The Greater Trumps Read online

  “Why not?” Henry asked lightly. “What does it matter? There’re all sorts of explanations. Besides, I want to show Nancy, and she’ll be able to work on him better if he’s seen them.”

  “But he’ll tell people!” Aaron protested.

  “What can he tell them?” Henry asked. “And, if he does, who’s to believe him? Besides—after we’ve got the cards … well, we don’t know what we can do, do we? I’m sure that’s the best. See, I’ll ask Nancy, and she’ll bring her aunt, I suppose.”

  “Her aunt?” Aaron interrupted sharply. “How many are you going to bring? Who is this aunt?”

  “Her aunt,” Henry said, “is just the opposite to her father. As serene and undisturbed as … as they are. Nothing puts her out; nothing disturbs her. Yet she isn’t a fool. She’ll be quite harmless, however; it won’t matter whether she sees or not. She’ll be interested, but not concerned. Well, Nancy and her aunt and her father. I’ll try and dodge the brother; he’s simply a bore. There’ll be the three of them, and me; say, for—Christmas Day’s on a Saturday, isn’t it?—say, from Thursday to Tuesday, or a day or two longer. Well?”

  “But will he come?” Aaron asked doubtfully.

  “I think he may,” Henry said. “Oh, of course he won’t want to, but, as he won’t want to do anything else in particular, it may be possible to work it. Only you’d better keep Joanna out of the way.”

  “I don’t know in the least where she is,” the old man said irritably.

  “Can’t you find out by the cards?” Henry smiled. “Or must you wait for the Tarots?” On the word his face changed, and he came near to the table. “We will certainly have them,” he said in a low, firm voice. “Who knows? Perhaps we can find out what the Fool means, and why it doesn’t dance.”

  Aaron caught his sleeve. “Henry,” he breathed, “if—if there should be an accident—if there should—who would get the cards?”

  “Don’t be a fool,” Henry said roughly. “Haven’t you always told me that violence breaks the knowledge of the cards?”

  “They told me so,” the old man answered reluctantly, “but I don’t see … anyhow, we needn’t both …”

  “Wait,” his grandson answered, and turned to pick up his coat. “I must get back.” He stretched himself and laughed a little. “Nancy told me to have a good night,” he said, “and here I am spending it talking to you.”

  “Don’t talk too much to these people of yours,” Aaron grumbled, “Nancy or any of them.”

  His grandson pulled on his coat. “Nancy and I will talk to one another,” he said, “and perhaps what we say shall be stranger talk than ever lovers had before. Good night. I will tell you what I can do about it all in London.”

  3

  THE SHUFFLING OF THE CARDS

  THE CONINGSBYS usually went to Eastbourne for Christmas. The habit had been begun because Mr. Coningsby had discovered that he preferred hotel life for those few days to having his own house treated as an hotel. Groups of young people would arrive at any hour of day or night, and Nancy or Ralph, if in, would leap up and rush to welcome them, or, if not in, would arrive soon after, inquiring for friends who had already disappeared. Mr. Coningsby disapproved strongly, but for once found himself helpless, so sudden was the rush; he therefore preferred to be generous and give everyone a thorough change. It was never quite clear whether he regarded this as on his sister’s account chiefly or on his children’s. She was supposed to need it, but they were supposed to enjoy it, and so after the first year they all went back each Christmas to the same hotel; and Mr. Coningsby put up with playing bridge and occasionally observing the revels and discussing civilization with other gentlemen of similar good nature.

  It annoyed him slightly at times that Sybil never seemed quite grateful enough for the mere change—as change. Even the profound content in which she normally seemed to have her being—“sluggish, sluggish,” Mr. Coningsby said to himself when he thought of it, and walked a little more briskly—even that repose must surely be all the pleasanter for a change. There were always some nice women about for her to talk to. Of course, she was pleased to go, but not sufficiently pleased to gratify Mr. Coningsby; he was maddened by that continuous equable delight. She enjoyed everything—and he, he enjoyed nothing.

  But this year things were different—had got, or anyhow were going, to be different. It had begun with Ralph, who, rather confusedly, had intimated that he was going to have a still more thorough change by going off altogether with some friend of his whose people lived somewhere near Lewes. Mr. Coningsby had not said much, or did not seem to himself to have done so, but he had made it clear that he disliked such secession from the family life. To summer holidays spent with friends he had (he hoped) never objected, but Christmas was different. Christmas was, in fact, the time when Mr. Coningsby most nearly realized the passage of time and the approach of age and death. For Christmas every year had been marked by small but definite changes, through his own childhood, his youth, his marriage, his children’s infancy and childhood; and now there were only two possibilities of change—the coming of a third generation or the stopping of Christmas. Each year that Mr. Coningsby succeeded in keeping Nancy and Ralph by him for Christmas postponed either unwelcome change, and enabled him to enter the New Year with the pretense that it was merely the old year beginning over again. But this year his friend’s death had already shaken him, and if he and Sybil and Nancy—an engaged Nancy—were to be without Ralph, the threat of an inevitable solitude would loom very near. There would be a gap, and he had nothing with which to fill the gap or to meet what might come through it; nothing except the fact that he was a Warden in Lunacy, and had all the privileges of a Warden—such as going in to dinner before the elder sons of younger sons of peers. He did not know where, years before, he had picked up that bit of absurd knowledge, in what odd table of precedence, but he knew it was so, and had even mentioned it once to Sybil. But all the elder sons of younger sons of peers whose specters he could crowd into that gap did not seem to fill it. There was an emptiness brought to mind, and only brought to mind, for it was always there, though he forgot it. He filled it with his office, his occupation, his family, his house, his friends, his politics, his food, his sleep. But sometimes the emptiness was too big to be filled thus, and sometimes it rolled up on him, along the street when he left the home in the morning, blowing in at evening through the open window or creeping up outside when it was shut, or even sometimes looking ridiculously at him in the unmeaning headlines of his morning paper. “Prime Minister,” he would read, “Announces Fresh Oil Legislation,” and the words would be for one second all separate and meaningless; “Prime Minister.” What was a Prime Minister? Blur, blot, nothingness, and then again the breakfast-table and The Times and Sybil.

  Ralph’s announced defection therefore induced him unconsciously to desire to make a change for himself, and induced him again to meet more equably than he otherwise might have done Nancy’s tentative hints about the possibility of the rest of them going to Henry’s grandfather. It didn’t strike him as being a very attractive suggestion for himself, but it offered him every chance of having Nancy and Henry as well as Ralph to blame for his probable discomfort or boredom or gloom, and therefore of lessening a concentration on Ralph, Ralph’s desertion, change, age—and the other thing. Sybil, when he consulted her, was happy to find him already half reconciled to the proposal.

  “I’m afraid it’ll be very dull for you,” he said.

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” she answered. “It’ll have to be very dull indeed if it is.”

  “And of course we don’t know what the grandfather’s like,” he added.

  “He’s presumably human,” Sybil said, “so he’ll be interesting somehow.”

  “Really, Sybil,” Mr. Coningsby answered, almost crossly, “you do say the most ridiculous things. As if everybody was interesting.”

  “Well, I think everybody is,” Sybil protested, “and things apart from their bodies we don’t k
now, do we? And considering what funny, lovely things bodies are, I’m not especially anxious to leave off knowing them.”

  Her brother kept the conversation straight. “I gather that he’s old but quite active still, not bed-ridden or anything.”

  “Then we shan’t be expected to sit with him,” Sybil said happily, “and, as Nancy and Henry certainly wouldn’t want to, you and I will be much freer.”

  “If I thought I was expected to sit with a senile old man——” Mr. Coningsby said in alarm, “but Henry implied that he’d got all his faculties. Have you heard anything?”

  “Good heavens, no!” said Sybil, and, being in what her brother called one of her perverse moods, added, “I love that phrase.”

  “What phrase?” Mr. Coningsby asked, having missed anything particular.

  “Good heavens,” Sybil repeated, separating the words. “It says everything almost, doesn’t it? I don’t like to say ‘Good God’ too often; people so often misunderstand.”

  “Sometimes you talk exactly in Nancy’s irresponsible way, Sybil,” her brother complained. “I don’t see any sense in it. Why should one want to say ‘Good God’?”

  “Well, there isn’t really much else to say, is there?” Sybil asked, and added hastily, “No, my dear, I’m sorry, I was only …” She hesitated for a word.

  “I know you were,” Mr. Coningsby said, as if she had found it, “but I don’t think jokes of that kind are in the best of taste. It’s possible to be humorous without being profane.”

  “I beg your pardon, Lothair,” Sybil said meekly. She tried her best not to call her brother “Lothair,” because that was one of the things which seemed to him to be profane without being humorous. But it was pain and grief to her; there wasn’t all that time to enjoy everything in life as it should be enjoyed, and the two of them could have enjoyed that ridiculous name so much better together. However, since she loved him, she tried not to force the good God’s richness of wonder too much on his attention, and so she went on hastily, “Nancy’s looking forward to it so much.”

  “At her age,” Mr. Coningsby remarked, “one naturally looks forward.”

  “And at ours,” Sybil said, “when there isn’t the time there isn’t the necessity; the present’s so entirely satisfactory.”

  Mr. Coningsby just stopped himself saying, “Good God,” with quite a different intonation. He waited a minute or two and said, “You know Henry’s offered to take us down in his car?”

  “Nice of him,” Sybil answered, and allowed herself to become involved in a discussion of what her brother would or would not take, at the end of which he suddenly said, “Oh, and by the way, you might look through those packs of cards and put in a few of the most interesting—and the catalogue—especially the set we were looking at the other evening. Nancy asked me; it seems there are some others down there, and Henry and she want to compare them. A regular gipsy taste! But if it amuses them … He’s promised to show her some tricks.”

  “Then I hope,” Miss Coningsby said, “that Nancy won’t try to show them to us before she’s practiced them. Not that I mind being surprised in an unintentional way, but it’d show a state of greater sanctity on her part.”

  “Sanctity!” Mr. Coningsby uttered derisively. “Nancy’s not very near sanctity.”

  “My dear, she’s in love,” his sister exclaimed.

  “And what’s that got to do with sanctity?” Mr. Coningsby asked triumphantly, and enjoyed the silence to which Sybil sometimes found herself driven. Anyone who didn’t realize the necessary connection between love and sanctity left her incapable of explanation.

  “Tricks” was hardly the word which Nancy would have used that same evening, though it was one which Henry himself had used to her a week or so before. It was still some ten days to Christmas, and in the fortnight that had elapsed since the examination of the late Mr. Duncannon’s legacy the subject of the cards had cropped up several times between the two young people. Nancy had the natural, alert interest of youth, as Sybil had the—perhaps supernatural—vivid interest of age, and Henry’s occasional rather mysterious remarks had provoked it still more. She had, in fact, examined the cards by herself and re-read the entry in the catalogue, and looked up “Tarot” in the encyclopedia without being much more advanced. As she sat now coiled in front of the dining-room fire, playing gently with her lover’s fingers, at once stirred and soothed by the contact, she suddenly twisted round to face him in the deep chair to her right.

  “But, Henry, dearest, what is it you mean?” she said. “You keep on talking of these cards as if they were important.”

  “So they are,” Henry answered. “Exactly how important depends on you, perhaps.”

  Nancy sat up on her heels. “Henry,” she said, “are you teasing me or are you not? If you are, you’re not human at all; you’re a black-maned devil from Hell, and I’ve got engaged to you by the worst mistake that ever happened. And if you’re not, then show some pity, and leave off talking like a doctor about some bit of my inside that I don’t understand. How and why and when and where and what have I got to do with the cards? If you don’t tell me, I shall go straight down to father and say you’ve insulted me.”

  “Then you don’t know what you’d miss,” Henry said.

  Nancy threw out her arms. “O wretched me!” she cried dramatically. “Henry, if I pretend I don’t want to know, are you sure you’ll play up? You won’t take a mean advantage, will you?”

  “If you really don’t want to know,” he told her, “I certainly won’t tell you. That’s the whole point. Do you really want to know?”

  “Have I bared my heart to have it mistrusted?” she said. “Must I pine away in an hour or so to persuade you? Or will it do if I sob myself to sleep on the spot? As I used not to say when we did Julius Caesar at school, if you don’t tell me, ‘Portia is Brutus’ harlot, not his wife.’ What a nasty little cad and cat Portia was—to squeeze it out of him like that! But I swear I’ll give myself a wound ‘here in the thigh’ unless you do tell me, and bleed to death all over your beautiful trousers.”

  He took her hand in his so strongly that her eyes changed to immediate gravity.

  “If you want to know,” he said, “I will tell you what I can here, and the rest—there. If you can bear it.”

  “Do as you will,” she answered seriously. “If it’s no joke, then try me and let me go if I fail. At that,” she added with a sudden smile, “I think I won’t fail.”

  “Then bring the Tarot cards now, if you can,” he said. “But quietly. I don’t want the others to know.”

  “They’re out—father and Ralph,” she answered. “I will go and get them,” and on the word was away from the room.

  For the few minutes that elapsed before she returned he stood looking absently before him, so that he did not at once hear her entrance, and her eyes took him in: his frown, his concentrated gaze, the hand that made slight unpurposed movements by his side. As she looked, she herself unconsciously disposed herself to meet him, and she came across the room to him with something in her of preparation, as if, clear and splendid, she came to her bridal. Nor did they smile as they met, though it was the first time in their mutual acquaintance that so natural a sweetness had been lacking. He took the cards from her, and then, laying his hand on her shoulder, lightly compelled her towards the large table in the middle of the room. Then he drew the cards from their case, which he threw carelessly from him to the floor, and began to separate them into five piles.

  “Look,” he said, “these are the twenty-two cards—the twenty-one and the one which is nothing—that we looked at the other night. Those are the Greater Trumps, and there’s nothing to tell you about them now; they must wait till another time. But these others are the four suits, and you will see what we did not carefully look at then; they’re not the usual designs, not clubs and spades and hearts and diamonds, but staffs or scepters, and swords and cups and coins—or deniers. Those last are shaped sometimes as pentacles, but this is th
e better marking. And see—there are fourteen and not thirteen in each suit, for besides the Knave and Queen and King there is in these the Knight. So that here, for instance, are the Knave—or Esquire—of scepters, and the Knight, Queen, and King of scepters; and so with the swords, the cups, and the deniers. Look, here they are.”

  She bent above them, watching, and after a moment he went on.

  “Now these cards are the root and origin of all cards, and no one knows from where they came, for the tale is that they were first heard of among the gipsies in Spain in the thirteenth century. Some say they are older, and some even talk of Egypt, but that matters very little. It isn’t the time behind them, but the process in them, that’s important. There are many packs of Tarot cards, but the one original pack, which is this, has a secret behind it that I will show you on Christmas Eve. Because of that secret this pack, and this only, is a pack of great might.”

  He paused again, and still she made no movement. He glanced at her hands resting on the edge of the table and resumed.

  “All things are held together by correspondence, image with image, movement with movement. Without that there could be no relation and therefore no truth. It is our business—especially yours and mine—to take up the power of relation. Do you know what I mean?”

  As she suddenly looked up at him, she almost smiled.

  “Darling,” she murmured, “how couldn’t I know that? I didn’t need the cards to tell me. Ah, but go on. Show me what it means in them.”

  For another second he paused, arrested; it was as if she had immediately before her something which he sought far off. A little less certainly he again went on, his voice recovering itself almost immediately.

  “There is in these suits a great relation to the four compacted elements of the created earth, and you shall find the truth of this now, if you choose, and if the tales told among my people and the things that were written down among them are true. This pack has been hidden from us for more than two centuries, and for all that time no one, I think, can have tried it till tonight. The latest tale we know of is that once, under Elizabeth, a strange ancestor of mine, who had fled to England from the authority of the King of Spain, raised the winds which blew the Armada northward past Scotland.”