“Sylvie?”
The Folding Bedroom seemed oddly large, and, though sunlight poured in through all its little windows, Somehow not cheerful. What was it? The place seemed swept, but not tidy; cleaned, but not clean. There was a lot of stuff missing, he gradually realized; a lot of stuff. Had they been robbed? He went gingerly into the kitchen. Sylvie’s collection of unguents and such that clustered above the sink was gone. Her shampoos and hairbrushes, gone. It was all gone. All but his own old Gillette.
In the bedroom likewise. Her totems and pretty things, gone. Her china señorita, with a dead-white face and black spitcurls, whose top half separated from her flaring skirt which was really a jewel box, gone. Her hats hung on the back of the door, gone. Her crazy envelope of important papers and assorted snapshots, gone.
He tore open the closet door. Empty coat-hangers clanged, and his own overcoat hung on the door flung out startled sleeves, but there was nothing at all of hers there.
Nothing at all.
He looked around him, and then looked around him again. And then stood still in the middle of the empty floor.
“Gone,” he said.
Book Five
THE ART OF MEMORY
I.
The fields, the caves, the dens of Memory cannot be counted; their fullness cannot be counted nor the kinds of things counted that fill them… I force my way in amongst them, even as far as my power reaches, and nowhere find an end.
Upon a deep midnight, the Maid of Stone knocked with a heavy fist on the tiny door of the Cosmo-Opticon on the top floor of Ariel Hawksquill’s townhouse.
“The Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club to see you.”
“Yes. Have them wait in the parlor.”
The moon behind the mirrored moon of the Cosmo-Opticon, and the dull glow of the City lights, were all that illuminated the heavens of glass; the blackish Zodiac and the constellations could not be read. Odd, she thought, how (reversing the natural order) the Cosmo-Opticon was intelligible, ablaze, in the day, and obscure at night, when the real heaven’s panoply is full… She rose and came out, the iron Earth with its enameled rivers and mountains clanging beneath her feet.
The Hero Awakened
A year had passed since she had looked up to see that the Zodiac painted on the night-blue ceiling of the Terminus had changed its old wrong order of march and went the way the world went. In that year, her investigations into the nature and origins of Russell Eigenblick had grown only more intense, though the Club had fallen oddly silent; no longer lately did they send her cryptic telegrams urging her on, and though Fred Savage showed up as usual at her door with the installments of her fee, these weren’t accompanied by the usual encouragements or reproaches. Had they lost interest?
If they had, she thought she could awaken it this night.
She had broken the case, in fact, some months before; the answer came, not from her occult researches, but from such mundane or sublunary places as her old encyclopaedia (tenth Britannica), the sixth volume of Gregorovius on Medieval Rome, and (a great folio in double columns, with a hasp to lock it up) the Prophecies of Abbot Joachim da Fiore. It was certainty that had taken all her arts, and that had to be bought at the cost of much labor, and much time. There was no doubt, now, though. She knew, that is, Who. She did not know How, or Why; she knew no more than she had known who the children of the children of Time were, whose champion Russell Eigenblick might be; she didn’t know where those cards were which he was in, or in what sense he was in them. But she knew Who: and she had summoned the Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club to hear that news.
They had disposed themselves around the chairs and sofa of her dimly-lit and crowded drawing-room or study on the ground floor.
“Gentlemen,” she said, gripping the back of an upright leather chair like a lectern, “more than two years ago you gave me the assignment of discovering the nature and intentions of Russell Eigenblick. You have had an unconscionable wait, but I think tonight I can at least provide you with an identification; a recommendation as to the disposition of the case will be far harder. If I can make one at all. And if I can make one, then you—yes, even you—may be incapable of acting on it.”
There was an exchange of glances at this, subtler than one sees on stage, but with the same effect of registering mutual surprise and concern. It had once before occurred to Hawksquill that the men she dealt with were not the Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club at all, but actors hired to represent them. She suppressed the notion.
“We all know,” she went on, “the tales, found in many mythologies, of a hero who, though slain on the field of battle or otherwise meeting a tragic end, is said not to have died at all, but to have been home away to somewhere, elsewhere, an isle or a cave or a cloud, where he sleeps; and from where, at his people’s greatest need, he will issue, with his paladins, to aid them, and to rule then over a new Golden Age. Rex Quondam et Futurus. Arthur in Avalon; Sikander somewhere in Persia; Cuchulain in every other fen or glen of Ireland; Jesus Christ himself.
“All these tales, moving as they are, are not true. No trials of his people awakened Arthur; Cuchulain is able to sleep through the mutual slaughter of his, protracted over centuries; the Second Coming, continually announced, has been delayed past the virtual end of the Church that so much counted on it. No: whatever the next World-Age brings (and that age lies anyway well in the to-come) it will not bring back a hero whose name we know. But…” She paused, assailed by a sudden doubt. Said aloud, the absurdity of it seemed greater. She even flushed, ashamed, as she went on: “But it happens that one of these stories is true. It’s not one we would ever have thought to be true, even if it were one we remember and tell, and for the most part it isn’t; it and its hero are much forgotten. But we know it to be true because the necessary conclusion of it has occurred: the hero has awakened. Russell Eigenblick is he.”
This shot fell less heavily among her hearers than she had expected it to. She felt them withdraw from her; she saw, or perceived, their necks stiffen, their chins draw down doubtfully into expensive haberdashery. There was nothing for it but to go on.
“You may wonder,” she said, “as I did, what people Russell Eigenblick has returned to aid, We as a people are too young to have cultivated stories like those told of Arthur, and perhaps too self-satisfied to have felt the need of any. Certainly none are told of the so-called fathers of our country; the idea that one of those gentlemen is not dead but asleep, say, in the Ozarks or the Rockies is funny but not anywhere held. Only the despised ghost-dancing Red Man has a history and a memory long enough to supply such a hero; and the Indians have shown as little interest in Russell Eigenblick as in our Presidents, and he as little in them. What people then?