Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

77-85 Fulham Palace Road

Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Copyright © E. R. Eddison 1941

Jacket illustration by John Howe © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 2014

E.R. Eddison asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007578153

Ebook Edition © October 2014 ISBN: 9780007578160

Version: 2014-09-09

Dedication

To my son-in-law

Flying Officer KENNETH HESKETH HIGSON

who in an air fight over Italy

saved his four companions’ lives

at cost of his own

I DEDICATE THIS BOOK

which he had twice read.

Proper 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’.

This divine beauty is evident, fugitive, impalpable, and homeless in a world of material fact; yet it is unmistakably individual and sufficient unto itself, and although perhaps soon eclipsed is never really extinguished: for it visits time and belongs to eternity.

GEORGE SANTAYANA

EURIPIDES, ION, 1615

… though what if Earth

Be but the shaddow of Heav’n, and therein

Each to other like, more than on earth is thought?

MILTON, PARADISE LOST, V. 571

Ces serments, ces parfums, ces baisers infinis,

Renaîtront-ils d’un gouffre interdit à nos sondes,

Comme montent au ciel les soleils rajeunis

Après s’être lavés au fond des mers profondes?

—O serments! ô parfums! ô baisers infinis!

BAUDELAIRE, LE BALCON

SAPPHO, ODE TO APHRODITE

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Introduction by James Stephens

A LETTER OF INTRODUCTION

I. Aphrodite in Verona

II. Memison: King Mezentius

III. A Match and Some Lookers on

IV. Lady Mary Scarnside

V. Queen of Hearts and Queen of Spades

VI. Castanets Betwixt the Worlds

VII. Seven Against the King

VIII. Lady Mary Lessingham

IX. Ninfea di Nerezza

X. The Lieutenant of Reisma

XI. Night-Piece: Appassionato

XII. Salute to Morning

XIII. Short Circuit

XIV. The Fish Dinner: Praeludium

XV. The Fish Dinner: Symposium

XVI. The Fish Dinner: Caviar

XVII. In What a Shadow

XVIII. Deep Pit of Darkness

XIX. Ten Years: Ten Million Years: Ten Minutes

NOTE

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

MAP OF THE THREE KINGDOMS

ALSO BY E. R. EDDISON

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

INTRODUCTION
BY JAMES STEPHENS

THIS is a terrific book.

It is not much use asking, whether a given writer is great or not. The future will decide as to that, and will take only proper account of our considerations on the matter. But we may enquire as to whether the given writer does or does not differ from other writers: from, that is, those that went before, and, in especial, from those who are his and our contemporaries.

In some sense Mr Eddison can be thought of as the most difficult writer of our day, for behind and beyond all that which we cannot avoid or refuse – the switching as from a past to something that may be a future – he is writing with a mind fixed upon ideas which we may call ancient but which are, in effect, eternal: aristocracy, courage, and a ‘hell of a cheek’. It must seem lunatic to say of any man that always, as a guide of his inspiration, is an idea of the Infinite. Even so, when the proper question is asked, wherein does Mr Eddison differ from his fellows? that is one answer which may be advanced. Here he does differ, and that so greatly that he may seem as a pretty lonely writer.

There is a something, exceedingly rare in English fiction, although everywhere to be found in English poetry – this may be called the aristocratic attitude and accent. The aristocrat can be as brutal as ever gangster was, but, and in whatever brutality, he preserves a bearing, a grace, a charm, which our fiction in general does not care, or dare, to attempt.

Good breeding and devastating brutality have never been strangers to each other. You may get in the pages of, say, The Mahabharata – the most aristocratic work of all literature – more sheer brutality than all our gangster fictionists put together could dream of. So, in these pages, there are villanies and violences and slaughterings that are, to one reader, simply devilish. But they are devilish with an accent – as Milton’s devil is; for it is instantly observable in him, the most English personage of our record and the finest of our ‘gentlemen’, that he was educated at Cambridge. So the colossal gentlemen of Mr Eddison have, perhaps, the Oxford accent. They are certainly not accented as of Balham or Hoboken.

All Mr Eddison’s personages are of a ‘breeding’ which, be it hellish or heavenish, never lets its fathers down, and never lets its underlings up. So, again, he is a different writer, and difficult.

There is yet a distinction, as between him and the rest of us. He is, although strictly within the terms of his art, a philosopher. The ten or so pages of his letter (to that good poet, George Rostrevor Hamilton) which introduces this book form a rapid conspectus of philosophy. (They should be read after the book is read, whereupon the book should be read again.)

It is, however, another aspect of being that now claims the main of his attention, and is the true and strange subject of this book, as it is the subject of his earlier novels, Mistress of Mistresses and The Worm Ouroboros, to which this book is organically related. (The reader who likes this book should read those others.)

This subject, seen in one aspect, we call Time, in another we call it Eternity. In both of these there is a somewhat which is timeless and tireless and infinite – that something is you and me and E. R. Eddison. It delights in, and knows nothing of, and cares less about, its own seeming evolution in time, or its own actions and reactions, howsoever or wheresoever, in eternity. It just (whatever and wherever it is) wills to be, and to be powerful and beautiful and violent and in love. It enjoys birth and death, as they seem to come with insatiable appetite and with unconquerable lust for more.

The personages of this book are living at the one moment in several dimensions of time, and they will continue to do so for ever. They are in love and in hate simultaneously in these several dimensions, and will continue to be so for ever – or perhaps until they remember, as Brahma did, that they had done this thing before.

This shift of time is very oddly, very simply, handled by Mr Eddison. A lady, the astounding Fiorinda, leaves a gentleman, the even more (if possible) astounding Lessingham, after a cocktail in some Florence or Mentone. She walks down a garden path until she is precisely out of his sight: then she takes a step to the left, right out of this dimension and completely into that other which is her own – although one doubts that fifty dimensions could quite contain this lady. Whereupon that which is curious and curiously satisfying, Mr Eddison’s prose takes the same step to the left and is no more the easy English of the moment before, but is a tremendous sixteenth- or fifteenth-century English which no writer but he can handle.

His return from there and then to here and now is just as simple and as exquisitely perfect in time-phrasing as could be wished for. There is no jolt for the reader as he moves or removes from dimension to dimension, or from our present excellent speech to our memorable great prose. Mr Eddison differs from all in his ability to suit his prose to his occasion and to please the reader in his anywhere.

This writer describes men who are beautiful and powerful and violent – even his varlets are tremendous. Here, in so far as they can be conjured into modern speech, are the heroes. Their valour and lust is endless as is that of tigers: and, like these, they take life or death with a purr or a snarl, just as it is appropriate and just as they are inclined to. But it is to his ladies that the affection of Mr Eddison’s great and strange talent is given.

Women in many modern novels are not really females, accompanied or pursued by appropriate belligerent males – they are mainly excellent aunts, escorted by trustworthy uncles, and, when they marry, they don’t reproduce sons and daughters, they produce nephews and nieces.

Every woman Mr Eddison writes of is a Queen. Even the maids of these, at their servicings, are Princesses. Mr Eddison is the only modern man who likes women. The idea woman in these pages is most quaint, most lovely, most disturbing. She is delicious and aloof: delighted with all, partial to everything (ça m’amuse, she says). She is greedy and treacherous and imperturbable: the mistress of man and the empress of life: wearing merely as a dress the mouse, the lynx, the wren or the hero: she is the goddess as she pleases, or the god; and is much less afraid of the god than a miserable woman of our dreadful bungalows is afraid of a mouse. And she is all else that is high or low or even obscene, just as the fancy takes her: she falls never (in anything, nor anywhere) below the greatness that is all creator, all creation, and all delight in her own abundant variety. Je m’amuse, she says, and that seems to her, and to her lover, to be right and all right.

The vitality of the recording of all this is astonishing: and in this part of his work Mr Eddison is again doing something which no other writer has the daring or the talent for.

He is also trying to do the oddest something for our time – he is trying to write prose. ’Tis a neglected, almost a lost, art, but he is not only trying, he is actually doing it. His pages are living and vivid and noble, and are these in a sense that belongs to no other writer I know of.

His Fish Dinner is a banquet such as, long ago, Plato sat at. As to how Mr Eddison’s philosophy stands let the philosophers decide: but as to his novel, his story-telling, his heroical magnificence of prose, and his sense of the splendid, the voluptuous, the illimitable, the reader may judge of these things by himself and be at peace or at war with Mr Eddison as he pleases.

This is the largest, the most abundant, the most magnificent book of our time. Heaven send us another dozen such from Mr Eddison,

JAMES STEPHENS

15th December 1940

A LETTER OF INTRODUCTION
TO GEORGE ROSTREVOR HAMILTON

MY dear George,

You have, for both my Zimiamvian books, so played Pallas Athene – sometimes to my Achilles sometimes to my Odysseus – counselling, inciting, or restraining, and always with so foster-brotherly an eye on the object we are both in love with, that it is to you sooner than to anyone else that this letter should be addressed. To you, a poet and a philosopher: from me, who am no poet (for my form is dramatic narrative in prose), nor philosopher either. Unless to be a humble lover of wisdom earns that name, and to concern myself as a storyteller not so much with things not of this world as with those things of this world which I take to be, because pre-eminently valuable, therefore pre-eminently real.

The plain ‘daylight’ parts of my story cover the years from April 1908 to October 1933; while, as for the month that runs contemporaneously in Zimiamvia (from Midsummer’s Day, Anno Zayanae Conditae 775, when the Duke first clapped eyes on his Dark Lady, to the 25th July, when his mother, the Duchess of Memison, gave that singular supper-party), it is sufficient to reflect that the main difference between earth and heaven may lie in this: that here we are slaves of Time, but there the Gods are masters.

There are no hidden meanings: no studied symbols or allegories. It is the defect of allegory and symbolism to set up the general above the individual, the abstract above the concrete, the idea above the person. I hold the contrary: to me the value of the sunset is not that it suggests to me ideas of eternity; rather, eternity itself acquires value to me only because I have seen it (and other matters besides) in the sunset and (shall we say) in the proud pallour of Fiorinda’s brow and cheeks – even in your friend, that brutal ferocious and lionlike fox, the Vicar of Rerek – and so have foretasted its perfections.

Personality is a mystery: a mystery that darkens as we suffer our imagination to speculate upon the penetration of human personality by Divine, and vice versa. Perhaps my three pairs of lovers are, ultimately, but one pair. Perhaps you could as truly say that Lessingham, Barganax, and the King (on the one hand), Mary, the Duchess, and Fiorinda (on the other), are but two persons, each at three several stages of ‘awakeness’, as call them six separate persons.

And there are other teasing mysteries besides this of personality. For example: Who am I? Who are you? Where did we come from? Where are we going? How did we get here? What is ‘here’? Were we ever not ‘here’, and, if so, where were we? Shall we someday go elsewhere? If so, where? If not, and yet we die, what is Death? What is Time, and why? Did it have a beginning, and will it have an end? Whatever the answer to the last two questions (i.e., that time had a beginning or that it had not: or an end) is either alternative conceivable? Are not both equally inconceivable? What of Space (on which very similar riddles arise)? Further, Why are we here? What is the good of it all? What do people mean when they speak of Eternity, Omnipotence, God? What do they mean by the True, the Good, the Beautiful? Do these ‘great and thumping words’ relate to any objective truth, or are they empty rhetoric invented to cheer or impress ourselves and others: the vague expressions of vague needs, wishes, fears, appetites of us, weak children of a day, who know little of (and matter less to) the vast, blind, indifferent, unintelligible, inscrutable, machine or power or flux or nothingness, on the skirts of whose darkness our brief lives flicker for a moment and are gone?

And if this is the true case of us and our lives and loves and all that we care for, then Why is it?

Ah, Love! Could you and I with Him conspire

To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,

Would not we shatter it to bits – and then

Re-mould it nearer to the Heart’s Desire!

Why not? Why is there Evil in the world?

Such, in rapid and superficial survey, are the ultimate problems of existence; ‘riddles of the Sphinx’ which, in one shape or another, have puzzled men’s minds and remained without any final answer since history began, and will doubtless continue to puzzle and elude so long as mankind continues upon this planet.

But though it is true that (as contrasted with the special sciences) little progress has been made in philosophy: that we have not today superseded Plato and Aristotle in the sense in which modern medicine has superseded Hippokrates and Galen: yet, on the negative side and particularly in metaphysics, definite progress has been made.

Descartes’ Cogito ergo sum – ‘I think; therefore I exist’ – has been criticized not because its assumptions are too modest, but because they are too large. Logically it can be reduced to cogito, and even that has been shorn of the implied ego. That is to say, the momentary fact of consciousness is the only reality that cannot logically be doubted; for the mere act of doubting, being an act of consciousness, is of itself immediate proof of the existence of that which was to be the object of doubt.

Consciousness is therefore the fundamental reality, and all metaphysical systems or dogmas which found themselves on any other basis are demonstrably fantastic. In particular, materialistic philosophies of every kind and degree are fantastic.

But, because demonstrably fantastic, they are not therefore demonstrably false. We cannot, for instance, be reasonably driven to admit that some external substance called ‘matter’ is prior to or condition of consciousness; but just as little can we reasonably deny the possibility of such a state of things. For, logically, denial is as inadmissible as assertion, when we face the ultimate problems of existence outside the strait moment of consciousness which is all that certainly remains to us after the Cartesian analysis. Descartes, it is true, did not leave it at that. But he had cleared the way for Hume and Kant to show that, briefly, every assumption which he himself or any other metaphysician might produce like a rabbit from the hat must have been put into the hat before being brought out. In other words, the scientific method, applied to these problems and pressed to its logical implications, leads to an agnosticism which must go to the whole of experience, as Pyrrho’s did, and not arbitrarily stop short at selected limits, as did the agnosticism of the nineteenth century. It leads, therefore, to an attitude of complete and speechless scepticism.

If we think this conclusion a reductio ad absurdum, and would seek yet some touchstone for the false and the true, we must seek it elsewhere than in pure reason. That is to say (confining the argument to serious attitudes of speculation on the ultimate problems of existence), we must at that stage abandon the scientific attitude and adopt the poet’s. By the poet’s I mean that attitude which says that ultimate truths are to be attained, if at all, in some immediate way: by vision rather than by ratiocination.

How, then, is the poet to go to work, voyaging now in alternate peril of the Scylla and Charybdis which the Cartesian–Kantian criticism has laid bare – the dumb impotence of pure reason on the one hand, and on the other a welter of disorganized fantasy through which reason of itself is powerless to choose a way, since to reason (in these problems) ‘all things are possible’ and no fantasy likelier than another to be true?

Reason, as we have seen, reached a certain bed-rock, exiguous but unshakable, by means of a criticism based on credibility: it cleared away vast superfluities of baseless system and dogma by divesting itself of all beliefs that it was possible to doubt. In the same way, may it not be possible to reach a certain bed-rock among the chaos of fantasy by means of a criticism based not on credibility but on value?

No conscious being, we may suppose, is without desire; and if certain philosophies and religions have set up as their ideal of salvation and beatitude a condition of desirelessness, to be attained by an asceticism that stifles and starves every desire, this is no more than to say that those systems have in fact applied a criticism of values to dethrone all minor values, leaving only this state of blessedness which (notwithstanding their repudiation of desire) remains as (for their imagination at least) the one thing desirable. And in general, it can be said that no religion, no philosophy, no considered view of the world and human life and destiny, has ever been formulated without some affirmation, express or implied, of what is or is not to be desired: and it is this star, for ever unattained yet for ever sought, that shines through all great poetry, through all great music, painting, building, and works of men, through all noble deeds, loves, speculations, endurings and endeavours, and all the splendours of ‘earth and the deep sky’s ornament’ since history began, and that gives (at moments, shining through) divine perfection to some little living thing, some dolomite wall lighted as from within by the low red sunbeams, some skyscape, some woman’s eyes.

This then, whatever we name it – the thing desirable not as a means to something else, be that good or bad, high or low (as food is desirable for nourishment; money, for power; power, as a means either to tyrannize over other men or to benefit them; long life, as a means to achievement of great undertaking, or to cheat your heirs; judgement, for success in business; debauchery, for the ‘bliss proposed’; wind on the hills, for inspiration; temperance, for a fine and balanced life), but for itself alone – this, it would seem, is the one ultimate and infinite Value. By a procedure corresponding to that of Descartes when, by doubting all else, he reached through process of elimination something that he could not doubt, we have, after rejecting all things whose desirableness depends on their utility as instruments to ends beyond themselves, reached something desirable as an end in itself. What it is in concrete detail, is a question that may have as many answers as there are minds to frame them (‘In my Father’s house are many mansions’). But to deny its existence, while not a self-contradictory error palpable to reason (as is the denial of the Cartesian cogito), is to affirm the complete futility and worthlessness of the whole of Being and Becoming.

It is not to be gainsaid that a position of complete scepticism and complete nihilism in regard to objective truth and objective value is, logically, unassailable. But since, logically, he who takes up that position must remain speechless (for nothing, ex hypothesi, can be affirmed, nor does anybody exist to listen to the affirmation), must desire nothing (for there is nothing to be desired), and do nothing (for nothing is worth doing), therefore ‘the rest is silence’.

Proceeding, then, on the alternative supposition – that is to say, accepting the fact of consciousness as our fundamental reality and this undefined but uneliminable ‘one thing desirable’ as the fundamental value – we are free to speculate on the ultimate problems of metaphysics, using as instrument of investigation our mind at large, which includes (but is not restricted to) the analytic reason. Such speculation is what, for want of a better word, I have called poetic. It might (with some danger of misconception) also be called the kind of speculation appropriate to the lunatic, or to the lover! for—

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet,

Are of imagination all compact.

Three broad considerations may here be touched on:

(1) It does not seem necessary to postulate a plurality of ultimate values. Truth, Beauty, Goodness, are commonly so postulated. The claim of Truth, however, can hardly survive examination. On the one hand, the empirical truths of science or the abstract truths of mathematics are ‘values’ either as a means to power, or else for a kind of rightness or perfection which they seem to possess: a perfection which seems to owe its value to a kind of Beauty. On the other hand, Truth in the abstract (the quite neutral judgement, ‘That which is, is’) can have no value whatsoever: it acquires value only in so far as ‘that which is’ is desirable in itself, and not merely on account of its ‘truth’. If Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea is a statement of the truth, then truth has, ultimately, a negative value and we are better off without it (except as a means to power, etc.). Truth, therefore, is only an ultimate value if it is good. But the ‘Good’, again, is ambiguous, meaning both (a) good as an end to be desired, and (b) moral good. In sense (a) it is surely tautologous to speak of the ‘good’ as distinct from the beautiful; in sense (b) it is arguable (and, as I myself hold, true) that acts are morally ‘good’ only in so far as, in the last analysis, they tend to create, serve, or safeguard, Beauty. The trinity of so-called ‘ultimate values’ is thus reduced to one.

(2) No sane theory of values will ultimately square with the facts of this world as we know it ‘here and now.’ But ultimate value, as we have seen, is one of the ‘bed-rocks’: not so, however, this world, which we know only empirically and as a particular phase of our other ‘bed-rock’ (viz. consciousness). Accordingly, the test of any metaphysic is not that it should square with the world as we know it, but that it should square with the ultimate value. (Cf. Vandermast’s words in Mistress of Mistresses: ‘In this supermundal science concerning the Gods, determination of what Is proceedeth inconfutably and only by argument from what Ought to be.’)

(3) Concrete reality, whether as consciousness or as value, has two aspects which are never in fact separated or separable: the One and the Many: the Universal and the Particular: the Eternal and the Temporal: the Never Changing and the Ever Changing. It is the inseparability of these modes of Being that makes it idle to seek abstract Beauty, Truth, Goodness, apart from their particular manifestations, and equally idle (conversely) to try to isolate the particulars. The Many are understandable only as manifestations of the One: the One, only as incarnate in the Many. Abstract statements, therefore, such as have been occupying our attention in the proceedings pages, can bear no nearer relation to the concrete truths which they describe than (for example) the system of latitude and longitude bears to the solid earth we live on.

It is on these terms only, then (as an explanation of our ‘latitude and longitude’), that it is possible to sum up in a few lines the conception which underlies Mistresses of Mistresses and A Fish Dinner in Memison.

In that conception, ultimate reality rests in a Masculine-Feminine dualism, in which the old trinity of Truth, Beauty, Goodness, is extended to embrace the whole of Being and Becoming; Truth consisting in this – That Infinite and Omnipotent Love creates, preserves, and delights in, Infinite and Perfect Beauty (Infinitus Amor potestate infinitâ Pulchritudinem infinitam in infinitâ perfectione creatur et conservatur). Love and Beauty are, in this duality, coequal and coeternal; and, by a violent antinomy, Love, owing his mere being to this strengthless perfection which he holds at his mercy, adores and is enslaved by her, while Beauty (by a like antinomy) queens it over the very omnipotence which both created her and is her only safeguard.

Ultimate reality, as was said above, must be concrete; and an infinite power, creating and enjoying an infinite value, cannot be cribbed or frozen in a single manifestation. It must, on the contrary, be capable of presenting itself in an infinite number of aspects to different minds and at different moments; and every one of these aspects must be true and (paradoxically) complete, whereas no abstract statement, however profound in its analysis, can ever be either complete or true. This protean character of truth is the philosophical justification for religious toleration; for it is almost inconceivable that truth, realized in the richness of its concrete actuality, should ever present itself to two minds alike. Churches, creeds, schools of thought, or systems of philosophy, are expedient, useful or harmful, as the case may fall out. But the ultimate Vision – the ‘flesh and blood’ actuality behind these symbols and formulas – is to them as the living body is to apparel which conceals, disguises, suggests, or adorns, that body’s perfections.

This ‘flesh and blood’, then, so far as it shapes itself in Mistress of Mistresses and is on the way to further definition in the Fish Dinner, shows this ultimate dualism as subsisting in the two supreme Persons, the divine and perfect and eternal He and She, Zeus and Aphrodite, ‘more real than living man’. All men and women, all living creatures, the whole phemonenal world material and spiritual, even the very forms of Being – time, space, eternity – do but subsist in or by the pleasure of these Two, partaking (every individual soul, we may think, in its degree), of Their divine nature—

‘The Lord possessed Me in the beginning of His way, before His works of old. I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was … When He prepared the Heavens I was there: when he set a compass on the face of the depth: when He established the clouds above: when He strengthened the fountains of the deep: when He gave to the sea His decree, that the waters should not pass His commandment: when He appointed the foundations of the earth: then I was by Him, as one brought up with Him, and I was daily His delight, rejoicing always before Him … Whoso findeth Me findeth life, and shall obtain favour of the Lord. But he that sinneth against me wrongeth his own soul: all they that hate Me love death.’

(Proverbs, VIII: there spoken by Wisdom; but it is truer of a less mundane matter. For wisdom can never be an ultimate value but a means only to something beyond itself, e.g. a guide to action; whereas She [l’inutile Beauté] is not a means but the end and mistress of all action, the sole thing desirable for Herself alone, the causa immanens of the world and of very Being and Becoming: ‘Before the day was, I am She’.)

Mundane experience, it must be admitted, goes, broadly, against all this: it affords little evidence of omnipotent love, but much of feeble, transient, foolish loves: much of powerful hatreds, pain, fear, cruelty. ‘Tout passe, tout casse, tout lasse’: death, disease, deformity, come to mortals indiscriminately. ‘And captive good attending captain ill’ – this and all the accusations of Shakespeare’s LXVIth sonnet are true of ‘this vain world’, and always have been true. This world, to say the best of it, has always been both good and bad; to say the best of it, it is a flux, in which, on the whole, the changes compensate each other.

But (standing upon the rock – the Zeus–Aphrodite dualism), we are faced, in this imperfection of mundane experience, with the problem of Evil; and (standing upon that rock) the only solution we can accept is one that shall concede to Evil something less than reality. Lame excuses for the impotence, unskilfulness, inattentiveness, callousness, or plain malevolence of God Almighty, to which all other solutions of the problem reduce themselves, are incompatible with the omnipotence of Love, which can hardly be supposed to possess, in action, the attributes of an idiot or a devil. (It may be said, no doubt, that Love is not omnipotent but subject to some dark or necessity that binds even a God. Obviously this can neither be proved nor disproved, but it is repugnant to my judgement. For, if true, it means that the Scheme is indeed rotten at the core.)

Sub specie aeternitatis, therefore, this present world is understandable only on the assumption that its reality is not final but partial. On two alternative hypotheses might it thus be credible—

1 as something in the making, which in future aeons will become perfect;

2 as an instrument of , a training-ground or testing place.

Both hypotheses, however, present difficulties: (1) Why need omnipotence wait for future aeons to arrive? why have imperfections at all? (2) (The same difficulty in a different aspect) If perfection were available – and, to omnipotence, what is not? – why need omnipotence arrange for tests or trainings?

We are forced back, therefore, on the question: if illusion, why is there this illusion?

There seems to be no clear answer to this question; and no certain test (short of experience) of the truth of any particular experience. This world has got to be lived through, and the best way of living through it is a question for ethics: the science of the Good in action. A ‘good’ action is an action of Love, i.e. (see above) an action which serves Beauty. The ‘good’ man in action is therefore doing, so far as his action is good, and so far as his power goes, what the divine eternal Masculine is doing: creating, serving, worshipping, enjoying and loving Her, the divine eternal Feminine. And, by complement, the ‘good’ woman in action is doing, so far as in her lies, what the divine eternal Feminine is doing; completing and making up, that is to say, in her unique person, by and in her action and by and in her passivity, ‘whatsoever is or has been or shall be desirable, were it in earth or heaven’. In action therefore, this is ‘All ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’

But man is not only, but – concerned not with action only but with contemplation – and the unanswered questions in the third preceding paragraph remain. May there possibly be one answer to both? viz. that there is no necessity for these peculiar and (to us) inconvenient arrangements, but that – for the moment – they are amusing?

That they are far from ‘amusing’ to us, here and now – that they daily, for some or other of their helpless victims, produce woes and agonies too horrible for man to endure or even think of – is perhaps because we do not, in the bottom of our hearts, believe in our own immortality and the immortality of those we love. If, for you and me as individuals, this world is the sum, then much of it in detail (and the whole in general plan) is certainly not amusing. But to a mind developed on the lines of the Mahometan fanatic’s, the Thug’s, the Christian martyr’s, is it not conceivable that (short, perhaps, of acute physical torture) the ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’ should be no more painful than the imagined ills of a tragic drama, and could be experienced and appraised with a like detachment? The death of your nearest and dearest, e.g., would be but a deepening of experience for you, if you could believe and know (beyond peradventure and with that immediacy which belongs to sense experience) that there is no death, except of the body in this transient and unsatisfactory life; that Truth rests indeed in that eternal duality whereby the One Value is created and tendered by the One Power; that the Truth is not abstract and bodiless, but concrete in all imaginable richness of spirit and sense; that the parting is therefore but for a while; and, last, that the whole of human history, and the material cosmos known to science, are but trivial occurrences – episodes invented perhaps, and then laid aside, as we ourselves might conceive and in a few minutes reject again some theory of the universe, in conversation after supper.

It may be asked, Why not suicide, then, as a way out? Is not that the logic of such an other-worldly philosophy? The answer surely is that there is a beauty of action (as the Northmen knew), and only seldom is suicide a fine act. Unless it is time to ‘do it in the high Roman fashion’: unless we stand where Othello stood, or Cleopatra, suicide is an ignoble act, and (as such) little to Her liking. The surer we are of Her, therefore, the less we are likely to take, in despair, that dark leap which (though not, as is vulgarly said, an act of cowardice: it demands much courage if done deliberately) is essentially a shirking of the game She sets us. And that game (as no one will doubt, who has looked in the eyes of ‘sparkling-thronèd heavenly Aphrodite, child of God, beguiler of guiles’) is a game which, to please Her, we must play ‘acording to its strict rules’.

This book can be read as well before as after Mistress of Mistresses. The chief persons appear in both books, but each is a self-contained work complete in itself.

Yours affectionately,

E. R. E.

Dark Lane

Marlborough

Wiltshire

29th July 1940

PRINCIPAL PERSONS

THE KING

BARGANAX, DUKE OF ZAYANA

EDWARD LESSINGHAM

LADY MARY LESSINGHAM

THE DUCHESS OF MEMISON

FIORINDA

I
APHRODITE IN VERONA

‘ÇA M’AMUSE.’ The words, indolent, indolently fallen along the slowness of a lovely lazy voice, yet seemed to strike night, no, Time itself, with a sudden division; like as when that bare arrow-like three-octave E, high on the first violin, deep on the cello, stabs suddenly the witched quietude of the andante in the third Rasoumoffsky Quartet. A strange trick, indeed, in a woman’s voice: able so, with a chance phrase overheard, to snatch the mind from its voyaging in this skiff between sightless banks: snatch and translate it so, to some stance of rock, archaean, gripping the boot-nails, high upon mountains; whence, as gathering your senses out of sleep, you should seem to discern the true nature of the stream of things. And here, tonight, in Verona—

Lessingham looked round, quickly enough to catch the half mocking, half listening, inclination of her head as her lips closed upon the lingering last syllable of that private ‘m’amuse’. The words had been addressed, it was clear, to nobody, for she was alone at her table: certainly not to him: not even (curiously) to herself: to velvet-bosomed Night, possibly, sister to sister: to the bats, the inattentive stars, this buzz of Latin night-life; little white tables with their coffee, vino rosso, vino bianco, carafe and wine-glass, the music and the talk; wreaths of cigar-smoke and cigarette-smoke that hung and dissipated themselves on airs that carried from the flower-beds of the mid piazza a spring fragrancy and, from the breathing presences of women, wafts of a more exotic and a deeper stirring sweetness. Over all, the tremendous curved façade of Diocletian’s amphitheatre, ruined deep in time, stood desolate in the glare of electric arclights. In Lessingham’s hand arrested on the table-top, the cigar went out. Into the stillness all these things – amphitheatre, electric lights, the Old and the New, this simple art of living, the bat-winged night, the open face of the dark – seemed to gather and, with the slow upsurging might of their rise, to reach to some timeless moment which seemed her; and which seemed as fixed, while beyond it life and the hours streamed unseizable as the unseizable down-streaming spray-motes into which water is dissipated when it falls clear over a great height – Ça m’amuse.

Then, even as in the andante the processional secular throb of the arpeggios, so Time seemed now to recover balance: catch breath: resume its inexplicable unseizable irreversible way. Not to be explained, yet upon that echo illuminated: not to be caught, yet (for that sudden) unprecedentedly submitting itself within hand-reach: not to be turned back, yet suddenly self-confessed as perhaps not worth the turning. She looked up, and their eyes met.

‘Vous parlez français, madame?’

‘O, depende dello soggetto: depende con cui si parla. To an Englishman, English.’

‘Mixed with Italian?’

‘Addressed to a person so mixed. Or do I not guess aright?’

Lessingham smiled and replied: ‘You pay me a doubtful compliment, signora. Is it not a saying: “Inglese Italianato e Diavolo incarnato”? And as for the subject,’ he said, ‘if the signora will permit a question: is there then a special fitness to be amused, in French?’

‘Simply to be amused – perhaps, No. But to be amused at this – Yes.’

‘And this is?—’

Her hand, crimson-gloved, on which till now her cheek had been resting, traced, palm-upwards, a little half circle of disdain indicative of the totality of things. ‘There is a something logical: a something of precision, about the French, which very well fits this affair. To be polite to it, you must speak of it in French: it is the only language.’

‘There is in Latin, equally, a precision.’

‘O but certainly: and in a steam roller: but not altogether spirituel. Il faut de l’esprit pour savourer nettement cette affaire-là’; and again her hand delicately acknowledged it: ‘this clockwork world, this mockshow, operated by Time and the endless chain of cause and effect. Time, if you consider it,’ she said, ‘works with so ingenious a simplicity: so perfect a machine. Like a clock. Say you are God: you need but wind it up, and it proceeds with its business: no trouble at all.’

‘Until,’ said Lessingham, ‘you have to wind it up again?’

The lady shrugged her shoulders.

‘Signora,’ he said, ‘do you remember M. d’Anquetil, at that enjoyable unrestrained supper-party in La Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque? “Je vous confierai que je ne crois pas en Dieu.”’

‘And permit me, sir,’ said she, ‘to continue the quotation from that entertaining book: “Pour le coup, dit l’abbé, je vous blâme, monsieur.” And yet I am glad; for indeed it is a regrettable defect of character in a young man, to believe in God. But suppose, sir, that you in fact were – shall I say? – endowed with that authority: would you wind it up again?’

He paused before answering, held by the look of her: the passivity of her lips, that was like the swept silences of the sky expectant of dawn, or like the sea’s innumerable rippled stillness expectant of the dark after sunset: an assuredness, as native to some power that should so far transcend omnipotence as that it needs no more but merely to be and continue in that passivity, and omnipotence in action must serve it.

Like the oblique wide circle of a swift’s flight, down and round and up again, between earth and sky, the winged moment swung: now twenty years backwards into earliest childhood: the tennis lawn, of a June evening, of the old peelhouse where he was born, youngest of seven, of a great border family, between the Solway and the Cumberland hills: church bells, long shadows, Rose of Sharon with its sticky scent: Eton: then, at eighteen (getting on for eight years ago now), Heidelberg, and that unlucky episode that cut his studies short there. Then the Paris years, the Sorbonne, the obsessed concentration of his work in Montmartre studios, ending with the duel with knives with that unsavoury musician to whose Spanish mistress Lessingham, with the inexperienced ardour and quixotism of youth, had injudiciously offered his protection. And so, narrowly escaping imprisonment, to Provence and his Estremaduran Amaryllis: in a few weeks their parting by mutual consent, and his decision (having overspent his allowance, and in case his late adversary, again in hospital, should die, and that be laid at his door) to enlist in the Légion Etrangère under an assumed name. His desertion after some months (disillusioned with such a school but pleased with the experience for the power it gave him), and escape through Morocco in Egypt. Arrival penniless at the British Agency: news that his father, enraged at these proceedings, had stopped allowances and cut him out of his will. So, work his passage home as a stoker on a P. & O.: upon his twenty-first birthday, the twenty-fourth of November, 1903, land at Tilbury, and (by his mother’s means, that queen of women, seconding friendship and strong argument of flesh and blood) at one again with his father before Christmas; and so a year in England, his own master and with enough money to be trusted to do what money is meant for: look after itself, and leave its owner free. Then east, mainly India: two seasons exploring and climbing, Eastern Himalaya, Karakoram. Journey home, against official advice and without official countenance, dangerously through Afghanistan and Persia: then nearly the whole year 1906 in Greece, on horseback, sailing among the islands, studying in Athens. Then – the nineteenth of December, 1906. Sixteen months ago.

The nineteenth of December: Betelgeuze on the meridian at midnight, his particular star. The beginning: dinner at his sister Anne’s, and on with her party to that historic ball at the Spanish Embassy. Queer composition, to let the theme enter pianissimo, on muted strings, as it were; inaudible under such a blaring of trumpets. Curious to think of: towards the end of the evening, puzzling over his own scribble on his programme, ‘Dijon-Fiammetta’, against the next waltz, and recalling at last what it stood for: ‘Fiammetta’ – flame: red-gold hair, the tea-rose she wore in it, and a creamy dress like the rose’s petals. Their dancing: then, afterwards, sitting out on the stairs: then (as in mutual unspoken agreement to leave deserted partners to their devices in the glitter and heat of the ballroom, and themselves to savour a little longer this quiet), their sitting on, and so through two dances following. Whether Mary was tired, or whether minded to leave the ball of conversation to him, they had talked little. Dark girls were the trumpets in that symphony; and he had throughout the evening neither lacked nor neglected opportunity to store his mind with images of allures, Circean splendours, unstudied witty charms, manifested in several partners of that preferred complexion. The mockery! that on such hushed strings, and thus unremarked, should have been the entry of so imperial a theme. So much so, that the next morning, in idle waking recollection casting up the memories of the night before, he had forgotten her.

And yet, a week later, Christmassing with Anne and Charles at Taverford Manor, he had forgot the others but begun to remember her: first, her talking of Wuthering Heights, a very special book of his: then a saying of her own here and there: the very phrase and manner. She had been of few words that night, but those few singularly as if her own yet not self-regarding: pure Maryisms: daffodils or stars of the blackthorn looking on green earth or out to the sun. As for instance this (comparing Highlanders and the Tyrolese): ‘Mountain people seem all rather the same – vague and butterflyish. If they lose something – well, there it is. All ups and downs. I should think.’ Or this (of the smallness of human beings in an Alpine valley): ‘What weasels we look!’ Also, there had been near the corner of her mouth, a ‘somewhat’, that sometimes slept, sometimes stirred. He had wondered idly who she was, and whether these things took place as well by daylight. And then, next week, at the meet of the West Norfolk, his fresh introduction to her, and satisfying himself on both questions; and, as for the second, that they did.

Then, six months afterwards. Twenty-fourth of June. That river-party: that well planned, well timed, confident proposal: its rejection (a discomfiture in which he had not been singular; rather ninth or tenth; if talk were to be trusted). And, most devastating, something in the manner of her refusal: an Artemisian quality, quiver of startled hind, which stripped scales from his eyes to let him see her as never before: as the sole thing, suddenly, which as condition absolute of continuing he must have, let the world else go hang; and, in the same thunderclap, the one sole thing denied him. And so, that feverish fortnight, ending (thank heaven) with the best terms he might make (her cousin Jim Scarnside playing honest broker): burial of that black No, upon condition he should himself leave the country and not before fifteen months come back for his answer: eighteen months, as first propounded; which he would have shortened to August year (that is harvest time); but Mary would not give ground beyond Michaelmas: ‘An omen too, if you were wise – Vintage.’

Vintage. Vindemiatrix: she who harvests the grape: the delicate star in whose house the sun sits at autumn, and with her mild beams moderates his own to a more golden and more tranquil and more procreative radiance.

Nine months gone: Dahomey, Spain, Corsica. And April now: the twenty-second of April. A hundred and fifty-nine days to go.

The back arrowed swoop of the moment swung high into the unceilinged future, ten, fifty, sixty years, may be: then, past seeing, up to that warmthless unconsidered mock-time when nothing shall be left but the memorial that fits all (except, if there be, the most unhappiest) of human kind: I was not. I lived and loved. I am not. Then (or was it a bat, of the bats that hawked there between the piazza lamps and the stars?) it swung near, flashing darkly past that Dark Lady’s still mouth, at whose corner flickered a something: miraculously that which, asleep or awake, resided near the corner of Mary’s mouth.

Queen of Hearts: Queen of Spades: ‘Inglese Italianato’: the conflict of north and south in his blood; the blessing of that – of all – conflict. And yet, so easily degraded. As woman’s beauty, so easily degraded. The twoness in the heart of things: that rock that so many painters split on. Loathsome Renoir, with his sheep-like slack-mouthed simian-browed superfluities of female flesh: their stunted tapered fingers, puffy little hands, breasts and buttocks of a pneumatic doll, to frustrate all his magic of colour and glowing air. Toulouse-Lautrec, with his imagination fed from the stews, and his canvases all hot sweat and dead beer. Etty’s fine sensuality coarsely bitted and bridled by a convention from without, and starved so of the spirit that should have fed it to beauty from within. Burne-Jones’s beauties, nipped by some frost: Rossetti’s weighted with undigested matter: Beardsley, a whore-master, prostituting his lovely line to unlovely canker-buds. Even the great: even Titian in his Sacred and Profane Love, even Botticelli in his supreme Venus, were (he said in himself), by some meddling from within or without, restrained from the ultimate which I would have, and which as a painter I (Kapaneus’s – with God’s will, or if not, against it) will attain. Did the Greeks, with their painted statues, Apelles with Phryne for his model, attempt it? Did they, attempting, succeed? We can never know. Do such things die, then? Things of the spirit? Sappho’s burnt poems? Botticelli’s pictures of ‘beautiful naked women’ of like quality, perhaps, with his Venus and his nymphs of spring? – poor consolation that he was burnt that burnt them.

Yes. They die – half brother to man-slaying Hector, and his charioteer; under the dusty battle-din before Ilios, ‘mighty, mightily fallen: forgetful of his horsemanship’. All time past, the conflict and the heartbreak (he looked at the amphitheatre, a skeleton lifted up to witness): frozen. He looked at her: her eyes were more still than the waiting instant between the flash and the thunder. No. Not frozen; for that is death. No death here: rather the tenseness of sinew that is in the panther before the leap: Can Grande’s tomb, as this morning, in broad sunshine. Below, under the Gothic canopy carved in stone, the robed figure, lying in state, of the great condottiere, submissive, supine, with pious hands clasped upon his breast as in prayer, ‘requiescat in pace’, ‘Domine, in manus tuas’, etc., weak childhood come back like a song’s refrain, sightless eyes facing upwards. But above, high upon that canopy, the demonic equestrian figure of him in the April sap of his furious youth, helmed and harnessed, sword aloft, laughing on his caparisoned horse that seems itself to be informed with a secret kindred laughter, to say ha! ha! among the trumpets: a stirring together of the warring mights and glories, prides, overthrowings, and swiftnesses, of all worlds, to one flame; which takes on, of its mere eternity and only substantiality, as ice will scorch or fire freeze, the semblance of a death-like stillness.

All this in a few seconds of time: apocalyptically.

Lessingham answered her: ‘Signora, if I were God Omnipotent, I should be master of it. And, being master, I would not be carried by it like a tripper who takes a ticket for a cruise. I would land where I would; put in to what ports I liked, and out again when I would; speed it up where I would, or slow it down. I would wind it to my turn.’

‘That,’ she said, ‘would be a very complicated arrangement. One cannot deny it would be a pleasure. But the French precision, I fear, would scarcely apply itself so fitly, were that the state of things.’

‘You would hardly have me do otherwise?’

Slowly drawing off her right-hand glove, she smiled her secular smile. ‘I think, sir (in my present mood), that I would desire you, even so, to play the game according to its strict rules.’

‘O,’ said Lessingham. ‘And that (if it is permissible to enquire), in order to judge my skill? or my patience?’

Her fingers were busied about her little gold-meshed bag, finding a lira for her wine: Lessingham brought out a handful of coins, but she gracefully put aside his offer to pay for it. ‘I wonder?’ she said, looking down as she drew on her crimson glove again: ‘I wonder? Perhaps my answer is sufficient, sir, if I say – Because it amuses me.’ She rose. Lessingham rose too. ‘Is that sufficient?’ she said.

Lessingham made no reply. She was tall: Mary’s height to an inch as he looked down at her: incredible likenesses to Mary: little turns of neck or hand, certain looks of the eye, that matter of the mouth (a thing surely unknown before a living woman). Unlike Mary, she was dark: jet-black hair and a fair clear skin. ‘Good night, sir,’ she said, and held out her hand. As if bred up in that gracious foreign courtesy, he bowed: raised it to his lips. Strangely, be made no motion to follow her; only as she turned away, watched her gait and carriage, inhumanly beautiful, till she was vanished among the crowd. Then he put on his hat again and slowly sat down again at his table.

So he sat, half an hour more, may be: a spectator: looking at faces, imagining, playing with his imaginations: a feeling of freedom in his veins: that strange glitter of a town at night, offering boundless possibilities. In that inward-dreaming mood he was unconscious of the clouding over of the stars and the closeness of the air, until rain had begun in big drops and the whole sky was split with lightning which unleashed the loud pealing thunder. Hastening back drenched to his hotel with collar turned up and with the downpour splashing again in a million jets from the flooded pavement, he, as in a sudden intolerable hunger, said in himself: ‘It is long enough: I will not wait five months. Home tomorrow.’

She, in the mean while (if, indeed, as between World and World it is legitimate to speak of ‘before’ and ‘after’), had, in a dozen paces after Lessingham’s far-drawn gaze had lost her, stepped from natural present April into natural present June – from that night-life of Verona out by a colonnade of cool purple sandstone onto a daisied lawn, under the reverberant white splendour of midsummer noonday.

II
MEMISON: KING MEZENTIUS

COMING now beyond the lawn, that lady paused at the lily-pond under a shade of poplar-trees: paused to look down for a minute into depths out of which, framed between the crimson lilies and the golden, looked up at her, her own mirrored face. The curves of her nostrils hardened: some primal antiquity seemed suddenly to inform the whole presence of her, as if this youth and high summer-season of her girlhood were, in her, no season at all: not a condition, bearing in its own self its own destiny to depart and make place for future ripenesses, of full bloom, fading and decay; but a state unchanging and eternal. Her throat: her arm: the line of her hair, strained back from the temples to that interweaving of darkness with sleek-limbed darkness, coiled, locked, and overlaid, in the nape of her neck: the upward growth there, daintily ordered as black pencillings on the white wings of a flower-delice, of tiny silken hairs shading the white skin; her lips, crystal-cold of aspect, clear cut, red like blood, showing the merest thread-like glint of teeth between; these things seemed to take on a perfection terrible, because timeless.

The lord Chancellor Beroald, from his seat beneath an arbour of honeysuckle leftwards some distance from where she stood, watched her unseen. In his look was nothing of that worship, which in dumb nature seemed: rather an appraising irony which, setting profession beside performance, fact beside seeming, sucks from their antic steps not present entertainment only, but knowledge that settles to power.

‘Is your husband in the palace?’ he said presently.

‘How should I know?’

‘I had thought you had come that way.’

‘Yes. But scarcely from taking an inventory.’

‘Ha, so there the wind sits?’

He stood up as she came towards him, and they faced each other in silence. Then, light as the stirring of air in the overarching roof of poplar leaves above them, she laughed: held out a hand to him, which he after a pause dutifully, and with some faint spice of irony to sauce the motion, kissed;

‘Your ladyship has some private jest?’

She sat down, elegantly settling herself on the rose-coloured marble bench, and elegantly drawing down, to smell to, a spray of honeysuckle. The black lashes veiled her eyes, as she inhaled from eight little branching horns of crimson, apricot-gold, and creamy colour, the honeysuckle’s sweetness. Then, letting go the trailing flower, she looked round at him sitting now beside her. ‘I was diverted,’ she said, ‘by your look, my noble brother. That look you had, I remember, when you enveigled me to fall in with your pretty plan touching my former husband.’

‘As we mount the hill,’ said the Chancellor, ‘the prospect opens more large. That was beginnings.’

‘O, I spoke not of beginnings: not with that Borgian look. Piazza steps in Krestenaya.’

‘Leave this talk,’ said the Chancellor.

‘Having yourself, before, fobbed him off on me like a base coin, to serve your own turn,’ said she; ‘and, soon as well rid of him, teased me to taking of this Morville: so much the better alliance for you, as being by some distant removes able to claim kinship with the Parrys. You think, I suppose, that, holding in me the Queen of Spades, you shall always be able to command the Ace to take knaves with?’

‘Fie, sister!’

‘Fie, brother! And you shall see, I’ll play cards for love, not for policy. And next time you shall need to play me the King of Hearts, to be worth my Ace to trump him.’

‘What’s this?’ said the King behind them: ‘chancellors with kings i’ their hands? That was ever ruin, sure, whether to him that held or him that was holden.’

‘Serene highness,’ said the Chancellor, rising and turning about to face his master: ‘you do know me: I ne’er play cards.’

The King laughed. ‘Nor I: save now and then with the Devil; and that’s now and then both good and needful.’ Well six foot tall stood the Chancellor, clean of build and soldier-like; but the King, in black-bearded majesty, with eagle eyes, from under his black bonnet plumed with black eagle’s feathers, looked down to him. The Duchess of Memison on the King’s arm was as the beauty of an autumn evening leaning on night: a beauty of clouds and fire, of red-gold effulgence of sunset shining low through pine-tops and fern-fronds, when a little mist steals along the hillside and homing wild-duck stream high against the west. That Dark Lady, still seated, still with her back towards them, had but reached a jewelled hand to the honeysuckle to draw it down again to smell to.

‘My Lady Fiorinda.’

She turned, saw, and rose, all duty and obedience, yet with the self-ordered unhasting haste of a foam-footed wave of the sea in calm June weather. ‘Your gentle pardon, not to have known your highness’ voice. Madam, your grace’s humble servant.’

‘I have pardoned worse than that,’ said the King, ‘in a Valkyrie.’

‘In a Valkyrie? Am I that?’

‘Answer her, madam.’

‘O,’ said the Duchess, ‘she is none of mine. Let her answer for herself.’

‘None of yours? and in lovely Memison? where the very birds do fly to you at your becking? By whose doing but by yours should I have met her this morning, on a white horse, galloping, at the first spring of day as I rode up through your oak-groves.’

‘As to speak of Valkyries,’ said Fiorinda: ‘I had supposed rather that your highness thought my horse had ta’en command of me: so swift as you rode me down and had him by the bridle.’

The King met her eyes, green and hard. ‘It is best way,’ he said, ‘with a Valkyrie: safer treat Goddess as woman than woman as Goddess. And, as to speak of pardon: tell me not, mistress! You knew. And studied so to sit on: note whether I’d call you.’

She stood silent, looking down, as a statue unconcerned save that from the faint lifting, like the wings of a sea-swallow in flight, of her slender black eye-brows and from some subtle change about her mouth, there seemed to be shed about her a coldness as of the waste between the worlds.

‘I have procured a place for you,’ said the King: ‘lady of the bedchamber to the Duchess. Will you thank me for it?’

She looked up, and first at the Duchess. ‘I’ll thank both, and offend none. And, so please your serenity, I’ll ask my husband’s leave first.’

‘No need,’ said the King. ‘That’s asked and given this hour since. And now attend me, Beroald.’ He said apart to the Duchess, looking into her green eyes across her fingers as he raised her hand to his lips, ‘You see, madonna: I will do your way.’

‘The Chancellor? O I am glad,’ said she, and it was as if some benediction came and went like a breath of honeysuckle among common garden sweetnesses.

‘Then, ladies, give us leave for an hour. ’Fore God, matters of state, here in Memison, serve as salt pilchards and fumadoes ’twixt the wines, lest too much sweetness quite cloy us. Even as lovely Memison and your dear acquaintance, madam, are my noonday shadow and greenery in the desert of great action.’

‘And yourself,’ said the Duchess, ‘Lord of us and all; and yet slave yourself to that same desert.’

‘Of one thing only, in earth or heaven, am I slave.’

‘And ’tis?’

‘Of my own self will,’ said the King, laughing at her. ‘Come Chancellor.’

They two walked away slowly, over the lawn and through under that colonnade to another lawn, a hundred and fifty paces in length, may be, and forty across, with the long eastward-facing wall of the castle to bound it on the further side. Fair in the midst of that lawn they now began to pace the full length of it back and forth with slow and deliberate strides; and whiles they talked, whiles they seemed, falling silent, to weigh the matter. Low was their talk, and in that open sun-smitten place no danger of eavesdropping; unless the blackbird that hopped before them, jerking his tail, should listen and understand their discourse; or the martin, skimming to and fro in flashes of black and silver, still coming and returning again to her nest in the colonnade.

‘I have eggs on the spit, Beroald.’

‘I know,’ said the Chancellor, very soberly.

‘How should you know? I never told you.’

‘I can smell them, even through this air of lilies.’

‘Beroald, I have resolved to employ you in a matter I did mean, until this morning, none should have hand in but myself only. Am I well advised, think you?’

‘If your serenity mean, well advised in undertaking of the thing, how can I answer, knowing not for certain what it is?’

‘I mean,’ said the King, and there was a tartness in his voice, ‘is it well advised to open, even to you, a business of so much peril and import?’

The Chancellor paused. Then, ‘That is a question,’ he said, ‘my Lord the King, that neither you nor I can answer. The event only can answer it.’

‘You say, then, the event must show whether I be a fool to trust you? Whether you be, as I think, a man of mettle, and a man of judgement, and my man?’

‘Your highness hath spoke my thought with your own mouth.’

‘As cold as that?’

‘Well, there is this besides,’ said the Chancellor: ‘that you were always my furtherer; and I, having looked on this world for five times seven years, have learnt this much of wisdom, to “bow to the bush I get bield frae”.’

‘A fair-weather friend could say that,’ said the King, searching his face. ‘But we are to put into a sea we cannot sound.’

The Chancellor replied, ‘I can say no more; save that, if this be action indeed, as your highness (as I have ever known you) counteth action, then, choosing me or any other man, you have but a weak staff to lean unto.’

‘Enough. Beroald, my eye is on the Parry.’

‘So are lesser eyes.’

‘These four years.’

‘Since his crushing for you of Valero’s rebellion in the March of Ulba. You have taken your time.’

‘I would let him run on in his course of spending.’

‘Yet remember,’ said the Chancellor, ‘his policy is that of the duck: above water, idle and scarce seen to stir; but under water, secretly and speedily swimming towards his purpose.’

The King said, ‘I know an otter shall pluck down yonder duck by the foot when least she doubts it.’

‘It will need civil war now to bring him in.’

‘He is my Vicar in Rerek. Will it not argue a feeble statecraft if I, that have reigned twenty-five years in troubles and disquietudes, cannot now command my own officer without I make war against him?’

‘Your serenity may have information we know not of. But most certain it is that, ever since the overthrow of those attempts in the Marches made him higher crested, he hath used your royal commission as his grappling-iron to grapple to his private allegiance the whole mid kingdom ’twixt Megra and the Zenner. I say not he meaneth openly to outbeard the sovereign himself. I think not so. But waiteth his time.’

They took a turn in silence. Then said the King, letting his right fore-arm, that had lain loosely about the Lord Beroald’s neck, slip back till the hand shut strong upon his shoulder: ‘You remember we lately found a league in hand ’mongst some discontented spirits in Rerek and the Marches, which practice, though the branches on’t were easily cut off, yet was it thought to have a more dangerous and secret root. I myself have since, by divers ways, as many lines meet in the dial’s centre, come nearer to the truth. There be five or six, instruments of his: names, were I to name ’em you’d ne’er believe me: so many showing friends, so many unshowing enemies. I have letters, enough to satisfy me. Advise me: what shall I do?’

‘Summon them before you, himself and all, and let them answer the matter. If their answer be not sufficient, take off their heads.’

‘What? When the cry “Puss, puss, where art thou?” were next way to fright ’em to open rebellion? Mend your counsel, my lord Chancellor: this serves not.’

‘Serene highness, I am a man of law, and should meddle no further than my commission. Yet is it the platform and understanding of all law that the King, just cause arising, may lawfully act without the law? You are our great pilot, on whom all we cast our eyes and seek our safety. For security of your person, it were good this Vicar were made away. This then is my counsel: assure yourself well of your forces, and, that done, strike: and at unawares.’

The King laughed in his great black beard. ‘You have confirmed my very resolve, and so shall it be. But with two provisoes. First, I’ll not, like an unskilful boor, kill my good hawk ’cause she turns haggard: I’ll tame my Horius Parry, not end him.’

‘I’m sorry, then,’ said the Chancellor. ‘He is a buzzard: he is of bad carry: you can make him do nothing.’

‘Who are you, to prescribe and measure my ability?’

‘It should not be for my honesty to flatter you. Moreover, your highness hath proved him a man that neither believeth anything that another man speaketh, nor speaketh anything himself worthy to be believed.’

‘I say to you,’ said the King, ‘I’ll bring him to lure. As some reclaim ravens, kestrels, pies, what not, and man them for their pleasure, have I not so used him as my own these years and years? I would not lose him for twice the purchase of that dominion he holdeth for me.’

Beroald said, ‘If my words be too thin to carry so tough a matter, let your serene highness be advised further: require of my lord Admiral, or Earl Roder, or old Bodenay, your knight marshall in Rialmar, their opinions; or your tributary princes in north Rerek: they’ll say the same.’

But the King answered him, ‘Not all of you, Beroald, on your bended knees, nor all my liege subjects up and down the Three Kingdoms, might move me in this. Besides,’ he said, halting and turning to look Beroald in the eye, ‘(and here’s second proviso): to be King, as I have ever opinioned and ever set my course according, should be by competency, not by privilege. If I of myself be not competent of this thing to perform it, better goodnight then and a new king i’ the land.

‘Hearken, therefore, and note it well. ’Twas not by chance I guested with him in Laimak two weeks since in such loving-kindness, in my progress, and well forced; nor by chance that I removed thence with great show of pomp south hither into Meszria. It was to lull them. For all this I did, knowing secretly that he is to meet one night, in some convenient place remote among the upper waters of the Zenner, with five or six (the same I spoke on), there to complete and make up their plot for seizing of Rerek to be a kingdom of itself, with him king thereof. Of time, place, and other particulars of this meeting set, I expect information hourly. You and I, we two alone, will keep that tryst with ’em: wherein if I bring not the rest to destruction and him to his obedience, at least I’ll die attempting it.

‘Well? Will you go, or bide behind?’

The Chancellor very pale and proud of mien, gazing as if into some distance, said after a minute: ‘I’ll go, my Lord the King.’ The King took him by both hands and kissed him. ‘And yet,’ said the Chancellor, facing him now squarely, ‘I would, with your serene highness’ leave, say one word.’

‘Say on, what thee lust.’

‘This, then: I think you are stark mad. And yet,’ he said and drew up his lip, ‘I may well humour my master in this, to suffer myself to be murdered along with him; for I am not afraid of my death.’

The King looked strangely at him: so might some eagle-baffling mountain look upon its own steadfastness imagined dim in some lake where rufflings of the water mar the reflection: so, it may be, might Zeus the cloud-gatherer look down, watching out of Ida. ‘If such fate expect my life, then better so. This must be for us a master-hour, an hour that judgeth all others. I’ll not turn back, Beroald.’

III
A MATCH AND SOME LOOKERS ON

‘TIME, you know, is a curious business’, said Lord Anmering, tilting his head forward a little to let the brim of his panama hat shade his eyes; for it was teatime, and the afternoon sun, from beyond the cricket field below, blazed out of cloudless blue full in their faces. ‘Love of money, we’re told – root of all evil. Gad! I think otherwise. I think Time strikes deeper.’

Lady Southmere replenished the vacuum with one of the more long-drawn, contemplative, and non-committal varieties of the inimitable transatlantic ‘Aha’.

‘Look at Mary,’ he said. ‘Look at me. If I wasn’t her father: wasn’t thirty-two years her senior. Wouldn’t I know what to do with her?’

‘Well, I dare say you would.’

‘Easy enough when they’re not your own,’ he said, as they walked on slowly, coming to a halt at the top of two flights of shallow steps that led down to the field from the gardens. ‘But when they are – By Jove, that’s the style!’ The ball, from a magnificent forward drive, sailed clean over the far fence, amid shouts of applause, for six. ‘If you let your boy go and smash my melon-houses, knocking the bowling about like that, I’ll tell you, I’ll have no more to do with him. We mustn’t forget,’ he said, lower again: ‘she’s very young. Never force the pace.’

‘O but don’t I just agree? And the very dearest, sweetest—’

‘You know her, well as I do. No, you don’t, though. Look there,’ putting up his eye-glass to examine the telegraph board: ‘Eighty. Eighty: a hundred and sixty-three: that’s eighty-four to win. Not so bad, with only three wickets down. It’s that boy of yours is doing it: wonderful steady play: nice style too: like to see him make his century. You know our two best bats, Chedisford and that young Macnaghten, didn’t add up to double figures between ’em: Hugh’s got his work cut out for him. Look at that! Pretty warm bowling. A strong team old Playter’s brought us over this time from Hyrnbastwick: Jove, I’d like to give ’em a whacking for a change. Well, Hugh and Jim seem settled to it. Would you like to come down over there: get a bit of shade?’

‘I would like to do anything anybody tells me to. This is just too perfect.’ She turned, before coming down the steps, to look back for a minute to the great west front of Anmering Blunds, where it ranged beyond green lawns and flower-beds and trim deep-hued hedges of clipped box and barberry and yew: long rows of mullioned windows taking the sun, whose beams seemed to have fired the very substance of the ancient brickwork to some cool-burning airy essence of gold. This wing, by Inigo Jones, was the newest part, masking from this side the original flint-built house that had been old Sir Robert Scarnside’s whom Henry VIII made first Earl of Anmering. Round to the right, in the home park, stood up, square and grey, Anmering church tower. A sheltering wood of oak, ash, beech and sycamore was a screen for hall and church and garden against the east; and all the midsummer leafage of these trees seemed, at this hour, impregnate with that golden light. Northwards, all lay open, the ground falling sharply to the creek, salt marshes and sand-dunes and thence-away, to the North Pole, the sea. Southwards and landwards, park and wood and meadow and arable rose gently to the heaths and commons: Bestarton, Sprowswood, Toftrising. Lady Southmere, waiting on the silence a minute, might hear as under-tones to the voices of the cricket field (of players and lookers on, click of wood against leather as the batsman played) the faint far-off rumour of tide-washed shingle, and, from trees, the woodpigeon’s rustic, slumbrous, suddenly started and suddenly checked, discourse: Two coos, tak’ two coos, Taffy, tak’ two coos, Taffy tak— From golden rose to larkspur a swallowtail butterfly fluttered in the heat. ‘Just too perfect for words,’ she said, turning at last.

They came down the steps and began walking, first north, and so round by the top end of the cricket field towards the tents. ‘I’ll make a clean breast of it,’ she said: ‘twenty-six years now I have been English and lived in the Shires; and yet, Blunds in summer, well, it gets me here: sends me downright home-sick.’ Just as, underneath all immediate sounds or voices, those distant sea-sounds were there for the listening, so in Lady Southmere’s speech there survived some pleasant native intonations of the southern States.

‘Home-sick?’ said Lord Anmering. ‘Virginia?’

‘No, no, no: just for Norfolk. Aren’t I English? And isn’t your Norfolk pure England as England ought to be?’

‘Better get Southmere to do an exchange: give me the place in Leicestershire and you take Blunds.’

‘Well and would you consent to that? Can you break the entail?’

‘My dear lady,’ he said, ‘there are many things I would do for you—’

‘But hardly that?’

‘I’m afraid, not that.’

‘O isn’t that just too bad!’ she said, as Jim Scarnside, playing forward to a yorker, was bowled middle stump.

Fifty or sixty people, may be, watched the game from this western side where the tents were and garden chairs and benches, all in a cool shade of beech and chestnut and lime and sycamore that began to throw shadows far out upon the cricket field: a pleasant summer scene as any could wish, of mingled sound and silence, stir and repose: white hats and white flannels and coloured caps and blazers contrasting here and there with more formal or darker clothes: a gaiety of muslin frocks, coloured silks, gauzes and ribbons, silken parasols and picture hats: the young, the old, the middle-aged: girls, boys, men, women: some being of the house-party; some, the belongings of the eleven that had driven over with Colonel Playter from Hyrnbastwick; some, neighbours and acquaintance from the countryside: wives, friends, parents, sisters, cousins, aunts. Among these their host, with Lady Southmere, now threaded his way, having for each, as he passed, the just greeting, were it word, smile, formal salutation or private joke: the Playter girls, Norah and Sybil, fresh from school: old Lady Dilstead, Sir Oliver’s mother, and his sister Lucy (engaged to Nigel Howard): young Mrs Margesson, a niece of Lord Anmering’s by marriage: Romer, the bursar of Trinity: Limpenfield of All Souls’: General Macnaghten and his wife and son: Trowsley of the Life Guards: Tom and Fanny Chedisford: Mr and Mrs Dagworth from Semmering: Sir Roderick Bailey, the Admiral, whose unpredictable son Jack had made top score (fifty) for the visiting eleven that morning: the Rector and his wife: the Denmore-Benthams: Mr and Mrs Everard Scarnside (Jim’s parents) and Princess Mitzmesczinsky (his sister): the Bremmerdales from Taverford: the Sterramores from Burnham Overy: Janet Rustham and her two little boys: Captain Feveringhay; and dozens besides.

‘Sorry, uncle,’ said Jim Scarnside, as their paths met: he on his way to the pavilion. ‘Ingloriously out for three.’

‘I was always told,’ Lady Southmere said, ‘you ought to block a yorker.’

‘My dear Lady Southmere, don’t I know it? But (I know you won’t believe this), it was all your fault.’

‘That’s very very interesting.’

‘It was.’

‘And please, why?’

‘Well. Just as that chap Howard was walking back the way he does to get properly wound up for one of those charging-buffalo runs that terrify the life out of a poor little batsman like me—’

‘Poor little six foot two!’ she said.

‘Just at that instant, there, on the horizon, your black and white parasol! And I remembered: Heavens! Didn’t Mary make me promise that Lady Southmere should have the first brew of strawberries and cream, because they’re so much the best? and isn’t it long past tea-time, and here she comes, so late, and they’ll all be gone? So there: and Nigel Howard sends down his beastly yorker. Is it fair? Really, Uncle Robert, you ought not to allow ladies to look on at serious cricket like ours. All very well at Lord’s and places like that; but here, it’s too much of a distraction.’

‘But dreadfully awkward,’ said she, laughing up at him, ‘not to have us to put the blame on? Jim!’ she called after him as they parted: he turned. ‘It was real noble and kind of you to think about the strawberries.’

‘I’m off to rescue them.’ And, using his bat like a walking-stick, he disappeared with long galloping strides in the direction of the tea-tent.

St John, next man in, was out first ball. This made an excitement, in expectation that Howard should do the hat-trick; but Denmore-Bentham, who followed, batted with extreme circumspection and entire success (in keeping his wicket up, though not indeed in scoring).

‘Who’s this young fellow that’s been putting up all the runs? Radford? Bradford? I couldn’t catch the name?’ said an old gentleman with white whiskers, white waistcoat, and that guinea-gold complexion that comes of long living east of Suez. His wife answered: ‘Lord Glanford, Lord Southmere’s son. They’re staying here at the house, I think. And that’s his sister: the pretty girl in pink, with brown hair, talking now to Lady Mary.’

His glance, following where hers gave him the direction, suddenly came to rest; but not upon Lady Rosamund Kirstead. For Mary, chancing at that instant to rise and, in her going, look back with some laughing rejoinder to her friends, stood, for that instant, singled; as if, sudden in a vista between trees, a white sail drawing to the wind should lean, pause, and so righting itself pass on its airy way. A most strange and singular look there was, for any perceiving eye to have read, in the eyes of that old colonial governor: as though, through these ordinary haphazard eyes, generations of men crowded to look forth as from a window.

Glanford, with a new partner, seemed to settle down now to win the match by cautious steady play, never taking a risk, never giving a chance. When, after a solid half hour of this, a hundred at last went up on the board, the more cavalierly minded among the onlookers began to give rein to their feelings. ‘Darling Anne,’ Fanny Chedisford said, arm in arm with Lady Bremmerdale, ‘I simply can’t stick it any longer: poke, poke, poke: as soon look on at a game of draughts. For heaven’s sake, let’s go and drown our sorrows in croquet.’

‘Croquet? I thought you agreed with Mary—’

‘I always do. But when?’

‘When she said it was only fit for curates and dowagers, and then only if they’d first done a course in a criminal lunatic asylum.’

‘O we’re all qualified after this. Try a foursome: here’s Jim and Mr Margesson: ask them to join in.’

‘Did I hear someone pronounce my name disrespectfully?’ said Jim Scarnside. Fanny laughed beneath her white parasol. ‘Ah, it was my much esteemed and never sufficiently to be redoubted Miss Chedisford. You know,’ he said to Cuthbert Margesson, ‘Miss Chedisford hasn’t forgiven us for not making it a mixed match.’

‘Broom-sticks for the men?’ said Margesson.

‘Not at all,’ said Fanny.

Jim said, ‘I should think not! Come on: Margesson’s in next wicket down. It does seem rather cheek, when he’s captain, but after all it’s his demon bowling made him that, and his noted diplomacy. Let’s take him on and coach him a bit: teach him to slog.’

Anne Bremmerdale smiled: ‘Better than croquet.’ They moved off towards the nets.

‘Are you a bat, Miss Chedisford? Or a bowler?’ said Margesson.

‘Well, I can bat more amusingly than this.’ Fanny cast a disparaging glance at the game. ‘My brothers taught me.’

‘All the same,’ Margesson said, ‘Glanford’s playing a fine game. We shall beat you yet, Lady Bremmerdale. How is it you didn’t bring your brother over to play for Hyrnbastwick?’

‘Which one? I’ve five.’

‘I’ve only met one. The youngest. Your brother Edward, isn’t it?’

‘She couldn’t bring him because she hasn’t got him.’

Fanny said, ‘I thought he was staying with you now at Taverford?’

‘Not since early May.’

‘He’s the kind of man,’ said Jim, ‘you never know where he is.’

Fanny looked surprised. ‘I’d have sworn,’ she said, ‘it was Edward Lessingham I saw this morning. Must have been his double.’

‘Antipholus of Ephesus,’ said Jim: ‘Antipholus of Syracuse.’

‘About eight o’clock,’ said Fanny. ‘It was such a dream of a morning, all sopping with dew. I’d got up with the lark and walked the dogs right up onto Kelling Heath before breakfast. I’d swear no one in these parts had that marvellous seat on a horse that he has. So careless. My dear, I’ll bet you anything you like it was he: galloping south, towards Holt!’

‘Really, Fanny, it couldn’t have been,’ said Anne.

‘There are not many young men you’d mistake for him,’ said Fanny.

Jim said to them, ‘Talking of Kelling Heath, I’ll tell you an idea of mine; why can’t we get up a point-to-point there this autumn? What do you say, Cuthbert?’

‘I’m all for it.’

‘I tackled Colonel Playter about it today at lunch: very important to get him, as M.F.H., to bless it: in fact, he really ought to take it over himself, if it’s to be a real good show. He likes the idea. Did you sound Charles, Anne?’

‘Yes I did: he’s awfully keen on it, and means to get a word with you this evening. Of course you could have a magnificent run right over from Weybourne Heath to Salthouse Common, and back the other way; pretty rough and steep, though, in places.’

Fanny accepted the change of subject. May be she thought the more.

Bentham was out: caught at the wicket: six wickets down for a hundred and nine, of which Glanford had made sixty off his own bat. Margesson now went in, and (not because of any eggings on of impatient young ladies – unless, indeed, telepathy was at work – for Glanford it was who did the scoring), the play began to be brisk. Major Rustham, the Hyrnbastwick captain, now took Howard off and tried Sir Charles Bremmerdale, whose delivery, slowish, erratic, deceptively easy in appearance, yet concealed (as dangerous currents in the body of smooth-seeming water) a puzzling variety of pace and length and now and again an unexpected and most disconcerting check or spin. But Glanford had plainly got his eye in: Margesson too. ‘We’re winning, Nell,’ said Lord Anmering to his niece, Mrs Margesson. ‘A dashed fine stand!’ said Sybil Playter. ‘Shut up swearing,’ said her sister. ‘Shut up yourself: I’m not.’ People clapped and cheered Glanford’s strokes. Charles Bremmerdale now could do nothing with him: to mid-off, two: to mid-on, two: a wide: a strong drive, over cover’s head, to the boundary, four: to long-leg in the deep field, two – no – three, while Jack Bailey bungles it with a long shot at the wicket: point runs after it: ‘Come on!’ Four: the fieldsman is on it, turns to throw in: ‘No!’ says Margesson, but Glanford, ‘Yes! come on!’ They run: Bremmerdale is crouched at the wicket: a fine throw, into his hands, bails off and Glanford run out. ‘Bad luck!’ said Jim Scarnside, standing with Tom and Fanny Chedisford at the scoring table: Glanford had made ninety-one. ‘But why the devil will he always try and bag the bowling?’

Glanford walked from the field, bat under his arm, shaking his head mournfully as he undid his batting-gloves. He went straight to the pavilion to put on his blazer, and thence, with little deviation from the direct road, to Mary. ‘I am most frightfully sorry,’ he said, sitting down by her. ‘I did so want to bring you a century for a birthday present.’

‘But it was a marvellous innings,’ she said. ‘Good heavens, “What’s centuries to me or me to centuries?” It was splendid.’

‘Jolly decent of you to say so. I was an ass, though, to get run out.’

Mary’s answering smile was one to smoothe the worst-ruffled feathers; then she resumed her conversation with Lucy Dilstead: ‘You can read them over and over again, just as you can Jane Austen. I suppose it’s because there’s no padding.’

‘I’ve only read Shagpat, so far,’ said Lucy.

‘O that’s different from the rest. But isn’t it delicious? So serious. Comedy’s always ruined, don’t you think, when it’s buffooned? You want to live in it: something you can laugh with, not laugh at.’

‘Mary has gone completely and irretrievably cracked over George Meredith,’ Jim said, joining them.

‘And who’s to blame for that?’ said she. ‘Who put what book into whose hand? and bet what, that who would not be able to understand what-the-what it was all driving at until she had read the first how many chapters how many times over?’

Jim clutched his temples, histrionically distraught. Hugh was not amused. The match proceeded, the score creeping up now very slowly with Margesson’s careful play. General Macnaghten was saying to Mr Romer, ‘No, no, she’s only twenty. It is: yes: quite extraordinary; but being only daughter, you see, and no mother, she’s been doing hostess and so on for her father two years now, here and in London: two London seasons. Makes a lot of difference.’

Down went another wicket: score, a hundred and fifty-three. ‘Now for some fun,’ people said as Tom Appleyard came on the field; but Margesson spoke a winged word in his ear: ‘Look here, old chap: none of the Jessop business. It’s too damned serious now.’ ‘Ay, ay, sir.’ Margesson, in perfect style, sent back the last ball of the over. Appleyard obediently blocked and blocked. But in vain. For one of Bremmerdale’s master-creations of innocent outward show and inward guile sneaked round Margesson’s defence and took his leg stump. Nine wickets down: total a hundred and fifty-seven: last man, nine. Hyrnbastwick, in some elation, were throwing high catches round the field while Dilstead, Anmering’s next (and last) man in, walked to the wicket. Margesson said to Tom Appleyard, ‘It’s up to you now, my lad. Let ’em have it, damn slam and all if you like. But, by Jingo, we must pull it off now. Only seven to win.’ Appleyard laughed and rubbed his hands.

There was no more desultory talk: all tense expectancy. ‘If Sir Oliver gets the bowling, that puts the lid on it: never hit a ball yet.’ ‘Why do they play him then?’ ‘Why, you silly ass, because he’s such a thundering good wicket-keeper.’ George Chedisford, about sixteen, home from Winchester because of the measles, maintained a mature self-possession at Lord Anmering’s elbow: ‘I wish my frater – wish my brother was in again, sir. He’d do the trick.’ ‘You watch Mr Appleyard: he’s a hitter.’ By good luck, that ball that had beaten Margesson was last of the over, so that Appleyard, not Dilstead, faced the bowling: Howard once more, a Polyphemus refreshed. His first ball was a yorker, but Appleyard stopped it. The second, Appleyard, all prudent checks abandoned, stepped out and swiped. Boundary: four. Great applaudings: the parson’s children and the two little Rustham boys, with the frenzy of Guelph and Ghibelline, jumped up and down jostling each other. The next ball, a very fierce one, pitched short and rose at the batsman’s head. Appleyard smashed it with a terrific over-hand stroke: four again – ‘Done it!’ ‘Match!’

Then, at the fourth ball, Appleyard slogged, missed, and was caught in the slips. And so amid great merriment, chaff and mutual congratulations, the game came to an end.

‘Come into the Refuge,’ said Jim Scarnside, overtaking Mary as they went in to dress for dinner: ‘just for two twos. I left my humble birthday offering in there, and I want to give it to you.’

‘O, but,’ she said, pausing and looking back, one foot on the threshold of the big French window: ‘I thought it was a bargain, no more birthday presents. I can’t have you spending all those pennies on me.’ Her right hand was lifted to a loose hanger of wistaria bloom, shoulder-high beside the doorway: in her left she carried her hat, which she had taken off walking up from the garden. The slant evening sun kindled so deep a Venetian glory in her hair that every smooth-wound coil, each braid, each fine straying little curl or tendril, had its particular fire-colour, of chestnut, tongued flame, inward glow of the brown-red zircon, burnished copper, realgar, sun-bleached gold: not self-coloured, but all in a shimmer and interchange of hues, as she moved her head or the air stirred them.

‘Twenty pennies precisely,’ said Jim. ‘Can’t call that breaking a bargain. Come. Please.’

‘All right,’ she smiled, and went before him through the small tea-room and its scents of pot-pourri, and through the great skin-strewn hall with its portraits and armour and trophies and old oak and old leather and Persian rugs and huge open fire-place filled at this season with roses and summer greenery, and so by a long soft-carpeted passage to the room they called the Refuge: a cosy sunny room, not belonging to Mary specially or to her father, but to both, and free besides to all dogs (those at least that were allowed in the house) that lived at Blunds, and to all deserving friends and relations. Those parts of the walls that were not masked by bookcases or by pictures showed the pale reddish paper of Morris’s willow pattern; a frieze of his rich dark night-blue design of fruit, with its enrichments of orange, lemon, and pomegranate and their crimson and pallid blooms, ran around below the ceiling. There was a square table with dark green cloth and upon it a silver bowl of roses: writing things on the table and chairs about it, and big easy chairs before the fire-place: a bag of tools (saws, hammers, screw-drivers, pliers and such-like) behind the door, a leather gun-case and fishing-rods in this corner, walking-sticks and hunting-crops in that, a pair of field-glasses on the shelf, some dog-medicines: pipes and cigar-boxes on the mantel-piece: on a bureau a large mahogany musical-box: an early Victorian work-table, a rack full of newspapers, a Cotman above the mantel, an ancient brass-bound chest covered with an oriental rug or foot-cloth of silk: a Swiss cuckoo-clock: a whole red row of Baedekers on one of the bookshelves, yellowbacks on another: Wuthering Heights open on a side-table, Kipling’s Many Inventions open on a chair, and a text of Homer on the top of it: a box of tin soldiers and a small boy’s cricket bat beside them: over there a doll or two and a toy theatre, with a whole mass of woolly monkeys, some in silver-paper armour and holding pins for swords: a cocker spaniel asleep on the hearth-rug, and a little dark grey hairy dog, a kind of Skye terrier with big bat-like ears and of beguiling appearance, asleep in an armchair. There pervaded this room, not to be expelled for all the fresh garden air that came and went through its wide windows and door which opened on the garden, a scent curiously complex and curiously agreeable, as of a savoury stew compounded of this varied apparatus of the humanities. Plainly a Refuge it was, and by no empty right of name: a refuge from tidiness and from all engines, correctitudes, and impositions of the world: in this great household, a little abbey of Thélème, with its sufficient law, ‘Fay ce que vouldras’.

Mary sat on the table while Jim unearthed from somewhere a little parcel and presented it to her, with scissors from the work-table to cut the string. ‘Twenty, you see, for the birthday cake,’ he said, as she emptied out on the green baize a handful of little coloured candles.

‘You are so absurd.’

‘We ought to have the cake,’ he said. ‘No time for it now, though. Look: there are heaps of colours, you see. Do you know what they mean?’

‘How should I know?’

‘I’ll show you’: he began to arrange them side by side. ‘They’re highly symbolical. Nine white. Those are your nine first years: tabula rasa, from my point of view. Then, you see, a red one: a red-letter day for you when you first met me.’

‘Was I ten then? I’d forgotten.’

‘La Belle Dame sans Merci, always forgets. Now, look: violet, blue, green, yellow, orange, pink.’

‘The rainbow?’

‘Haven’t I charming thoughts?’

‘Then three goldy ones. Gold dust in them,’ said she, touching them with one finger.

‘Because of the presents,’ Jim said, ‘that I’d like to have given you these last three years, had I been Midas or John D. Rockefeller. Last, you observe: Black. For my own sake, because you’re going to be married.’

‘My dear Jim, what awful nonsense! Who told you so?’

‘That would be telling. Isn’t it true?’ He backed to the fireplace and stood looking at her.

The sudden colour in her cheek, spreading yet lower as she faced him, made her seem (if that could be) yet lovelier. ‘It is not so,’ answered she. ‘Nor it was not so. And, indeed, God forbid it ever should be so.’

‘O dangerous resolution. But I really think it’s uncommon nice of you, Mary. Of course, for myself, I gave up hope long ago; and you’ll have noticed I’ve even given up asking you these last – two years, is it? No, since your last birthday:’ Mary gave a little start. He moved to the window, and stood not to look direct at her: ‘that was really when I decided, better give it up. But it does help my self-esteem to know there’s no one else in the offing,’ he said, lightly as before, playing with the scissors. ‘May I tell people the good news?’

‘Certainly not. Why should you go meddling with my affairs? I think it’s most insolent of you.’

‘Well, I thought you might like me to tell – well, Glanford: just to break the news to the pore fella.’

There was dead silence. He looked round. Mary’s head was turned away: she seemed to be counting the little candles with her finger. Suddenly she stood up: went over to the fire-place. ‘Sheila’s a naughty little thing,’ she said: the form curled up on the chair moved the tip of a feathery tail and, with a pricking and apologetic laying again of bat-like ears, cast up at Mary a most melting glance. ‘Ate a quarter of a pound of butter in the larder this morning; and yet now, what a little jewel she looks: as if butter wouldn’t melt.’ She bent and kissed the little creature between the eyes, a kind of butterfly kiss, then, erect again, confronted Jim.

‘It was infernal cheek on my part,’ he said, ‘to say that. Still: between old friends—’

Mary swept up the candles. ‘I must fly and change.’ Then, over her shoulder from the doorway, where she turned for an instant, tall, light of carriage in her white dress, like a nymph of Artemis: ‘Thanks for a word fitly spoken, mon ami!

IV
LADY MARY SCARNSIDE

THAT something which, asleep or awake, resided near the corner of Mary’s mouth peeked at itself in the looking-glass: a private interchange of intelligence between it and its reflection there, not for her to read. She turned from the dressing-table to the window. It was slack-water, and the tide in. Under the sun the surface of the creek was liquid gold. The point, with its coastguard cottage, showed misty in the distance. Landscape and waterscape departed, horizon beyond horizon, to that meeting of earth and heaven which, perhaps because of the so many more and finer gradations of air made visible, seemed far further remote in this beginning of midsummer evening than in the height of day. Mary stood for a minute looking from the window, where the airs stirred with honeysuckle scents and rose scents and salt and pungent scents of the marsh and sea.

Suddenly she moved and came back to the looking-glass. ‘“Then that’s settled, Señorita Maria. I carry you off tonight.” – And that,’ she said aloud, looking at herself with that sideways incisive mocking look that she inherited from her father, ‘was a piece of damned impertinence.’

There was a knock at the door. ‘Come in. O Angier, I’ll ring when I’m ready for you: ten minutes or so.’

‘Yes, my lady. I thought your ladyship would want me to do your hair tonight.’

‘Yes I’ll ring,’ Mary said, giving her maid a smile in the looking-glass. She retired, saying, ‘It’s nearly half past seven, my lady.’

Half past seven. And half past seven this morning. Twelve hours ago. Thrown from her ring, where the sun took it, a rainbow streak of colour appeared on the carpet: her white kitten made a pounce to seize the mysterious dancing presence, now there, now gone. And then, half past seven tomorrow. Always on the go, by the look of it: everything. Nothing stays. She moved her finger, to draw the iridescent phantom again along the carpet and so up the wall, out of reach from velvet paws that pounced. And yet, you can’t believe that. The whole point about a thing like this morning is that it does stay: somewhere it stays. What you want to find out how to get back to it: or forward? for it is forward, too. Or perhaps back and forward don’t belong to it at all: it just is. Perhaps back and forward just aren’t. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

To ride her down like that: if anyone had seen them. ‘Unpardonable,’ Mary said, as she took her seat at the mirror and began to let down her hair. And Tessa is a pretty good little mare: showed him a clean pair of heels for a mile or so. Something in the shadowy backgrounds of the mirror surprisingly assumed a neat little black thoroughbred horse’s face, and shockingly said to Mary: ‘Haven’t I a perfect mouth? to have understood and slowed down the least little bit in the world just at the—’

The north-westerly sun made it hot in the dressing-room. The door was shut between this and her bedroom, to keep that cool for the night: bedroom with windows that opened north and east to let in the mornings. She was in a kind of kimono of pale blue silk after her bath, and now, for this heat, while she sat to brush her hair, she untied the sash, and with a shake of her shoulders, let the soft garment fall open and down about her hips. ‘Carry you off tonight.’ It really was a bit much. The extraordinary coolness of it all, after that dreadful scene they had had at the end of April, when he had turned up five months before his time, and she had said – well, said enough to end it for most men, one would think. And yet now, this morning, after six weeks of obedient absence and silence— She had ridden to hounds often enough; but to be hunted like a hare! True, she had started the thing, in a way, by turning to ride off in the other direction as soon as she saw him. But still. Her bosom rose and fell with the memory of it: as if all the wide universe had suddenly run hunting-mad, and she the quarry: she and poor little Tessa with her flying feet: an excitement like darkness with sudden rollings in it like distant drums; and the trees, the solid ground, the waking buttercups and meadowsweet with the dew on them, the peggy-whitethroat on the thorn, the brier-rose at the edge of the wood, larks trilling invisible in the blue, the very upland newness of the summer air of this birthday morning, all had seemed as if caught up into that frenzy of flight to join in the hunt, multiplying the galloping music of Lessingham’s horse-hooves, now loud, now dim, now loud again, to a hue and cry and a gallop of all these things. And then the coolness of him, after this wild horse-race: the astounding assurance of this proposition, put to her so easily and as if it were the simplest thing in the world: and his having a motorcar, so that they shouldn’t be caught. Most monstrous of all, about the luggage: that he had luggage for her as well, every possible thing she could want, every kind of clothes.

How did he know? Mary laid down her brush and leaned back, staring into her own eyes for a minute in the looking-glass. Then, after a minute, some comical matter stirred in her eyes’ inward corners. ‘How did you know?’ she said, addressing not her own image but the mirrored door over its shoulder, as if somone had come in there and stood in the doorway. Then, with eyes resting on herself again, she said suddenly in herself: ‘This is how I should— If we were to be— If we are to be— But no, my friend. Not to be swept up like – like a bunch of candles.’

She and her looking-glass self surveyed one another for a while, coolly, in detail, not looking any more into each other’s eyes nor over each other’s shoulders to the door beyond. At length the looking-glass image said, not audibly, but to Mary’s inward ear: I suppose a man sees it differently. I think I understand, partly, how he might see it: something very delicate, easily hurt, easily broken, but so gentle that you couldn’t bear to. Like a field-mouse or some such: or like a baby. No, for what matters about a baby is what it is going to be; but this – here it is, full-fledged: what it is and what it ought to be, in one: doesn’t want to change: just to be. That is enough for anybody. And its power, what all power ought to be: not to overpower the weak, but overpower the powerful. Really it hasn’t any power: except that it need only lift a finger, and every power there is or ever could be must rise to protect it.

But that isn’t true (said the looking-glass image, going over with musing untroubled eyes the thing before it: chin, throat: gleam of a shoulder betwixt fallen masses of flame-coloured hair: arms whose curves had the motion of swans in them and the swan’s whiteness: breasts of a Greek mould and firmness, dove-like, silver-pure, pointing their rose-flowers in a Greek pride: and those wild delicate little perfections, of the like flame colour, beneath her arms): that isn’t true. And with that (perhaps for two seconds) something happened in the mirror: a two-seconds’ glimpse as of some menace that rushed upwards, like the smoke of some explosion, to yawning immensities bleak, unmeaning, unmindful of the worm that is man; into which void there seemed, for that moment, to be sucked up all comfort of cosy room, home, dear ones, gaiety of youthful blood, the sweet nostalgia of childhood born of the peace of that June evening, its scents, its inwardness and whispered promise: the familiar countryside that made a lap for all these: the sea, island-girdling of England: the kindly natural earth: the very backgrounds and foundations of historic time: sucked up, swallowed, brought to nought. And, naked to this roofless and universal Nothing, she: immeasurably alone, a little feminine living being, and these ‘little decaying beauties of the body’.

But two seconds only, and blood danced again. Mary jumped to her feet: put on some clothes: rang the bell.

She was nearly ready when her father’s knock came on the door: his voice, ‘Can I come in?’

‘Come in, Father.’ She swam towards him with the style of a du Maurier duchess and shook hands in the most extreme high-handed affectation of the moment. ‘So charmed you could come, Lord Anmering. So charmin’ of you to spare us the time, with so much huntin’ and shootin’ this time of year, and the foxes eatin’ up all the pear-blossom and all.’

He played up; then stood back to admire her, theatrically posed for him, with sweeping of her train and manage of her point-lace fan. Her eyes danced with his. ‘Looking very bonnie,’ he said, and kissed her on the forehead. ‘Table arranged? I suppose you’ve given me Lady Southmere? And Hugh on your right?’

‘O yes. Duty at dinner: pleasure afterwards.’

He caught the look on her face as she turned to the dressing-table for her gloves: this and a strained something in her voice. ‘Not a very nice way,’ he said, ‘to talk about our friends.’

Mary said nothing, busy at her looking-glass.

Lord Anmering stood at the window, trimming his nails, his back towards her. Presently he said quietly, ‘I’m getting a bit tired of this attitude towards Glanford.’

Mary was unclasping her pearl necklace to change it for the sapphire pendant: it slipped and fell on the dressing-table. ‘Damn!’ she said, and was silent.

‘Do you understand what I said?’

‘Attitude? I’ve none, that I’m aware of. Certainly not “towards”.’ She fastened the clasp at the back of her neck, turned and came to where he stood, still turned away from her in the window: slipped her arm in his. ‘And I’m not going to be bullied on my birthday.’ His arm tightened on hers, a large reassuring pressure, as to say: Of course she shan’t.

He looked at his watch. ‘Five past eight. We ought to be going down.’

‘O and, Father,’ she said, turning back to him half way to the door, ‘I don’t think I told you (such a rush all day): whom do you think I met out riding this morning? and asked him to come to dinner tonight? Edward Lessingham. Only back from Italy, and I don’t know where, last month.’

Lord Anmering had stopped short ‘You asked him to dinner?’

‘Yes.’

‘What did you do that for?’

‘Ordinary civility. Very lucky, too: we’d have been three thirteens otherwise, with Lady Dilstead turning up.’

‘Pah! We’d have been three thirteens with him, then, when you asked him. And it isn’t so: we were thirty-eight.’

‘Thirty-nine with Madame de Rosas.’

‘My dear girl, you can’t have that dancer woman sit down with us.’

‘Why not? She’s very nice. Perfectly respectable. I think it would be unkind not to. Anybody else would do it.’

‘It’s monstrous, and you’re old enough to know better.’

‘Well, I’ve asked her, and I’ve asked him. You can order them both out if you want to make a scene.’

‘Don’t talk to me like that,’ said her father. She shrugged her shoulders and stood looking away, very rebellious and angry. ‘And I thought you knew perfectly well,’ he said, ‘that I don’t care for that young Lessingham about the place.’

‘I don’t understand what you mean, “about the place”.’

‘I don’t care about him.’

‘I can’t think why. You’ve always liked Anne Bremmerdale. Isn’t his family good enough for you? As old as ours. Older, I should think. You’ve hardly seen him.’

‘I don’t propose to discuss him,’ said Lord Anmering, looking at her piercingly through his eye-glass: then fell silent, as if in debate whether or not to speak his mind. ‘Look here, my darling,’ he said, at last, with an upward flick of the eyebrow letting the eye-glass fall: ‘It’s just as well to have cards on the table. It has been my serious hope that you would one day marry Hugh Glanford. I’m not going to force it or say any more. But, things being as they are, it is as well to be plain about it.’

‘I should have thought it had been plain enough for some time. Hanging about us all the season: most of last winter, too. People beginning to talk, I should think.’

‘What rubbish.’

‘All the same, it was nice of you to tell me, Father. Have you been plain about it to him too?’

‘He approached me some time ago.’

‘And you gave him your—?’

‘I wished him luck. But naturally he understands that my girl must decide for herself in a thing like that.’

‘How very kind of him.’ Mary began laughing. ‘This is delightful: like the ballad:

He’s teld her father and mither baith,

As I hear sindry say,

But he has nae teld the lass her sell,

Till on her wedding day.’

Her voice hardened: ‘I wish I was twenty-one. Do as I liked, then. Marry the next man that asked me—’

‘Mary, Mary—’

‘—So long as it wasn’t Hugh.’ Mary gave a little gulp and disappeared into her bedroom, slamming the door behind her. Her father, feet planted wide apart in the middle of her dressing room floor, waited, moodily polishing his eye-glass with a white silk pocket-handkerchief scented with eau de Cologne. In three minutes she was back again, radiantly mistress of herself, with a presence of mischief dimpling so elusively about mouth and eyes in her swimming towards him, that it were easier tell black from green in the rifle-bird’s glinting neck, than tell whether in this peace-making she charmingly dispensed pardon or as charmingly sought it. ‘Happy birthday?’ she said, inclining her brow demurely for him to kiss. ‘Must go down now, or people will be arriving.’

Among the guests now assembling in the drawing-room Lessingham’s arrival was with some such unnoted yet precise effect as follows the passing of a light cloud across the sun, or the coming of the sun full out again as the cloud shifts. Mary said, as they shook hands, ‘You know Mr Lessingham, Father? You remember he and Jim were at Eton together.’

There was frost in Lord Anmering’s greeting. ‘I had forgotten that,’ he said. ‘When was it I met you last?’

‘About a year ago, sir,’ said Lessingham. ‘I’ve been out of England.’

‘I think I remember. You’ve lived abroad a good deal?’

‘Yes, sir: on and off, these last seven years.’

‘What did you come home for?’

Lessingham’s eyes were grey: straight of gaze, but not easily read, and with a smoulder in the depths of them. He answered, ‘To settle up some affairs.’

‘And so abroad again?’

‘I’ve not decided yet.’

‘A rolling stone?’

Lessingham smiled. ‘Afraid I am, sir.’

Jim joined them: ‘Did I tell you, uncle, about Lessingham’s running across some of your Gurkha porters when he was in India two or three years ago? that had climbed with you and Mr Freshfield in Sikkim?’

‘You’re a climber, then?’ Lord Anmering said to Lessingham, looking him up and down: very tall, perhaps six foot three, black-haired, sunburnt but, as his forehead showed, naturally white and clear of skin, and with the look of one able to command both himself and others, as is not often seen at that age of five and twenty.

‘I’ve done a little.’

‘A lot,’ said Jim. Lessingham shook his head. ‘In the Himalaya?’ said Lord Anmering.

‘A little, sir.’

‘A little!’ said Jim: ‘just listen how these mountaineers talk to each other! Twenty-two thousand feet he did once, on – what’s the name of it? – one of the cubs of Nanga Parbat. A terrific thing; and pages about it at the time in the Alpine Journal. Come,’ he said, taking Lessingham’s arm, ‘I want to introduce you to my sister. She married a Russian: we can never pronounce the name, none of us; so please don’t mind, and please don’t try. You’re taking her in to dinner: that’s right, Mary?’

Mary smiled assent. For a flash, as she turned to welcome the Denmore-Benthams who had just come in, her glance met Lessingham’s. And, unless seen by him and by her, then to every living eye invisible, something (for that flash) danced in the air between them: ‘But, after dinner—’

Dinner was in the picture gallery (where later they were also to dance), the only room big enough and long enough to take forty people comfortably at one table. A fine room it was, eighty feet perhaps by twenty-five, with a row of tall low-silled windows going the whole length of its western wall. These, left uncurtained when dinner began, and with their lower sashes thrown up to admit the evening air, were filled with the sunset. Dozens of candles, each from under its rose-coloured little prim hat of pleated silk, beamed down clear upon the white of the table-cloth, the glass, the silver and the china and the flowers of Mary’s choosing and delicate trailers of greenery; imbuing besides with a softer, a widelier diffused and a warmer glow the evening dresses, the jewels, the masculine black and white, the faces, hosts’ or guests’: faces which, young, old or of doubtful date, were yet all by this unity of candlelight brought into one picture, and by the yet airier but deeper unity that is in pleasant English blood, secure, easy, gay, fancy-free. And (as for proof that England were to wrong her own nature did she fail to absorb the exotic), even the Spanish woman, midway down the table between Jim Scarnside and Hesper Dagworth, was assimilated by that solvent, as the sovereign alkahest will subdue and swallow up all refractory elements and gold itself.

Conversation, like a ballet of little animals (guests at Queen Alice’s looking-glass party when things began to happen), tripped, paused, footed it in and out, pirouetted, crossed and returned, back and forth among the faces and the glasses and the dresses and the lights. For a while, about the head of the table, the more classic figures revolved under the direction of Lord Anmering, Mr Romer, General Macnaghten and Mr Everard Scarnside. Lady Rosamund Kirstead, on the skirts of this Parnassus, her back to the windows, tempered its airs with visions of skiing-slopes above Villars that February (her first taste of winter sports), and so succeeded at last in enveigling Anne and Margesson and Mr Scarnside from those more intellectual scintillations (which Anne excelled in but Rosamund found boring) down to congenial common ground of Ascot, Henley, Lord’s, the Franco-British Exhibition, in prospect and retrospect: what to wear, what not to wear: August, September, grouse-moors and stalkers’ paths of Invernesshire and Sutherland.

Lessingham, further down on the same side of the table, held a three-cornered conversation with Amabel Mitzmesczinsky on his right and Fanny on his left: here the talk danced to merrier and stranger tunes, decking itself out as if the five continents and all past and present were its wardrobe. Into its vortex were drawn Tom Chedisford and Mrs Bentham from across the table, till Jack Bailey sat marooned; for, while Mrs Bentham, his rightful partner, who had hitherto displayed a most comforting interest in things within the grasp of his understanding, unfeelingly began to ignore him for the quattrocento, Lucy Dilstead on his other side conducted an esoteric conversation, not very vocal, with her fiancé. Jack, hearing at last in this loneliness a name he knew (of Botticelli’s Primavera), took advantage of a lull in the talk to say, with honest philistine conviction, ‘And that’s a nasty picture.’ Jim and Hesper Dagworth experimented by turns, Hesper with his own Spanish, Jim with the lady’s English, on Madame de Rosas, who thus became a distraction in the more serious discussions carried on by Bremmerdale, Colonel Playter, and Jim, on the subject of point-to-points. Appleyard with his funny stories kept the Playter girls in fits of boisterous laughter, till finally they took to bombarding him with bread-pills: an enterprise as suddenly ended as suddenly begun, under the horrified reproof of the parson’s wife and the more quelling glare of the paternal eye upon them.

At the foot of the table Mary, as hostess, seemed at first to have her hands full: with Hugh on her right, rather sulky, scenting (may be) an unfavorable climate for his intended proposal, and becoming more and more nervous as time went by; and, on her left, the breezy Admiral, flirting outrageously with Mrs Dagworth who seemed, however, a little distrait, with her eye on Hesper and the de Rosas woman. But Mary’s witty talk and the mere presence of her worked as lovely weather in spring, that can set sap and blood and the whole world in tune.

Lessingham and Mary, breaking off from the dance as it brought them alongside the door, went out quickly and through the tea-room and so out from the music and the stir and the glitter to the free air of the terrace, and there stood a minute to taste it, her arm still in his, looking both into the same enbowered remoteness of the dark and the star-shine: the fragrant body of night, wakeful but still.

Mary withdrew her arm.

Lessingham said, ‘Do you mean to make a practice of this? For the future, I mean?’

‘Of what?’

‘What you’ve been doing to me tonight?’

‘I don’t know. Probably.’

‘Good.’

Mary was fanning herself. Presently he took the fan and plied it for her. The music sounded, rhythmic and sweet, from the picture gallery. ‘That was rather charming of you,’ she said: ‘to say “good”.’

‘Extremely charming of me, if I was a free agent But you may have noticed, that I’m not.’

Mary said, ‘Do you think I am?’

‘Completely, I should say. Completely free, and remarkably elusive.’

‘Elusive? Sometimes people speak truer than they guess.’

‘You’ve eluded me pretty successfully all the evening,’ Lessingham said, as she took back the fan. The music stopped. Mary said, ‘We must go in.’

‘Need we? You’re not cold?’

‘I want to.’ She turned to go.

‘But, please,’ he said at her elbow. ‘What have I done? The only dance we’ve had, and the evening half over—’

‘I’m feeling – ratty.’

Lessingham said no more, but followed her between the sleeping flower-borders to the house. In the doorway they encountered, among others, Glanford coming out. He reddened and looked awkward. Mary reddened too, but passed in, aloof, unperturbed. She and Lessingham came now, through the tea-room and the great galleried hall, to the drawing-room, where, since dinner, at the far end a kind of platform or stage had been put up, with footlights along the front of it, and in all the main floor of the room chairs and sofas arranged as for an audience. Shaded lamps on standards or on tables at the sides and corners of the room made a restful, uncertain, golden light.

‘You’ve heard the castanets before, I suppose?’ said Mary.

‘Yes. Only once properly: in Burgos.’

‘Castanets and cathedrals go rather well together, I should think.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I never thought of that before; but they do. A curious mix up of opposites: the feeling of Time, clicking and clicking endlessly away; and the other – well, as if there were something that did persist.’

‘Like mountains,’ Mary said; ‘and the funny little noise of streams, day after day, month after month, running down their sides.’

Lessingham said, under his breath, ‘And sometimes, an avalanche.’

They were standing now before the fireplace, which was filled with masses of white madonna lilies. Over the mantelpiece, lighted from above by a hidden electric lamp, hung an oil painting, the head-and-shoulders portrait of a lady with smooth black hair, very pale of complexion, taken nearly full-face, with sloping shoulders under her gauzy dress and a delicate slender neck (, as Homer has it in the hymn). Her forehead was high: face long and oval: eyebrows arched and slender: nose rather long, very straight, and with the faintest disposition to turn up at the end, which gave it a certain air of insolent but not unkindly disdainfulness. Her eyes were large, and the space wide between them and between lid and eyebrow: the lid of each, curving swiftly up from the inner corner, ended at the outer corner with another sudden upward twist: a slightly eastern cast of countenance, with a touch perhaps of the Japanese and a touch of the harsh Tartar.

‘Reynolds,’ said Lessingham, after a minute’s looking at it in silence.

‘Yes.’

‘An ancestress?’

‘No. No relation. Look at the name.’

He leaned near to look, in the corner of the canvas: Anne Horton 1766.

‘Done when she was about nineteen,’ said Mary. There seemed to come, as she looked at that portrait, a subtle alteration in her whole demeanour, as when, some gay inward stirrings of the sympathies, friend looks on friend. ‘Do you like it?’

On Lessingham’s face, still studying the picture, a like alteration came. ‘I love it.’

‘She went in for fatty degeneration later on, and became Duchess of Cumberland. Gainsborough painted her as that, several times, later.’

‘I don’t believe it,’ he said. He looked round at Mary. ‘Neither the fat,’ he said, ‘nor the degeneration. I think I know those later paintings, and now I don’t believe them.’

‘They’re not interesting,’ Mary said. ‘But in this one, she’s certainly not very eighteenth-century. Curiously outside all dates, I should say.’

‘Or inside.’

‘Yes: or inside all dates.’

Lessingham looked again at Mrs Anne Horton – the sideways inclination of the eyes: the completely serene, completely aware, impenetrable, weighing, look: lips as if new-closed, as in Verona, upon that private ça m’amuse. He looked quickly back again at Mary. And, plain for him to see, the something that inhabited near Mary’s mouth seemed to start awake or deliciously to recognize, in the picture, its own likeness.

It recognized also (one may guess) a present justification for the ça m’amuse. Perhaps the lady in the picture had divined Mary’s annoyance at Glanford’s insistent, unduly possessive, proposal, at her own rather summary rejection of it, and at Lessingham’s methods that seemed to tar him incongruously with the same brush (and her father, too, not without a touch of that tar): divined, moreover, the exasperation in Mary’s consciousness that she overwhelmingly belonged to Lessingham, that she was being swept on to a choice she did not want to make, and that Lessingham unpardonably (but scarcely unnaturally, not being in these secrets) did not seem to understand the situation.

Mary laughed. It was as if all the face of the night was cleared again.

The room was filling now. Madame de Rosas, in shawl and black mantilla, took her place on the platform, while below, on her right, the musicians began to tune up. Lessingham and Mary had easy chairs at the back, near the door. The lamps were switched out, all except those that lighted the pictures, and the footlights were switched on. ‘And my Cyprus picture over there?’ Lessingham said in Mary’s ear. ‘Do you know why I sent it you?’

Mary shook her head.

‘You know what it is?’

‘Yes: you told me in your letter. Sunrise from Olympus. It is marvellous. The sense of height. Windy sky. The sun leaping up behind you. The cold shadows on the mountains, and goldy light on them. Silver light of dawn. And that tremendous thrown shadow of Olympus himself and the kind of fringe of red fire along its edges: I’ve seen that in the Alps.’

‘Do you know what that is, there: where you get a tiny bit of sea, away on the left, far away over the ranges?’

‘What is it?’

‘Paphos. Where Aphrodite is supposed to have risen from the sea. I camped up there, above Troodos, for a fortnight: go up with my things about four o’clock every morning to catch the sunrise and paint it. I’ll tell you something,’ he said, very low: ‘I actually almost came to believe that story, the whole business, Homeric hymn, Botticelli’s picture in the Uffizi, everything: almost, in a queer way, when I was looking across there, alone, at daybreak. But—’ he said. The strings burst into the rhythm of an old seguidilla of Andalusia: the Spanish woman took the centre of the stage, swept her shawl about her shoulders and stood, statuesque, motionless, in the up-thrown brilliance of the footlights. Lessingham looked up at her for a moment, then back at Mary. Mary’s eyes had left picture for stage; but his, through the half-light, fed only upon Mary: the profile of her face, the gleam of the sapphired pendant that in so restful a sweet unrest breathed with her breathing. ‘But,’ he said, ‘it was you.’ The dusky sapphire stood still for an instant, then, like a ship from the trough of the sea, rose and, upon the surge, down again.

‘It would be a foolish myth if it could have been anyone else but you,’ he whispered. And the castanets began softly upon a flutter or rumour of sound, scarce heard.

An Andalusian dance, done by a hired woman to please the guests at an English country house in this year of Our Lord 1908. And yet, through some handfasting of music with landscape and portrait painted and their embarking so, under the breath of secular deep memories in the blood, upon that warmed sapphire rocked on so dear a sea, the rhythms of the dance seemed to take to themselves words:

Awful, gold-crowned, beautiful, Aphrodite—

and so to the ending:

Hail, You of the flickering eyelids, honey-sweet! And vouchsafe me in this contest to bear victory; and do You attune my song. Surely so will I too yet remember me of another song to sing You.

The castanets, on a long-drawn thinness of sound, as of grass-hoppers on a hot hillside in summer, trembled down to silence. Then a burst of clapping: smiles and curtseys of acknowledgement from the platform: talk let loose again in a buzz and chatter, cleft with the tuning of the strings: under cover of which, Mary said softly, with her eye on the Cyprus picture, ‘You didn’t really believe it?’

‘No. Of course I didn’t.’

‘And yet perhaps, for a moment,’ she said: ‘with that burning on the edge of the shadow? For a moment, in the hurry to paint it?’

Lessingham seemed to answer not her but the mystery, in the half-light, of her face that was turned towards his. In mid speech, as if for the sweet smell of her, the living nearness of her, his breath caught and his words stumbled. ‘I think there’s part of one,’ he said, ‘believes a lot of queer things, when one is actually painting or writing.’

‘Part? And then, afterwards, not believe it any more?’

In a mist, under his eyes the sapphire woke and slept again as, with the slight shifting of her posture, the musk-rose milk-white valley narrowed and deepened.

She said, very softly, ‘Is that how it works? With everything?’

‘I don’t know. Wish I did.’

V
QUEEN OF HEARTS AND QUEEN OF SPADES

A HALF mile north-east from the summer palace at Memison, out along the backbone of the hill, a level place, of the bigness of a tennis-court, overhangs like a kestrel’s nest the steeps that on that side fall abruptly to the river-mouth of Zeshmarra, its water-meadows and bird-haunted marshlands. Here, years ago, when King Mezentius made an end of the work of raising about the little old spy-fortalice of Memison halls and chambers of audience, and lodging for twenty-score soldiers and for the folk of all degree proper to a princely court besides, and brought to completion the great low-built summer palace, with groves and walks and hanging gardens and herb-gardens and water-gardens and colonnades, so that there should be no season of the year nor no extreme of weather but, for each hour of the day, some corner or nook of these garden pleasances should be found to fit it, and gave it all, with patent of the ducal name and dignity, to Amalie, his best-beloved; here, on this grassy shelf, turning to that use a spring of clear water, he had devised for her her bath, as the divine Huntress’s, in a shade of trees. A rib of rock, grown over with rock roses and creeping juniper, shut it from sight from the castle and gardens, and a gate and stairs through the rock led down to it. Upon the other side oaks and walnut-trees and mimosa-trees and great evergreen magnolias made a screen along the parapet with vistas between of Reisma Mere and, away leftwards, of the even valley floor, all cut into fields with hedgerows and rounded shapes of trees, clustering here and there to a billowy mass of coppice or woodland. And there were farmsteads here and there, and here and there wreathings of smoke, and all the long valley blue with the midsummer dusk, the sun being settled to rest, and the mountains east and north-east dark blue against a quiet sky. All winds had fallen to sleep, and yet no closeness was on the air; for in this gentle climate of the Meszrian highlands, as there is no day of winter but keeps some spice of June in it, so is no summer’s day so sun-scorched but some tang of winter sharpens it, from mountain or sea. No leaf moved. Only, from the inner side of that pool, the bubbling up of the well from below sent across the surface ring after widening ring: a motion not to be seen save as a faint stirring, as mirrored in the water, of things which themselves stood motionless: pale roses, and queenly flower-delices of dark and sumptuous hues of purple and rust of gold. In that perfect hour all shadows had left earth and sky, and but form and colour remained: form, as a differing of colour from colour, rather than as a matter of line and edge (which indeed were departed with the shadows); and colour differing from colour not in tone but in colour’s self, rich, self-sufficing, undisturbed: the olive hue of the holm-oak, the green-black bosky obscurities of the pine, cool white of the onyx bench above the water, the delicate blues of the Duchess’s bathing-mantle of netted silk; incarnadine purities, bared or half-veiled, of arm, shoulder, thigh; her unbound hair full of the red-gold harmonies of beechwoods in strong spring sunshine; and (hard to discern in this uncertain luminosity or gloam of cockshut time) her face. Her old nurse, white-haired, with cheeks wrinkled like a pippin and eyes that seemed to hold some sparkles blown from her mistress’s beauty, was busy about drying of the Duchess’s feet, while she herself, resting her cheek on her right hand with elbow propped upon cushions of dove-grey velvet, looked southward across the near water to the distant gleam of the mere, seen beyond the parapet, and to woods and hills through which runs the road south to Zayana.

‘The sun is down. Your grace will not feel the cold?’

‘Cold tonight?’ said the Duchess, and something crossed her face like the dance, tiny feathered bodies upright hovering, wings a-flutter, downward-pointing tails flirting fan-like, of a pair of yellow wagtails that crossed the pool. ‘Wait till tomorrow: then, perhaps, cold indeed.’

‘His highness but goeth to come again, as ever was.’

‘To come again? So does summer. But, as we grow old, we learn the trick to be jealous of each summer departing; as if that were end indeed, and no summer after.’

‘In twenty years’ time I’ll give your beauteous excellence leave to begin such talk, not now: I that had you in cradle in your side-coats, and nor kings nor dukes to trouble us then.’

‘In twenty years?’ said the Duchess. ‘And I today with a son of two and twenty.’

‘Will his grace of Zayana be here tonight?’ Myrrha said, sitting on the grass at the Duchess’s feet with Violante, ladies of honour.

‘Who can foretell the will-o’-the-wisp?’

‘Your grace, if any,’ said the old woman; ‘seeing he is as like your grace as you had spit him.’

‘Hath his father in him, too,’ said the Duchess: ‘for masterfulness, at least, pride, opinion and disdain, and ne’er sit still: turn day in night and night in day. And you, my love-birds, be not too meddling in these matters. I am informed what mad tricks have been played of late in Zayana. Remember, a spaniel puts up many a fowl. Brush my hair,’ she said to the nurse: ‘so. It is not we, nurse, that grow old. We but sit: look on. And birth, and youth, the full bloom, the fading and the falling, are as pictures borne by to please or tease us; or as seasons to the earth. Earth changes not: no more do we. And death but the leading on to another summer.’

‘Sad thoughts for a sweet evening,’ the old nurse said, brushing.

‘Why not? Unless (and I fear ’tis true) shades are coveted in summer, but with me ’tis fall of the leaf. Nay, I am young, surely, if sad thoughts please me. Yet, no; for there’s a taint of hope sweetens the biting of this sad sauce of mine; I can no more love it unalloyed, as right youth will do. Grow old is worse than but be old,’ she said, after a pause. ‘Growing-pains, I think.’

‘I love your hair in summer,’ the nurse said, lifting the shining tresses as it had been something too fair and too fine for common hand to touch. ‘The sun fetches out the gold in it, where in winter was left but red-hot fire-colours.’

‘Gold is good,’ said the Duchess. ‘And fire is good. But pluck out the silver.’

‘I ne’er found one yet,’ said she. ‘So the Lady Fiorinda shall have the Countess’s place in the bedchamber? I had thought your grace could never abide her?’

The Duchess smiled, reaching for her hand-glass of emerald and gold. ‘Today, just upon the placing of the breakfasting-covers, I took a resolve to choose my women as I choose gowns. And black most takingly becomes me. Myrrha, what scent have you brought me?’

‘The rose-flower of Armash.’

‘It is too ordinary. Tonight I will have something more strange, something unseasonable; something springlike to confound midsummer. Wood-lilies: that were good: in the golden perfume-sprinkler. But no,’ she said, as Myrrha arose to go for these: ‘they are earthy. Something heaven-like for tonight. Bring me wood gentians: those that grow many along one stem, so as you would swear it had first been Solomon’s seal but, with leaving to hang its pale bells earthward, and with looking skywards instead through a roof of mountain pines, had turned blue at last: colour of the heaven it looked to.’

‘Madam, they have no scent.’

‘How can you know? What is not possible, tonight? Find me some. But see: no need,’ she said. ‘Fiorinda! This is take to your duties as an eagle’s child to the wind.’

‘I am long used to waiting on myself,’ said that lady, coming down the steps out of an archway of leafy darknesses, stone pine upon the left and thick-woven traceries of an old gnarled strawberry-tree on the right, her arms full of blue wood gentians, and with two little boys in green coats, one bearing upon a tray hippocras in a flagon and golden globlets, and the other apricots and nectarines on dishes of silver.

‘Have they scent indeed?’ said the Duchess, taking the gentians.

‘Please your grace to smell them.’

The Duchess gathered them to her face. ‘This is magic.’

‘No. It is the night,’ said Fiorinda, bidding the boys set down and begone. The shadow of a smile passed across her lips in the meeting of green eye-glances, hers and the Duchess’s, over the barrier of sky-blue flowers. ‘Your grace ought to kiss them.’

The Duchess did so. Again their glances met. The scent of those woodland flowers, subtle and elusive, spoke a private word as into the inward and secretest ear of her who inhaled that perfume: as to say, privately, ‘I have ended the war. Five months sooner than I said, my foot is on their necks. And so, five months before the time appointed – I will have you, Amalie.’ She caught her breath; and that perfume lying so delicate on the air that no sense but hers might savour it, said privately again to Amalie’s blood, ‘And that was in that room in the tower, high upon Acrozayana, with great windows that take the sunset, facing west over Ambremerine, but the bedchamber looks east over the sea: the rooms where today Barganax your son has his private lodging. And that was this very night, of midsummer’s day, three-and-twenty years ago.’ She dismissed her girls, Myrrha and Violante, with a sign of the hand, and, while the nurse braided, coiled and put up her hair, kissed the flowers again, smoothed her cheek against them as a beautiful cat will do, gathered them to her throat. ‘Dear Gods!’ she said, ‘were it not blasphemy, I could suppose myself the Queen of Heaven in Her incense-sweet temple in Cyprus, as in the holy hymn, choosing out there My ornaments of gold and sweet-smelling soft raiment, and so upon the wind to Ida, to that princely herdsman,

Who, on the high-running ranges of many-fountain’d Ida,

Neat-herd was of neat, but a God in frame and seeming.’

‘Blasphemy?’ said Fiorinda. ‘Will you say the Gods were e’er angered at blasphemy? I had thought it was but false gods that could take hurt from that.’

‘Even say they be not angered, I would yet fear the sin in it,’ said the Duchess: ‘the old son of – man to make himself equal with God.’

Fiorinda said, ‘I question whether there be in truth any such matter as sin.’

The Duchess, looking up at her, abode an instant as if bedazzled and put out of her reckonings by some character, alien and cruel and unregarding; that seemed to settle with the dusk on the cold features of that lady’s face. ‘Give me my cloak,’ she said then to the nurse, and standing up and putting it about her, ‘go before and see all fit in my robing-room. Then return with lights. We’ll come thither shortly.’ Then, the nurse being gone, ‘I will tell you an example,’ she said. ‘It is a crying and hellish sin, as I conceive it, to have one’s husband butchered with bodkins on the piazza steps in Krestenaya.’

Fiorinda raised her eyebrow in a most innocent undisturbed surprise. ‘That? I scarce think Gods would fret much at that. Besides, it was not my doing. Though, truly,’ she said, very equably, and upon a lazy self-preening cadence of her voice, ‘’twas no more than the quit-claim due to him for unhandsome usage of me.’

‘It was done about the turn of the year,’ said the Duchess; ‘and but now, in May, we see letters patent conferring upon your husband the lieutenancy of Reisma: the Lord Morville, your present, second, husband, I mean. What qualification fitted Morville for that office?’

‘I’ll not disappoint your grace of your answer. His qualification was, being husband of mine; albeit then but of three weeks’ standing.’

‘You are wisely bent, I find. Tell me: is he a good husband of his own honour?’

‘Truly,’ answered she, ‘I have not given much thought to that. But, now I think on’t, I judge him to be one of those bull-calves that have it by nature to sprout horns within the first year.’

‘A notable impudency in you to say so. But it is rifely reported you were early schooled in these matters.’

Fiorinda shrugged her shoulders. ‘The common people,’ she said, ‘were ever eager to credit the worst.’

‘Common? Is that aimed at me?’

‘O no. I never heard but that your grace’s father was a gentleman by birth.’

‘How old are you?’ said the Duchess.

‘Nineteen. It is my birthday.’

‘Strange: and mine. Nineteen: so young, and yet so very—’

‘Your grace will scarcely set down my youth against me as a vice, I hope: youth, and no stomach for fools—’

‘O I concern not myself with your ladyship’s vices. Enough with your virtues: murder, and (shall we say?) poudre agrippine.’

Fiorinda smoothed her white dress. ‘The greater wonder,’ she said, with a delicate air, ‘that your grace should go out of your way to assign me a place at court, then.’

‘You think it a wonder?’ the Duchess said. ‘It is needful, then, that you understand the matter. It is not in me to grudge a friend’s pleasures. Rather do I study to retain a dozen or so women of your leaven about me, both as foils to my own qualities and in case ever, in an idle hour, he should have a mind for such highly seasoned sweetmeats.’

The Lady Fiorinda abode silent, looking down into the water at her feet. The full moon was rising behind a hill on the far side of the valley, and two trees upon the sky-line stood out clear like some little creature’s feet held up against the moon’s face. A bat flittered across the open above the pool, to and again. High in the air a heron went over, swiftly on slow wing-beats, uttering three or four times his wild harsh cry. There was a pallour of moonlight on that lady’s face, thus seen sideways, downward-gazing, and on her arm, bare to the shoulder, and on the white of her gown that took life from every virginal sweet line of her body, standing so, poised in that tranquillity; and the black of her hair made all the awakening darknesses of the summer night seem luminous. And now, with the lifting of her arm to settle the pins in her back hair, there was a flash of black lightning that opened from amid those pallours and in a flash was hidden, leaving upon the air a breathlessness and a shudder like the shudder of the world’s desire. At length, still side-face to the Duchess, still gazing into that quiet water, she spoke: ‘A dozen? Of my leaven? Must they be like me to look upon? or is it enough that they be—? but I will not borrow your grace’s words.’

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.