4.That Devil in the Library
YET Gerald looked back for an instant at that unfortunate devil, in the appearance of a sedate young red-haired man, who remained in the library. To regard this Gerald Musgrave, now, was like looking at a droll acquaintance in whom Gerald was not, after all, very deeply interested.
For this Gerald Musgrave, the one who remained in the library, was really droll in well-nigh every respect. About the Gerald who was now—it might be, a bit nobly,—yielding up his life in preference to violating the code of a gentleman, and who was now quitting Lichfield, in order to become a competent magician, there was not anything ludicrous. That Gerald was an honorable and intelligent person who sought a high and rational goal.
But that part of Gerald Musgrave which remained behind, that part which was already marshaling more words in order the more pompously to inter the exploits of Dom Manuel of Poictesme, appeared droll. There was, for one thing, no sensible compulsion upon that red-haired young fellow thus to be defiling clean paper with oak-gall, when he might at that very instant be comfortably drunk at the Vartreys’ dinner, or he might be getting pleasurable excitement out of the turns of fortune at Dorn’s gaming-parlors, or he might be diverting himself in his choice of four bedrooms with a lively companion.
But, instead, he sat alone with bookshelves rising stuffily to every side of him,—rather low bookshelves upon the tops of which were perched a cherished horde of porcelain and brass figures representing one or another beast or fowl or reptile. Among the shiny toys, which in themselves attested his childishness, the young fellow sat of his own accord thus lonely. And his antics, incontestably, were queer. He fidgeted. He shifted his rump. He hunched downward, as if with a sudden access of rage, over the paper before him. He put back his head, to stare intently at a white china hen. He pulled at the lobe of his left ear; and he then rather frantically scratched the interior of this ear with his little finger.
Between these bodily exercises he, who was so precariously seated upon the crust of a planet teetering unpredictably through space, was making upon the paper before him, with his much nibbled-at black pen, small scratches, the most of which he presently canceled with yet other scratches, all the while with the air of a person who was about something intelligent and of actual importance. The spectacle was queer; it was unspeakably irrational: for, as always, to an onlooker, the motions of creative writing revealed that flavor of the grotesque which is attendant upon every form of procreation.
Yet it was upon a graver count that Gerald felt honestly sorry for the inheritor of Gerald Musgrave’s natural body. For Gerald was giving up his life out of deference to the code of a gentleman with rather more of relief than he had permitted the Sylan to suspect. And the poor devil who had so rashly taken over this life would—howsoever acute his diabolical intelligence,—he too would, in the end, Gerald reflected, be powerless against that unreasonable Evelyn Townsend and that even more unreasonable code of a gentleman.
Nobody, Gerald’s thoughts ran on, now that he had found a rather beautiful idea to play with, nobody who had not actually indulged in the really dangerous dalliance of adultery in Lichfield could quite understand the hopelessness of the unfortunate fiend’s position. For in the chivalrous Lichfield of 1805 adultery had its inescapable etiquette. Your exact relations with the woman were in the small town a matter of public knowledge familiar to everybody: but no person in Lichfield would ever formally grant that any such relations existed. Eyes might meet with perfect understanding: but from the well-bred lips of no Southern gentleman or gentlewoman would ever come more than a suave and placid “Evelyn and Gerald have always been such good friends.” For you were second cousins, to begin with: and—in a Lichfield wherein, as everywhere else in this human world, most people unaffectedly disliked, and belittled, and kept away from their cousins,—that relationship was considered a natural reason for you two being much together. Moreover, every woman in Lichfield was, by another really rather staggering social convention, assumed to be beautiful and accomplished and chaste: it was an assumption which needed hardly to be stated: it was merely among all Southern gentry an axiom in the vast code of being well-bred.
It followed that, when you were once involved in a liaison, your one salvation was for your co-partner in iniquity to become tired of you, and to cease dwelling upon the fact that she had trusted you and had given you all. That remained, of course, by the dictates of Southern chivalry, at any moment her privilege: but in this case the inconsiderate woman only grew fonder and fonder of Gerald, and repeated the dreadful observation more and more frequently.... And it remained, too, the privilege of the technically aggrieved husband to pick a quarrel with you, provided only that the grounds of this quarrel in no way involved a mention of his wife’s name. Then, still by the set rules of Lichfield’s etiquette, there would be a duel. After the duel you either were dispiritingly dead or, else, if you happened to be the more assuredly luckless survivor, you were compelled, merely by the silent force of everybody’s assumption that a gentleman could not do otherwise, to marry the widow. To do this was your debt to society at large, in atonement for having “compromised” a lady, where, bewilderingly enough, she was unanimously granted never to have been concerned at all. For never, in either outcome, would the occurrence of anything “wrong” be conceded, nor would ever the possibility of a lady’s having committed adultery be so much as hinted at in any speech or act of the chivalrous gentry of Lichfield.
Meanwhile you were trapped. There was no way whatever of avoiding that bleated “Oh, and I trusted you! I gave you all!” You were not even privileged to avoid the woman. It was not considered humanly possible that you were bored, and upon some occasions frenziedly annoyed, by the society of a beautiful and accomplished and chaste gentlewoman who honored you with her friendship. There was, instead, compressing you everywhere, the tacit but vast force of the general assumption that your indebtedness to her could not ever be discharged in full. The deplorable—and sometimes, too, the rather dear—fond woman’s inability to keep her hands off you was conscientiously not noticed. So your Cousin Evelyn pawed at you in public without an eyebrow’s going up: hostesses smilingly put you together: other men affably quitted her side whensoever you appeared. Her husband was no different: Frank Townsend, also, genially accepted—in the teeth of whatsoever rationality the man might privately harbor,—the axiom that “Evelyn and Gerald have always been such good friends.”
Of course, Gerald granted, this was, in the upper circles of the best Southern families, an exceptional case. Time and again Gerald had envied the dozens of other young fellows in Lichfield who were conducting their liaisons with visibly such superior luck. For the lady tired of them or, else, was smitten with convenient repentance: and these gay blades passed on high-heartedly to the embraces of yet other technically beautiful and accomplished and chaste playfellows. But Evelyn evinced an impenitence which threatened to be permanent; Evelyn did not tire of Gerald; she pawed at him; she slipped notes into his hand; she bleated almost every day her insufferable claim to upset his convenience and his comfort: and he cursed in all earnestness that fatal charm of his which held him in such desperate loneliness.
—In loneliness, because not even the lean comfort of candor, not even any quest of sympathy, was permitted you. A gentleman did not kiss and tell: he, above all, might not tell that the kissing had become an infernal nuisance. Not any of your brothers, neither one of your sisters—not even when your indolence and your general worthlessness had reduced Cynthia to whimpering bits of the New Testament, or had launched Agatha in a chattering millrace of babbling maledictory vaticinations,—would ever recognize to you in plain words that you and Cousin Evelyn were illicitly intimate. Nor would any of your kindred, either, ever contemplate the possibility of you yourself acting or speaking here with common-sense, or in any other manner violating the formulas set for every gentleman’s conduct by the insane and magnificent code of Lichfield.
For it was, after all, magnificent, in its own way, the code by which those bull-headed Musgraves—who shared the blood that was in your body, but no one of the notions in your astonishingly clever head,—along with the rest of this brave and stupid Lichfield, lived day after day, and carried genial, never-troubled self-respect into the graveyard. This code avoided, so far as Gerald could see, no especial misdoing or crime: but it did show you how, with the appropriate and most graceful of gestures, to commit either, when the need arose, in the prescribed fashion of a well-bred Southern gentleman. Yes, really, Gerald reflected, that code was rather a beautiful idea to play with. It was an excellent thing to be a gentleman: but it proved always fatal, too, in the end, simply because no lady was a gentleman.
However, it was that poor devil in the library who was now involved in the dangerous task of carrying through an adultery in Lichfield after the fashion of well-bred persons. It was in his ears that a still rather dear but too damnably adhesive Evelyn would be bleating every day a reiteration of the fact that she had trusted him and had given him all. And Gerald himself, having decorously laid down his life rather than violate this dreadful code of a gentleman, was now fairly in train to become a competent magician.
Not ever again would he sit writing among those bookshelves, engrossed, and rubbing at his chin or forehead, or scratching his head, or sticking his little finger into his ear, or restively shifting his weight from one buttock to the other buttock, in his multiform efforts to quicken, somehow, the flow of lagging thought. He would pause no more to prop his chin (with an unpleasantly moist hand, as a rule), and thus to stare lack-wittedly at one or another of the china and brass toys which he had, quite as idiotically, collected to make vivid his bookshelves. All these queer exercises, as Gerald, standing there, had seen them in the last few minutes performed by the natural body of Gerald Musgrave, did, manifestly, not constitute an engaging or a sane way of spending the evening, in a somewhat stuffy room.
No, he was now, forever, very happily done with all these forlorn gymnastics. It was only the natural body of Gerald Musgrave which henceforward would, before this commensurately irrational audience of small elephants and dogs and parrots and chicken, go through these foolish writhing antics, in that wholly nice looking young idiot’s endeavor to complete the romance about Dom Manuel of Poictesme.... Well, one could but wish the poor devil joy of his bargain! and it no longer really mattered that all which pertained to Gerald Musgrave was rather droll, Gerald decided, as he passed out of sight of that red head bent over that incessant pen scratching.
PART TWO
THE BOOK OF TWILIGHT
“It is Not Well to Look aGift Horse in the Mouth.”
“It is Not Well to Look aGift Horse in the Mouth.”
“It is Not Well to Look aGift Horse in the Mouth.”
“It is Not Well to Look a
Gift Horse in the Mouth.”
5.Christening of the Stallion
GERALD descended nineteen steps; and in the dusk he found waiting there, beside a tethered riding-horse, yet another young man, with hair as red as Gerald Musgrave’s own.
“That you may travel the more quickly, along a woman-haunted way, in your journeying toward your appointed goal,” this stranger began, “I have fetched a horse for you to ride upon.”
Yet the speaker was not wholly a stranger. So Gerald now said, “Oh, so it is you!” As a student of magic, Gerald had held earlier dealings with this red-haired Horvendile, who was Lord of the Marches of Antan.
And Gerald went on, gratefully: “Come now, but this is kind! Even as a courtesy between fellow artists, this is generous!”
“The amenities of fellow artists,” returned Horvendile, “are by ordinary two-edged. And this one may cut deeper than you foreknow.”
“Meanwhile you have brought me this huge shining horse, which cannot be other than Pegasus—”
“Whether or not this divine steed be that Pegasus which bears romantics even to the ultimate goal of their dreams, depends upon the horseman. It has been prophesied, however, that the Redeemer of Antan and the monarch who shall reign, after the overthrow of the Master Philologist, in the place beyond good and evil, will come riding upon the silver stallion that is called, not Pegasus, but Kalki—”
“Oh! oh!” said Gerald: and for an instant he considered this surprising turn of affairs. To reign in Antan had, very certainly, been no part of his modest plans; but he saw at once how much more becoming it would be, and how much better suited to his real merits, to enter into Antan as its heir apparent, resistless upon the silver stallion famous in old prophecies, rather than to come as a suppliant begging for a few words.
“Prophecies,” said Gerald, then, “ought to be respected by all well brought up persons. Only, does this horse happened to be Kalki? Because, you see, Horvendile, that appears to be the whole point of the prophecy.”
Rather oddly, Horvendile said, “Whether or not this divine steed be that Kalki which bears romantics even to the ultimate goal of all the gods, depends upon the horseman.”
Gerald considered this saying. Gerald smiled, and Gerald remarked:
“Oh, but now I comprehend you! The rider and the owner of any horse is, quite naturally, entitled to call the animal whatsoever he prefers. Very well, then! I shall christen this riding-horse Kalki. Yes, Horvendile, upon mature deliberation, I will accept the throne of Antan, without considering my personal preferences and my dislike of publicity and ostentation, in order that the prophecy may be fulfilled, because that is always a good thing for prophecies.”
“Since that is your decision, Gerald, you have but, after you have paid homage here, to mount intrepidly. And the divine steed will carry you upon no common road, but, since he is divine, along that way which the gods and the great myths pursue in their journeying toward Antan.”
“It is appropriate, of course, that I should travel on the road patronized by the best classes. Nevertheless, it would, I think, be a rather beautiful idea—”
“Nevertheless, also,” said Horvendile, “and all the while that you waste in talking about beautiful ideas, there is a man’s homage to be paid here; and moreover, at the first gap of the Doonham, the Princess awaits you with some impatience. It would not be going too far to say, indeed, that she hungers for your coming.”
“Come now, but the things you tell me steadily become more palatable!” remarked Gerald, as he approached the huge stallion. “Now that I have accepted the responsibilities of a throne and of all the great and best words of the Master Philologist, it would be most unbecoming for a princess to be ignored by anyone who already is virtually a reigning monarch. There are amenities to be preserved between royal houses. Very terrible wars have sprung from the omission of such amenities. So do you lead me forthwith to this impatient princess; but do you first tell me the adorable name of her highness!”
Horvendile answered, “The princess who just now awaits you is Evasherah, the Lady of the First Water-Gap of Doonham.”
“I admit that the information, now I have it, means very little. Nevertheless, my dear fellow, do you direct me to the water-gap of this princess!”
“Yet, I repeat, it would be wise for you, before departing from this place, to render a man’s homage to the ruler of it.”
“Well, Horvendile, the name of this tropical, damp, and this rather curious smelling country is no doubt better known to you than, I confess, it stays to me!”
“This place has not any name in the reputable speech of men. It is the realm of Koleos Koleros.”
At that name Gerald bowed his head; and, as became a student of magic, he courteously made the appropriate sign.
And Gerald said: “Very dreadful is the name of Koleos Koleros! Yet, quite apart from the fact that I am a member of the Protestant Episcopal church, I owe this Koleos Koleros no homage. And I, very certainly, shall not linger to pay any, with a princess waiting for me! Rather, do I elect to pass hastily through this land of quags and underbrush, and to leave this somewhat unsanitarily odored neighborhood, in which, I perceive, misguided persons yet live—”
For these two young men were no longer alone in this ambiguous valley. Through the twilight Gerald now saw many women passing furtively toward a dark laurel grove; and from out of that grove came a queer music.
Then Horvendile spoke of these women.
6.Evadne of the Dusk
NOW all the while that Horvendile talked it was to the accompaniment of that remote queer music: and Gerald was troubled. He came, at least, as near to being troubled as Gerald ever permitted himself to do. For Gerald did not really enjoy trouble of any kind, and said frankly that he found it uncongenial.
“But these,” said Gerald, by and by, “all these, my dear fellow, I had thought to have perished a long while ago.”
“You travel, Gerald, on the road of the greater myths. Such myths do not perish speedily. And, besides, nothing is true anywhere in the Marches of Antan. All is a seeming and an echo: and through this superficies men come to know the untruth which makes them free. It follows, in my logic, that to-day these women are the flute-players of Koleos Koleros. They serve to-day, forever unsatiated, that most insatiable divinity who is shaggy and evil-odored, and who can taste no pleasure until after bloodshed—”
“I have read, also,” Gerald broke in, with the slight smile of one who is not unpleased to display his learning, “that this Koleos Koleros is a somewhat contradictory goddess, producing the less the more constantly that she is cultivated and stirred up—”
“Oho, but a most potent goddess is this Koleos Koleros!” continued Horvendile. “She is wrinkled and flabby in appearance, yet the most stout of heroes falls at last before her. Infants perish nightly in her gloomy vaults, and plagues and diseases harbor there—”
But again Gerald had interrupted him, saying: “Yet I have read, moreover, that this modest and retired Koleos Koleros, alone of eternal beings, is ever ardent to quench the ardor of her servitors; and that—still to praise merit where merit appears,—in her untiring warfare with all men that rise up to oppose her, she displays the magnanimity to favor, and to embrace lovingly, the adversary that attacks her most often and most deeply.”
Horvendile thereupon held out his hand. He showed thus the tip of his forefinger touching the tip of his thumb so that they formed a circle. And Horvendile said:
“She varies even as the moon varies. Yet equally is this divine small monster the bestower of life and of all joy; she charms in defiance of reason: and whensoever Koleos Koleros appears, red and inflamed and hideous among her tousled tresses, a man is moved willy-nilly to place in her his chief delight.”
“Oho!” said Gerald, and, as became a student of magic, he also made the needful sign, “oho, but a most potent goddess is this Koleos Koleros!”
“Now, then,” continued Horvendile, “all they who in this place serve eternally this most whimsical divinity are a loving and a peculiarly happy people. Their amorousness, which here is not ever blighted by shrill reprobation, has need at no time to fear either the chastisement of human law nor the anathemas of any other religion anywhere in the quiet brakes and lowlands of the moist realm of Koleos Koleros. For, you conceive, these feminine myths who now are flute-players in and about the shrine of the wrinkled goddess, and who through so many centuries have been trained in all the arts of pleasure, came by and by into a certain confusion—”
“But what sort of confusion, Horvendile, do you mean? For I find your speaking another sort. And I am rather more interested in that princess—”
“I mean that their religion, which ranks pleasure above all else, permits no man to pass by unpleased.”
“Ah, now I understand you!”
“—I mean that, through the duties of their religious faith, their way of living has been given over to an assiduous and an empirical study of all the charms peculiar to a woman, the more particularly as these charms are employed—”
“Let us say, in the exercise of their religion,” Gerald suggested, “for I wholly understand you, sir.”
“It has followed that the taste of these ladies has become more delicate. It has followed that, by force of considering their own feminine loveliness, always unveiled and in lively employment, and by comparing it so intimately and so jealously with the loveliness of their female rivals in the service of the wrinkled goddess, they have become connoisseurs of the beauties peculiar to their sex. They have acquired a refinement of taste—”
“To be refined in one’s taste is eminently praiseworthy. Ah, my dear fellow, if you but knew what shocking examples of bad taste we kings are continually encountering among our sycophants! And that reminds me, you said something about a princess—”
“—They have learned to despise the hasty and boisterous and, between ourselves, the very often disappointing ways of men—”
“Ah, yes, no doubt!” said Gerald. “Men are a bad lot. But we were speaking of a princess—”
“—And they have lovingly contrived more finespun and more rococo diversions without the crude assistance of any man. Then also they delight in playing with many well-trained pets,—with goats and large dogs and asses and, they tell me, with rams and with bulls also. The surprising and mysterious joys which blaze up among these flute-players are, thus, very violent and delicious.”
Gerald said then that kindness to dumb animals was generally reckoned a most estimable trait in the United States of America. Whereas, in all quarters of that enlightened and hospitable republic, Gerald estimated, a princess—
“Yet,” Horvendile went on, “these learned women do not forget, in mere pleasure-seeking, their religious duty of permitting no man to pass by unpleased. Go to them, therefore, you will be welcome. Yonder at this instant a religious festival is preparing. Yonder sweet-voiced Leucosia, who hereabouts is called Evadne, waits for you—”
“But I have not the honor of knowing this Evadne—”
“She is easily known, by her violet hair and her sharp teeth. Moreover, Gerald, her wise sisters—Telês, and Parthenopê, and Radnê, and Ligeia, and Molpê,—all these will greet you with ardor. They will deny to you no secret of their pious rites; they will share with you esoteric joys religiously. They will incite you to perform among their choir, in the most secret shrine of Koleos Koleros—”
“But, really now, my dear fellow! I have no talent whatever for music. I would be quite out of place in any choir.”
“These flute-players are very ingenious. They will find for you some suitable instrument. And there will be strange harmonies and much soft laughter at this festival: each reveller will pour out libations copiously: cups will be refilled and emptied until dawn. There will be for you perfumes and rose garlands and the most exquisite of wines and the most savory of dishes and other delicacies. Due homage will be paid to Koleos Koleros.”
“Nevertheless,” said Gerald, “there is a phrase which haunts me—”
“That dusky grove of laurels yonder is the hall of this pious feast. Nothing will be lacking to you at this feast if you attend it with proper religious exaltation; and you will discover abilities there which will surprise you.”
“Ah, as to that now, Horvendile—! Yes, I have a man’s proper share of ability, I have quite enough ability for two persons. Nevertheless, there is a patriotic phrase which haunts me, and that phrase isE pluribus unum. For I have compunctions, Horvendile, which are translating that same phrase, a little freely, as ‘One among so many.’ ”
“It seems to me a harmless phrase even in your paraphrase. More harm may very well come of the fact that these learned ladies will endeavor to cajole you out of the divine steed, so that he may be added to their trained pets—”
“Oh! oh, indeed!” said Gerald. “But that is nonsense. The rider upon Kalki, and none other, has to fulfil that estimable old prophecy: and a deal of good such wheedlings will do any woman breathing, with a fine kingdom like that of mine set against a mere kiss or, it may be, a few tears!”
“That matter remains to be attested in due time. Meanwhile, I can but repeat that if you do not render a man’s homage to the ruler of this place there is no doubt whatever that the slighted goddess will avenge herself.”
“Sir,” Gerald now replied, with appropriate dignity, “I am, as were my fathers before me, a member of the Protestant Episcopal church. Is it thinkable that a communicant of this persuasion would worship a goddess of the benighted heathen? Do you but answer me that very simple question!”
“In Lichfield,” Horvendile retorted, “to adhere to the religion of your fathers is tactful, and in this place also, as in every other place, tactfulness ought to be every wise man’s religion. Otherwise, you will be running counter to that which is expected of the descendants of Manuel and of Jurgen; and you may by and by have cause to regret it.”
But Gerald thought of his church, and of its handsome matters of faith in the way of organ music and of saints’ days and of broad-mindedness and of delightful lawn-sleeved bishops and of majestic rituals. He thought of newly washed choir-boys and of his prayer-book’s wonderful mouth-filling phrases, of rogation days and of ember days and of Trinity Sunday. He thought about pulpits and hassocks and stained glass and sextons, and about the Thirty-nine Articles, and about those unpredictable, superb mathematics which early in every spring collaborated with the new moon to afford him an Easter: and these things Gerald could not abandon.
So he said: “No. No, Horvendile! I pay no homage to the wrinkled goddess.”
Then Horvendile warned him again, “You may find that decision costly.”
“That is as it may be!” said Gerald, with his chin well up. “For a good Episcopalian, sir, finds in the petulance of no heathen goddess anything to blench the cheek and make the heart go pitapat.”
Still, he looked rather fondly through the dusk. And now his shoulders also went up, shruggingly.
“Yet I concede,” said Gerald, “that, howsoever firm my churchmanship, and even with a princess waiting for me, I am tempted. For yonder flute-player who still delays to join her companions—who are now, no doubt, already about their merry games with one another and with their trained pets,—has charms. Yes, she has charms which give my thoughts, as it were, a locally religious turn, and make the notion of joining her a rather beautiful idea. I deplore, of course, her feathered legs. Even so, she displays, as you too may observe, in her so leisurely retreat, an opulence in that most engaging kind of beauty which once got for Aphrodite the epithet of Callipygê. I contemplate, with at least locally pious joy, the curving of those reins, the whiteness and the fineness of the skin, and the graciousness of those superb contours, designed without any stinting or exaggeration, into the perfection of those fair twin moons of delight—”
But in a moment Gerald said, “Still, there is something vaguely familiar, a something which chills me—”
And Gerald said also: “Or, rather, in their so gentle undulations as she walks unhurriedly away from us, in their so amiable convulsions,—in their heavings, their twitchings, their ripplings and their twinklings,—rather, do the bewitching and multitudinous movements of those silvery spheres resemble, to my half dazzled eyes, the unarithmeticable smiling of the sunlit sea, to which, as you will remember, Horvendile, old Æschylos has so finely referred. I feel that I could compose a not discreditable sonnet to that most beautiful of backsides. There is nothing more poetical than is the backside of a naked woman who is walking away from you. Its movements awaken the yearnings of all elegiac verse.... And I do not doubt, sir, that the front of this feathery-legged lady is fully as enchanting as the rear. Yes, I imagine that the façade too has its own peculiar attractions: and I admit, in a word, that I am tempted to confront her—”
Horvendile glanced toward the woman who alone remained within reach. “That is Evadne, who in the days of her sea-faring was called Leucosia. And it is plain enough that she waits for temptation to inflame and to uplift you into raptures somewhat more practical than all this talking.”
“She waits,” said Gerald, “in vain. At this distance she is a rather beautiful idea: nearer, she would be only another woman with her clothes off. Moreover, sir, I am a self-respecting member of the Protestant Episcopal church: and besides that, as I now perceive, it is of Evelyn Townsend’s figure that this woman’s half-seen figure reminds me. That resemblance makes for every sedentary virtue. I have learned only too well what comes of permitting any female person to trust you and to give you all. Then, too, I am called to duties of more honor and responsibility in my appointed kingdom. And for the rest, I prefer to disappoint these ladies by failing in ardor at such a distance as will not provoke my blushes. No, Horvendile: no, I am still haunted by that patriotic phraseE pluribus unum; and I shall not just now presume to render a man’s homage to Koleos Koleros, among quite so many flute-players. Moreover, you assert that a princess is waiting for me, to whom I prefer to present the member of another royal house in the full possession of all faculties. So I do not elect, just now, to share in these—if you will permit the criticism,—somewhat un-American methods of religious exercise. I ask, instead, that you conduct me to the impatient princess about whom you keep talking so obstinately that, I perceive, there is no least hope of my stopping you.”
It was in this way that Gerald began his journey by putting an affront upon Koleos Koleros.
PART THREE
THE BOOK OF DOONHAM
“Though a Woman’s Tongue be but ThreeInches Long, It can kill a Six-foot Man.”
“Though a Woman’s Tongue be but ThreeInches Long, It can kill a Six-foot Man.”
“Though a Woman’s Tongue be but ThreeInches Long, It can kill a Six-foot Man.”
“Though a Woman’s Tongue be but Three
Inches Long, It can kill a Six-foot Man.”
7.Evasherah of the First Water-Gap
“AGOOD-MORNING to you, ma’am,” Gerald had begun. His horse was tethered to a palm-tree, and Horvendile was gone, so that there now was only the Princess to be considered. “And in what way can I be of any service?”
Yet his voice shook, as he stood there beside the alabaster couch.... For Gerald was enraptured. The Princess Evasherah was, in the dawn of this superb May morning, so surpassingly lovely that she excelled all the other women his gaze had ever beheld. Her face was the proper shape, it was appropriately colored everywhere, and it was surmounted with an adequate quantity of hair. Nor was it possible to find any defect in her features. The colors of this beautiful young girl’s two eyes were nicely matched, and her nose stood just equidistant between them. Beneath this was her mouth, and she had also a pair of ears. In fine, the girl was young, she exhibited no deformity anywhere, and the enamored glance of the young man could perceive in her no fault. She reminded him, though, of someone that he had known....
Such were the ardent reflections which had passed through Gerald’s mind in the while that he said decorously, “A good-morning, ma’am: and in what way can I be of any service?”
But the Princess, in her impetuous royal fashion, had wasted no time upon the formal preliminaries which were more or less customary in Lichfield. And while Gerald’s patriotic republican rearing had been explicit enough as to the goings-on in monarchical families, he was whole-heartedly astounded by the animation and candor which here confronted him. There was no possible doubting that the Princess Evasherah was prepared to trust him and to give him all.
“But, oh, indeed, ma’am,” Gerald said, “you quite misunderstand me!”
For he had it now. This woman was uncommonly like Evelyn Townsend.
Gerald sighed. All ardor had departed from him. And with a few well-chosen words he placed their relationship upon a more decorous basis.
Now the Princess Evasherah, that most lovely Lady of the Water-Gap, was lying down even when Gerald first came to her, just after sunrise. She was lying upon a couch of alabaster, which had four legs made of elephants’ tusks. Upon this couch was a mattress covered with green satin and embroidered with red gold; upon the mattress was the Princess Evasherah in a brief shirt of apricot colored silk; and, over all, was a saffron canopy adorned with fig-leaves worked in pearls and emeralds.
This couch was furthermore shaded by three palm-trees, and it stood near to the bank of the river called Doonham. And by the sparkling ripples of that river’s deep waters—as the Princess Evasherah explained, some while after she and Gerald had reached a friendly and clean-minded understanding, with no un-American nonsense about it,—was hidden the residence of the Princess, where presently they would have breakfast.
“But,” Gerald said, a little dejectedly, “I have just now no appetite of any kind.”
“That will not matter,” said the Princess: and for no reason at all she laughed.
“—And to live under the water, ma’am, appears a virtually unprecedented form of royal eccentricity—”
“Ah, but I must tell you, lord of the age, and most obdurate averter from the desirer of union with him, that very long ago, because of a girlish infatuation for a young man whose name I have forgotten, I suffered a fiery downfalling from the Home of the Heavenly Ones, into the waters of this river. For I had offended my Father (whose name be exalted!) by stealing six drops of quite another kind of water, of the water from the Churning of the Ocean—”
“Eh?” Gerald said, “but do you mean the divine Amrita?”
“Garden of my joys, and summit of sagacity,” the Princess remarked, “you are learned. You have knowledge of heavenly matters, you have traversed the Nine Spaces. And I perceive that you who travel overburdened with unresponsiveness upon this road of the gods are yet another god in disguise.”
“Oh, no, ma’am, it is merely that, as a student of magic, one picks up such bits of information. I am the heir apparent to a throne, I cannot honestly declare myself any more than that: and I am upon my way to enter into my kingdom, but it is not, I am tolerably certain, a celestial kingdom.”
The Princess was not convinced. “No, my preceptor and my only idol, it is questionless you are a god, all perfect in eloquence and in grace, a temptation unto lovers, and showing as a visible paradise to the desirous. Here, in any event, out of my keen regard for your virtues, and in exchange for that great gawky horse of yours which reveals in every feature its entire unworthiness of contact with divine buttocks, here are the five remaining drops, in this little vial—”
Gerald inspected the small crystal bottle quite as sceptically as the Princess had regarded his disclaimer of being a god. “Well, now, ma’am, to me this looks like just ordinary water.”
She placed one drop of the water upon her finger-tip. She drew upon his forehead the triangle of the male principle, she drew the female triangle, so that one figure interpenetrated the other, and she invoked Monachiel, Ruach, Achides, and Degaliel. No student of magic could fail to recognize her employment of an interesting if uncanonical variant of the Third Pentacle of Venus, but Gerald made no comment.
After that the Princess Evasherah laughed merrily. “Now, then, companion of my heart, now that you have promised me that utterly contemptible horse of yours, I unmask you. For I perceive that you, O my master, more comely than the moon, are the predestined Redeemer of Antan—”
“That much, ma’am, I already know—”
“In short,” said the Princess, “you are Fair-haired Hoo, the Helper and Preserver, the Lord of the Third Truth, the Well-beloved of Heavenly Ones, thus masked in human flesh and in human forgetfulness and in peculiarly unhuman coldness. Yet very soon the power of the Amrita will have bestowed unfailing vigorousness upon your thinking, and presently the hounds of recollection will have run down the hare of your inestimable glory.”
“That is well said, ma’am. It is spoken with a fine sense of style. And I conjecture that, although the better stylists usually omit this ingredient, it has some meaning also.... Yes, you do allude to my having red hair, but the hare of my inestimable glory, which you likewise mention, is not capillary, but zoölogical,—in addition to being also metaphorical.... You state, in brief, in a figurative Oriental way, that by and by I shall recollect something which I have forgotten.... But just what is it, ma’am, that you so confidently expect me to recollect?”
“My lord, and acme of my contentment, you will recall, for one matter, the love that was between us in this world’s infancy, when you did not avert from me the inspiring glances of fond affection. For you, the bright-tressed, the resplendent, are unmistakably the Well-beloved of Heavenly Ones. I perfectly remember you, by your high nose, by your jutting chin, and by the eminence of yet another feature whose noble proportions also very deeply delighted me during my visit to your Dirghic paradise, and which I perceive to remain unabatedly heroic.”
Gerald, gently, but with decision, took hold of her hand. It seemed to him quite time.
Then the fair Lady of the Water-Gap, she who would have been so adorable if only she had not reminded Gerald more and more of Evelyn Townsend, began to talk about matters which Gerald as yet really did not remember.
She spoke of Gerald’s golden and high-builded home, in which, it seemed, this Princess had trusted him and had given him all: and she spoke also of the unresting love for mankind which had led Gerald to quit that exalted home, among the untroubled lotus-ponds of Vaikuntha, upon nine earlier occasions, and of his nine fine exploits in the way of redemption.
She spoke of how Gerald had visited men sometimes in his present heroic and elegant form, at other times in the appearance of a contemptible looking dwarf, and upon yet other occasions as a tortoise and as a boar pig and as a lion and as a large fish. His taste in apparel seemed as fickle as his charitableness was firm. For over and over again, the Princess said, it had been the power of Gerald, as Helper and Preserver, which had prevented several nations and a dynasty or two of gods from being utterly destroyed by demons whom Gerald himself had destroyed. It was Gerald, as he learned now, who had preserved this earth alike from depopulation and from ignorance, when during the first great flood the Lord of the Third Truth, in his incarnation as a great fish, had carried through the deluge seven married couples and four books containing the cream of earth’s literature: whereas, later, during a yet more severe inundation, Gerald had held up the earth itself between his tusks,—this being, of course, in the time of his incarnation as a boar pig,—and swimming thus, had preserved the endangered planet from being as much as mildewed.
And Evasherah spoke also of how when Gerald was a tortoise he had created such matters as the first elephant, the first cow, and the first wholly amiable woman. He had created at the same time, she added, the moon and the great jewel Kaustubha and a tree called Parijata, which yielded whatever was desired of it, and it was then also that Fair-haired Hoo, the Well-beloved Lord of the Third Truth, had invented drunkenness. There had been, in all, Evasherah concluded, nineteen supreme and priceless benefits invented by Gerald at this time, but she confessed her inability to recall offhand everyone of them—
“It is sufficient,—oh, quite sufficient!” Gerald assured her, with wholly friendly condescension, “for already, ma’am, it embarrasses me to have my modest philanthropies catalogued.”
Yet Gerald, howsoever lightly he spoke, was thrilled with not uncomplacent pride in his past. He was not actually surprised, of course, because logic had already pointed out that the ruler of Antan would very naturally be a divine personage with just such a magnificent past. To be a god appeared to him a rather beautiful idea. So he first asked what was the meaning of that skull over yonder in the grass: the Princess explained that it was not her skull, but had been left there by a visitor some two months earlier: and then Gerald, after having agreed with her that people certainly ought to be more careful about their personal belongings, went on with what was really in his mind.
“In any event, ma’am,” he hazarded, with the brief cough of diffidence, “it seems there have been tender passages between us before this morning—”
“I trusted you! I gave you all!” she said, reproachfully. “But you, disposer of supreme delights, and fair vase of my soul, you have forgotten even the way you used to take advantage of my confidence! For how can the modesty of a frail woman avail against the brute strength of a determined man!”
“No, Evelyn, not to-night—I beg your pardon, ma’am! My mind was astray. What I meant to say was that I really must request you to desist.” Then Gerald went on, tenderly: “To the contrary, my dear lady, our love stays unforgettable. I recall every instant of it, I bear in mind even that sonnet which I made for you on the evening of my first respectful declaration of undying affection.”
“Ah, yes, that lovely sonnet!” the Princess remarked, with the uneasiness manifested by every normal woman when a man begins to talk about poetry.
“—And to prove it, I will now recite that sonnet,” Gerald said.
And he did.
Yet his voice was so shaken with emotion that, when he had completed the octave, Gerald paused, because it was never within Gerald’s power to resist the beauty of a sublime thought when it was thus adequately expressed in flawless verse. So for an instant he stayed silent.
He caught up the lovely, always straying hands of the Princess Evasherah, of this impulsive and investigatory lady, who so troublingly resembled Evelyn Townsend, and Gerald pressed these hands to his trembling lips. This lovely girl, returned to him almost miraculously, it might seem, out of his well-nigh forgotten past, was not merely intent once more to trust him and to give him all. She trusted also, as Gerald felt with that keen penetration which is natural to divine beings, to delude and to wheedle him into some material loss. What the Princess desired to cajole him out of was, perhaps, not wholly clear. Nevertheless, he felt that, in some way or another way, Evasherah was attempting to deceive him. It might be that neither her explanation as to that skull nor even her so candid seeming adoration of his wisdom and his comeliness was entirely sincere. For women were like that: they did not always mean every word they said, not even when they were addressing a god. And so, the gods had over-painful duties laid upon them, Gerald decided.
After that he sighed: and he continued the reciting of his sonnet with an air of lofty resignation, with which was intermingled a certain gustatory approval of really good verse.
“Light of my universe, that is a very beautiful sonnet,” the Princess remarked, when he had finished, “and I am proud to have inspired it, and I am almost equally proud of the fact that you (through whose supreme elegance and amiable aspect my heart is once more rent with ecstasy) should remember it so well after these thousands of years.”
“Years mean very little, ma’am, to Fair-haired Hoo, the Helper and Preserver, the Lord of the Third Truth, the Well-beloved of Heavenly Ones: and centuries are, quite naturally, powerless to dim my memories of any matter in any way pertaining to you. Yet affairs of minor importance do rather tend to become a bit ambiguous as the æons slip by.... For example, what, in the intervals between my redemptory exploits—upon mere week days, as it were,—what do I happen to be the god of?”
“That,” said the Princess, “O my master, and pure fountain-head of every virtue, is a peculiarly silly question to be coming from you, who are, as everybody knows, the Lord of the Third Truth.”
“Ah, yes, to be sure,—of the Third Truth! My divine interests are invested in veracity. Well, that is highly gratifying. Yet, ma’am, there are a great many gods, and it is a rather beautiful idea to observe that, even where their professional spheres are the same, these gods differ remarkably. Thus, Vulcan is the lord of one fire, and Vesta of another, but Agni and Fudo and Satan rule over yet other fires, each wholly individual. Cupid and Lucina traffic in the same port, but not in the same way. Æolus controls twelve winds, and Tezcatlipoca four winds, and Crepitus only one wind—”
“Director of my life, and comely shepherd of my soul, I know. Few gods are strange to me or to my embraces. Many a Heavenly One has invited me to love, and I have yielded piously: my kisses have written the tale of my religious transports upon many divine cheeks.”
“—And I imagine that this water from the Churning of the Ocean was not intended, in the first place, to further my apotheosis. I mean, ma’am, I do not suppose you went to the trouble of stealing six drops of the Amrita in order just to recall to me that divinity which, in the press of other affairs, I had somehow permitted to slip my mind?”
“Disposer and sole archetype of the seven magnanimities, you speak the truth. For the five remaining drops, as I was trying to tell you when you kept interrupting me, O my lord, and beloved of my heart, and joy of both my eyes, were intended for the five human senses of the young man about whom I was then rather foolish; and upon whom I meant to bestow immortality and eternal youth. The first drop, inasmuch as the Amrita confers a never-ending vigorousness, I had of course already placed. So my Father (whose name be exalted!) smote us both with lightnings, in his impetuous way, and tumbled us both from out of the Home of the Heavenly Ones into this river. My young man was thus drowned before I had the chance to confer upon him any of the favors which I greatly fear your superior strength and your pertinacity are now about to force from me—”
Gerald replied: “I really do think you would get on far more quickly with your story if you were to keep both of these like this. The position, you see, is much more American: it lacks that earlier air of such personal freedom as a democracy does not think well of.”
“Light of the age, I hear and I obey. Yet all my tale has been revealed to your consideration—”
“Yes,” Gerald assented, “but your history interests me far more—”
“Far more than what, O cruel and resplendent one?”
“Why, far more than I can say, of course. So let us get on with it!”
“But my sad history is now as refined glass before your discerning glance. It suffices to add that the immortal part of my young man was happily removed from the waters of this river, and is now worshipped as a god in Lytreia. But for me, alas! the squirrel of calamity continued to revolve in the cage of divine wrath. For, so perfectly ridiculous is the way my Father (whose name be exalted!) behaves when the least thing upsets him, that I was condemned through the length of nine thousand years to assume certain official duties in the waters of this river, in the repugnant shape of a crocodile.”
But with that statement Gerald took prompt issue. “What may be your official duties as the guardian of these waters I can no more guess than I can guess how your visitors happen to be so careless about leaving their skulls behind. That really is a sort of slapdash and inconsiderate behavior which I cannot condone without considerable reflection. But I do know that the shape which I have beheld, and still see a great deal of, in nothing resembles the shape of a crocodile.”
“Epitome of every excellence, and exalted zenith of my existence, that is because the nine thousand years of my doom have now happily expired. The proof of this is that already my luckless substitute arrives. We shall now behold her encounter with the terminator of delights and the separator of companions. Thereafter, when we have had breakfast, O vital spirit of my heart, whom my unmitigated love incites me to devour out of pure affection, I shall ride hence upon the horse with which you have so gallantly presented me, to enter again into the Home of the Heavenly Ones.”
With that, the Princess pointed.