Conrad Aiken - Blue Voyage

“The climate?” said the Major, in a pause during which the poker players arranged and examined their cards. “Delightful. Hot in the middle of the day, but you retire for a nap … There! those are the stone stairs I told you about. Look at the size of them. Each step two feet high. It’s a humorous custom there to take ladies to see them. You let the lady go first, and if you loiter a step or two below— he he ! That’s Mrs. Grant, wife of one of the officials. A jolly good sport. She didn’t give a damn — and didn’t wear any petticoat either!.. I stayed behind, admiring the view …” He laughed at the Welsh Rarebit with scarlet forehead; his face, flushed with invitation, moving jerkily upward and downward. The Welsh Rarebit, holding the photograph in one hand, regarded the invitation snakily; with an air of stupid appraisal. Then she squeezed his wrist.

“Naughty man!” she crooned.

“Well, boys,” sang the glass-eyed poker player. “I think I’ll have a look at this. There’s fifty, and I’ll raise it ten. It’s a great life if you don’t weaken.”

Hay-Lawrence brooded downward with cheeks sunk upon fists. Thought was moving in his brain. Like a train in a dark subway. A red spark coming nearer through the darkness, gliding round curves. Other thoughts too, going in other directions — he was listening to the voices in the room, listening to the half-excluded sound of sea, the thrum of the engines which vibrated his English body. What else? A brass telescope at Cowes; three pairs of white flannels; four pairs of white shoes; tea on the lawn with Lady Daphne Twinkleplume (slightly literary) followed by a week on his little shoot in Wales. At home, his neurotic wife, Gladys, sitting by the fire, looking out of the darkening window on which long bright gashes of rain began to glisten, looking into the gloom of a London dusk, then again sitting by the fire, shivering. Tea at five. Vivien had sailed from Cartagena. He had sailed from Rio. He had sailed (a postcard said) from Panama. He was sailing (a cable said) from New York. The maid was taking Ching (the Pekingese) for a walk round Sloane Square and perhaps as far as Harrods. She ought to have known it would rain. “Vivien, tell me, why is it you go away so much? Why are you always going away to sea? leaving me alone?” “Are we going to discuss that again?” “I can’t stand it, Vivien — I can’t stand it … and all my friends saying—” “Let them talk. Tell them it’s doctor’s orders. Always tell them that. It’s doctor’s orders that I should go to sea, and go to sea alone. Would you like me to go mad?”

Knight to queen’s rook four, the black horse taken firmly by the ears.

“This is the part of the game where I always go wrong,” said Hay-Lawrence.

Exchange the bishop for the knight? No. Concentrate on the center — then the queen’s pawn forward. Bishop back, out of reach, to bishop two.

“The part where I invariably go wrong,” murmured Hay-Lawrence lifting his queen’s bishop’s pawn to bishop four. Pawn attack on the queen’s side — not too difficult to dispose of. Hay-Lawrence was human, after all — began shrinking to commensurable proportions. Refinement without taste, intelligence without originality. From either vantage point, one could probably intimidate him; for he was intelligent enough to know his weaknesses and weak enough to be snobbish, to want to make a good impression. Silberstein, for all his vulgarity, had ruffled him and put him at a disadvantage. “Why shouldn’t I ?” thought Demarest, secretly smiling. “ The Duke of Clarence, my partner .” Pawn to queen four. Moses Caligula Silberstein. Solomon Caligula. Did Jael: with a nail: pierce the viscera: of Sisera? No, his head! He is dead … Caligula in Italian sunset under a purple canopy, on which flashed the eagle: Veronese, crouching in the dark foreground, saw the scene. The wide eye of Veronese saw the royal canopy, saw the black hand that drew the curtain, watched the distance brightening among the hills. The cold, precise, lavish hand of Veronese took possession of these things; but it lacked madness … Again: King Caligula, setting forth; after a seven days’ meditation; marched his army a parasang north; and in the evening took his station: on a green hilltop peaked and gleaming: in the last slant of Alban sun. Black slaves hoisted a canopy of purple — to hue the vision of the godlike one … The movement too jaunty altogether — but no matter. Let it go — let it come — let it blossom and die. Why did it blossom, though, out of the massive face, dead white brow, and cruel eyes of Silberstein?… There, as he slept, he had his vision: but what was the vision? Elysian, fountain, mountain — threadbare rhymes, but let them serve. There as he slept he had his vision: candles burned by the sacred fountain; sadly he walked, through a twilight Elysian, and came to the wall of the laureate mountain . (Why laureate?) Bathe your heart in the lustral water (a voice, this was — a voice on the air, out of a grotto, out of a tree) until like silver it burns and shines (pleonastic), and lo from the sky comes heaven’s tall daughter — down from a star — by a stair of vines. Seven ripe peaches, from the walls of heaven— not six, not eight, but seven. The Pleiades. Mystical seven. The seven moles on Juno’s back. The seven stages in the life of man. The dance of the seven veils. Come seven — come eleven; everything at sixes and sevens. SEVEN. The word was extraordinarily beautiful, had a balance analogous to the balanced rhythm of the number itself — seven digits, of which the second was the s and the sixth the N. NEVES: Eno, owt, eerht, ruof, evif, xis, neves. A less emphatic series, but decidedly more interesting as sound, more varied. Queen to bishop two. Yes. He might have withdrawn the knight, however — to knight two. No — a pawn given up. The king’s knight to queen two, then? That might have been better?…

“Oo, no — certn’y not !” cried the Welsh Rarebit with all-embracing archness, loudly and proudly.

“Why not?” The Major leaned forward over clasped fingers. His eyes, without the pince-nez, were beginning to look strained — but he liked his brown eyes to be seen. He had probably been told that their effect was fatal. They twinkled, small, dark and bright, shy yet challenging, attractive in spite of (perhaps partly because of) their boyish vanity.

Peggy lifted her black-and-white striped coat collar against the side of her face as if she were taking the veil. Over this she swerved green eyes at him, upward. Then lowered the long lashes and looked away. An expression of practiced fright — yet perhaps there was some faint survival of genuine feeling in it. The Major, still gazing at her, as she did not reply, gave the little crisp musical giggle (very appealing) with which he was accustomed to fill in awkward pauses; and cast a quick glance over the small room to see if he were being observed. When his eye met Demarest’s, he looked sharply away, preened his mustache briskly with thumb and finger, then leaned, flagrantly confidential, toward the Welsh Rarebit and said something inaudible, gravely. Peggy ululated, lifting her throat. The crumpled handkerchief was pressed against her lamia mouth.

“She drinks blood, that trollop,” said Demarest.

“Who? Oh … Can I look?”

“No. The Major has his eye on us … The Major’s a fast worker, as the saying is.”

As the saying is. He had added this phrase for fear Hay-Lawrence might suppose him to use slang unconsciously — a disgusting cowardice! “Yet I feel, somehow, that the Major will play safe, oh, very, very safe.” Queen’s knight to queen two. “With masks and buttons — a friendly bout, no injuries, and a sweet heartache, not too severe, at farewell.”