The Mezentian Gate. E. Eddison R.

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СКАЧАТЬ but traces of wind and tempest, as in a man customed all his life to open weather at sea or on mountain ridges and all desolate sun-smitten places about the world. He was taller than most tall men: patently an Englishman, yet with that facial angle that belongs to old Greece. There was in him a magnificence not kingly as in ordinary experience that term fits, but deeper in grain, ignoring itself, as common men their natural motions of breathing or heart-beat: some inward integrity emerging in outward shape and action, as when a solitary oak takes the storm, or as the lion walks in grandeur not from study nor as concerned to command eyes, but from ancestral use and because he can no other.

      He said, to himself: ‘Checkmate. And by a bunch of pawns. Well, there’s some comfort in that: not to be beaten by men, but the dead weight of the machine. I can rule men: have, all my life ruled them: seen true ends, and had the knack to make them see my ends as their own. Look at them here: a generation bred up in these five-and-twenty years like-minded with me as if I had spit ’em. Liker minded than if they had been sprung from my loins. And now?—

      the bright day is done,

      And we are for the dark.

      What can a few thousand, against millions? Even if the millions are fools. It is the old drift of the world, to drabness and sameness: water, always tending by its very nature to a dead level.’ He folded his arms and stood looking seaward over the parapet. So, perhaps, Leonidas stood for a minute when the Persians began to close in upon the Pass.

      Then he turned: at a known step, perhaps: at a known perfume, like the delicate scent of the black magnolia, sharpened with spindrift and sea-foam and wafted on some air far unlike this cool northern breath of the Raftsund. He greeted her with a kind of laugh of the eyes.

      ‘You slept?’

      ‘At last, yes. I slept. And you, mon ami?’

      ‘No. And yet, as good as slept: looking at you, feeding on you, reliving you. Who are you, I wonder, that it is the mere patent of immortality, after such a night, only to gaze upon your dear beauties asleep? And that all wisdom since life came up upon earth, and all the treasure of old time past and of eternity to come, can lie charmed within the curve of each particular hair?’ Then, like the crack of a whip: ‘I shall send them no answer.’

      Something moved in her green eyes that was like the light beyond the sound ‘No? What will you do, then?’

      ‘Nothing. For the first time in my life I am come to this, that there is nothing I can do.’

      ‘That,’ said she, ‘is the impassable which little men are faced with, every day of their lives. It awaits even the greatest at last. You are above other men in this age of the world as men are above monkeys, and have so acted; but circumstance weighs at last too heavy even for you. You are trapped. In the tiger-hunts in old Java, the tiger has no choice left at last but to leap upon the spears.’

      ‘I could have told you last night,’ he said ‘(but we were engrossed with things worthier our attention), I’ve everything ready here: for that leap.’ After a pause: ‘They will not move till time’s up: noon tomorrow. After that, with this new Government, bombers no doubt. I have made up my mind to meet them in the air: give them a keepsake to remember me by. I will have you go today. The yacht’s ready. She can take you to England, or wherever you wish. You must take her as a good-bye gift from me: until we meet – at Philippi.’

      She made no sign of assent or dissent, only stood still as death beside him, looking across at Rulten. Presently his hand found hers where it hung at her side: lifted it and studied it a minute in silence. It lay warm in his, motionless, relaxed, abandoned, uncommunicative, like a hand asleep. ‘Better this way than the world’s way, the way of that yonder,’ he said, looking now where she looked; ‘which is dying by inches. A pretty irony, when you think of it: lifted out of primaeval seas not a mountain but a ‘considerable protuberance’; then the frosts and the rains, all the infinitely slow, infinitely repeated, influences of innumerable little things, getting to work on it, chiselling it to this perfection of its maturity: better than I could have done it, or Michael Angelo, or Pheidias. And to what end? Not to stay perfect: no, for the chisel that brought it to this will bring it down again, to the degradation of a second childhood. And after that? What matter, after that? Unless indeed, the chisel gets tired of it.’ Looking suddenly in her eyes again: ‘As I am tired of it,’ he said.

      ‘Of life?’

      He laughed. ‘Good heavens, no! Tired of death.’

      They walked a turn or two. After a while, she spoke again. ‘I was thinking of Brachiano:

      On paine of death, let no man name death to me,

      It is a word infinitely terrible—’

      ‘I cannot remember,’ he said in a detached thoughtful simplicity, ‘ever to have been afraid of death. I can’t honestly remember, for that matter, being actually afraid of anything.’

      ‘That is true, I am very well certain. But in this you are singular, as in other things besides.’

      ‘Death, at any rate,’ he said, ‘is nothing: nil, an estate of not-being. Or else, new beginning. Whichever way, what is there to fear?’

      ‘Unless this, perhaps?—

      Save that to dye, I leave my love alone.’

      ‘The last bait on the Devil’s hook. I’ll not entertain it.’

      ‘Yet it should be the king of terrors.’

      ‘I’ll not entertain it,’ he said. ‘I admit, though,’ – they had stopped. She was standing a pace or two away from him, dark against the dawn-light on mountain and tide-way, questionable, maybe as the Sphinx is questionable. As with a faint perfume of dittany afloat in some English garden at evening, the air about her seemed to shudder into images of heat and darkness: up-curved delicate tendrils exhaling an elusive sweetness: milk-smooth petals that disclosed and enfolded a secret heart of night, pantherine, furred in mystery. – ‘I admit this: suppose I could entertain it, that might terrify me.’

      ‘How can we know?’ she said. ‘What firm assurance have we against that everlasting loneliness?’

      ‘I will enter into no guesses as to how you may know. For my own part, my assurance rests on direct knowledge of the senses: eye, ear, nostrils, tongue, hand, the ultimate carnal knowing.’

      ‘As it should rightly be always, I suppose; seeing that, with lovers, the senses are the organs of the spirit. And yet – I am a woman. There is no part in me, no breath, gait, turn, or motion, but flatters your eye with beauty. With my voice, with the mere rustle of my skirt, I can wake you wild musics potent in your mind and blood. I am sweet to smell, sweet to taste. Between my breasts you have in imagination voyaged to Kythera, or even to that herdsman’s hut upon many-fountained Ida where Anchises, by will and ordainment of the Gods, lay (as Homer says) with an immortal Goddess: a mortal, not clearly knowing. But under my skin, what am I? A memento mori too horrible for the slab in a butcher’s shop; or the floor of a slaughter-house; a clockwork of muscle; and sinew, vein and nerve and membrane, shining – blue, grey, scarlet – to all colours of corruption; a sack of offals, to make you stop your nose at it. And underneath (when you have purged away these loathsomeness of the flesh) – the scrannel piteous residue: the stripped bone, grinning, hairless, and sexless, which even the digestions of worms and devouring fire rebel against: the dumb argument that puts to silence all were’s, maybe’s, and might-have-beens.’

      His СКАЧАТЬ