The Walking Knife, Doctor Marsden said, was both straight and twisted as love or death.
The Walking Harp, Doctor Marsden said, was an essential ruined cage within ourselves/cradle of music/vibrating touchstone….
So he spoke and I listened.
A month or two later with Spring his words began to blossom and take shape. He had accepted my invitation to return with me to my house in Edinburgh (and stay as long as he liked) the afternoon I had stumbled upon him in a corner of the ancient Dunfermline Abbey….
The first to arrive was the beautiful Gorgon of Marsden’s open-ended circus of reality. Marsden had dug her up from some appalling dive in London where her life-blood and talent were draining away. Knife (another poor gifted devil in need of succour) would follow in due course. Then Harp (a bewildered musician rusting in a garret). They all needed shoes and hose and meat and potatoes. Marsden laughed cheerfully. Then became grave. And gentle. “It is no accident we met,” he said. “I am a doctor of the soul and you are a patron of the arts. A rare combination.”
There was a pause and a gust of wind shook the window-panes of the house. Then he introduced the Gorgon who had sailed into my sitting-room and deposited her spring coat. “Filthy,” said Marsden pointing to the coat which seemed quite stunning and fashionable to me. “Now take the dress she is wearing — the more one sees the less one sees. Her name is MORE-AND-LESS.” He laughed again. “You wouldn’t believe what an infinite labour of love it is.” He stroked her dress. “Seamless my boy. Half-an-inch here. Then half of that half again making a quarter. Then half again of that quarter making one-eighth. Then one-sixteenth. Then one-thirty-secondth. Ad infinitum. God knows how old the thing is and why it doesn’t fall to pieces on her back.”
The beautiful Gorgon smiled and said, “You’re such a joker, Mardie. It’s a new outfit as well you know. Bless you for the cash.”
“Don’t bless me,” said Doctor Marsden. “Bless him, your patron and host.” As he spoke he snapped his fingers. I felt a curious thrill or shock strike the back of my neck and unaccountable laughter welled in my throat. Then a hypnotic bulb switched on and off in my skull like variegated lights in a television studio. “It takes lots of divine money to put on a show.” As Doctor Marsden’s hypnotic voice rose and faded the bulb switched on again. I now saw the beautiful Gorgon plain as a fashion plate wired to a guillotine in a glossy magazine studio. A long dress fitted her like a tube. The bulb switched off. I felt now that if I unscrewed the top or head from that revolutionary French fashion plate and looked down into the dark tube or garment she wore at the light of her soul within, I would, in fact, be seized by the open-ended mystery of beauty which revealed and concealed all its intricate parts ad infinitum. So that the woman within was rendered invisible and her charms became a light at the end of the longest tunnel on earth through which one’s senses ran like sand or sea or blood.
Black Marsden was staring at me intently. I felt myself on the verge of collapse — thrilled to bits as the newspapers say. Like someone who was part of a gigantic hourglass or sea of faces around the globe hypnotized to the brink of love or fear, desert or ocean, mimic creation of catastrophe. “You flaked out,” said Marsden enigmatically, “in the middle of a scene. As you were tipped into the tunnel.”
“What do you mean?” I demanded. “What tunnel?”
“Ah,” said Marsden, “the tunnel of civilization. O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark. It’s part of the jargon of the trade. The commerce of love. Gorgon.”
“Where is she?” I cried. “Where has she gone?”
“I sent her off on another shopping spree,” said Marsden briskly. “But she’ll be back never fear. She’s our skylight to eternity.” He gave his croaking laugh.
2
Mrs. Glenwearie was my housekeeper. If I were to sum up her solid attributes (wholly opposite to the Gorgon fashion plate Doctor Marsden had dug up from the dive in London) seven words would suffice — a woman with a heart of gold. She was nearly sixty and in excellent health. She kept my large house scrupulously clean. I possessed three floors. The ground floor comprised a spacious sitting-room, a good-sized dining-room, a study, a rather large kitchen, bedroom and lavatory; the second floor was divided into four good-sized bedrooms and a large bathroom; the third floor made available a small sitting-room, bedroom and bath — Mrs. Glenwearie’s quarters.
Face to face with Mrs. Glenwearie one morning I was fascinated once more by an inventory of virtues, household virtues, hearth and home (all that money could buy). I was the luckiest of men I reasoned to get someone like her for forty pounds a month. Not only was I abnormally lucky in winning a considerable fortune from the Pools which gave me the key, as it were, to placate heaven and hell (by feeding many a poor angel and devil) but for a man without a family I possessed in Mrs. Glenwearie the nearest whole-hearted substitute nature could provide.
As I basked now in the glow of her temperament it seemed Marsden did not exist at all until Mrs. Glenwearie herself asked after him. The fact was she had seen him the evening he arrived like an ancient ghost from the Abbey. When I brought him to the house I thought I might keep him out of her sight. Or if she did see him make her think he was nothing but a fly-by-night beggar. But she had seen him again the very next morning large as life. Then, with the arrival of the Gorgon Spring she had been conscious of peculiar burgeonings in my part of the house.
Mrs. Glenwearie addressed me as “Mr. Goodrich”, “Mr. Goodrich dear” or “sir” as the fancy took her. (My name is Clive Goodrich.) She preserved a kind of sunny-faced acceptance of her “place” (as employee to employer) which, however, never blighted our relationship. (I am sure I had become not only her privileged ornament but a kind of adopted sou as well.) Nor did it lessen the shrewd labyrinth of conversation always at the edge of her tongue. I was greatly fascinated by this. A healthy fascination I supposed when I recalled another compulsion in my blood towards the Gorgon clothes horse of French fashion whose bars or open-ended frame Marsden had christened “skylight to eternity”.
“Oh Mr. Goodrich dear,” said Mrs. Glenwearie, “that woman is a flighty-looking one. Sailing about your house as if she owned it. She must have spent a pretty penny on her clothes. A bonnie Spring coat draped over her arm. And her dress fit for a Queen. A royal treat she is I’m sure.”
“But flighty-looking you think, Mrs. Glenwearie?”
“Aye, true enough. Flighty-looking she is,” said Mrs. Glenwearie. (Did she think “tart”, I wondered.) It was left to me to fit together royal treat and flighty-looking and to wonder, in fact, how entangled was the moral with the aesthetic judgement. Did moral fascinations breed dangerous Queens or dangerous Queens moral fascinations?
“Did he take many pictures of her, Mr. Goodrich?”
“Did who take many pictures of whom, Mrs. Glenwearie?”
“That Doctor Marsden. I saw him take his flash-bulb camera from his room to the sitting-room. There came a flash through the half-open door and a minute or two later I saw another flash on the window to the street as I was on my way to the butcher’s up the road.”
“I didn’t see anything. I hate flash-bulb cameras,” I said suddenly as if Mrs. Glenwearie had touched a deeply embedded nerve-end of sensation (or the crippling of sensation) to which I rarely confessed within the chopping and changing lights of space. “It’s an allergy of sorts I suppose. Space allergy. Though I must confess I absolutely love the open sea and the sky. Storms, however, can do peculiar things to me. Makes me feel sometimes I’m in a faint tunnel with frozen lightning at the far end. It’s too ridiculous for words.” I was given to this kind of rambling absurd improvisation or confession to my housekeeper.