A Fish Dinner in Memison - Zimiamvian Trilogy 02 (33 page)

'A world,' said the King, 'of most infinite complication.'

'Nay, but I give it simple laws to work by, for makeweight.'

'What laws, then?'

'First, (to order perfectly my perfect world, as perfect in action), this law: that at each succeeding moment of its existence the sum and totality of my world, and all that in it is, shall be determined reasonably and inevitably by that which was the moment before.'

'Sensible chaos, yet grounded in an infinite order.'

‘
Which is,' said that lady, 'the strainable force of destiny. No chanceableness. Nor no meddling finger of God neither, to ruffle the serenity of my world's unfolding. As a rose-bud discloseth itself and spreadeth abroad, so shall its processions be: as inevitable as one and one is two, one and two is three, and so on for ever,
ad infinitum.
The general forms, constant, unchangeable, un-transformable; but all else changing as oft as weathercock in wind. Truly a world most exquisitely well fitted to be comprehended by a man of law?' She glanced at the Lord Beroald, who, for answer, but smiled his unbelieving smile.

'But no world, sure,' said the lord Admiral, 'for the living beings that must live in it. What manner freedom have they, where all must be predetermined and like a clock-work?'

There was a cruel look of that lady's lips and teeth, daintily eating up the little piece of caviar. She turned upon the King eyes over the balls of which suddenly a film seemed to be drawn, as they had been the eyes of an empoisoned serpent.
‘I
think,' she said,
‘I
will tease them a little with my laws. They shall seem indeed to themselves to have freedom; yet we, who look on, know 'tis no such matter. And they shall seem to themselves to live; yet if, 'tis a life not their own. And they shall die. Every one that knoweth life in my world shall know also death. The little simplicities, indeed, shall not die. But the living creatures shall. Die, and dissipate as children's castles in sand when the tide takes them, but the sand-grains abide. Is it not a just and equal choice? either be a little senseless lump of jelly or of dead matter, and subsist for ever; or else be a bird, a fish, a rose, a woman, 'pon condition to fade, wax old, waste at last to carrion and corruption?'

'Men and women, as we be?' said the Duchess. 'O, you have answered me! Or is it,' she said under her breath, 'that Myself hath answered Myself?' And again the King's gaze, unfastening itself from Fiorinda's, rested curiously on his Amalie. She was staring, as fascinated, into the teeming inwardness of the sphered thing which, motionless save for a scarce perceptible rhythmic expanding and contracting of its translucent envelope from with-inward, remained balanced as it had been some heavy bubble, a foot, may be, in diameter, upon the table betwixt her and the King. There was silence for a minute, while, under the eyes of those feasters, miniature aeons trained their untermed texture of death and birth within the artificial confines of that cosmos.

Presently Fiorinda spoke, 'As we be? I question that, (saving your grace). How were that possible, out of this? Is there mind in this?' Lovelier than the argent limb of the cold moon, the curve showed of that lady's arm as, chin propped on hand, she leaned pensive over the table. 'Unless, indeed,' she said, and the slowed music of her voice sounded to new deeps: 'unless, indeed, We Ourselves will go in and enter it. Know it so. Go down—'

'Undergrope it so from within,' said the King. 'For a moment, We might. To know.'

The Duchess trembled. It was as if, in the stillness, she had suffered his mind and thought to enter so deep into her own, that she tasted, in her inmost being and without necessity of communication, the inwardness of his: tasted how, as one awakening in a strange bed sinks back into sleep again and the place of visions, he beheld now in the baseless clearness of a dream, a meadow grey with the rime of hoar-frost that sparkled with many colours as the sun made and unmade stars of the tiny crystals. A sycamore-tree was shedding its golden leaves in a slow shower in the nearly windless air: two or three at a time it shed them, translucent gold against the rising sun, and at the foot of the tree they made a carpet of darker gold where they fell. And in that necessity of dreams, that binds together as of course things which in waking life are severed and unrelated, he perceived, in the falling of each particular leaf in that bounteousness and Danae's shower of beauty, the falling away of something that had been his. His ancient royal palace and seat-town on two-horned Rialmar, his fleets, armies, great vassals, princes and counsellors and lords of the Three Kingdoms, his queens, mistresses, children, alive or dead, they of his courts and households afar or near, under his hands: all his wide dominions welded and shaped to his will, of Meszria, Rerek, and Fingiswold: lovely Memison itself, whose balm was in his nostrils, the turf of whose garden was soft here beneath his feet: very Amalie herself, sitting and breathing now beside him: the whole of his life, this actual world he lived in, fluttered downward, unregarded, severed, golden, through that cold still air in the bright beams of the clear sun: floating scraps of memory, every one of which, even while the mind strove to grasp it, was dissipated and gone to spread deeper the bed of gold at that tree's foot.

Fiorinda but flickered an eyelid. 'It moves,' she said presently. 'It amuses me. Always it moves. Always it - changes. Yet, for all its changing, is never much the better. Nor much the worse.' She paused. In the beholding of her face, thus pensive and stilled, was such unquiet pleasures as the sight of the stars gives. Then, "This amuses me, too,' she began to say again: 'to note how, by merest clockwork, is a kind of perfection created, brought to maturity, maintained in being.' The scaled familiar gathered itself at her mouth's corner, intent, like as a lizard that espies a fly. 'Amuses me to regard, as in some crooked mirror, this perfection which wanteth but one jot to be a master-work, and that jot'—

'That it be truth,' said Barganax, out of the thick shadow.

It was as if a frozen blast went suddenly about that garden, come and gone in a moment of time behind the flower-sweet darknesses and the candles' soft and comfortable radiance.

Barganax and Fiorinda beheld the Duchess Amalie's hand fasten over the King's hand at her side upon the table: beheld her beauty gather itself like a serpent coiled, as she sat, level-browed, level-eyed, some high-descended Queen dreadless on the brink of fate. 'The game's too much in earnest,' she whispered in the King's ear. 'Stay for me. You and I,' she whispered: 'we are noosed: we are limed. We are in it.'

XVII

In What a Shadow

I
t
was
O
ctober
now
, of that same year nineteen hundred and twenty-three: the nineteenth of October. Night shut down on Nether Wastdale in a great rain without wind: rain steadily falling out of the premature darkness of rain-cloud that covered the sky without a gap. There was nothing to hear but the rain: nothing to see but the appearance of trunks and leafage picked out, chalky and unsubstantial, where the glare of headlights struck the holm-oaks west of the house; these, and the rain that the cold twin beams made visible, and a feebler, more distant, luminosity as of another car waiting in the road below the drive gates.

Jim Scarnside pressed the door-bell and waited. He pressed it again: waited again: then set his thumb hard upon it and kept it there, may be for thirty seconds, while he listened to the shrill metallic whirr far away within. Then lights went up in the porch: steps sounded in the hall: turn of a key, drawing of bolts, and the door stood ajar on the chain, with old Ruth's face peering through the opening. With a little inarticulate apology, she closed the door to shoot the chain, then opened it wide. They stood silent a moment, she in the doorway, Jim over against her on the doorstep. Her face showed a death-like pallour: eyes dull and puffy.

'Master at home?' he said. He saw that her cheeks were stained with the lashing of tears.

'We don't expect him t
ill to-morrow, at earliest.'

‘
Nonsense. What's the car doing at the drive gates, then?'

She looked helplessly at Jim's own car, her hands, with their swollen joints and wrinkled skin, twitching at her apron.

'At the drive gates. Out in the road. It's his car. Empty, and lights on.'

She brought her hand up to her mouth. 'O, not that too. Please dear God, not that. And yet,' she said, with a kind of sob—

'All right,' said Jim. 1 expect he made better time than he expected.' He pulled up the collar of his mackintosh: began to run down the steps. At first step he turned. 'Any man in the house?'

She shook her head: 'No but me and the girls. We were shutting up for the winter, when Mr. Edward comes back all sudden-like (you know his ways, sir), and starts to, packing up and I don't know what; and then, Tuesday it was: that telegram—' she choked. 'And then. Then he went,' she said. 'No, no man in the house. Only old David, sir, and he took David, so as he was to wait, mind the car at Dover, while the master went across to—' she broke down. 'O, Mr. James, sir. Her ladyship: that telegram: it can't be true, sir: not killed: God couldn't permit it. And my Miss Janet and all. God couldn't—'

'Look here, Ruth,' he said, very kind but firmly, taking her by the arms,
‘
you and I have got to see about this: no good crying. Is the master's room ready? fires? he'll want some dinner. You get on with it: I'll be back in a few minutes.'

'Yes, Mr. James, sir. That's right, sir,' she said with a gulp: 'that's right.' Both her hands fastened on Jim's right, squeezing it. Suddenly the squeeze became tighter. He turned, looking where she looked. Their hands disengaged. Lessingham was in the porch beside them: bareheaded, in his travelling-clothes, seemingly soaked to the skin with rain.

'Jim. Good. Wait while I get the car in.'

Jim, noting the steady ring of Lessingham's voice, noted too, for all the uncertain light, as it were some glint, some poise of sinew or of lineament, in the iron-seeming face of Lessingham, that stayed the impulse to offer to go too: kept him obedient in the porch. After a few minutes they saw the lights stir and creep round at the foot of the drive; then presently met the full glare of them as the car rounded the last sweep past the strawberry-trees and swung out of sight behind the house towards the garage.

'You'll be staying to dinner, sir?'

Jim shrugged his shoulders. 'I don't know.'

'You'd better, sir. It isn't good for Mr. Edward to be too much by his self, sir. Not just now it isn't.'

'We'll see.'

Lessingham's step returning, elastic and firm, crunched the gravel. 'Put your car in there if you like. Ruth will get us something to eat presently. I wish I could put you up, but I may not be staying myself to-night.'

Jim checked himself. 'Right,' he said, and got into his car.

'Well, Ruth,' said Lessingham. Their eyes met for a moment. 'I'm wet through, I think': he looked down at his rain-sodden coat and trousers and muddy waterlogged shoes as if he had but just discovered it.

The luggage, sir? If you'll let me have the keys, Sally will put out your things in the dressing-room and get the bath ready and I'll be seeing about your dinner. I'll just unlock the lobby door for her, upstairs.'

'No. Put the things in the Trellis Room. Here's the key of the suitcase': he took it off his chain. 'Lay for two.'

'You'll have it in the dining-room?'

'No. Lay it in the Armoury. A couple of bottles of the Lafite. Careful how you decant it.'

'And letters, please, sir.' She handed them on the silver tray from the hall table. The tray shook a little in her hand as Lessingham rapidly went over the envelopes, took a particular one (her eye was on it, too) and put it unopened in his pocket. 'Let them wait.'

The old woman put them back on the table. She hesitated for a moment, looking up at him with sad eyes like a dog's. 'Nothing fresh, I suppose, sir? over there? I suppose—?'

'Nothing.'

'Hope?' the word was almost inaudible.

'Nothing. Except,' he said, 'I've seen—' his voice hardened, 'what there is to see. And that's enough for the purpose.'

The hall door stood wide, lighting Jim up the steps as he returned: lighting the thin curtain of the rain. He could hear Lessingham's measured tread pacing the un-carpeted floor in the hall, the squelch of water at every foot-step. As he shut the door behind him, Ruth bustled in from the kitchen quarters with a tray: set it down on the table: tumblers, a syphon, and the curious purple bottle of Bristol glass that served as whisky-decanter. 'Bath ready in ten minutes, sir. You'd better have something to warm you inside, sir: that soaked as you are.'

Lessingham poured out for both. His face was unreadable: like the great rock fa
ces, lean north crags of Mickle
dore, two or three miles away, three thousand feet up, alone now in the lampless darkness and the rain that turned, up there, no doubt to sleet.

As they drained the glasses, the emptiness of the house chilled Jim Scarnside's members: took hold as with claws at the pit of his stomach.

They ate at first in silence made audible by the click of knife and fork, Ruth's quiet footsteps on the parquet floor, the faint rustle of her black dress as she came and went, the steadfast tick-tack of the great Italian clock above the door, and the crackle and hiss of the logs whenever a scutter of rain came down the chimney. Unshaded candles in Venetian silver candlesticks of the cinquecento lighted the table, and candles in sconces on the walls gleamed with sometimes a windy light on the arms and armour. Ugly shadows lengthened, shortened, trembled, or stilled themselves: shadows of these things on the walls: the pig-faced basinet dating from 1400 with its camail of chain mail: the Italian armet, late fifteenth century, an heirloom come down to Lessingham through his mother along with that morning-star beside it, plated and exquisitely damascened in gold and silver, which family tradition traced back to the Prince Pier Luigi, bastard of Pope Paul III and Cellini's best-hated oppressor—Signor Pier Luigi Farnese, whose portrait by Titian, in black armour, black-bearded, with a wolf in each eye and bearing on his forehead and in every line of his face the brand of archangel ruined, hung over the fire-place, frighteningly like (as Jim with a new vividness of perception saw now) to Lessingham. And here were maces, war-hammers etched and gilt, pole-axes, swords by the dozen—German, Italian, French, English, Spanish: pistols, arquebuses richly wrought, a dagger of russet steel (supposed Frangois Premier's) with gold inlaid and mother-of-pearl: the complete suit of war-harness for man and horse, a thing unique, given to Lessingham by that Arab sultan somewhere in the Middle East two or three years since, in memory of service rendered: and there, in a glass case, dark with age, notched and grown lean like a mummy, the viking sword dug up twelve years ago by Lessingham that summer they had spent carrying out excavations in Alsteno, far up the coast of Norway o
ff Halogaland: Thorolf Kveldulf
son's 'Alost'. Dug up, at the very spot which expert conjecture pointed to as t
he site of the old hall at Sand
ness: Thorolfs house, where more than ten centuries ago he fell defending his life at hopeless odds against the great King he deserved well of. It might, for all anyone knew, have been Thorolf Kveldulfson's sword: the date was near enough: his, or one of theirs that fought beside him while the burning house scorched them from behind and King Harald Hairfair and his three hundred men set on them from before. She had loved the slow sunshiny Arctic summer: the open-air life, the far-ranging mountains, the Norse country-folk and their ways of life (so effortless, her mastery of the language), the sailing, the long drawn out processions of sunset and sunrise, the unearthly sense as of Time's clock run down. But she—Jim swallowed his second glass at a draught: the fine claret, tasteless in his mouth, at least prevented the dryness of his throat from strangling him. He saw that though Lessingham ate, his glass stood untasted. Six weeks ago they had danced in this hall; a dozen couples, in the family mostly: the old Blunds tradition. Time never touched her: that divine and lovely gift of abiding youth, no older, only maturer; a little deepening and sweetening. Six weeks: what did it mean? Dead. Killed in that railway smash in France. He looked at Lessingham who, as if unconscious of his presence, was staring before him with a stare that seemed to be blunted and forced back upon itself: turned inward.

Lessingham spoke. 'Well, Jim, how do you like our post-war politics?'

'What, in this country?'

'Europe. The world.'

'The Ruhr, you mean? this morning's papers? I don't like them at all.'

'Are you surprised at the way things are shaping?' 'Not much surprised. But sorry.'

Tear, and stupidity. The two universal counsellors and path-finders of mankind. There's really nothing singular about it.'

‘I
remember you saw it coming long since.' 'So did you.'

'When you pointed it out to me. But I don't think I honestly believed it. Just as nobody believed what you said a year ago, when a hundred marks were worth about two-pence.'

'What was it I said?'

'That you wouldn't discount a million of them for sixpence on twelve months credit.'

'Too optimistic, as things have turned out.'

'What is it to-day? a hundred million or so to the dollar?'

'You and I have to remember,' Lessingham said, 'that we were born and bred up in our early youth in reposed and peaceful times almost, I suppose, without example. That led us by the sleeve: showed us but a back-eddy only in the great stream of things. Made us apt to imagine that the war was something remarkable, when it was truly no more but a ripple on the stream. You remember James Bryce's saying about the Middle Ages: that never at any other time has theory, professing all the while to control practice, been so utterly divorced from it: an age ferocious and sensual, that yet worshipped humility and asceticism: never a purer ideal of love nor a grosser profligacy of life. It is a great untruth. The description is just, but it fits all human history, not merely a particular age. And as for those unhappy five years, there was nothing new in them: unless, possibly, an unusual babblery of self-righteousness.'

'I'm not sure,' said Jim. 'Possibly there might be something a little bit new underlying just that.'

'What? "War to end war?" "World safe for democracy"? "A land fit for heroes to live in"? I wonder. I've more respect for old Clemenceau. He, at any rate, realized what company he was in in nineteen-nineteen, sitting between his "sham Napoleon and sham Christ".'

'You're unfair to them. Even the catchwords do stand for something. That they should be said at all, is something.'

'I agre
e. And to say "Liberte, Egalite,
Fraternite" was something.' Lessingham toyed with his untasted glass, his hand closing round the stem of the delicate Murano goblet, between the body of it and the foot. 'A quite unimpeachable copy-book text. But (very amusingly) it turned in practice to the cutting off of people's heads with
a
mechanical slicer. You remember that wire puzzle made in Germany I used to bring out in school sometimes, when we were up to old Harry Broadbent in Middle Division? called
The Merry Decapitation without Trousers?'
He was smiling; but from under the smile suddenly came a sound of teeth gritted together. Jim averted his eyes: heard, as though across some solution of continuity, the ticking of the clock: then Lessingham's voice, toneless, even, and detached, resuming, as if upon an after-thought: 'Women's heads, in considerable numbers.' Then the clock again, intolerably loud and clear: once: twice. Then a crack, and something falling. Jim looked up quickly. The stem of the glass had snapped in Lessingham's grip and the great red stain spread wet and slow-oozing over the white cloth.

'Careless of me. Never mind. Leave it. For my own inclinations,' he said after a pause, wiping his hand carefully on his dinner-napkin, 'I infinitely prefer Jenghiz Khan. But then I have always favored the great carnivora rather than the monkey tribe.'

They were silent. Then Jim said,
‘
I wish you'd ring for Ruth to get a bandage or something. Your hand—'

Lessingham examined it. 'It's nothing.' He took out a clean handkerchief. 'Give me a hand with this: that'll stop it. I'm sorry,' he said, as Jim, finishing off the knot, sat back, very white. 'Go on: you must finish it up.' He pushed the decanter across. Jim filled, drank, and sat back once more, passing his hand with a light stroking movement from brows upwards over his forehead to the hair and so over to the back of his head. 'It's purely physical,' Lessingham said: like sea-sickness, or a bad head on mountains. My father, for instance: the toughest sailor you'd find in all England; and yet, stand him on a height, he'd feel nausea: vertigo: catch behind the knees. It's the same thing.'

‘I
suppose it is.' Jim finished his glass: forced a smile. 'Makes one feel a damned fool, all the same. You, of course,—' he stopped.

'Yes,' said Lessingham, his voice quiet and level, while Jim watched frame and feature gather by some indefinable transmutations to a yet closer likeness to the Titian on the wall:
‘I
have. And enough, at any rate, to deaden the spice of novelty.

'You're a comfort to me, Jim,' he said after a moment's silence. 'You are the most perfect Tory I ever met.'

'And you, the most complete and absolute Whig.'

'I? I have no politics.'

'You are a Whig
of the Whigs. Consequently (as I’
ve told you before) your politics are (a) damnable, and (b) completely out of date.'

‘I
have, it is true,' said Lessingham, 'an interest in politics: to observe them, survey them back again: note how, under every new suit of clothes, the same body, the same soul, live on unchanged. Apparently unchangeable. An amusing study, my
dear Signor Giacomo. And Machia
velli is the one philosopher who had the genius and the honesty to write down the truth about politics.'

‘I
know what you mean. It is a limited truth, though.'

'Limited to this world. I hope so.'

'I limit it more narrowly than that. Besides, I've never heard you applaud our modern practitioners who live by the gospel according to Machiavelli.'

'As an artist, I have a certain regard for one or two of them: always (curiously, you may think) where the field of action has been comparatively small. In the Middle East I've come across it: in the Balkans: among the Arabs, here and there.'

'Yes, and you've practised it.'

'Well, I have ruled 'em for their own good now and then. On the right, small, human scale.'

'But the real Machiavelli: on the grand scale. You haven't much regard for him in Russia, for instance.'

'The fox in the lion's skin,' replied Lessingham, 'is admirable
up to a point. But in the bell
wether's skin, un-cured and beginning to putrefy, he is no longer an impressive sight; while the mixture of stinking fox and stinking carrion—' he stopped as if he had bitten on his tongue. Jim felt his own teeth click together and a chill steal from the back of his throat down his spine: a shivering-fit blown from France.