by Russell Kirk
But Eugenides winced, rose, shuffled round to the other side of the table. The Archvicar slid his stick beneath his chair and sank into the vacated place beside Marina. “There has been odd company in this house before now,” he murmured to her, “but never quite such a lot as we have with us this night.”
Dusty was going about with a heavy decanter, refilling the wineglasses. “Don’t touch your lips to it,” the Archvicar advised, putting his graceful old hand across the mouth of Marina’s glass. “It may be right enough, but who can say? The water is good here; I know it of old.”
“I never drink much,” Marina assured him. “It makes me so sleepy. Oh, who is that lady beside the Master?”
Apollinax had taken his chair at the head of the long table, with Grishkin at the foot. On his right hand sat a tall woman, perhaps forty years old, her red hair piled high upon her head, her features striking, her eves bad.
“We call her the Princess Yolupine,” Gerontion whispered, “and with reason. Actually, she is a princess-that is, an Australian woman divorced from various earlier husbands, and most recently from an Italian prince. Her tastes are said to be exotic in divers ways. At present, I understand, she is mistress of nothing except a large fortune, which helps to pay for our present retreat. But I had quite forgotten that you hadn’t been presented to most of our disciples, my dear. Shall I run through the roster for you?” Marina nodded.
“On the princess’ right, then, is Mr. Hakagawa, the proprietor of a number of clinics for young women troubled by ‘unwanted pregnancies,’ from Tokyo to Buenos Aires. Next to him, Fraulein von Kulp, of the welcoming but empty eyes, haunting and haunted, amor bruja. Beyond her, Mr. Silvero, a connoisseur in arts and crafts, possessor of a capacious and precious collection of erotica, much of which features himself, I am told. After that lively gentleman, Mrs. Equitone, your benefactress, who also helps to pay the Master’s bills, and who long ago was charged with complicity in the curious death of her own daughter-though acquitted. Then our friend Eugenides, who has done very well out of large-scale direction of the world’s oldest profession; at the foot, our Coppelia-Grishkin, of course-she being my colleague in this undertaking, I refrain from describing her adventures.”
Could any of this be true? Marina tried to collect her thoughts. “I don’t see Mr. Sweeney.”
“No.” The Archvicar was barely audible. “Sweeney is below stairs, in more senses than one. Willy-nilly, his talents as architect are being employed, and probably he will be at his labors much of the night. Coriolan-Captain Bain, you know—is lending him a hand. Well, on Grishkin’s far side sits Mr. Bleistein, the man with the thick cigar-would you buy a used automobile from him? Yet he has left a trail of bankrupt international companies behind him, apparently being plausible in his fashion, and has flourished by others’ misfortunes. Next to him, Madame de Tornquist, of the heavy-lidded eyes, providentially widowed, subtle, serpentine, given to fearful séances. Then Monsieur de Bailhache-you’ve spoken with him?-who in the troubles of our time has served as many masters as did Talleyrand, and has betrayed them all.”
“Are you being quite fair?” Marina demanded. She was flushed with surprise and anger. “After all, these are Mr. Apollinax’s disciples...”
“Hush, my dear, and trust this old scoundrel to spy out other scoundrels. After all”—here the Archvicar pressed his hands together in an attitude of prayer, perhaps piously—“who came to save sinners, not the righteous? Mr. Apollinax is magnanimous. The poor little withered creature on my right, happily deaf, is Mrs. Cammel, a militant votary of Sappho, burning, burning, with a hard perverse flame.” Gerontion took a sip of water, and tried to writhe himself into a tolerably comfortable position.
“Let us proceed. Your companion Professor Channing-Cheetah-don’t be alarmed, for he doesn’t hear us, Grizel having him in play-sometime of Cambridge, Massachusetts, amuses himself by conspiring with terrorists and writing letters to the papers in their defense-any band of terrorists will do, whatever their persuasion. Ah, so you talked with him already!
“Then comes my Grizel, Madame Sesostris, famously clairvoyant; then that vacant place, intended for Sweeney until his very recent fall from grace-I’ll explain another time. Last, on the Master’s left, Mrs. Channing-Cheetah, whose passion for bloody enslaving liberation surpasses even her husband’s. I declare, my dear Marina, that in such company I feel almost a prig.”
Marina sat there dazed. Could she believe half of what this old man had told her? The arrival of the dinner’s main course saved her from having to reply at once.
The principal course, on its beautiful plates, consisted of large portions of ham and chips, miserably cooked, which would have discredited an East End fish-and-chips saloon. Marina had come near to starving before Mrs. Equitone had bestowed that hundred pounds upon her, but she never had dined so wretchedly as this. All this grease, all this slapped-down mess, contrasted with the charming tableware, the fine napery, the elaborate candelabra upon the table, the grand room with its musty dignity!
Yet the disciples and Grishkin and Apollinax himself, she noticed, ate greedily enough, hastily, and in silence-as if they needed sustenance but were beyond the pleasures of the palate. She could not see Madame Sesostris, but the Archvicar left his food quite untouched, only drinking a little water. Marina tried to eat, cutting up her ham, fiddling with her chips-but could bring herself to swallow only a few morsels. The acolytes kept filling the glasses with that odd drink, and everybody but the Archvicar and herself seemed to be washing down the mess with that liquid. She was so ashamed of herself! Perhaps the badness of the food was deliberate mortification of the flesh; yet even in the convent she had known no such harsh contempt for the body’s claims. Couldn’t she rise above such trifles-and if she couldn’t, how might she hope to share in the Timeless Moment?
“Phlebas will cook some pigeons’ eggs for us-tolerable omelettes, actually,” the Archvicar was whispering to her. She felt guiltily grateful for this promise. The swilling was almost over; the young people had begun to clear away the plates. She ran her glance round the table again. Was she going mad? Every face there seemed to be a mask, as in her nightmare. And the face of Apollinax, in its blurred indefinable incompleteness, seemed the weirdest mask of all-when one could not make out his eyes, that was.
What lay behind these masks? But before she could sink into such perilous speculations, Mr. Apollinax rose. All masks were turned toward him with a pathetic intensity.
“Now evensong,” the Archvicar drawled into her ear.
“Many of you present,” Mr. Apollinax began, “have heard me utter before such words as I shall speak this night. But you seem not to tire of them; and for Marina they are fresh truths.”
“Did you know that chap was a priest once?” Gerontion breathed.
Yet Marina sat rapt, enchanted by the flow of Apollinax’s eloquence and the marvelous eyes of the Master.
Mr. Apollinax paused before commencing his lecture or sermon. He seemed to have grown a foot in height, abruptly, there at the end of the table. “He’s standing on a little stool—that’s his way,” the Archvicar confided. Hearing even that faint whisper, Apollinax glanced sharply toward Marina and the Archvicar, and they were chastened.
“The first truth,” Apollinax began, “is that there is but one Lord, and but one world. That Lord is not the unjust Demiurge. He is kind, and all impulses in his world are natural. It has been the repression of natural impulses that has worked ferocious mischief upon mankind almost from the beginning. Now modern science teaches us that universal happiness may be secured through the removal of repression and inhibition. That was the intention of the Lord from the first days of the human race, but human perversity has sublimated natural impulses into aggressive channels. At last we begin to understand the order of release.”
Mrs. Equitone was nodding ardent approval, very like a piece of clockwork. Princess Volupine gazed at Apollinax with a devotion almost erotic. Mr. Apollinax spoke with moving c
ertitude, as the Hebrew prophets must have spoken—as if he were the mouthpiece of an Other.
“I tell you that there exists but one world,” Apollinax went on, “and yet that world is a realm of spirit. All these material forms about us, including our bodies, are appearances merely. Every one of us here will transcend this clay. Our bodies are mortal, but you and I are meant for eternity. True, it seems that men and women die; and some indeed are extinguished with the cadaver, the husk; but a few at least endure, an elect—if they have faith. They know eternity in certain Timeless Moments. Those moments may occur in several episodes of what we fondly call a ‘lifetime.’
“Of those especial moments, the fortunate disciplined soul is fully aware throughout eternity. Nay, we experience those moments totally, world without end. I am not saying that we remember or re-experience those Timeless Moments; rather, I am saying something far more important, so mark me. I tell you that such Moments themselves endure forever, in their fullness. To employ a homely and absurd parallel, let us suppose that a woman passionately enjoys the eating of a chocolate éclair. Well, then: if her passionate eating of it is such that for her the occasion of the éclair constitutes a Timeless Moment, she will consume that éclair forever and a day. She will not merely remember having eaten the éclair; she will not merely eat another éclair, on another occasion, in some other world. Instead, she actually will eat that very same éclair perpetually, outside of what we conventionally call Time.”
The Archvicar, greatly daring, ventured the faintest of whispers, out of the corner of his mouth, to Marina: “Were it an éclair baked by one of those scruffy acolyte-girls, that Timeless Moment would be Hell.”
Mr. Apollinax did not notice the soft comment. “Now we know that any mere nourishing of the body is a low thing, not to be delectated upon. But if we can fancy even the eating of an éclair to endure as a Timeless Moment, think how intense will be the perpetual endurance of some overwhelmingly strong action and emotion! There, not in some fancied ‘other world,’ is to be found our immortality. Here and now, you and I can be in eternity. What we hear now, see now, feel now, do now can be our seeing, hearing, feeling, acting when the dream-realm of material things has passed away altogether. Our passionate pleasures need know no termination: they may outlast the great globe itself. You and I may dwell unchanged, at what Eliot calls ‘the still point of the turning world,’ quite freed from past and future, quite unalterable. You and I may be as gods.”
What preaching! Marina thought. For the First time in her life, she was beginning to understand the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. She glanced at the Archvicar, but found his face perfectly expressionless.
“Yet these Timeless Moments may be attained only through a strict discipline,” the Master resumed after a little pregnant pause, “and through a high solemn ceremony. For that we have come to this old house. On Ash Wednesday, after dusk, we all shall participate in a ritual which will convey us, collectively and individually, into a most intense Timeless Moment. All here will receive something infinitely precious, a fragment of eternity.
“Believe me, in the twinkling of an eye we shall be changed; corruption will put on incorruption. All here shall experience such an intensity of feeling that the unique moment cannot be gnawed by the tooth of Time.
“As in a glass darkly, such possibilities were glimpsed confusedly in other ages. The Hebrew prophecies of salvation, the Orphic mysteries, the Christian teaching of the mystical body-these were feeble foreshadowings of what will be consummated in us and through us. By a collective act of will, our ritual serving as catalyst, we shall break through the barriers of time and circumstance. Earth may be mixed with fire, as the old Greeks said, and yet what we do here in Balgrummo Lodging will be done by us still when heaven and earth have passed away.”
Fraulein von Kulp had been clutching her wineglass fiercely as Apollinax spoke; now it splintered in her hand, and a little blood ran down her slim fingers; but she took no notice, and Apollinax went on without interruption.
“To employ classical images, my friends, we shall know the Dionysian ecstasy. Away with Apollo! Our Lord is not the lord of prohibitions and shackles. We are to be liberated, here beneath this house: liberated from guilt, from shame, from memory, from expectation. We shall be immersed in the true reality, the eternal present. Our ceremony of innocence shall purge us of lesser fears and longings. In an experience that fulfills and satisfies every dream and desire, an experience attainable nowhere but here on Ash Wednesday night, you shall know such pleasure as the ordinary senses cannot afford. And again I promise you that this pleasure shall have no end.”
Apollinax’s voice, which had risen high, now sank a trifle. “Some may wonder why we have taken unto ourselves names from the poems of Eliot. It is because Eliot knew of Timeless Moments; some vision had been vouchsafed to him. Yet Eliot’s perception was narrow, purblind: his Timeless Moments would have been cribbed, cabined, confined, spoilt by foolish old prejudices from the childhood of the race, trammeled by obsolete conventions, old saws of the Church, notions which modern science explodes. His would have been Timeless Moments of withdrawal, stagnation, inaction.
“Ours, on the contrary, shall be Timeless Moments of passionate intensity, all feeling, all action. We shall take the Kingdom by storm. There shall be no sublimation of desire: we shall acknowledge desire honestly, embrace it, and so be freed. We shall invert Eliot, as we shall invert much else.
“Madame de Tornquist will not shift the candles in vain. Fraulein von Kulp will not pass through that doorway alone. Mr. Silvero will possess what he covets, at Limognes or elsewhere. Hakagawa will be master of all cultures. Gerontion, saved from Christ the Tiger, will not end in fractured atoms...”
“For that relief, Master, much thanks,” said the Archvicar, distinctly.
Apollinax frowned. “But I speak, foolishly, of realities that cannot be expressed adequately in words, those being feeble tools,” he resumed. “Let me answer one other unvoiced question. Doubtless a number of you think it strange that we have assembled in this forgotten house. I tell you that I have chosen Balgrummo Lodging for the consummation of our bold experiment because here ‘prayer has been valid.’
“Beneath the spot upon which this house now stands, there have been celebrated from early times rites not unlike ours. Those ceremonies were put down, repeatedly, by the enemies of spiritual freedom. More than six decades have elapsed since the last collective attempt at communion with the source of spiritual power in this house. All those earlier endeavors were primitive, groping ventures, by contrast with what we shall do.
“Yet the old Romans saw clearly enough when they spoke of the genius loci, the tutelary spirit of a place. There still broods over this particular spot the lingering power of those earlier communions; of conceivable centers for our ceremony, none seemed more propitious than this Balgrummo Lodging. Why one place is quick with spiritual force, and another dead to all evocation, remains a mystery. However that may be, here at Balgrummo Lodging we enjoy the likelihood that we will communicate with an Other.
“I spoke of ‘evocation’ just now: well, to aid us in our conscious quest on Ash Wednesday, we shall evoke one spiritual essence at least which, when enfleshed, sought after that timeless condition which shall be ours. ‘The dead alone give us energy,’ it has been said; and also, by another, ‘The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.’ There shall be raised up among us an essence which circumstance has bound to this spot; and that essence, that revenant, shall be compelled to minister to us.”
Marina scribbled stealthily upon a scrap of paper, “What does he mean?” and pushed it toward the Archvicar.
When it was thrust back to her, Marina found under her sentence, in a bold hand, “Necromancy. It has been achieved here before.” Marina found herself not much the wiser.
“Even as I speak,” Apollinax was saying, “clay-shuttered doors are being opened beneath us. Where inquiring souls
worshipped so long, we shall worship afresh. Perfect faith is our first necessity; but believe wholly, my friends, and you shall be given all that has been promised, to the last ounce and drop. As some of you know, I have worked experiments before, but those were small tentative things by the side of what we are to do here. The altar lights shall be rekindled, and the offering made ready. Our Lord willing, you are but the privileged first among those multitudes who may transcend repression and come to dwell changeless in the Timeless Moment. Our little forlorn hope must cross the frontier as a body of scouts for a huge host.”
Much of what Apollinax had said, Marina did not understand, really. And she thought-though it was a guilty thought-Perhaps I’m not expected to understand. Everyone else, she surmised from the faces that had been bent upon the Master, had understood far more than she. Little smug smiles on those mask-faces, now and again, somehow had distressed her: secret smiles, perhaps greedy and malicious smiles. Was there a hidden doctrine for the initiates, implied in Apollinax’s sentences-some teaching beyond the rather obscure general doctrine which Mr. Apollinax had uttered just now? Had this talk of his been mostly for her own neophyte ears? O ye of little faith! She must cast out such suspicions. Yet, never before having fancied herself shrewd, she could not help being rather proud of a second reflection, and that second rumination was this: beyond the second doctrine—if there was such—did there conceivably exist a third body of doctrine, harder, more demanding, known only to Mr. Apollinax and possibly to the Archvicar or Grishkin or a few others? Wheels within wheels, labyrinth within maze... However had this notion crept into her poor silly head?
Mr. Apollinax was concluding: “For the present, it is required that we hold ourselves severely in check, an exercise in lustration, as preparation for the ceremony of innocence on Ash Wednesday night. Concentration of essences must be observed, if the frontier is to be crossed by all. After that-why, ‘Do as you will.’ To those who have passed through the Ceremony of Innocence, all acts thereafter are unpolluted. Now go and think on these things.”
