A Fish Dinner in Memison - Zimiamvian Trilogy 02 (37 page)

'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, to-night?'

‘
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 foreknowledge
d to the estate of becco or cor
nuto?'

'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,—

Sl
eep 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 to-morrow 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 the 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, 'doubt
less I have already. Else, O Be
guiler of Guiles, how came We here?'

Anthea whispered something, inaudible save to Cam-paspe. Their dryad eyes, and that Princess Zenianthe's, rested now on the King, now on Barganax, now once more on the King.

And now, as the company began again to take their departure towards the Duchess's summer palace, my Lady Fiorinda, in her most languefied luxuriousness lazying on Barganax's arm, idly drew from her back hair a hair-pin all aglitter with tiny anachite diamonds and idly with it pricked the thing. With a nearly noiseless fuff it burst, leaving, upon the table where it had rested, a little wet mark the size of her finger-nail. The Duke might behold now how she wore glow-worms in her hair. His eyes and hers met, as in a mutual for ever untongued understanding of his own wild unlikely surmise of Who in very truth She was: Who, for the untractable profoundness sake of
his own nature and his unsatiabl
e desires and untamed passions sake, wh
ich safety and certitude but un
happieth, could so unheaven Herself too with dangerous elysiums, of so great fr
ailty, such hope unsure: unmeas
urable joys, may be undecayable, yet mercifully, if so, not known to be so.—Her gift: the bitter-sweet:

'Well?' she said, slowly fanning herself as they walked away, slowly turning to him once more, with flickering eyelids, Her face which is the beginning and the ending, from all unbegun eternity, of all conceivable worlds: 'Well?—and what follows next, My Friend?'

P
roper names
the reader will no doubt pronounce as he chooses. But perhaps, to please me, he will let
Memison
echo 'denizen' except for the
m:
pronounce the first syllable of
Reisma
'rays': keep the i's short in
Zimiamvia
and accent the third syllable: accent the second syllable in
Zayana,
give it a broad
a
(as in 'Guiana'), and pronouce the
ay
in the first syllable (and also the
ai
in
Laimak, Kaima,
etc., and the
ay
in
Krestenaya)
like the
ai
in 'aisle': accent the first syllable in
Rerek
and make it rhyme with 'year': keep the
g
soft in
Fingiswold:
remember that
Fiorinda
is an Italian name,
Beroald
(and, for this particular case,
Amalie)
French, and
Zenianthe,
and several others, Greek: last, regard the
sz
in
Meszria
as ornamental, and not be deterred from pronouncing it as plain 'Mezria.'

In Doctor Vandermast's aphorisms students of Spinoza may often recognize their master's words, charged, no doubt, with implications which go beyond his meaning. Lovers of the supreme poetess will note that, apart from quotations, I have not scrupled to enrich my pages with echoes of her: this for the sufficient reason that Sappho, above all others, is the poet not of 'that obscure Venus of the hollow hill' but of 'awful, gold-crowned, beautiful Aphrodite.'