Something About Eve

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 Mahits 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 carefree 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, 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 AEsred 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 saucebox, 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

24. On Mispec Moor

“He goes farthest that knows not where he is going.”

GERALD, after they had dined, persuaded Maya of the Fair Breasts to permit him to rest over for supper also, now that his journeying was virtually complete. For beyond the home of the wise woman upon Mispec Moor the way lay unimpeded to the ambiguous lowlands of Antan, where Queen Freydis and her consort the Master Philologist ruled in, it was said, a very old, red-pillared palace which had once belonged to still another queen, named Suskind.

But, as to this Antan, Gerald could not, even now, learn anything quite definite, because of all the gods and myths who had passed down into Antan none ever returned. It thus stayed, as yet, regrettably dubious whether these glorious beings now all lived together in unimaginable splendor, as Gerald had gathered at Caer Omn; or whether, as ran the gloomier report which prevailed in Lytreia, they had each been destroyed by the Master Philologist.

In any case, from Mispec Moor you clearly saw Antan. Thus, there remained for Gerald hardly more than an hour’s ride, and perhaps a morning’s spirited work, in order to complete his predestined conquest of his appointed kingdom. Gerald therefore rested until to-morrow, with this not over-hospitable hostess,—who viewed him with such uncalled-for suspicion that (as he found toward midnight) the woman had actually bolted the door to her room, out of a foolish notion that he might be trying to enter this immovable door, from which he was, instead, with entire dignity tiptoeing away. He rested so as to be in his very best fettle when he approached, to-morrow, the climax of his superb achievements.

Meanwhile he questioned Maya of the Fair Breasts as to his future kingdom; and she told him it was a poorly thought-of place. Nobody ever went there, Maya said, except such trash as poets and threadbare myths and over-inquisitive persons and such celestial riffraff as had lost their station in human esteem and their priests and their temples, said Maya, nodding her head rather gravely. That curious crown of hers sparkled cheerily with every movement of her head, for she sat at the window in a patch of sunlight, about her darning. And as to what became of such worthless people, Maya continued, after they reached Antan, that, certainly, was a question of no importance—

“Yes, but what is the general opinion hereabouts, among the sorcerers and enchanters of Turoine?”

“Our opinion is that the matter is not worth bothering about.”

“Yes, but what do you think—?”

Maya looked up from her darning, in mild but candid surprise. “You really do ask the silliest questions! For one, I do not think at all about those outcast tramps and vagabonds except to see that they steal nothing as they go by.”

So then Gerald questioned her about Freydis.

“I have heard of the woman,” said Maya, rather absent-mindedly, as she went on with the darning upon which stayed fixed her actual attention,—“of course: but nothing to her credit. They report, for example, that she has a mirror—”

“I, too, have heard continually of that mirror, but never of exactly what she does with it.”

“For that matter, Gerald, I also have a mirror, if that is all which is needed. Everybody has a mirror. In fact, I have a number of mirrors.”

“I know. I have noticed them everywhere about the cottage. But all your mirrors, dear lady, are rose-colored.”

—To which Maya replied irrelevantly, and without looking up from her darning: “But did you not know from the first that I was a wise woman? In any case, it is said that Queen Freydis holds her mirror up to nature, and that she does not scruple to hold this mirror up to her disreputable visitors, too. For they really are, you know. It is all very well being a god while it lasts. Only, it never does. And then where are you? Why, exactly! That is why the overlords of Turoine have always seemed to me more business-like. And there is no flaw in it, people say,”—now, though, as Gerald deduced, Maya was talking about the Mirror of the Hidden Children,—“no distortion of any kind, no flattering in it, and no kindly exaggeration. It is not in anything like my more sensible rose-colored mirrors. And nobody could of course be expected to approve of such a mirror.”

“Nevertheless, if there indeed be any such mirror, I mean to face it, when to-morrow I enter into my kingdom, and liberate the great words of the Master Philologist, and restore the Dirghic mythology, for in that mythology, I must tell you, I am a god with four aspects.”

“What nonsense you do talk!” said Maya, comfortably, as she slipped the darning-egg into another stocking.

Then Gerald confided in her. Then Gerald told Maya of how he, howsoever unmeritorious, was heir to all the unimaginable wonders which harbored yonder. He told her that he and none other was Fair-haired Hoo, the Helper and Preserver, the Lord of the Third Truth, the Well-beloved of Heavenly Ones. He told her of everything that had happened in his triumphant expedition, thus far. He told her of somewhat more than had happened, for under Gerald’s expansive handling of the rather beautiful idea of his own invincibility the tale became an epic. And Gerald told her, too, of how he intended to rule in the goal of all the gods. He briefly indicated his summer and winter palaces, the probable personnel of his harem, the deities who would serve in his immediate household, and, in a general way, the worlds which he would create: and he promised to remember Maya, liberally, after he had come into his kingdom.

And Maya all this while went on darning placidly. She admitted that men—

“But, as I was telling you, I am a god,—a god with no less than four aspects.”

That did not really matter, Maya considered. The gods, as near as she had been able to judge those scatter-brained ne’er-do-wells that went tramping by, were just the same, and, if anything, more so. It was simply incredible, she continued, how little wear there was in a stocking nowadays. She then admitted that male persons did have these notions, even about such unlikely places as Antan. And Gerald would, in any event, be finding out for himself all about Antan tomorrow, because if he for one solitary instant thought she was going to have him hanging about her cottage forever—!

“Come now, my dear, but hospitality is a very famous virtue: and, besides, you owe it to me that you are now the handsomest woman in these parts.”

“But that, Gerald,—even if it were the truth, of course, for you need not think you are fooling me, you scamp,—that is just why people will be imagining things if you continue to stay here.”

“Then let us take good care not to be suspected unjustly, because that would be unfair to everybody—”

“Oh, get along with you! and do you pick up every one of those stockings, too, now you have scattered them all over the floor. And really, you red-headed pest, I am not joking, either. That horse of yours—”

“Ah, yes, that horse of mine! I admit that to the discerning eyes of a woman it is not the handsomest beast in the world. And I suppose you are about to point out that this horse is unworthy of me, and that I ought to dispose of it, in one way or another—”

“But whatever nonsense are you talking, now! It is an extremely handsome horse. There is some sort of prophecy about it, too, is there not? So you would be even more foolish than you seem to be, to part with that horse.”

“Well, to be sure, there may be something in what you say.”

“—And what I was attempting to tell you is that, if you will simply permit me to talk for one minute without interrupting—”

“Hereafter I remain as quiet, my dear, as a belch in polite society; and you may go on.”

“Why, then, I was trying to say that your horse can get you to Antan within an hour. You can find out for yourself all about the place. And I daresay this Queen Freydis, from all I have heard of her, will not have the least objection to your rude way of grabbing and pawing at people and interfering with my housework and generally misconducting yourself. It is the sort of thing she is quite used to. But I do not like it: I feel you would not do it if you really respected me. And I am sorry if anything I have said or done has given you any such wrong notions about me. And if you stuck yourself with that needle it was simply your own fault. And that is all there is to it.”

Gerald replied: “You are regrettably lacking, my dear, in the confidence and the generosity peculiar to your sex. It is impossible for the mind to conceive of anything more dreadful than your conduct. Nevertheless, I must stay until Wednesday, for otherwise I cannot possibly judge of your magics.”

“Oh, very well, then!” Maya answered, with unconcealed regretfulness over the fact that she would have to put up with Gerald for yet another day.

25. The God Conforms

FOR Gerald, upon reflection, had decided it would be really amusing to remain upon Mispec Moor until Wednesday, since only upon Wednesday could Maya show the perfection of her thaumaturgy. Thursday, though, as the wise woman forewarned him candidly, was her cleaning day; and she simply could not be bothering over company with the house all topsy-turvy.

“And I also warn you well in advance, my darling,” said Gerald, “that the performance must be gratis, since I have no material possessions, save possibly my riding-horse, to barter for the privilege of witnessing your parlor magic.”

“Why, but what in the world would I be needing with another horse, who already have dozens of them eating their heads off all over the moor? and when in the world, you pest, I became ‘your darling’ I would really like to know!”

“Now, but have you, indeed? The very first moment I saw you, my dear.”

“I do wish you would sometimes, just for a change, talk half rationally. And of course it has always been my custom to further the true happiness of the men with whom I was particularly intimate by turning them into domestic animals of one kind or another. Quite a number of them came out horses—”

“I do not altogether approve of such a custom. Still, women have incalculable fancies: and all men find out sooner or later that it is less trouble to indulge these fancies than to thwart them. At any rate, a god has no concern with these minor sorceries.”

“Of course not!” Maya agreed. “A scatterbrained, talk-you-to-death, carrot-topped, and generally good-for-nothing god is not concerned with anything except with getting on to that minx Freydis.”

Gerald waved aside the insinuation. He continued to talk about more immediate matters, and he said:

“Nevertheless, your story interests me. It would be droll to have a horse like that. So suppose, now, my dear, suppose that I trade my divine steed for one of those unusual horses of yours?”

“No, Gerald, really I would rather not. For the men that I put my magic upon used once to be fine knights or barons or even kings,—and, for that matter, there were a couple of emperors, though only in a small way,—and I confess to a certain sentiment about them still.”

Then in a clay chafing-dish Maya of the Fair Breasts burned fig-leaves with benzoin and macis and storax. And she showed Gerald how one might master mercurial things. She displayed to him the small magics which are Wednesday’s. She revealed to him—cursorily, since they had only a morning at their disposal,—the secrets of remunerative mediocrity in the learned professions, in truth-telling, in upholstering, in the removal of mountains into the sea, in the erection of bridges over any unpassable place, in the preparation of rose-colored mirrors, in criticism, in oratory, in jurisprudence, and in the safe interpretation of Holy Writ. As himself a former student of magic, Gerald found these formulae of interest: but, as a god, he, regarded Maya with profound respect, as one who, with no native divine advantages, had yet mastered this quite reputable stock of knowledge and ability.

Yet the workings of these magics were not apparent until Gerald had put on the spectacles which Maya gave him. He found these glasses so soothing to the eyes that he retained them, just for the remainder of his visit to her cottage.

For, after all, Gerald decided to stay over the week-end, since Maya was so unflatteringly eager to be rid of him. It was an eagerness troubling to his self-respect. Here was he, a god whom women had always run after, and had pestered beyond reasonable endurance, here was he, of all persons, being treated with unconcealed indifference by a mere hedge-sorceress, by a creature who had not even any remarkable good looks or wit to justify her impudence. This Maya of the Fair Breasts needed taking down quite a large number of pegs. So Gerald fell to wooing her with an ardor that somewhat surprised him. For it was eminently necessary, it was, indeed, a rather beautiful idea, to win the woman, and then to jilt her, so as to teach her, once for all, not ever again to make free and easy with the will of a god.

Meanwhile, Maya had suggested that he conceal the fact he was a god; and that she should introduce him to the local gentry of Turoine as a visiting sorcerer.

“For I must tell you, Gerald,” Maya said, “all the best-thought-of people hereabouts are in one or another branch of sorcery. We have, thus, never had any relations with Heaven. All our connections have been with another quarter. And it is not that we are unduly conceited and exclusive, it is simply that it has just happened so. Nevertheless, so many gods have straggled by, on their way to an ambiguous end, as they went down to encounter the Master Philologist, and whatever it is that he does to them, that there is a tendency among the best people hereabouts, as I will not conceal from you, to regard them as not quite the sort that one meets socially.”

“But I—I” said Gerald, in uncontrolled indignation.

“I know, my poor boy, you are entirely different. And I am perfectly broad-minded about it, myself. But other people are not. And it would sound much better.”

Then Gerald spoke with dignity and firmness. Gerald said that not for one moment would he stoop to such a subterfuge. Not for an instant would he who was a lord of all exalted white magics pretend to be a sorcerer soiled with infernal traffics and patronized by mere devils. After that, Gerald passed as a visiting sorcerer.

26. “Qualis Artifex!”

AND Gerald used to amuse himself by talking with the travelers who passed by the neat log and plaster cottage of Maya the wise woman, upon their way to the court of Queen Freydis and her consort the Master Philologist. For it was a good and shrewd policy, Gerald felt, for a monarch to familiarize himself with his future subjects: so he would sit by the wayside, in the shade of a conveniently placed chestnut-tree,—incognito, as it were,—and would artfully allure them into conversation.

“Hail, friends! And what business draws you to the city of all marvels?” said Gerald, on the first morning that he fell into this long-sighted course.

He was told—by the big-bellied, yellow-haired man, whose skin was so curiously spotted,—that they were two poets upon their way to Antan, the goal of all the gods, and the friendly haven of true poets, where poets might hope to find at last that loveliness which they desired and could nowhere discover in their everyday life upon earth. To Gerald this was excellent news, since it increased the number of his future subjects very gratifyingly.

But he said nothing, while the big-bellied, spotted, thin-legged gentleman in the purple robe adorned with golden stars, went on in his answer to Gerald’s first question, by explaining that the speaker was Nero Claudius Caesar, the king of all poets, and that his scrawny companion, in a brown doublet of which both elbows needed patching, was an artist of considerable talent from out of the Gallic provinces, who was called Francois Villon.

Gerald found this also of some interest, in view of what he remembered about the Mirror of Caer Omn. Not often did you thus come face to face with two discarded personalities. But Gerald said nothing about this either. Instead, he questioned Nero yet further, and he thus learned that these two poets were on their way to the court of Freydis, because there alone in the universe was art properly regarded: for there, indeed, true artists were manufactured out of common clay, and were informed with the fire of Audela.

It was one or another old hero from out of Poictesme, Nero had heard, who had first modeled these earthen images; and Freydis, as occasion served, gave life to these images and set them to live upon earth, as changelings. But, above all, said Nero, in Antan the true poets of this world fared happily among the myths and the gods who once had afforded to these poets such fine themes, so that to-day of course these poets wrote even more splendid poems now that they composed with the eye upon the object.

Yet, Nero thought, playing idly with the emerald monocle which hung upon a green cord about his scrawny neck, this Queen would not be very likely ever to create in clay, or to find coming to her court, such another artist as Nero himself had been in the days of his Roman pre-eminence. No other person known to him had ever excelled in all the polite arts. For in dancing and in oratory, in wrestling (even with such dreadful adversaries as lions) and in music both vocal and instrumental,—alike as a charioteer and as a tragic actor,—but, above all, as a poet, and equally as a dramatic, a lyric and an epic poet,—Nero had been unanimously awarded the first prize in every contest. He did not care to appear boastful: yet, by all canons of criticism, one had to consider the list of his overwhelming triumphs, in Rome, in Naples, in Antium, in Alba,—at the Parthian games, at the Isthmian games, at the Olympic games,—and, in fine, in each contest which Nero had ever entered anywhere in all the kingdoms of which he was Emperor. No other artist had a record to compare with that: no other of the world’s great geniuses had ever been confessedly supreme in every polite form of aesthetic endeavor.

Of course, as a student of history, Nero conceded that the elect artist was not to be placed, not permanently, by his ranking in the eyes of his contemporaries, who might often be swayed by such matters, really extraneous to enduring art, as the artist’s ingratiating manners and his personal beauty. As a man of the world, he even conceded the judges of the sacred games in awarding all the first prizes to Nero might furthermore have been influenced by the large sums of money which the Emperor always conferred upon his acclaiming judges after such occasions, as well as by the dexterity of the tortures which would have followed any decision less just.

But the indisputable fact, the fact of superb importance, was that Nero had made of his life a poem which was wholly a unique masterpiece in the way of self-expression: he, above all other men, had served the one end of every poet’s art, by revealing the true nature of man’s being; for Nero had embodied, with loving carefulness, each trait which he found in himself, through some really memorable action,—rearing, as it were, among marshes and quicksands, and in yet other places which other persons feared to visit, those strange and passionately colored orchid growths which alone could express the highly complex nature of every man’s desires—

“That jargon becomes somewhat senescent,” said Gerald. “Still, as a museum piece,—yes, even now, sophistication does display something of the quaint beauty of thorough obsoleteness. It has acquired the charm, and, as it were, the patina, of sedan chairs and of full-bottom wigs and of girdles of chastity and of suits of armor, and of all other things, once useful enough, which are nowadays endeared to every poet’s heart by the fact that they are forever outmoded. So let us grant it, O Caesar, in the days that are gone you were a devil of a fellow and a sad rip among the ladies—”

“Why, but, for that matter—” Nero began.

“I know. You broad-mindedly despised neither sex. You were in amour a Greek scholar. You were something of a surgeon also. I concede it, I blush, and I urge you to omit all embarrassingly personal details.”

So Nero went on, saying that other emperors, with very much his chances, had lacked the genius necessary to develop these chances. There had, of course, been minor artists. Caligula, for example, among so much hackwork in the way of throat-cutting, had shown at least one jet of rather lovely inspiration when he attempted a criminal assault upon the moon; that was a really finely imagined bit of work. Then, also, Domitian and Commodus and Tiberius had displayed praiseworthy ambitions; quite neat little things had been done by Tiberius, in an amateur way, at Capri; Caracalla too had been so-so: but they had all tended to wallow unimaginatively in cut and dried executions; merely to chop off anybody’s head was not art, no matter how often you did it. Besides, work done upon a public scaffold inevitably coarsened one’s touch. And Heliogabalus, whatsoever the lad’s thin vein of undeniable talent in the way of lyric lechery, had lacked the stamina and gusto for any sustained masterpiece in Nero’s copious epic style.

For Nero alone had been, in every branch of self-expression, the sincere, skilled artist, enriching his handiwork always with that continual slight novelty which art demands. He had builded his appropriate stage, in the Golden House—

“A house entirely overlaid with gold,” said Gerald, reminiscently, “and adorned everywhere with jewels and mother of pearl, a house so rich and ample that it had three-storied porticos a mile long, and huge revolving banqueting halls, and ivory ceilings which perpetually scattered perfumes and red rose-petals—”

Nero, at that, had out his emerald monocle; and through it he now regarded Gerald with the childlike amiability of a sincere artist whensoever his vanity is flattered.

Yes, Nero admitted, he had endeavored to express himself in that house also. The Golden House had been (to play with metaphor) the handsome binding of that poem which was his life, when in a setting such as the world had never known, before or since, he had given to his every human trait its full color value. In the Golden House he had reared his orchids, he had labored to open many frank and incisive and utterly unstinted avenues of self-expression to that somewhat complex thing called human nature....

But here he entered rather explicitly into details. Gerald felt the style of this emperor to be growing woefully un-American; and Gerald fidgeted.

“Let us, I again urge you,” said Gerald, “speak of less personal matters, and diversify the vividness of these orchids with a few fig-leaves!”

Perhaps, of course, the Emperor continued, he, like every other really great artist, had been somewhat the anthologist, in that he had invented outright none of the art forms among the many in which he had distinguished himself. He had taken over from his predecessors a number of inspirations and a formula or two, as he would be the very last to deny: but the fine craftsmanship was all his, as well as that distinguishing, that peculiarly Neronic, touch of romantic irony, by virtue of which this artist had slain with suavity, had destroyed with a caress, and had ennobled all that was most dear to his human nature by killing it. He spoke now of the deaths of his wives, of Octavia and Poppaea, and of others who had been his wives just for the evening; he spoke of Sporus, of Aietes, of Narcissus, and of that other exceedingly beautiful boy, Aulus Plautinus....

And again Gerald raised a protesting hand. “Let us still,” said Gerald, “avoid these quite un-American personalities! Meanwhile, you do not speak of your mother Agrippina.”

He surprised in the spotted face of Nero something very like terror. But Nero said only, “No.”

And besides, the Emperor continued, with rising animation, that happy chronological accident, the fact that Christianity began in the days of Nero its advance toward world supremacy, had enabled him, by pure luck, to lend to the great poem of his life just the needful felicitous touch of working in a new medium. To burn well-thought-of taxpayers and putative virgins as the torches at your supper parties was a device which, out of a natural desire to surprise and to amuse one’s guests, might have occurred to almost any host in quest of that continual slight novelty which the art of hospitality also demands. But that these flambeaux should later become the brightest glories of a triumphant church had made these supper parties, which were really quite modest affairs, unforgettable. Nero had expressed himself—not merely, as he thought at the time, through persons supposed to be deficient in patriotism and more or less suspected of being (here again, to play with metaphor) not one hundred per cent Roman,—but, as it had turned out, through saints and apostles, and through consecrated religious martyrs, such as not every artist could get for his themes and raw material. So, the succeeding discouragements of Christians had, aesthetically, fallen flat, in their impression upon posterity: their authors had come into this field too late, to find that tragic vein worked out, and all its most striking possibilities exhausted, by the great artist that was Nero. It was hardly remembered that Marcus Aurelius and Diocletian and many others had broken and flayed and mutilated and burned to the very best of their ability: these plodders were but the epigoni and the unimaginative plagiarists of Nero.

So had it come about that of all the emperors Rome had known, and of all the tyrants and despots in every land and era, who had followed the fine art of self-expression, and who had shown what human nature really is—in, as it were, the nude, when any man is released from time-serving and is made omnipotent,—of all these, there had remained just one whose name was remembered everywhere; just one whose fame was imperishable; just one who had become a never-dying myth: and that one was Nero. The legend of Nero was, in a world wherein every other man stayed more or less unwillingly an unfulfilled Nero, the supreme type of the literature of escape. The legend of Nero was a poem which men would not ever forget: it was a poem current in all languages: and it was a poem which, now, everybody could cordially admire and delight in, because time had removed the need of considering any current moral standards or one’s own physical safety in judging this poem, now that Nero was only a character in a book, like—as the Emperor said, with a quaint revealment of his retained interest in literature,—like Iago or Volpone or Tartuffe. For whether you called any particular book a history or a poem or a drama did not, of course, effect the impressiveness and vigor and complexity of the character drawing in it, nor the value of the author’s apt and edifying revelations as to any eternal verities of man’s being.

“For, certainly,” said Nero, “my life presented, as no other artist has ever done, the gist of all human nature as that nature actually is, when freed of such inhibitions as constrain it in but too many baffled lives. My life was, thus, a connoisseur’s production, and a work of art which escaped even the grave risk of anti-climax. For there was not anything lacking in the ending of it, either. My fall and the circumstances of my death were so aesthetically right that, as an artist, I never in my life enjoyed anything I quite so much. Nothing could conceivably have been in better taste. For, overnight, as you may remember, I passed from the throne of the world, to hide in a tumbled-down out-house, under a ragged, very faded blue coverlet, and to perish thus by my own hand,—with an appropriate tragic verse upon my lips,—and without any friend remaining anywhere. No tragedy could have been more boldly proportioned, with all the Aristotelian unities so exactly preserved. And it was most gratifyingly led up to, too. For just as I was about to approach the denouement of my poem, the statues of my Lares tumbled down miraculously, the hind quarters of my favorite riding-horse were transformed into the hind quarters of an ape, and the doors of the mausoleum of Augustus having unclosed of their own accord, there issued from the tomb a divine voice which summoned me to destruction. These incidents, I repeat, were gratifying, for they showed that the exercise of my art had been viewed by Heaven appreciatively. Ah, yes, in all I was peculiarly favored.”

27. Regarding the Stars

VILLON spat meditatively between his yellow front teeth. He fingered, in the while that he continued his reflections, his scarred and puckered lower lip. Then he confessed that he dissented from a great many of his predecessor’s remarks.

“You were impressive. Your life was a competent job, boldly executed, and nobody denies its merits on their own melodramatic plane. Yet it lacked the indispensable touch of tenderness, without which no work of art is of the first class. No: it was I who was truly favored; and I made of my life a flawless poem without dragging in such gaudy accessories as thrones and burning cities and the wasting of a lovely, mother-naked virgin on a mere lion.”

And this Francois Villon went on to speak of the great blessings which had been accorded him. He had been granted irresolution, and lewdness, and poverty, and cowardice, and a large weakness for drink, and an ingrained dishonesty, and a disease-wrecked body, and everything else which was needed to make him a knave as contemptible as any man could hope to be.

“I was, in brief, gentlemen, as I have elsewhere remarked, a hog with a voice. And there was no voice like my voice.”

For out of the mire that wallowing, lustful and cowardly beast had sung. Now he sang jeeringly, and made fun of the whole world with satire and mockery and invective, and with plain filth-flinging,—which was all quite good art, because it pleases people to see a man superior to his fate. Now he sang piercingly of the great platitude that death conquers and ruins everything: and to that sentiment nobody can ever turn a deaf ear, because it is the only sentiment with a universal personal application. But, above all, he sang of his regret for his past indiscretions, and of his yearning for spiritual cleanliness, and—“soaring,” as Villon now quoted, with admirable complacency, “to the very gates of Heaven upon the star-sown wings of faith and song,”

—he had proclaimed his trust in that divine love which, ultimately, would redeem all properly repentant persons from the logical outcome of their doings in this world, and would give to the marred life of every properly repentant person a happy ending in a fair-colored paradise agreeably full of harps and lutes. And people liked that, too, of course, because such a philosophy made everybody feel muggily consoled and, for no especial reason, magnanimous.

So had Villon become a very great poet whose art was a fine blending of mirth and of pathos and of faith, and so might he hope to win to high honors in Antan, where, if anywhere, poets were properly rewarded. And the squalor and degradation of his terrestrial living were, now, but so many picturesque ingredients in the superb poem of his life, now that Villon too was—just as his Roman confrere had pointed out,—to be regarded as a character in a book. The difference was that Villon had become a never-dying myth of vagabondage with its heart in the right place, and a parable which revealed how much of good always survives in the most vile and abandoned of criminals and even in persons unsuccessful in business life. The legend of Villon thus proved exactly the contrary to that which was proved by the legend of Nero: as the one demonstrated the real nature of man to aspire only to lust and cruelty the moment that inhibitions were removed, so did the other legend show the real fundamental nature of every man to be incurably good and lovable under all possible surface stains. And the legend of Villon, Villon repeated, had in it tenderness,—that indispensable flavor of tenderness and of a sentimentality as wholesomely nourishing as molasses, without which no work of art can ever really be of the first class so far as goes its popular appeal.

“For my life, gentlemen, was truly a superb parable. And it has been properly appreciated, it has ever been paid the fine compliment of being plagiarised by Holy Writ. Why, what the devil! if the parable of the Prodigal Son be good art in the New Testament, is it the less good art for being acted out with the vigor and the brio I brought to that task? For I too wasted all my substance, with some feminine assistance, and went down among the swine and the husks, without ever forgetting that by and by I was to be comforted with never-failing love and veal cutlets. In brief, although I lived perforce in the gutter, yet my eyes were upon the stars “

Then Gerald remarked, to this one of his discarded personalities: “You move me, Messire Francois. You sound upon my heart-strings a resounding chord, through your employment of a figure of speech which is always effective. I do not know why, but any imaginable bit of verse conveying a statement manifestly untrue can be made edifying and sublime through ending it with the word ‘stars’. We poets have convinced everybody, including ourselves, that there is some occult virtue in the act of looking at the stars. So, when you said just now, ‘Although I lived perforce in the gutter, yet my eyes were upon the stars’, I was moved very mightily. I seemed to hear the yearning cry of all human aspirations, foiled but superb. Yet if you had asserted your eyes to have been habitually, or at least every clear night, upon the planets—or, for that matter, upon the comets or the asteroids,—I would not have been moved in the least.”

“It is sufficient that you were moved without knowing why,” observed Nero. “That is the magic of poetry. Very often when I recited some of my best poems, to commemorate the sorrows of Orestes or Canace or OEdipus, I myself could not quite understand the springs of that terrible misery which convulsed my hearers. They wept; they fainted; a number of the women entered prematurely into the labors of childbirth; and I was compelled to have the doors and windows guarded by my Praetorian soldiers because so many of the audience invariably attempted to escape from the well-nigh intolerable ecstasies which my art provoked. Such is the magic of great poetry, a thing not ever wholly to be explained even by the poet.”

Then Gerald said: “Yet, you two poets who have traveled through the Marches of Antan, wherein only two truths endure, and the one teaching is that we copulate and die,—do you not look to find when you have reached Antan, which is the goal of all the gods, some third truth?”

And it seemed to him that the faces of the two myths had now become evasive and more wary.

Nero replied, “For a poet, there exist always just as many truths as he cares to imagine.”

And Villon remarked: “I would phrase it somewhat differently. I would say there exist more truths than any poet cares to imagine. But it comes to the same thing.”

“Yes,” Gerald assented,—“for it comes to an evasion. Yet I, who also am a poet, I retain my faith in the rather beautiful idea of that third truth.”

And then Gerald told them that he himself had long dabbled in the art of poetry. “Indeed,” he added, generously, “I will now recite to you one of my sonnets which appears appropriate to the occasion.”

“Dog,” Villon replied, taking up his hat, “does not eat dog.”

And Nero very hastily stated that, howsoever unbounded their regret, they really must be hurrying on to the city of marvels.

So these myths departed, traveling together, with an intimacy somewhat remarkable in the light of their flatly diverse teachings. And Gerald warned them to make the most of the present state of affairs in Antan, because the day after to-morrow the Lord of the Third Truth, a deity with several not uninteresting aspects, would be descending upon Antan, to take over all the powers of the Master Philologist, and to deal with Queen Freydis afterward as his divine inclinations might prompt.

Thereafter Gerald went back to Maya and to his dinner quite jauntily, now that he knew in his appointed kingdom the true poets of this world were assembling to purvey his amusement: and he felt himself to be afire with impatience to reach that city of all marvels, yonder behind him, as he walked away from Antan, leisurely ascending to the trim cottage of Maya the wise woman, who went as a crowned queen, and would have none of his love-making, and yet was such an excellent cook, in her plain way.

PART EIGHT THE BOOK OF MAGES

28. Fond Magics of Maya

“Not every good scholar is a good schoolmaster.”

GERALD delayed his departure until Friday, because Gerald was cordially amused by the fond magics of Maya of the Fair Breasts. He regarded them, as he did her, through those roseate spectacles which the wise woman had loaned him to be an unfailing comfort to his eyes: and he found all very good.

He had known many lovelier and more brilliant women, alike in the relinquished world of Lichfield and in his journeying through the Marches of Antan. But Maya contented him: he had really not the heart to disappoint his Maya by not forcing upon her—after four prolonged and tender arguments,—those physical attentions which all women seemed to expect.

After that, she put aside her crown; and Gerald never saw it any more.

And after that, also, the date of his departure from her neat cottage was postponed until after Sunday, though it was quite understood that, the very first thing after a particularly early breakfast on Monday, he would pass on to enter into his appointed kingdom, and to possess himself of the Master Philologist’s great words, and to reanimate the Dirghic mythology in which he was a god, and would come to know the third truth over which he exercised celestial authority.

Meanwhile he stayed upon Mispec Moor, to regard with indulgence, and even with some pity, his predecessors in Maya’s affection, those beguiled men whom she had converted into domestic animals. His divine steed was for the while turned out to graze with those docile geldings that had once been knights and barons and reigning kings: all wandered contentedly enough about the neat cottage, along with a number of steers and sheep and three mules, who, also, had once been noblemen and well-thought-of monarchs.

Gerald saw that these animals seemed not dissatisfied with their transfiguring doom. Yet it appeared a bit wanton—even to him, who had once been a tortoise and a lion and a fish and a boar-pig,—that these gentlemen should have been snatched from positions of responsibility and worldly honor, from thrones and tournaments and large bank accounts, and set to eating grass in a field. And Gerald sincerely pitied them for their ignorance as to the correct way in which to deal with the small magics of Maya.

The dear woman herself you could not blame. She could not help trying, out of pure kindliness and affection, to hold men back from daring and splendid exploits, because she really thought they would be much safer, and more happy, as domestic animals.

And, in fact, she justified her charitableness with a logic which was plausible. She argued that all men were better content after they had become domestic animals. She pointed out that her lovers, in particular—Why, but Gerald could see for himself how little vexed were her steers and geldings, now, by affairs of the heart. Upon every imaginable moral ground they had been made better by their double transformation. They did not run after lewd females, they were not bloodthirstily jealous of one another, and they were asleep every night at a respectable hour. If Gerald had only known them, as she had known them, when they were gentlemen of high distinction and reigning monarchs, he would never argue about an improvement so obvious.

Besides, domestic animals were spurred by magnanimity and altruism into no devastating wars, thrift did not often make them covetous of money, neither did self-respect induce them to spend money foolishly: religion did not lead mules to bray in any pulpit, nor did the conscientiousness of a sheep ever make of him an ever-meddling and pernicious pest. In fine, the domestic animals were undisfigured by any human virtues, and were quite easy to get along with. Whereas, if any woman attempted to have that many men about the house—! Maya, who had lost so many husbands (at least partially) did not complete the statement. But her expression made the aposiopesis eloquent.

Gerald had no smallest doubt but that, if he himself had not been divine and beyond her arts, Maya of the Fair Breasts would long ago, out of pure kindliness and affection, have transformed him too into a sheep or an ox or some other useful quadruped, and would thus have held him back from his appointed inheritance in Antan. And he did not blame her. The placid, stupid, rather lovable woman simply did not understand that to be contented was not all: she did not comprehend the obligations which were upon a god to live with generous splendor and to perform very tremendous feats in the way of heroism and of philanthropy.

Of course, just as she said, the exploits of a champion who came to enlighten and improve any place—even to redeem it from what, by the standards of the United States of America, was iniquitous and backward and probably undemocratic,—did of necessity upset the routine to which the inhabitants had grown accustomed. Antan, as Gerald looked down upon it from the porch of Maya’s cottage, seemed a contented and tranquil realm. No matter by howsoever un-American standards people might be living there, to redeem the place from those standards would bring upsetment and confusion. And it did seem almost a pity—just as Maya said,—to be bothering people who were contented enough, when you too were contented.... Even so, there was an obligation upon a god. To be contented, to have no cares to worry you by day, to lack for nothing by day, and every night to induce decorously through connubial affection a profound and refreshing slumber,—that was not everything a god desired. Yonder there was a third truth. Yonder was Gerald’s appointed kingdom, and not here upon Mispec Moor. Besides, Gerald had begun to wonder more and more about Freydis. By all reports, it was she who really ruled those hills and lowlands yonder, which to-morrow—or at least, next week,—would be Gerald’s hills and lowlands; and it was she who controlled in everything the Master Philologist, whom Gerald was appointed to overthrow. It had not been prophesied, however, so far as Gerald knew, how he would deal with Freydis. That, to every appearance, was a matter left to his divine election. Well, one would not be over-harsh with any woman whom rumor declared so beautiful, Gerald decided, half drowsily, as he sat there so utterly comfortable in the spectacles and the dressing-gown and the brown carpet slippers which Maya had provided, and so pleasantly replete with Maya’s excellent cooking.

29. Leucosia’s Singing

AND upon another day, as Gerald sat by the roadside beneath his chestnut-tree, and waited for supper to be ready, three persons passed toward Antan, traveling together. They were all notable looking men; and Gerald greeted them with the sign which is known only to supreme mages. They returned his greeting, but they shaped signs that were of an older magic than any which was familiar to Gerald.

And then the first of these men said, “I was Odysseus, Laertes’ son.”

Gerald thus knew that before him stood yet another of his discarded personalities. But Gerald made no comment.

And Odysseus continued: “I had wisdom. My prudent wisdom was to men of every calling an object of considerable attention, and the fame of it reached Heaven. I ruled in Ithaca, an island kingdom, well situated toward the west. I went unwillingly with the other well-greaved Greeks to besiege Ilion: the enterprise to me seemed rash, and unlikely to be remunerative: yet, being engaged, I dealt prudently, and in the end, where so many merely brave persons had failed, it was through my prudence that the enterprise succeeded. For ten years Ilion defied the strength of Achilles and of Ajax; Ilion derided all the endeavors of auburn-haired Menelaus and of godlike Agamemnon: but the cunning of Odysseus felled Ilion in one night. I took my share of the spoils; I left the glory to them that wanted it. I returned across the world to that which I more prudently desired, toward the quiet comforts of my home in craggy Ithaca. The prayer of the blinded Cyclops, the wrath of earth-shaking Poseidon, the white thunder of offended Zeus, and the twelve winds of AEolus, all fought against me. I prevailed. The sea-witch Scylla, an exorbitant lady with twelve arms, a ravening monster whom none might pass and live, I passed. Charybdis, which devoured all, did not devour me, for I clung prudently to a fig-tree.”

“Indeed,” said Gerald, “the leaves of that tree are very often a great protection,—O much-enduring and crafty Odysseus,” Gerald added hastily, as became a Greek scholar.

“Moreover, the sun’s daughter, fair-haired Circe, and bright Queen Calypso, the divine one of goddesses, these also detained me rather more amiably. I embraced them; they did not find me slothful in their beds. For they were goddesses, as quick in anger as they were in lust. It is not prudent to deny a goddess. From the fond arms of these immortals I passed on toward my desired goal. Yet nobody is always prudent. When my ship approached the island of the man-devouring Sirens I caused the ears of my sailors to be stopped with wax; but I caused myself to be bound to the mast, so that I might hear the song which Leucosia sang in the while that Parthenope and Ligeia made a sweet music. I desired to hear without any hurt that song which was so lovely that it. drew less prudent men to the arms of its singer, wherein, as they well knew, dark death awaited them. I heard that song. It did not matter to me that I saw how the low beach about those music-makers gleamed, like silver, where a thin silk light fell upon the scattered bones of many men whom they had slain. I struggled to cast myself into the gray sea-water, so that I might go to Leucosia. But my bonds held me. I was bound, both my hands and feet were bound, with very strong cables. The black ship passed onward, whitening the water with its polished blades of fir-wood; and I wept as I too passed onward, away from my own ruin, and drawing nearer to the goal which my prudent wisdom had desired.”

“Truly, the enchantment of her singing must have maddened you. Yet such is the magic of great poetry,” Gerald remarked, “a thing not ever wholly to be explained even by the poet.... Yet your goal, nevertheless, was reached, they tell me, O much-contriving Odysseus. Your goal was reached, as remember it, in the many-pillared hall of your home in Ithaca, and in a fine slaughter of those suitors who were pestering your wife because they believed that she was your widow.”

“Very naturally my goal was reached. I was Odysseus. Very naturally I made an end of those wasters of my substance who had been eating and drinking for nine years at my expense. There arose, as one by one their heads were smitten off, a hideous moaning. The floors ran with blood. It was wholly plain that Odysseus faced those imprudent persons who had made over-free with his flocks and his wine jars and his wife and the other goods of his household. Yet I knew, by and by, that what I now desired was not to be found in craggy Ithaca nor in the calm embraces of Penelope nor in the tranquility of my well-ordered home. I gave laws. I heard cases. I decided squabbles between one shepherd and another shepherd. I who had contrived the burning of Ilion now oversaw the branding of my cattle. War did not trouble Ithaca, of whose king all other kings were afraid. For I was very famous. I lacked for nothing in wealth. I lived at ease. But no man hears the singing of Leucosia except at a great price. I heard Leucosia no more. I heard, instead, the voices of fools praising my strength and my prudent wisdom, and the voice of my wife talking sensibly about I never noticed exactly what. I lacked for nothing which prudent men desire, in my snug, sleek, well-ordered Ithaca. But I had seen too much in my voyaging about a world which was more lewd and riotous than I permitted anybody to be in my Ithaca. I remembered too many things. No, I did not regret, Calypso nor Circe nor that fine girl Nausicaa. I could at will have returned to them. But I remembered the singing of Leucosia, to whom I dared not return. For no man hears the singing of Leucosia except at great price.”

“But of what did she sing, O much-planning Odysseus?”

“She sang of that which haunted me, and which derided the rewards of my prudent wisdom. She sang of the one way to that which I truly desired.”

“That, O noble son of Laertes, is not a remarkably explicit reply.”

Now the wise Greek regarded Gerald sombrely. Odysseus said, by and by:

“She sang of that which troubles a prudent person’s soul and despoils his rational living of all contentment. Let it suffice that she sang, I think, of Antan. That is why I must travel to Antan, wherein—it may be,—is my desire.”

—It was only then that Gerald recollected something. He recollected that Evadne of the Dusk, that feathery-legged Evadne, who, Horvendile had said was called Leucosia in the days of her sea-faring. But Gerald said nothing about what, after all, was none of his affair. ...

30. What Solomon Wanted

AND then the second traveler spoke. He spoke of that which had been his in the days when all riches and all pleasures and all power had been accorded to Solomon because of his sixfold wisdom. To no other being that ever lived among mankind was given such mightiness as was granted to King Solomon in the time that he reigned over Israel and ruled this world.

For Solomon had sexanary wisdom. Solomon knew the six words which were not known to any other men. He understood the speaking of these words.

The word of the beasts. It was spoken, and there assembled in the sight of Solomon a pair of every creature that walks or creeps upon earth, from the elephant to the smallest worm. Upon the neck of each was pressed the seal of Solomon, so that the race of each must henceforth be subject to him. They revealed to him the wisdom of the beasts that perish and do not bother about it. He feasted them at a table of silver and iron which covered four square miles; and at that banqueting Solomon the King served as the pantler, bringing with his hands to every beast and reptile its food according to its kind, from the elephant to the smallest worm.

The word of Morskoi. It was spoken, and all manner of fishes rose to the surface of the sea’s water near Ascalon. Upon the neck of each was pressed the seal of Solomon. Then came a hundred thousand camels and a hundred thousand mules laden with new corn, and all the creatures of the water were fed, and after that they served King Solomon and they revealed to him the wisdom of the Sea Market.

The word of the fowls. It was spoken, and the sky was hidden by the birds who came to render fealty and to instruct King Solomon in the wisdom of the Apsarasas. The peewit alone did not come But he came afterward, crying, “He that hath no mercy for others, shall find none for himself.” And it was the peewit who fetched to Solomon wise Balkis, and who taught Solomon to look through the surface of this earth as a man peers through a sheet of glass.

The word of the Adversary. It was spoken, and the entire citizenry of hell kneeled before King Solomon, saving only Sachr and Eblis. The female Djinns were shaped like dromedaries with the wings of a bat; the male Djinns were like peacocks with the horns of a gazelle. The Mazikeen and the Shedeem came also. To the neck of each was pressed the seal of Solomon: and they revealed to him both the black and the gray wisdom.

The word of Arathron. It was spoken, and there came to King Solomon the Seven Stewards of Heaven. The eyes of Solomon were closed, and his hand had shaken a little, as he pressed to the neck of each kneeling Steward the seal of Solomon, for he was troubled by the exceeding glory of the supreme Princes of Heaven. Of these the most terrible were Ophiel and Phul, whose reign is not yet. But these seven Stewards also served King Solomon; and they revealed to him the white wisdom.

The word of the mirror. It was spoken, and before him stood a wicker cage containing three pigeons. Beside this cage lay a small mirror three inches square.

All these six words were known to the wise King. It was the power of these six words which made him lord over the wild beasts and the birds of heaven, and over the devils and the elemental spirits and the ghosts of the dead, and over the sea-depths, and over the cherubim. All creatures upon earth trembled before King Solomon because of these six words: no other king withstood Solomon, nor sent forth his chariots against the army of Solomon. For the soldiers of Solomon were the beasts of the field and of the wild wood; the birds of prey were his horsemen; the little birds were his very cunning spies. His admirals were the huge whales and sea serpents, and Leviathan also served in the navy of King Solomon. His lieutenants were the overseers of hell; the supreme angels were his counselors. He had also his mirror. The power of these six words was exceedingly great.

Yet there remained one other word, that word which was in the beginning, and which will be when all else has perished. There stayed yet unrevealed that word which is spoken by the Master Philologist all the gods of men. That word alone was not known to King Solomon. His little mirror showed him the word, as it showed every other thing; but the word was written in a language which he could not read.

“What need is there for you to be bothering about that word?” said all the women who loved and cherished him. He answered, “I do not know.” The wives and concubines then stated, speaking with nine hundred voices in unanimity, that no one of them had ever before heard of such nonsense. And he answered them again, “I do not know....”

For this reason King Solomon must pass down into Antan, to hear the speaking of the last great word of power.

31. Chivalry of Merlin

THEN said the third of these wise men: “I was Merlin Ambrosius. The wisdom that I had was more than human, for it came to me from my father. But I served Heaven with it. The land was starved and sick and frightened. Many little chieftains fought in its wild naked fields, and murderously waylaid one another in its old forests, causelessly. I made the land an ordered realm. I gave the land one king, a king whose sword was as bright as thirty torches. That sword flashed everywhither about the land to enforce justice and every other virtue commendable to Heaven.. Arthur Pendragon and the knights who served him all served my whims. They were my toys. ... I in my playing gave to the gaping, smooth-chinned boy, and to his shaggy followers, a notion to play with in their turn. This notion was that each one of them, and that every other man, was the child of God and his Father’s vicar upon earth; and that each human life was all a journeying home, toward a not ever ending happiness, and that it was a journeying which should be performed in a style appropriate to Heaven’s heir apparent. Those savages believed me. They were joyous both night and day. They learned to be envious of no one, to love God, and to support no unjust cause. They learned to speak seasonably and graciously, to be generous in giving, to clothe themselves neatly, and to sing and dance, and to war fearlessly against evil. It all quite upset my father.... Yet my notion was, I still believe, a very beautiful notion. It created beauty everywhere, because, as I have said, the heir apparent of Heaven must journey homeward in an appropriate style. Yes, the results were eminently picturesque. Caerleon arose; there was no city more delectable upon earth than was the pleasant town of Caerleon, builded upon Usk between the forest and the clear river. Arthur sat there upon a dais over which was spread a covering of flame-colored satin. Under his elbow was a cushion of red satin. The lords and princes and the knights sat about King Arthur Pendragon, each in his order and degree. The oppressed and the unhappy came to Arthur. He was to the young a father, to the old a comforter. Wrong was loathsome to him, the right was very dear to Arthur, and he knew not what it was to fear. My father did not think at all well of him.... But I was pleased with my toys, for now I found in every part of the land a romantic strange beauty. The knights rode at adventure upon enormous stallions. They clanked as they rode. They went masked in blue armor and in crimson armor and in silver-speckled green armor. Upon their heads were brightly colored lions and leopards and griffins and sea horses, and very often their helmets were wrapped about with a woman’s sleeve. The giants that these knights fought against were mighty giants who ate at one meal six swine: the dragons that they fought against were marvelous huge worms with shining scales and wattles and magnificent whiskers. The maidens whom they rescued were each more lovely than the day. These maidens had blond curling hair and frontlets of red gold upon their heads. About each tender and rose-tinted body was a gown of yellow satin. Upon the feet of these maidens were shoes of variegated leather fastened with gilt clasps. ... In fine, the heirs of Heaven discharged their moral and constabulary duties quite picturesquely as they rode homeward. It was in this way I who was Merlin Ambrosius played with heroic virtues: it was thus that I who was the son of my father made, for my amusement, men that were more virtuous and colorful than Heaven had ever been able to make them. Still, still, it really was a rather plainly outrageous notion upon which all this was founded: and by and by the dear and droll, and heart-breakingly beautiful antics of my flesh and blood toys did not content my desire.”

Gerald remarked, now that the old gentleman had paused in his meditative speaking, “Your desire, Messire Merlin, as I remember it, was for an enchantress who outwitted and betrayed you.”

“Men,” Merlin answered, with a grave smile, “have made a mistake in that report. Is it likely that I could be outwitted? No: I was Merlin Ambrosius.”

And then Merlin told Gerald about the child Nimue, who was the daughter of the goddess Diana and of how old, wearied, over-learned Merlin had come to her in the likeness of a young squire. He told of how they played for a long while with his ancient magics, there in the spring woods, beside a very clear fountain in which the gravel shone like powdered silver. To make this twelve-year-old child laugh, as she did so adorably, the mage had turned into prettiness and drollery every infernal device. He create for the child Nimue. there in the April woods, an orchard full of all those fruits and flowers, howsoever unseasonably mingled, which have the liveliest sweetness and flavor. Phantoms danced for her wide-eyed amusement, in the shaping of armed knight and archbishops and crowned ladies and goat-legged fauns: and it was all quite excellent fun.... Then Merlin told to Nimue, because she pouted so adorably, the secret of building a tower which is not made of stone or timber or iron, and is so strong that it may never be felled while this world endures. And Nimue, the moment that he had fallen asleep with his head in her lap, spoke very softly the old runes In the while that she continued to caress her lover she imprisoned Merlin in an enchanted tower which she had builded out of the magic air of April above a flowering white hawthorn-bush, so that Nimue might keep her wonderful, so wise, dear lover utterly to herself.

“And I was happy there for a long while,” said Merlin. “My toys, now that I played no more with them, began to break one another. Dissension and lust and hatred woke among them. They forgot the very pretty notion which I had given them in their turn to play with. The land was no longer an ordered realm. My toys now fought in the land’s naked fields, and they murderously waylaid one another in its old forests. Arthur was dead, at the hands of his own bastard son begotten in incest. It was an awkward ending for the heir apparent of Heaven. The Round Table was dissolved. The land was starved and sick and frightened.”

Now Merlin, the old poet who did not any longer delight to shape and to play with puppets, had paused: and he sat gazing thoughtfully, with wholly patient, tired eyes, at nothing in particular. Then Merlin said:

“I heard of all these things. They did not matter. I was happy. Yes, I suppose that I was happy. My ways were utterly domestic. They stayed thus for a long while.... There was no variety. In that small heaven which a child had builded out of the magic air of April there was no variety whatever. There was no enemy, no adversary for me to get the better of through some cunning device. There was only happiness.... Nimue stayed always young and kind and beautiful and contented just because I was there The child loved me. But there was no variety. No son of my father stays forever a domestic animal. So in the end I who was Merlin Ambrosius found my desire was not in that tower of April air. There was only heaven. There was only just such a never-changing happiness as I had once talked about to the gaping, smooth-chinned boy and to his shaggy followers.’?

“Yet how could you escape from the blessings of a happy home-life, Messire Merlin, if that tower was truly enchanted?”

“It does not seem reasonable that I should tell you all my secrets,” Merlin replied, drily, “any more than it seemed reasonable that the son of my father should share every secret with Nimue. The child loved me utterly. And I loved her. Yes, I love Nimue as I have loved no other creature fluttering about earth. She did not seem to walk.... Even so, I was Merlin Ambrosius. So in the end I left my child mistress. I quitted the small heaven which a child’s pure-mindedness had contrived. And I go now into Antan to get, it may be, my desire.”

Then there was silence, now that the three mage had all spoken.

And Gerald shook his head. “You gentlemen have talked with gratifying candor. You have expressed yourself, with chaste simplicity, in very plain short sentences. You have reasoned powerfully. You imply that neither a wife nor a mistress, or even a harem, is able to dissuade a wise man from this journeying toward the goal of all the gods. I infer that, to the contrary, the domestic circumstances of no one of you were wholly satisfactory in the old time. Well, that is a situation still to be encountered more frequently than is desirable, even in Lichfield, and it is the reason that I too am on my way to Antan. I am stopping here just for the week-end. Yet I still do not know what in the world you gentlemen really desire.”

“For one, I desire nothing that is in this world,” replied Odysseus.

“Yet, do you but answer me this very simple question! What do you three expect to find in Antan? Because I can assure you that, after the impending changes to be made in the government and other civic affairs of Antan by the Lord of the Third Truth,—a deity, gentlemen, with several not uninteresting aspects, a deity with whom I may without boasting say that I have considerable influence,—why, then, the moment everything is in tolerable working order, it will be a real pleasure to afford you three gentlemen all possible courtesies.”

But the three mages did not seem impressed.

“I was wise,” said Solomon. “I knew all things save one thing. I did not know that word which was in the beginning, and which will be when all else has perished. And that word no god knows until he has heard it spoken by the Master Philologist.”

“My desire,” said Merlin, “was for the Nimue and for the love of my child mistress. When I had my desire it did not content me. So I now go into Antan to find, it may be, something which I desire. But my father’s son does not go asking favors of any god.”

Then Gerald said: “Yet, you three mages who have traveled through the Marches of Antan wherein only two truths endure, and the teaching is that we copulate and die,—do you not look to find in the goal of all the gods some third truth?”

And it seemed to him that the faces of these myths had now become somewhat evasive and more wary.

But they said only, speaking severally: “A wise man knows that no truth is affected either by his beliefs or by his hopes.”—“A wise man accepts each truth as it is revealed to him.”—“A wise man will risk nothing upon the existence of any truth.”

“Still, gentlemen, these are enigmas! These sayings are not a plain answer to a plain question: and I do not quite understand these sayings.”

They answered him, “There is no need that you should understand.”

Then these three passed down toward the sunset statelily. And Gerald, gazing after them, once more shook his red head. These wise myths seemed to him in a bad way: it would not be easy to content the more eminent sages among his future subjects, because these three at least, for all their wisdom, appeared never to have found out what they wanted.

Gerald shrugged. He, in any event, perfectly well knew what in this bracing country air he wanted at once. So Gerald went in at once to supper with his Maya who was such an excellent cook in her plain way.

32. A Boy That Might As Well Be

WHAT more is needed,” Maya had asked, “to make this last day with me pass pleasantly?”

—For this, again, was the very last day which Gerald could possibly spend in the trim log and plaster cottage. Maya had decided, without any reticence, that it was high time he attended to whatsoever foolishness he seemed to think himself committed to, in that disreputable low place down yonder, and that to keep putting it off in this way looked like shirking, and that, for her part, she simply could not understand why he did not get his nonsense over with….

And Gerald said, “It would be nice if we had a son.”

But Maya at once dissented, as, it seemed to Gerald she nowadays dissented, at least in part, from everything that Gerald proposed.

“No, Gerald,” said Maya. “For you would grow far too fond of him. You would be foolish about him. You would be unwilling to leave him, you probably never would leave him. And it would end in you being in my way, and bothering me in the night season, and being under my feet all day, for the rest of your life—”

“But I am a god—”

“Yes, Gerald, to be sure, you are. I had forgotten. I apologize. Now, do not be upset about it! Stop pouting! You are a god, that is quite understood. You are immortal, you are going to outlive me indefinitely, and you are going to perform wonders in Antan, and it is all going to be very nice. I hope so, anyhow. I was only saying it would be much better for us to have no son.”

But Gerald answered: “Do not keep contradicting me in that maddening way! If you again fly out at me like that, Maya, you will rouse my temper. Then I shall rage and roar and, quite possibly, ramp. I will bluster and speak harshly. I will huff, I will puff, I will blow the house down. For I insist it would be quite nice if we had a son.”

“Oh, very well, then!” said Maya; and she turned with that sulkiness which she ever and again displayed—nowadays,—toward a large basket of magics.

“—I mean, though, once he were old enough. Babies are too limited in conversation, they are too vocal, and they are too leaky.”

Maya had lifted from an amber basin a small shining lizard. She held it toward her mouth, breathing softly upon the creature, in the while that she answered Gerald.

“I think, myself,” said Maya, “that, since you insist upon having a son, he might as well be seven or eight years old to begin with.”

Then Maya took off the top of the basket, she reached far into the blue basket with the hand which she held the shining lizard, and out of the basket, clinging to Maya’s hand for support, climbed a freckled red-haired boy, about eight years old, in blue garments, and having as yet only one upper front tooth.

“We have now got a splendid son,” said Gerald contentedly. “But who is to christen our son? For shall of course call him Theodorick Quentin, just my father and my oldest brother were called.”

The boy was, thus, named Theodorick Quentin Musgrave, and Gerald delighted in the child. For the Lord of the Third Truth put off once more his entry into his kingdom....

“I told you so!” said Maya.

“But, really now, my darling, would you have me lacking in all proper paternal feeling! It is necessary I give the child a fair start in life; and I ask you, candidly, could any parent discharge that duty, with any real thoroughness, in less than a week?”

“That, though, is not at all what I said. And for any full-grown man to be talking such nonsense—”

“So now you see for yourself! Therefore I shall be leaving you both next Tuesday, and it is quite useless for you to implore me to stay a half-second longer than that. Besides, I rather like him.”

Yet the child showed peculiarities. For one thing, his tongue had no red in it, but was formed of perfectly white flesh. When Gerald noticed this odd fact he said nothing about it, though, because Gerald comprehended the limitations of gray magic. And for another thing, on the third day of Theodorick’s existence, Gerald happened to lay aside his rose-colored spectacles while he was playing with his son. Then the boy was not there. Gerald shrugged, just in time to avoid shuddering. He replaced his spectacles, and all was as before, to every freckle and each red hair.

After that, Gerald wore his spectacles always.

For Theodorick Quentin Musgrave had become very dear to him. No more than any other father could Gerald rationally explain this dearness or justify it by any common-sense logic. He only knew that the brat aroused in him a tenderness which came appreciably near to being unselfish; that it worried him to have the brat go unchristened in this neighborhood so full of sorcerers and wizards; that when he touched the brat it pleased him, for no assignable reason; and that when the brat displayed the mildest gleam of intelligence, it at once seemed quite brilliant and profound, and inexpressibly beyond all other people’s children.

For Theodorick noticed everything. And Gerald delighted particularly in the child’s intelligence and powers of observation, because, since no sort of cleverness could possibly be inherited from poor dear stupid Maya, all the boy’s more excellent mental traits were obviously paternal.

For example, “There is a lady,” Theodorick had stated, pointing toward Antan.

“Oh, any number of ladies, my son,” Gerald assented, as he thought of the many beautiful goddesses and feminine myths who (for all that, he reflected, he had never seen any female creature pass toward Antan) must be aiding to make yet more glorious that kingdom over which Gerald would be traveling in that direction.”

And Gerald’s hand went to the shoulder of the freckled brat whom, after next week, he would not ever be seeing any more: and Gerald wondered at the wholly illogical pleasure he derived just from touching this child.

“Oh, yes, there are no doubt a great many ladies in Antan,” said Gerald, “and the coincidence is truly quaint that I have not yet seen any woman traveling in that direction.”

But the boy explained he meant the very large lady lying down over yonder as if she were dead, but not dead, because her heart was breathing.

Then Gerald saw that, in point of fact, the hill toward the southwest had, from this station, the shaping of a woman’s body. She seemed to lie flat on her back, with her long hair outspread everywhither about her head, of which the profile, now that you look for it, was complete and quite definitely formed. Also you saw her throat and her high breasts, whence the hills sloped downward into the contour of a relatively smallish, flat belly. Just here the outline of the vast violet-tinted figure was broken by the nearer green hill immediately across the road which led to Antan, but all that you could see of this womanlike figure was complete and perfectly moulded. Moreover, Gerald noted that, near where the heart would have been, a forest fire was sending up its languid smoke, which was, of course, what Theodorick Quentin Musgrave had meant by saying that the lady’s heart was breathing.

Gerald was very proud of Theodorick’s cleverness in noticing the shaping of these hills, which Gerald himself had not ever observed, in the entire three weeks he had spent upon Mispec Moor. But when this odd accident of nature was pointed out to Maya, she only said that she saw what you meant of course, but that, after all, it was only two hills, and that hills looked much more like hills than they looked like anything else.

PART NINE THE BOOK OF MISPEC MOOR

33. Limitations of Gaston

“To tame the wolf you must marry him.”

IT WAS at this time, toward the middle of June, that Gaston Bulmer came from Lichfield. Gerald was sitting, as was his daily custom now, under the chestnut-tree beside the road which led to Antan. He waited there to engage in conversation the next of his future subjects who might pass by in that perpetual journeying toward Antan. Gerald, under this same chestnut-tree, had by this time talked with many such unearthly wayfarers: and if the rather interesting things they had told him were all written down, it would make a book unutterably enormous and utterly incredible.

In such circumstances it was, just after two not unfamiliar mountebanks had gone by carrying with them the paraphernalia of their Punch and Judas show, that Gerald noticed a small sulphur-colored cloud sweeping rapidly from the east. It descended: and when it was near to Gerald, it unclosed. Gaston Bulmer then stepped, a bit rheumatically, from its glowing depths, and he laid down a rod of cedar wood tipped with an apple carved in blue-stone. There was not in all this anything in itself astonishing, since Gaston Bulmer was an adept in the arts of which Gerald, in the strange days before he knew that he was a god, had been a student. But to note how Gaston had aged in the last week or so was astounding. Yet Gerald, in any case, was wholly delighted to see again his old friend and preceptor, and a person who had for so long been virtually his father-in-law.

Gaston would not come up to the cottage, though, for dinner, because, as he confessed, he preferred not to encounter Maya. Rather, it was his wish, and it seemed, indeed, to be his errand, to free Gerald from what Gaston Bulmer, surprisingly enough, described as the wise woman’s pernicious magic.

Gerald said: “Oh, bosh! For really now, Gaston, if such nonsense were not heart-breaking it would be side-splitting. I am inexpressibly shocked by your hallucination, which is, I trust, of a most transitory nature. However, let us not discuss my wife, if you please. Instead, do you tell me how my body is faring.”

So they sat down together under the chestnut-tree. And Gaston Bulmer answered, “That body, Gerald, since you quitted it, has become a noted scholar and a man of letters.”

“Ah! ah!” said Gerald, greatly pleased, “so my romance about Dom Manuel of Poictesme has been completed, and is now being admired everywhere!”

“No, for your body has become, just as I said, a scholar. Scholars do not write romances.”

“Yet you referred to a man of letters—?”

“Your body is now a rather famous ethnologist. Your body deals with historical and scientific truths. Your body thus writes large quartos upon topics to which no romance, howsoever indelicate, could afford to devote a sentence.”

Gerald fell to stroking that long chin of his. “Still, I recall that the present informant of my body once informed me there were only two truths of which any science could be certain.”

“And what were these two truths?”

Gerald named them.

Gaston said then: “The demon is consistent. For these two are precisely your body’s scientific specialty. To-day your body writes invaluable books in which the quaint and interesting customs that accompany an interplay of these two truths, and the various substitutes for that interplay, are cataloged and explained, as these customs have existed in all lands and times. Lichfield to-day is wholly proud of the scholarship and the growing fame of Gerald Musgrave.”

“I am glad that my body has turned out so splendidly. And I trust that all goes equally well with your daughter Evelyn?”

“Gerald,” the older man replied, looking more seriously troubled than Gerald ever liked to have anybody seeming in his company, “Gerald, it is an unfair thing that your Cousin Evelyn, without knowing it, should be living upon terms of such close friendship with a demon-haunted body.”

“Ah, so that friendship continues!”

“It continues,” said Gaston, “unaltered. It may interest you, Gerald, by the way, to hear that your Cousin Evelyn has now a son, quite a fine red-headed boy, born just a year after you relinquished your body to that treacherous Sylan.”

Gerald answered affably: “Why, that is perfectly splendid! Frank always wanted a boy.”

“My son-in-law, in fact, is much pleased. It is about my daughter I was thinking. It seemed to me the situation is hardly fair to her, Gerald.”

Gerald replied: “My body is all of me that she was ever acquainted with, Gaston. So I fail to perceive that anything is altered.”

“Yet, when I reflect that a beautiful and accomplished and chaste gentlewoman, Gerald—”

“Ah, ah! But, yes, to be sure! you speak in the time-hallowed terms of Lichfield. And I really do not know why I interrupted you.”

“—When I reflect that, without knowing it, a gentlewoman is living upon terms of such close friendship with a mere demon-haunted body—”

“And is, in fact, trusting and giving all?”

“All her friendship and the natural affection of a kinswoman. Yes, that is a sad spectacle. It is an unsuitable spectacle. So it seems to me your duty as a Musgrave, and as a Southern gentleman, to return forthwith to mortal living and to your mortal obligations, and in particular to the obligations of your life-long friendship with your Cousin Evelyn.”

Gerald said, for the second time, “Oh, bosh!”

For the notions and the chivalrous assumptions of Gaston Bulmer all now appeared to Gerald out of reason, in view of the divine predestination which was upon him. A god had no concern with such slight imbroglios as the code of a merely terrestrial gentleman and the proper maintenance upon Earth of polite adultery. It would, indeed, be positively ill-bred for a Dirghic god to meddle with any of the affairs of a planet which, according to Gerald’s Protestant Episcopal faith, had been created and was controlled by an Episcopalian deity; for Gerald had of course retained, provisionally, that religion in which he was a communicant until he could find out something rather more definite about the religion in which he was a god.

Gerald therefore said: “My good Gaston, that your meaning is excellent, I do not doubt. And it is not your fault of course that, in your merely human condition, you do not quite understand these matters, and certainly cannot view them with an omniscient eye.”

The older man said: “I understand, in any event, that through all these years you have stayed here bewitched with terrible half-magics, and that your own eyes are blinded with the woman’s rose-colored spectacles. And I seek to preserve you.”

“You would preserve me for the provincial life of your little Lichfield! You would make me just another chivalrous, bull-headed, rather nice-looking and wholly stupid Musgrave! In fine, you would urge me to become genteel and to deny my glorious destiny. Yet to do that would be cowardly, Gaston: for, whether I like it or not, there is upon me the divine obligation to fulfill some very ancient prophecies.

“What sort of prophecies are these?”

“They are Dirghic prophecies. But, then? it is not the language in which a prophecy is uttered that matters, rather it is—Well, it is the spirit of the thing! For you must know—although, in view of my wife’s social position, I have compelled her, after some little argument, to introduce me hereabouts as a visiting sorcerer,—yet I may tell you, in strict confidence, Gaston, it is decreed that, as the Lord of the Third Truth, I am to reign in Antan.”

“And who told you any such unlikely nonsense?”

“Some people that I met upon the road. Oh, quite honest looking people, Gaston!”

“And who told you that you were the Lord of any Third Truth?”

“There my authority is unimpeachable. For I had it from the lips of a beautiful and accomplished and chaste gentlewoman, Gaston, who was speaking with all the frankness begotten by our being in bed together at the time.”

“And how can you reign in Antan, or anywhere else, when you do not ever go there? Through all these years, I gather, you have loitered here within a man’s arm’s reach of Antan!”

Gerald said, with the slight frown of one who finds trouble uncongenial: “I am puzzled, my dear friend, by your continued references to all these years. And I admit that various matters have a bit hindered my technical and merely formal entry into my kingdom. Yet I shall be leaving Mispec Moor the instant that this week’s washing is in, on Thursday afternoon—”

“But, my poor Gerald! you will not go, either forward to Antan or back to Lichfield, on what you think to be next Thursday. You have lost here all sense of time, you do not even know that the days you have spent in this place have counted as four years in Lichfield. I tell you that the wise woman, with her half-magics and her accursed spectacles, holds you here bewitched. And I now perceive that nothing whatever can be done for you, who are ensnared by the most fatal of all the magics of the wrinkled goddess.”

—To which Gerald, for the third time, replied: “Oh, bosh! No sorceress has any power over a god. And so completely do you misunderstand my wife, Gaston, that I must tell you hardly a day passes without her urging me to hurry on to Antan.”

Gaston Bulmer was still regarding him with that extraordinary and wholly uncalled-for look of compassion.

“How completely,” he remarked, “she understands you Musgraves! Yes, you are lost, my poor Gerald.”

“—It follows that your notions are preposterous. Oh, that is not your fault, my dear fellow, and not for an instant am I blaming you. Your conduct, from your human point of view, is very right, very friendly, very proper. So your rather laughable blunder does not offend me in the least. And if, as you declare, I have lingered here for some four years as you human beings estimate time, what do four years amount to with an immortal who has at his disposal all eternity? Come now, Gaston, do you but answer me that very simple question!”

But Gaston answered only: “You are content. You are lost.”

34. Ambiguity of the Brown Man

AND Gaston said no more about the matter, because just here their talking was interrupted. For now, as these two still sat at the roadside, they were joined by a brown man, dressed completely in neat brown, who was journeying toward Antan.

“Hail, friend!” said Gerald, “and what business draws you to the city of all marvels?”

And the brown man, pausing, said that, in point of fact, it was upon a slight matter of business routine that he desired to consult with Queen Freydis. All gods, he said, had rather speedily passed downward to encounter the word which was in the beginning,—for it was thus that the brown man spoke, very much as King Solomon had spoken,—all gods, that is, save only one, who so bewilderingly altered his tenets that there was no telling where to have him.

The brown man thought that, nowadays, in a comparatively enlightened nineteenth century, was perhaps the appropriate time for something to be done about this celestial chameleon. And in any case, he said yet further, he always enjoyed his little conferences with Freydis, who was rather a dear—

“So, so!” said Gerald, “you, sir, have previously visited Antan?”

“Oh, very often. For I am the adversary of all the gods of men.”

And Gerald viewed with natural interest the one person who pretended to know at first hand anything about Gerald’s appointed kingdom: yet, even so, if this brown gentleman, as Gerald had begun to suspect, happened to be the Father of All Lies, there was no real point to questioning him, inasmuch as you could believe none of his answers.

“—For, I infer,” said Gerald, “that you who travel on the road of gods and myths are that myth not unfamiliar to my Protestant Episcopal rearing; and that I have now the privilege, so frequently anticipated for me by my nearer relatives, of addressing the devil?”

“I retain of course in every mythology, including the Semitic, my niche,” replied the brown man, “from which to speak to intelligent persons in somewhat varying voices.”

Then Gaston Bulmer arose, and the aging adept shaped a sign which to Gerald was unfamiliar.

“I suspect, sir,” said Gaston Bulmer, “that my mother’s father, who was called Florian de Puysange, once heard the speaking of that voice.”

“It is a tenable hypothesis. I in my day have spoken much.”

“—As did, I believe, yet another forebear of mine, the great Jurgen, from whom descends the race of Puysange, and who once encountered someone rather like you in a Druid wood—”

“I cannot deny it. The Druids also knew me. I, who am the Prince of this world, meet however, as you will readily understand, so many millions of people during the course of my efforts to keep them contented with my kingdom that it is not always possible for me to recollect every one of my beneficiaries.”

“Still,” Gerald said, “you have played in large historical events a strange high part; you have known all the very best people: and you must have much of interest to tell me about. You, sir, at least shall dine with me, since my friend here is obdurate. My wife avoids the usual run of gods, but to devils I have never heard her voice the slightest objection. So, if you will do me the honor to accompany me to my temporary home, in that cottage—”

But the brown man smiled. And he excused himself.

“For your wife and I are not wholly strangers, And the circumstances in which we last parted were, I confess, a bit awkward. So I really believe it would be more pleasant, for everyone concerned, for me not to meet your wife just now. Do you present, none the less, my compliments.”

“And whose compliments shall I tell her that they are?”

“Do you say a friend of her earliest youth passed by, one somewhat intimately known to her before she first became a mother; and I make no doubt that Havvah will understand.’’

“But my wife’s married name is Maya, and before our marriage it was AEsred—”

“Ah, yes!” the brown man said, precisely as Glaum had done, “women do vary in their given names. Do you present my compliments, then, to your wife: for that word, by and by, means the same thing to every husband.”

“I will convey the message,” Gerald promised: “but the aphorism I would prefer to have delivered by somebody else.”

And he so parted with both his guests.

For Gaston Bulmer embraced Gerald and then went sorrowfully back to Lichfield, in a cloud which the aging adept’s despondency made quite black: and the brown man leisurely strolled on toward Antan, with the ease of one who was well used to walking to and fro about the earth.

He did not hurry, nor did he look inquisitively about him, Gerald noticed, as has done the other travelers toward the city of all marvels. The brown man, alone of the many that had passed toward Antan, appeared to travel upon a road with which he was thoroughly acquainted, toward a familiar goal.

35. Of Kalki and a Doppelganger

SO IT was that Gerald stayed yet a while longer upon Mispec Moor. July passed uneventfully. Each pleasant summer day found Gerald sitting beneath his chestnut-tree at the roadside: and he talked there with many wayfarers who have no part in this tale. For almost all these travelers told the same story. Nine out of every ten of them had yesterday been a god whom human beings served; each had been worshipped by mankind in one or another quarter of the world: to-day their human concerns were over, and they journeyed toward the goal of all the gods. What did they look to find there? Gerald would ask: and—to this very simple question,—every one of them replied evasively. They went to hear that word which was in the beginning, and which would be after everything else had perished, that word which was unknown to all the gods of men. They would say no more: and Gerald did not deeply bother about the matter, because he was nowadays quite well contented, and when he went to Antan would soon be clearing up every mystery for himself.

And the divine steed Kalki also appeared content enough, nor was his aspect altered by inaction. The horse retained that uniform strange shining and that metallic glitter which made him seem actually to be made of untarnished silver. Of course when you saw him grazing upon Mispec Moor just after a rain-shower his back would be dark and sleek, and his broad sides would be streaked with wavering, oily-looking bands. But at all other times he kept his glowing silver color, which was unlike that of any other horse Gerald had ever seen.

Meanwhile the divine steed grazed with the geldings who once had been the human lovers of Maya. He went as they did, lifting each hoof with somewhat droll carefulness as he grazed forward on the sloping ground about the cottage. For Gerald would often watch this grazing. And to him these horses as they moved slowly and irregularly windward seemed continually to pick up and to replace their hoofs upon the ground as though they believed each hoof to be a rather fragile parcel. The pendulous, stretched, heavy necks of these horses, each neck staying always monotonously parallel to all the other necks, appeared to him too heavy ever again to be lifted erect. To wonder in the drowsy summer afternoon how this lifting could possibly be achieved aroused an unpleasant sensation in Gerald’s collarbone.

So Kalki fed all day among the geldings, and on windy nights he huddled with them in the lee of the cottage. Each day Kalki went looking downward, grazing interminably, and without ever ceasing to move those wobbling, dark, prehensile, rotatory, snuffling lips as the divine steed fed upon the sparse grass of Mispec Moor. He, just as greedily as the geldings, would contort his lips and twist his head when he attempted to get at the longer and more luscious grass which grew almost inaccessibly about the fence posts. And to reflection there was something of the incongruous in the spectacle of a divine steed engrossed by this problem.

Now and again, as Gerald noted also, the stallion would raise his superb head, and Kalki would look almost wistfully toward Antan. But soon he would be back at his grazing: and, upon the whole, he seemed content enough with the pleasures appropriate to ordinary horses. And Gerald thought too that, nowadays, Kalki looked less often toward the goal of all the gods.

Yet Kalki turned out to be not wholly unique. For, one morning, as Gerald went toward his chestnut-tree, he noted the approach from afar of a traveler who rode upon a horse that had very much the appearance of Kalki. And when Gerald had reached the roadway he saw that the newcomer was in fact mounted upon a steed which might well have been Kalki’s twin.

“Hail, friend!” said Gerald, “And what business draws you to the city of all marvels?”

Then a regrettable thing happened; for the young horseman pretended not to have heard Gerald, and as the boy passed he looked investigatively about Mispec Moor, and he pretended not to have seen Gerald, who stood within a few feet of him.

He was a notably handsome boy, too, in a blue coat and a golden yellow waistcoat, with a tall white stock and ruffles about his throat. His hair seemed red: and Gerald noted, moreover, the lazy and mildly humorous, half-mocking gaze with which this boy regarded Mispec Moor, as he rode by unhurriedly toward Antan, without any pausing, and Gerald noted in particular the very lovely smiling of this boy’s so amply curved and rather womanish mouth, as the boy went by upon the horse which was astonishingly like Kalki.

Yes, he had quite the air of a gentleman: and it was a great pity that this young whippersnapper had not the manners of a gentleman also, Gerald reflected, as Gerald stood there, feeling unwarrantably snubbed, and blinking behind his rose-colored spectacles. .

36. Tannhauser’s Troubled Eyes

AND upon yet another day Gerald talked with the comely but now aged knight Tannhauser, as this famous myth passed by, in full armor, upon his journey into Antan.

“There,” said Tannhauser, “there I may find again, it may be, the fair Dame Venus and all the brave and high-hearted sinners who would not compromise with the narrow and cruel ways of respectable persons.”

“My friend,” said Gerald, mildly, “there is considerable virtue to be found, here and there, among respectable persons. There is even a virtue in compromise.”

And Tannhauser shouted: “That I deny! All my life denies that, and so long as my name lives I am that lie’s denial! For it was the good and the respectable who betrayed me. I found pride and worldliness and a lack of cordiality to exist among the bourgeoisie and even among those professional churchmen who should have been the first to sustain and guide a repentant sinner. And so I turned again to that frankly pagan beauty which is hateful to pious and small-minded persons.”

Then this resplendent gray-haired myth spoke heatedly of his own life history and of how his love for this frankly pagan beauty had led him into the hollow mountain called the Horselberg, to live there as the lover of Dame Venus in all manner of frankly pagan pleasure-seeking; and of how, after seven years of frankly pagan recreations, when repentance smote him, abetted by the frailties of middle age, it was among the leading church members, and in the heart of the very head of the church, that he had found no sympathy. Therefore Tannhauser was returning to those frankly pagan recreations, so far at least as they were consistent with late middle life, because he was disgusted by those whining anti-hypocritical, cruel church members.

And Gerald listened. He remembered how in the Mirror of Caer Omn he for a while had been Tannhauser. Yet it was a queer thing, and a circumstance which made Gerald suspect time to be changing him, somehow, who used to be such a tremendous iconoclast, that now this old rebellious myth,—which represented yet another of Gerald’s discarded personalities,—appeared to Gerald remarkably over-colored and rather pitiably foolish. For here was a story which led to wrong conclusions. It ended by depicting a god at loggerheads with the head of his own church: and it begot, somewhat inevitably, those loud sneers at the bourgeois virtues, and those denunciations of people who, after all, had done nothing worse than to live quiet and common-sense lives which Tannhauser was now declaiming, and which to Gerald appeared unutterably childish. There was no conceivable reason why a well-thought-of pope should be hobnobbing with and coddling a broken-down old lecher just come out of a superior brothel. In fact, in reproving Pope Urban so publicly, Heaven had been, to Gerald’s finding, rather tactless, and had violated the esprit de corps which ought to be preserved among the fellow workers in every church. And in any case, Tannhauser’s present reflections upon religion were not such as Gerald, now that he had become a god, could listen to with approval.

Still, Gerald did listen: and Gerald smiled, friendlily enough.

“I know, I know!” said Gerald. “I know, friend, all about you. When you repented of evil-doing,—and, really, you did take your time about that,—then you turned hopefully to religion, but, alas! you were repelled by its ministers. You found them to be human beings subject to human frailties. You found that—in Heaven’s eyes, anyhow,—even a pope might make a mistake. And so, quite naturally, you proceeded to drown the surprise and horror awakened by this discovery in out-and-out debauchery and in cutting reflections upon all pew-renters. For your discovery was revolutionary; no doubt the stars were shaken in their courses, to observe a human being making a mistake; and you also must have found the spectacle extremely trying. Still, you in this way became useful to romantic art.”

Then Gerald said: “Lord, man, but what a following you have had! and what a number of people have got harmless pleasure out of developing the discovery which Tannhauser first made, that inconsistency and mean-spiritedness may be found among the clergy and the churchgoers! You will thus continue to be a benefactor of your kind for centuries, I have not a doubt. Yet I sometimes fancy that inconsistency and mean-spiritedness may be found even among recognizedly depraved persons who do not go to any church at all. I find that every religion cows a number of its devotees into a thrifty-minded practice of generally beneficent virtues. The average of desirable qualities in the congregation of every church appears to me, after all, quite perceptibly higher than is that average among the regular customers of any brothel or the clients of the public hangman. I do not deny that my discovery also is, from any aesthetic standpoint, revolutionary. I confess that it is nowhere represented in romance, as yet, and that no conceivable realist can ever regard such a grotesque fancy with anything save loathing. But I believe that some day an intrepid handling of this daring theme will prodigally repay some very great innovator, and will become useful to romantic art.”

And Gerald said also: “Moreover, you remain quite invaluable as a pretext and a palliation whenever youth hungers for its fling. Only, I must dare point out, my dear sir, that your second century-long fling was, by the best people, unavoidably, felt to be excessive. All of us, more or less, have had our flings: even so, a fling needs to be conducted, and above all to be wound up, with some discretion. It ought to be high-hearted and lyrical in every feature: it ought especially to have the briefness of the lyric. And it ought not, no, it really ought not, to wind up in the Horselberg. Now I, too, my friend, for example, have had my fling. But I have had it in a quiet, self-controlled and gentlemanly way, without overdoing the thing. Thereafter I settled down,—just temporarily, to be sure, but still I have settled down,—in no lewd and feverish Horselberg, but here, where a contented husband risks no further chance of becoming useful to romantic art.”

“It is possible for one to exist, but not for anybody to live, here!” replied Tannhauser, scornfully, as his wild gaze swept over the still stretches of Mispec Moor.

“Allow me!” said Gerald, with the tiniest of smiles; and he perched his rose-colored spectacles upon the beaked high nose of Tannhauser.

There was a pause. And Tannhauser sighed.

“I see,” said the knight then, “a quiet little home of your own, in the country, with your wife and with the kiddies, too, I daresay. And with fresh vegetables, of course, right out of your own garden.”

“In just such a home, Messire Tannhauser, as is the cornerstone of every nation, the cradle of all the virtues, and the guiding-star of I forget precisely what. It is also the brightest jewel in the crown of something or other, and it assists other desirable abstractions in the capacity of a bulwark, a spur, and an anchor. It is, you may depend upon it, the proper place in which to end one’s fling.”

“And I! I might, if only I had married that dear fine sweet girl Elizabeth, I, too, might have had such a home! For, after all, there is nothing like marriage and the love of a good woman. An endless round of perpetual pleasure-seeking rings hollow by and by, and one hungers for the simple sacred joys of home life. I must, oh, very decidedly, I must settle down. I, too, must have just such a home as this.”

But the thought of all which he had been missing so affected Tannhauser that he took off the spectacles and unaffectedly wiped his eyes. After that the aging, comely knight sat for a while silent and rather frightened looking. He stared again at the cottage and at the moor, and then he stared at Gerald.

“And you live in this hole, with a muddy brat and a dull-witted, middle-aged, not at all good-looking woman for your only company! I marvel at the enchantment which controls you. At least Dame Venus held me with an intelligible sort of sorcery.”

“That,” Gerald replied, as he contentedly put on his rose-colored spectacles again, “is nonsense.”

“It is a very dreadful nonsense. It is a soul-destroying and besotting nonsense, from which I flee to look for the less terrible enchantments of the Horselberg.”

Then Gerald put his question. “You, who have traveled through the Marches of Antan, wherein only two truths endure, and the one teaching is that we copulate and die,—do you not look to find in the goal of all the gods some third truth?”

But the comely knight seemed not to have heard this question, in his frank terror of domesticity. Tannhauser had mounted his horse, and he now rode galloping like a madman toward Antan.

37. Contentment of the Mislaid God

NOW life contented Gerald as he lived it through this recognized parenthesis in his divine career. Very soon this little episode of his stay upon Mispec Moor would be ended: it would even be forgotten, perhaps, in the press of regal and superhuman affairs. Meanwhile he lived in quite tolerable ease. He had nothing to trouble him. Hardly a morning passed without his finding some more or less interesting celestial outcast to talk to under his chestnut-tree. Maya continued to be an excellent cook, in her plain, unpretentious way: and she saw to it that the cottage was kept comfortable and efficient in all appointments.

And Maya was dear to him. She nowadays found fault with virtually everything that Gerald did. And whenever he ventured any suggestion, as to Theodorick or the economics of the cottage or their social engagements in Turoine,—or even if Gerald as much as suggested opening or closing a window,—Maya at once produced at least nine grounds upon which the suggestion was plainly very foolish and would never have occurred to anyone of real intelligence. And she cherished the most imaginative views as to the extent of Gerald’s selfishness and lack of consideration for other people, and of his habit of never doing anything whatever for her pleasure.

Sometimes, though, she would go for as much as an hour without dwelling, at especial length, upon what a trial Gerald was to her in one way or another. And in all respects she was a capable woman who made him an excellent wife, and treated him far better than she could have found any excuse for doing in what she said about him.

And Gerald loved Theodorick Quentin Musgrave, also, with an affection which rather troubled Gerald. The child, he knew, displayed no extraordinary charm nor talent: no course of reasoning could justify any extreme fondness for Theodorick upon the ground of his physical or mental gifts. Theodorick Quentin Musgrave was not brilliant, he was not lovely, he was not especially amiable: he was, indeed, by way of being a particularly selfish small tyrant, continually adding to the disorder of the cottage, to the dismay of Gerald’s finicky liking for neatness, and continually devising unneeded trouble and commandeering manual tasks from his parents because of the droll pleasure which Theodorick appeared to derive from seeing his parents fetch and carry in his service.

Yet, whensoever Gerald put his arm about the small, warm, yielding, sturdy, but so helpless body, it was as though Gerald’s own body were melting in a grateful glow of what was—bewilderingly—a sort of panic terror. He loved this freckled, fragile creature with an unwisdom which was, as Gerald knew, an assuredness of more or less future discomfort and, it well might be, of anguish, for him who quite honestly disliked trouble of any kind. Since this child had been created, Gerald’s well-being was not any longer a matter which Gerald could hope to control or even to protect: his happiness was now risked upon what might befall this imp. It was the helplessness of the child which frightened Gerald with a sense of his own helplessness. Life was so cruel to children. Life damaged and hurt children in so many ways inevitably. And every hurt to this child, now, would be an anguish to Gerald, who could avoid none of them. He could not even manage to get the child properly christened, in this neighborhood so profuse in sorcerers and wizards, who used, as everybody knew, unchristened children in horrible ways which it was not comfortable to think about.....

Then, too, Gerald was not certain Theodorick Quentin Musgrave was real. Gerald remembered always, at the back of his mind, that frightful instant when he had removed his spectacles, to find the child had vanished. Gerald assured himself that the cause was a slight indigestion, and that the moment’s blur of vision came from a disordered stomach. But he was wholly careful not ever again to look at Theodorick except through the rose-colored spectacles which made visible the magics of Maya. He kept resolutely out of his full attention the fact that Theodorick might be an illusion which Maya had created. And he grew accustomed to that unusual milk-colored tongue, which showed like a white snake within the red moist little mouth whenever the child laughed.

And Gerald sometimes wondered if Maya had over-ambitiously designed to make permanent this mere parenthesis in his career. She had attempted, to be sure, no magic such as that with which she had transformed his predecessors. No sorceress would dare, for that matter, thus to presume against a god.... Gerald knew that, instead, it was his Maya’s wholesome simplicity and the prosaic human comfort which he did get, after all, from living with this middle-aged and fault-finding and not in the least beautiful woman that had detained him, just for the while of this parenthesis in his career. He of course would pass on, to enter into his kingdom, by and by. And there was no conceivable hurry about it, now that his journeying to Antan was for every practical purpose finished, and now that whensoever he elected he might within the next half-hour or so be taking over the realm and all the powers of the Master Philologist.

Meanwhile, though, Gerald would now and then wonder amusedly if his dear, stupid Maya could perhaps have struck upon the device of detaining him by not using any magic whatever: if she in secret flattered herself that this device was succeeding: and if she actually cherished the delusion that she was hoodwinking omniscient Fair-haired Hoo, the Helper and Preserver, the Lord of the Third Truth, the Well-beloved of Heavenly Ones?

Anyhow, his life here very amiably contented him for the while. The local circles of sorcerers and wizards were pleasant enough, barring only that haunting memory as to how they used unchristened children. Gerald and Maya did not go out a great deal; but they were on friendly terms with the Neighbors; they attended an occasional Sabbat; and they kept in touch generally with the affairs of Turoine. And for the rest, the little happenings of his home life temporarily contented the Lord of the Third Truth.

And he began to reflect that, just possibly, Antan might be to him, after he had entered into his kingdom, a disappointment. From here Antan seemed uniformly wonderful. It was astonishingly pleasant to sit upon the western porch of the small cottage, especially toward evening, when your shoes propped up before you on the porch railing reflected a pinkish glow from the sunset, and to imagine what was going on in that broad expanse of yet unvisited fields and hills which now were turning into gray and purple mists directly beneath the gold and crimson of the sunset. The trouble was that you, who were gifted with the imagination of a god, were very certainly imagining more wonderful happenings for that mysterious theatre than could by any chance be enacted there.

For one matter, after dark, Antan always displayed eight lights, six of them grouped together in the middle of the vista with the general effect of a cross, and the other two showing much farther off to the northwest. About those never-varying huge lights Gerald had formed at least twenty delightful theories, all plausible as long as you remained upon Mispec Moor, whereas if you went to Antan not more at most than one of these theories could prove true.

To go to Antan thus meant the destruction of no less than nineteen rather beautiful ideas as to those lights alone. However, Gerald felt, there was no help for this: and he whole-heartedly meant to take over his appointed kingdom without any unpleasant criticizing, no matter what might be the deficiencies of the place, by and by. Meanwhile, there was no great hurry: and it was, indeed, a prudent and longsighted course for him to be pausing here to enjoy these fine scenic effects, because by and by he would not ever again be seeing Antan from this distance.

After nightfall those eight lights never varied. But by day there was always a different and, as it seemed, a more lovely display of rounded, particolored, cleared hills, which here and there were darklier streaked, no doubt with orchards. Beyond them many flat-topped mountains showed, yet farther to the west, like a sleeping herd of gigantic blue crocodiles all couched across the west and facing north. And above so much terrestrial graciousness moved an incessant pageant of clouds, not a bit like the flat clouds which you looked up at from Lichfield, because the clouds which brooded over Antan were seen, from Gerald’s station upon Mispec Moor, as on a level with you: and, when they were thus considered sidewise, they resembled moving walls and crags and drifting curtains through which the sun-light smote in slanting and huge and pallid and quite tangible looking shafts.

Always, too, you noticed, nowadays, that vast and violet-shrouded, high-breasted woman’s figure lying yonder, motionless, with that ever-burning heart; and you were visited by an odd fancy. You fancied that Queen Freydis, the as yet unwon-to queen of your appointed kingdom, was like that woman. And this fancy came to you none the less often because of your plain perception of its illogic.

“Come, now!” said Gerald, “a mistress of that size would be unsuitable. Charms of so diffuse an acreage would create, even in a god, a sense of inadequacy. Nevertheless, I am falling rather ardently in love with those two hills. I begin to adore the casual play of lights and shadows upon yonder piled-up dirt, which when seen from any other station than this would not in the least resemble a woman. And such amorous notions, apart from their insanity, are not befitting in a contentedly, if temporarily, married person.”

The transience of his comforts made them very dear. It was well worth the inconvenience of sleeping in his spectacles (as Gerald, for his own reasons, did) so that in the night season he could awaken, to see Maya’s tranquil brown head yonder beside the smaller and tousled and livelily red head of Theodorick Quentin Musgrave,—both visible yonder because of the lamp which the child demanded at night, and because of his insistence that Mother was to sleep with him instead of with Father.

Outside, Gerald would hear those of his transformed predecessors who now were horses, shuffling and restively stamping, and at times snorting and whinnying, in the chill outer darkness; or a misguided gentleman who lived nowadays as a steer would low, much farther off; or Gerald would hear yet another one of Maya’s former husbands coughing, with the far-reaching and morose scornfulness peculiar to a sheep. And then the difference between the estate of Gerald’s predecessors and the snug warmth of his so comfortable soft bed, and his knowledge of that un-marred bodily ease which, just now, was his through every hour of the day, would trouble Gerald, because he knew it all to be so satisfying and so transient.

PART TEN THE BOOK OF ENDINGS

38. About the Past of a Bishop

“Trust nobody but thyself, and none other will betray thee.”

SO GERALD stayed content enough, all through those pleasant summer days. It was odd to reflect that these days were counting as he did not know how many years in Lichfield. He would now and then contrast himself with his great ancestor Dom Manuel, the same about whom, in that quaint far-off time when Gerald had believed himself merely human, and was interested in such human nonsense, Gerald had intended to write a romance,—because the Redeemer of Poictesme, as Gerald remembered it, had passed a month with the wood demon Beda, in the forest of Dun Vlechlan, where the company consisted entirely of evil principles, and where the passing of each day left Manuel a year older.

Gerald would reflect how much more sensible and pleasant was the course which he was following, surrounded with every domestic virtue, where the days did not count at all. For Gerald was content, and certainly he had grown no older in body. He had become used to living upon Mispec Moor: he wondered sometimes if Antan could afford any splendor which he personally would find more to his taste; and he felt that he would honestly miss the simple wholesome ways of Maya’s log and plaster cottage after he had entered forever into the red-pillared palace of his kingdom beyond good and evil,—next week, perhaps, or at all events not later than September.

And it stayed diverting to observe those persons who almost every day passed beyond Mispec Moor in their journeying toward the goal of all the gods of men. Then by and by one of these wayfarers turned out to be a stalwart, white-bearded old gentleman dressed as a bishop. And the sight of him delighted Gerald: for here at last was somebody who could properly christen Theodorick Quentin Musgrave.

Meanwhile this traveler was asking hospitality of Maya. She, who disliked travelers, prepared the white and tender flesh of a calf, she kneaded cakes of fine meal and baked them upon the hearth, she fetched milk and butter. All these she set before the seeming bishop upon the front porch of her cottage quite affably. For this old gentleman, it appeared, had known Maya of the Fair Breasts a great while ago, at the very beginning of a career confessedly so populous in husbands that Gerald always felt a certain delicacy in asking questions about it.

“But there was never any reasoning with you, my dear,” said the old gentleman, as they all ate amicably together upon the porch. “So you eluded my purpose, and you preferred to content that first man of yours for his loss of the over-willful beauty and the rebellious wisdom of your predecessor—”

Maya replied: “I do wish you would try just one more of those cakes, for I made them myself, exactly as you used to like them in the plains of Mamre, when you were up to your nonsense with Sarah. Yes, I believe that a girl, a really nice girl, that is, should keep her caresses for her husband. Oh, I am casting no reflections upon either of your sweethearts. It is a matter every woman must decide for herself. I merely say that, for my part, I think a love-affair with a god while he is still in power is ostentatious and can only end in unhappiness—”

“But—!” Gerald had begun indignantly.

She patted his hand. “No, Gerald, I did not mean you. Your power is limitless, and you are quite different from all other gods, and nobody knows that better than I do. So please do not start any pouting while we have company! He thinks that he is a god, too,” Maya then stated, casually, to her visitor. “That is why his feelings are upset. He believes he is the Fair-haired Hoodoo, the Helper and the Pretender, or something of that sort. As for that woman, Adam was very lucky to get rid of her.”

“I wonder,” said the white-bearded gentleman, smiling reminiscently, “I wonder if he always thought so?”

“My dear old friend! but you and I know quite well what the creatures are! Of course he cherished the memory of her for the rest of his life, long after the worthless piece had gone, just literally, to the devil. She was not bad looking: that much, anyhow, one can say in her favor: and so the poor fellow had always his memories of that beauty which he had known, once. He used to say it was too lovely to be retained by any man. And I agreed with him. No man had the least chance, with infernal connoisseurs about.... And his sons,” said Maya, as she reflectively scratched at her nose, “have, somehow, all preserved that memory. There is no one of them but now and then finds my daughters rather inadequate, and half remembers that woman and gets lackadaisical over her. It is just another thing about the creatures which my daughters have to put up with.”

“She too is yonder, they tell me,”—and the old gentleman nodded toward Antan. Then he continued:” And I suspect there is no one of your daughters but is jealous of this ever-living memory of that Lilith who stays always the first, never quite forgotten love of every son of Adam; and who prevents more of them than you would care to acknowledge, my dear, from ever utterly giving over their hearts to any of your daughters.”

“We are jealous, within limits,” Maya replied, in the while that she hospitably refilled his glass with fresh milk. “No woman likes playing second fiddle, even in the moonstruck brain of a poet. Yet my daughters know it does no real harm. And if men were not up to something, they would be up to something else. Besides, it gives them their nonsense to be romantic over in private, without pestering their poor sweethearts, and their wives too, at first, to be romantic along with them, which is a thing no nice woman really feels comfortable about—”

But the old gentleman had sighed. “You touch upon a somewhat harrowing subject. For I fancy that no other luckless being has ever had to cater to the shifting needs of popular romance so arduously or so variously as I.”

And Maya now was beaming upon him quite fondly. “Yes, but how clever you have been about it! In fact, I suppose that nobody anywhere has ever had a more wonderful career than yours. And it seems only yesterday—does it not?—that we were all young together in the Garden, and your reputation was merely local. But you Jews are so adaptable!”

“I was not even a Jew, my dear, to begin with. Perhaps that is why I never quite got on with them. I was a storm deity of the Midianites. But the Jews kidnapped me, in some way or another, when I was just a godling playing happily with my thunderbolts upon the flanks of Sinai.”

“Even so, when I think of what a position you have attained in the best Christian circles, and of the perfect respectability of the church to which you now belong, and of all the splendid poetry you have inspired, and of how generally famous you have become everywhere, I am wholly proud that you once, when we were both younger”—and Gerald saw that Maya had colored up rather prettily,—“had other plans for me.”

“You,” said the old gentleman,—who, as Gerald now observed, was really quite Jewish looking,—“were the first of my disappointments. Yes, I suppose that in many respects my career has been unusual. Yet it has ended by placing me in a most awkward position: and nothing ever turned out in accordance with my plans, somehow.”

Then the stalwart, white-bearded old gentleman who was dressed as a bishop spoke of his first family, and of how his descendants through a son named Isaac went astray. He spoke of his efforts to retain the affection of his family, through the vigorous methods appropriate to a storm god. But nothing had seemed to avail. There had been fine plagues and deluges and captivities and decimations and devastating miracles by the score. He had sent the swords of Babylon and of Philistia and of dozens of other kingdoms to slay them, and huge dogs to tear their corpses, and many birds of prey and all the wild beasts of earth to devour and to destroy them, without arousing one ray of real affection. He had laid waste their cities; he had made their widows as the sands of the sea; he had starved them, and had smitten them with leprosy, and had burned them with lightnings; he had afflicted them with the most voluble and pessimistic prophets: he had, in a word, done absolutely everything he could think of as likely to requicken their waning affection. But the more he annoyed his descendants, the less they had seemed really to love him. Upon the heels of every warning, and immediately after each paternal correction, the survivors of it seemed only the more inclined to prefer some other patron: and it was all very discouraging.

And of his second son he spoke also. Here he became remarkably vague, and he talked as if muddled by the whole affair. There had been a great sacrifice and an atonement, the workings of which the old gentleman could not pretend to understand. He could not yet say just who had been put in a more amiable frame of mind by that atonement, since personally he imagined any father would have found it most distasteful and upsetting. Anyhow, the affair had resulted in a church with which he had felt it rather his duty to associate himself. And, awkwardly enough, after he had thus been persuaded by them formally to commit himself to a policy of peace and forgiveness and general loving-kindness, his incomprehensible servants had gone on squabbling and murdering, only much more often than before, because now they did it on high moral grounds. They had fought over transubstantiation, and over Greek diphthongs, and over the respective merits of complete and frontal baptism, and over infant damnation, and over redemption through faith alone, and over a number of other recondite matters which no Arabian storm god, very simply reared in the country during the really formative years of his life, and with no regular academic training, could well be expected to understand: and it was all very discouraging.

Nor to-day was his position much happier. He found himself ranked rather high in the church with which he was associated professionally. Yes, the old gentleman admitted, with plain bewilderment, his name was honored. But all his actions—even such quite notable actions as holding a conference with his disciples in a fiery furnace, and affording his messengers inter-urban transportation by means of a whale, and of causing the sun itself to stand still,—all these fine exploits, along with his every natural exhibition of the irascibility and truculence appropriate to a storm god, had been reduced to poetic inventions. His very existence had been complicated with a triplicity which, since the mind could not grasp it, prevented his existence from being, actually, believed in by anybody. That had seemed, from the first moment he heard of it, a doctrine a bit difficult for him personally to accept, after having been an undivided deity in regular practice for so many thousands of years. And eighteen centuries of pondering upon that doctrine of his triune nature, to which he was through his official position committed, had showed a matter so abstruse and puzzling to be far beyond the comprehension of any country-bred Arabian storm god, howsoever faithfully he had broadened his mind, at the courts of various Christian monarchs and in the larger nunneries, since the commencement of his religious training among the farming element of Seir and Sinai. Nor could he honestly say that he had ever been able to take quite kindly to the notion that his being was confessedly a mystery not to be understood by prelates graduated from the best seminaries, and that his actions were all poetic inventions. For that left of him, so far as could be seen by a plain-thinking Arabian storm god, nothing which the human mind could grasp as an actuality; it made every one of his really thorough-going servants who accepted utterly the teachings of his church, so far as he could infer, a devotee of vacuousness: and it was all very discouraging.

“Altogether,” said the old gentleman who was dressed as a bishop, “I feel that my present ranking in the Christian church is a perplexing and, in some sense, a false position for an Arabian storm god. I have aged under it. Oh, I have tried to be quite fair about the matter. Sometimes I even go so far as to concede that people who have never met a particular person might, just possibly, believe that person to be three persons whose actions were all poetic inventions. The human imagination is vigorous. I must point out to you, though, my friends, that nobody could conceivably believe that about himself. These very curious theories about me thus postulate the existence of at least one sceptic, and they hinge indeed upon the existence of that sceptic, in me. Now, I feel instinctively there must be an error in any such logic. I feel it unfair that I alone of all the persons connected with my church should be inevitably doomed to remain an atheist. And I have aged steadily under the injustice and unreason of it all. Otherwise, if I yet retained the vigor of my youth, I might yet, in my frank way, attempt to clean the slate, as it were, with whirlwinds and thunderbolts and another deluge or so, and to make a fresh start all around. But, alas, I have aged, my dear Havvah, since the days of our first acquaintance. The inexplicable theology and the rationalization, as they call it, to which I have been subjected by my incomprehensible servants, now for some eighteen centuries with ever increasing rigor, have brought me to the point that I cannot logically believe in my own existence. The things they tell me simply do not hold together. And so—”

He comprehensively waved his hand toward Antan.

But Gerald rose, and Gerald put aside his glass of milk and his veal sandwich.

And Gerald said, beamingly: “You who have traveled through the Marches of Antan, wherein only two truths endure, and the one teaching is that we copulate and die,—you at least, I know, must, as a leading official of the Protestant Episcopal church, look confidently forward to finding in the goal of all the gods a third truth. The fact emboldens me to ask that you do but answer me this very simple question—”

“Alas, my friend,” the badgered looking old gentleman broke in, “professionally, of course, my faith is all that it should be. But in my private capacity, as a plain-thinking Arabian storm god, now that I am retiring from active churchwork, I suspect that when anybody anywhere once understands the nature of any two truths, that will be quite time enough for him to be requiring a third truth to exercise his wits upon.”

“That truism, sir, is not to be denied,” said Gerald, rather crestfallen. “Yet that is likewise an evasion.”

“In fact,” said the bewildered old gentleman, shaking sadly his white head, “in fact, ever since I acquired triplicity, I have been accused of duplicity also. The Gnostics, I remember, said very unkind things about that: the Valentinians were no more charitable: whereas I would really hesitate to repeat, my friends, the remarks of the Priscillianists.”

“—And in any case,” Gerald said, emphatically, “howsoever you may evade me, it would not do for you to evade your duties to the Protestant Episcopal church. The world as yet has need of bishops and all that they signify. I must point out to you, sir, the wild talking of bishops yet frightens many sons into a thrifty-minded practice of generally beneficent virtues. Indeed, sir, bishops remind rather of calomel in the effect which they have upon the run of men, because I find their effect also to be, ultimately, beneficial. There are also other points of resemblance. And if the strange ways of episcopal action now and then unavoidably upset you, sir, you ought to remember that it is, after all, for the general good. I, moreover, must point out that it absolutely would not do for you to go into Antan and be one of my subjects—”

“He thinks,” Maya once more explained, parenthetically, to her guest, “that he is a god, you understand.”

“But I am!” said Gerald. “These continual interruptions are really very awkward, my dear. And the present situation also is awkward, in view of Protestant Episcopal upbringing. It is a situation which must at any cost be avoided. This gentleman simply must not go into Antan.”

“But what is to be done about it?”

“Oh, do you not be uneasy! Your age, sir, and its attendant delusions, such as wanting to go into Antan, are matters quite easily remedied by any competent Dirghic deity. You could not possibly have pursued a wiser course than to come to me for assistance. So, if you will permit me, sir—”

Thereafter Gerald, still in something of a flutter, baptized the old gentleman who was dressed as a bishop with the last remaining drop of water from the Churning of the Ocean.

39. Baptism of a Musgrave

FORTHWITH the old white-bearded gentleman became a most personable looking youngish Oriental, who shone with a fiery radiance, and about whose head played a continual flashing like small lightnings. And he said, approvingly:

“That is a fine magic which has restored to me my youth and the vigorousness I had in Midian before I was kidnapped by those stiff-necked and affectionate Jews.”

“And will you now be going into Antan?” asked Gerald, rather anxiously.

“Not yet, my friend,” replied the merry, strong, young Arabian storm god. “Oh, very certainly, not yet! No, I have had quite enough of my illogical position as a Christian and of the worries of being rationalized by incomprehensible foreigners. I shall thankfully return to my Midianites and to my little shrines upon Seir and Sinai and Horeb, and to the quiet living of a local godling. I shall be hearing again my own people’s sane and intelligible prayers for rain, and I shall be snuffing up the smoke of such rational offerings as kids and goats and an occasional prisoner of war, just as I used to do, where I was given due credit for my actions, and where you heard no unpleasant personal scandal circulated about my being triplets. In the meanwhile, my benefactor, is there not any favor which, in my turn, I can do you?”

“Indeed, my dear sir,” Gerald answered, harking back to that worriment which in a neighborhood so full of sorcerers and wizards stayed always in the rear of Gerald’s mind, “there is a small one, now you mention it. For we have a boy, as you perceive. And it occurs to me that this is the first chance to have Theodorick Quentin Musgrave properly christened according to the rites of the Protestant Episcopal church—”

The storm god asked of Gerald, in good-humored surprise. “But do I now look to you much like an Episcopalian clergyman?”

“Well, sir, I admit the situation is perplexing. Nevertheless, you remain, so far as I can see, one of the three official heads of the Christian church, in every denomination. And as such, you must be wholly competent to administer the sacred rites of that baptism to which we Musgraves are accustomed.”

He who had been a bishop laughed again. For an instant he glanced sidewise at Maya, rather impishly. Then the god called to him Theodorick Quentin Musgrave.

The boy came forward without speaking. There had never been any dearer brat since time began, Gerald reflected, than was this sturdy droll redheaded jackanapes who waited there holding his small chin well up in order to look with politely puzzled interest at the storm god’s glittering face and the tiny lightnings which played about it. Gerald was abeam with the most fatuous sort of pride in Theodorick’s perfect behavior. Gerald glowed all over, now that awkward matter of the boy’s christening was being at last attended to, by the very highest authority. And Gerald nodded smilingly and with some inconsequence at his dear stupid Maya, so that she too might note how splendidly Theodorick was behaving. The boy was displaying the composure and the excellent manners of a true Musgrave.

Then the storm god dipped his fingers in his unfinished glass of milk, and upon Theodorick’s lifted forehead he drew a sign. Gerald was not wholly certain, afterward, that it was the sign of a cross.

“This is another sort of baptism than that which restored my youth. For youth this child already has,—to every seeming,” the god said, a bit unaccountably. “Therefore I now release this child whom I did not create, I release him from the bondage of the woman and of the Adversary who caused him to live upon this earth. I decree a forgiveness for the seven crimes. I cry a remission of the seven punishments.”

“I must say, though, you have been long enough about it,” Maya placidly observed.....

As for Gerald, now that the ceremony was over, he was unaffectedly hugging Theodorick, and telling him that he was far too big a boy to be kissing people, and the vaguely puzzled, clinging child was asking, But who started it, Father? ...

And the storm god was saying to Maya, “Do you forget, my dear Havvah, that it is from your service I am releasing him?”

She answered, still quite placidly: “So far as that goes, the imp has well earned a holiday; and it is not as if I were dependent upon him. No, but I confess to wondering—and not for the first time, either,—just what you may be up to.”

40. On the Turn of a Leaf

SO THE Oriental storm god went back into the world of everyday, to look for his old shrines upon Sinai and Horeb: and Gerald was happily rid of a future subject whom, he could not but feel, it would have been a bit awkward to have as a subject. And the evening passed tranquilly, although it seemed to Gerald that Theodorick was rather moody and quiet after his christening.

But it was not until the next day that Theodorick, just after breakfast, spoke with a voice which seemed to Gerald not quite the voice of a child: and Theodorick told his parents he wanted to go down into Antan.

Gerald was troubled. Yet he suggested, with very careful levity, “If—?”

“If you please,” the but half-smiling, ugly, so dear brat now added, docilely.

“Why, it must be as your father says,” Maya replied. She had paused in her sweeping off of the porch, and for a moment she held the broom slantwise as she meditated over the boy’s notion. “But, for one, I see no great harm in your having a little outing, for I will put a protection on you. Only, you must promise to be back in good time to have your face and hands washed for supper.”

Gerald said forlornly, “But what are those small yellow things you are sweeping from the porch, my dear?”

“They are fallen leaves from a sycamore-tree, left here last night by that wind, Gerald: and I really do wish you would not ask such silly questions, when I was talking about something quite different.”

“But that means summer is ending, Maya. It means an end of all growing. It means that not anything now will become any larger or more lovely.”

“Upon my word, but I never did hear of any such nonsense as you do talk sometimes, for a grown man, Gerald, as if summer did not always end!”

“That is it, precisely. It always ends: and the warmth and comfort of it perish. Yes, there is death in the air. I do not find that cheering. And that is all, my darling.”

“Why, then, Gerald, if you are quite through with that up-in-the-air sort of talking—which may be very deep and clever indeed, only I happen not to understand it, and certainly have no wish to,—why, then, I was asking you about something entirely different.”

“Oh, yes, you were speaking of Theodorick! Well, boys do get restless without any playmates, I suppose. I will talk to him about his notion while you are making up the beds.”

Nothing could have been more prosaic. Yet Gerald was troubled. He could hear Maya inside the cottage, already thumping at the pillows. All about him seemed matter of fact, and comfortable, and familiar, and stable. And yet everything, as he somehow knew, was about to change. There awoke in him as yet no real unhappiness, but just a faint uneasiness mixed with resentment, now that he noted the fall of the first leaf in autumn, and knew he was powerless to stay the beginning change in everything about his small, snug home.

41. Child of All Fathers

THEN Gerald followed the child down to the roadside. And they talked together under the chestnut-tree, just where Gerald had talked with so many strange beings who had passed beyond Mispec Moor in that continuous journeying toward Antan.

First Gerald performed that needful rite which would reveal the truth. The child watched quietly. By and by Theodorick began to smile. But he said never a word until his father was through with these droll doings.

Then Gerald questioned his small son. Theodorick replied. The appearance of a little child still sat there, and the soft red lips of a child were moving, but that curious tongue which was like a small white serpent was speaking about matters never known to any child.

No one of Gerald’s excursions into the darker magics had prepared him for what was now in part revealed. Something of the spaces outside the world apparent to human senses Gerald knew, and of the realms beyond Earth’s orbit he, as a former student of magic, was not ignorant. But now he understood from what remote abyss his wife had drawn the being which seemed his child: a bit unwillingly, he could even surmise with what kind of enchantments Maya had fetched this seeming into the happier superficial world which is apparent to human senses.

And Gerald was moved: he was, as so many husbands have been, before and since, now almost frightened by this glimpse of the unswerving and wholehearted and unscrupulous love which women nourish for that man whom marriage has given them to look after. He was not worthy, he contritely felt, of being thus idolized and of being coddled at the fearful price of such unearthly indiscretions. And Gerald was sincerely touched, now that he comprehended to what lengths Maya had gone to gratify his whim of wanting a son, out of hand. She had warned him, too, that he was contriving for himself grief. Yes, her womanly intuition had, somehow, foreseen that to which all his cleverness had been blind. And yet, even so, Maya had not denied him his desire, because poor Maya pampered him in everything, to the accompaniment of a commentary howsoever tart.

And Gerald thought too of how, a moment since, his worst dread had been that the boy was an illusion. He looked at his beloved son, knowing now what inhabited that freckled and droll, sturdy little body. The boy had of a sudden become strange; he was now a threat of unimaginable danger, and a creature worse than evil: yet Gerald knew, with a dull wonder, that he loved Theodorick Quentin Musgrave even now.....

Gerald by and by put yet another question to this dreadful parody of a child’s innocence and helplessness, to the being whom Gerald invoked as Abdel-Hareth.

“But I have served her purpose,—my father,” the child replied, with a rather perturbing smile. “Oh, but I know! She has had many husbands. Most of them desired a son. I have always been that son.” Then, after an instant of silence, the being who was speaking through the child’s dear lips told of the bonds from which the Midianite storm god’s touch and absolution had released him. Gerald found this part of the story particularly unpleasant. And Theodorick Quentin Musgrave, whom Gerald still addressed as Abdel-Hareth, went on to tell why he must now go downward into Antan, to encounter, not the Master Philologist, but Queen Freydis. Gerald asked, What was needed of Queen Freydis?

The child told him. Then Gerald shivered. He felt, if only for the instant, physically cold and nauseated. Still, that this creature should desire to return to its unearthly home was natural enough.

“I comprehend,” said Gerald. “I comprehend a great deal which was unknown to me ten minutes ago. I confess to being surprised by much that I have learned from you. Nevertheless, my son,—if you will pardon the force of habit, sir, and the love I had for my own little, so dear son—! But I drift into emotional remarks which would be wholly out of place. My voice, as I note with sincere regret, evinces a distressing tendency—”

Gerald paused. He gulped. He spoke now in a voice that was light and high-pitched and rather hysterical.

“In fine, my dear Abdel-Hareth, as you see, I incline somewhat to blubber like a badly whipped baby. I can but ask you to respect the emotions of a suddenly bereaved parent, without bothering to understand his confused utterances. No: you have given me my desire, and my great happiness. A part of that dies now. But I have had it, utterly. I am content I will see to it that you, in your turn, sir, get what you desire.”

42. Theodorick Rides Forth

IT WAS after using his handkerchief a bit that Gerald returned to Maya. Nor did it surprise him she had already prepared a neatly wrapped up lunch for Theodorick Quentin Musgrave to be eating that day in Antan.

Gerald said, with painstaking carelessness, “Well, my dear, after talking the matter over, I have decided we may as well let the boy go.”

“Why, to be sure!” said Maya. “And a great deal of bother, too, there has been made this morning over nothing, as if I did not already have quite enough to bother me!”

And with that, she summoned from among her enchanted geldings the handsomer of the pair who formerly had been emperors.

“For a child of mine must go in proper state,” said Maya.

Then Gerald said: “No. An imperial steed is well enough, but a divine steed is better. Let him take Kalki!”

“Now, really, Gerald, your unreasonableness sometimes surprises even me! For you know perfectly well that Kalki is your own horse, and that you will be needing him yourself when you ride down to the appointed kingdom you are always talking your stuff and nonsense about.”

Gerald looked at her for some while. He was conscious of a hushed great exultation that in a world wherein all else seemed doubtful and unstable he had, somehow, through blind luck, won to his Maya and her snappishness and her unswerving and wholehearted and quite unscrupulous love for him. She was not pretty, she was not brilliant, she was not even easy to live with. But Gerald knew now that he and this woman were one person; and that any living without Maya would be a maimed business; and that there could be nothing in Antan which could conceivably content him for the loss of this dear, ever-wrangling, dull-witted woman.

Then Gerald said: “But it is prophesied that the power of Antan shall pass to the rider upon Kalki. No harm can befall the rider upon Kalki. So we will let—we will let our son take Kalki. For in this way we will secure his protection, and we will remove the one chance of my ever leaving you, who are worth all the kingdoms that have ever been.”

Maya said, “But—”

Gerald, smiling, replied, “Nevertheless!” Then the illusion called Theodorick Quentin Musgrave was lifted up by Gerald to the back of Kalki, and it was Gerald who adjusted the stirrups for his successor upon the divine steed. And the seeming of a child rode down toward the goal of all the gods, a rather quaintly pathetic little figure perched up there so high upon the back of the huge shining stallion.

Gerald watched the two pass out of his sight. His arms lifted after them ever so slightly. His arms seemed to ache as he recalled the feel of that small body and the warmth and yieldingness of it, which were now lost forever. Theodorick Quentin Musgrave was only an illusion contrived by forces which it was not comfortable to think about. Gerald knew that now with certainty. And it did not matter. Nor did it cheer him to reflect—as he did,—that he was in no worse case than all other fathers, no one of whom might ever retain the child that was little and helpless, and was loved for no reason at all, as nobody could quite love the hobbledehoy thumping schoolboy or even the estimable young man into whom that warm and yielding, sturdy, so small body might develop.....

Then Gerald turned to Maya. “I have only you. But that which I have suffices me. I have been lucky, O my dearest, very far beyond my merits.”

She was regarding him with a sort of troubled fondness; and her speech now was hardly snappish at all. “You really are, my poor Gerald, quite too ridiculous about the child! You talk, you actually do talk, as though he were not ever coming back,—and in good time for supper, too, unless he wants a spanking.”

At that, Gerald raised a protesting hand. “Do you not trick me into optimism, also! Too much ambition and high dreams and that which was perhaps divine have now departed forever. The illusion which you created to be our son has departed, forever. But use and wont and a great deal of honest love remain. I do not say these things are heroic. I do say that these suffice. So do you let the strong bonds which are about me content you, my darling, without wreathing them in the paper flowers of optimism.”

“But are you, also,” Maya said, “content?” Gerald answered: “I am well content. Day in, day out, let there be between us faith, and aid, and a great fondness, O my dear, and no parting! For I am content and very contrite. I know that any life without you would be a maimed business. I know that I desire only to continue in our quiet way of living upon Mispec Moor. For the middle way of life is best. What need have I to be a god or to be seeking unfamiliar places so that I may rule over them? That way is troubled, and too full of noise and striving. It is better to be content. It is better to be content with the dear, common happenings of human life, shared loyally with the one woman whose love for you is limitless and does not change, for all that it is blind to none of your failings; and to know that these things are enough and very far beyond your deserts; and not to be insanely hankering after any more high-hearted manner of living which is out of your reach or, at any rate, is attained through more trouble than it is probably worth. Ah, yes, the middle way of life is best.”

“At least it is some comfort,” Maya said, “to hear you talking almost sensibly.”

Then she reached up, still with a grave and rather tender smiling upon her beloved, homely face; and she took away from Gerald’s eyes the rose-colored spectacles.

“In fact,” said a male voice, “the woman’s task is ended.”

43. Economics of Redemption

FOR now had come to them, traveling back from Antan, the brown man. This brown man came, he said, to summon Maya to her appointed task of transforming yet other men into domestic animals.

“—For women,” he said, also, “have always their fond task and their beneficent labor. Here, I repeat, the woman’s task is ended. But yonder many men go untamed and unbroken to the sane ways of compromise.”

Then Maya a bit absent-mindedly assented, as she put away those spectacles of hers for future use, that, in point of fact, she supposed she had done everything that was actually necessary in Gerald’s case, although nobody ever would really know what a trial he had been to her.

And Gerald for one instant looked at his wife. He found in his wife’s face that which it is the doom of most husbands to find there at one time or another. And it caused Gerald to laugh a little.

“Nevertheless,” Gerald said, quietly, “I am Fair-haired Hoo, the Helper and the Preserver, the Well-beloved of Heavenly Ones. I am Lord of the Third Truth, in this world which knows of only two truths and of the compromises which they beget.”

The brown man greeted that with a thin smile. “You have been long expected. Oh, very long have scepticism and despair, with somewhat varying voices, invoked your name, saying, ‘Who will overthrow the Master Philologist!’”

“Well, and now,” said Gerald, with the outline of a swagger, for he was getting himself more in hand, “now that prophecy is about to be fulfilled, for I am Hoo, and none other.”

“But, really, friend, I do not see how you can be an interrogative pronoun.”

“To a god, and more particularly to a Dirghic god, all incarnations are possible. There is no reason whatever why I should not be an interrogative pronoun. It is merely a matter of divine election.”

And the brown man civilly inclined his grave brown head, as he remarked:

“Do you have it your own way! Indeed, my people have very often derived their deities from less promising locations than the pages of a grammar. And upon the whole, your epiphany is most gratifying. For I try to keep my people content: yet it has been lamented, from the beginning, that no mythology revealed a god who might answer that word which the Master Philologist speaks to all the gods of men. And so, between despair and scepticism, those of my people who were so unwise as to exercise their minds in fields wherein thinking does not make for happiness, have very long been saying, ‘Who will redeem the goal of all the gods of men from the Master Philologist?’ Now it appears that this word also has become flesh; and that this interrogative pronoun Who? stands here before us. Yes, I consider that quite gratifying; for it is desirable that the sceptical and the despairing also should be contented, by being justified in their faith.”

“You quibble,” Gerald replied, “you quibble very tediously and frivolously, in the divine presence of a god who is about to take over his appointed kingdom, and to make known that Third Truth which is not known upon Mispec Moor, where the one teaching is that we copulate and die.”

“But uncelestial common-sense has always been my failing. So I must tell you, friend, that it seems to me, now that you have abandoned the Redeemer’s steed to a small freckled illusion, Antan has nothing to expect even from the mysterious awfulness of an interrogative pronoun. And yet, for one, I abandoned the place when your dwarfed deputy approached it—”

“And you acted wisely, sir,” Gerald replied, with simple dignity. “No matter how potent may be the impious sorceries of the Master Philologist, a child has entered into his domain, fearing nothing and loving all. The fact that the powers of evil cannot prevail against this conjunction is well known to every citizen of the United States of America.”

But the brown man still seemed rather moody. “I cannot say.... No, you and my friend Jahveh have, between you, loosed against Antan a power which is not of my kingdom. I therefore do not pretend to say what may come of the experiment. I merely await with lively interest, and at a reassuring distance, the upshot of this experiment, now that—of all the beings from beyond Earth’s orbit,—Abdel-Hareth has been deputed to ride upon the Redeemer’s steed.”

“And, in any case, it is always very certain, dearie,” Maya said, “that no real comfort can ever come of such foolish notions as I have ridded you of a little by a little. And in exchange for those toplofty dreams, I have trusted you as far as seemed expedient, and I have given you all that was really good for you. I have given you a season of content and every wholesome joy of domesticity now for some thirty years of mortal time. No man gets more from life, my poor dearie. None attempts to get more without ending in disappointment and discontent: and so no sane man tries to get any more than you have had. And the end finds even the most wise and reasonable son of Adam—though, to be sure, that is not saying much,—if he but lives rationally enough to survive all thirty of those quiet happy years, with a wife who is just as I am, whatever she may have seemed to begin with.”

Gerald saw, without any grief or horror, that he had now lost both his child and his wife. For Maya had become old. She was again the shrivelled and wrinkled creature, red and inflamed and hideous among her tousled tresses, that he had first found upon Mispec Moor. And fleetingly he reflected that she spoke the truth: all women, howsoever dear and beautiful, did become like that, provided they did not first die and become even more repulsive carrion .... But Gerald lacked time to discuss these generalities just now: for he had been looking toward Antan....

“To this chatter about domesticity and pessimism and content,” Gerald replied sternly, “I answer that the Well-beloved of Heavenly Ones is above all aphorisms. I answer that I am Hoo, the Lord of that Third Truth whose nature is unknown to you. Now that Third Truth is loosed. Do you look now upon Antan!”

The woman and the Adversary had turned when Gerald pointed, quite as majestically as though he knew just what he was talking about. In the midst of Antan they could see, as Gerald had already seen, a flaring green flame. Now this great flaming sunk earthward, much as the waters of a fountain descend; the flame spread evenly to every side, sweeping outward in an ever-widening circle; and now this flaming was no longer green, but red and glowing. You saw this flood of fire pass equably and swiftly, surging outward toward the horizon, where at once the mountains collapsed and disappeared. All that remained was flat and black and bare. Antan no longer existed.

It was from such a miracle that the woman and the Adversary looked back toward Gerald, with every sign of sincere respect.

And Gerald’s bewilderment was rather more profound than theirs. He could surmise only that the dreadful being to whom he had given Kalki had held to its plan, as voiced by the lips of a child, and had loosed elemental fires of a nature incomprehensible to Gerald, since they were drawn from beyond Earth’s orbit. Yet that seemed to Gerald no real reason for marring a fine attitude or for failing to preserve his self-respect before the woman and the Adversary. Tricked he might have been: that was a wholly different thing from ever admitting that he had been tricked. Gerald knew at least that the illusion which had appeared to be his son had entered the perhaps equally illusory place where Gerald now might never enter; and that, whatever had befallen the best loved but one of his illusions, the rider upon the silver stallion had destroyed Antan. And it seemed obvious, too, that Abdel-Hareth had returned homeward….

Therefore Gerald claimed with a clear conscience the miracle which Gerald had, in fact, actually performed, at one remove. And Gerald kept his long chin, resolutely, well up....

“So that,” observed the brown man, quietly, “that is the end of Antan. I do not complain.”

“I had forgotten,” then said the wrinkled old woman who had been Maya of the Fair Breasts, “I had forgotten how willful is that Abdel-Hareth who got his being upon Earth from me. Something of this sort was to be looked for, the first moment that the headstrong wretch was freed from my control. Still, Jahveh has gained less than we have gained through Jahveh’s meddling. Abdel-Hareth has served me even at the last by removing Antan from the horizon. Earth will be quieter now; and my daughters will not be so hard put to it to keep men in reasonable order.”

“I forget nothing,” the brown man remarked, drily. “And so I did not await the coming of your first-born in the likeness of a child whose fearless innocence surmounts all evil. For it was the seeming of a little child who rode up against Antan, you conceive, with every appearance of that faith against which the snares of no sorcerer and of hardly nine women in ten can prevail. Such innocence is a quite dangerous counterfeit. For one, I do not meddle with it nor with any other unearthly phenomenon. I have my realm. It suffices me.”

The woman asked, “But what, what, Janicot, do you suppose has happened?”

“How shall we ever know, dear Havvah, when manifestly there are no survivors of that happening? Antan, in any case, is no loss to us.”

Here Gerald broke in upon their talking; and Gerald shook at them his red head lordlily.

“You little creatures guess in vain at the means which I have employed. And equally in vain will you supplicate me to reveal those means. For I shall tell you nothing. It is sufficient that the Well-beloved of Heavenly Ones has accomplished the mission of his tenth incarnation with a thoroughness not customary in interrogative pronouns. I came to redeem my appointed kingdom from the rule of usurpers. I came as the Lord of that Third Truth which is unknown to those who teach only that we copulate and die. That Third Truth has been loosed. No, I shall tell you nothing of its nature, for you are not fit to comprehend the Third Truth. But the mightiness of it your own eyes have witnessed. So Antan is now redeemed—”

His voice broke here. But Gerald presently continued:

“Antan is now redeemed at a great price. That woman and that child to whom my heart was given have perished. I remain. I know that these two were illusions. Nevertheless, I remain. There is no bond upon the Lord of the Third Truth to be happy: there is a strong bond upon every Helper and Preserver not to evade the full discharge of his mission. What, you may ask of me, is the mission of the Lord of the Third Truth? And I will reply to you out of my divine wisdom. It is the mission of the Lord of the Third Truth, howsoever he may palter or struggle against his doom, to destroy that which he most loves.”

44. Economics of Common-Sense

NOW Gerald sat with his head bowed. He heard a talking between the old woman who had been his Maya and the brown man who was the Adversary of all the gods of men.

“What is it men desire?” said the woman. “My daughters prepare for them fine food and drink, my daughters see to it that their homes are snug, and at the end of each day my daughters love them dutifully. All things that men can ask for, my daughters furnish them. Why need men cherish strange desires which do not know their aims? For how can any of my daughters content such desires?”

“I also marvel at the desires of men,” replied the Adversary. “I, too, am ready to accord whatsoever a man can ask for sensibly and in plain words. I, who am the Prince of this world, remain a generous and ever-indulgent monarch. I will to make my people happy. My curious opulence awaits at every hand to afford my subjects whatsoever they can ask. But men want more. They desire that which was never in my kingdom. They have followed after impalpable gods: they have been enamoured of phantoms. They have believed that their desire was in Antan, in part because they did not know what was their desire, and in part because they did not know what was Antan. Yes, it is well that Antan has perished.”

“This world is well enough,” the woman said. “It is well to be born into this world of an ever-loving mother. It is well to be a young man in this world wherein one may follow after young women and be cherished by them. There is soft living in this world when you have come as near discretion as men ever get and have had the wit to find a wife to take care of you. And at the end it is well to fare out of this world quietly and incuriously, with a deft-handed woman to nurse you and to wash your body afterward. But men want more.”

“This world is very good. My kingdom is a wholly sufficing kingdom,” agreed the Adversary. “The wise man, as goes human wisdom, will be content with the inexhaustible goodness of those material things which all are mine. For the five senses are an endless comfort; the five senses are an endless store of anodynes. A man may purchase bodily ease and a drugged brain with his five senses. But men want more.

“So they have passed beyond my daughters,” the woman said. “One by one, a many have passed, perversely and so lonelily, from all my daughters could contrive to content them: and one by one a host of demented romantic men have struggled toward Antan, and toward what befalls all mortals and immortals there. Yes, it is very well that Antan has perished.”

“One by one,” said the Adversary, “they have derided my kingdom. They have followed after impalpable gods. These gods passed futilely. But they drew many of my subjects from me, all to be lost forever in that beguiling Antan.”

“Men are great fools, and my daughters can hardly hamper their folly. That which my daughters can do they perform willingly. But not all men could my daughters preserve from the madness which drew men toward Antan and into ruinous desires to judge the goal of every god. At last, Antan has fallen: it is very well.”

The Adversary said, more leniently: “Men are, beyond doubt, great fools. But they are my people; and those that I can save I save. Yet many evade me. And their dreaming troubles all my realm and me, too, they trouble now and then. But Antan has fallen: and after that foolishness at least my people will not be following any more.”

“The daughters of Eve are not troubled now and then, they are troubled at every moment, by the dreams of men. Such of these blundering men as fond and eternal laboring may save, my daughters win away from their toplofty dreams. But the work is hard; the work is endless; and our losses are many.”

And then the Adversary said: “We two who began in the Garden to contrive for the happiness of men, and to be speaking always for the real good of men—yes, certainly, our work is hard and endless.

For men stay romantically minded creatures who aspire beyond my kingdom. Yet we do not despair.”

45. Farewell to All Fair Welfare

WHEN Gerald raised his head he was alone on the naked moor, for the brown man had departed, and Maya had gone away with the first of all her lovers, and her illusions had vanished, including the neat log and plaster cottage. And mists were creeping up from the ruined kingdom of Antan, in billows of ever-thickening gray which seemed to be the smoke from that great burning.

Then Gerald said:

“I have come out of my native home on a gainless journeying with no profit in it: yet there has been pleasure in that journeying. I do not complain. Let every man that must journey, without ever knowing why, from the dark womb of his mother to the dark womb of his grave, take pattern by me!

“For all that every pleasure is departed from me, I have had pleasure. I do not grieve because I have gained nothing in my journeying. The great and best words of the Master Philologist stay unrevealed; that supreme word which was in the beginning, and which will be when all else has perished, I may not surmise: but I have played with many words which were rather pretty. In the art of magic which I chose to be my art I have performed no earth-shaking wonders, yet in small thaumaturges I have had some hand. I did not ride the divine steed to my journey’s end: but a part of the way I rode quite royally.

“That which I heard of from afar I have not won to in my foiled journeying. So I now cry farewell to that Queen Freydis whom, I suspect, I might have loved with a great love if lesser women had not solicited me. I cry farewell to the Mirror of the Hidden Children in which, I believe, I might have found myself as I am, and might have come to knowledge of the Third Truth. And I cry farewell to Antan, to that never-won-to goal of all the gods which was, I think, my appointed kingdom. I have surmised high things. I have gained none of them. My doom has been a little doom. It contents me.

“I may well be content, because all that a man may hope for I have had, who have learned at least that the lot of a man is more sure than the lot of any god. For the deceit which you put upon me, O venerable and subtle AEsred, I cry out my gratitude. There was the seeming of a home and of a woman who loved and tended me and of a child. I may not speak of my love for these illusions. Now they have perished. But my memories remain: and they are more dear to me than is any real thing.

“All, all, is perished! It may be that I have offended the two truths which I did not esteem sufficiently august. And I who willed to be Lord of the Third Truth have found no third truth anywhere. I have found only comfortably colored illusions. But I am content with that which I have found here upon Mispec Moor.”

In the while that Gerald had been speaking, the mists rose thicker and thicker from destroyed Antan. He had noted in the while that he spoke how the first wavering thin billows crept tentatively up the hills and along the roadway, creeping upon the ground, and under the low-swinging tree branches, with, as it seemed, a pre-meditated furtiveness; and then, as if emboldened by finding the way unopposed, these mists had risen up from the ground, always swiftlier, until now they had eclipsed all. Gerald, now that he ended his talking, could see nothing palpable anywhere save the little patch of intermingled stone and grass immediately beneath his feet; and about him everywhere were the cool mists, lighted with a diffused gray radiancy which seemed to come from all sides.

PART ELEVEN THE BOOK OF REMNANTS

46. The Gray Quiet Way of Ruins

“When wages are paid, work is over.”

GERALD now was wandering among thick luminous gray mists, on a gray way which led through long quieted places. It led him to a weather-beaten pavilion of badly stained and tattered cloth which once had been flesh-colored.

Within this pavilion was a masked skeleton. The gleaming bones sat upright, and in unmarred order, in a gilded chair. A fan lay in the lap of this skeleton, a fan that was painted with the gay amours of Harlequin and Columbine, which Pierrot was observing, wistfully, through a gap in a yew-hedge: and the skeleton wore a little black velvet carnival mask, which covered all the upper front part of the skull, about the eye-sockets.

And beyond that was a castle, whose exterior was overlaid with cracked and peeling black-and-gold lacquer work. This castle was empty everywhere of any inhabitant. Gerald passed through its courtyard and about many large rooms and corridors, all hung with faded, very ancient tapestries. He encountered nobody. Then he came to the inmost tower, builded of horn, and so into the room which had been the bedchamber of the lord of that castle, and he perceived the reason why not even mice nor spiders dared to dwell in that place.

Afterward Gerald came to a dragon’s den. But the dragon was dead long ago, and the cupboards of that den were as empty as had been the castle of Vraidex, except for a pepper cruet and a salt cruet, both of time-blackened silver, and a light golden semi-circular crown inset with emeralds such as blonde princesses were used to wear in that dragon’s heyday.

Thence Gerald passed to a jousting ground, and that too was tenantless and fallen into decay. In the paved place where knights had tilted against one another lay at random nineteen broken spears and three tarnished shields. In the ladies’ gallery Gerald found only a chamber pot. The hangings of this gallery were discolored and torn, but you could yet see that these hangings had been of black cloth embroidered with small rearing silver horses.

And Gerald came also to a green pasture through which flowed unruffled a deep stream of still water. This pasture was strewn everywhere with many curious objects. He noted a crozier, and a wheel, and a camel-hair shirt, and a huge gridiron, and a copper dish containing the breasts of a young woman. He found in that pasture also a porcelain box of ointment, and a great saw, and a blue hat, and a large iron comb, which like the saw had long-dried blood upon its teeth, and a palm branch, and two enormous, very rusty keys marked with the monogram S. P.

Then Gerald passed where three crosses lay overturned.

And beyond that the way was yet more murky. To this hand and the other hand Gerald could just dimly divine the ruined porticos and domes and pylons of incredibly ancient buildings: he seemed to go among obelisks and many-storied square towers. But all was very gray and dubious. He wandered now in a cloudiness wherein not anything was indisputable.

He passed across a narrow bridge beneath which showed a dark and sluggish river. In that water Gerald could see moving, many-colored figures which were not strange to him. For Evasherah was there, and Evaine, and Evarvan, and Evadne also, smiling at him now for the last time, and he could see how notably they had all resembled one another. And yet one more woman was there, a blue-clad woman in a crown just such as Maya had worn before she became his wife, but the face of this woman Gerald could not clearly discern.

And upon the farther bank of the dark river one sat among a herd of black swine, and the eyes of all these swine gleamed meditatively at Gerald through their ragged white lashes. The man arose: and Gerald saw this swine-driver was that same young red-haired Horvendile who was Lord of the Marches of Antan.

Then Horvendile began to speak.

47. How Horvendile Gave Up the Race

HORVENDILE spoke of the race of Manuel, and of the joy, and the vexation, too, which the antics of this so inadequate race had been to Horvendile. And it was of Merlin that Gerald was thinking now, for it seemed to him that here was yet another poet who did not any longer delight to shape and to play with puppets, because Horvendile was saying: