than when it does. It is not more difficult: it is not an “achievement” at all. It is merely impossible. Humans affairs conducted on the basis of megalopolitan civilization are simply not susceptible of good government. You have two choices: tyranny and mob-rule.’
Jim held his tongue.
Presently Lessingham resumed, as if following some elusive thought through the floating trails of cigar-smoke: ‘Wein, Weib, und Gesang: after all, what other thing is needful? I hate the folly, the false ends, the will-o’-the-wisps. Samuel Butler knew better: said the three most important things a man has are briefly, his (very well, my dear Jim. I’ll spare your blushes), and his money, and his religious opinions.’
‘Yes. Like all true Whigs, you are fundamentally immoral. And unreligious.’
‘I have never professed to have any morals whatsoever. As for religion—’
Jim Scarnside ground his partly-smoked cigar into the ash-tray. ‘What I want to know,’ he said violently, ‘is why you tore that up and threw it into the fire.’ And, without looking for an answer, he buried his face in his hands.
Lessingham made no sign, save for, on brow and cheekbones, a sudden paleness or discolour. Jim jumped up: met in Lessingham’s eyes a flash of red-looked anger: swung away from them to lean, elbows and forehead, against the high mantelpiece. ‘I can bear it no more: hide and seek in the dark. I don’t know what you’re thinking about. Don’t know what you’re feeling – if you do feel. I’d better go,’ he said. ‘Only for God’s sake—’
Lessingham rose. His grey eagly eyes, when Jim faced them, seemed dulled now, unproachable. However, he held out a hand: the left hand: Jim saw, as in the bright clarity of a tempera painting, the blood on the handkerchief that bandaged the right. Jim’s ring, in the grip of their handshake, was driven into the flesh of his fingers like a tooth.
‘It was good of you to come to me, Jim. I think you had better go now.’
‘I’m not sure. Not sure I ought to.’
Lessingham’s mustachios stirred with a sardonic smile. ‘You can set your mind at rest for that, my dear keeper. And in any case, I do as I please. And not all the great masters of Hell – much less you – are ever going to stop that.’ The cold words seemed to thin themselves on the air to a great still miasma of unfortunateness, in a loneliness of night unhandsome to work in, and (for his taking) no through-path. ‘I’ve been glad to have you,’ he said as, coming to the hall now, he helped Jim on with his coat.
‘I wasn’t much use to you.’
‘A little. Chiefly because you, too—’
‘O, my God!’
‘And yet, another ingenious device that amuses Them, I suppose (if there is any “Them”), Who look on at it all from above,’ said Lessingham, ‘is that each of us, and every living creature in the world, has to suffer alone. In the flesh, alone.’
XVIII
DEEP PIT OF DARKNESS
LESSINGHAM went back to the library: rang the bell. ‘Take these things, Ruth. I shan’t want anything else tonight. Better all get to bed early. Call me at half past five: breakfast, six fifteen sharp: I want to be off by seven. Funeral is at Anmering on Sunday. I shall come straight back. Get on with shutting up the house while I’m away. I shall only come back to finish packing: then straight abroad. Good night.’
‘Good night, sir. And asking your pardon for your old servant, Mr Edward, sir, we know we are in His hand, sir; and it is written, Our Saviour Jesus Christ hath abolished death.’
‘Yes, yes. I know. Good night, Ruth. Good night.’
She had brought a pile of letters from the hall. He now sat down to them at the table and for a couple of hours dealt with them, pushing some aside to be attended to later on by Milcrest, crumpling up others and throwing them into the waste-paper basket, writing answers to some
two dozen in his own hand. That done, he opened a drawer or two, burnt one or two more photographs, and so went through the hall and along the passage to the Refuge.
There was no fire here. There was her hunting-crop, on the sofa: her book-case, Meredith, Jane Austen, the Alice books, Edward Lear, Ethel Sidgwick’s Lady of Leisure and Duke Jones, half a dozen Conrads, Keats, Sappho, Homer: Peter Ibbetson – his nostrils stiffened:
Death said, I gather, and pursued his way.
Here in this drawer, her account books: sweets in a tin box: sewing things, little reels of cotton and silk thread of all kinds of colours, and these little balls of wool that Mischi liked to scrabble with his white hind paws: Mischi’s toy bird, with two real feathers for wings: everything in the drawer so beautifully arranged and smelling of that special French scent of hers. He shut the drawer gently: crossed over to the mantelpiece: several more photographs to burn, of various dates. He tore them up without looking at them: took from its frame and tore up also, after a moment of hesitation, that pencil drawing he had done in 1907.
It wanted a bare half-hour of midnight when he came up the leisured ascent of the great staircase, turned right, along the gallery, and stood, his back to the old oak balustrade, and before him the lobby door. Behind and beneath, in the square well of the hall, as he glanced down over his shoulder, all showed warmthless and lifeless. Against the gilded sconces unlighted candles pointed up: stiff, like dead women’s fingers. The hearth stood swept and empty. A circlet of electric bulbs, high in the seven-sided lantern of the skylight – things meant but as for occasional convenience, not, as the candlelight and the lamplight, to live with – shed an unqualified strengthless glare. He had his key in the door. A step sounded behind him: Ruth in a grey flannel dressing-gown, her hair down in plaits, a candle in her hand.
She had a scared look. ‘O I’m sorry, sir. I thought I heard something. Thought happen you might be wanting something, sir.’
‘No, thank you. I shall be turning in soon. One or two things I’ve got to get together in here, ready for the morning. You get along back to bed.’
‘Can I put a match to the fire in there? It’ll be fair perishing, Mr Edward, sir.’
‘I’ll light it if I want it.’
It’s all ready, sir, same as always at all times it was, in case—’
‘I know. You go to bed, Ruth. I’ll see to it.’
‘Very well, sir.’ She looked at him, and her face took on something of reassurance.
Lessingham went in and locked the door behind him. It was dark in the lobby. On the deep carpet his footfall made no sound. In half a dozen paces he came to the inner doorway leading to the Lotus Room. It had no door, but was closed with rich curtains, coloured dusky green of the moss agate, but, in this invisibility, black of the all-pervading black darkness.
At the touch of the unseen curtains, heavy, silken, smooth to the hand, and at the invading of his senses by a most faint but precise perfume which preserved within itself (as perfumes will) memories, as ephemeral winged creatures are preserved even to each tiniest particularity, unique, apparent, eternized in amber: at that touch, at the inhaling of that perfume, a memory warmed the darkness, and suddenly flamed through it to the point of hallucination. It was as if his hands, motionless in fact on the mid division of those curtains, had thrown them apart: as if the moment that was actual ten years ago were by miracle restored, and Mary, caught between the warm firelight and the glitter of the candles, sat at her dressing-table before her tortoise-shell looking-glass: her dress of sea-blue silk, webbed over with seed-pearls, as with streaks and flowers of sea-foam, fallen down billowy about her hips. It was as if she turned: gave him her face: gave him also, shadowy in the looking-glass where the candles wove ever dissolving nets of radiance, the adorable back-view: the line of her cheek, seen from behind a little to one side; and the braided coils of all hues from dark chestnut through tawny Sicilian wine-gleams to hues of gold burning to redness. It was as if all the whole university of times and things sat ready in Mary’s eyes. Her lips parted, but no word came.
He opened the curtains: switched on the electric light.
It was as if, than this stillness, than the houselessness of this suddenly unrelated room, nothing other remained: only here, for yet a little while, the hideous bottom of the world unworlded, bearing but this last fading character – of the irrefragable irreversibility of death.
For a minute he paused there in the threshold, like a man that maintains his footing against battering great gusts of wind. Then he thrust his way into the emptiness as into some resisting substance: a substance heavy against all senses, penetrable, breathable as common air is breathable, yet too still. In a strange violent haste, he lighted the lamps now: lighted scores of candles that stood waiting on dressing-table, writing-tables, mantelpieces, walls, and beside the great canopied bed: kindled the fires of cedar-wood, in both fireplaces: then switched off the hard electric glare. Still in a deep drunkenness of the outward senses, he unlocked that cabinet that held his picture of pictures. Without looking at the picture, he cut it from the frame, rolled it up, and put it on his writing-table. Then he unlocked and threw wide the ponderous steel door of the fire-proof safe that was built into the wall behind a panel to the left of the further fireplace, pulled out of it two deed-boxes, banged the door of the safe and locked it up again, put the boxes on his writing-table, and sat down. First he unlocked the box covered with pale blue morocco leather: it was full of letters, arranged in bundles by years: hundreds, all of them of her writing, each in its original envelope, with sometimes a mark or a note on the envelope in Lessingham’s own hand. He added two letters from the letter-case in his pocket to the collection in the box: locked it again. The second box, the black one, held documents. He went through them rapidly: deeds of title, his will, Mary’s will, a score perhaps in all. He tore across and across and threw into the fire the fire-insurance policy for the manor house of Nether Wastdale: tossed the rest back in the box: locked it. Last, pausing a moment as to bethink him whether anything were forgotten, he took his keys once more: opened the drawer under his right hand: took out a bunch of notes, cheque-book, pass-book, one or two Greek gems. His heavy Service revolver, box of cartridges beside it, lay in this drawer. He regarded it for a moment with a curious twitching of the nostrils, as a man might stand looking in readiness at a snarling poison-toothed jackal, then slammed the drawer and locked it.
And now, still standing at his writing-table, he began slowly and meditatively to arrange the things upon it: boxes, rolled-up canvas, tortoiseshell paper-knife, chequebook, silver ink-stand, pass-book, rings: all to lie true with the edges of the gold-cornered black seal-skin blotter. So will a man, waiting for the next course, adjust (with his thoughts elsewhere) knife or spoon to a tangential correctitude in relation to the empty plate beside it. Suddenly he sat down in the chair, lurching forward, in a dumb beast-like extremity grinding his forehead against the table-top.
He stood up again: waited a minute, his hands flat-palmed upon the table. Slowly at last he turned: began pacing with measured steps to and about from end to end of that room, as of his cage or prison: lotus frieze, precious tapestries and hangings, carpets, priceless Eastern rugs, huge deep-reflecting mirrors, and that great bed with its carved and inlaid pillars, its golden and silken luxury. All these had a ghastliness as of things cut off, wreckage, obscene mutilations, without root or cause in reason.
He stopped presently at the far window, opened the curtains, and threw up the lower sash. Rain had long set in for the night: October downpour, that filthily, with no wind to deflect or vary it, fell out of pitch darkness into pitch darkness: gurgle of rain-gutters, intermittent plash upon soaked earth of water from some overcharged gully clogged with leaves. ‘What I saw at Amiens,’ he said in himself: ‘meaningless: like a dead bird: without any—’ There was a horrible sudden sucking in of his breath through the nostrils ‘—O my queen, my heart’s dear, my beautiful – thank God if that meant too
quick to hurt’ – He stood staring where the light from behind him was cast back in weak reflections from the face of the rain. Then, as if shaking his senses awake again, resumed his ranging walk.
‘She: self-conscious as I am self-conscious.’ Then suddenly, out loud: ‘O speak to me, my dear, my dear—’ and his teeth ground together.
‘No,’ after the two or three hundredth to-and-about in that cage or room (in himself again). ‘No. Because this is the true material Hell. Because the imagination or illusion of her which I have conceived, to my own eternal ruin, has’— Something as it had been a scorpion sitting in his brain began to speak abominations to the profanation and unhallowing both of life and death, both of body and soul, till past and present and future loomed now as transformed to tinselled tattered trappings of their own inanity, to flicker momentally between corpse-fire and charnel-house, turning the sweet air poisonous as with the sickening smell of blood.
‘Alone. Punishment of the damned: an outmoded foolishness not worthy the confutation. Yet it is here. Unless,’ and he flung a look at the writing table, ‘unless that could end it. But I do not choose that.’
He threw more wood on the fire near her dressing-table. ‘I knew. Know now. The scientific fact. Truth, like enough. But it means nothing. It may be the explanation of Edward Lessingham and Mary Scarnside: of Edward Lessingham and Mary Lessingham. No explanation whatever of Me and She.’ As if in utter weariness of body and mind, he flung himself into the deep armchair and sat watching the bark curl, twist, and burst into flame: the sparks fly up: disappear.
After a long time, the workings in his brain began to say: ‘But here: – what to bank on? Empirical evidence of fact? Or the knowledge inside you that cuts and burns? Knowledge of what is perfect: of what is the unique thing desirable for itself alone. Which I have loved, had, lived with. Thought the thoughts of. Breathed the breath of. Naked in bed with.’ He sprang up.
