M&D - Chapter 16 - Star-Gazing

[Johnny Marr]

Mason, lost and alone, lovesick for glamorous Susannah and having
apparently lost interest in the day's festivities, nearly finds himself *The
victim of Cheese malevolent *when the Vicar's mild roll of a Double
Gloucester sets off a near catastrophic chain of unloosened cheeses, with
Octuple breaking out of its Wagon and nearly singling out CM for
'Misadventure'.

Instead, in the best mock-epic romantic fashion, Rebekah dives into the
story to save CM. Dressed in Taffeta rather than Silk, suddenly life in
Aleppo doesn't seem quite so unappealing.

TRP is kind enough to explain his wordplay for us: '"Were it Night-time,
Sir, I'd say you were out Star-Gazing" ... [which] in the those parts was a
young man's term for masturbating'. Unusual for TRP to make the jokes so
explicit (I can't help but wonder how many other similar jokes am I missing
out on?), but perhaps he wants to emphasise that, for all the brilliance
and sublimity of Mason's profession, he is prone to becoming self-absorbed
and wrapped up too exclusively in his own world. (I might well be straining
for meaning here over a mere double-entendre - rather onanistically so).

Mason almost reproaches Rebekah for her blunt comment, but founds himself
"stupefied" by her beauty. TRP describes her mouth in ambiguous detail:
"Lips slightly apart, in an Inuiry that just fail'd to be a Smile,- like a
Gate-Keeper aout to have a word with him". Yet this is the only detail that
TRP, lover of verbose descriptions, offers about Rebekah's appearance. He
tells us that she's not an English Rose like Susannah, nor a "rugged
Blossom of the Heath", but he doesn't tell us what she does look like.

Admittedly TRP might have elaborated a bit more in a now forgotten earlier
passage, but the lack of physical description resonates all the more when
we start to question whether Rebekah's a ghost. The Gate-Keeper comment,
and Mason's reverie about "black Fumes welling from the Surface of her
Apparition, heard her voice thickening to the timbres of the Beasts ... the
serpents of Hell, real and swift, lying just the other side of her Shadow".

This furthers the connection to Eurydice - does Charles fear that Rebekah's
been consigned to Hell because she gave birth out of wedlock? The children
are registered as Gloucestershire born, but Mason and Rebekah hadn't yet
been registered as married - presuming they hadn't got married elsewhere,
like Greenwich instead ... or that she is the mother of his children ... or
that she existed in the first place ... "I am outside of Time"

Is Rebekah Mason's muse? His guiding light in his life and his career?
'"Look to the Earth," she instructs him. "Belonging to her as I do, I know
she lives, and that here upon this Volcanoe in the Sea, close to the forces
within, even you, Mopery, may learn of her, Tellurick Secrets you could
never guess"'.
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