A Fish Dinner in Memison - Zimiamvian Trilogy 02 (29 page)

Mary made no answer: only sat there, breathing, beautiful, desirable, while the clock ticked on.

'Some Absolute? Some universalized Being? The Self resumed like a drop of water into a river, or like the electric lamplight into the general supply of electrical energy, to be switched on again, perhaps, in new lamp-bulbs? Surely all these conceptions are pompous toys of the imagination, meaning the same thing—Death—from the point of view of the Me and You: from the point of view, that is to say, of the only things that have ultimate value. Futile toys, too. Abstractions. Unrealities.'

'Futile toys,' Mary said, under her breath.

'"Love is stronger than Death",' Lessingham said. 'How glibly people trot out these facile optimisms, till the brutal fact pashes them to pieces. "The spirit lives on": orthodox Christian ideals of love. Well,' he said, 'goodness counts.' He painted in silence for a time. 'And, in this world, goodness fails.'

Mary half opened her lips. 'Yes. It does,' she said at last, in a voice that seemed to go sorrowful over sea-streams to oblivion.

Lessingham's words came slower as the tempo of his painting became faster, his brushwork surer and more triumphant. 'The tragedy,' he said, 'is in the failure of other people's goodness: to see someone you love suffer unjustly. No good man cares a snap about his own goodness' failing. Probably because, seen from inside, it is not such a good goodness after all.'

Mary said,
‘I
think we all see truest from outside.'

'I hope we do.'

After a silence, while the splendour of the picture grew together swiftlier and swiftlier on the canvas, he began to say, 'The ideal of the non-attached. It's a compromise ideal. A sour-grapes ideal. A spiritless weak negation, to reject the goods of this world, the heaven of the senses. Sensual delight by itself is an abstraction, therefore worthless. But in its just context, it folds in the whole orb of the world: it becomes the life-blood, the beatific vision.'

Mary said, 'That is pure truth,
mon ami
’

'It is the arch-truth,' he said; 'and of it is born the great truth of conflict and contradiction. But it is not a truth of this life. Look at the two good characters of perfection: the static and the dynamic. You must have both. But, in this life, that is just what you can't have. Evanescence in itself; the sunrose, a sheet of trembling shell-pink blossom at mid-day, bare twigs and fallen petals by evening: sunset light on the Sella (do you remember?): human birth, flowering time, decay, and death: the kitten becoming a cat: night giving place to day, day to night: all the uncertainnesses and unknown-ness of the future. Are not all these part of the very being of perfection? the Ever-Changing: bitter-sweet: that which cannot be reversed: that which will never come back: that which says "never again". But so also, the imperishable laughter: the sun that never sets: the night that stands still for lovers: the eternal eyes of the Gods: the Never-Changing.'

Mary said, 'Ever-Changing: Never-Changing. You had it engraved in my alexandrite ring.'

‘
But how reconcile them?' He squeezed out more paint. 'Can you and I?'

'Only Omnipotence can do it.'

'And Omnipotence is a fraud if it doesn't?'

'Dare we say that?'

'With our last breath, we must. Or be blasphemers.'

After a moment's silence, 'Where does that come,' Mary said:
'God's adversaries are some way His own; and that ownness works patience?'
Then, after another silence,
‘I
am sometimes so taken with astonishment,' she said, 'at the unspeakable blessedness of some passing minute, that I could not have the heart to be unthankful even if I knew for certain there was nothing besides: nothing before that minute and nothing after it, for ever and ever and ever. And that minute, nothing too, as soon as it was over.'

'And my answer to that,' said Lessingham, very slowly, 'is that in the pure goodness and perfectness that bred those words out of your mouth this moment, burns a reality that blows to the wind in ashes the doubt those words plead for.'

She watched him painting while he spoke. 'And so, you believe it?' she said at last.

Lessingham said, 'Because of you.'

'Literally believe it, as sober matter of fact? So firmly as to be able to die in that belief?'

'Yes,' he said: 'as firmly as that'

'Even at the risk of its being a false belief? And (as you used so often to say to me) how can we tell?'

'Don't you think a belief so strong that you can die in it is too strong to be false? Must it not, of its mere strength, be true?'

‘
I would say yes. But if it were the other to die. If you had me here dead this minute. What then?'

Lessingham painted swiftly. 'Compromise,' he said, 'is a virtue in an imperfect world: it is the virtue of statesmanship. But in philosophy, compromise is abdication of the sovereign mind within us, and a fogging of the issue. Our love, yours and mine, is native to a perfect world, where spirit and flesh are one: where you can both eat your cake and have it. Isn't that true?' After a pause he said, very low, 'And w
hen it comes to dying, I had ac
tually rather you went first. Not long first, I should hope; but first.'

Their eyes met.

Mary said, 'I know. And I know why. And, for the very same "why" I had rather, myself, have it the other way.'

She watched him awhile in silence: the Olympian grace and strength of him, the singular marriage of his bodily frame of north with south, the gyr-falcon lights in his eyes, the sensitive powerful hand that guided the brush as he painted, the great black beard. Presently he stepped back to survey his work. From half-finished portrait to original his eyes leapt, and there
stayed held. Utterly unselfcon
scious Mary seemed, sitting there, all turned outward to the world; yet with that unselfconsciousness that accepts admiration, which is its natural atmosphere, as a flower accepts sunshine; as of course. Her hair was done low on the back of her neck, plaited so that the plaits gave a tesselated effect with ever varying shades of gold and copper and red in the tight-wound gleaming surfaces; and at the side, upon the neck behind the ear, the growth of the extreme hairs, delicate as single threads of the silkworm, rose exquisite in intricate variety of upward curve, as the lines of fire or of a fountain's upward jet blown sideways in the wind. You say it is credible because of me,' she said softly. 'I suppose that must always be so: easy to see the Divine shine through in the person one loves: quite impossible to see or imagine it in oneself.'

Suddenly, by a short-circuiting of the electric current, the light went out. Neither he nor she moved.

'That was a strange effect,' Lessingham said out of the blackness. 'My eyes were filled, I suppose, with the green of your dress, so that when the light went I still saw, for a flash, clear cut on the darkness, that dress, but flaming scarlet.'

He struck a match.

‘
Well, here I am,' Mary said, 'still in my right complexion. But why scarlet?'

'The complementary colour.'

'Very appropriate too,
mon ami,
after what we were talking about?'

XIV

The Fish Dinner: P
raeludium

Mean
time
in lovely Memison, (if indeed, betwixt here and yonder, there could be other than mean time), the Lady Fiorinda, pleasuring her senses with the balm-sweet breathings of the air in that Zimiamvian garden, walked, with none but her own most unexperimented thoughts for company, in the tented glory, wide-rayed, cloudless, golden, serene, of the slow July sun descending. Here, upon the Duchess's birthday, but a month ago, had she lazed herself, beneath these poplars, beside this lily-pond, but then under heat of noon: a month ago only and a day. And now, like a refrain to bring back with its presence the preluding music of that midsummer night, there came through the trees the lord Chancellor Beroald, gorgeously apparelled in doublet and hose of gold-broidered brocade.

'Good evening, good brother. Are these your mourning weeds, for your late brother-in-law?'

'No,' he said. 'Are these yours, for your late husband?'

‘
Now I think on't, they will serve.' She looked down at her coat-hardy, woven of thousands of tiny margery-pearls and yellow sapphires, skin-close, clinging like a glove, and her velvet skin, black as the raven, fastened low about the hips with a broad girdle laid over with branches of honeysuckles of fine flat gold and cloudy strawberry-coloured tourmalines. "I have evened accounts with you now,' she said, meeting with mockery in her eyes his haughty outwardness of ironic calm. 'You put on your ruffians to ease me from the first bad card you dealt me:

not out of any undue study of my convenience, but because you thought you knew a likelier to serve your purpose. And now I have turned your likelier second (almost of the same suit) with the deuces and treys out of the deck.'

'What course took you to destroy him?' asked Beroald equably, as it had been to ask 'rode he on Tuesday to Rumala?' or such ordinary matter.

Fiorinda laughed. 'And your intelligencers have not told you that? You, who keep
a
servant fee'd in every man's house from Sestola to Rialmar?'

'He was found torn in pieces in the woods hereabout,' said the Chancellor. 'This is the bruit in this countryside. I know no more.'

'Suffice it, he had me wronged. May be that is enough for your lordship to know. I did not dive into your profundities in that matter of Krestenaya, thinking your most ingenious policies your affair. You may justly use a like discretion when (as now) my private matter is in question.'

'Sometimes, my lady sister,' he said,
‘I
am almost
a
little afeared of you.'

Fiorinda looked at him through her fingers. 'I know you are. It is wholesome for us both you should treat me with respect. If I am minded to lend you a hand in the otherwhile vacations of your graver businesses, be thankful. But forget not, sweet brother, I am not to be used for ends outside myself: not by any man: not were he my lover even: much less by a politician such as you.'

The Lord Beroald's lean lips under his short clipped mustachios stirred upon a sardonic smile. 'You are all firishness and summ
er li
ghtnings this afternoon. There's something unovercomable underlies it,' he said. 'Howsoever, I think we have the wit to understand each other. Enough, then. I came not to speak on these trifles, but to let you know her grace hath bid me to supper to-night, private, a fish dinner, at the summer palace. Know you who shall be there?'

"The King. The Duke. The Parry. You. My lord Admiral (Gods be gentle to his harmless soul). There's the sum, I think.'

'No ladies?'

'Myself.' All delicious pleasures and delectations worldly respired ab
out that word as she spoke it, ‘
No more?'

'O a one or two, for form sake.' She looked at him a moment, then said:
‘I
will tell you a thing, now I remember me. I have been honoured with a new proposal of marriage.'

'Ha?' the Chancellor's cold eye sparkled. 'I know from whence.' 'You know?' 'All Meszria knows.' 'Indeed? Well, and I have refused it.' 'Nay, I am put from shore then. Who was it?' 'Ask not overcuriously.' 'Not the Duke of Zayana.' The Duke of Zayana.'

'But I thought so. But you jest, sister. You have refused the Duke?'

‘I
have refused him once, twice.' 'But third time?'

'And he come to me a hundred times with such a suit, he shall have No for every time he shall ask me.'

'But wherefore so? Duke Barganax?'

'I know not,' said she. 'Perhaps for because that I grow out of liking of this vain custom, whereby husbands have been sessed and laid upon me, as soldiers are upon subjects, against my will.'

Like wind on clear water, ruffling the surface that none may see what rests below, a kind of laughter hid the deeps of her unblemishable green eyes. Beroald shrugged his shoulders.
‘I
would know some more weighty and more serious reason why you refused so great a match.'

'For a reason too nice for a man of law to unravel,' she said. 'Because truly and undissemblingly I wonder, sometimes, if'I be not fallen, may be, a little in love with him.'

Beroald looked her in the eye. 'In love with him? And therefore would strain him fast and sure? And therefore not minded to dwindle into his Duchess?'

'Why truly and indeed you are my brother!' she said, and very sisterly kissed him.

The Chancellor being departed, Fiorinda resumed her walk, to and fro under the trees, from splendour to shadow and from shadow to splendour again as the arrows of gold found or missed her as she passed. There alighted upon pebbles at the pond's further brink a water ousel and began to regard her, with much dipping and bobbing of his body and much rolling up of the whites of his eyes. Whether because of her being alone, without so much as a brother's unenchanted eye to rest upon her, or for whatever cause, Her presence, in this hour of but natural beauties' composing of themselves for slumber, seemed to unsubstantiate all that was not Her. Black velvet's self and this milky way of seed-pearls and yellow sapphires: close-bodied coat, gown, and girdle: seemed as if fined to tissue of night made palpable, unveiling more than they clothed. Slowly some perfection, opening its heart like evening, began to enfold air, sky, and shadowy earth.

Presently came two little yellow wagtails to play in the air like butterflies, up and down, back and across, above the water. She held out a hand: they left playing, to perch upon her fingers, and there fell to billing and kissing of one another.

'The little silly birds too!' said Barganax, as, suddenly aware of his presence behind her, she shook them off.

'And will your grace think there is anything new in that?' said she, looking at him over her shoulder through the curtained fringes of her lids. There was something questionable, coloured her mood, this evening. Her lips, where but a moment since, like the dog-star's frosted sparkle of winter-nights, the colours of her thought seemed to dance, settled suddenly to the appearance as of lips carved out of sard or cornelian: so stone-like, so suddenly unmerciless in the harsh upward curling of them, like fish-hooks at her mouth's corners. 'Will you think there is anything new in that? They are grateful, I suppose, for the tricks I teach them.'

'Ingenuities beyond Aretine's', he said.

She flamed crimson, cheek and neck.

'Forgive that,' said the Duke.
‘I
forgot myself. And small marvel: I find all
infir
m
and unstable whatever I behold out of you. But I forget not—'

Very delicately she bent, upon that hesitation and with widened nostrils, to a yellow lily that she wore pinned at the bosom of her dress. Then, with questioning eyebrows: 'And what will your grace's untamed thoughts forget not?'

'Tuesday night,' answered he; and watched the fires of her eyes curdle to some impenetrability of flint or ironstone.

'Well? And what will your grace wish me to say to that?'

'What you will. Worst woe in the world to me, were you ever act or speak upon order.' He paused: then,
‘
Nor, I think, need your ladyship forget it neither,' he said.

The sphinxian hooks unmild hardened in the corners of her mouth.
‘I
am yet to learn but that a night is a night, and one night as another.' In the stilled silence, the blades of their eye-glances engaged: as in sword-play, feeling one another's temper.

'Shall I, for my turn,' said Barganax, 'to match the honesty of your conversation, madam, tell you, then, a like truth?'

'As you will. An unlawful and useless game, this truth-telling. Remember, too, you did not desire me to say truth, but say what I would.'

'Know you what the wild unwise tongue of them blabbeth abroad about you, that I have it thrice in one day 'twixt here and Zayana?' 'I can conceive.'

'What? that you do rustle in unpaid-for silks? live so disorderly? marry but to unmarry yourself by running away? or, the better to uncumber you of your husband, take a resolution to have him murdered.'

'Fair words and good semblant.'

'And fitly paid for. I'm sorry, madam, that the last, and the most mouthiest, speaker of these things—'

'A duello?'

'It was somewhat too sudden, overhearing him speak so buggishly of your ladyship: took him neck and breech, and threw him against the wall.'

‘
And so?'

'And so.' The Duke shrugged, looking at his fingernails. 'Well,' he said, after a moment, looking up: 'that was the third. You perceive how effectual and operative your ladyship's last dealings with me were: three men's blood,' he tapped his sword-hilt, 'for washing out this slander-work.'

She smelled once more to the lily, all the while looking up at him with a smoulder of eyes from under delicate-arching eyebrows: very slowly smiling. It was as if some string had been plucked. All little evening noises of that garden, stir of leaf, babble of running water, winding of tiny horn of gnat, beetle, or bee, seemed to put on a kind of tumultuous enormity.

'O You, unmedicinable,' he said, and his voice caught:
‘
unparagoned: ineffable: unnameable.' And he said, very deep and low:

‘
Nightshaded moon-still’
d meadow-close,

Where the Black Iris grows:

The Black Musk Rose:

Musk-breathing, deadly sweet,

Setting the veins a-beat

Till eyes fail and the sense founder and fleet:

Imperial petals curl'd,

Sable falls and wings deep-furl'd—

You have drunk
up
the World.

Flow'r
of
unsounded Night:

Black fire over-bright:

Blinder
of
sight—

So, the supreme full close.

So, drink
up
me,
my
Rose.'

With unreadable grave eyes still holding his, she listened, her face still mclining above the sulphur-coloured scarlet-anthered lily-flower, where it bedded so softly, there at the sweet dividing of her breasts. Surely all the pleasures of irresolution
and uncertainness, all disordi
nate appetites of the body and unlawful desires of the soul, the very deepest secretaries of nature, unnaturalizing itself, took flesh in their most unshelled shining mother-of-pearled proportions, in that lady's most slow and covert smile. At length she spoke:

'Si tu m'aimes dix fois

Qu'une nuit de mal
,

Onziesme j'y croys

Que ton amour soit vrai.—

And remember, I will be wooed afresh
chaque fois, mon ami: mais chaque fois.'

The voice of her speech trailed under-tones as of ankle-rings a-clink, or as the playing of idle polished fingernails upon hanging mirrors, or the drawing of curtains to shut in the warmth and the things of heart's desire and shut out the dark. Then, like some day-drowsy sweet beast thatwakes, stretches, and rises for night and action, she faced him at her full stature. 'Some cannot do', she said, 'but they overdo. Or did I wish your impudent grace, indeed, to meet me here to-night?'

'Chaque fois?' said the Duke, gazing at her between half-closed lids. 'It has been so, and it ever shall be so, and the better so shall our tastes run in harness. I hold, not as the poet, but thus:

Love given unsought is good, but sought is better
’

' "Ce que femme veut, Dieu le veut"? Well?' said she. 'But "our tastes" you said? As for Meszrian grandeur, will you think, and well-shapen mustachios?'

'O and in very particular matters I have studied your ladyship's taste too.'

She turned from him: then, after a step or two, upon a lazing motion full of languishing luxuriousness, paused at the pond's brim, to look down, hands lightly clasped behind her, to her own counter-shape in the cool of the water. Her hair was dressed for to-night to a new fashion of hers, close-braided in two thick tresses which, coiling each twice about her head and interwoven with strings of honey-coloured cat's-eye chrysoberyls, made her a kind of crown in the likeness of two hearts bound together; all setting back, like an aureole of polished jet, from her beautiful white brow and from the parting above it, where the black hair, albeit drawn never so demurely backward on either si
de, carried even so some untame
able note of its own free natural habit of smooth-running waves of ocean beneath midnight unstarred. The Duke, as a man that draws tight the curb on some unrulable thing within him, stayed himself for a minute, overlooking her from that distance, twice and again, from head to foot. Without further word spoken, he came over to stand beside her, so that they looked down to their two selves, mirrored there side by side.

‘I
find,' he said presently, 'that I do begin, in you, to know my own self. My way it hath long been, born bastard and unlegitimate, to have what I have a mind to, as the whirlwind, suddenly, unresistably. But you shall find I am not a man quickly fired and quickly laid down with satisfaction.' He paused. It was as if his heart's pounding were become a thing outwardly audible. 'These four days,' he said: 'Tuesday, and now it is Saturday: back to Zayana and back again: the unfillable desire of you. Take away you out of the world,' he said, 'and it unworlds all.'

As if bodied out of that appassionate quietude, a little owl settled on Fiorinda's shoulder. Barganax, looking round at her, met its eyes, sharp, inscrutable, staring into his. The lovely face of that lady, and lovely head inclining forward a little, showed clear, side-face in the light that began to be crimsoned now toward sun-setting: clear of the small feathered thing that perched bolt upright upon her shoulder. The whole unseizable beauty of her seemed moment by moment to suffer alteration, waxing, waning, blazing anew, as now some Greek purity of feature, now some passing f
avour of an unas
sayed sensual sweetness or, in cheekbone or nostril, some old Tartarean fierceness untreatable in the blood, wore for the instant her beauty as its own. 'Another taste in common,' h
e said: 'for that fire that burn
eth eternally without feeding.'