“I can never see that Death card without shuddering.”
“Pooh! Everybody shudders at the Death card, because they don’t think what it means. But you—a priest! Doesn’t Death mean transfiguration, change, turning the whole spread into something else—and you tell us into something better? And look at your oracle cards. The Tower—well probably somebody will take a tumble; it would be queer if they didn’t considering what you tell me about your Foundation. And Judgement. Who escapes it? But look at the Hermit—the man who lives alone—that sounds like you, Priest Simon. And most powerful of all—the Fool! What’s the Fool’s number in the pack?”
“The Fool has no number.”
“Of course not! The Fool is zero! And what is zero? Power, no? Put zero to any number and in a wink you increase its power by ten. He is the wise joker who makes everything else in the hand conditional, and he is in the place of greatest power. The Empress and the Fool govern the spread, and with the Tower of Destruction in the first place among the oracles that probably means that there will be a lot of—what’s the word—is it higgledy-piggledy? Lots of upsets and turn-arounds—”
“Topsy-turveydom,” said Maria.
“Is that the word?”
“Topsy-turveydom seems all too likely,” said Darcourt.
“Don’t fear it! Love it! Give it the big kiss! That’s the way to deal with destiny. You gadje are always afraid of something.”
“I didn’t ask you about my own fate, Madame, but about this venture of the Foundation’s. They are my friends and I am worried on their behalf.”
“No use worrying on anybody else’s behalf. They must take care of themselves.”
“Are you going to explain the spread?”
“Why? It looks clear enough. Topsy-turveydom. I like that word.”
“Would you consider associating the Empress, the guardian woman, with Maria?”
Mamusia went into one of her infrequent fits of laughter; not the cackling of a witch, but a deep, gutty ho-hoing. Darcourt had been mistaken if he expected her to relate her daughter to any figure of power.
“If I try to explain, I will just confuse you, because I am not at all sure myself. Your Fool-zero could be your Round Table, or that Fool-zero my son-in-law; I love him pretty well, I suppose, but he can be a Fool-zero as much as anybody else, when he gets too high and mighty. And that Great Mother, that High Priestess, could be your Platter of Plenty who can dish it out—but can she take it? I don’t know. It could be somebody else, somebody new in your world.”
“Couldn’t Arthur be the Lover?” said Maria and was vexed to find herself blushing.
“You want him to be that, but the card is in the wrong place. Life is full of lovers, for people whose minds are set on love.”
Darcourt was disappointed and worried. He had seen Mamusia discourse on a spread of cards many times, and never had she been so reluctant to speak about what she saw, what she felt, what her intuition suggested. It was not common for her to ask somebody else to lay out the cards; did that mean something special? He began to wish he had not asked Maria to bring him to the Gypsy camp in the bottom of her apartment house, but as he had done so he wanted something from the oracle that was positive, even if in small measure. He talked, he coaxed, and at last Mamusia relented a little.
“You must have something, eh? Something to lean on? It’s reasonable, I suppose. Three things come to me that I would be very careful about, if I had dealt this hand for myself. The first is, be careful how you give money to this child.”
“To Schnak, you mean?”
“Awful name. Yes, to Schnak. You tell me she has great talent as a musician. I know a lot about musicians; I’m one myself. I used to be greatly admired in Vienna, before I married Maria’s father. I sang and played the fiddle and the cimbalom and danced my way into hundreds of hearts. Rich men gave me jewels. Poor men gave me what they couldn’t afford. I could tell you—”
“Hold your gab!” said Yerko, who had been busy with the plum brandy. “Priest Simon doesn’t want to hear you blow your horn.”
“Yes, yes, Mamusia,” said Maria, “we all know how wonderful you used to be before you became even more wonderful as you are now. You could break hearts still, if you wanted to be cruel. But you don’t, dear little mother. You don’t.”
“No. You have embraced your fate as a phuri dai,” said Darcourt, “and become a very wise woman and a great help to us all.”
The flattery worked. Mamusia liked to be thought a wonderful old woman, although she could not have been far over sixty.
“Yes, I was wonderful. Perhaps I am even more wonderful now. I’m not ashamed to speak the truth about myself. But this Schnak—keep her short. You people on foundations ruin a lot of artists. They need to work. They thrive on hunger and destruction. So keep this child from going on the streets, but don’t drown her talent with money. Keep her short. Be careful the Platter of Plenty doesn’t become the instrument of destruction.”
“And the second thing?”
“Not clear at all, but it looks as if some old people, dead people, were going to say something important. Funny-looking people.”
“And the third?”
“I don’t know if I should say.”
“Please, Madame.”
“These things have nothing to do with the cards. They are just things that come to me. This third one comes very, very strong; it came when you were shivering over the Death card. I don’t think I should say. Perhaps it was something just for me, not for you.”
“I beg you,” said Darcourt. He knew when the seeress wanted to be coaxed.
“All right. Here it is. You are wakening the little man.”
Mamusia had a strong sense of the dramatic, and it was plain that this was the end of the session. So, after protestations of gratitude, and astonishment, and enlargement—there could never be too much unction for Mamusia—Darcourt and Maria returned to the penthouse and whisky, of which the abbé drank more than he intended, though less than he wanted.
Whatever Mamusia might say, he hated the Death card and it soured his feeling toward the whole of the prediction. He knew how stupid that was. If the prediction had been all positive he would have accepted it happily, at the same time retaining in another part of his mind a patronizing feeling toward the Tarot and all Gypsy vaticination. To put full trust in a sunny future would be un-Canadian, as well as unworthy of a Christian priest. But now, when he had been shown fear by the cards, that other part of his mind told him he was a fool to play King Saul, and resort to wizards who peep and mutter. Christian priest that he was, he deserved to suffer for his folly, and suffer he did.
The three random predictions he liked even less. He did not believe that artists should be kept short of money. Fat cats hunt better than lean. Don’t they? Does anyone know? Poverty was not good for anybody. Was it? As for utterances by funny-looking people, he felt no response at all.
But—Wakening the little man? What little man?
The little man he knew best was his own penis, for that was what his mother had called it. Always keep the little man very clean, dear. Later he had heard it called the old man, by friends of his days as a theological student, for to those jokers it meant the Old Man, or Old Adam, whom the Redeemed Man was bidden to cast out. As a bachelor whose sexual experience, for a man of his age, had been sporadic and slight, he suffered frequent reminders from the little man that there was a side of his nature that was not being given enough attention.
His physical desire for Maria had never been overwhelming, but it was a fretting element in his life. When they met she kissed him, and he rather wished she wouldn’t because it aroused inadmissible longings. But had they not agreed, when he had proposed marriage to her, that they should be friends? It had possessed deep meaning for him then, and their friendship was one of the fostering things in his life, but he was aware that there was a farcical side to it. We are just good friends. Wasn’t that what people said when they were denying insinuations of a love affair in the press? Oh, intolerable torment! Oh, frying lust—yet not a lust that would drive him to shoot Arthur and carry Maria away to a love-nest in the East. Oh, farce of priesthood, which demanded so much that was unnatural, but failed to give the strength to banish worldly desires! Oh, misery of being the Reverend Professor Simon Darcourt, Vice-Warden of Ploughwright College, professor of Greek, a Fellow of the Royal Society, who was, in the most pressing areas of his life, a poor fish!