“That’s what Victoria Cameron used to say.”
“One of the women in your gaudy past?”
“No. Something like my nurse, I suppose. I have no gaudy past, as I’m sure you’ve read in the stars. My wife was always rubbing it in.”
“A wife? So that’s the woman in the horoscope?”
“You’ve found her, then?”
“A woman who gave you the most frightful dunt.”
“That’s Ismay, right enough. She always said I was too innocent for my own good.”
“You’re not innocent, Frank. Not in any stupid way. Your horoscope makes that extremely clear.”
“When are you going to unveil the great horoscope? It’d better be soon, if the Countess comes back tomorrow.”
“Tonight’s the night. And we must get out of this nest of guilty passion right away, because I’ve got to dress and so have you, and we both want a wash.”
“I’d been thinking about a bath. We both reek, in an entirely creditable way.”
“No, no bath. The servants would be on to us at once if we bathed during the late afternoon. In the Bavarian lexicon of baths, an afternoon bath means sex. No, you must be content with a searching wash, in your pre-dinner allowance of hot water.”
“Okay. ‘Ae fond kiss, and then we sever’.”
“ ‘Ae farewell, alas, forever’.”
“Oh Ruth, don’t say forever.”
“Of course not. But until dinner, anyhow. And now—up and out!”
“I hope there’s something good for dinner.”
“What would you guess?”
“Something utterly unheard of in Düsterstein. What would you say to veal?”
“Bang on! I saw the menu this morning. Poitrine de veau farci.”
“Ah, well; in the land of veal, all is veal.
“Lucky to get it. I could eat a horse.”
“Hunger is the best sauce.”
“Frank, that’s magnificent. What an encapsulation of universal experience! Is it your own?”
Francis gave her a playful punch, and went back to his own room, for a searching wash before dinner.
After dinner, the horoscope. Ruth had an impressive clutch of papers, some of which were zodiacal charts, upon which she had added copious notations in a handsome Italic hand.
“The writing oughtn’t to swear at the material, you see, so I learned to write like this.”
“Yes. Very nice. The only trouble is that it’s so easily forged.”
“Think so? I’m sure you could spot a forgery of your own fist.”
“Yes, I’ve done so.”
“There you go, being Le Beau Ténébreux. Could it have been the Dream Girl who appears so strongly in your chart?”
“It was. Clever of you to guess.”
“A lot of this work is clever guessing. Making hints from the chart fit in with hints from the subject. That girl is an important figure for you.”
“Thank God she’s gone.”
“Not gone. She’ll be back.”
“What then?”
“Depends if she’s still the Dream Girl. You ought to get wise to yourself, Francis. If she treated you badly, some of it was your own fault. When men go about making Dream Girls out of flesh-and-blood girls, it has the most awful effect on the girl. Some fall for it, and try to embody the dream, and that is horribly phoney and invites trouble; others become perfect bitches because they can’t stand it. Is your wife a bitch?”
“Of the most absolute and triple-distilled canine order.”
“Probably only a fool. Fools make more trouble than all the bitches ever whelped. But let’s look at your full chart. Let’s get down on the floor, where I can spread it out. Put some books on the corners to hold it down. That’s it. Now—”
It was a handsome chart, handsome as the zodiac can be, and as neatly annotated as a governess could make it.
“I won’t overwhelm you with astrological jargon, but take a look at these principal facts. The important thing is that your Sun is in midheaven, and that’s terrific. And your eastern horizon—the point of ascent—is in conjunction with Saturn, who is a greatly misunderstood influence, because people immediately think, Oh yes, Saturn, he must be saturnine, or sour-bellied, but that’s not what it really means at all. Your Moon is in the north, or subterranean midheaven. And—now this is very significant—your Sun is in conjunction with Mercury. Because of your very powerful Sun, you have lots of vitality, and believe me you need it, because life has given you some dunts, and has some others in waiting. But that powerful Sun also assures you of being right in the mainstream of psychic energy. You’ve got spiritual guts, and lots of intuition. Then that wonderful, resilient, swift Mercury. Psychologically, Francis, you are very fast on your feet.
“Now—here’s that very powerful and influential Saturn. That’s destiny. You remember about Saturn? He had it tough, because he was castrated, but he did some castrating himself. What’s bred in the bone, you know. Patterns necessarily repeat themselves. All kinds of obstacles, burdens to be borne, anxieties, depressions and exhaustion—there’s your Beau Ténébreux personality for you—but also some compensations because you have the strong sense of responsibility that carries you through, and at last, after a struggle, a sense of reality—which is a fine thing to have, though not always very comfortable. Your Mars supports your Sun, you see, and that gives you enormous endurance. And—this is important—your Saturn has the same relationship to your Moon that Mars has to your Sun, but it’s a giver of spiritual power, and takes you deep into the underworld, the dream world, what Goethe called the realm of the Mothers. There’s a fad now for calling them the Archetypes, because it sounds so learned and scientific. But the Mothers is truer to what they really are. The Mothers are the creators, the matrixes of all human experience.”
“That’s the world of art, surely?”
“More than that. Art may be a symptom, a perceptible form, of what the Mothers are. It’s quite possible to be a pretty good artist, mind you, without having a clue about the Mothers.
“Saturn on the ascendant and the Sun in midheaven is very rare and suggests a most uncommon life. Perhaps even some special celestial guardianship. Have you ever been aware of anything like that?”
“No.”
“You really are a somebody, Francis.”
“You’re very flattering.”
“Like hell I am! I don’t fool around with this stuff. I don’t make a chancy living by casting horoscopes for paying customers. I’m trying to find out what it’s all about, and I’ve been very lucky in discovering that old astrologer’s secret I told you about. I’m not kidding you, Francis.”
“I must say my remarkableness has taken its time about showing itself.”
“It should start soon, if it hasn’t started already. Not worldly fame, but perhaps posthumous fame. There are things in your chart that I would tell you if I were in the fortune-telling and predicting business. Being at Düsterstein is very important; your chart shows that. And working with Saraceni is important, though he simply shows up as a Mercurial influence. And there are all kinds of things in your background that aren’t showing up at present. What’s happened to all that music?”
“Music? I haven’t been much involved with music. No talent.”
“Somebody else’s music. In your childhood.”
“I had an aunt who sang and played a lot. Awful stuff, I suppose it was.”
“Is she the false mother who turns up? There are two. Was one the nurse?”
“My grandfather’s cook, really.”
“A very tough influence. Like granite. But the other one seems to be a bit witchy. Was she queer to look at? Was she the one who sang? It doesn’t matter that what she sang wasn’t in the most fashionable taste. People are so stupid, you know, in the way they discount the influence of music that isn’t right out of the top drawer; if it isn’t Salzburg or Bayreuth quality it can’t be influential. But a sentimental song can sometimes open doors where Hugo Wolf knocks in vain. I suppose it’s the same with pictures. Good taste and strong effect aren’t always closely linked. If your singing aunt put all she had into what she sang, it could have marked you for life.”