by E R Eddison
THE FISH DINNER: FIRST DIGESTION
UPON a morning of late August the Duchess of Memison was abroad before breakfast upon the out-terraces above the western moat. The year was turning golden to all ripenesses, of late flowers, and fruit, and (albeit yet far off) fall of the leaf. In this light of early morning the yew hedges that run beside the terraces were covered with spiders’ webs wet with dew-drops, a shimmering of jewels on mantles of white lace: a beauty ever changing, and with a hint of things altogether strengthless and ephemeral. No bird-voice sounded, except twitterings of swallows in the sky or exclamations from the Duchess’s white peacocks, whose plumage was like woven moonbeams, and the eyes in their tail-feathers like iridescent moons when they displayed in the slant rays of the sun.
At the far end of the terrace southwards, she was met with Duke Barganax, picking his way among the peacocks and bending, as he came towards her, to stroke now this one, now that. They drooped tails, and with an elegant, crawling, swimming, undulating gait, in its extremity of submission too abject to be called pavane, passed under his hand for the caress. ‘You are up early, my lady Mother,’ he said.
‘Well, and what of you? And besides, is it not a virtue?’
‘Depends of the occasion. For my part, I never (provided I lie alone) insult a fair morning by lying a-bed.’
‘A very needful proviso. But tell me,’ said she, ‘while I think on’t: was not that a misreckoning of mine, at our fish dinner here a month ago, not to bid you bring the learned doctor with you, ’stead of leave him to stew in his most metaphysical juices in Zayana?’
‘I had not thought so. Why?’
‘Might have told us now what in sober truth happened that night.’
‘I can tell you that,’ said the Duke. ‘Noble feasting. Good discourse.’
‘No more?’
‘Come, you remember as well as I.’
The Duchess shook her head. ‘If so, we are in one ridiculous self-same plight of forgetfulness. I remember nought past the ordinary, as you have summed it. But even next morning I woke to a discomfortable and teasing certainty that there was much forgot; and amongst it, the heart and argument of our whole proceeding.’
‘What if ’twere so indeed?’ said the Duke. ‘’Twas but pleasant talk. If unremembered, as like as not worth the remembering.’
They walked slowly on, back along the terrace, in the way of the summer palace, peacocks following them at heel. She said presently, ‘More I consider of it, more am I suspicious that ’twas not talk only, but something we did. Could I call it back to mind, might give me the key to unlock certain perplexities.’
‘Did you not ask the King my Father?’
‘Yes. But no light there. Did but laugh at me: fub me up with quips and riddles and double meanings: made me worse.’
‘Or my lord Chancellor? Or the Admiral (heaven be kind to him)? No light there? As for the Vicar—’
‘’Las,’ said she, ‘what a red lion, and what a red fox, is that! Disputations in divine philosophy are but dry hard biscuit to him.’
‘And to mend the dryness, did drink drunk or the true main act of our masque were led on. And that, as myself have noted in him afore this, needeth an unconscionable, unimaginable, deal of wine.’
‘The true main act: what was that?’
‘Why,’ said he, ‘I meant when, after the rest of us (you remember this, surely?) had spoken our minds ’pon the question: What world would we choose to dwell in for ever, say we were Gods, and thus able to have our desire fulfilled into our hand soon as thought on? I meant when, after that, she, under pressure from you and from my Father, began to speak of the world which, had she that absolute sovereignty of choice, she would choose.’
‘And it was—?’
Barganax had come to a stand: his gaze across the dew-drenched grass. Here, seen in the pathway of the sun, hundreds of starry lights glowed and sparkled: topaz, emerald, fire-opal, ruby, sapphire, diamond; always changing place and colour, kindling, flashing, disappearing and appearing again in least expected places, as some shift of the eye of the beholder called them into being or laid them by; tiny unsure elysiums, here and away, unreachable; and yet perfect, yet never wholly extinguished: spawned or conceived by this unsightable golden splendour of the risen sun. ‘Strange. ’Tis a thing I had not thought on,’ he said; ‘my mind being bent on things nearer my concern. But true it is, when I try now to recall that latter part of our discourse, I am in your case: ’tis gone from me.’
‘Perhaps the night put it from our minds?’
‘The night?’ said the Duke: no more. But when he looked round at her it was as with eyes dimmed after gazing too near at hand into a naked flame.
He began to walk up and down, the Duchess in silence watching him. Suddenly he turned heel, came straight to her where she stood, took her in his arms and kissed her. He said, still holding her, looking down into her eyes: ‘Who made you such a queen-rose, my Mother?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, and hid her face on his shoulder, her right hand coming up to his cheek. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’ When she looked up, her eyes were smiling.
Taking her hands in his, ‘What is this?’ he said. ‘You’re not unhappy?’
‘Something has changed since that night.’ She was looking down now, playing with his fingers.
‘Come, sweet Mother. You have not changed. I have not changed.’
‘God be thanked, no. But – well, weather has changed.’
‘Nonsense. It is set fair.’
‘It is changed,’ said she, ‘and changing. I have a disliking for changes.’
He said, after a pause, ‘I think I should die of the tediousness without them.’
The Duchess smiled. ‘Everybody has a different weather, I suppose. You and I certainly. May be that is why we love each other.’
Barganax kissed her hand. She caught his and, under laughing protest, kissed it.
‘My Father, then?’
She said, ‘I can feel the change in him. It frightens me. I would have him never change.’
‘And he you.’
‘That is true, I know.’
Barganax’s brow was clouded. He walked over to the parapet’s edge, upon their left, and stood there silent a minute, looking over. The Duchess followed him. ‘I have not seen him since then,’ he said, after a while. ‘So I cannot tell.’ A clump of belladonna lilies were in flower there beside them: thick strong stems, sleek and columnar, and great trumpets of a silvery rose-colour, smooth-skinned as a woman’s throat, cool, bedewed, exhaling a heavy sweetness. The Duke picked one. Suddenly he spoke: ‘Can you remember what she said that night, when you and my Father pressed her to answer? About her world she would have?’
‘Yes. That came before the things I have forgotten. She said: “The choice is easy. I choose That which is.”’
‘True. And the King took exceptions: saith, what could that be but the ultimate Two alone? They, and the lesser Gods and Goddesses who keep the wide heaven, of a lower reality, may be, than His and Hers, yet themselves more real than such summer-worms as men? And he bade her picture it to him that he might perceive it: all this and the golden mansions of the Father – I liked not that. I saw she was angry with him, thinking he mocked. She was in a strange contrary temper that evening. Answered him, “No. Like as her grace, I also will change my mind too: look lower.” You remember that Look lower?’
The Duchess covered her face with her hands. ‘When I would remember, I seem to walk on a swaying rope between darkness and darkness. What happened in truth that night?’ she said, looking up again. ‘Had we drunk too much wine, will you think?’
‘A love-draught?’ said Barganax. ‘’Tis not impossible.’ He clasped his strong hand about his mother’s shoulder and drew her to him: then, in her ear: ‘Those words, Look lower. And with them a look in her eye I’ll swear, Mother, no eye but mine hath seen or shall ever; to be seen, it needs to be loved. An unplacable look: a serpent-look.’
/> ‘The dream comes back to me,’ said the Duchess, turning her fingers in his, of his hand that rested on her shoulder. ‘“I have thought of a world,” she said. “Will your highness create it indeed for me?”’
‘Be careful,’ the Duke said, in a kind of fierceness. ‘It was no dream. You have brought it back alive to me, and not the words only, neither. You have caught the very accents of her voice beyond all elysiums.’ Then, loosing his hold and stepping back to have full view of her: ‘You remember my Father’s reply? “I’ll do my endeavour”?’
The Duchess was trembling. ‘Since when have you, my son, had this art to speak to me, out of your own mouth, with his voice?’
‘She lifted her head,’ said the Duke, as if locked up alone with his inward vision, ‘as a she-panther that takes the wind. By heavens!’ he said, as the Duchess lifted hers; ‘you have the motion. Continue, if you love me. Continue. Her eyes were on me, though she spoke as if to him. Rehearse it: act it for me, to prove it more than a dream of mine.’
And the Duchess, looking at this son of hers as it were to look through a perspective that should show her his father, her lover, began to speak: as a sleep-walker might, not her words but the Lady Fiorinda’s.
When she had ended, her son abode motionless against the parapet, staring at her. Then she, as if by mere silence startled out of her sleep-walking: ‘What have I said? It is gone from me: I cannot remember.’
He leaned towards her. ‘For all sakes, remember. Think of me as the King my Father. He made it, that thing, that massy glistering bubble, even as she required it of him: made and fashioned it, there on the table before us, growing between his hands. What was it? Did we not behold it put on substance, mature to an inconceivable intricacy in obedience to her unbitted fancy? As though all Gods and Powers had been but ministers to her least desires (as, by my soul, they ought to be). But a clockwork only it was: a make-believe: a dead world.’
‘His words,’ said the Duchess, and trembled: ‘his voice yet again. “A dead world. A dead soul.” And she desired him then give it life: “Let it teem with life,” she said; “and that horribly.” So, and in that humour. Her laws for the living beings in that world: you remember? “I will tease them a little with my laws.”’
Barganax narrowed his eyelids, looking at his mother; and yet (it may be thought) not at his mother but, in her, at his Dark Lady. ‘That they should seem to have freedom,’ he said; ‘and yet we, who look on, should know ’tis no such matter. And her law of death: “Every one that knoweth life in my world shall know also death. The little simplicities, indeed, shall not die. But the living creatures shall.” Well, was she not right? “A just and equal choice: either be a little senseless lump of jelly or of dead matter, and subsist till world’s ending; or else—”’
‘“Or else be a bird, a fish, a rose,”’ said the Duchess, as if unburying a new fragment from amongst the chaos of broken memories of that strange supper-entertainment: ‘“or men and women as we be—”’
‘“Upon condition to fade, wax old, waste at last to carrion and corruption” – Well? Is it so much unlike this loved world of ours?’
‘’Tis too much like,’ the Duchess replied. ‘It is the same as this world: but crooked: but spoilt.’
‘Your grace needs not to tell me,’ said the Duke: ‘et ego in Arcadiâ,’ and he laughed, ‘– but that scarce fits. “Men and women as we be.” And then she said, sitting at your table here, before your summer palace, while her world-destroying beauty, pensive and stilled, shone down upon that misconceived master-work of self-thwarting perfections: “As we be? How were that possible, out of this? Is there mind in this? – Unless, indeed” (you remember), “unless We Ourselves go in and enter it. Know it so, go down –” And then my Father said: “Undergrope it from within. For a moment, We might. To know.”’
‘No more, I beseech you,’ said the Duchess. ‘What are we about?’
But Barganax had her by the hand. ‘Think of me constantly now, as the King my Father. Let’s try it again. You and I, this time. I begin to remember things I, too, had forgot; and I know not who I am, nor who you are. Come, we will. I will know again whether there be truth in it or but make-believe.’
‘Stop!’ she said, ‘I cannot bear it: not a second time.’
But he, still straining her by the hand, overbore her. For a minute they stood, here in lovely Memison, as two unfleshed souls might aboard Charon’s ferry, waiting to be put from shore. But nothing came about: no expected half-remembered translation out of their native substantiality of life and being into a more dimmer and crippled world, in detail so like, in sum so alien: unimaginable now: a prison-life which had been, or could be, theirs, but now well forgotten; and yet half tasted in remembrances which, slight, smudged, fleeting, were now blessedly lost again, blotted out in a wreathing of mists and fog and billowing darkness. Then, as with the going of a shadow from across the sun’s face, was this real world back again true and perfect: smells of wet earth and wood-smoke, the snail on the path, the wren scolding from the yews: on the glassy waters of Reisma Mere afar a rippling here and there where the morning breeze touched them: great sulphur-coloured lilies seen against the yews’ darkness, distilling on the air their voluptuous sweet scent: morning light upon Memison; and breakfast-time.
The same day, Duke Barganax rode south, having appointed the day after to hold his weekly presence: receive petitions, hear suits if any there were of enough matter and moment to be pleaded before him in person, treat with men in their quarrels and set them at one, or, where that would not speed, deliver judgement and give order for its execution.
It was past supper-time when he rode up into Acrozayana. He delayed but to eat some cold collation: smoked salmon, caviar, boar’s head spiced and dressed with hippocras sauce, with a flagon of Reisma wine to wash it down; then, retiring himself to the western balcony of his own privy lodging that looks on Zayana lake and Ambremerine, summoned Doctor Vandermast. ‘I would have your head in a matter, honoured sir: not as my secretary, but as of old, master and teacher in the noble dark science. How came this world, think you, and other worlds if other there be?’
Vandermast answered and said, ‘By God alone, that made all.’
‘Good. Ergo, made also Himself?’
‘Undoubtedly so. Your grace hath not forgotten the definitio: Per causam sui intelligo id, cujus essentia involvit existentiam: sive id, cujus natura non potest concipi nisi existens? Nought else save God alone is able to be cause of itself, since nought else hath such a nature as is not able to be conceived save as existing. In none else doth the Essence thereof inescapably involve also the Existence.’
The Duke sat gazing before him, as rapt with some picture in his mind. Then leaning forward to look in the doctor’s eyes (as well as a man were able, under their shadowing eaves and but starlight to see by): ‘But there is a Twoness,’ he said, ‘in the ultimate Onehead of Godhead?’
‘There is a Darkness. If indeed by God we understand a Being absolutely infinite, that is to say, a Substance made up and compounded of infinite attributes, every particular one of which expresseth an Essence infinite and eternal.’
‘And you yourself,’ said the Duke, leaning nearer, eyeing him yet closelier, ‘when I was but of years sixteen and did first dally with the Metaphysicals, you did ground me in that principle you name lode-star and cynosure of divine philosophy: Per realitatem et perfectionem idem intelligo: “Reality,” that is, “and perfection are the same thing.”’
‘Through the monster-teeming seas of thought, ay, and in action, assaying those topless spires whence in highest majesty God looks down, that,’ replied Vandermast, ‘is indeed man’s cynosure: the alonely certain star to steer by.’
Barganax sat back in his chair. The sky was of a soft violet-colour and full of stars whose beams showed, in those windless upper airs, a strange constancy, but the mirrored stars in Zayana lake swayed and broke in pieces and ran together again as quicksilver: a changefulness and a rest
lessness like as that of the dew-lights that morning in Memison. A like unrestful secretness stirred under the deep harmonies of his voice as he said, as if examining some strange unheard-of novelty in his own hidden mind: ‘Realitatem: Perfectionem. Well, I have found perfection.’
Doctor Vandermast held his peace.
The Duke said, still as to himself, almost with a tang of mockery in his accents, yet in the same slow wonder: ‘Am not I therefore beyond example fortunate? What need I further, having possessed me of Perfect and Real in One?’ He stretched his arms as one waking from sleep, and laughed. ‘Come, you are silent. Will you envy me, old man, to have found, and in my young years, this true philosopher’s stone?’
‘How shall any man but yourself tell whether you are to be envied or commiserated? Satiety is death. Desire is life.’
‘And is not the mere quality of Perfection, this,’ said the Duke, leaping to his feet to stand against the balustrade, his back to the night sky, his face in deep shadow looking down on Vandermast: ‘to be infinite? Infinitely desirable, and infinitely unsupportable: explored without and within, yet ever the more terrible and the more appassionately sought in its unknowable secrets. In fiercest beauties, in supremest deliciis, absent, yet absent unsparable. And so, elysium beyond elysiums: here and away, yet so as a man would joyfully cut his hand off to buy off change, and when change is come, cut off t’ other sooner than go back to status quo ante.’
‘Laetitia,’ said that ancient doctor slowly, as to weigh each word, ‘est hominis transitio a minore ad majorem perfectionem: Joy is the passing of a man from the smaller to the greater perfection.’
‘And (corollarium) the greater oft-times becometh greater by bringing back the smaller. Infinite change; yet infinite self-same bewitchment.’ There was a grandeur of line, beyond the use of human kind, in the lithe frame of him outlined there against stars. Vandermast watched him in silence, then spoke: ‘I observed this in your grace, even at my first coming into your noble service, that alike by soul and body you are of apt temper to understand the depth of that wisdom: Nous connaissons la vérité non seulement par la ration, mais encore par le coeur; c’est de cette dernière sorte, que nous connaissons les premières principes.’
