Goose of Hermogenes (11 page)

I must have been borne away beyond the confines of the house, for when I next knew anything I was lying upon some eminence, centre of a grassy open space surrounded with trees, in a remote part of the grounds. The moon was invisible, but it must have been shining, for its pearly light was diffused through a sky of thin cloud. Sound’s equivalent to the aromatic odour, a droning music produced from I know not what instruments, arose from the nearby bushes, where a circle of dimly-distinguishable figures crouched in the longer grass. Among these I thought I could at various moments discern my sisters, and then the taller shapes of my Uncle and the Anchorite; in the shadows I seemed to glimpse the inmates of the monastery, and the women I had encountered while making my way towards this island. Later I thought I could see the more sinister or equivocal inhabitants of Troubh – my mother, the doctor, Rohan; and female forms that I took to be dwellers in the tree-houses of the Green-Light district, beckoning to their half-materialised customers. All was shifting; I could not tell whether I saw or fancied I saw these people, even whether I was awake or asleep. Dazed by the phantasmagoria, I turned my eyes away and looked upwards to a still and solid shape towering above me. This was a worn statue, such as often grow in old and neglected gardens, antique in design without, perhaps, being very ancient, a rectangular pillar unhumanised but for a surmounting bearded head of faun or silen, and a tail curling out of the panel furthest away from me. Glancing down at myself, I saw that I was naked except for my jewels.

A wailing sound that sprang from some tubular instrument not hitherto used now entered upon the drone of the music; and I could hear, too, a thudding undertone as of drums, with, rarely, a subdued clash of cymbals. The Anchorite approached me and raised my shoulders, pressing a vessel of some scorching viscous liquid to my lips. Already more than half-bemused, I had no choice but to drink – it seemed as though fluid fire were pouring down my throat and through any veins. The taste was not merely of burning, but recalled with augmented intensity the tang of both unguent and fume.

The Anchorite lifted me up – whether or no it was illusion I cannot tell, but the pull of gravity appeared to have lost some of its hold over me and I weighed almost nothing – and set me upon the image. I embraced the armless torso, finding an unlooked-for excitement in the pressure of its frigid moulding. I laid my mouth to its stoney lips, and a tongue, icy as an adder’s, seemed to dart from between them to meet mine.

I sensed the figure of my Uncle towering behind me, taller than the statue. Selecting a pliable wand from a bundle lying beside it, he began to whip me, while the music increased, clashing more harshly, drumming more insistently, wailing more stridently. I could feel a mounting frenzy in the now-invisible spectators; I could hear their shuffling movements, sombre breathing and stifled cries as their circle slowly dosed in. Every lash sent a shudder of delight through me; I saw that my flanks were speckled with blood, yet I felt no pain from the strokes, only a stinging unbearable titillation. Clouds of unknown colour and texture were racing past me, wild corruscations of light, shape and hue; then at a stroke keener than the rest and a final eruption of music, an icy jet coursed through me to my furthest limbs and I fell insensible.

I awoke next morning as from a profound sleep, but fully clothed. Memories of the night flooding in upon me, I examined myself for some sign that I had been victim of more than delusion. But there was no sign nor symptom; drug, delirium, wounds, rape, all had left me unscathed.

Yet I did not doubt that I had in fact been used by my Uncle for one of his experiments, even though it might have been conducted in the sphere of hallucination. And what had he gained from it? Not my jewels: they rested languidly in their accustomed places, all their stones intact The thought occurred to me that by my swoon at the climax of the orgy I might unintentionally have thwarted him; that perhaps what he needed was my knowledge of the moment, which, had I possessed it, he could by his subtle arts have filched from me.

Looking about me, I saw that I was not in my own room, but reclining upon a couch in what I now recognised as the ante-room to my Uncle’s library.

‘Between mutability’s teeth let us make our dwelling,
And let her savour us slowly in her contemplative way.’

– Rilke.

To the left, an immense archway reared itself; and shaking off my drowsiness, I got to my feet and wandered towards it. Above, four painted archetypal panels were set into the wall and connected with a scroll, carved and dimly-gilt, bearing this legend: ‘The All-Wise Doorkeeper, or a Four-fold Figure, exhibiting analytically to all who enter this Museum the Mosaico-Hermetic Science of Things above and Things below.’ I entered a long corridor, from which I could view a series of chambers containing each a sort of emblematic tableau.

Before these began, one was presented with a panorama of heathery landscape still shrouded in the misty grey of morning, and featureless but for an extensive mere. There was little to hold the eye; yet I could not take my gaze from it; and a remote voice issued as it were from the shining water, softly proclaiming it ‘The Silver Morn.’ Something made me remember the Anchorite; but if this voice were indeed his, it had become greatly etherealised. The sounds were not repeated, and their spell gradually fading, I passed on to the exhibits proper.

The Book of Lambspring
was still in my mind, and remembering its first engraved plate, I recognised that this corresponded with the first chamber; in fact, that the chamber was nothing less than a three-dimensional translation of the engraving. For the entire room, divided from the corridor by a huge pane of glass, formed a tank in which two gigantic fish of the carp family, one incandescent red, the other phosphoric blue, their snouts connected by an all-but-impalpable thread, were swimming languidly round one another in a tireless dance. The water-level reached about two-thirds of the way up the pane, and distant boats sailed across its surface, making voyages to and from the serene landscape that glowed beyond. Suddenly in the sky there appeared, as if inscribed by a lightning-flash, the gnomic words: ‘Be warned and understand truly, that two fishes are swimming in our sea.’ As I passed on, I saw all fifteen plates ultimately thus given a solid counterpart; and I noticed that many dealt with some aspect of duality.

After this, the compartments changed in character; for it seemed as though my Uncle, hypnotised by the symbolic suits of the Taro, had gathered under their four main categories almost every conceivable object; or rather, that in an attempt to classify specimens of such objects, he had well-nigh lost himself in their diversity. For instance, in the compartment devoted to ‘Wands’ he had assembled and preserved every imaginable species of leafy branch; and not these only, but also everything that might possibly be called a ‘wand’, from an axle to a divining-rod; many varieties of walking-sticks also, pencils, brushes, feathers, hair, wings, bones and even portions of furniture, table-legs, carved pilasters, frames.

Under ‘Swords’ he had collected innumerable objeots of metal, weapons of course in great variety, tools and pieces of machinery, though never complete machines – spokes, hat-pins, and indeed anything of a piercing or cutting nature.

In the section for ‘Cups’ was a most heterogeneous collection of vessels in every kind of material, especially in glass or the more precious metals; but not only these, for almost anything that could hold or contain anything else was here included: cases, boxes, boats in great numbers; flowers, too, of approximately cup-like shape; diagrams and models of anatomical structures; craters, lake-bed formations, marine shells.

According to my Uncle’s morphological studies, crazy if you will, though ardently pursued, there were heaped together under ‘Discs’ not only everything even roughly disc-shaped, including thousands of coins in many different materials and of all sizes and periods; but seemingly everything that he could lay hands on of a flat and extended form. It was before this compartment that I paused; not that it was intrinsically more interesting than its predecessors, for each of them had at first glance given me the impression of an ill-assorted junk-shop, very different from the exquisitely-finished tableaux that brought Lambspring to life; but partly, I suppose, because I had almost traversed the corridor and was nearing the final item in the display. For now, my mind attuned to my Uncle’s uncouth approach, I perceived a relationship between the many examples of Disc he had collected and the Trump Major known as the ‘Wheel’. There had been several volumes in the library treating of Taro symbolism, and from these I had gleaned enough to recognise certain correspondences. My eyes focussed themselves with special intensity upon a dart-board that had once been highly-coloured, and I picked it out of its chaotic heap and began to dust it. Soon I made out letters spaced at wide intervals round the edge of its surface – four letters only, spelling the word ‘rota’; and though I could hardly explain in words what they conveyed to me, I felt a sensation of ineffable relief. I knew that this simple word held release, both for my sisters and for myself.

The final tableau now presented itself to me; it was the same empty moorland scene as the first, but lacking the mere, and now bathed in the most triumphant sunset glow. The sinking sun was not to be seen, for a gigantic throne rose into the west, superimposing its metallic weight on a good quarter of the sky. The same voice I had heard before, but richer in timbre, extolled ‘The Golden Eve’.

I had come to the end of the far-stretching corridor, and, still carrying the board, I opened a door and found myself in the garden. I set the disc bowling like a hoop in the direction of Troubh, and with a sensation of exultant reliance on fate taken at the spin, I let it go. I watched it swiftly gaining momentum down a gentle incline, and knew it would reach its destination. After that, my sisters and half-brother must read its message as I had done, and find in it their freedom.

When I returned to my own apartments, I came upon a rill of pellucid water, not more than ten inches wide, sliding with scarcely a sound over the moss-green carpet of my bed-room. It bubbled up from beneath the wainscot by the window, and flowed diagonally across the floor to disappear under the doorway. I could not find a trace of it in the passage outside, where I suppose it lost itself in the shadows. Making for itself a bed in the pile of the carpet, it seemed no deeper than this, which it filled level with an invisible brink. A few delicatestemmed flowers like columbines, fritillaries or autumn crocus appeared growing from the carpet near the water, but they looked so fragile that I did not try to pluck them.

I was surprised though not alarmed by this phenomenon, which lasted upwards of half-an-hour and then vanished, leaving the carpet quite dry. I could not explain it, but felt it as a symptom of consolation.

‘Yo soy la mata inflamada,
Ardiendo sin ser quemada
Ni con aquel fuego tocada
Que a los otros tocara.’

– Spanish Song.

It was not only consolation which was brought me by the mysterious rill, but something stronger – a deep conviction that I must get away. I kept to my room all day, the resolve growing in density and form. Finally, at a late hour, I opened my door and peeped into the passage. All was still, and lightless except for the glass of an uncurtained window at the end of the landing.

I halted outside the door of my Uncle’s study; there was no sign of an occupant, but I felt certain that he was there within, waiting. As I have said, I habitually wore jewellery – several heavy bracelets and rings, a triple chain forming a collar, a watch, a big brooch, ear-rings. These I began to tear off; I flung them all down on my Uncle’s threshold, their metallic crash and tinkle echoing through the entranced house. One of the rings rolled away under his door. Then I fled down the passage; and as I turned at the head of the stairway, I caught a last glimpse over my shoulder of the faintly-glimmering heap. The stones gathered within themselves all the light there was in the corridor, and sent it forth again in a muted and reptilian ray.