One of the members made a noise that indicated: if he does not, he could not have any other ambition that could truly alarm us; and if he does, he is helpless, because for some years the regular succession of shadowy presidents has been solely the concern of the Club, whatever the people or the Presidents may have thought. It was a brief noise, made in the throat.
“It’s difficult to describe precisely,” Hawksquill said. “On the one hand his self-importance seems ludicrous, and his aims so huge as to be dismissable entirely, like God’s. On the other hand… He claims, for instance, often and with a particular expression that seems to hint at large secrets, to be ‘in the cards.’ An old catch phrase: and yet Somehow (I’m afraid I can’t say quite how) I think his words are exact, and that he is in the cards, in some cards, only I don’t know which ones.” She looked over her slow-nodding listeners, and felt sorry to puzzle them, but she was puzzled herself. She had spent weeks with Russell Eigenblick on the road, in hotels, on planes, transparently disguised as a journalist (the hard-faced paladins who surrounded Eigenblick saw easily through the disguise, but could see nothing within); but she was less able now to offer a suggestion as to the disposition of his case than when she had first heard his name, and laughed.
Fingertips on her temples, she walked carefully through the perfectly-ordered new wing which she had added over the last weeks to her memory mansion to contain her investigation of Russell Eigenblick. She knew at what turnings he himself should appear, at the head of which staircases, at the nexus of which vistas. He would not appear. She could picture him with the ordinary or Natural Memory. She could see him against the rain-streaked window of a local train, talking indefatigably, his red beard wagging and his curling eyebrows ascending and descending like a ventriloquist’s dummy’s. She could see him haranguing the vast ecstatic dove-moaning audiences, real tears in his eyes and real love poured forth from them to him; she could see him rattling a blue teacup and saucer on his knee at a women’s club meeting after another interminable lecture, with his steely disciples, each holding his own cup and saucer and cake, around him. The Lecturer: it was they who insisted on his being called that. They arrived first and made arrangements for the Lecturer’s appearance. The Lecturer will stand here. No one must use this room but the Lecturer. There must be a car for the Lecturer. And their eyes never filled with tears as they sat behind his lectern, faces as composed and expressionless as their black-socked ankles. All this she had quarried from Natural Memory and by artifice constructed into a fine Palladian wing of her memory mansion, where it ought all to make a new and subtle sense; she expected to be able to turn a marble corner and find him there, framed in a vista, suddenly revealed and revealing what he was, which she had known all along but had not known she knew. That was how it was intended to work, how it had always worked in the past. But now the Club waited, silent and unstirring, for her disposition; and between the pillars and on the belvederes there stood the disciples, neatly dressed, holding each the emblem to identify himself which she had given him— train-ticket stub, golf club, purple mimeo sheets, dead body. They were clear enough. But he would not appear. And yet the whole wing was, yes, for sure, him; and it was chill, and pregnant.
“What about these lectures?” a member said, interrupting her survey.
She looked at him coldly. “God,” she said. “You have transcripts of them all. Is that what I’m to concern myself with? Can you read?” She paused then, wondering whether her contempt was merely a mask for her own failure to encompass her quarry. “When he speaks,” she said more graciously, “they listen. What he says you know. The old amalgam designed to touch every heart. Hope, a limitless hope. Common sense, or what passes for it. Wit that releases. He can draw tears. But many can. I think…”It was as close as she could come now to a definition, and was not close: “I think he is less or more than a man. I think we are Somehow dealing not with a man but with a geography.”
“I see,” said a member, brushing a moustache pearly-gray like his tie.
“You do not,” Hawksquill said, “because I do not.”
“Snuff him out,” another said.
“His message,” said another, drawing from his supple case a sheaf of papers, “is not one we object to, though. Stability. Vigilance. Acceptance. Love.”
“Love,” said another. “All things degenerate. Nothing works any more, everything misfires.” There was a desperate quaver in his voice. “There is no force left on earth found stronger than love.” He burst into strange sobs.
“Do I see, Hawksquill,” someone said calmly, “decanters on your sideboard there?”
“One is cut-glass, and has brandy,” Hawksquill said. “The other is not, and has rye.”
They calmed their associate with a taste of brandy, and declared the meeting closed, sine die, with Hawksquill’s commission continued and the new business unresolved; and left her house in greater puzzlement than they had felt since the society whose secret pillars they were had first begun perversely to sicken and waste.
Pictured Heavens
When she had shown them out, Hawksquill’s servant stood in the hall, gloomily contemplating what seemed to be a pale stain of dawn showing in the barred glass of the door, and complaining inwardly of her state, her subservience, her brief glows of nighttime consciousness worse almost than having none at all. All this while the gray light grew, and seemed to stain the unmoving servant, to subtract the living light from her eyes. She raised a hand in an Egyptian gesture of blessing or dismissal; her lips sealed. When Hawksquill passed her on her way upward, day had come, and the Maid of Stone (as Hawksquill named this ancient statue) was all marmoreal again.
Hawksquill climbed up within the tall, narrow house, four long flights (a daily exercise that would keep her strong heart beating till great old age) and arrived at a small door at the very top of the house, where the stairs narrowed sharply and ran out. She could hear the steady noise of the great mechanism beyond the door, the drop of heavy weights inch by inch, the hollow clicks of catchments and escapements, and felt her mind already soothed. She opened the door. Daylight, many-colored and faint, poured out; the music of the spheres, like soft-soughing wind among clicking bare branches, became distinct. She glanced at her old, square-faced wristwatch, and bent to enter.
That this City house was one of only three in the world equipped with a complete Patent Cosmo-Opticon or Theatrum Mundi in more-or-less working order, Hawksquill had known before she bought it. It had amused her to think that her house would be capped by such an enormous and iron-bound talisman of her mind’s heavens. She had been prepared, though, neither for its great beauty, nor—when it had been set in motion, and she had adjusted it in certain long-thought-out ways—for its usefulness. She had been unable to learn much about the Cosmo-Opticon’s designer, so she couldn’t tell what he had conceived its function to be—entertainment only, probably—but what he hadn’t known she supplied, and so now when she bent to enter the tiny door she entered not only a stained-glass-and-wrought-iron Cosmos exquisitely detailed and moving with spanking exactness in its clockwork rounds, but one which presented to Hawksquill the actual moment of the World-Age that was passing as she entered.