"Not really. These things happen."
"Well you got to say it makes him look a fool, if you want to keep those papers, don't you?"
Shushila sat between her guests and smiled. Blackadder watched the cameras and felt like a dusty barman. Dusty grey between these two peacocks, dusty with face-powder-he could smell himself-under the hot light. The moment before the broadcast seemed eternal, and then suddenly, like a sprint race, they were all talking very rapidly and as suddenly silent again. He had only the vaguest recollection of what had been said. The two women, like gaudy parrots, talking about female sexuality and its symbols when repressed, the Fairy Melusina and the danger of the female, LaMotte and the love that dared not speak its name, Leonora's huge surprise when it seemed that Christabel might have loved a man. And his own voice: "Randolph Henry Ash was one of the great love poets in our language. Ask to Embla is one of the great poems of true sexual passion. No one has ever really known whom those poems were written for. In my view the explanation advanced in the standard biography always looked unconvincing and silly. Now we know who it was-we've discovered Ash's Dark Lady. It's the kind of discovery scholars dream of. The letters have got to stay in our country-they're part of our national story."
And Shushila: "You won't agree with that, Professor Stern? Being an American?"
And Leonora: "I think the letters should be in the British Library. We can all have microfilms and photocopies, the problems are only sentimental. And I'd like Christabel to have honour in her own country and Professor Blackadder here, who's the greatest living Ash scholar, to have charge of the correspondence. I'm not acquisitive, Shushila-all I want is a chance to write the best critique of these letters once they're available. The days of cultural imperialism are over, I'm glad to say…"
Afterwards Leonora took his arm. "I'll buy you a drink," she said. "You need one, I guess. So do I. You did fine, Professor, better than I thought."
"It was your influence," Blackadder said. "What I said was an awful travesty. I apologise, Dr Stern. I didn't mean to imply that you influenced me to travesty, I meant that you influenced me enough to make me articulate at all-"
"I know what you meant. I bet you like malt whisky, you're a Scot." They found themselves in a dim and beery bar, where Leonora shone like a Christmas tree. "Now, let me tell you where I think Maud Bailey is…"
Chapter 21
MUMMY POSSEST
Look, Géraldine, into the stones of fire
I spread my hands out on the velvet cloth-
Come closer, child, if you would learn to scry
And read the hieroglyphics of my rings!
See, how the stones glow on the milky skin-
Beryl and emerald and chrysoprase-
The gifts of lords and ladies, which I prize
Not for their cost, but for their mystic sense
The subtle silent speech of Mother Earth.
Your hands, like mine, are sweetly soft and white.
I touch your fingers, and the electric spark
Springs twixt our skins-you sense it? Good. Now see
The shifting lights move on the stones and see
If any vision show itself to you
As, it may be, a mystic Face, all flushed
With floating radiance of actinic light,
Or, it may be, the interlacing boughs
Of God's unearthly Orchard of Desire.
What do you see? A spider-web of light?
That's a beginning. Soon the lines will form
The blessed showings of the Spirit World.
Lights are Intelligences in our minds, whose force
We no more comprehend than here, in these
Glittering jewels, we can say how rose
Or sapphire blue or emerald steady shines,
Or what makes all the brilliant colours glow
Along the throat of the Arabian bird,
Whilst here, in milder air, her neck is grey
Or in the Polar void a brilliant white.
Thus in God's Garden the stones speak and shine.
Here we may read their silences, or scry
Eternal forms in earthly blocks of light.
Take up the crystal ball, sweet Géraldine.
Gaze on the sphere. Observe how left and right,
Above, below, reverse themselves in this
And in its depth a glittering chamber lies
Like a drowned world with downward-pointing flames,
This room in miniature, all widdershins.
Look steadily, and you will see all shift
Under the veils of spirit vision, see
What is not here, but comes from o'er the bourn.
My face, reversed, shall bathe in rosy fronds
As in her rocky cave, Actinia
The sea-anemone, puts out a cloud
Of hidden halo of odylic force-
And after mine, you shall see other Forms
In other lights, come swimming into view,
You shall, I swear it. Still be patient.
The force is fitful, and the vital spark
Which kindles in the Medium and lights
Conductive channels for the venturesome
Friends in the Spirit, leaps and dies again
Like Will-o-the-Wisps, or marsh-lights flickering.