17.The Armory of AntanTHE way to Antan was made difficult by darkness and obstacles and illusions, and the three that guarded the cedar-shadowed way were called Glam of the Haunting Eyes and Ten-jo of the Long Nose and Maya of the Fair Breasts. But these warders did not greatly bother Horvendile, who passed them by the appointed methods and through means which Florian found remarkable if not actually indelicate. In no other way than through these cedar-groves and the local customs might you win to Freydis, whom love brought out of Audela to suffer as a mortal woman, and whom the druids and satirists had brought, through Sesphra’s wicked aid, to Antan. Thus had she come to reign in Antan, and to attest, with many dreadful instances, her ardor to do harm and work great mischief.Now this Antan was a queer place, all cloudiness and grayness, but full of gleamings which remindedyou of sparks that linger insecurely among ashes: and there were no real noises, not even when you talked. And when Horvendile had departed, you asked this gray and dimly golden woman if the sword Flamberge was to be come by anywhere in madame’s most charming and tasteful residence? She replied, a shadow speaking with the shadow of a voice, that it was very probably somewhere in her armory: and she led the way into a misty place wherein were the famous swords whereby came many deaths and a little fame.Very curious it was to see them coldly shining in the mistiness, and to handle them. Here was long Durandal, with which Sir Roland split a cleft in the Pyrenees; and beside it hung no less redoubtable Haulte-Claire, with which Sir Oliver had held his own against Durandal and Durandal’s fierce master, in that great battling which differed from other military encounters by resulting in something memorable and permanent, in the form of a proverb. Here was Lancelot’s sword Aroundight, here was Ogier’s Courtain, and Siegfried’s Balmung. One saw in this dim place the Cid’s Colada, Sir Bevis’s Morglay, the Crocea Mors of Cæsar, and the Joyeuse of Charlemagne. Nor need one look in vain for Curtana and Quernbiter, those once notable guardians of England and Norway, nor for Mistelstein, nor Tizona, nor Greysteel, nor Angurvadel,nor any other charmed sword of antiquity. All were here: and beside Joyeuse was hung Flamberge; for Galas made both of them.Well, you estimated, Flamberge was by no means the handsomest of the lot: but it would serve your turn, you did not desire to seem grasping. And since madame appeared somewhat oversupplied with cutlery—Indeed that was the truth, as Freydis could not deny, in the thin tones which people’s voices had in Antan, since not only these patrician murderers harbored here. Here too were death’s plebeian tools in every form. Here were Italian stilettoes heaped with Malay krisses, the hooked Turkish scimitar with the Venetian schiavona; curved Arab yataghans, sabres that Yoshimitzu had tempered, the Albanian cutlass, and the notched blades of Zanzibar; the two-handed claymores of Scotland, the espada of the Spanish matador, the scalping-knives of the Red Indians and the ponderous glaives of executioners: swords from all cities and all kingdoms of the world, from Ferrara and Toledo and Damascus, from Dacia and Peru and Muscovy and Babylon.To which you replied that, while you had never greatly cared for the cataloguing method in literature, you allowed its merits in conversation. These crisp little résumés indicated a really firm grasp ofthe subject. For the rest, it was most interesting to note what ingenuity people had displayed in contriving how to kill one another.Freydis assented as to men’s whole-heartedness in malignity, but was disposed to view without optimism the support it got from human ingenuity. She considered these swords in any event to be outmoded lumber, as concerned the needs of anybody who really desired to do harm and work any actually great mischief.Still, you, whose speaking seemed even to you a whisper in the grayness, declined to be grasping: and Flamberge would serve your turn. Therefore it was vexatious that, instead of gracefully presenting you with the sword, the Queen of Antan went through a gray vague corridor, wherein upon a table lay a handful of rusty iron nails and a spear, and then into another twilit place.Here, as you hastily observed, were madame’s pistols, cannons, culverins, grenades, musketoons, harquebusses, bombs, petronels, siege-guns, falconets, carbines, and jingals, and swivels. Yes, it was most interesting.Freydis looked at you somewhat queerly: and it was, again, as outmoded lumber that she appraised this arsenal. Then Freydis almost proudly showed the weapons she had in store for men’s needs when men should go to war to-morrow, and such assistants would further every patriot’s desire to do harm and work great mischief. And you felt rather uncomfortable to see the sleek efficiency of these gleaming things in this ambiguous place.Yes, they were very interesting, and beside them, Flamberge certainly seemed inadequate. Still, you admitted, you had never been grasping: and Flamberge would serve your turn.It was really maddening how the woman kept turning to irrelevant matters. These engines of destruction, although ingenious and devastating toys within their limits, should not be regarded overseriously. A million or so of persons, or at most a few nations, could be removed with these things, but that was all. So speaking, she passed into a room wherein were books,—but not many books,—and four figures modelled in clay, as she told you, by old Dom Manuel very long ago. It was more important, her thin talking went on, that as occasion served she was sending into the world these figures, to follow their six predecessors, to all whom she had given a life empoisoned with dreams, with dreams that were immortal and contagious; and so would infect others and yet others eternally, and would make living as unhappy and detestable a business as dying. What were these dreams? she was asked: and she in turn asked, Why should I tell you? Your dream is different, nor may you escapeit. This must suffice: that these dreams are the most subtle and destructive of poisons, and do harm and work great mischief, in that they enable men to see that life and all which life can afford is inadequate to men’s desires.This seemed rather morbid talk. To evade it tactfully, the four changelings as yet unborn were examined, with civil comments: and indeed there was about one little hook-nosed figure a something which quite took the fancy. He reminds me of a parrot, was your smilingly tendered verdict: and Freydis, with her habitual tired shrugging, replied that others, later, would detect, without much reticence, a resemblance to that piratical and repetitious bird.Now then, all this was very interesting, most interesting, and you really regretted having to return to the topic of the sword Flamberge—Freydis had not made up her mind: she might or might not give the sword, and her deciding must pivot upon what harm you meant to do with it. Her visitor from the more cheery world of daylight was thus forced to make a clean breast of why he needed Flamberge, the only sword that may spill the blood of the Léshy, so that he might give, by the old ritual, his unborn child, and rid himself of his wife.Whereon Queen Freydis expressed frank indignation, because the child would by this plan be rescued from all, and the woman from much, sorrow. Could even a small madman in bottle-green and silver suppose that the Queen of Antan, after centuries of thriving malevolence, was thus to be beguiled into flagrant philanthropy?But it was not, in the long run, philanthropy, you insisted. It was depressing to have to argue about anything in this gray, vague, gleaming, endless place, wherein you seemed only to whisper: and you were, privately, a little taken aback by the unaccustomed need to prove an action, not amply precedented and for the general good, but the precise contrary. Aloud,—though not actually aloud, but in the dim speech one uses in Antan,—you contended that when a man thus rid himself of his wife he did harm and worked great mischief, because the spectacle made all beholders unhappy. Women of course had obvious reasons for uneasiness lest the example be followed generally: and men were roused to veritable frenzies of pious reprovings when they saw the thing they had so often thought of doing accomplished by somebody else.Did married men, then, at heart always desire to murder their wives? was what Freydis wondered. No, you did not say that: not always; some wives let weeks go by without provoking that desire. And to appearances, most men became in the end more or less reconciled to having their wives about. Still,let us not go wholly by appearances. Let us be logical! Whom does any man most dislike?Freydis had settled down, with faint golden shimmerings, upon a couch that was covered with gray cushions, and she meditated. What person does any man most dislike? Why, Freydis estimated, the person who most frequently annoys him, the person with whom he finds himself embroiled in the most bitter quarrels, the person whose imperfections are to him most glaringly apparent, and, in fine, the person who most often and most poignantly makes him uncomfortable.Just so, you assented: and in the life of any possible married man, who was that person? The question was rhetorical. You did not have to answer it, any more than did most husbands. None the less, you esteemed it a question which no married man had failed to consider, if gingerly and as if from afar, with the mere tail of his mental eye, in unacknowledged reveries. It was perhaps the memory of these cloistered considerations which made married men acutely uncomfortable when any other man disposed of his wife without all this half-hearted paltering with the just half-pleasant notion that some day she would go so far as to make justifiable—A gesture showed what, as plainly as one could show anything in this vague endlessness of grays and gleamings. No, madame might dependupon it, to assist any gentleman in permanently disposing of his wife was not, in the long run, philanthropy. It really did make the majority of other husbands uncomfortable, whether through envy or though a conscience-stricken recalling of unacknowledged reveries, you did not pretend to say.All that might be true enough, Freydis admitted, from her dim nook among the gray cushions, without alluring her into the charitable act of preventing a child’s enduring the sorrows and fatigues of living.Ah, but here again, madame must not reason so carelessly, nor be misled by specious first appearances. Let us, instead, be logical! The child, knowing nothing, would not know what it was escaping: and it would not be grateful, it would derive no æsthetic pleasure from the impressive ceremony of giving by the old ritual, it would even resent the moment’s physical pain. But the beholders of the deed, and all that heard of it, would be acutely uncomfortable, since the father that secured for his child immunity from trouble and annoyance, did harm and worked great mischief by setting an example which aroused people to those frenzies evocable by no other prodigy than a display of common-sense.For people would turn from this proof of paternal affection, to the world from which the child wasbeing removed: and people would be unhappy, because, with all their natural human propensity for fault-finding tugging them toward denunciation, nobody would be able to deny the common-sense of rescuing a child from discomforts and calamities. What professional perjurer anywhere, madame, whether in prison or politics or the pulpit, could muster the effrontery to declare life other than a long series of discomforts diversified only by disasters? What dignity was possible in an arena we entered in the manner of urine and left in the shape of ordure? What father endowed with any real religious faith could, after the most cursory glancing over of the sufferings he had got gratis in this life and had laboriously earned in the next,—could then appraise without conscience-stricken remorse the dilemma in which he had placed his offspring?Well, to see thus revealed the one sure way of rescuing the child from this disastrous position, and to know himself too much a poltroon to follow the example of which his judgment and all his better instincts approved, was a situation that, madame, must make every considerate parent actually and deeply miserable, through self-contempt. In one manner alone might every man be made really miserable,—by preventing him from admiring himself any longer.For people would look, too, toward the nearest police officer and toward the cowardice in their own hearts: and these commingled considerations would prevent many fathers from doing their plain duty. They would send many and it might be the hapless majority of fathers to bed that night with clean hands, with the pallid hands of self-convicted dastards: and self-contempt would make these fathers always unhappy. No, here again, madame might depend upon it that to assist a gentleman in this giving, by the old ritual, of his offspring was not, in the long run, and whatever the deed might seem to a first glance, philanthropy. It did some good: one could not deny that: but, after all, the child was absolutely the only person who profited, and through the benefits conferred upon the child was furthered the greatest ill and discomfort for the greatest number, who, here as in every other case, replied to any display of common-sense with frenzies that did harm and everywhither splutteringly worked mischief.And you spoke with such earnestness, and so much logic, that in the end the vaguely golden Queen of Antan smiled through the gray mist, and said that you reminded her of her own children. You were enamored of words, you delighted in any nonsense which was sonorous. You were like all her children, she told you, the children whom,in spite of herself, she pitied. Here Freydis sighed.Pity has kindred, you stated. Freydis leaned back among the gray cushions of her couch, so as to listen in perfect ease, and bade you explain that saying.And as you sat down beside her, Puysange arose to the occasion. Here was familiar ground at last, the ground on which Puysange thrust forward with most firmness. And you reflected that it would be inappropriate to lament, just now, that not even in Antan did a rigidity of logic seem to get for anyone the victory which you foresaw to be secured by your other gifts....When Florian left Antan, the needed sword swung at his thigh.Chicken-man and mountains
17.The Armory of Antan
17.The Armory of Antan
T
HE way to Antan was made difficult by darkness and obstacles and illusions, and the three that guarded the cedar-shadowed way were called Glam of the Haunting Eyes and Ten-jo of the Long Nose and Maya of the Fair Breasts. But these warders did not greatly bother Horvendile, who passed them by the appointed methods and through means which Florian found remarkable if not actually indelicate. In no other way than through these cedar-groves and the local customs might you win to Freydis, whom love brought out of Audela to suffer as a mortal woman, and whom the druids and satirists had brought, through Sesphra’s wicked aid, to Antan. Thus had she come to reign in Antan, and to attest, with many dreadful instances, her ardor to do harm and work great mischief.
Now this Antan was a queer place, all cloudiness and grayness, but full of gleamings which remindedyou of sparks that linger insecurely among ashes: and there were no real noises, not even when you talked. And when Horvendile had departed, you asked this gray and dimly golden woman if the sword Flamberge was to be come by anywhere in madame’s most charming and tasteful residence? She replied, a shadow speaking with the shadow of a voice, that it was very probably somewhere in her armory: and she led the way into a misty place wherein were the famous swords whereby came many deaths and a little fame.
Very curious it was to see them coldly shining in the mistiness, and to handle them. Here was long Durandal, with which Sir Roland split a cleft in the Pyrenees; and beside it hung no less redoubtable Haulte-Claire, with which Sir Oliver had held his own against Durandal and Durandal’s fierce master, in that great battling which differed from other military encounters by resulting in something memorable and permanent, in the form of a proverb. Here was Lancelot’s sword Aroundight, here was Ogier’s Courtain, and Siegfried’s Balmung. One saw in this dim place the Cid’s Colada, Sir Bevis’s Morglay, the Crocea Mors of Cæsar, and the Joyeuse of Charlemagne. Nor need one look in vain for Curtana and Quernbiter, those once notable guardians of England and Norway, nor for Mistelstein, nor Tizona, nor Greysteel, nor Angurvadel,nor any other charmed sword of antiquity. All were here: and beside Joyeuse was hung Flamberge; for Galas made both of them.
Well, you estimated, Flamberge was by no means the handsomest of the lot: but it would serve your turn, you did not desire to seem grasping. And since madame appeared somewhat oversupplied with cutlery—
Indeed that was the truth, as Freydis could not deny, in the thin tones which people’s voices had in Antan, since not only these patrician murderers harbored here. Here too were death’s plebeian tools in every form. Here were Italian stilettoes heaped with Malay krisses, the hooked Turkish scimitar with the Venetian schiavona; curved Arab yataghans, sabres that Yoshimitzu had tempered, the Albanian cutlass, and the notched blades of Zanzibar; the two-handed claymores of Scotland, the espada of the Spanish matador, the scalping-knives of the Red Indians and the ponderous glaives of executioners: swords from all cities and all kingdoms of the world, from Ferrara and Toledo and Damascus, from Dacia and Peru and Muscovy and Babylon.
To which you replied that, while you had never greatly cared for the cataloguing method in literature, you allowed its merits in conversation. These crisp little résumés indicated a really firm grasp ofthe subject. For the rest, it was most interesting to note what ingenuity people had displayed in contriving how to kill one another.
Freydis assented as to men’s whole-heartedness in malignity, but was disposed to view without optimism the support it got from human ingenuity. She considered these swords in any event to be outmoded lumber, as concerned the needs of anybody who really desired to do harm and work any actually great mischief.
Still, you, whose speaking seemed even to you a whisper in the grayness, declined to be grasping: and Flamberge would serve your turn. Therefore it was vexatious that, instead of gracefully presenting you with the sword, the Queen of Antan went through a gray vague corridor, wherein upon a table lay a handful of rusty iron nails and a spear, and then into another twilit place.
Here, as you hastily observed, were madame’s pistols, cannons, culverins, grenades, musketoons, harquebusses, bombs, petronels, siege-guns, falconets, carbines, and jingals, and swivels. Yes, it was most interesting.
Freydis looked at you somewhat queerly: and it was, again, as outmoded lumber that she appraised this arsenal. Then Freydis almost proudly showed the weapons she had in store for men’s needs when men should go to war to-morrow, and such assistants would further every patriot’s desire to do harm and work great mischief. And you felt rather uncomfortable to see the sleek efficiency of these gleaming things in this ambiguous place.
Yes, they were very interesting, and beside them, Flamberge certainly seemed inadequate. Still, you admitted, you had never been grasping: and Flamberge would serve your turn.
It was really maddening how the woman kept turning to irrelevant matters. These engines of destruction, although ingenious and devastating toys within their limits, should not be regarded overseriously. A million or so of persons, or at most a few nations, could be removed with these things, but that was all. So speaking, she passed into a room wherein were books,—but not many books,—and four figures modelled in clay, as she told you, by old Dom Manuel very long ago. It was more important, her thin talking went on, that as occasion served she was sending into the world these figures, to follow their six predecessors, to all whom she had given a life empoisoned with dreams, with dreams that were immortal and contagious; and so would infect others and yet others eternally, and would make living as unhappy and detestable a business as dying. What were these dreams? she was asked: and she in turn asked, Why should I tell you? Your dream is different, nor may you escapeit. This must suffice: that these dreams are the most subtle and destructive of poisons, and do harm and work great mischief, in that they enable men to see that life and all which life can afford is inadequate to men’s desires.
This seemed rather morbid talk. To evade it tactfully, the four changelings as yet unborn were examined, with civil comments: and indeed there was about one little hook-nosed figure a something which quite took the fancy. He reminds me of a parrot, was your smilingly tendered verdict: and Freydis, with her habitual tired shrugging, replied that others, later, would detect, without much reticence, a resemblance to that piratical and repetitious bird.
Now then, all this was very interesting, most interesting, and you really regretted having to return to the topic of the sword Flamberge—Freydis had not made up her mind: she might or might not give the sword, and her deciding must pivot upon what harm you meant to do with it. Her visitor from the more cheery world of daylight was thus forced to make a clean breast of why he needed Flamberge, the only sword that may spill the blood of the Léshy, so that he might give, by the old ritual, his unborn child, and rid himself of his wife.
Whereon Queen Freydis expressed frank indignation, because the child would by this plan be rescued from all, and the woman from much, sorrow. Could even a small madman in bottle-green and silver suppose that the Queen of Antan, after centuries of thriving malevolence, was thus to be beguiled into flagrant philanthropy?
But it was not, in the long run, philanthropy, you insisted. It was depressing to have to argue about anything in this gray, vague, gleaming, endless place, wherein you seemed only to whisper: and you were, privately, a little taken aback by the unaccustomed need to prove an action, not amply precedented and for the general good, but the precise contrary. Aloud,—though not actually aloud, but in the dim speech one uses in Antan,—you contended that when a man thus rid himself of his wife he did harm and worked great mischief, because the spectacle made all beholders unhappy. Women of course had obvious reasons for uneasiness lest the example be followed generally: and men were roused to veritable frenzies of pious reprovings when they saw the thing they had so often thought of doing accomplished by somebody else.
Did married men, then, at heart always desire to murder their wives? was what Freydis wondered. No, you did not say that: not always; some wives let weeks go by without provoking that desire. And to appearances, most men became in the end more or less reconciled to having their wives about. Still,let us not go wholly by appearances. Let us be logical! Whom does any man most dislike?
Freydis had settled down, with faint golden shimmerings, upon a couch that was covered with gray cushions, and she meditated. What person does any man most dislike? Why, Freydis estimated, the person who most frequently annoys him, the person with whom he finds himself embroiled in the most bitter quarrels, the person whose imperfections are to him most glaringly apparent, and, in fine, the person who most often and most poignantly makes him uncomfortable.
Just so, you assented: and in the life of any possible married man, who was that person? The question was rhetorical. You did not have to answer it, any more than did most husbands. None the less, you esteemed it a question which no married man had failed to consider, if gingerly and as if from afar, with the mere tail of his mental eye, in unacknowledged reveries. It was perhaps the memory of these cloistered considerations which made married men acutely uncomfortable when any other man disposed of his wife without all this half-hearted paltering with the just half-pleasant notion that some day she would go so far as to make justifiable—A gesture showed what, as plainly as one could show anything in this vague endlessness of grays and gleamings. No, madame might dependupon it, to assist any gentleman in permanently disposing of his wife was not, in the long run, philanthropy. It really did make the majority of other husbands uncomfortable, whether through envy or though a conscience-stricken recalling of unacknowledged reveries, you did not pretend to say.
All that might be true enough, Freydis admitted, from her dim nook among the gray cushions, without alluring her into the charitable act of preventing a child’s enduring the sorrows and fatigues of living.
Ah, but here again, madame must not reason so carelessly, nor be misled by specious first appearances. Let us, instead, be logical! The child, knowing nothing, would not know what it was escaping: and it would not be grateful, it would derive no æsthetic pleasure from the impressive ceremony of giving by the old ritual, it would even resent the moment’s physical pain. But the beholders of the deed, and all that heard of it, would be acutely uncomfortable, since the father that secured for his child immunity from trouble and annoyance, did harm and worked great mischief by setting an example which aroused people to those frenzies evocable by no other prodigy than a display of common-sense.
For people would turn from this proof of paternal affection, to the world from which the child wasbeing removed: and people would be unhappy, because, with all their natural human propensity for fault-finding tugging them toward denunciation, nobody would be able to deny the common-sense of rescuing a child from discomforts and calamities. What professional perjurer anywhere, madame, whether in prison or politics or the pulpit, could muster the effrontery to declare life other than a long series of discomforts diversified only by disasters? What dignity was possible in an arena we entered in the manner of urine and left in the shape of ordure? What father endowed with any real religious faith could, after the most cursory glancing over of the sufferings he had got gratis in this life and had laboriously earned in the next,—could then appraise without conscience-stricken remorse the dilemma in which he had placed his offspring?
Well, to see thus revealed the one sure way of rescuing the child from this disastrous position, and to know himself too much a poltroon to follow the example of which his judgment and all his better instincts approved, was a situation that, madame, must make every considerate parent actually and deeply miserable, through self-contempt. In one manner alone might every man be made really miserable,—by preventing him from admiring himself any longer.
For people would look, too, toward the nearest police officer and toward the cowardice in their own hearts: and these commingled considerations would prevent many fathers from doing their plain duty. They would send many and it might be the hapless majority of fathers to bed that night with clean hands, with the pallid hands of self-convicted dastards: and self-contempt would make these fathers always unhappy. No, here again, madame might depend upon it that to assist a gentleman in this giving, by the old ritual, of his offspring was not, in the long run, and whatever the deed might seem to a first glance, philanthropy. It did some good: one could not deny that: but, after all, the child was absolutely the only person who profited, and through the benefits conferred upon the child was furthered the greatest ill and discomfort for the greatest number, who, here as in every other case, replied to any display of common-sense with frenzies that did harm and everywhither splutteringly worked mischief.
And you spoke with such earnestness, and so much logic, that in the end the vaguely golden Queen of Antan smiled through the gray mist, and said that you reminded her of her own children. You were enamored of words, you delighted in any nonsense which was sonorous. You were like all her children, she told you, the children whom,in spite of herself, she pitied. Here Freydis sighed.
Pity has kindred, you stated. Freydis leaned back among the gray cushions of her couch, so as to listen in perfect ease, and bade you explain that saying.
And as you sat down beside her, Puysange arose to the occasion. Here was familiar ground at last, the ground on which Puysange thrust forward with most firmness. And you reflected that it would be inappropriate to lament, just now, that not even in Antan did a rigidity of logic seem to get for anyone the victory which you foresaw to be secured by your other gifts....
When Florian left Antan, the needed sword swung at his thigh.
Chicken-man and mountains