And with that Father sat down upon a pink granite plinth, his head cocked slightly to one side to watch his charges. The man and dog moved tentatively across the bald.
“Loosen your gait, Professor. Heftig, wuchtig, you haven’t been drafted, you know. And this is no funeral!”
And indeed, as the Professor allowed his ankles to loosen, his spine to sway, Topsy picked up her feet with a bit more merriment. “Kraftig, nicht zu schnell!” They had reached the line where a graveled track crossed the grass. With their backs turned, they stopped and stared across the broken path as if it were a wild Russian river.
But they had stopped together, without so much as a tremor between them, and that was the point. Topsy sat down gently, her golden cape settling about her haunches, and the Professor’s shoulders seemed broader for a moment, almost athletic. Father nodded approvingly.
“Anything diagonal across the body relaxes it,” he said. Then the Professor’s hand dropped tremulously to Topsy’s muzzle.
“So schmart,” he crooned, “so very schmart.”
“Cantabile, Professor, non troppo lugubre, if you please,” Father said. “Now turn and take care not to get tangled, sehr langsam.”
The Professor accomplished a cautious half-circle in front of her nose, and then as the couple headed back toward Felix, Topsy pirouetted on her butt and they moved as one, a perfect arc of affective slackness in the cord — arm in arm, so to speak.
“Schmart, sie schmart,” the Professor chanted softly, but then self-consciously he broke his stride, and the cord suddenly drew taut. Topsy resisted, and the grace note fell away flat. Both master and pupil looked mournfully to Father, who, walking quickly toward them and taking up the cord, took Topsy through a quick series of snappy turns, in order that she finish strongly. Then, as he released her to run, he said over his shoulder:
“Walk the walk, Professor, then talk the talk. It’s moves that make views, not the other way about.”
At the ford, a furtive, boney stag with a broken rack and patchy coat appeared, pawing at the water. But as he pricked up his ears and crossed, there were no splashings, no white-fringed wavelets about his fetlocks. Here was a river that could be stepped in twice and twice and twice again, the Heraclitian riddle broken: no flow, no flux, no exchange — only stasis. Left foot, right foot, still he could not step into the river, even once. I saw that my little aesthetic trick, my devotion to the precious pause and the language of omission, was a flimsy thing, for in this world the basic constant is not change, despite its many apologists. What goes unremarked is that, without any reason, things just stop. For nature loves to hide, and history is mostly stillness.
My Waterman seemed quite content, even louche, out of his element, constantly lighting and relighting his sodden pipe, and pouring a stream out of a figured urn into the blackening marsh. Fish occasionally stuck their heads out of the water to stare at him, as they will sometimes do for sick men.
The ladies had known of each other since childhood, but heretofore had seen one another only from a distance. Through the turn of the century, the Cannonian royal family had left their wooden palace at Umfallo to vacation at Semper Vero for the summer, as the nether-reaches of our acreage were still technically part of the royal hunting grounds. It had been the decision of Zanäia’s father, King Peveny, to live as the people do for the best part of the summer, for it was well-known that rough as a peasant’s life might be, they invariably looked out upon beauty, even while locked in a starving carnal embrace. Every member of the court changed into peasant clothes for the season, living in elegant Turkish tents and small portable cottages brought in by oxen. Princess Zanäia herself resided in a small gabled treehouse, a portion of whose parlor still remained in the crotch of a huge beech, which could bear the weight of her many surreptitious nightly visitors, though by now the view had lost much of its charm. But the court kept its distance from the gentry, suspicious of any intercourse with the upper middle classes, and as the gentry themselves of course felt morally superior to the aristocrats, they got along quite well. To underline the simplicity of the royal summer, a large scaffolding had been erected between the trees, suggesting some kind of pagan sacrificial platform, and around this stood supercilious servants in frock coats, each standing with a flaming taper by a satin footstool. There were as well some large and rather unconvincing life-sized dolls, impaled on tritons for Scythian effect, as the royalty liked nothing so much as to remind themselves that they, too, had once been classified as barbarians. This mise-en-scène was framed with long wafts of diaphanous silk trailing down from the beeches, making a kind of osmotic proscenium. It was as if they could only accept the view if it were made commonplace while you were looking out and pornographic while you were looking in, creating a kind of allegory, though suggestive of what it was hard to say, except that the traditional invasion route had been turned into a kind of slow-motion debauche, particularized by large potted plants, beautiful young city boys, angelic peasant girls, petards, and Vaseline.
King Peveny himself was a strange man, given to visiting exhibitions in Cannonia about foreign lands, then writing speeches giving the impression he had actually traveled there. Once, when bouncing his darling, curly-haired Zanäia on his knee, he had looked at her sideways, saying, “You know my sweet, if you were in a brothel, you are not the one I’d pick.” In their most recent hysterical quest for a ruler, the Astingi had sent out feelers to all the royal houses, magnates, and grofs without privilege, even unmarried daughters of the higher nobles. But nothing remotely like a prince would consider them, except one Grof Peveny, “Falconer of the Hereditary lands,” who, tired of hunting rats in Poland, was enticed by the promise to take unlimited Cannonian forest pig from horseback. But despite the unprecedented game potential, he reluctantly withheld his candidacy for a time, as he perceived the ancient hermit kingdom to be a troubled place. Yet times were such for the minor nobility that he was finally forced to accept the regency. So in 1875, Grof Peveny moved his loyal retainers, sporting chums, knockneed horses, and scruffy dogs to the wooden castle with no stairway and a leaking roof at Umfallo, where to polite applause, and with only a single assassination threat, he summed up his feelings in his acceptance speech: “My people are neither handsome nor gay, meseems. They are neglected, superstitious, and ignorant. But they are indescribably picturesque, and I have learned to love them.” And then they all stood round and sang the new national anthem, a reorchestrated Astingi revel.
Over the creation of thy beauty,
There is a mist of tears
Oh my poor strange land
How long have I kept watch with thee. .
Princess Zanäia and Count Zich had been heavy petters of a sort since thirteen, and the Count had been credited as her lover, an improbable distinction. Each of them liked nothing better than to take the Eroica Express anywhere. That famous train was twice as long as any in Europe, its double-hinged steam engine running wildly as if in terror of itself, hauling its notorious Cannonian first-class sleeping coaches, in which all the bedrooms were adjoined by secret inner doors, and each car in turn bracketed by ornate buffet and smoking carriages. Theirs were intermittent and compensatory attentions in later life, consoling one another with infinite tenderness and solicitude during those intervals when the other had driven away another lover, due to a gross instability and selfishness which they knew better than to practice on each other. It was noted in Father’s daybook that had they been joined in matrimony and publicly practiced the management science and cosseting they adopted when the other was most forlorn, they might have shrewdly ruled the Central Empires, and entirely sidestepped the horrific detour of the twentieth century.