Mistress of Mistresses

Your voice, that all these years, forty-eight years and a month or two, since first I knew you, has had power over me as has no other thing on earth, I think. And today – But why talk of today? Either today is not, or you are not: I am not very certain which. Yesterday certainly was yours, and those five and twenty years in which you, by your genius and your riches, made of these islands a brighter Hellas. But today: it is as well, perhaps, that you have nothing to do with today. The fourteenth of July tomorrow: the date when the ultimatum expires, which this new government at Oslo sent you; the date they mean to take back their sovereign rights over Lofoten in order to reintroduce modern methods into the fisheries. I know you were prepared to use force. It may come to that yet, for your subjects who have grown up in the islands under the conditions you made for them may not give up all without a stroke. But it could only have been a catastrophe. You had not the means here to do as you did thirty-five years ago, when you conquered Paraguay: you could never have held, with your few thousand men, this bunch of islands against an industrialized country like Norway. Stir’s, ‘Shall the earth-lice be my bane, the sons of Grim Kogur?’ They would have bombed your castle from the air.

And so, I think fate has been good to you. I am glad you died this morning.

I must have been deep in my thoughts and memories when the Señorita came into the room, for I had heard no rustle or footfall. Now, however, I turned from my window-gazing to look again on the face of Lessingham where he lay in state, and I saw that she was standing there at his feet, looking where I looked, very quiet and still. She had not noticed me, or, if she had, made no account of my presence. My nerves must have been shaken by the events of the day more than I could before have believed possible: in no other way can I explain the trembling that came upon me as I watched her, and the sudden tears that half blinded my eyes. For though, no doubt, the feelings can play strange tricks in moments of crisis, and easily confound that nice order which breeding and the common proprieties impose even on our inward thoughts, it is yet notable that the perturbation that now swept my whole mind and body was without any single note or touch of those chords which can thrill so loudly at the approach of a woman of exquisite beauty and presumed accessibility. Tears of my own I had not experienced since my nursery days. Indeed, it is only by going back to nursery days that I can recall anything remotely comparable to the emotion with which I was at that moment rapt and held. And both then as a child, and now half-way down the sixties: then, as I listened on a summer’s evening in the drawing-room to my eldest sister singing at the piano what I learned to know later as Schubert’s Wohin?, and now, as I saw the Señorita Aspasia del Rio Amargo stand over my friend’s death-bed, there was neither fear in the trembling that seized me and made my body all gooseflesh, nor was it tears of grief that started in my eyes. A moment before, it is true, my mind had been feeling its way through many darknesses, while the heaviness of a great unhappiness at long friendship gone like a blown-out candleflame clogged my thoughts. But now I was as if caught by the throat and held in a state of intense awareness: a state of mind that I can find no name for, unless to call it a state of complete purity, as of awaking suddenly in the morning of time and beholding the world new born.

For a good many minutes, I think, I remained perfectly still, except for my quickened breathing and the shifting of my eyes from this part to that of the picture that was burning itself into my senses so that, I am very certain, all memories and images will fall off from me before this will suffer alteration or grow dim. Then, unsurprised as one hears in a dream, I heard a voice (that was my own voice) repeating softly that stanza in Swinburne’s great lamentable Ballad of Death:

By night there stood over against my bed

Queen Venus with a hood striped gold and black,

Both sides drawn fully back

From brows wherein the sad blood failed of red,

And temples drained of purple and full of death.

Her curled hair had the wave of sea-water

And the sea’s gold in it.

Her eyes were as a dove’s that sickeneth.

Strewn dust of gold she had shed over her,

And pearl and purple and amber on her feet.

With the last cadence I was startled awake to common things, as often, startling out of sleep, you hear words spoken in a dream echo loud beyond nature in your ears. I rose, inwardly angry with myself, with some conventional apology on the tip of my tongue, but I bit it back in time. The verses had been spoken not with my tongue but in my brain, I thought; for the look on her face assured me that she had heard nothing, or, if she had, passed it by as some remark which demanded neither comment on her part nor any explanation or apology on mine.

She moved a little so as to face me, her left hand hanging quiet and graceful at her side, her right resting gently on the brow of the great golden hippogriff that made the near bedpost at the foot of Lessingham’s bed. With the motion I seemed to be held once again in that contemplation of peace and power from which I had these hours past taken some comfort, and at the same time to be rapt again into that state of wide-eyed awareness in which I had a few minutes since gazed upon her and Lessingham. But now, just as (they tell us) a star of earthly density but of the size of Betelgeuze would of necessity draw to it not matter and star-dust only but the very rays of imponderable light, and suck in and swallow at last the very boundaries of space into itself, so all things condensed in her as to a point. And when she spoke, I had an odd feeling as if peace itself had spoken.

She said: ‘Is there anything new you can tell me about death, sir? Lessingham told me you are a philosopher.’

‘All I could tell you is new, Doña Aspasia,’ I answered; ‘for death is like birth: it is new every time.’

‘Does it matter, do you suppose?’ Her voice, low, smooth, luxurious (as in Spanish women it should be, to fit their beauty, yet rarely is), seemed to balance on the air like a soaring bird that tilts an almost motionless wing now this way now that, and so soars on.

‘It matters to me,’ I said. ‘And I suppose to you.’

She said a strange thing: ‘Not to me. I have no self.’ Then, ‘You,’ she said, ‘are not one of those quibbling cheap-jacks, I think, who hold out to poor mankind hopes of some metaphysical perduration (great Caesar used to stop a bung-hole) in exchange for that immortality of persons which you have whittled away to the barest improbability?’

‘No,’ answered I. ‘Because there is no wine, it is better go thirsty than lap sea-water.’

‘And the wine is past praying for? You are sure?’

‘We are sure of nothing. Every path in the maze brings you back at last to Herakleitos if you follow it fairly; yes, and beyond him: back to that philosopher who rebuked him for saying that no man may bathe twice in the same river, objecting that it was too gross an assumption to imply that he might avail to bathe once.’

‘Then what is this new thing you are to tell me?’

‘This,’ said I: ‘that I have lost a man who for forty years was my friend, and a man great and peerless in his generation. And that is death beyond common deaths.’

‘Then I see that in one river you have bathed not twice but many times,’ she said. ‘But I very well know that that is no answer.’

She fell silent, looking me steadfastly in the eye. Her eyes with their great black lashes were unlike any eyes that I have ever seen, and went strangely with her dark southern colouring and her jet-black hair: they were green, with enormous pupils, and full of fiery specks, and as the pupils dilated or narrowed the whole orbs seemed aglow with a lambent flame. Frightening eyes at the first unearthly glance of them: so much so, that I thought for an instant of old wild tales of lamias and vampires, and so of that loveliest of all love-stories and sweet ironic gospel of pagan love – Théophile Gautier’s: of her on whose unhallowed gravestone was written:

Ici gît Clarimonde,

Qui jut de son vivant

La plus belle du monde.

And then in an instant my leaping thoughts were stilled, and in awed wonderment I recognized, deep down in those strange burning eyes, sixty years in the past, my mother’s very look as she (beautiful then, but now many years dead) bent down to kiss her child good night.

The clock chiming the half hour before midnight brought back time again. She on the chime passed by me, as in a dream, and took my place in the embrasure; so that sitting at her feet I saw her side-face silhouetted against the twilight window, where the darkest hour still put on but such semblance of the true cloak of night as the dewdrops on a red rose might wear beside true tears of sorrow, or the faint memory of a long forgotten grief beside the bitterness of the passion itself. Peace distilled upon my mind like perfume from a flower. I looked across to Lessingham’s face with its Grecian profile, pallid under the flickering candles, facing upwards: the hair, short, wavy, and thick, like a Greek God’s: the ambrosial darknesses of his great black beard. He was ninety years old this year, and his hair was as black and (till a few hours ago, when he leaned back in his chair and was suddenly dead) his voice as resonant and his eyes as bright as a man’s in his prime age.

The silence opened like a lily, and the Señorita’s words came like the lily’s fragrance: ‘Tell me something that you remember. It is good to keep memories green.’

‘I remember,’ answered I, ‘that he and I first met by candlelight. And that was forty-eight years ago. A good light to meet by; and a good light for parting.’

‘Tell me,’ she said.

‘It was Easter time at Mardale Green in Cumberland. I had just left school. I was spending the holidays with an aunt of mine who had a big house in the Eamont valley. On Easter Sunday after a hard day by myself on the fells, I found myself looking down on Mardale and Haweswater from the top of Kidsty Pike. It was late afternoon, and the nights still closed in early. There was leavings of snow on the tops. Beneath my feet the valley was obscure purple, the shadows of night boiling up from below while weak daylight still walked the upper air and the mountain ridges. I ran down the long spur that Kidsty Pike sends down eastwards, dividing Randale from Riggindale. I was out of breath, and half deaf too after the quick descent, for I had come down about fifteen hundred feet, I suppose, in twelve minutes by the time I came to cross the beck by the farmhouse at Riggindale. Then I saw the light in the church windows through the trees. I remembered that Haweswater and all its belongings were condemned to be drowned twenty feet deep in water in order that some hive of civilization might be washed, and I thought I would go in to evening service in that little church now while I might, before there were fishes in its yew-trees instead of owls. So I stumbled my way from the gathering dusk of the quiet lane through the darkness of those tremendous yews, and so by the curtained doorway under the square tower into that tiny church. I loved it at first sight, coming in from the cold and darkness outside: a place of warmth and gentle candles, with its pews of oak blackened with age, its little Jacobaean gallery, its rough whitewashed walls, simple pointed windows, low dark roof-beams: a glamorous and dazzling loveliness such as a child’s eyes feed upon in its first Christmas tree. As I found my way to a seat half-way up the aisle on the north side, I remember thinking of those little earthenware houses, white, green, and pink, that you can put a night-light inside; things I had forgotten for years, but I had one (as I remembered) long ago, in those lavender and musk-smelling days of childhood, which seemed far more distant to me then, when I was nineteen, than they do now; German things, I fancy: born of the old good German spirit of Struwwelpeter and Christmas trees. Yes, it was those little earthenware houses that I thought of as I sat there, sensuously loving the candlelight and the moving shadows it threw: safe shadows, like those there used to be in the nursery when your nurse was still there; not the ghostly shadows that threatened and hovered when she had gone down to supper and you were left alone. And these shadows and the yellow glamour of the candles fell on kind safe faces, like hers: an old farmer with furrowed, strong, big-boned, storm-weathered features, not in his Sunday-go-to-meeting suit, but with heavy boots nailed and plastered with mud, as if he had walked a good distance to church, and rough strong tweed coat and breeches. Three or four farmers, a few farm men, a few women and girls, an old woman, a boy or two, one or two folk in the little gallery above the door: that was all the congregation. But what pleased me most of all was the old parson, and his way of conducting the service. He was white-haired, with a bristly moustache. He did everything himself single-handed: said the prayers, read the lessons, collected the offertory, played the harmonium that did duty for an organ, preached the sermon. And all these things he did methodically and without hurry or self-consciousness, as you might imagine him looking after a roomful of friends at supper in the little rectory across the road. His sermon was short and full of personalities, but all kindly and gentle-humoured. His announcements of times of services, appointments for weddings, christenings and what not, were interspersed with detailed and homely explanations, given not in the least ex cathedra but as if across the breakfast-table. One particularly I remember, when he gave out: “Hymn number one hundred and forty: the one hundred and fortieth hymn: Jesus lives! No longer now Can thy terrors, death, appal us.” Then, before sitting down to the harmonium, he looked very benevolently at his little flock over the tops of his spectacles, and said, “I want everybody to try and get the words right. Some people make a mistake about the first line of this hymn, and give it quite a wrong meaning. Remember to pause after ‘lives’: ‘Jesus lives!’ Don’t do like some people do, and say ‘Jesus lives no longer now’: that is quite wrong: gives quite a wrong meaning: it makes nonsense. Now then: ‘Jesus lives! No longer now’;” and he sat down to the harmonium and began.

‘It was just at that moment, as we all stood up to sing that innocent hymn with its difficult first line, that I first saw Lessingham. He was away to my right, at the back on the south side, and as the congregation rose I looked half round and saw him. I remember, years later, his describing to me the effect of the sudden view you get of Nanga Parbat from one of those Kashmir valleys; you have been riding for hours among quiet richly wooded scenery, winding up along the side of some kind of gorge, with nothing very big to look at, just lush, leafy, pussy-cat country of steep hillsides and waterfalls; then suddenly you come round a corner where the view opens up the valley, and you are almost struck senseless by the blinding splendour of that vast face of ice-hung precipices and soaring ridges, sixteen thousand feet from top to toe, filling a whole quarter of the heavens at a distance of, I suppose, only a dozen miles. And now, whenever I call to mind my first sight of Lessingham in that little daleside church so many years ago, I think of Nanga Parbat. He stood half a head taller than the tallest man there, but it was the grandeur of his bearing that held me, as if he had been some great lord of the renaissance: a grandeur which seemed to sit upon every limb and feature of him with as much fitness, and to be carried with as little regard or notice from himself, as the scrubby old Norfolk jacket and breeches in which he was dressed. His jacket was threadbare, frayed at the cuffs, strapped with leather at the elbows, but it was as if lighted from within, as the flame shows in a horn lantern, with a sense of those sculptured heroes from the Parthenon. I saw the beauty of his hand where it rested on the window-sill, and the ruby burning like a coal in the strange ring he wore on the middle finger. But just as, in a snow mountain, all sublimities soar upwards to the great peak in the empyrean, so in him was all this majesty and beauty and strength gathered at last in the head and face; that serene forehead, those features where Apollo and Ares seemed to mingle, the strong luxurious lines of the mouth showing between the upcurled moustache and the cataract of black beard: that mouth whose corners seemed the lurking-places of all wild sudden gleams, of delightful humour, and melancholy, and swift resolution, and terrible anger. At length his unconscious eyes met mine, and, looking through me as lost in a deep sadness, made me turn away in some confusion.

‘I thought he had been quite unaware of me and my staring; but as we came out into the lane when church was over (it was starlight now, and the moon risen behind the hills) he overtook me and fell into step beside me, saying he noticed that we wore the same tie. I hardly know which was to me the more astonishing, that this man should deign to talk to me at all, or that I should find myself within five minutes swinging along beside him down the lake road, which was my way home, and talking as easily as if it had been to an intimate friend of my own age instead of a man old enough to be my father: a man too who, to all outward seeming, would have been more in his element in the company of Cesare Borgia or Gonsalvo di Cordova. It was not, of course, till some time after this that I knew he traced his descent through many generations of English forefathers to King Eric Bloodaxe in York, the son of Harald Hairfair, that Charlemagne of the north, and, by the female line, from the greatest ruler of men that appeared in Europe in the thousand years between Charlemagne and Napoleon: the Emperor Frederick II, of whom it has been written that “the power, which in the rout of able and illustrious men shines through crannies, in him pours out as through a rift in nature”. In after years I helped Lessingham a good deal in collecting material for his ten-volume History of Frederick II, which is of course today the standard authority on that period, and ranks, as literature, far and away above any other history book since Gibbon.

‘We talked at first about Eton; then about rowing, and riding, and then about mountains, for I was at that time newly bitten with the climbing-madness and I found him an old hand at the game, though it was not for a year or so that I discovered that he was among the best (though incomparably the rashest) of contemporary climbers. I do not think we touched on the then recent War, in which he attained great distinction, mainly in East Africa. At length the wings of our talk began to take those wider sweeps which starlight and steady walking and that aptness of mind to mind which is the basis of all true friendship lead to; so that after a while I found myself telling him how much his presence had surprised me in that little church, and actually asking him whether he was there to pray, like the other people, or only to look on, like me. Those were the salad-days of my irreligious fervour, when the strange amor mortis of adolescence binds a panache of glory on the helmet of every unbelief, and when books like La Révolte des Anges or Swinburne’s Dolores send a thrill down the spine that can never be caught again in its pristine vigour when years and wisdom have taught us the true terrors of that drab, comfortless, and inglorious sinking into not-being which awaits us all at last. He answered he was there to pray. This I had not expected, though I had been puzzled at the expression on his face in church: an expression that I thought sat oddly on the face of a pagan God or an atheistical tyrant of the renaissance. I mumbled some awkwardness about his not looking to me much like a churchman. His laughter at this seemed to set the whole night a-sparkle: he stopped, caught me by the shoulder with one hand and spun me round to face him. His mouth was smiling down at me in the moonlight in a way which made me think of Pater’s essay about Mona Lisa. He said nothing, but I felt as if I and my half-fledged impieties shrank under that smile to something very naked and nerveless: a very immature Kapaneus posturing before Thebes; a ridiculous little Aias waving a toy sword against the lightning. We walked on beside the dark lake. He said nothing, neither did I. So completely had he already bound me to his chariot-wheels that I was ready, if he had informed me that he was Anabaptist or Turk, to embrace that sect. At length he spoke, words that for some reason I have never forgotten: “No doubt”, he said, “we were both in that little place for the same reason. The good, the true, the beautiful: within that triangle (or rather, upon that point; for ‘truth’ is but to say that beauty and goodness are the ultimate reality; and goodness is servant to beauty), are not the Gods protean?” Rank bad philosophy, as I soon learned when I had made some progress in metaphysics. And yet it was out of such marsh-fires that he built up in secret places of his mind (as, from time to time in our long friendship, I have from fleeting revelations and rare partial confidences discovered), a palace of pleasure or house of heart’s desire, a creed, a myth, a fabric of pure poetry, more solid in its specifications and more concrete in its strange glorious fictions and vanities beyond opium or madness than this world is, and this life that we call real. And more than that, for he moulded life to his dreams; and, besides his poems and writings “more lasting than brass”, his paintings and sculptures that are scrambled for by the picture-galleries of Europe, and those other (perhaps the most astounding) monuments of his genius, the communities of men who have felt the iron and yet beneficent might of his statecraft, as here in Lofoten – besides all these things, I know very well that he found in this Illusion of Illusions a something potent as the fabled unction of the Styx, so that no earthly loss, pain, or grief, could touch him.

‘It was not until after many years of friendship that I got some inkling of the full power of this consolation; for he never wore his heart for daws to peck at. The bare facts I was soon informed of: his marriage, when he was not yet twenty-six, and she barely twenty, to the beautiful and brilliant Lady Mary Scarnside, and her death fifteen years later in a French railway accident along with their only child, a girl. This tragedy took place about two years before our meeting in Mardale church. Lessingham never talked of his wife. I learned that he had, soon after her death, deliberately burnt down their lovely old house in Wastdale. I never saw her portrait: several, from his own brush, were destroyed in the fire; he told me, years later, that he had subsequently bought up every picture or photograph of her that he could trace, and destroyed them. Like most men who are endowed with vigorous minds and high gifts of imagination, Lessingham was, for as long as I have known him, a man of extreme attractiveness to women, and a man to whom (as to his imperial ancestor) women and the beauty of women were as mountain air and sunshine. The spectacle of the unbroken succession and variety of ladies, who crowned, like jewels, the ever increasing splendour and pomp of his existence, made me think that his marriage had been without significance, and that he never spoke of his wife because he had forgotten her. Later, when I heard about the burnt portraits, I changed my mind and supposed he had hated her. It was only when our friendship had ripened to a deep understanding in which words were scarcely needed as messengers between our minds, that I realized how things stood: that it was only his majestic if puerile belief in her personal immortality, and his own, beyond the grave, that upheld him in all the storm and peace and magnificence and high achievement of the years (fifty, as it turned out) that he was to live on without her.

‘These pragmatical sophisters, with their loose psychology and their question-begging logic-chopping that masquerades as metaphysic! I would almost give them leave to gag truth and lead the world by the nose like a jackass, if they could but be men as this man, and bend error and self-deception to high and lofty imaginings as he did. For it is certain mankind would build better if they built for themselves; few can love and tender an unknown posterity. But this man, as I have long observed him, looked on all things sub specie æternitatis; his actions all moved (like the slow procession of this northern summer night) to slow perfection, where the common run of men spoil all in their makeshift hurry. If he followed will-o’-the-wisps in metaphysics, they proved safe lights for him in practical affairs. He was neither deceived nor alarmed by the rabble’s god, mere Quantity, considering that if you inflate it big enough the Matterhorn becomes as insignificant as a grain of sand, since the eye can no longer perceive it, and that a nebula in which our whole earth would be but as a particle in a cloud of tobacco-smoke is (unless as a whetter of imagination’s appetite), more unimportant than that smoke, because further divorced from life. And so, with sound wisdom, he applied all his high gifts of nature, and that sceptre which his colossal wealth set ready in his hand, not to dissipate them in the welter of the world, but to fields definite enough to show the effect. And for all his restless vigour and love of action, he withheld himself as a rule from action in the world, except where he could find conditions, as in Paraguay and again in Lofoten, outside the ordinary texture of modern life. For he felt, I think, by a profound instinct, that in modern life action swallows up the individual. There is no scope for a good climber, he said, to show his powers in a quagmire. Well, it is night now; and no more climbing.’