Messiah Read Free Page B

roses, like all the summers I had ever known. But it was impractical. I could not stuff it into my buttonhole for it was as large as a baby's head while I was fairly certain that my hostess would be less than pleased to receive at my hands one of her best peonies, cut too short even to place in water. Obscurely displeased with myself and the day, I plunged the flower deep into a hedge of boxwood until not even a glimmer of white showed through the dense dark green to betray me: then, like a murderer, the assaulted day part-spoiling, I went inside.
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    "You have been malingering in the garden," she said, offering me her face like a painted plate to kiss. "I saw you from the window."
    "Saw me ravage the flowers?"
    "They all do," she said obscurely, and led me after her into the drawing room, an oblong full of light from French windows opening upon the terrace. I was surprised to see that she was alone.
    "She'll be along presently. She's upstairs changing."
    "Who?"
    "Iris Mortimer . . . didn't I tell you? It's the whole reason."
    Clarissa nodded slyly from the chair opposite me. A warm wind crossed the room and the white curtains billowed like spinnakers in a regatta. I breathed the warm odor of flowers, of burned ash remnants from the fireplace: the room shone with silver and porcelain. Clarissa was rich despite the wars and crises that had marked our days, leaving the usual scars upon us, like trees whose cross-sections bear a familial resemblance of concentric rings, recalling in detail the weather of past years . . . at least those few rings we shared in common, for Clarissa, by her own admission, was twenty-two hundred years old with an uncommonly good memory. None of us had ever questioned her too closely about her past. There is no reason to suspect, however, that she was insincere. Since she felt she had lived that great length of time and since her recollections were remarkably interesting and plausible she was much in demand as a conversationalist and adviser, especially useful in those plots which require great shrewdness and daring. It was perfectly apparent that she was involved in some such plot at the moment.
    I looked at her thoughtfully before I casually rose to take the bait of mystery she had trailed so perfunctorily before me.
    She knew her man. She knew I would not be difficult in the early stages of any adventure.
    "Whole reason?" I repeated.
    "I can say no more!" said Clarissa with a melodramatic emphasis which my deliberately casual tone did not entirely justify. "You'll love Iris, though."
    I wondered whether loving Iris, or pretending to love Iris, was to be the summer's game. But before I could inquire further, Clarissa, secure in her mystery, asked me idly about my work and, as idly, I answered her, the exchange perfunctory yet easy, for we were used to one another.
    "I am tracking him down," I said. "There is so little to go on, but what there is is quite fascinating, especially Ammianus."
    "Fairly reliable, as military men go," said Clarissa, suddenly emerging from her polite indifference: any reference to the past she had known always interested her, only the present seemed to bore her, at least that ordinary unusable present which did not contain promising material for one of her elaborate human games.
    "Did you know him?" I never accepted, literally, Clarissa's unique age: two thousand years is an unlikely span of life even for a woman of her sturdy unimaginativeness; yet there was no ignoring the fact that she seemed to have lived that long, and that her references to obscure episodes, where ascertainable, were nearly always right and, more convincing still, where they differed from history's records, differed on the side of plausibility . . . the work of a memory or a mind completely unsuperstitious and unenthusiastic: (she was literal; she was, excepting always her central fantasy, matter-of-fact. To her the death of Caesar was the logical outcome of a system of taxation which has not