Nights at the Circus (14 page)

‘So
that
was the signification of his gold medallion! The penis, represented by itself, aspires upwards, represented by the wings, but is dragged downwards, represented by the twining stem, by the female part, represented by the rose. H’m. This is some kind of heretical possibly Manichean version of neo-Platonic Rosicrucianism, thinks I to myself; tread carefully, girlie! I exort myself.

‘He’s so appalled himself at the notion of the orifice that the poor old sod mumbles and whimpers himself to a halt, though he’s no stranger to the Abyss, himself, used to come every Sunday, just to convince himself it was as ’orrible as he’d always thought. I pour myself another glass of claret, to strengthen myself, and one for mine host, too, who seems to need it. He tosses it off absentmindedly and, after a few moments, recovers his equanimity sufficient to turn his mind to happier things.

‘“Flora!” he cries. “Quick spirit of the awakening world! Winged, and aspiring upwards! Flora; Azrael; Venus Pandemos! These are but a few of the many names with which I might honour my goddess, but, tonight, I shall call you ‘Flora’, very often, for do you not know what night it is, Flora?”

‘I try a dollop of his excellent Stilton, pondering as I savour it the baroque eclecticism of his mythology.

‘“April thirtieth,” I says, suspicious lest this turns out to be another riddle.

‘“May eve, Flora, mia,” he assures me. “In but a few moments, it will be
your
day, the green hinge of the year. The door of spring will open up to let summer through. It will be the merry morning of May!”

‘I nervously fortify myself with another glass of wine.

‘“Now the maypole is, self-evidently, nothing but the representation of a
phallos
, i.e. a lingam, i.e. a piercing and fructifying spear such as the lance of Longius – note that ‘long’! The long lance of Longius . . .” but here he blinks and stutters, for he is about to lose his way in his own mythology and wax Arthurian, which will lead him up a blind alley in next to no time. He pours himself more claret with a shaking hand and lurches back to his fertility rites.

‘“Maypole, phallus, lingam – ha! Up! heave ho and up he rises! up tomorrow on all the village greens of merrie England will spring the sacred phalloi of this blessed season and that is why, tonight of all nights, I chose to spirit you away from the dark house, the abyss, the erberus of perpetual winter ruled over by the old gnome of hell, Madame Schreck.”

‘Now, “old gnome of hell” fitted the said Mrs S to a ‘t’, so I thought the fool may speak some sense in the midst of his folly and looked at him more kindly.

‘Would you like to know his name, sir?’ she interrupted herself, abruptly, giving Walser the touch of an eye like sudden blue steel. Her hairpins had all given away under the tumultuous impulses of her half hundredweight of hair, that now flowed and tumbled all around her, and she had become somewhat flushed, giving her a wild and maenad air. Walser wilted in the blast of her full attention.

‘You don’t half look done in, sir,’ said Lizzie, with unexpected concern. And Walser did indeed feel himself at the point of prostration. The hand that followed their dictations across the page obediently as a little dog no longer felt as if it belonged to him. It flapped at the hinge of the wrist. All the same:

‘No, no,’ he lied. ‘I’ll be fine.’

‘You must know this gentleman’s name!’ insisted Fevvers and, seizing his notebook, wrote it down. She had a fine, firm, flowing Italic hand. On reading it:

‘Good God,’ said Walser.

‘I saw in the paper only yesterday how he gives the most impressive speech in the House on the subject of Votes for Women. Which he is against. On account of how women are of a different soul-substance from men, cut from a different bolt of spirit cloth, and altogether too pure and rarefied to be bothering their pretty little heads with things of
this
world, such as the Irish question and the Boer War.

‘In the course of our interminable, if one-sided, conversation, he reveals to me how he is much afraid of growing old. And, indeed, who isn’t! Who doesn’t fear the relentless spinning of the celestial wheel off which, one day, all are doomed to topple. And after much hemming and hawing and mystical circumlocution, at last he gives it to me: that the sage, Artephius, invented a cabbalistic magnet which secretly sucked out the bodies of young women their mysterious spirit of efflorescence – “efflorescence, Flora,” he says, with a significant intonation. By applying a concentration of these spirits to himself by his magic arts, and continually rejuvenating himself, it was spring all year long with Artephius and so Mr Rosencreutz hopes it will be for him.

‘Furthermore, opines Mr Rosencreutz, didn’t King David, when he grew old, take Abishag the Shulamite to lie in his bosom and “thereby he got heat”, and lived two, three hundred years more, and turned into one of the Nine Worthies? He went on, too, about a certain Signor Guardi whom Mr Rosencreutz himself had met in Venice, how this Signor Guardi possessed a portrait of himself as a young man
painted by Titian.
Proving this Signor Guardi was a cool three hundred years old, or so, and he told Mr Rosencreutz how he had himself rubbed all over by a baker’s dozen young girls from the Apennines, their massage oil consisting of a distillation of spring flowers and chemical extracts known only to himself. But there came an exceedingly furtive expression over Mr Rosencreutz’s face when he spoke of Signor Guardi’s prescription, and I thought, there’s something here he’s keeping to himself.

‘But this he
will
say. That, since he first grew versed in esoteric law and the magic arts, he has known of my existence, of the bright angel who will release him from the bonds of the material, the winged spirit of universal springtime – knew, too, I was locked away beneath the ground in Hell. H’m, I thinks, to that, and, h’m, again, when he starts rummaging away in his book and jabbing his stubby finger at the pages that tell him death and life are all the same. And then the book slipped off his lap, due to his trembling, and, at last, blushing and stumbling in his speech, lowering his voice, he tells me how he thinks that, by uniting his body with that of Azrael, the Angel of Death, on the threshold of the spring, he would cheat death itself and live forever while Flora herself will be forever free of winter’s chill.

‘This he has proved, in the seven weeks since he first saw me, by all manner of cabbalistic geometry, of which he will gladly, he says, show me the proofs. But I poured out the last of the claret without offering him some, for I thought two thousand guineas was cheap at the price, and said so, but he was too far sunk in his own ecstatic reveries to hear me. I thought the least he could do was crack another bottle of claret, seeing as he was getting eternal life dirt cheap and I was obtaining only half the profit from this bizarre transaction but he was temporarily blind and deaf to the world, harkening only to the invisible angels shouting in his ears, so I rapped loudly with the book upon the table and that brought one of his bullies in, at the double – out of a door of a secret kind concealed in the panelling.

‘“If the gentleman were not so exalted by the presence of his visitor, I’m sure he’d order up another bottle,” I says. “Let’s try the ’88 vintage, this time, if the cellar will run to it.”

(‘For I do like a nice glass of good wine, when I get the chance, Mr Walser.’)

‘“. . . in comparison with the hermetic adepts, monarchs are poor,” mumbles Mr Rosencreutz, sunk in his dreams, and the bully tips me a wink as he piles up the dirty crocks on the tray, mutters: “ ’e keeps ’is wallet in the top drawer of the bureau in the bedroom, you’ll see it, remember me.”

‘Indeed I remember ’im, ’e’s the one groped my right tit, and am almost sorry for my poor gull with his fancy-dress notions, fleeced by his servants, deluded by charlatans, until the rogue returns with the bottle. Mr Rosencreutz wakes up with a start, says: “What’s this? Can’t have your vital spirits dulled by base vapours!” And upends the claret into the jug of white roses, which blush. So I must sit on a horrid, hard chair, parched with thirst, and wait for dawn to get the business over with.

‘For I plan to pick up the cash owing to me and so depart.

‘Not – never! back to Madame Schreck, of course; but straight home to Battersea, for what Mr Rosencreutz is willing to pay for the privilege of busting a scrap of cartilege was quite sufficient to set my entire family up in comfort, I can tell you. And I passed the hours of that short summer night happily enough, fool that I was, for I was busy building castles in the air while Mr Rosencreutz repeats his cryptic orizens, for he seems so excited by the apotheosis he thinks is offered by my embraces as to appear half-crazed.

‘Somewhere a clock tells the hours and when it gets to four or quarter past, he comes to his senses somewhat and tells me I must prepare myself.

‘“Prepare myself how, master?” I asked craftily.

‘“By pure thoughts,” he says, and apostrophises me: “Queen of ambiguities, goddess of in-between states, being on the borderline of species, manifestation of Arioriph, Venus, Achamatoth, Sophia.”

‘I can’t tell you what a turn it gave me, when he called me “Sophia”. How did he stumble over my christened name? It was as if it put me in his power, that he should know my name, and, though I am not ordinarily superstitious, now I became strangely fearful.

‘“Lady of the hub of the celestial wheel, creature half of earth and half of air, virgin and whore, reconciler of fundament and firmament, reconciler of opposing states through the mediation of your ambivalent body, reconciler of the grand opposites of death and life, you who come to me neither naked nor clothed, wait with me for the hour when it is neither dark nor light, that of dawn before daybreak, when you shall give yourself to me but I shall not possess you.”

‘Give yourself, that’s rich! I thought, considering the amounts of money changing hands. But I outwardly adopted a submissive stance and asked in a humble voice: “How shall I do that, oh, great sage?”

‘“The rest of the riddle you must answer at the appointed hour,” he intones. So I had to make do with that.

‘You may well wonder, sir, why I hadn’t hopped straight out of the window and away long ago but all I knew of my location was that his house was somewhere in the Home Counties, and, further than that, I couldn’t for the life of me think where it was. And wouldn’t I be in a pickle, then, out in the middle of nowhere in me altogether, flapping for cover from tree to tree like a bloody dog all the way to Battersea!

‘I must say, too, that I both hate and fear the open country. I do not like to be where Man is not, I tell you straight. I love the sight and stink and bustle of humanity as I love my life and a bit of landscape that has no people in it, no friendly smoke rising from the chimney of some human habitation, is as good as desert waste to me. Not that I ever spent much time in the woods and fields, I’m happy to say, but, sometimes, in Ma Nelson’s day, on August Bank Holiday, she’d pack us all into a barouche and off we’d go to the New Forest for a picnic, and I was always heartily glad to get back to Wapping High Street, for there I breathed more easy – Cockney to the bone, sir!

‘Besides, sir, I am an honest woman. And the poor old bugger had put his cash down on the nail, hadn’t he, even if I’d pocketed none of it so far. But I’d high hopes of that thousand on delivery, plus the extra hundred he’d promised me. Why, I’d already bought one of those nice big houses off Lavender Hill, and fixed Gianni and Isotta and Violette and Lizzie and me and the rest of us up in it nice as you please.

‘It was the promise of hard cash kept me there, and, well, I thought I’d not have too much trouble with the old fool when it came to the pinch, because he had the look of a Johnny-come-quickly, I can tell you. And, in my innocence, of a worse fate than that fate – why, I never thought!

‘So time passed, as it sometimes does, he babbling to himself, until those leaded panes grow pale. At which he bursts into song.

‘“Unite and unite! oh! let us all unite!

For summer is icumen today.”

‘And jumps up, switches off the electrics, flings open the casement. A little spring wind, still with a chill on it, blows into the room, and, silly, tender-hearted me, I fear for his middle-aged health.

‘“You mind your bare head, or you’ll catch your death!”

‘That word, “death”, had an electrifying effect upon him; he brayed and neighed, quivered and whinnied, clinging on to the casement frame as if, without its support, down he would flop, but, the spasm soon over, then he quavered:

‘“Oh, my rejuvenatrix! the Fructifying disc is just now nudging his way up the backside of yonder hillock! Lie down on the altar!”

‘Mr Walser, sir, though I blush to admit it to a man,
intacta
as I am, I knew enough to know if I got down on my back not only would it hold no joy for me, but the ensuing attempt at connection would cause a commotion similar to a bout of all-in wrestling in a pillow factory.

‘“You may take me exclusively by the rear entry, oh, great sage, due to my feathers!” I warned him hastily, though I question in my mind his dislike of the orifice, and, even then, as in a flash of understanding, it comes to me that his idea of sex-magic and my own might not concur.

‘“Never you mind that!” he cried in his frenzy. “Just you lie down!”

‘Capering back to me, he clears off the table on which my supper had been served with one swipe of his scrawny arm, knocking book and roses to the floor. Yet, for all the sacred terror of his blue features, I spied in them something else, something that troubled me dreadfully, for it was just that look of anticipated naughtiness I’ve caught on the face of my goddaughter Violetta when she’s just about to plunge her fingers into the forbidden glories of the chocolate ice. And then I think: this man is going to do me harm.

‘Seeing the shadow of reluctance on my face, he recovers himself a little and, summoning to himself all the authority of a captain of industry, repeats: