Lord of the Hollow Dark (12 page)

Marina did not know what comment she was expected to make: from the professor’s hopefully raised eyebrows, she judged that he expected felicitation. She said nothing at all. A slight frown crept over the professor’s forehead.

“I suppose,” he went on, “that many of the dead people lying in that field had complained about their soup, and more than once. They were the sort of people who won’t accept the mission of the proletariat. Do you know, some of the corpses in that Algerian field were of young women your age, all naked and bloody? And as my wife and I watched, ‘A rat crept softly through the vegetation, dragging its slimy belly on the bank...’ That rat didn’t set up for a gourmet.” Marina was about to say something really rude, when she felt Mr. Eugenides prodding her, positively prodding. Startled but almost grateful, Marina turned back to him.

“Ever you want money,” he was sighing affectionately, “I got a place for you in my business.”

“What business is that, Mr. Eugenides?”

“Girls like you,” Eugenides informed her confidentially, giving her a painful dig in the ribs.

Whatever did this man mean? But she was not to discover that; for a hand was laid upon Eugenides’ shoulder, and a bland voice declared. “I do beg your pardon, Eugenides, but your place is on the other side of this table. Doris, my child, carry this good disciple’s soup plate round to that vacant place by Mrs. Equitone—yes, and his wineglass and napkin, too, if you will.”

Mr. Eugenides scowled at the Archvicar. “Why you say that?”

“Your place is over there,” Archvicar Gerontion insisted urbanely, nodding across the table to a chair beside Mrs. Equitone. The Archvicar’s fingers tightened upon Eugenides’ shoulder blade: Marina observed that those fingers seemed like the talons of an owl. For a moment she fancied that the crippled old man somehow would pluck Eugenides straight out of his chair, as if he were a mouse.

But Eugenides winced, rose, shuffled round to the other side of the table. The Archvicar slid his stick beneath his chair and sank into the vacated place beside Marina. “There has been odd company in this house before now,” he murmured to her, “but never quite such a lot as we have with us this night.”

Dusty was going about with a heavy decanter, refilling the wineglasses. “Don’t touch your lips to it,” the Archvicar advised, putting his graceful old hand across the mouth of Marina’s glass. “It may be right enough, but who can say? The water is good here; I know it of old.”

“I never drink much,” Marina assured him. “It makes me so sleepy. Oh, who is that lady beside the Master?”

Apollinax had taken his chair at the head of the long table, with Grishkin at the foot. On his right hand sat a tall woman, perhaps forty years old, her red hair piled high upon her head, her features striking, her eves bad.

“We call her the Princess Yolupine,” Gerontion whispered, “and with reason. Actually, she
is
a princess-that is, an Australian woman divorced from various earlier husbands, and most recently from an Italian prince. Her tastes are said to be exotic in divers ways. At present, I understand, she is mistress of nothing except a large fortune, which helps to pay for our present retreat. But I had quite forgotten that you hadn’t been presented to most of our disciples, my dear. Shall I run through the roster for you?” Marina nodded.

“On the princess’ right, then, is Mr. Hakagawa, the proprietor of a number of clinics for young women troubled by ‘unwanted pregnancies,’ from Tokyo to Buenos Aires. Next to him, Fraulein von Kulp, of the welcoming but empty eyes, haunting and haunted,
amor bruja.
Beyond her, Mr. Silvero, a connoisseur in arts and crafts, possessor of a capacious and precious collection of erotica, much of which features himself, I am told. After that lively gentleman, Mrs. Equitone, your benefactress, who also helps to pay the Master’s bills, and who long ago was charged with complicity in the curious death of her own daughter-though acquitted. Then our friend Eugenides, who has done very well out of large-scale direction of the world’s oldest profession; at the foot, our Coppelia-Grishkin, of course-she being my colleague in this undertaking, I refrain from describing her adventures.”

Could any of this be true? Marina tried to collect her thoughts. “I don’t see Mr. Sweeney.”

“No.” The Archvicar was barely audible. “Sweeney is below stairs, in more senses than one. Willy-nilly, his talents as architect are being employed, and probably he will be at his labors much of the night. Coriolan-Captain Bain, you know—is lending him a hand. Well, on Grishkin’s far side sits Mr. Bleistein, the man with the thick cigar-would you buy a used automobile from him? Yet he has left a trail of bankrupt international companies behind him, apparently being plausible in his fashion, and has flourished by others’ misfortunes. Next to him, Madame de Tornquist, of the heavy-lidded eyes, providentially widowed, subtle, serpentine, given to fearful séances. Then Monsieur de Bailhache-you’ve spoken with him?-who in the troubles of our time has served as many masters as did Talleyrand, and has betrayed them all.”

“Are you being quite fair?” Marina demanded. She was flushed with surprise and anger. “After all, these are Mr. Apollinax’s disciples...”

“Hush, my dear, and trust this old scoundrel to spy out other scoundrels. After all”—here the Archvicar pressed his hands together in an attitude of prayer, perhaps piously—“who came to save sinners, not the righteous? Mr. Apollinax is magnanimous. The poor little withered creature on my right, happily deaf, is Mrs. Cammel, a militant votary of Sappho, burning, burning, with a hard perverse flame.” Gerontion took a sip of water, and tried to writhe himself into a tolerably comfortable position.

“Let us proceed. Your companion Professor Channing-Cheetah-don’t be alarmed, for he doesn’t hear us, Grizel having him in play-sometime of Cambridge, Massachusetts, amuses himself by conspiring with terrorists and writing letters to the papers in their defense-any band of terrorists will do, whatever their persuasion. Ah, so you talked with him already!

“Then comes my Grizel, Madame Sesostris, famously clairvoyant; then that vacant place, intended for Sweeney until his very recent fall from grace-I’ll explain another time. Last, on the Master’s left, Mrs. Channing-Cheetah, whose passion for bloody enslaving liberation surpasses even her husband’s. I declare, my dear Marina, that in such company I feel almost a prig.”

Marina sat there dazed. Could she believe half of what this old man had told her? The arrival of the dinner’s main course saved her from having to reply at once.

The principal course, on its beautiful plates, consisted of large portions of ham and chips, miserably cooked, which would have discredited an East End fish-and-chips saloon. Marina had come near to starving before Mrs. Equitone had bestowed that hundred pounds upon her, but she never had dined so wretchedly as this. All this grease, all this slapped-down mess, contrasted with the charming tableware, the fine napery, the elaborate candelabra upon the table, the grand room with its musty dignity!

Yet the disciples and Grishkin and Apollinax himself, she noticed, ate greedily enough, hastily, and in silence-as if they needed sustenance but were beyond the pleasures of the palate. She could not see Madame Sesostris, but the Archvicar left his food quite untouched, only drinking a little water. Marina tried to eat, cutting up her ham, fiddling with her chips-but could bring herself to swallow only a few morsels. The acolytes kept filling the glasses with that odd drink, and everybody but the Archvicar and herself seemed to be washing down the mess with that liquid. She was so ashamed of herself! Perhaps the badness of the food was deliberate mortification of the flesh; yet even in the convent she had known no such harsh contempt for the body’s claims. Couldn’t she rise above such trifles-and if she couldn’t, how might she hope to share in the Timeless Moment?

“Phlebas will cook some pigeons’ eggs for us-tolerable omelettes, actually,” the Archvicar was whispering to her. She felt guiltily grateful for this promise. The swilling was almost over; the young people had begun to clear away the plates. She ran her glance round the table again. Was she going mad? Every face there seemed to be a mask, as in her nightmare. And the face of Apollinax, in its blurred indefinable incompleteness, seemed the weirdest mask of all-when one could not make out his eyes, that was.

What lay behind these masks? But before she could sink into such perilous speculations, Mr. Apollinax rose. All masks were turned toward him with a pathetic intensity.

“Now evensong,” the Archvicar drawled into her ear.

“Many of you present,” Mr. Apollinax began, “have heard me utter before such words as I shall speak this night. But you seem not to tire of them; and for Marina they are fresh truths.”

“Did you know that chap was a priest once?” Gerontion breathed.

Yet Marina sat rapt, enchanted by the flow of Apollinax’s eloquence and the marvelous eyes of the Master.

Mr. Apollinax paused before commencing his lecture or sermon. He seemed to have grown a foot in height, abruptly, there at the end of the table. “He’s standing on a little stool—that’s his way,” the Archvicar confided. Hearing even that faint whisper, Apollinax glanced sharply toward Marina and the Archvicar, and they were chastened.

“The first truth,” Apollinax began, “is that there is but one Lord, and but one world. That Lord is not the unjust Demiurge. He is kind, and all impulses in his world are natural. It has been the repression of natural impulses that has worked ferocious mischief upon mankind almost from the beginning. Now modern science teaches us that universal happiness may be secured through the removal of repression and inhibition. That was the intention of the Lord from the first days of the human race, but human perversity has sublimated natural impulses into aggressive channels. At last we begin to understand the order of release.”

Mrs. Equitone was nodding ardent approval, very like a piece of clockwork. Princess Volupine gazed at Apollinax with a devotion almost erotic. Mr. Apollinax spoke with moving certitude, as the Hebrew prophets must have spoken—as if he were the mouthpiece of an Other.

“I tell you that there exists but one world,” Apollinax went on, “and yet that world is a realm of spirit. All these material forms about us, including our bodies, are appearances merely. Every one of us here will transcend this clay. Our bodies are mortal, but you and I are meant for eternity. True, it seems that men and women die; and some indeed are extinguished with the cadaver, the husk; but a few at least endure, an elect—if they have faith. They know eternity in certain Timeless Moments. Those moments may occur in several episodes of what we fondly call a ‘lifetime.’

“Of those especial moments, the fortunate disciplined soul is fully aware throughout eternity. Nay, we
experience
those moments totally, world without end. I am not saying that we remember or re-experience those Timeless Moments; rather, I am saying something far more important, so mark me. I tell you that such Moments themselves endure forever, in their fullness. To employ a homely and absurd parallel, let us suppose that a woman passionately enjoys the eating of a chocolate éclair. Well, then: if her passionate eating of it is such that for her the occasion of the éclair constitutes a Timeless Moment, she will consume that éclair forever and a day. She will not merely remember having eaten the éclair; she will not merely eat another éclair, on another occasion, in some other world. Instead, she actually will eat that very same éclair perpetually, outside of what we conventionally call Time.”

The Archvicar, greatly daring, ventured the faintest of whispers, out of the corner of his mouth, to Marina: “Were it an éclair baked by one of those scruffy acolyte-girls, that Timeless Moment would be Hell.”

Mr. Apollinax did not notice the soft comment. “Now we know that any mere nourishing of the body is a low thing, not to be delectated upon. But if we can fancy even the eating of an éclair to endure as a Timeless Moment, think how intense will be the perpetual endurance of some overwhelmingly strong action and emotion! There, not in some fancied ‘other world,’ is to be found our immortality. Here and now, you and I can be in eternity. What we hear now, see now, feel now, do now can be our seeing, hearing, feeling, acting when the dream-realm of material things has passed away altogether. Our passionate pleasures need know no termination: they may outlast the great globe itself. You and I may dwell unchanged, at what Eliot calls ‘the still point of the turning world,’ quite freed from past and future, quite unalterable. You and I may be as gods.”

What preaching! Marina thought. For the First time in her life, she was beginning to understand the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. She glanced at the Archvicar, but found his face perfectly expressionless.

“Yet these Timeless Moments may be attained only through a strict discipline,” the Master resumed after a little pregnant pause, “and through a high solemn ceremony. For that we have come to this old house. On Ash Wednesday, after dusk, we all shall participate in a ritual which will convey us, collectively and individually, into a most intense Timeless Moment. All here will receive something infinitely precious, a fragment of eternity.

“Believe me, in the twinkling of an eye we shall be changed; corruption will put on incorruption. All here shall experience such an intensity of feeling that the unique moment cannot be gnawed by the tooth of Time.

“As in a glass darkly, such possibilities were glimpsed confusedly in other ages. The Hebrew prophecies of salvation, the Orphic mysteries, the Christian teaching of the mystical body-these were feeble foreshadowings of what will be consummated in us and through us. By a collective act of will, our ritual serving as catalyst, we shall break through the barriers of time and circumstance. Earth may be mixed with fire, as the old Greeks said, and yet what we do here in Balgrummo Lodging will be done by us still when heaven and earth have passed away.”

Fraulein von Kulp had been clutching her wineglass fiercely as Apollinax spoke; now it splintered in her hand, and a little blood ran down her slim fingers; but she took no notice, and Apollinax went on without interruption.