Читать книгу Salome and other Decadent Fantasies - Brian Stableford - Страница 6

THE LAST WORSHIPPER OF PROTEUS

When I was a student in Leiden, some thirty years after the death of the city’s most famous son, Rembrandt van Rijn, I used to lodge in a third-storey room whose only window looked out over a dark and narrow canal. The canal had no towpath, being used solely to transport cargoes of linen and finished cloth in small rowing-boats, and its waters lapped against the foot of the rear wall of the house in which I lived. All the houses that bordered the waterway were cellarless and very tall, and because the canal was so lacking in width, the space between the buildings was always in shadow, always grim. My window let in hardly any light, even when the sun stood high and bright in a cloudless sky, but the gloomy shadows that dwelt beyond the pane seemed always to be restlessly astir.

The room next to my own was occupied by a man named Clement Folle, who told me the first time we met on the stairway that he was a painter. He struck me even then as the most curious person I had ever met, and I thought at first that his description of himself was mere vainglory, for I could not imagine what light he painted by, if his room were as dim and dismal as my own. Later, when we became better acquainted, I found that he had told me the truth, and was ashamed for doubting him.

I had always thought myself to be a desperately poor man, but Clement was even poorer than I was. He too had originally come to Leiden to be a student at William the Silent’s great university, but he had discovered—so he said—that he had no more vocation for orthodox scholarship than for holy orders. He told me even before he had cause to trust my discretion that, for one such as him, the world itself was the only subject fit for serious research, and that the wisdom of fable and legend seemed infinitely greater and finer to him than the stored-up heritage of the theologians and rhetoricians who taught in the ancient colleges. He took a risk in saying so, in the city which had become the heart of Protestant Holland, even though he knew that I deemed myself a tolerant man. He was probably past caring what others thought of him, and the heresy-hunters were far less active then than they had been in earlier and direr days.

Clement’s room had only a narrow wooden bed and an unsteady table for furniture. He had but a single wooden spoon and a single polished knife, and possessed no fork at all. The pitcher he used to fetch water was cracked and chipped, and so were the shallow bowl from which he ate and the cup from which he drank. He owned nothing of any value, save for his easel and his canvases, and his most precious possession seemed to be a curious but commercially worthless piece of dull stone, which he kept on the mantelshelf above his cold and empty fireplace. Whatever money came his way he infinitely preferred to spend on paint rather than food, and he bitterly resented the threat of starvation which frequently prevented him from exercising his preference. I never knew him other than ravenous, and was embarrassed by the eager way in which he devoured the crusts and pastries that I sometimes offered him.

I did not visit his room very often, and in the early days of our acquaintance he was reluctant to enter mine, but, poor as I was, I could still afford bundles of firewood to keep the winter cold at bay and set my kettle to the boil, so the simple instinct of survival encouraged him to make the most of my hospitality. For this reason, I rarely saw him actually engaged in painting, and caught only glimpses of the produce of his supposed artistry, but I often heard him talk, sometimes for hours on end, about his philosophy of life and the ancient wisdom which he believed to have been preserved in fables and legends.

Although I was rarely in his room, I do remember that his easel was always stationed close to the window. By that means, I supposed, he sought to make what use he might of the feeble daylight—for he was as parsimonious with candles as he was with comestibles—but the images he committed to his canvases bore not the slightest resemblance to the dull greyness without the window; they were full of the most extraordinary color.

I had never seen pigments of the particular kind that Clement used, and he explained to me that they had been devised for him by a cunning pharmacist.

“The colors are suspended in a lighter and less viscous oil than those which are commonly used,” he said. “Portraitists would consider such a medium worthless, because it would not allow them to hold a firm line, and all their fields of color would become blurred—but there are no clear edges in my representations, and the flux of the paint reflects the flux of the world, which I am not at pains to suppress. Other painters endeavor to freeze time and clarify the boundaries that separate entities, but my interest is in change rather than constancy. My own pigments permit greater accuracy in representing the mercurial play of light and color, and greater scope for the exercise of the visual imagination.”

The influence of these ideas upon his work was easy to see. His canvases depicted very fantastic scenes—if they could, in fact, be thought of as “scenes”—in which no shape was definite and everything did indeed seem to be in a constant state of flux. They were riotously bright, and it sometimes seemed to me when I stood before one of them, struggling to divine some sense or meaning in it, that I was looking through a magical window upon a world illuminated by a sun less gentle by far than the one that shines on our own quotidian earth. There was a sky of sorts in most of his paintings, and ground over which it arched, but the landscapes thus described were always blurred and hazy, and their horizons were always obscured by the strange creatures that cavorted in the foreground. These figures were never distinct, though they did not seem to be surrounded by cloud or mist, and were so intimately crowded together that it was difficult to say where one ended and another began.

At first, I thought that these creatures of Clement Folle’s extraordinary imagination might be birds, for there was something very bird-like about them. Peacock-feathered and eagle-eyed they seemed to be, but they were never entirely avian in form, often seeming to be cursed with a curious superfluity of wings, and sometimes having snakelike appendages or almost-human limbs. There were always entities of other kinds mingling with them, as though to accompany them in a madcap dance; their predominant hues were vivid scarlet, bright yellow and startling blue, and their contours somehow defied the logic of shape and perspective. Some seemed to have the texture of living flames; others reminded me a little of the stranger creatures of the sea whose likeness was preserved in some of the books which I was expected to study, but I could not imagine that Clement Folle had ever been a fisherman.

When my neighbor first showed me his paintings, I was quite tongue-tied, and for want of any honest or adequate response I muttered about their unusual nature. I dared not request explanations of their composition. When the painter had gained my confidence more fully, however, and I had become more curious about him, I began to ask him tentatively why he never portrayed more conventional subjects.

“No doubt I would be better paid,” he said, sorrowfully, “if I could paint portraits of stout burghers, and printers’ wives, and good Protestant cloth-merchants. A tolerable living can be made, I understand, by those who will condescend to devote their lives to the production of flattering images of the scornful sons and harridan wives of petty noblemen. Alas, I cannot be one of that company, for when I try to copy such images they appear on my canvas exactly as they appear to my eye: flat, false, and devoid of interest.”

Eventually, when I had become fond enough of him to want to understand him better, I plucked up the courage to ask him exactly what it was that he was trying to achieve in his painting. At first, though, he shied away from the question, and elected to discuss his aesthetic philosophy in such vague terms that it was difficult for me to discover the relevance of what he believed to what he actually did.

Once, when I knocked upon his door and entered without waiting for an invitation, I found him standing before one of his paintings—but he had set down his brush and his palette, and was holding to his forehead the piece of stone which he kept on the mantelshelf. His eyes were closed and his manner was rapt, and I had no doubt that he was in some way seeking inspiration from the stone.

When he opened his eyes to see who had disturbed him, he seemed at first to be alarmed and annoyed, but his expression soon softened. I think that was the moment in which he decided that I was to be reckoned a true friend rather than a mere acquaintance, and it was not long afterwards—without any undue pressure on my part—that he attempted to explain, step by careful step, the true nature of his artistic quest.

“Do you know the name of Proteus?” he asked me, while he sat before my fire, pulling his threadbare jerkin tightly about his lean frame.

“Certainly,” said I, having by then progressed far enough in my education to know more than a little Greek. “He was the Old Man of the Sea, Poseidon’s seal-herd. Homer tells the tale of how he was trapped by Menelaus after Troy fell; although he changed his shape repeatedly, Menelaus would not let him go until he had revealed the secret of what Menelaus must do in order to win safely home to Sparta.”

“That story reduces him in status,” Clement told me, soberly. “He is an older sea-god by far than the upstart Poseidon, and not just a lord of the sea, although he came out of its bosom uncountable eons ago. He is change itself, and the world is not rid of him, despite that we think that we have bound him to our service, as proud Menelaus claimed to have done.”

“I know no older tales of him than those the Greeks told,” I admitted. “He is in the Odyssey, and also the Georgics of Virgil, but that is all.”

“The older tales were never written down,” said Clement, “but they are preserved nevertheless for those who know how to listen. Do you know the western isles, beyond the northern part of Britain?”

“Only by repute,” I replied.

“They are inhabited by fisher-folk, who have many tales to tell of the tempestuous ocean from which they make their living—and which they call, in recognition of the price which they must pay for their livelihood, the Great Grey Widowmaker. Many of these tales tell of a group of islands which lies far beyond the western horizon, which the fisher-folk call Mag Mell, or the Land of Happiness.

“In Mag Mell, they say, summer is perpetual, and the trees produce fruit in great profusion, while fine corn is always ripening in the valleys between the warm wild hills. From these isles, it is enviously said, no man need ever set sail in a tiny wooden boat, to submit himself to the mercy of the murderous waves. If they are asked, ‘Why do men not set sail for these Isles of the Blest, to make better lives for themselves?’ the fisher-folk will answer that many have, and that some have succeeded. They will also say, however, that the journey is extremely perilous because the sea between their own islands and the others is the haunt of a dire demon of the sea, which they call a draug.

“The draug, according to the island people, was once a fabulous dragon of the air, whose scales were colored like the rainbow and which meant no harm to man. One day, though, the wondrous beast was seized by an old and meddlesome sea-god, who cast it down from the bright blue sky into the cold grey sea. There its scales became silvery and pale, and its glorious wings became mere spiny fins. The gall of these misfortunes made its heart bitter against all creatures, especially the men who might witness its degradation, so that it became an enemy to all those folk who sail in ships. Now, they say, the draug does the dark work of the master who remade it, seizing the boats of all who try to sail to the Land of Happiness, and crushing their timbers in its cruel coils.

“If these folk are asked, ‘Why did the old sea-god set this hateful leviathan to do such work?’ they will answer that he is vilely envious of any who might find calm and content and peace of mind, for, although he has the powers of a god, he has none of these things for himself, and by virtue of his nature can never find them.

“There are in the land of the Scots those who keep sheep on the hills, and those who till the ground, and none of whom can truly understand the life of fisher-folk. Men like these have long taken leave to laugh at those islanders who dare to believe that a god might be envious of happy men, and by their mockery have driven the old beliefs into secrecy. Nowadays, fear of heresy-hunters makes the islanders anxious to copy the religious forms of the mainland, but some of the most ancient men and women still remember what was done in olden days. Then, when a brave man set out in his boat and did not return, his family would hold two funeral rites instead of one. In the first they cried their anxious lamentations because the Great Grey Widowmaker had claimed another life with its cold embrace, but in the second they sang and danced to express the hope that the man might have escaped the draug and the envy of the old sea-god, and might have come therefore to his appointed rest in marvelous Mag Mell.”

“It is a pretty tale,” I admitted, though the mention of heresy-hunters made me shiver. “And you believe that this old and meddlesome sea-god, who could never find calm and peace of mind, was the same as Homer’s Proteus?”

“He is the same,” Clement assured me. “I know it, for I am his worshipper—perhaps the last worshipper he has in this dull and Christian world—and I am the custodian of one of the seven fallen stones.”

I did not immediately ask him what he meant by the seven fallen stones, because I was deeply disturbed by his declaration—even though I did not think he meant it seriously—that he worshipped a pagan god. We live in enlightened times, it is said, but in the days of my youth heretics still burned in their hundreds in many European lands, and none but a fool would ever declare himself a worshipper of demonic idols, even in metaphor or jest. Like the careful young man I was, I closed my mouth whenever I heard the least suggestion of blasphemy or heresy, and it was not until another night, when the cold had driven Clement to my fireside yet again, that he told me the legend of the seven fallen stones.

“There is a very ancient story,” he said, contemplatively, “which is true, alas, which tells how the first god of the sea once cut seven magical stones from the rocks that support the deepest part of his kingdom. He threw them high into the dark night-sky, so that when they fell once more upon the earth, they were scattered far and wide about its surface.

“Many tales have been told of the finding of those stones, by men or by hobgoblins, though none but a few of their tellers had any inkling of where the stones originated, or what their purpose was. Most tales of this kind are tragedies of lives and projects blighted; some few are tales of tragedy avoided by cleverness and self-restraint; but none are tales of fortunes made and power gained, for these dull and deceptive stones cut by the old sea-god were made to sow the seeds of a terrible revelation.

“According to the legend, the unlucky man that finds one of the seven fallen stones, and takes it in his hand, will find that while he holds it he has a magic power of sight, which shows him in the things which are that which in time they are certain to become. When he looks upon a worm, the holder of the stone might see a bright-winged insect; but when he looks upon a lover, he can only see a corpse moldering in the grave; when he looks upon an empire he must witness the bloodbath of rebellion that will tear it down; when he looks upon the sun, he will see an exploded ember; and when he looks up into the starry sky, he will see the eternal darkness that will reign when the stars themselves have died. By such means, the finder of one of the seven fallen stones is forced to know that there is hope only in the smallest and most wretched of things, while in all that seems glorious, there is naught but the promise of loss and emptiness.

“The tales of which I speak, almost without exception, regard the finding of such a stone as a misfortune to be avoided. This is understandable, for such tales are intended to offer advice to brave soldiers, clever thieves and bold explorers. The moral intended to be drawn therefrom is that men should beware of strange dark things that are found, as if by chance, in secret coverts; and that they should not seek to know the mysteries the future holds, lest the revelation be too much for mortal hopes to bear.”

“I presume from your tone,” I said, “that you have some cause to disagree.”

“I am neither a soldier nor a thief,” he told me. “I am a painter, to whom truth is more precious than glamour. I do not fear change, nor seek to bind it to my convenience. I desire to be its celebrant, to perceive it as it is, and to make my perceptions known to other men.”

“So you strive to capture the spirit of change in your paintings,” I said, proud of my powers of deduction, and anxious to show that I too knew how to declaim in a passably eloquent manner. “You have taken this ancient and troubled sea-god as your spiritual tutor, and it is Proteus who guides your arm when you ply your brushes. You believe that you have come into possession of one of the seven stones which he cast up on to the land to make men miserable, but you seek inspiration in it, not despair.”

He nodded his head fervently, and his prematurely grey hair fell untidily about his eyes. “You understand!” he crowed, as if it were a minor miracle. “I am trying to paint the most intimate processes of change. My mission is to confirm and prove the essential flux of things, their eternal becoming.”

What I really understood, of course—or thought I understood—was that the poor fellow was entirely mad. Poverty, misfortune and malnutrition, I believed, had so addled his brain that he thought he heard sermons in stones. Nor were they the virtuous sermons of our own blessed Lord, but the ravings of some unholy pagan deity: some vile member of that host which was cast out of Heaven into Pandemonium, but which had returned to earth by the permission of the Lord in order to tempt and torment the sons of Adam and the daughters of Eve. Those who resisted such temptation, I knew, achieved goodness through the exercise of their free will, and thus proved themselves worthy of Paradise—but those who could not were damned by their weakness.

I was a charitable man in those days, as I try to be today, and I believed in my heart than many of those who had been burned in time past as witches and sorcerers were merely harmless lunatics. Because of that belief I did not run to any priest with the rumor of Clement Folle’s heretical convictions, nor did I try to keep him from my hearth and my table. I tried as best I could, within my limited means, to be his friend and help him to stay alive. I resolved to try to convince him of the error of his beliefs, but I confess that I did not try as hard as I might have done, for he was impatient with my efforts. I admit that I found his tales quite fascinating in their way, and would have felt myself far poorer had he ceased to relate them to me.

“Ever since I was a boy,” he told me, once he had decided that I might safely be further initiated into the mysteries of his strange art and his peculiar religion, “I have been quite convinced that the world of appearances is only that: an appearance. I do not mean that it is an illusion—only that the semblance which it presents to the eye depends more upon the properties and limitations of the eye than upon its own inherent nature.

“Even before I found the stone, I was convinced that my eyes might see far more, and very differently, if I could only make them adept and sensitive in an appropriate fashion. Certain other creatures, I am convinced, must look upon a very different and perhaps much richer world than the one which is ordinarily available to our over-precise eyes. Where human eyes can perceive nothing but shadow and darkness, others have light by which to see. Where human eyes are ever avid to select out constancy and order, others surely remain content with the gorgeous bewilderments of change and confusion. Where we see those objects and living beings which are ordinary to us, they might see entities whose colors and properties are dramatically transfigured, among which life and inertness might be very differently distributed.

“It was always the primary mission of my life to learn to see things as higher beings than ourselves might see them—and I did not hesitate to use whatever means came to hand towards that end. I was not always as poor as I am now, but the meager inheritance I had was soon exhausted by my quest. I sampled many exotic potions which I bought from hedge-wizards and dubious pharmacists, and attempted many magical rituals that I found in certain tomes in that section of the university library which is nowadays forbidden to students like yourself. Nothing served my purpose, until I finally came upon the stone, and realized what it was. Only then could I begin the work of penetrating the veil, of looking into the worlds beyond the world, into the Protean realm of the Ephemeral.”

As befitted a humble and pious person, I was properly horrified by the revelation that Clement’s madness had led him to dabble in witchcraft and sorcery—but if the truth be told, I found the violence of my reaction to be a rather pleasant and exciting sensation. Far from being intimidated by my horror, I became hungry for more revelations, although I felt it incumbent upon me to make my own reservations perfectly clear.

“I am compelled to believe,” I told him, awkwardly, “that we are made as we are for a reason. We are men, made by God, and were made to see as God intended men to see. What you are trying to do, I fear, is to see the world as demons might see it, and you may be sure that if you make way within the threads and sinews of your being for Satan to control your sight, he will not hesitate to seize the opportunity to steal your soul. I beg you to abandon this quest of yours, before it leads you to a tragic end.”

Clement was not annoyed with me for saying this, but only sorrowful. Needless to say, he entirely ignored my good and heartfelt advice, and his contempt for my opinion renewed the barriers of embarrassment and mistrust which had only recently been lowered. He did not try to shun me, or to hide his paintings from me, but he recovered his discretion, and ceased to speak of Proteus and magic spells. In the meantime, as the harsh winter extended into March, he continued to deteriorate physically. I continued to let him warm himself before my fire, and I gave him the occasional crust or rind of cheese, as common charity demanded, but my own table was by no means so rich that a man might live off its crumbs. I am certain that he had no other resource with which to ward off starvation; his other acquaintances had by now deserted him.

Precisely what happened in Clement Folle’s room on the night of his disappearance, I cannot say. I know that I was roused from fitful sleep by a very peculiar sound, which seemed to me to be like the rushing of a great wind or the roar of a tremendous fire. The thought that the building might be ablaze filled me with consternation; I leapt from my bed and immediately put my trousers on. Then I threw open my door, very fearfully—and was astonished to discover that the noise appeared to be coming from my neighbor’s room.

Perhaps I should have opened his door immediately, but such was the strangeness of that uncanny sound that I dared not. Nor did I return to collect the nightlight which burned by my bed. I only stood in the unlit corridor and called out to Clement, imploring him to tell me what was going on. By the time my courage was equal to the task of opening his door and entering the room, the noise was already fading—fading to a thin keening that was almost plaintive in its tenor.

When I finally looked inside, I could not see anything at all. The room was pitch-dark—but the noise was still perceptible. It did not seem to be emanating from the place where, as I assumed, Clement lay in his bed, but rather from the direction of the window; and it seemed, although I cannot say exactly how or why, to be horribly menacing.

In spite of my terror I stumbled forward in the direction of the bed, reaching out with my hand in order to rouse the man who ought to have been lying there. But when I found the bed, falling to my knees as I did so, Clement’s body was not there.

I groped about the ragged mattress, unable to believe that it was empty. Stygian gloom was all about me, and I was quite blind—until my hand fell upon the stone that ought to have been on the mantelshelf.

I did not grasp the stone or pick it up, but the moment my fingers touched it I felt a horrid thrill travel up my arm, which burst like a Roman candle inside my head. My eyes were suddenly deluged with light. The darkness split, and was instantly dispelled. From the window of Clement Folle’s room, which should have looked out into dark and dismal shadow, there fell an amazing blaze of many-colored light. It was far too bright to permit my startled eyes to see anything through the window, but I had the impression of the fluttering of myriad wings, and of a host of dancing creatures made of pure white flame.

I did not take a single step in the direction of the window; indeed, I put up my arm to shield my eyes from the appalling glare, and shrank back against the frame of the bed. I understood then that when Clement had looked out into the void above the black canal, he had not seen what other man would have seen. Whether it was in truth the gift of Proteus, or of Satan, which had transformed his power of sight, I could not tell—but I had no alternative save to accept that his powers of sight had indeed been strangely augmented.

The glazed window that separated the shadowed room from the brilliant world beyond was not open or broken, but I could not suppress a conviction that Clement had somehow been claimed by that other world, and ripped out of the fabric of ours. If he had been among the fabulous host beyond the window I could not possibly have seen him, nor recognized him, but I could not help wondering whether he might have undergone some astonishing metamorphosis in being devoured and consumed by that incredible cataract of light.

I pressed my arm more firmly across my eyes as I thrust myself up from the place where I knelt. I regained my feet, unsteadily, and staggered towards the door. I found it somehow, and launched myself into the corridor beyond. I closed the door behind me, and only then did I lower the protective arm from my face.

I ran to my own room, which was as darkly shadowed as it had always been. I went quickly to the window, there to stare out into the comforting darkness, which veiled the high, blank walls that men had labored so hard to build in the cause of civilization.

You might think me a coward, but I told no one what had happened. I dared not speak to anyone about what I had seen, lest they should conclude—as I already had—that I had glimpsed the fires of Hell, and the legion of the damned. Many years passed before I felt able to speak of those events even to my most intimate friends. You will readily understand, therefore, how it came about that several days passed without my making any attempt to enter the room next door to mine. I tried with all my might to pretend that the world was exactly as it had always been: firm; dependable; fixed by the indomitable will of God.

During those days I heard no sound from within the neighboring room, and never saw the door open, until the day when a new tenant moved in.

It was only then that I recovered my lost courage, and I went to bid the newcomer welcome, as a good neighbor should—but when I asked him, belatedly, what had become of Clement Folle’s canvases, he replied that he did not know.

Later, I discovered that the landlord had sold the bed, the table and the easel. He had tried to sell the completed paintings too, but having been assured by everyone to whom he showed them that they were absurd and utterly worthless, he had consigned them to the cold, still waters of the canal behind the house. I have no doubt that the mysterious stone accompanied them.

Now, in looking back on that far-distant time, I cannot regret that I made no effort to acquire one of Clement’s paintings, and I certainly cannot regret the loss of that infernal stone. I know only too well that, had I had such a painting on my wall, I would not have been able to resist looking at it, and wondering, and remembering. Such things have always had a fascination for me, and I am very well aware of the dangers of Satanic seduction.

I firmly believe that it is the divinely-ordained task of mankind to find the clarity and solidity that is in the world, to oppose change and inconstancy, and to strive for certainty and perfection. I understand, therefore, that it is the appointed duty of all God-fearing men to keep Proteus at bay, and I am glad that his last worshipper is dead and gone, and that the world is safe in the sovereign charge of science, truth and certainty.

And yet....there was such luminosity in that uncertain world which I glimpsed, such awful glory in its infinite possibility, that somewhere deep inside me there has ever burned a flickering flame of hellish doubt. Now that I am old, I can no longer believe that it will one day die, but still I dare to hope that it will not prevent my salvation.