18.End of a Vixen
WHEN Evaine was asleep, though, then Gerald rose softly from his chair. He approached the bed. Very carefully he inserted his hand between the young breasts of Evaine, and lightly he drew out the strange white gem. He waited now, looking down compassionately at this really very lovely girl....
But at his touch the learned Fox-Spirit had moved, so that she now lay flat upon her back, with her mouth a little open. Evelyn slept thus. And that was why Evelyn snored....
Gerald shrugged. He took up the sacrificial ax.
Now that the dawn was at hand, he went out from the tomb, to the glorification tree, and he began to fell the tree with this ax. At the first stroke blood gushed out of the gray bark copiously, and Gerald heard a wailing noise. Gerald looked upward. The appearance of a young child dressed in blue garments was to be seen in a cleft in the side of the tree. It had the seeming of a boy child about seven or eight years old, a freckled boy, with tousled red hair, and with as yet only one upper front tooth.
This child wailed broken-heartedly: “A blasphemer is come up against the Two Truths; a vainglorious fool derides the pair that endure where all else perishes; and life is denied to me by his wrongheadedness.”
Gerald had put down the ax. He was trembling. He did not like the love and the great yearning which had awakened in his heart. He folded his arms very tightly: he seemed tense and rather frightened looking as he waited there peering sidewise toward this boy.
“Child,” Gerald said, “what is your will that you cry out for life from the glorification tree?”
“My father, I demand the life which you have not given me, that life which you owe to me, and that life which is denied me so long as you deny the Two Truths.”
“I serve the demands of my appointed kingdom, child. I serve the needs of no other truth and the needs of no pawing women who would keep me out of that kingdom.”
“My father, your kingdom is a doubtful dream, but the flesh of my mother is real.”
“My dream is lovelier than any woman. Oh, and a doubtfulness also is more lovely than the body of a woman, for I know the shaping of that body over-well.”
“My father, you refuse the pleasures which will not ever be returning.”
“I am a god. I serve the needs of my own will.”
“The gods also pass, my father, they also pass without any returning, upon the road which you now tread.”
“Let us pass, then, unhindered! But no woman permits it.”
“That is because these women, O my father, have a very rational wisdom.”
“Such is, perhaps, the case. But a god has his irrational dream. And that is better.”
“It is well enough, my father, for that dream to end contentedly in the arms of some woman.”
“It is well enough. It is customary. But I am Fair-haired Hoo, the Helper and the Preserver. I go to my appointed kingdom: and I am Lord of a Third Truth, whose mightiness I must help and preserve.”
Then Gerald hewed on: and as the tree fell, the child vanished.
Now Gerald set fire to the tree: and when a tidy blaze was crackling, he spoke the needed words, and into the heart of this fire he tossed the strange white gem. Straightway you heard a loud screeching. Out of the tomb of Peter the Builder came a vixen fox, screaming and shuddering quite horribly, but not ever ceasing to approach the fire. She entered the flames. Silence followed, and the dawn of a superb May morning which was marred only by an unpleasant odor of singed hair and burning flesh.
Gerald after that went back into the tomb from which the omniscient Fox-Spirit had been dispossessed. He looked rather sentimentally upon the empty disordered bed: then he passed beyond the brazier, in which the ruins of fig-leaves yet smouldered, toward the Mirror of the Two Truths.
The fact no longer mattered, perhaps, that any man who looked into this mirror straightway found himself transformed into two stones: but it very greatly mattered what effect this mirror would have upon a sun god and a Savior and a culture hero. So he removed the flesh-colored veil.
19.Beyond the Veil
BUT he was not turned into two stones. Nor was there confronting him any mirror. Beyond the flesh-colored veil he found only an ancient painting very carefully done, but upon an unhuman scale which made this painting monstrous. The subject of the picture, however, is not known, because Gerald never told anybody.
But it is known that Gerald shook his head at this painting.
“Laborious daub of prevaricating pigment!” he remarked. “O futile painting, which so many foolish believers in Lytreia think to be the Mirror of the Two Truths! I question your arithmetic. For I myself am the Lord of a Third Truth, for all that I have just at present no precise idea as to its nature. In consequence, I know the two objects which you magnify are not all which exists. And I deny that their never-ending search of each other is the one gesture of life. No: I at least, I feel assured, am destined to take part in some quite other gesture, of a more graceful and more cleanly and more dignified nature,—a gesture of, it well may be, eternal importance....”
Yet Gerald glanced about him a little forlornly. This place was now rather lonesome and ambiguous looking. In the crypt immediately beneath him, Gerald knew, lay all that remained of King Peter and the most of his numerous family; dozens upon dozens of peculiarly ugly objects were there, all that remained of a great conqueror and of the queens who had delighted him, all that attestedly remained now anywhere of a strong hero’s pride and famous warfaring and of his many women’s loveliness....
“Oh, yes, it may be,” Gerald conceded, half frettedly, because he did not like to be troubled with such reflections, “it may be that I am wrong in this belief. And that seems to me yet another reason for adhering to this belief. I, standing here alone upon the remnants of so many utter strangers, admit indeed to some depression of spirits. It seems to me, at this exact instant, that just conceivably I may be neither a Savior nor a sun god nor a culture hero, but merely another bull-headed Musgrave, for whom death waits, and after death, perhaps, oblivion. Nevertheless, I find it a more beautiful and a much more entertaining idea to believe in than to deny the immortality even of a mere Musgrave. There is to my mind nothing at all interesting in the idea of my own extinction. And it appears that my belief in this matter, with no assured knowledge anywhere to go on, must be simply a question of personal taste. Modesty even suggests that my belief is an affair of irrelevance.”
And Gerald said also: “Therefore it furthermore appears to me, O peculiarly unimaginative painting, a sheer waste of opportunity to assume that anything is ever going to end even for a mere Musgrave all conscious experience. I had far rather play with a beautiful idea than with one utterly lacking in seductiveness. I very much prefer to believe that I at least am, in one way or another, reserved to take part in some enduring and rather superb performance,—somewhere, by and by,—in a performance concerned with some third truth, more august and æsthetically more pleasing than are the only ever-enduring truths apparent to us here. We copulate and die, and that is all?—Well, perhaps! But, then again, perhaps not! One must, you see, be broad-minded about the matter.”
He for a moment kept silence. That regrettably candid painting and all the other adjuncts of this place were certainly very depressing, now that the learned diableries of the Fox-Spirit no longer enlivened this tomb. Nevertheless, Gerald kept his long chin well up.
“Yes, every man ought to be broad-minded about this matter, and ought to cherish always, if only as a diverting and inexpensive plaything, this pungent notion of being immortal. It is really inexpensive, because, should your notion prove ungrounded, you run no risk, no tiniest risk, of being twitted, by and by, for credulity, or even of ever discovering your error. Meanwhile this faith in your own durability and potential importance is in some sense a cordial; and is in sundry ways a fine toy. It renders life, and dying too, endurable: and it offers against all vacant half-hours a variety of diverting speculations... as to that possible third truth.”
Again Gerald paused. For it seemed to him, as he unwittingly repeated the age-old self-persuasions of so many of his ancestors, that he had found now another facet in this jewel of an idea that he was playing with; and this fact considerably cheered Gerald.
“Then, too,” said he, “then, too, that rather wide-spread expectation of an oncoming triumph—somewhere, in some hazed roseate arena, beyond the discomforts of death and the incredible impudence of the mortician’s titivating,—that triumph which is to be a perpetual triumphing of justice and of rationality and of kindliness and of all the other canonical virtues, this rumored triumph yet cows many persons, not infrequently, into one or another thrifty-minded practice of these generally beneficent virtues.”
Gerald said then: “It thus makes for, at any rate, terrestrial ease and stability and repose: it gives people, as the phrase runs, something to go by, in that it supports the most of every nation’s social and legal rules of thumb. And it tends appreciably to limit men’s common greed and viciousness, and all the harsher lusts of human beings, to exercises through which there seems some quite tangible gain within tolerably safe reach.”
And Gerald said also: “Yes: it is much better for men to believe in some third truth which will be revealed to them after the death of their bodies; and a general faith in the immortality even of mere Musgraves appears to me, thus, very plainly, because of its happy blending of the functions of a narcotic and of a policeman, a generally desirable assumption. It remains in all ways a desirable faith, no matter whether or not there be any grounds for it. And if this careful painting presents the entire truth, that fact is but another excellent reason for paying no attention to it.”
Gerald now felt quite comfortable through having listened so respectfully to his own relentless logic.
“For these reasons, O foolish painting of the Two Truths, I deny your fleshly significance. Whether I happen to be a sun god or a Savior or a culture hero or just another bull-headed Musgrave, I deny that you present to me any truth whatever. I snap my fingers at your materialism; I turn up my nose at your indecorous anatomical studies; and I send the divine foot of the Lord of the Third Truth smashing through your ancient canvas. These things I do to proclaim the majesty of the Third Truth. And I depart from this Peter and this Peter’s Tomb, to seek my appointed kingdom.”
It was in this way that Gerald yet again put an affront upon Koleos Koleros and upon the Holy Nose of Lytreia.
PART SIX
THE BOOK OF TUROINE
“Weathercocks Turn more Easilywhen Placed very High.”
“Weathercocks Turn more Easilywhen Placed very High.”
“Weathercocks Turn more Easilywhen Placed very High.”
“Weathercocks Turn more Easily
when Placed very High.”
20.Thaumaturgists in Labor
GERALD passed on, still riding upon the silver stallion, which Evaine the Fox-Spirit had not, after all, demanded of him that morning as her promised honorarium. And the next place he came to, and where he got his breakfast, was Turoine. This was a small free city given to sorceries of two colors.
To every side of him the inhabitants of Turoine were about their arts: and Gerald, as a former student of magic, quite naturally observed their various activities with interest.
Now the first sorcerer that he encountered was making a figure out of pink wax with which was mixed baptismal oil and the ashes of a consecrated wafer. The next sorcerer was murmuring charms over a very fat toad which was imprisoned in a net rudely woven out of the golden hairs from the head of some luckless, unresponsive woman, who was now about to meet a not wholly desirable doom after that toad had been buried at her threshold. And the third sorcerer huddled over a small fire wherein burned cypress branches and broken crucifixes and portions of a gibbet. In his hand was a skull filled with dark wine which had been seasoned with hemp and with the fat of a girl child and with poppy seed: and his familiar, in the shape of a large dun-colored cat, was lapping up that bitter drink.
No sorcerer anywhere in Turoine was idle upon this fine May morning. And in this small, ever-busy city—where all the buildings were quaintly marked with stars and pentagrams and the signs of the zodiac and the two kinds of triangles, and were cozily overgrown with honeysuckle and arum lilies and black poppies and deadly nightshade,—these sorcerers were about a bewildering variety of studies.
“I,” one of them told Gerald, “am learning the secrets which proceed from Saturn, that ashy lord of the greater infortune. I have especial power over all husbandmen and beggars, over grandfathers and monks of every order and ministers of the gospel, over all potters, and miners, and gardeners, and cow-tenders. I have learned how to make men envious, covetous, slow of thought, suspicious, and stubborn. And I am also able to afflict whatsoever person I elect with toothache and dropsy and black jaundice and leprosy and hemorrhoids, either severally or in unison.”
Another said: “I study to divine and to make smooth the approach of every evil fortune,—with smoke and arrows and wax, with an egg, with mice, and with the simulacra of dead persons;—but, above all, as you may perceive, I have been most successful with the head of an ass in a brazier of live coals. And my guide is not any bow-legged, swarthy eunuch, but Leonard, the Grand Master of the Sabbat.”
“I,” said a third, “have found in Turoine the Great Juggle Bag, for my guide is Baalberith. So have I mastered all kinds of unheard-of, secret, merry feats and mysteries and inventions—”
“But what,” asked Gerald, “what purpose does your knowledge serve?”
“By means of it, sir, those who are favored by my lord Baalberith, the Master of Alliances, may make real the sin performed in a dream; may open the locked door of any jail or bedchamber or counting house; may smite a husband with embarrassing weakness; may inspire strange maids and married women with flaming desires; may increase his natural height here by seven ells and here by three inches; may make himself invisible or invulnerable; may change his form into that of a cat or a hare or a wolf; may control thunder and lightning; may collect and talk with snakes; and”—here the sorcerer coughed,—“and may perform five other advantageous, extravagant and authentic devices.”
But Gerald shrugged. “These sciences are well enough for a sorcerer; and I perceive that the industrious may pick up much useful information in Turoine. But I am a god who travels toward his appointed kingdom, and toward the mastery of secrets rather more vital than any of these. For your arts are of that black magic which hurts but cannot help; your guides are devils; and you deal only in misfortune and destructiveness.”
“Then perhaps, sir, you may be better pleased by the enchanters who live at the other end of this city. For these enchanters have no guides save restlessness and foiled desires and impotence; they get no direct aid from hell, but from somewhat less ancient intellectual centres; and they work all their magic, such as it is, with words.”
“And what does the magic of these same enchanters create?”
“It creates, sir, a comfortable sense of equality with your betters wherever there is least reason for it.”
“I find that saying obscure. Nevertheless, I will visit these enchanters,” said Gerald.
And he rode on.
21.They That Wore Blankets
THUS Gerald came to the enchanters who were used to perform all their magic with words. And they greeted his coming with a very cordial enthusiasm for creatures so gray and vague and bedraggled looking as they sat huddled there, each one of them clothed in a blanket, and thoroughly drenched as though with sour smelling rain.
Now the first enchanter to speak wore a violet blanket. He arose; and dripping bilge-water everywhere about him in the while that he smiled with wholly friendly condescension, he observed:
“Here is another rider on the silver stallion. Here is yet another figure of papier mâché which Horvendile has despatched upon a profitless journeying.”
“But I—” said Gerald.
Without at all heeding Gerald, a second enchanter, in a well soaked green blanket, laid down his scissors; and he addressed the first enchanter with some fervor, saying:
“Let us not speak harshly of our good Horvendile’s magic, for everybody ought to respect the impotence of the aging. We must concede, of course, that his magic is no longer fresh. It is not possible to deny that a woefully infirm magic has set this papier mâché figure on a hackneyed journeying. Candor compels us to grant that this journeying crosses once sparkling rivers which have long ago run dry. We, as intelligent enchanters, must admit that a wearying fog lowers thickly about this journeying, that above it the sun of romance shines very pale and cold, and that this journeying is sterile and empty of gusto. Nevertheless, this journeying, as we ought not to ignore, is no doubt an afterthought, it is the belated invention of a tired mind, and a desperate and ill-advised proceeding. For these reasons, howsoever sorrowfully we, as Horvendile’s fellow artists and well-wishers, must always deplore among ourselves the kindergarten notions of this poor Horvendile, and his ponderous playfulness, and the limitations of his few and unenterprising ideas, still we must be careful not to apply to his magic one single harsh word.”
“Yet—” Gerald stated.
Nodding in profound and entire approbation, with which Gerald was not in any way connected, an enchanter in a sopping yellow blanket now remarked:
“I, too, am always ready to defend the magic of our fellow practitioner. My conscience forces me to grant that his magic is not faultless. In mere honesty I have to confess that his magic is stupid and stilted and silly; that it is sniggering and sly and nasty; that it wallows in a morass of self-satisfaction; and that it is steeped and soaked in ever-fretful egoism, in spite of our friendly candor in all dealings with him from the very first. Nor can I dispute that our confrère behaves too much like a decadent small boy who is proud of having been haled into the police court for chalking dirty words on a wall. Apart, though, from his stinking filth and his vileness and his tinsel cynicisms, and aside from his bestiality and his vulgar frippery and his dabblings in cesspools and his vapid sophistries, I stand always ready to defend the magic of Horvendile, because it is not, after all, as if he were a mage of any real importance, and one ought always to be indulgent to persons of third and fourth rate ability.”
“Even so—” Gerald pointed out.
But now an enchanter in a thoroughly drenched scarlet blanket was saying, as he meditatively unclosed his pastepot:
“I quite agree with you. Nobody admires the merits of our esteemed confrère more whole-heartedly than I do. It would be merely silly to deny that he has weakened his always rather wishy-washy magic potions by too frequent blendings. It is impossible to ignore that his magic has become a cloying weariness and a mincing indecency. We are forced to acknowledge that Horvendile is insincere, that he very irritatingly poses as a superior person, that he is labored beyond endurance, that he smells of the lamp, that his art is dull and tarnished and trivial and intolerable, but, even so, we ought also to admit that he does as well as could be expected of anybody who combines a lack of any actual talent with ignorance of actual life.”
“However—” Gerald explained.
The fifth enchanter to interrupt Gerald wore a black blanket; and he, too, appeared to drip with wisdom and bilge-water and judicious amiability in the while that he said:
“It is, in fact, alike our duty and our privilege to be most lenient with this laborious bungler who, after all, is probably doing the best he can. So I, for one, I never dwell even fleetingly upon the awkward fact that the banality of his magic is no excuse for the way he botches its execution. Indeed, I do not know but that a person of very lively imagination might conceive of our confrère’s turning out worse work than he does. Nor do I think I am being over-charitable. For, upon my word,—while I can see that his magic is morbid, that it is sophomoric, that it is malignant, that it is plagiarized, that it is intolerably insipid, that it is sacrilegious, that it is naïve, that it is pseudo whatever or other may happen to sound best, that it is over brutal in cynicism, that it is incurably sentimental, and that it bores me beyond description,—yet otherwise I can, at just this moment, think of no especial other fault to find with his magic.”
So it was that these dripping and affable enchanters went on defending Horvendile with such generous volubility that Gerald could get in no word.
Then each took off the single garment which he wore, and so vanished, because without their wet blankets these enchanters were in no way noticeable. And Gerald rode away from that place contentedly, because it was a natural comfort to know that he traveled with a guide and a patron who was so well thought of by the best judges.
22.The Paragraph of the Sphinx
NOW upon the outskirts of Turoine, after Gerald had ridden through this city, Gerald paused to talk with the Sphinx who lay there writing with a black pen in a large black-covered book like a ledger. The monster had so long couched in this place as to be half-imbedded in the red earth.
“This partially buried condition, ma’am,” Gerald began,—“or perhaps one ought to say ‘sir’—”
“Either form of address,” replied the Sphinx, “may be applicable, according to which half of me you are considering.”
“—This semi-interment, then, madam and sir, is untidy looking, and cannot be especially comfortable.”
“Yet I may not move,” replied the Sphinx, “in part because I have my writing to complete, in part because I know all movement and all action of every kind to be equally fruitless. So do I retain eternal bodily as well as mental poise.”
“Such acumen borders upon paralysis,” Gerald said: “and paralysis is ugly.”
“Do you not despise ugliness!” the Sphinx exhorted, “who have traveled thus far upon the road of gods and myths. For what things have you found stable upon this road save only Koleos Koleros and the Holy Nose of Lytreia? and what is there more ugly than these two?”
Gerald replied: “That nose I found it my Christian duty to describe as a tongue; and the lady whom they call Koleos Koleros I have not yet seen. But, in any case, you, ma’am—for, after all, it is not quite nice for me to have your loins upon my mind—No, really, it does seem more becoming for me to treat you as a lady—”
“So, and do you find me ugly?”
“You mistake my meaning. I was about to observe that you, ma’am, also appear tolerably stable. And the Mirror of Caer Omn, that likewise remains in worship.”
“Dreams pass eternally varying through that golden mirror. Thoughts pass eternally varying through my wise head. But all these dreams and thoughts stay barren, as barren as they are irresolute. For we create nothing. We control no material thing. And we aspire toward no goal. That is why we are permitted to endure powerlessly in realms wherein two powers alone are never barren; wherein they control all; and wherein neither may ever be uncertain of its goal so long as the other survives.”
Gerald found this wholly incomprehensible and of no striking interest. So he only shrugged.
“Nevertheless, in my worlds,” Gerald said, “there shall not be any ugliness.”
“Do you, then, possess many worlds?”
“Not as yet, ma’am. I allude to the worlds I shall create by and by, when I have come into my kingdom yonder, in the place beyond good and evil, and have regained my proper station as the Lord of the Third Truth in the Dirghic mythology.”
Now the Sphinx frowned. “I perceive you are only another downfallen god upon your journey to the Master Philologist. I might have guessed it, for Thor and Typhon and Rudra and the Maruts and all the other storm gods who have gone blustering downward into Antan, all had red hair.”
Gerald slapped his thigh.
“Upon my word, ma’am, but that is a real clue! The storm gods did, in every mythology known to me, have red hair. I incline to believe that the wisdom of the Sphinx has solved the mystery of my being. I am no doubt a storm god also; I am rapidly becoming a complete pantheon upon two legs; and at this rate my waistcoat will end by embracing pure monotheism. Meanwhile I really do wonder, ma’am, at your offhand way of speaking about the gods, and I wonder, too, what grudge you can have against us gods?”
“For one thing, it is said that the gods created those men who interrupt me in my writing to plague me with just such silly questions.”
“Men naturally seek wisdom from you, ma’am, to whom the whole story of human life is familiar.”
“But the story of human life is not one story. There are three stories of human life.”
“Ah, ah! And what are they?”
“Why, there was once a traveling man who came one night to an inn—”
“I believe I have heard of his indecorous adventures there. So do you spare my blushes, ma’am, and tell me the second story!”
“It seems, then, there were once two Irishmen—”
“That anecdote also, in all conceivable variants, I am quite certain I have heard. So what is the third story?”
“There was once a young married couple. And it seems that on the first night—”
“Yet that story, in a great number of versions, is equally familiar to me. And really, ma’am, I question if these intolerably hackneyed tales sum up all human wisdom.”
“But the young married couple in the outcome got pleasure for their bodies in the service of those two powers which I was just talking about. The Irishmen found an unlooked-for drollness in the mechanics of those two powers, which they preserved in a neat and nicely memorable phrase, getting pleasure for their minds. So, by the way, did the two Jews and the two Scotchmen. And the traveling man, upon the next morning, after those same two powers had obtained their will of him, went away from that inn, traveling nobody knows whither; and so got, through a darker night, unbroken and uncompanioned sleep, unbothered any longer by those powers. Thus these three stories really do sum up all the gains which it is possible for a man to acquire through human living and all the wisdom that it is salutary for any man to know about.”
“Well, that is as it may be! I am persuaded that in the goal of all the gods there is a more august power than any which men know of hereabouts assuredly. For I note the sympathy and compassion and love and self-denial which human beings display toward one another, after all, rather copiously. I reflect that every art is a form of self-expression. And I deduce that the artist who created human beings was prompted in his embodiment of all these qualities by sheer egotism. He observed these qualities in his own nature: he approved of them: and so he embodied them. No actually reflective person, therefore, will ever imagine that human life does not go forward toward some kindly winding-up, since none who finds philanthropy in his own heart can doubt that philanthropy exists in the heart of his creator.”
“And does that stuff which you are now talking really seem to you,” the Sphinx asked, “sensible?”
“My dear lady, it seems to me something far better: it seems to me a rather beautiful idea. So I play with it sometimes. Now I dismiss that idea, out of deference to your proverbial wisdom: and I ask what far more gratifying and uplifting wisdom, ma’am, you may be writing in your black-covered book?”
“Oh, yes, my book!” said the Sphinx, with the livelier interest natural to an author. “You find me just now in some difficulty with my book. You conceive there has to be an opening paragraph. It would not be possible to leave out the first paragraph—”
“I can see that. I can recall no book in which there was not a first paragraph.”
“—And this paragraph ought to sum up all things, so to speak—”
“That likewise is a familiar rhetorical principle—”
“—And it is with the composition of this paragraph that I am just now having trouble.”
“Well, you could not possibly have consulted a more suitable person. I, too, used to dabble in the little art of letters before I became a god with four aspects. I am familiar with all rhetorical devices. I am a past master of zeugma and syllepsis; at hypallage, and chiasmus also, I excel; and my handling of meiosis and persiflage and oxymoron has been quite generally admired. So do you read me your rough draft: and I have no doubt I can arrange all difficulties for you.”
The Sphinx for a moment considered this suggestion, and, before the prospect of a connoisseur’s efficient criticism, the monster seemed rather shy.
“Do not be vexed unduly,” the Sphinx then said, “if you can find no meaning in this paragraph—”
“I shall not be excessively censorious, I assure you. No beginner is expected to excel in any art.”
“—For this paragraph was placed here simply because there happened to be a vacancy which needed filling—”
“I quite understand that. So let us get on!”
But there was no hurrying the diffident Sphinx. “The foolish, therefore,” the Sphinx continued in shy explanation, “will find in it foolishness, and will say ‘Bother!’ The wise, as wisdom goes, will reflect that this paragraph was placed here without its consent being asked; that no wit nor large significance was loaned it by its creator; and that it will be forgotten with the turning of the one page wherein it figures unimportantly—”
“No doubt it will be!” said Gerald, now speaking a little impatiently, “but let us get on to this famous paragraph!”
“—So do you turn the page forthwith, in just the care-free fashion of old nodding Time as he skims over the long book of life: and do you say either ‘Bother!’ or ‘Brother!’ as your wits prompt.”
“I will, I assure you, the moment your book is published. But why do you keep talking about your paragraph? why do you not read me what you have written?”
“I have just done so,” replied the Sphinx. “I have not been talking. I have been reading ever since I said, ‘Do you not be vexed’ and now I have read you the whole paragraph.”
Gerald said, “Oh!” He scratched his long chin a bit blankly. He approached the monster, and leaning over one forepaw, he read for himself in that black ledger the paragraph of the Sphinx.
Then Gerald said, “But what comes next?”
“Were I to answer that question you would be wiser than I. And of course nobody can ever be wiser than the Sphinx.”
“But is that as far as you have yet written?”
“It is as far as anybody has written,” said the Sphinx, “as yet.”
“In all these centuries you have not got beyond that one paragraph?”
“Now, do you not see my difficulty? I needed an opening paragraph which would sum up all things, so to speak, and all the human living which men keep pestering me to explain. And when I had written it there was not anything left over to put in the second paragraph.”
“But, oh, dear me! This is materialism! this is flat sacrilege committed in the actual presence of a god! I am embarrassed, ma’am. I hardly know which way to look before the spectacle of such conduct. For you fill your page, with your ambiguous paragraph—”
“Do you not be vexed unduly if you can find no meaning in this paragraph—”
“—Which has not anything to do with my exalted duties in this world—”
“This paragraph was placed here simply because there happened to be a vacancy which needed filling—”
“But I am not a paragraph, ma’am! I am no less a person, I may tell you in confidence, than Fair-haired Hoo, the Helper and Preserver, the Lord of the Third Truth, the Well-beloved of Heavenly Ones, upon a journey,—quite incognito, and therefore unattended by my customary retinue,—toward my appointed kingdom. And I confess that to my divine mind your writing has not any valid significance—”
“The foolish, therefore, will find in it foolishness, and will say ‘Bother!’—”
“—And conveys no valuable lesson—”
“The wise, as wisdom goes, will reflect that this paragraph was placed here without its consent being asked; that no wit nor large significance was loaned it by its creator; and that it will be forgotten with the turning of the one page wherein it figures unimportantly—”
“Quite honestly, ma’am, I am not a paragraph! No, I assure you that I really am the Lord of the Third Truth, upon my way to rule over Antan. I am the predestined conqueror who will force that irreligious Master Philologist to refrain from any further evil-doing, and to turn over a new leaf—”
“Do you turn the page forthwith, in just the care-free fashion of old nodding Time as he skims over the long book of life—”
“Yes, yes!” said Gerald, smiling, “I was thinking you could bring in that bit, neatly enough, if I gave you the simile to start on. And I know, of course, how all you authoresses love to quote your own works. So now, ma’am, if I were to remark, in a half puzzled way, that I hardly know what to say about your irrational paragraph—”
“Do you say either ‘Bother!’ or ‘Brother!’ as your wits prompt.”
“Quite so! And that finishes it. You have now had the privilege of quoting in the course of one conversation your complete collected works, from cover to cover: and that ought to leave any authoress in a fairly amiable frame of mind. My complaint, then, ma’am, is that you have exhausted my time rather than your subject. There should be by all means a second paragraph. You see, dear lady,—and I am speaking now from the professional knowledge of a god,—it is the gist of every religion that—still to pursue your bibliomaniacal metaphor,—one has but to turn over that page in order to begin upon the most splendid of romances.”
“What kind of romance can any dead man be getting pleasure out of in his dark grave?” the Sphinx asked, in frank surprise.
“Well, I must not speak over-hastily. I cannot supply offhand your second paragraph until I have learned what the Dirghic religion states to be the nature of this second paragraph.... For, you conceive, ma’am, in the opinion of many wise and virtuous persons that paragraph deals with a voyaging in the great sun boat, to a hidden land very far down in the west, after the heart of each passenger has been weighed against a feather, and forty-two judges have passed favorably upon his claims to free transportation. But dissenters, just as wise and virtuous, and just as numerous, declare the subject of that paragraph to be a pleasure garden in which properly behaved persons will recline in continuous tipsiness upon golden couches covered with green cushions, cosily shaded by lotus- and banana-trees, and will have no other occupation than perpetually to remove the virginity of large-eyed celestial ladies. Yet, other sages declare that paragraph to deal with the crossing of a bridge—in which transit a peculiarly obliging dog will serve as the guide,—into the presence of the bright Amshaspands. Whereas, still other estimable people contend that your second paragraph should treat of a four-square city builded of gold and jasper, upon a twelve-fold foundation of various precious stones, and irrigated by its own private crystal sea.... For, I repeat, ma’am, the best-thought-of religions vary quite noticeably as to the nature of this second paragraph: and it would be wholly a sad thing if by speaking over-hastily I were to run counter to my own mythology. But, in any case, I have no sympathy whatever with the mental morbidity of such materialism as would deny the existence of any kind of second paragraph.”
Then Gerald frowned, and he rode on.
23.Odd Transformation of a Towel
GERALD now passed beyond Turoine, and, crossing Mispec Moor, he came thus to the tumbled-down hut of a decrepit old woman.
“And how are you called, ma’am?”
“What is that to you?” she answered, peevishly.
And this wrinkled creature seemed to Gerald remarkably red and inflamed and regrettably hideous among her tousled tresses.
“Well, ma’am,” replied Gerald, pleasantly, “a name is a word: and words are my peculiar concern.”
“If it matters to you, young Carrot-top, I have had many names. And under one name or another I was used to deal with every man. Now my powers fall into decay, and one month is like another month, with never any changing in it. All about me is bleached, dearie, all is colorless. There is no more employment for me: and I am an old worthless flabby white-haired creature, still palely quivering with desire for the good ever-busy days—oh, and for the nights too, dearie,—that are overpast. Eh, dearie, though you would not ever think it, once I was Æsred, a mother of the Little Gods and of much else. And I fared handsomely then, taking liveliness and color out of all things, and turning men into useful domestic animals. But now the world is old, and I am the world’s twin: and all vigorousness has gone from me, and one month is like another month, with never any changing in it.”
“I am a god who bring with me all vigor and all youth,” said Gerald: for he remembered what the Sphinx had said about not despising ugliness.
Gerald spoke the appointed words: and he baptized the old whining trot after the rite of the Lady of the First Water-Gap. He straightway saw the dingy towel about her shaking head transformed. This towel had now become a crown composed, a bit surprisingly, of the four suits from a pack of playing cards. There were four clubs set upright, like the strawberry leaves in a duke’s coronet, and alternated with four spades: and the band of this crown was moulded in bas-relief with eight hearts and with sixteen diamonds.
In fact, everything near Gerald was changed. To Gerald’s right hand and to his left were seen neat fields and green things growing pleasantly, and the tumbled-down hovel was now a spruce new cottage. But what seemed even more interesting to Gerald was the circumstance that the wrinkled angry looking old woman had become a quite personable creature, not young and callow, but in the very prime of life: and the name of Æsred now, as she told him, and as he noted at least two other reasons for believing, was Maya of the Fair Breasts.
But she said also, forthwith: “Now that I am young, and have not any chaperon in the house, it would look better for you to be getting on with your journey, because you know how people talk. Yes, and how quick they are to be talking about all widow women anyhow—”
“Oh! oh!” said Gerald: “are you not, then, prepared to trust me?”
“—With or without,” continued Maya, “the least provocation. As for trusting you or any other young fellow living, I never heard before of such nonsense. It is only the elderly men that any woman can depend on, just as far as she can see them, in broad daylight, a good while after they can be depended on at night.”
“You are not even ready to give me all?”
Maya was reasonable. “I will give you your dinner, and on top of that your hat. For I can have no vagabond god hanging around my neat cottage when I am trying to get the dishes washed, and have the name of a widow to keep respectable.”
“Here,” Gerald stated, with conviction, “is an unusual woman. I search the pages of history in vain to find any parallel to the strange behavior of this woman.”
And Gerald reflected. Very certainly this Maya of the Fair Breasts did not excel all the other women his gaze had ever beheld. Yet the colors of her two eyes were nicely matched, and a fairish nose stood about equidistant between them. Beneath this was a tolerably good mouth, for all that the lips were sullen: and the indefinitely brownish hair, which was queerly arranged in nineteen formal braids, no doubt concealed a pair of well-enough ears. This rather heavy-visaged woman was reasonably young, she seemed hardly more than thirty-seven or thereabouts: she exhibited no deformity anywhere: her figure was acceptably preserved, her breasts were positively alluring.... In fine, the appraising glance of the young man could with the kindly eyes of twenty-eight perceive in her no really grave fault.
Moreover, she reminded him of no woman that he had ever seen anywhere before this morning.
So Gerald said: “I am satisfied. I shall stay for dinner. I shall thankfully accept all the refreshments you proffer, of every kind.”
Then Maya answered: “But, indeed, you sauce-box, you quite misunderstand me. So do you keep your proper distance! For I am not the sort of woman that you seem only too well acquainted with.”
Gerald said, with a caressing thrill in his voice, “Yet, do you but answer me this very simple question—”
Maya replied, “Oh, get away with you!”
Thus speaking, she boxed the jaws of the predestined ruler over all the gods of men; and with a few well-chosen words she placed their relationship upon a more decorous basis.
PART SEVEN
THE BOOK OF POETS