The Greater Trumps (6 page)

“I'm afraid it'll be very dull for you,” he said.

“Oh, I don't think so,” she answered. “It'll have to be very dull indeed if it is.”

“And of course we don't know what the grandfather's like,” he added.

“He's presumably human,” Sybil said, “so he'll be interesting somehow.”

“Really, Sybil,” Mr. Coningsby answered, almost crossly, “you do say the most ridiculous things. As if everybody was interesting.”

“Well, I think everybody is,” Sybil protested, “and things apart from their bodies we don't know, do we? And considering what funny, lovely things bodies are, I'm not especially anxious to leave off knowing them.”

Her brother kept the conversation straight. “I gather that he's old but quite active still, not bed-ridden or anything.”

“Then we shan't be expected to sit with him,” Sybil said happily, “and, as Nancy and Henry certainly wouldn't want to, you and I will be much freer.”

“If I thought I was expected to sit with a senile old man——” Mr. Coningsby said in alarm, “but Henry implied that he'd got all his faculties. Have you heard anything?”

“Good heavens, no!” said Sybil, and, being in what her brother called one of her perverse moods, added, “I love that phrase.”

“What phrase?” Mr. Coningsby asked, having missed anything particular.

“Good heavens,” Sybil repeated, separating the words. “It says everything almost, doesn't it? I don't like to say ‘Good God' too often; people so often misunderstand.”

“Sometimes you talk exactly in Nancy's irresponsible way, Sybil,” her brother complained. “I don't see any sense in it. Why should one want to say ‘Good God'?”

“Well, there isn't really much else to say, is there?” Sybil asked, and added hastily, “No, my dear, I'm sorry, I was only …” She hesitated for a word.

“I know you were,” Mr. Coningsby said, as if she had found it, “but I don't think jokes of that kind are in the best of taste. It's possible to be humorous without being profane.”

“I beg your pardon, Lothair,” Sybil said meekly. She tried her best not to call her brother “Lothair,” because that was one of the things which seemed to him to be profane without being humorous. But it was pain and grief to her; there wasn't all that time to enjoy everything in life as it should be enjoyed, and the two of them could have enjoyed that ridiculous name so much better together. However, since she loved him, she tried not to force the good God's richness of wonder too much on his attention, and so she went on hastily, “Nancy's looking forward to it so much.”

“At her age,” Mr. Coningsby remarked, “one naturally looks forward.”

“And at ours,” Sybil said, “when there isn't the time there isn't the necessity; the present's so entirely satisfactory.”

Mr. Coningsby just stopped himself saying, “Good God,” with quite a different intonation. He waited a minute or two and said, “You know Henry's offered to take us down in his car?”

“Nice of him,” Sybil answered, and allowed herself to become involved in a discussion of what her brother would or would not take, at the end of which he suddenly said, “Oh, and by the way, you might look through those packs of cards and put in a few of the most interesting—and the catalogue—especially the set we were looking at the other evening. Nancy asked me; it seems there are some others down there, and Henry and she want to compare them. A regular gipsy taste! But if it amuses them … He's promised to show her some tricks.”

“Then I hope,” Miss Coningsby said, “that Nancy won't try to show them to us before she's practiced them. Not that I mind being surprised in an unintentional way, but it'd show a state of greater sanctity on her part.”

“Sanctity!” Mr. Coningsby uttered derisively. “Nancy's not very near sanctity.”

“My dear, she's in love,” his sister exclaimed.

“And what's that got to do with sanctity?” Mr. Coningsby asked triumphantly, and enjoyed the silence to which Sybil sometimes found herself driven. Anyone who didn't realize the necessary connection between love and sanctity left her incapable of explanation.

“Tricks” was hardly the word which Nancy would have used that same evening, though it was one which Henry himself had used to her a week or so before. It was still some ten days to Christmas, and in the fortnight that had elapsed since the examination of the late Mr. Duncannon's legacy the subject of the cards had cropped up several times between the two young people. Nancy had the natural, alert interest of youth, as Sybil had the—perhaps supernatural—vivid interest of age, and Henry's occasional rather mysterious remarks had provoked it still more. She had, in fact, examined the cards by herself and re-read the entry in the catalogue, and looked up “Tarot” in the encyclopedia without being much more advanced. As she sat now coiled in front of the dining-room fire, playing gently with her lover's fingers, at once stirred and soothed by the contact, she suddenly twisted round to face him in the deep chair to her right.

“But, Henry, dearest, what
is
it you mean?” she said. “You keep on talking of these cards as if they were important.”

“So they are,” Henry answered. “Exactly how important depends on you, perhaps.”

Nancy sat up on her heels. “Henry,” she said, “are you teasing me or are you not? If you are, you're not human at all; you're a black-maned devil from Hell, and I've got engaged to you by the worst mistake that ever happened. And if you're not, then show some pity, and leave off talking like a doctor about some bit of my inside that I don't understand. How and why and when and where and what have I got to do with the cards? If you don't tell me, I shall go straight down to father and say you've insulted me.”

“Then you don't know what you'd miss,” Henry said.

Nancy threw out her arms. “O wretched me!” she cried dramatically. “Henry, if I pretend I don't want to know, are you sure you'll play up? You won't take a mean advantage, will you?”

“If you really don't want to know,” he told her, “I certainly won't tell you. That's the whole point. Do you
really
want to know?”

“Have I bared my heart to have it mistrusted?” she said. “Must I pine away in an hour or so to persuade you? Or will it do if I sob myself to sleep on the spot? As I used
not
to say when we did
Julius Caesar
at school, if you don't tell me, ‘Portia is Brutus' harlot, not his wife.' What a nasty little cad and cat Portia was—to squeeze it out of him like that! But I swear I'll give myself a wound ‘here in the thigh' unless you
do
tell me, and bleed to death all over your beautiful trousers.”

He took her hand in his so strongly that her eyes changed to immediate gravity.

“If you want to know,” he said, “I will tell you what I can here, and the rest—there. If you can bear it.”

“Do as you will,” she answered seriously. “If it's no joke, then try me and let me go if I fail. At that,” she added with a sudden smile, “I think I won't fail.”

“Then bring the Tarot cards now, if you can,” he said. “But quietly. I don't want the others to know.”

“They're out—father and Ralph,” she answered. “I will go and get them,” and on the word was away from the room.

For the few minutes that elapsed before she returned he stood looking absently before him, so that he did not at once hear her entrance, and her eyes took him in: his frown, his concentrated gaze, the hand that made slight unpurposed movements by his side. As she looked, she herself unconsciously disposed herself to meet him, and she came across the room to him with something in her of preparation, as if, clear and splendid, she came to her bridal. Nor did they smile as they met, though it was the first time in their mutual acquaintance that so natural a sweetness had been lacking. He took the cards from her, and then, laying his hand on her shoulder, lightly compelled her towards the large table in the middle of the room. Then he drew the cards from their case, which he threw carelessly from him to the floor, and began to separate them into five piles.

“Look,” he said, “these are the twenty-two cards—the twenty-one and the one which is nothing—that we looked at the other night. Those are the Greater Trumps, and there's nothing to tell you about them now; they must wait till another time. But these others are the four suits, and you will see what we did not carefully look at then; they're not the usual designs, not clubs and spades and hearts and diamonds, but staffs or scepters, and swords and cups and coins—or deniers. Those last are shaped sometimes as pentacles, but this is the better marking. And see—there are fourteen and not thirteen in each suit, for besides the Knave and Queen and King there is in these the Knight. So that here, for instance, are the Knave—or Esquire—of scepters, and the Knight, Queen, and King of scepters; and so with the swords, the cups, and the deniers. Look, here they are.”

She bent above them, watching, and after a moment he went on.

“Now these cards are the root and origin of all cards, and no one knows from where they came, for the tale is that they were first heard of among the gipsies in Spain in the thirteenth century. Some say they are older, and some even talk of Egypt, but that matters very little. It isn't the time behind them, but the process in them, that's important. There are many packs of Tarot cards, but the one original pack, which is this, has a secret behind it that I will show you on Christmas Eve. Because of that secret this pack, and this only, is a pack of great might.”

He paused again, and still she made no movement. He glanced at her hands resting on the edge of the table and resumed.

“All things are held together by correspondence, image with image, movement with movement. Without that there could be no relation and therefore no truth. It is our business—especially yours and mine—to take up the power of relation. Do you know what I mean?”

As she suddenly looked up at him, she almost smiled.

“Darling,” she murmured, “how couldn't I know
that
? I didn't need the cards to tell me. Ah, but go on. Show me what it means in them.”

For another second he paused, arrested; it was as if she had immediately before her something which he sought far off. A little less certainly he again went on, his voice recovering itself almost immediately.

“There is in these suits a great relation to the four compacted elements of the created earth, and you shall find the truth of this now, if you choose, and if the tales told among my people and the things that were written down among them are true. This pack has been hidden from us for more than two centuries, and for all that time no one, I think, can have tried it till tonight. The latest tale we know of is that once, under Elizabeth, a strange ancestor of mine, who had fled to England from the authority of the King of Spain, raised the winds which blew the Armada northward past Scotland.”

Nancy wrinkled her forehead as he paused. “Do you mean,” she began, “do you mean that he … I'm sorry, darling, I don't seem to understand. How could he raise the winds?”

“‘The beating of the cards is the wind,'” he answered, “but don't try and believe it now. Think of it as a fable, but think that on some point of the seashore one of those wild fugitives stood by night and shook these cards—these”—he laid his hand on the heap of the suit of staffs or scepters—“and beat the air with them till he drove it into tumult and sent the great blasts over the seas to drive the ships of King Philip to wreck and destruction. See that in your mind; can you?”

“I can,” she said. “It's a mad picture, but I can.”

He stooped to pick up the case and restored to it the swords, the staffs, and the cups, and the Greater Trumps, all in silence; then he laid it by and took up the suit of deniers, or coins, or pentacles.

“Now,” he said, smiling at her, “shall we see what your hands and mine can do?”

“Tell me,” she answered.

He gave the fourteen cards to her, and, standing close by her, he made her hold them in both hands and laid his own over hers. “Now listen,” he said in her ear, speaking slowly and commandingly, “you will think of earth, garden-mold, the stuff of the fields, and the dry dust of the roads: the earth your flowers grow in, the earth to which our bodies are given, the earth which in one shape or another makes the land as parted from the waters. Will you do as I say?”

Very serious, she looked up at him. “Yes, Henry,” she said, and her voice lingered a little on the second word, as if she gave herself so the more completely to his intention. He said again, “Earth, earth of growing and decaying things—fill your mind with the image of it. And let your hands be ready to shuffle the cards. Hold them securely but lightly, and if they seem to move let them have their way. Help them; help them to slide and shuffle. I put my hands over yours; are you afraid?”

She answered quite simply, “Need I be?”

“Never at all,” he said, “neither now nor hereafter. Don't be afraid; these things can be known, and it's good for us to know them. Now—begin.”

She bent her mind to its task, a little vaguely at first, but soon more definitely. She filled it with the thought of the garden, the earth that made it up, dry dust sometimes, sometimes rich loam—the worms that crawled in it and the roots of the flowers thrusting down—no, not worms and roots—earth, deep thick earth. Great tree-roots going deep into it—along the roots her mind penetrated into it, along the dividing, narrowing, dwindling roots, all the crannies and corners filled with earth, rushing up into her shoulder-pits, her elbows sticking out, little bumps on those protracted roots. Mold clinging together, falling apart; a spade splitting it almost as if thrust into her thoughts, a spadeful of mold. Digging—holes, pits, mines, tunnels, graves—no, those things were not
earth
. Graves—the bodies in them being made one with the earth about them, so that at last there was no difference. Earth to earth—she herself earth; body, shoulders, limbs, earth in her arms, in her hands.