by E R Eddison
‘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?’
‘I 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.
There was silence, save for Campaspe’s whisper, as the trembling of tiny waves among rushes in a windless autumn midnight: ‘The King of Worlds, undeadly and unsightable.’
But the King, elbow on the table still, looking still from above on this curious world of his creation, waited with the pleasant idleness of one content to drowse on in that borderland where the changing of the grey light is the only reality, and that less substantial than the elusive perfume of a forgotten dream. His mustachios stirred with the flicker of a smile, as he realized how long he must have stood with his hand upon the door-handle while his mind, in the timelessness of contemplation, had been riding with that music. With an art to refine to the delicatest half-retracted touch the dawning and unveiling of an expected joy, he let go the handle, stepped backwards a pace or two, and, with his back to the old oak balustrade, stood looking at that door. Behind and beneath him, in the square well of the hall, warm gleams and warm stirring shadows pulsed and wandered, here and there a spear of radiance shooting as high as the door’s dark panels, with the spurting of fresh flame as the logs settled together. He glanced down, over his shoulder. Against golden sconces a score of candles burned on the walls. On a chair was her hunting-crop thrown by: on another, things for sewing, and packets of flower-seeds (he could see the coloured pictures on the backs); and on the table in the middle of the hall were letters addressed and stamped ready for posting, and her account book and little golden pencil. On the great white bear-skin rug before the fire her Sheila, a little flat dog without much legs, iron grey and hairy and with feathery bat-like ears laid back, was stretched asleep: now and then with twitchings in her sleep, and half-smothered excited little dream-cries. Daffodils in a silver bowl in the middle of the table mixed with the candle scent and the wood scent their scent of spring.
He went to the bay-window at the end of the gallery on his left and, for a last deep draught of those airs of promise, opened it wide and stood for a minute out on the balcony. Dusk was on the garden and on the river. There were quiet noises of blackbirds and thrushes settling down to roost. The Copeland hills to the west were hard-outlined against the sky which low down glowed still with a waterish orange-coloured light. Higher, the bosom of the sky was neither blue nor grey nor green nor rosy but all of these at once, and yet far too pale for any of these, as if the illimitable spaces of heaven had been laid bare and found pure and perfect with the promise of alternate night and day. Across that purity, two or three vast smoky clouds drifted sea-wards; others, banked in flaky darkness, rested on the horizon south of the going down of the sun. The wind was falling to sleep among the apple-trees. Night, beginning to make up her jewels, set upon he
r forehead the evening star.
He came back, turned the handle, went in, and locked the door behind him. Before him, the lobby opened shadowy, with night-lights burning of scented wax in the embrasures of the walls to left and right. On the deep carpet his footfall made no sound; in half a dozen paces he came to the inner doorway; it had no door, but was closed with rich curtains coloured dusky green of the moss agate. Two blows of amethyst, upon tables of gold, right and left of that doorway, held immortal flowers: quiet dusky blooms of Elysian nepenthe, drenching the air with their fragrancy.
He parted the curtains and stood on the threshold. Mary, caught between the warm firelight and the glitter of the candles, sat at her dressing-table before her tortoise-shell looking-glass.
Through a glamour blinding the eyes he beheld her stand up now: beheld her turn to him, and that sea-foam dress slide down to foam about her feet. Like the wind on the mountains falling upon the oaks, Her beauty fell upon him, intolerable, that no eye can bear. And there was a shout, terrible, all-pervading, as of a voice crying and saying that all Gods, and men, and beasts, and fowls, and fishes, and creeping things, should bow down and give praise because of Her; and that the sun and the moon should be glad, and the stars sing, and the winds and the mountains laugh because of Her, and the golden mansions of the Father and the desirable concourse of the Gods be open unto Her, as it was and is and ever shall be. Surely he was become as one dead, covering his face before Her on that timeless shore: he that, a mortal man, not once but ten thousand times, but ten thousand times—
—with an immortal Goddess: not clearly knowing. At that thought, as the heart of Her doves turns cold and they drop their wings, so he.
The King, shaking himself awake out of that study he had for these past minutes seemed lost in, sat back in his golden chair. Sidelong he regarded Her for a minute, sitting there beside him, wearing that downward inward-listening look; upper lids level and still, under lids still and wide: mouth lightly closed in a secretness cool and virginal as the inward throat of a white lily, yet with the faint flicker of some tigerness, alive but sleeping, at Her mouth’s corner. He said, very low, ‘Well, Señorita Maria?’
With a motion scarce to be seen, she leaned nearer. The moth-like touch of her arm against his sleeve let him know she was trembling. His hand found hers, in her lap beneath the table. She said in a whisper, ‘It did not hurt, did it? – The coming out?’
‘Not the coming out,’ he answered, ‘but the not knowing.’
‘The not knowing? You, that do know all? Things past, present, and to come, and alike things not to come?’
‘The not knowing – there – that, for you, it did not hurt. Fifty more years I endured it there, remember, wanting you.’
‘But surely you knew, even in there, my friend?—
And we, madonna, are we not exiles still—
Surely you remember that?’
‘Some things we knew, even in there. Some things we will remember.’
‘But what need to remember things true and perfect? When all of them are ours. What need to remember present good?’
The King smiled. ‘It is but a name, this “remember”.’
They looked for a minute at the unsure thing on the table before them. ‘Fifty more years, afterwards, I wrought there,’ said the King: ‘yet here, what was it? the winking of an eyelid. And you see, it hath in itself, that world, the seeds of its own decay. Its way is not onward, but all turns in upon itself, so that every kind of being becomes there, as Time wears, ever more mongreled with the corruption of other kind. As at night all cats are grey: and as the dust of all right living things turns, mixed with bright water, to a grey mud.’
‘It is, what you said it should be, a strange unlucky word,’ he said. ‘Much like this real world, but crooked. The same canvas, same silks, same pattern, same colours; and yet something amiss in the working. As if a naughty child had unpicked it here and there, cut the threads, played the mischief with it.’ Her hand was still in the King’s under the table. ‘You and I dreamed it: that dream. – I’m frighted,’ she said suddenly, and buried her face on his shoulder beside her. Under the comfort of the King’s hand which tenderly, as things too dear for hand to touch, touched now her bended neck, now the up-piled red magnificences of her hair, she was ware of Zenianthe’s voice: the voice of a hamadryad, as out of the stillness of the heart of some great oak-forest:
It was no dream; or say a dream it was,
Real are the dreams of Gods, and smoothly pass
Their pleasures in one long immortal dream.
‘Was it a dream?’ the Duchess whispered, ‘or is this the dream? What is true?’
‘That I love you,’ he said, ‘beyond dream or waking. Further than that, it is best not to know.’
She raised her head. ‘But you. I believe you know.’
‘I know,’ he answered. ‘But I can forget, as you forget. It is necessary to forget.’
‘It is but a name, you say, this “remember”. Shall you and I remember—?’
The King drew her closer, to say in her ear, ‘—the Lotus Room, tonight?’
‘Yes, my dear, my lover, and my friend: the Lotus Room.’
‘And for us, madonna,’ said the Duke privately to that Dark Lady, from behind, in the dark: ‘our Lotus Room?’ As the white of her neck where her jewelled hand stroked it, smooth sleek and tender below the sleek close-wound tresses of her jet-black hair, untrodden snow is not so spotless.
‘Your grace,’ she replied, without looking round, ‘may wisely unlearn to use this cast.’
‘What cast, dear Lady Unpeace?’
‘As though you were my husband.’
‘Would heaven I were.’
‘And so foreknowledged to the estate of becco or cornuto?’
‘I will not hear you, wasp. He that would unwive me – well, your ladyship hath had example: he should ne’er come home uncut.’
She laughed: a sweeping of lute-strings to set all the velvet night suddenly awhirl with fire-flies. ‘O your grace hath a tongue to outcharm the nightingale: unsinews all my powers: is a key to unshut me quite, and leave me a poor lady uncounsellable, all o’ermastered with strawberry-water and bull-beef.’ Lithe as a she-leopard she eluded him, and, stepping out of the shadow, indolently approached the table. Her beauty, to the unquiet eye beholding her, seemed, spite bodice and gown’s close veiling, to shine through with such pure bounty as in Titian’s Venus is, naked upon her couch in that sunlit palace in Urbino: a body in its most yielding swan-soft and aching loveliness more ethereal, more aery-tender, than other women’s souls.
‘Your promise given, you shall not unpromise it again,’ said the Duke at her ear, following her.
‘I have not yet made up my mind. And indeed,’ she said, ‘I think, when ’tis well made up, I’ll change it.’
The King stood up in his majesty, the Duchess Amalie with him. All, at that, stood up from the table: all save the Vicar only, who, being untraded in philosophy, and having wisely drowned in wine the tedium of a discourse little to his taste, now slept drunk in his chair. And the King, with his Amalie’s hand in his, spoke and said: ‘It is high time to say goodnight. For, as the poet hath sung—
Sleep folds mountain and precipic’d ridge and steep abysm,
Wave-worn headland and deep chasm;
Creeping creatures as many as dark earth doth harbour;
Beasts too that live in the hills, and all the bee-folk;
And monsters in gulfs of the purple ocean;
Sleep folds all: folds
The tribes of the wide-wing’d birds.
And, because tomorrow the great stage of the world waits my action, and because not many such nights may we enjoy in lovely Memison, therefore we will for this night, to all who have sat at your board, madonna, wish (as Sappho of Lesbos wished) the length of our night doubled. And why we wish it,’ he said, secret to Amalie, ‘we know full well, you and I; for Night that hath the many ears calls it to us across th
e dividing sea.’
But now, as a score of little boys, for torch-bearers, formed two lines to light them to bedward and the guests began two by two to take their stations for departing, the Lord Beroald, marking where this ensphered creation rested yet where the King had left it, said, ‘What of that new world there your serenity was pleased to make us?’
The King half looked round. ‘I had forgot it. No matter. Leave it. It will ungo of itself. For indeed,’ he said, with a back-cast look at Fiorinda, ‘rightly reading, I hope, the picture in your mind, madam, I took occasion to give it for all your little entities that compose it, this crowning law: – that at every change in the figures of their dances they shall by an uneschewable destiny conform themselves more and more nearly to that figure which is, in the nature of things, their likeliest; which when they shall reach it at last, you shall find dance no more, but immobility: not Being any more, but Not-Being: end of the world and desistency of all things.’
The Duchess’s arm twined itself tighter in his. Fiorinda said, ‘I had noted that pretty kind of strategematical invention in it. And I humbly thank the King’s highness and excellency for taking this pains to pleasure me.’
‘O, we have done with it, surely?’ said the Duchess. ‘What began it but an unfledged fancy of hers?’ Her eye-glance and Fiorinda’s, like a pair of fire-flies, darted and parted: a secret dance in the air together. ‘Her fault it ever was made.’
‘For myself,’ said that lady. ‘I do begin to find no great sweetness in it. It has served its turn. And were ever occasion to arise, doubtless his serene highness could lightly make a better.’
The King laughed in his black beard. ‘Doubtless I could. Doubtless, another day, I will. And,’ he said, under his breath and for that lady’s ear alone, looking her sudden in the eye, ‘doubtless I have already. Else, O Beguiler of Guiles, how came We here?’
Anthea whispered something, inaudible save to Campaspe. Their dryad eyes, and that Princess Zenianthe’s, rested now on the King, now on Barganax, now once more on the King.
