CHAPTER IX. CONCERNING THE BLACK GODDESS FORTUNE AND THE WORSHIP OF HER,
TOGETHER WITH AN INTRODUCTION OF SOME OF HER VOTARIES
In those early days of Fortune’s pregnant alternations of colour between
the Red and the Black, exhibited publicly, as it were a petroleum spring
of the ebony-fiery lake below, Black-Forest Baden was the sprightliest’
of the ante-chambers of Hades. Thither in the ripeness of the year
trooped the devotees of the sable goddess to perform sacrifice; and
annually among them the beautiful Livia, the Countess of Fleetwood; for
nowhere else had she sensation of the perfect repose which is rocked to
a slumber by gales.
She was not of the creatures who are excited by an atmosphere of
excitement; she took it as the nymph of the stream her native wave,
and swam on the flood with expansive languor, happy to have the master
passions about her; one or two of which her dainty hand caressed,
fearless of a sting; the lady petted them as her swans. It surprised
her to a gentle contempt of men and women, that they should be ruffled
either by love or play. A withholding from the scene will naturally
arouse disturbing wishes; but to be present lulls; for then we live, we
are in our element. And who could expect, what sane person can desire,
perpetual good luck? Fortune, the goddess, and young Love, too, are
divine in their mutability: and Fortune would resemble a humdrum
housewife, Love a droning husband, if constancy were practised by them.
Observe the staggering and plunging of the blindfold wretch seeking to
be persuaded of their faithfulness.
She could make for herself a quiet centre in the heart of the whirlwind,
but the whirlwind was required. The clustered lights at the corner of
the vale under forest hills, the burst of music, the blazing windows of
the saloons of the Furies, and the gamblers advancing and retreating,
with their totally opposite views of consequences, and fashions of
wearing or tearing the mask; and closer, the figures shifting up and
down the promenade, known and unknown faces, and the histories half
known, half woven, weaving fast, which flew their threads to provoke
speculation; pleasantly embraced and diverted the cool-blooded lady
surrounded by her courtiers, who could upon occasion supply the luminous
clue or anecdote. She had an intuitive liveliness to detect interchanges
of eyes, the shuttle of intrigue; the mild hypocrisy, the clever
audacity, the suspicion confirmed, the complication threatening to
become resonant and terrible; and the old crossing the young and the
young outwitting the old, wiles of fair traitors and dark, knaves of all
suits of the pack. A more intimate acquaintance with their lineaments
inspired a regard for them, such as poets may feign the throned high
moon to entertain for objects causing her rays to flash.
The simple fools, performing in character, were a neutral people,
grotesques and arabesques wreathed about the margins of the scene. Venus
or Fortune smote them to a relievo distinguishing one from another.
Here, however, as elsewhere, the core of interest was with the serious
population, the lovers and the players in earnest, who stood round
the furnace and pitched themselves into it, not always under a
miscalculation of their chances of emerging transfigured instead of
serving for fuel. These, the tragical children of folly, were astute:
they played with lightning, and they knew the conditions of the game;
victories were to be had.
The ulterior conditions of the game, the price paid for a victory, they
thought little of: for they were feverish worshippers of the phantasmal
deity called the Present; a god reigning over the Past, appreciable only
in the Future; whose whiff of actual being is composed of the embryo
idea of the union of these two periods. Still he is occasionally a
benevolent god to the appetites; which have but to be continuous to
establish him in permanence; and as nothing in us more readily supposes
perpetuity than the appetite rushing to destroy itself, the rational
nature of the most universal worship on earth is perceived at once.
Now, the price paid for a victory is this: that having been favoured in
a single instance by the spouse of the aforesaid eminent divinity--the
Black Goddess of the golden fringes--men believe in her for ever after,
behold her everywhere, they belong to her. Their faith as to sowing and
reaping has gone; and so has their capacity to see the actual as it is:
she has the power to attach them to her skirts the more by rewarding
their impassioned devotion with cuffs and scorns. They have ceased to
have a first notion upon anything without a second haunting it, which
directs them to propitiate Fortune.
But I am reminded by the convulsions of Dame Gossip, that the wisdom of
our ancestors makes it a mere hammering of commonplace to insist on such
reflections. Many of them, indeed, took the union of the Black Goddess
and the Rosy Present for the composition of the very Arch-Fiend. Some
had a shot at the strange conjecture, figuring her as tired of men in
the end and challengeing him below--equally tired of his easy conquests
of men since the glorious old times of the duelling saints. By virtue of
his one incorrigible weakness, which we know him to have as long as we
have it ourselves: viz., the belief in her existence, she is to get the
better of him.
Upon this point the experience of Captain Abrane has a value. Livia was
a follower of the Red and Black and the rounding ball in the person of
the giant captain, through whom she received her succession of sweetly
teasing thrills and shocks, as one of the adventurous company they
formed together. The place was known to him as the fair Philistine to
another muscular hero; he had been shorn there before, and sent forth
tottering, treating the friends he met as pillars to fall with him; and
when the operation was done thoroughly, he pronounced himself refreshed
by it, like a more sensible Samson, the cooler for his clipping. Then
it was that he relapsed undistractedly upon processes of his mind and he
often said he thought Fortune would beat the devil.
Her power is shown in the moving of her solicitors to think, instantly
after they have made their cast, that the reverse of it was what they
intended. It comes as though she had withdrawn the bandage from her
forehead and dropped a leaden glance on them, like a great dame angry to
have her signal misinterpreted. Well, then, distinguished by the goddess
in such a manner, we have it proved to us how she wished to favour: for
the reverse wins, and we who are pinched blame not her cruelty but our
blind folly. This is true worship. Henceforth the pain of her nip
is mingled with the dream of her kiss; between the positive and the
imagined of her we remain confused until the purse is an empty body on a
gallows, honour too, perhaps.
Captain Abrane was one of the Countess Livia’s numerous courtiers on the
border of the promenade under the lighted saloons. A colossus inactive,
he had little to say among the chattering circle; for when seated, cards
were wanted to animate him: and he looked entirely out of place and
unfitted, like a great vessel’s figure-head in a shipwright’s yard.
She murmured: ‘Not this evening?’
Abrane quoted promptly a line of nursery song ‘How shall he cut it
without e’er a knife?’
‘Have we run it down so low?’ said she, with no reproach in her tone.
The captain shrugged over his clean abyss, where nothing was.
Yesterday their bank presented matronly proportions. But an importuned
goddess reduces the most voluminous to bare stitches within a few winks
of an eye.
Livia turned to a French gentleman of her court, M. de St. Ombre, and
pursued a conversation. He was a stately cavalier of the Gallicized
Frankish outlines, ready, but grave in his bearing, grave in his
delivery, trimly moustached, with a Guise beard.
His profound internal question relating to this un-English beauty of the
British Isles:--had she no passion in her nature? was not convinced by
her apparent insensibility to Fortune’s whips.
Sir Meeson Corby inserted a word of Bull French out of place from time
to time.
As it might be necessary to lean on the little man for weapons of war,
supposing Lord Fleetwood delayed his arrival yet another day, Livia was
indulgent. She assisted him to think that he spoke the foreign tongue.
Mention of Lord Fleetwood set Sir Meeson harping again on his alarms, in
consideration of the vagabond object of the young lord had roamed away
with.
‘You forget that Russett has gypsy in him: Welsh! it’s about the same,’
said Livia. ‘He can take excellent care of himself and his purse.’
‘Countess, he is a good six days overdue.’
‘He will be in time for the ball at the Schloss.’
Sir Meeson Corby produced an aspect of the word ‘if,’ so perkily, that
the dejected Captain Abrane laughed outright and gave him double reason
to fret for Lord Fleetwood’s arrival, by saying: ‘If he hangs off much
longer, I shall have to come on you for another fifty.’
Our two pedestrians out of Salzburg were standing up in the night of
cloud and pines above the glittering pool, having made their way along
the path from the hill anciently dedicated to the god Mercury; and at
the moment when Sir Meeson put forth his frilled wrists to say: ‘If
you had seen his hands--the creature Fleetwood trotted off alone
with!--you’d be a bit anxious too’; the young lord called his comrade to
gaze underneath them: ‘There they are, hard at it, at their play!--it’s
the word used for the filthiest gutter scramble.’
They had come to know something of one another’s humours; which are
taken by young men for their characters; and should the humours please,
they are friends, until further humours develop, trying these
nascent conservatives hard to suit them to their moods as well as the
accustomed. Lord Fleetwood had discovered in his companion, besides the
spirit of independence and the powers of thought impressed on him by
Woodseer’s precocious flashes, a broad playfulness, that trenched on
buffoonery; it astonished, amused, and relieved him, loosening the spell
of reverence cast over him by one who could so wonderfully illumine his
brain. Prone to admire and bend the knee where he admired, he chafed
at subjection, unless he had the particular spell constantly renewed.
A tone in him once or twice of late, different from the comrade’s, had
warned Woodseer to be guarded.
Susceptible, however, of the extreme contrast between the gamblers below
and Nature’s lover beside him, Fleetwood returned to his enthusiasm
without thinking it a bondage.
‘I shall never forget the walk we ‘ve had. I have to thank you for the
noblest of pleasures. You ‘ve taught me--well, a thousand things; the
things money can’t buy. What mornings they were! And the dead-tired
nights! Under the rock and up to see the snowy peak pink in a gap of
thick mist. You were right: it made a crimsoning colour shine like a
new idea. Up in those mountains one walks with the divinities, you said.
It’s perfectly true. I shall remember I did. I have a treasure for life!
Now I understand where you get your ideas. The life we lead down there
is hoggish. You have chosen the right. You’re right, over and over
again, when you say, the dirty sweaters are nearer the angels for
cleanliness than my Lord and Lady Sybarite out of a bath, in chemical
scents. A man who thinks, loathes their High Society. I went through
Juvenal at college. But you--to be sure, you add example--make me feel
the contempt of it more. I am everlastingly indebted to you. Yes, I
won’t forget: you preach against the despising of anything.
This was pleasant in Woodseer’s ears, inasmuch as it established the
young nobleman as the pupil of his philosophy for the conduct of life;
and to fortify him, he replied:
‘Set your mind on the beauty, and there’ll be no room for comparisons.
Most of them are unjust, precious few instructive. In this case, they
spoil both pictures: and that scene down there rather hooks me; though
I prefer the Dachstein in the wane of the afterglow. You called it
Carinthia.’
‘I did: the beautiful Gorgon, haggard Venus--if she is to be a girl!’
Fleetwood rejoined. ‘She looked burnt out--a spectre.’
‘One of the admirably damned,’ said Woodseer, and he murmured with
enjoyment: ‘Between the lights--that ‘s the beauty and the tragedy of
Purgatory!’
His comrade fell in with the pictured idea: ‘You hit it:--not what you
called the “sublimely milky,” and not squalid as you’ll see the faces
of the gambling women at the tables below. Oblige me--may I beg?--don’t
clap names on the mountains we’ve seen. It stamps guide-book on them,
English tourist, horrors. We’ll moralize over the crowds at the tables
down there. On the whole, it’s a fairish game: you know the odds against
you, as you don’t on the Turf or the Bourse. Have your fling; but don’t
get bitten. There’s a virus. I’m not open to it. Others are.’
Hereupon Woodseer, wishing to have his individuality recognised in the
universality it consented to, remarked on an exchequer that could not
afford to lose, and a disposition free of the craving to win.
These were, no doubt, good reasons for abstaining, and they were
grand morality. They were, at the same time, customary phrases of the
unfleshed in folly. They struck Fleetwood with a curious reminder of the
puking inexperienced, whom he had seen subsequently plunge suicidally.
He had a sharp vision of the attractive forces of the game; and his
elemental nature exulted in siding with the stronger against a pretender
to the superhuman. For Woodseer had spoken a trifle loftily, as quite
above temptation. To see a forewarned philosopher lured to try the swim
on those tides, pulled along the current, and caught by the undertug of
the lasher, would be fun.
‘We’ll drop down on them, find our hotel, and have a look at what
they’re doing,’ he said, and stepped.
Woodseer would gladly have remained. The starlit black ridges about him
and the dragon’s mouth yawing underneath were an opposition of spiritual
and mundane; innocent, noxious; exciting to the youthful philosopher. He
had to follow, and so rapidly in the darkness that he stumbled and fell
on an arm; a small matter.
Bed-chambers awaited them at the hotel, none of the party: and
Fleetwood’s man-servant was absent.
‘Gambling, the rascal!’ he said. Woodseer heard the first note of the
place in that.
His leader was washed, neatly dressed, and knocking at his door very
soon, impatient to be off, and he flung a promise of ‘supper presently’
to one whose modest purse had fallen into a debate with this lordly
hostelry, counting that a supper and a night there would do for it. They
hurried on to the line of promenaders, a river of cross-currents by the
side of seated groups; and the willowy swish of silken dresses, feminine
perfumery, cigar-smoke, chatter, laughter, told of pleasure reigning.
Fleetwood scanned the groups. He had seen enough in a moment and his
face blackened. A darting waiter was called to him.
He said to Woodseer, savagely, as it sounded: ‘You shall have something
to joint your bones!’ What cause of wrath he had was past a guess: a
wolf at his vitals bit him, hardening his handsome features.
The waiter darted back, bearing a tray and tall glasses filled each with
piled parti-coloured liqueurs, on the top of which an egg-yolk swam.
Fleetwood gave example. Swallowing your egg, the fiery-velvet triune
behind slips after it, in an easy milky way, like a princess’s train on
a state-march, and you are completely, transformed, very agreeably; you
have become a merry demon. ‘Well, yes, it’s next to magic,’ he replied
to Woodseer’s astonished snigger after the draught, and explained, that
it was a famous Viennese four-of-the-morning panacea, the revellers’
electrical restorer. ‘Now you can hold on for an hour or two, and then
we’ll sup. At Rome?’
‘Ay! Druids to-morrow!’ cried the philosopher bewitched.
He found himself bowing to a most heavenly lady, composed of day and
night in her colouring, but more of night, where the western edge has
become a pale steel blade. Men were around her, forming a semi-circle.
The world of men and women was mere timber and leafage to this flower of
her sex, glory of her kind. How he behaved in her presence, he knew not;
he was beyond self-criticism or conscious reflection; simply the engine
of the commixed three liqueurs, with parlous fine thoughts, and a sense
of steaming into the infinite.
To leave her was to have her as a moon in the heavens and to think of
her creatively. A swarm of images rushed about her and away, took lustre
and shade. She was a miracle of greyness, her eyes translucently grey, a
dark-haired queen of the twilights; and his heart sprang into his brain
to picture the novel beauty; language became a flushed Bacchanal in
a ring of dancing similes. Lying beside a bank of silvery cinquefoil
against a clear evening sky, where the planet Venus is a point of new
and warmer light, one has the vision of her. Or something of Persephone
rising to greet her mother, when our beam of day first melts through her
as she kneels to gather an early bud of the year, would be near it. Or
there is a lake in mid-forest, that curls part in shadow under the foot
of morning: there we have her.
He strained to the earthly and the skyey likenesses of his marvel of
human beauty because they bestowed her on him in passing. All the while,
he was gazing on a green gaming-table.
The gold glittered, and it heaped or it vanished. Contemptuous of money,
beyond the limited sum for his needs, he gazed; imagination was blunted
in him to the hot drama of the business. Moreover his mind was engaged
in insisting that the Evening Star is not to be called Venus, because of
certain stories; and he was vowed to defend his lady from any allusion
to them. This occupied him. By degrees, the visible asserted its
authority; his look on the coin fell to speculating. Oddly, too, he was
often right;--the money, staked on the other side, would have won. He
considered it rather a plain calculation than a guess.
Philosophy withdrew him from his temporary interest in the tricks of
a circling white marble ball. The chuck farthing of street urchins has
quite as much dignity. He compared the creatures dabbling, over the
board to summer flies on butcher’s meat, periodically scared by a cloth.
More in the abstract, they were snatching at a snapdragon bowl. It
struck him, that the gamblers had thronged on an invitation to drink
the round of seed-time and harvest in a gulp. Again they were desperate
gleaners, hopping, skipping, bleeding, amid a whizz of scythe-blades,
for small wisps of booty. Nor was it long before the presidency of
an ancient hoary Goat-Satan might be perceived, with skew-eyes and
pucker-mouth, nursing a hoof on a knee.
Our mediaeval Enemy sat symbolical in his deformities, as in old Italian
and Dutch thick-line engravings of him. He rolled a ball for souls,
excited like kittens, to catch it, and tumbling into the dozens
of vacant pits. So it seemed to Woodseer, whose perceptions were
discoloured by hereditary antagonism. Had he preserved his philosopher’s
eye, he would have known that the Hoofed One is too wily to show
himself, owing to his ugliness. The Black Goddess and no other presides
at her own game. She (it is good for us to know it) is the Power who
challenges the individual, it is he who spreads the net for the mass.
She liquefies the brain of man; he petrifies or ossifies the heart. From
her comes craziness, from him perversity: a more provocative and, on the
whole, more contagious disease. The gambler does not seek to lead his
fellows into perdition; the snared of the Demon have pleasure in the
act. Hence our naturally interested forecasts of the contests between
them: for if he is beaten, as all must be at the close of an extended
game with her, we have only to harden the brain against her allurements
and we enter a clearer field.
Woodseer said to Fleetwood: ‘That ball has a look of a nymph running
round and round till she changes to one of the Fates.’
‘We’ll have a run with her,’ said Fleetwood, keener for business than
for metaphors--at the moment.
He received gold for a bank-note. Captain Abrane hurriedly begged a
loan. Both of them threw. Neither of them threw on the six numbers
Woodseer would have selected, and they lost. He stated that the number
of 17 had won before. Abrane tried the transversal enclosing this
favoured number. ‘Of course!’ he cried, with foul resignation and a
hostile glare: the ball had seated itself and was grinning at him from
the lowest of the stalls.
Fleetwood quitted the table-numbers to throw on Pair; he won, won again,
pushed his luck and lost, dragging Abrane with him. The giant varied
his tone of acquiescence in Fortune’s whims: ‘Of course! I ‘ve only to
fling! Luck hangs right enough till I put down my stake.’
‘If the luck has gone three times, the chances....’ Woodseer was rather
inquiring than pronouncing.... Lord Fleetwood cut him short. ‘The
chances are equally the contrary!’ and discomposed his argumentative
mind.
As argument in such a place was impossible, he had a wild idea
of example--‘just to see’--; and though he smiled, his brain was
liquefying. Upon a calculation of the chances, merely for the humour of
it, he laid a silver piece on the first six, which had been neglected.
They were now blest. He laid his winnings on the numbed 17. Who would
have expected it? why, the player, surely! Woodseer comported himself
like a veteran: he had proved that you can calculate the chances.
Instead of turning in triumph to Lord Fleetwood, he laid gold pieces to
hug the number 17, and ten in the centre. And it is the truth, he hoped
then to lose and have done with it--after proving his case. The ball
whirled, kicked, tried for seat in two, in three points, and entered 17.
The usual temporary wonderment flew round the table; and this number was
courted in dread, avoided with apprehension.
Abrane let fly a mighty breath: ‘Virgin, by Jove!’
Success was a small matter to Gower Woodseer. He displayed his contempt
of fortune by letting his heap of bank-notes lie on Impair, and he won.
Abrane bade him say ‘Maximum’ in a furious whisper. He did so, as one at
home with the word; and winning repeatedly, observed to Fleetwood: ‘Now
I can understand what historians mean, in telling us of heroes rushing
into the fray and vainly seeking death. I always thought death was to be
had, if you were in earnest.’
Fleetwood scrutinized the cast of his features and the touch of his
fingers on the crispy paper.
‘Come to another of these “green fields,”’ he returned briefly. ‘The
game here is child’s play.’
Urging Virgin Luck not to quit his initiatory table, the captain
reluctantly went at their heels. Shortly before the tables were clad in
mantles for the night, he reported to Livia one of the great cases of
Virgin Luck; described it, from the silver piece to the big heap of
notes, and drew on his envy of the fellow to sketch the indomitable
coolness shown in following or in quitting a run. ‘That fellow it is,
Fleetwood’s tag-rag; holds his head like a street-fiddler; Woodler or
some name. But there’s nothing to be done if we don’t cultivate him. He
must have pocketed a good three thousand and more. They had a quarrel
about calculations of chances, and Fleet ran the V up his forehead at a
piece of impudence. Fellow says some high-flying stuff; Fleet brightens
like a Sunday chimney-sweep. If I believed in Black Arts, upon my word!’
‘Russett is not usually managed with ease,’ the lady said.
Her placid observation was directed on the pair then descending the
steps.
‘Be careful how you address, this gentleman,’ she counselled Abrane.
‘The name is not Woodier, I know. It must be the right name or none.’
Livia’s fairest smile received them. She heard the captain accosting the
child of luck as Mr. Woodier, and she made a rustle in rising to take
Fleetwood’s arm.
‘We haven’t dined, we have to sup,’ said he.
‘You are released at the end of the lamps. You redeem your ring,
Russett, and I will restore it. I have to tell you, Henrietta is here
to-morrow.’
‘She might be in a better place.’
‘The place where she is to be seen is not generally undervalued by men.
It is not her fault that she is absent. The admiral was persuaded to go
and attend those cavalry manoeuvres with the Grand Duke, to whom he had
been civil when in command of the Mediterranean squadron. You know,
the admiral believes he has military--I mean soldierly-genius; and the
delusion may have given him wholesome exercise and helped him to forget
his gout. So far, Henrietta will have been satisfied. She cannot have
found much amusement among dusty troopers or at that court at Carlsruhe.
Our French milliner there has helped in retarding her quite against her
will. She has had to choose a balldress for the raw mountain-girl they
have with them, and get her fitted, and it’s a task! Why take her to the
ball? But the admiral’s infatuated with this girl, and won’t hear of her
exclusion--because, he says, she understands a field of battle; and the
Ducal party have taken to her. Ah, Russett, you should not have flown!
No harm, only Henrietta does require a trifle of management. She writes,
that she is sure of you for the night at the Schloss.’
‘Why, ma’am?’
‘You have given your word. “He never breaks his lightest word,” she
says.’
‘It sounds like the beginning of respect.’
‘The rarest thing men teach women to feel for them!’
‘A respectable love match--eh? Good Lord! You’ll be civil to my friend.
You have struck him to the dust. You have your one poetical admirer in
him.’
‘I am honoured, Russett.’
‘Cleared out, I suppose? Abrane is a funnel for pouring into that Bank.
Have your fun as you like it! I shall get supplies to-morrow. By the
way, you have that boy Cressett here. What are you doing with him?’
Livia spoke of watching over him and guarding him:
‘He was at the table beside me, bursting to have a fling; and my friend
Mr. Woodseer said, it was “Adonis come to spy the boar”:--the picture!’
Prompt as bugle to the breath, Livia proposed to bet him fifty pounds
that she would keep young Cressett from gambling a single louis. The
pretty saying did not touch her.
Fleetwood moved and bowed. Sir Meeson Corby simulated a petrifaction of
his frame at seeing the Countess of Fleetwood actually partly bent with
her gracious acknowledgement of the tramp’s gawky homage.