SOMETHING ABOUT EVE
A Comedy of Fig-leaves
BY
JAMES BRANCH CABELL
“I WAS AFRAID, BECAUSE I WAS
NAKED: AND I HID MYSELF”
LONDON
JOHN LANE THE BODLEY HEAD LIMITED
First Published in 1927
Made and Printed in Great Britain by
Tonbridge Printers Peach Hall Works Tonbridge
To
ELLEN GLASGOW
—very naturally—this book which
commemorates the intelligence
of women
CONTENTS
PART ONE: THE BOOK OF OUTSET
1 How the Tempter Came 3
2 Evelyn of Lichfield 6
3 Two Geralds 15
4 That Devil in the Library 21
PART TWO: THE BOOK OF TWILIGHT
5 Christening of the Stallion 33
6 Evadne of the Dusk 38
PART THREE: THE BOOK OF DOONHAM
7 Evasherah of the First Water-Gap 51
8 The Mother of Every Princess 65
9 How One Butterfly Fared 72
PART FOUR: THE BOOK OF DERSAM
10 Wives at Caer Omn 77
11 The Glass People 83
12 Confusions of the Golden Travel 86
13 Colophon of a God 99
14 Evarvan of the Mirror 102
PART FIVE: THE BOOK OF LYTREIA
15 At Tenjo’s Court 113
16 The Holy Nose of Lytreia 120
17 Evaine of Peter’s Tomb 126
18 End of a Vixen 142
19 Beyond the Veil 146
PART SIX: THE BOOK OF TUROINE
20 Thaumaturgists in Labor 155
21 They That Wore Blankets 159
22 The Paragraph of the Sphinx 164
23 Odd Transformation of a Towel 176
PART SEVEN: THE BOOK OF POETS
24 On Mispec Moor 183
25 The God Conforms 190
26 “Qualis Artifex!” 195
27 Regarding the Stars 206
PART EIGHT: THE BOOK OF MAGES
28 Fond Magics of Maya 215
29 Leucosia’s Singing 220
30 What Solomon Wanted 225
31 The Chivalry of Merlin 229
32 A Boy That Might As Well Be 238
PART NINE: THE BOOK OF MISPEC MOOR
33 Limitations of Gaston 247
34 Ambiguity of the Brown Man 255
35 Of Kalki and a Döoppelganger 259
36 Tannhäuser’s Troubled Eyes 263
37 Contentment of the Mislaid God 270
PART TEN: THE BOOK OF ENDINGS
38 About the Past of a Bishop 281
39 Baptism of a Musgrave 294
40 On the Turn of a Leaf 298
41 Child of All Fathers 301
42 Theodorick Rides Forth 305
43 Economics of Redemption 310
44 Economics of Common-Sense 319
45 Farewell to All Fair Welfare 323
PART ELEVEN: THE BOOK OF REMNANTS
46 The Gray Quiet Way of Ruins 329
47 How Horvendile Gave Up the Race 333
PART TWELVE: THE BOOK OF ACQUIESCENCE
48 Fruits of the Sylan’s Industry 345
49 Triumph of the Two Truths 352
50 Exodus of Glaum 362
THE ARGUMENT OF THIS COMEDY
Set forth as clearly as discretion permits, for the convenience
of the intending reader
THESE shadows here are subtle: for they wait
Like usurers that briefly lend the sun
Disfavor and a stinted while to run
With flaunting vigor through life’s large estate
Of fire and turmoil; or like thieves that hate
No law-lord save the posturing of desire
With genuflexions where dejections tire
The fig-leaf’s trophy with the fig-leaf’s weight.
Yes; they are subtle: and where no light is
These tread not openly, as heretofore,
With whisperings of that at odds with this
To veil their passing, where a broken door
Confronts the zenith, and Semiramis,
At one with Upsilon, exhorts no more.
PART ONE
THE BOOK OF OUTSET
“Wheresoever a Man Lives, There
Will be a Thornbush Near His Door.”
1.
How the Tempter Came
FOR some moments after he had materialized, and had become perceivable
by human senses, the Sylan waited. He waited, looking down at the very
busy, young, red-haired fellow who sat within arm’s reach at the
writing-table. This boy, as yet, was so unhappily engrossed in literary
composition as not to have noticed his ghostly visitant. So the Sylan
waited....
And as always, to an onlooker, the motions of creative writing revealed
that flavor of the grotesque which is attendant upon every form of
procreation. The Sylan rather uneasily noted the boy’s writhing antics,
which to a phantom seemed strange and eerie.... For this mortal world,
as the Sylan well remembered, was remarkably opulent in things which
gave pleasure when they were tasted or handled,—the world in which this
pensive boy was handling, and now nibbled at, the tip-end of a black
pen. Outside this somewhat stuffy room were stars or sunsets or
impressive mountains, to be looked at from almost anywhere in this
mortal world,—which would also afford to the investigative, who
searched in appropriate places, such agreeable smells as that of vervain
and patchouli, and of smouldering incense, and of hayfields under a
large moon, and of pine woods, and the robustious salty odors of a wind
coming up from the sea.
Likewise, at this very moment, you might encounter, in the prodigal
world outside this somewhat stuffy room, those tinier, those mere baby
winds which were continually whispering in the tree-tops about this
world’s marvelousness now that April was departing; or you might hear
the irrationally dear sound of a bird calling dubiously in the spring
night, with a very piercing sweetness; or, if you went adventuring yet
farther, you might hear the muffled delicious voice of a woman
counterfeiting embarrassment and reproof of your enterprise.... Outside
this book-filled room, in fine, was that unforgotten mortal world in
which any conceivable young man could live very royally, and with
never-failing ardor, upon every person’s patrimony of the five human
senses.
And yet, in such a well-stocked world, this lean, red-headed boy was
vexedly making upon paper (with that much nibbled-at black pen) small
scratches, the most of which he almost immediately canceled with yet
other scratches, all the while with the air of a person who is about
something intelligent and of actual importance. This Gerald Musgrave
therefore seemed to the waiting, spectral Sylan a somewhat excessively
silly mortal, thus to be squandering a lad’s brief while of living in
vigorous young human flesh, among so many readily accessible objects
which a boy like this could always be seeing and tasting and smelling
and hearing and handling, with unforgotten delight.
But the Sylan reflected, too, a bit wistfully, that his own mortal youth
was now for some time overpast. It had, in fact, been nearly six hundred
years since he had been really young, a good five and a half centuries
since young Guivric and his nine tall comrades in the famous fellowship
had so delighted in their patrimony of five human senses and had spent
that inheritance rather notably. Yes, he was getting on, the Sylan
reflected; he had quite lost touch with the ways of these latter-day
young people.
Yet it was perhaps unavoidable that in the great while since he had gone
about this world in a man’s natural body, the foibles of human youth had
become somewhat strange to him; and it was not, after all, to appraise
the wastefulness of authors that you had traveled a long way, from Caer
Omn to Lichfield, at the command of another Author, to put this doomed
red-headed boy out of living.
The Sylan spoke....
2.
Evelyn of Lichfield
THE Sylan spoke. He spoke at some length. And the young man at the
writing-table, after arising with the slight start which these
supernatural visitations invariably evoked from him, had presently heard
the Sylan’s proposal.
“Who is it,” said Gerald, then, “that tempts me to this sacrifice and to
this partial destruction?”
The Sylan replied, “The name that I had in my mortal living was Guivric,
but now I am called Glaum of the Haunting Eyes.”
That was a queer name, and it was a queer arrangement, too, which this
vague wraith in the likeness of a man was proposing,—an arrangement,
Gerald Musgrave decided, which, at least, was worth consideration....
For, as a student of magic, Gerald Musgrave in his time had dealt with
many demons: but never had been made to him, before this final night in
the April of 1805, such a queer, and yet rational, and even handsome
offer as was now held out. Gerald pushed aside the manuscript of his
unfinished romance about Dom Manuel of Poictesme; he straightened the
ruffles about his throat; and for an instant he weighed the really quite
alluring suggestion.... Most demons were obsessed by the notion of
buying from you a soul which Gerald, in this age of reason, had no sure
proof that he possessed. But this Glaum of the Haunting Eyes, it seemed,
was empowered and willing to rid Gerald of all corporal obligations, and
to take over Gerald’s physical life just as it stood,—even with all the
plaguing complications of Gerald’s entanglement with Evelyn Townsend.
“I was once human,” the Sylan explained, “and wore a natural body. And
old habits, in such trifles as apparel, cling. I feel at times, even
nowadays, after five centuries of a Sylan’s care-free living, rather at
a loss for human ties.”
“I find them,” Gerald stated, “vast nuisances. Candor is no more
palatable than an oyster when either is out of season. And my relatives
are all cursed with a very disastrous candor. They conceal from me
nothing save that respect and envy with which they might, appropriately,
regard my accomplishments and nobler qualities.”
“That has been the way with all relatives, Gerald, since Cain and Abel
were brothers.”
“Still, but for one calamity, I could, it might be, endure my brothers.
I could put up with my sisters’ voluble and despondent view of my
future. I might even go so far in supererogation as to condone—upon
alternate Thursdays, say,—a chorus of affectionate aunts who speak for
my own good.”
“The first person, Gerald, that pretended to speak for the real good of
anybody else was a serpent in a Garden, and ever since then that sort of
talking has been venomous.”
“Yet all these afflictions I might,” said Gerald,—“conceivably, at
least, I might be able to endure, if only the pursuit of my art had not
been hampered, and the ease of my body blasted, by the greatest blessing
which can befall any man.”
“You allude, I imagine,” said the Sylan, “to the love of a good woman?”
“That is it, that is precisely the unmerited and too irremovable
blessing which may end, after all, in reducing me to your suggested
vulgar fraction of a suicide.”
Now Gerald was silent. He leaned far back in his chair. He meditatively
placed together the tips of his two little fingers, and then one by one
the tips of his other fingers, until his thumbs also were in contact;
and he regarded the result, upon the whole, with disapprobation.
“Every marriage gets at least one man into trouble,” he philosophised,
“and it is not always the bridegroom. You see, sir, by the worst of
luck, this Evelyn Townsend was already married, so that ours had
necessarily to become an adulterous union. It is the tragedy of my life
that I met my Cousin Evelyn too late to marry her. Any married person of
real ingenuity and tolerable patience can induce his wife to divorce
him. But there is no way known to me for a Southern gentleman to get rid
of a lady whom he has possessed illegally, until she has displayed the
decency to become tired of him. And Evelyn, sir, in this matter of
continuing her immoral relations with me has behaved badly, very badly
indeed—”
“All women—” Glaum began.
“No, but let us not be epigrammatic and aphoristic and generally
flippant about a perverseness which is pestering me beyond any
reasonable endurance! You know as well as I do that every pretty woman
ought, by and by, to remember what she owes to her husband and to her
marriage vows, and to act accordingly. Repentance when suitably timed in
a liaison makes for everybody’s happiness. But some women, sir, some
women stay more affectionately adhesive than an anaconda. They weep.
They reply to their helpless paramours’ every least attempt at any
rational statement, ‘And I trusted you! I gave you all!’”
Glaum nodded, not unsympathetically. “I also in my time have heard that
observation without any active enjoyment. It is, I believe,
unanswerable.”
Gerald shuddered. “There is, for a Southern gentleman at all events, no
really satisfactory reply save murder. And against that solution there
is of course a rather general prejudice. Therefore a woman of this
bleating sort exacts fidelity, she makes every nature of unconscionable
demand, and she pesters you to the verge of lunacy, always upon the
unanswerable ground that her claim upon your gratitude, and upon your
instant obedience in everything, ought not to exist. Oh, I assure you,
my dear fellow, there is no more sensible piece of friendly counsel
existent than is the Seventh Commandment!”
“Your aphorisms are more or less true, and your predicament I can
understand. Nevertheless—”
But the Sylan hesitated.
“You also understand us Musgraves perfectly!” Gerald applauded. “For I
perceive you are now about to wheedle me forward in this business by
throwing obstacles in my way.”
“I was but going to point out the truism that, nevertheless, it may be
wiser to put up with your Eve unresistingly—”
“The name,” emended Gerald, “is Evelyn.”
At that the Sylan smiled. “Yes, to be sure! Women do vary in their given
names. It might be wiser, then, I was about to say, for you to put up
with your Evelyn unresistingly, rather than for a student of magic, with
so little real practical experience as yours, to go blundering about the
doubtful road which leads to Antan.”
“But, sir, I have the soul of an artist! Once”—and Gerald pointed to
his manuscript,—“once it was the little art of letters. Then, through
my acquaintance with Gaston Bulmer, who is no doubt known to you—”
The Sylan shook his spectral head, like smoke in a veering wind. “I have
not, I believe, that pleasure.”
“You astound me. I would have supposed the name of Gaston Bulmer to be
in all infernal circles a household word, because the dear old rascal is
an adept, sir, of wide parts, of taste, and of sound judgment. Then,
too, since Mrs. Townsend is his daughter, he has now for some while been
my father-in-law for all practical purposes—But, where was I? Ah, yes!
Through Gaston Bulmer, I repeat, I became initiate into the greatest of
all arts. Now I desire to excel in that art. I note that I falter in the
little art of letters, that my prose is no longer superb and
breath-taking in its loveliness, because my heart is not any longer
really interested in writing, on account of my heart’s ever-pricking
desire to revive in its full former glories the far nobler and—at all
events, in the United States of America,—the unjustly neglected art of
the magician. And from whom else—just as you have suggested, my dear
fellow,—from whom else save the Master Philologist can I get the great
and best words of magic? Do you but answer me that very simple
question!”
“From no one else, to be sure—”
“So, now, you see for yourself!”
“Yet the Master Philologist is nowadays a married man, and is ruled in
everything by his wife. And this Queen Freydis has a mirror which must,
they say, be faced by those persons who venture into the goal of all the
gods of men—”
“That mirror, too,” said Gerald, airily, “I may be needing. Mirrors are
employed in many branches of magic.”
Glaum now was speaking with rather more of graveness than there seemed
any call for. And Glaum said:
“For one, I would not meddle with that mirror. Even in the land of
Dersam, where a mirror is sacred, we do not desire any dealings with the
Mirror of the Hidden Children and with those strange reflections which
are unclouded by either good or evil.”
“I shall face the Mirror of the Hidden Children,” Gerald said, with his
chin well up, “and should I see any particular need for it, I shall
fetch that mirror also out of Antan. When a citizen of the United States
of America takes up the pursuit of an art, sir, he does not
shilly-shally about it.”
“For my part,” the Sylan answered, “I wearied, some centuries ago, of
all magic: and I hanker, rather, after the more material things of life.
For five hundred years and over, in my untroubled abode at Caer Omn, in
the land of Dersam, I have reigned among the dreams of a god—”
“But how did you come by these dreams?”
“They forsook him, Gerald, when his hour was come to descend into
Antan.”
“That saying, sir, I cannot understand.”
“It is not necessary, Gerald, that you should. Meanwhile, I admit, the
life of a Sylan has no fret in it, a Sylan has nothing to be afraid of:
and there is in me a mortal taint which cannot endure interminable
contentment any longer. You conceive, I also was once a mortal man, with
my deceivings and my fears and my doubts to spice my troubled deference
to the ever-present folly of my fellows and to the ever-present
ruthlessness of time and chance. And, as I remember it, Gerald, that
Guivric, whom people so preposterously called the Sage, got more zest
out of his subterfuges and compromises than I derive from being
care-free and rather bored twenty-four hours to each insufferable day.
Therefore, I repeat, I will take over your natural body—”
“But that, my dear fellow, would leave me without any carnal residence.”
“Why, Gerald, but I am surprised at such scepticism in you who pay your
pew-rent so regularly! We have it upon old, fine authority that for
every man there is a natural body and a spiritual body.”
Then Gerald colored up. He felt that both his erudition and his piety
stood reproved. And he said, contritely:
“In fact, as a member of the Protestant Episcopal church, I am familiar
with the Burial Service—Yes, you are right. I have no desire to take
issue with St. Paul. The religion of my fathers assures me that I have
two bodies. I can live in only one of them at a time. It is, for that
matter, a bit ostentatious, it has a vaguely disreputable sound, for any
unmarried man to be maintaining two establishments. So, let us get on!”
“Therefore, I repeat, I will take over your natural body, just as that
first Glaum once took over my body; and I will take over all your body’s
imbroglios, even with your mistress,—who can hardly be more tasking to
get along with than are the seven official wives and the three hundred
and fifty-odd concubines I am getting rid of.”
“You,” Gerald said, morosely, “do not know Evelyn Townsend.”
“I trust,” the Sylan stated, more gallantly, “to have that privilege
to-morrow.”
It was in this way the bargain was struck. And then the Sylan who was
called Glaum of the Haunting Eyes did what was requisite.
3.
Two Geralds
THE Sylan who was called Glaum of the Haunting Eyes, be it repeated,
did that which was requisite.... To Gerald, as a student of magic, the
most of the process was familiar enough: and if some curious grace-notes
were, perhaps, excursions into the less wholesome art of goety, that was
not Gerald’s affair. It was sufficient that, when the Sylan had ended,
no Sylan was any longer visible. Instead, in Gerald Musgrave’s library,
stood face to face two Geralds, each in a blue coat and a golden yellow
waistcoat, each with a tall white stock and ruffles about his throat,
and each clad in every least respect precisely like the other.
Nor did these two lean, red-headed Geralds differ in countenance. Each
smiled at the other with the same amply curved, rather womanish mouth
set above the same prominent, long chin; and each found just the same
lazy and mildly humorous mockery in the large and very dark blue, the
really purple, eyes of the other: for between these two Gerald Musgraves
there was no visual difference whatever.
One half of this quaint pair now sat down at the writing-table; and,
fiddling with the papers there, he took up the pages of Gerald
Musgrave’s unfinished romance, about the high loves of his famous
ancestor Dom Manuel of Poictesme and Madame Niafer, the Soldan of
Barbary’s daughter. Gerald had begun this tale in the days when he had
intended to endow America with a literature superior to that of other
countries; but for months now he had neglected it: and, in fact, ever
since he set up as a student of magic he had lacked time, somehow, with
every available moment given over to runes and cantraps and
suffumigations, to get back to any really serious work upon this
romance.
Then the seated Gerald, smiling almost sadly, looked up toward his twin.
“Thus it was,” said the seated Gerald, “a great while ago at Asch, when
two Guivrics confronted each other and played shrewdly for the control
of the natural body of Guivric of Perdigon. All which I lost on that
day, through my over-human clinging to the Two Truths, I now have back,
after five centuries of pleasure-seeking in the land of Dersam. And I
find this second natural body of mine committed to the creating of yet
more pleasure-giving nonsense, about, of all persons, that eternal
Manuel of Poictesme! I find this body also enamored of the fig-leaf of
romance!”
“It may be that I do not understand your simile,” said the standing
Gerald, “for in the United States of America the fig-leaf is, rather,
the nice symbol of decency, it is, indeed, the beginning and the end of
democratic morality.”
“Nevertheless, and granting all this,” replied the now demon-haunted
natural body of Gerald Musgrave, “the fig-leaf is a romance with which
human optimism veils the only two eternal and changeless and rather
unlovely realities of which any science can be certain.”
“Ah, now I comprehend! And without utterly agreeing with you, I cannot
deny there is something in your metaphor. Yet I must tell you, sir, that
I am perhaps peculiarly qualified to deal with Dom Manuel because of the
fact that this famous hero was my lineal ancestor—”
“Oh, but, my poor Gerald, was he indeed!”
“Yes, through both the Musgrave and the Allonby lines. For my mother’s
father was Gerald Allonby—”
And Gerald would have gone on to explain the precise connection, of
which the Musgrave family was justifiably proud. But the unappreciative
Sylan who now wore good Musgrave flesh and blood had remarked, of all
conceivable remarks:
“I honestly condole with you. Yet ancestors cannot be picked like
strawberries. And my luck was even worse, for I was of Manuel’s
fellowship. I knew the tall swaggerer himself throughout his blundering
career. And I can assure you that, apart from his unhuman gift for
keeping his mouth shut, there was nothing a bit wonderful about the
cock-eyed, gray impostor.”
This was surprising news. Still, Gerald reflected, a demon did, in the
way of business, meet many persons in circumstances in which the better
side of their natures was not to the fore. Gerald therefore flew to
defend the honor of his race quite civilly.
“My progenitor, in any event, carried through his imposture. He died
very well thought of by his neighbors. That you will find to be a
leading consideration with any citizen of the United States of America.
And I in turn assure you that my account of the great Manuel’s exploits
will be, when it is completed, an exceedingly fine romance. It will be a
tale which has not its like in America. Loveliness lies swooning upon
every page, illuminated by a never-ceasing coruscation of wit. It is a
story which, as you might put it, grips the reader. There is no
imaginable reader but will be instantly engaged, by my adroit depiction
of the hardihood and the heroic virtues of Dom Manuel—”
“But,” said the really very handsomely disguised Sylan, “Manuel had
always a cold in his head. Nobody can honestly admire an elderly fellow
who is continually sneezing and spitting—”
“In American literature of a respectable cast no human being has any
excretory functions. Should you reflect upon this statement, you will
find it to be the one true test of delicacy. At most, some tears or a
bead or two of perspiration may emanate, but not anything more, upon
this side of pornography. That rule applies with especial force to love
stories, for reasons we need hardly go into. And my romance is, of
course, the story of Dom Manuel’s love for the beautiful Niafer, the
Soldan of Barbary’s daughter—”
“Her father was a stable groom. She had a game leg. She was not
beautiful. She was dish-faced, she was out and out ugly, apart from her
itch to be reforming everybody and pestering them with respectability—”
“Faith, charity and hope are the three cardinal virtues,” said Gerald,
reprovingly. “And I think that a gentleman should exercise these three,
in just this order, when he is handling the paternity or the looks or
the legs of any lady.”
“—And she smelt bad. Every month she seemed to me to smell worse. I do
not know why, but I think the Countess simply hated to wash.”
“My dear fellow! really now, I can but refer you to my previously cited
rule as to the anatomy of romance. A heroine who smells bad every
month—No, upon my word, I can find nothing engaging in that notion. I
had far rather play with some wholly other and more beautiful idea than
with a notion so utterly lacking in seductiveness. For this, I repeat,
is a romance. It is a romance such as has not its like in America. I
therefore consider that I display considerable generosity in presenting
you with those quite perfect ninety-three pages, and in permitting you
to complete this romance and to take the credit for writing all of it.
Why, your picture will be in the newspapers, and learned professors will
annotate your fornications, and oncoming ages will become familiar with
every mean act you ever committed!”
To that the Sylan replied: “I shall complete your balderdash, no doubt,
since all your functions are now my functions. I shall complete it, if
only my common-sense and my five centuries of living among the loveliest
dreams of a god, and, above all, if my first-hand information as to
these people, have not ruined me for the task of ascribing large virtues
to human beings.”
“I envy you that task,” said Gerald, with real wistfulness, “but, very
much as there was a geas upon my famous ancestor to make a figure in
this world, just so there is a compulsion upon me. The compulsion is
upon me to excel in my art; and to do this I must liberate the great and
best words of the Master Philologist.”
Then the true Gerald went out of the room through a secret passage
unknown to him until this evening.
4.
That Devil in the Library
YET Gerald looked back for an instant at that unfortunate devil, in
the appearance of a sedate young red-haired man, who remained in the
library. To regard this Gerald Musgrave, now, was like looking at a
droll acquaintance in whom Gerald was not, after all, very deeply
interested.
For this Gerald Musgrave, the one who remained in the library, was
really droll in well-nigh every respect. About the Gerald who was
now—it might be, a bit nobly,—yielding up his life in preference to
violating the code of a gentleman, and who was now quitting Lichfield,
in order to become a competent magician, there was not anything
ludicrous. That Gerald was an honorable and intelligent person who
sought a high and rational goal.
But that part of Gerald Musgrave which remained behind, that part which
was already marshaling more words in order the more pompously to inter
the exploits of Dom Manuel of Poictesme, appeared droll. There was, for
one thing, no sensible compulsion upon that red-haired young fellow thus
to be defiling clean paper with oak-gall, when he might at that very
instant be comfortably drunk at the Vartreys’ dinner, or he might be
getting pleasurable excitement out of the turns of fortune at Dorn’s
gaming-parlors, or he might be diverting himself in his choice of four
bedrooms with a lively companion.
But, instead, he sat alone with bookshelves rising stuffily to every
side of him,—rather low bookshelves upon the tops of which were perched
a cherished horde of porcelain and brass figures representing one or
another beast or fowl or reptile. Among the shiny toys, which in
themselves attested his childishness, the young fellow sat of his own
accord thus lonely. And his antics, incontestably, were queer. He
fidgeted. He shifted his rump. He hunched downward, as if with a sudden
access of rage, over the paper before him. He put back his head, to
stare intently at a white china hen. He pulled at the lobe of his left
ear; and he then rather frantically scratched the interior of this ear
with his little finger.
Between these bodily exercises he, who was so precariously seated upon
the crust of a planet teetering unpredictably through space, was making
upon the paper before him, with his much nibbled-at black pen, small
scratches, the most of which he presently canceled with yet other
scratches, all the while with the air of a person who was about
something intelligent and of actual importance. The spectacle was queer;
it was unspeakably irrational: for, as always, to an onlooker, the
motions of creative writing revealed that flavor of the grotesque which
is attendant upon every form of procreation.
Yet it was upon a graver count that Gerald felt honestly sorry for the
inheritor of Gerald Musgrave’s natural body. For Gerald was giving up
his life out of deference to the code of a gentleman with rather more of
relief than he had permitted the Sylan to suspect. And the poor devil
who had so rashly taken over this life would—howsoever acute his
diabolical intelligence,—he too would, in the end, Gerald reflected, be
powerless against that unreasonable Evelyn Townsend and that even more
unreasonable code of a gentleman.
Nobody, Gerald’s thoughts ran on, now that he had found a rather
beautiful idea to play with, nobody who had not actually indulged in the
really dangerous dalliance of adultery in Lichfield could quite
understand the hopelessness of the unfortunate fiend’s position. For in
the chivalrous Lichfield of 1805 adultery had its inescapable etiquette.
Your exact relations with the woman were in the small town a matter of
public knowledge familiar to everybody: but no person in Lichfield would
ever formally grant that any such relations existed. Eyes might meet
with perfect understanding: but from the well-bred lips of no Southern
gentleman or gentlewoman would ever come more than a suave and placid
“Evelyn and Gerald have always been such good friends.” For you were
second cousins, to begin with: and—in a Lichfield wherein, as
everywhere else in this human world, most people unaffectedly disliked,
and belittled, and kept away from their cousins,—that relationship was
considered a natural reason for you two being much together. Moreover,
every woman in Lichfield was, by another really rather staggering social
convention, assumed to be beautiful and accomplished and chaste: it was
an assumption which needed hardly to be stated: it was merely among all
Southern gentry an axiom in the vast code of being well-bred.
It followed that, when you were once involved in a liaison, your one
salvation was for your co-partner in iniquity to become tired of you,
and to cease dwelling upon the fact that she had trusted you and had
given you all. That remained, of course, by the dictates of Southern
chivalry, at any moment her privilege: but in this case the
inconsiderate woman only grew fonder and fonder of Gerald, and repeated
the dreadful observation more and more frequently.... And it remained,
too, the privilege of the technically aggrieved husband to pick a
quarrel with you, provided only that the grounds of this quarrel in no
way involved a mention of his wife’s name. Then, still by the set rules
of Lichfield’s etiquette, there would be a duel. After the duel you
either were dispiritingly dead or, else, if you happened to be the more
assuredly luckless survivor, you were compelled, merely by the silent
force of everybody’s assumption that a gentleman could not do otherwise,
to marry the widow. To do this was your debt to society at large, in
atonement for having “compromised” a lady, where, bewilderingly enough,
she was unanimously granted never to have been concerned at all. For
never, in either outcome, would the occurrence of anything “wrong” be
conceded, nor would ever the possibility of a lady’s having committed
adultery be so much as hinted at in any speech or act of the chivalrous
gentry of Lichfield.
Meanwhile you were trapped. There was no way whatever of avoiding that
bleated “Oh, and I trusted you! I gave you all!” You were not even
privileged to avoid the woman. It was not considered humanly possible
that you were bored, and upon some occasions frenziedly annoyed, by the
society of a beautiful and accomplished and chaste gentlewoman who
honored you with her friendship. There was, instead, compressing you
everywhere, the tacit but vast force of the general assumption that your
indebtedness to her could not ever be discharged in full. The
deplorable—and sometimes, too, the rather dear—fond woman’s inability
to keep her hands off you was conscientiously not noticed. So your
Cousin Evelyn pawed at you in public without an eyebrow’s going up:
hostesses smilingly put you together: other men affably quitted her side
whensoever you appeared. Her husband was no different: Frank Townsend,
also, genially accepted—in the teeth of whatsoever rationality the man
might privately harbor,—the axiom that “Evelyn and Gerald have always
been such good friends.”
Of course, Gerald granted, this was, in the upper circles of the best
Southern families, an exceptional case. Time and again Gerald had envied
the dozens of other young fellows in Lichfield who were conducting their
liaisons with visibly such superior luck. For the lady tired of them or,
else, was smitten with convenient repentance: and these gay blades
passed on high-heartedly to the embraces of yet other technically
beautiful and accomplished and chaste playfellows. But Evelyn evinced an
impenitence which threatened to be permanent; Evelyn did not tire of
Gerald; she pawed at him; she slipped notes into his hand; she bleated
almost every day her insufferable claim to upset his convenience and his
comfort: and he cursed in all earnestness that fatal charm of his which
held him in such desperate loneliness.
—In loneliness, because not even the lean comfort of candor, not even
any quest of sympathy, was permitted you. A gentleman did not kiss and
tell: he, above all, might not tell that the kissing had become an
infernal nuisance. Not any of your brothers, neither one of your
sisters—not even when your indolence and your general worthlessness had
reduced Cynthia to whimpering bits of the New Testament, or had launched
Agatha in a chattering millrace of babbling maledictory
vaticinations,—would ever recognize to you in plain words that you and
Cousin Evelyn were illicitly intimate. Nor would any of your kindred,
either, ever contemplate the possibility of you yourself acting or
speaking here with common-sense, or in any other manner violating the
formulas set for every gentleman’s conduct by the insane and magnificent
code of Lichfield.
For it was, after all, magnificent, in its own way, the code by which
those bull-headed Musgraves—who shared the blood that was in your body,
but no one of the notions in your astonishingly clever head,—along with
the rest of this brave and stupid Lichfield, lived day after day, and
carried genial, never-troubled self-respect into the graveyard. This
code avoided, so far as Gerald could see, no especial misdoing or crime:
but it did show you how, with the appropriate and most graceful of
gestures, to commit either, when the need arose, in the prescribed
fashion of a well-bred Southern gentleman. Yes, really, Gerald
reflected, that code was rather a beautiful idea to play with. It was an
excellent thing to be a gentleman: but it proved always fatal, too, in
the end, simply because no lady was a gentleman.
However, it was that poor devil in the library who was now involved in
the dangerous task of carrying through an adultery in Lichfield after
the fashion of well-bred persons. It was in his ears that a still rather
dear but too damnably adhesive Evelyn would be bleating every day a
reiteration of the fact that she had trusted him and had given him all.
And Gerald himself, having decorously laid down his life rather than
violate this dreadful code of a gentleman, was now fairly in train to
become a competent magician.
Not ever again would he sit writing among those bookshelves, engrossed,
and rubbing at his chin or forehead, or scratching his head, or sticking
his little finger into his ear, or restively shifting his weight from
one buttock to the other buttock, in his multiform efforts to quicken,
somehow, the flow of lagging thought. He would pause no more to prop his
chin (with an unpleasantly moist hand, as a rule), and thus to stare
lack-wittedly at one or another of the china and brass toys which he
had, quite as idiotically, collected to make vivid his bookshelves. All
these queer exercises, as Gerald, standing there, had seen them in the
last few minutes performed by the natural body of Gerald Musgrave, did,
manifestly, not constitute an engaging or a sane way of spending the
evening, in a somewhat stuffy room.
No, he was now, forever, very happily done with all these forlorn
gymnastics. It was only the natural body of Gerald Musgrave which
henceforward would, before this commensurately irrational audience of
small elephants and dogs and parrots and chicken, go through these
foolish writhing antics, in that wholly nice looking young idiot’s
endeavor to complete the romance about Dom Manuel of Poictesme.... Well,
one could but wish the poor devil joy of his bargain! and it no longer
really mattered that all which pertained to Gerald Musgrave was rather
droll, Gerald decided, as he passed out of sight of that red head bent
over that incessant pen scratching.
PART TWO
THE BOOK OF TWILIGHT
“It is Not Well to Look a
Gift Horse in the Mouth.”
5.
Christening of the Stallion
GERALD descended nineteen steps; and in the dusk he found waiting
there, beside a tethered riding-horse, yet another young man, with hair
as red as Gerald Musgrave’s own.
“That you may travel the more quickly, along a woman-haunted way, in
your journeying toward your appointed goal,” this stranger began, “I
have fetched a horse for you to ride upon.”
Yet the speaker was not wholly a stranger. So Gerald now said, “Oh, so
it is you!” As a student of magic, Gerald had held earlier dealings with
this red-haired Horvendile, who was Lord of the Marches of Antan.
And Gerald went on, gratefully: “Come now, but this is kind! Even as a
courtesy between fellow artists, this is generous!”
“The amenities of fellow artists,” returned Horvendile, “are by ordinary
two-edged. And this one may cut deeper than you foreknow.”
“Meanwhile you have brought me this huge shining horse, which cannot be
other than Pegasus—”
“Whether or not this divine steed be that Pegasus which bears romantics
even to the ultimate goal of their dreams, depends upon the horseman. It
has been prophesied, however, that the Redeemer of Antan and the monarch
who shall reign, after the overthrow of the Master Philologist, in the
place beyond good and evil, will come riding upon the silver stallion
that is called, not Pegasus, but Kalki—”
“Oh! oh!” said Gerald: and for an instant he considered this surprising
turn of affairs. To reign in Antan had, very certainly, been no part of
his modest plans; but he saw at once how much more becoming it would be,
and how much better suited to his real merits, to enter into Antan as
its heir apparent, resistless upon the silver stallion famous in old
prophecies, rather than to come as a suppliant begging for a few words.
“Prophecies,” said Gerald, then, “ought to be respected by all well
brought up persons. Only, does this horse happened to be Kalki? Because,
you see, Horvendile, that appears to be the whole point of the
prophecy.”
Rather oddly, Horvendile said, “Whether or not this divine steed be that
Kalki which bears romantics even to the ultimate goal of all the gods,
depends upon the horseman.”
Gerald considered this saying. Gerald smiled, and Gerald remarked:
“Oh, but now I comprehend you! The rider and the owner of any horse is,
quite naturally, entitled to call the animal whatsoever he prefers. Very
well, then! I shall christen this riding-horse Kalki. Yes, Horvendile,
upon mature deliberation, I will accept the throne of Antan, without
considering my personal preferences and my dislike of publicity and
ostentation, in order that the prophecy may be fulfilled, because that
is always a good thing for prophecies.”
“Since that is your decision, Gerald, you have but, after you have paid
homage here, to mount intrepidly. And the divine steed will carry you
upon no common road, but, since he is divine, along that way which the
gods and the great myths pursue in their journeying toward Antan.”
“It is appropriate, of course, that I should travel on the road
patronized by the best classes. Nevertheless, it would, I think, be a
rather beautiful idea—”
“Nevertheless, also,” said Horvendile, “and all the while that you waste
in talking about beautiful ideas, there is a man’s homage to be paid
here; and moreover, at the first gap of the Doonham, the Princess awaits
you with some impatience. It would not be going too far to say, indeed,
that she hungers for your coming.”
“Come now, but the things you tell me steadily become more palatable!”
remarked Gerald, as he approached the huge stallion. “Now that I have
accepted the responsibilities of a throne and of all the great and best
words of the Master Philologist, it would be most unbecoming for a
princess to be ignored by anyone who already is virtually a reigning
monarch. There are amenities to be preserved between royal houses. Very
terrible wars have sprung from the omission of such amenities. So do you
lead me forthwith to this impatient princess; but do you first tell me
the adorable name of her highness!”
Horvendile answered, “The princess who just now awaits you is Evasherah,
the Lady of the First Water-Gap of Doonham.”
“I admit that the information, now I have it, means very little.
Nevertheless, my dear fellow, do you direct me to the water-gap of this
princess!”
“Yet, I repeat, it would be wise for you, before departing from this
place, to render a man’s homage to the ruler of it.”
“Well, Horvendile, the name of this tropical, damp, and this rather
curious smelling country is no doubt better known to you than, I
confess, it stays to me!”
“This place has not any name in the reputable speech of men. It is the
realm of Koleos Koleros.”
At that name Gerald bowed his head; and, as became a student of magic,
he courteously made the appropriate sign.
And Gerald said: “Very dreadful is the name of Koleos Koleros! Yet,
quite apart from the fact that I am a member of the Protestant Episcopal
church, I owe this Koleos Koleros no homage. And I, very certainly,
shall not linger to pay any, with a princess waiting for me! Rather, do
I elect to pass hastily through this land of quags and underbrush, and
to leave this somewhat unsanitarily odored neighborhood, in which, I
perceive, misguided persons yet live—”
For these two young men were no longer alone in this ambiguous valley.
Through the twilight Gerald now saw many women passing furtively toward
a dark laurel grove; and from out of that grove came a queer music.
Then Horvendile spoke of these women.
6.
Evadne of the Dusk
NOW all the while that Horvendile talked it was to the accompaniment
of that remote queer music: and Gerald was troubled. He came, at least,
as near to being troubled as Gerald ever permitted himself to do. For
Gerald did not really enjoy trouble of any kind, and said frankly that
he found it uncongenial.
“But these,” said Gerald, by and by, “all these, my dear fellow, I had
thought to have perished a long while ago.”
“You travel, Gerald, on the road of the greater myths. Such myths do not
perish speedily. And, besides, nothing is true anywhere in the Marches
of Antan. All is a seeming and an echo: and through this superficies men
come to know the untruth which makes them free. It follows, in my logic,
that to-day these women are the flute-players of Koleos Koleros. They
serve to-day, forever unsatiated, that most insatiable divinity who is
shaggy and evil-odored, and who can taste no pleasure until after
bloodshed—”
“I have read, also,” Gerald broke in, with the slight smile of one who
is not unpleased to display his learning, “that this Koleos Koleros is a
somewhat contradictory goddess, producing the less the more constantly
that she is cultivated and stirred up—”
“Oho, but a most potent goddess is this Koleos Koleros!” continued
Horvendile. “She is wrinkled and flabby in appearance, yet the most
stout of heroes falls at last before her. Infants perish nightly in her
gloomy vaults, and plagues and diseases harbor there—”
But again Gerald had interrupted him, saying: “Yet I have read,
moreover, that this modest and retired Koleos Koleros, alone of eternal
beings, is ever ardent to quench the ardor of her servitors; and
that—still to praise merit where merit appears,—in her untiring
warfare with all men that rise up to oppose her, she displays the
magnanimity to favor, and to embrace lovingly, the adversary that
attacks her most often and most deeply.”
Horvendile thereupon held out his hand. He showed thus the tip of his
forefinger touching the tip of his thumb so that they formed a circle.
And Horvendile said:
“She varies even as the moon varies. Yet equally is this divine small
monster the bestower of life and of all joy; she charms in defiance of
reason: and whensoever Koleos Koleros appears, red and inflamed and
hideous among her tousled tresses, a man is moved willy-nilly to place
in her his chief delight.”
“Oho!” said Gerald, and, as became a student of magic, he also made the
needful sign, “oho, but a most potent goddess is this Koleos Koleros!”
“Now, then,” continued Horvendile, “all they who in this place serve
eternally this most whimsical divinity are a loving and a peculiarly
happy people. Their amorousness, which here is not ever blighted by
shrill reprobation, has need at no time to fear either the chastisement
of human law nor the anathemas of any other religion anywhere in the
quiet brakes and lowlands of the moist realm of Koleos Koleros. For, you
conceive, these feminine myths who now are flute-players in and about
the shrine of the wrinkled goddess, and who through so many centuries
have been trained in all the arts of pleasure, came by and by into a
certain confusion—”
“But what sort of confusion, Horvendile, do you mean? For I find your
speaking another sort. And I am rather more interested in that
princess—”
“I mean that their religion, which ranks pleasure above all else,
permits no man to pass by unpleased.”
“Ah, now I understand you!”
“—I mean that, through the duties of their religious faith, their way
of living has been given over to an assiduous and an empirical study of
all the charms peculiar to a woman, the more particularly as these
charms are employed—”
“Let us say, in the exercise of their religion,” Gerald suggested, “for
I wholly understand you, sir.”
“It has followed that the taste of these ladies has become more
delicate. It has followed that, by force of considering their own
feminine loveliness, always unveiled and in lively employment, and by
comparing it so intimately and so jealously with the loveliness of their
female rivals in the service of the wrinkled goddess, they have become
connoisseurs of the beauties peculiar to their sex. They have acquired a
refinement of taste—”
“To be refined in one’s taste is eminently praiseworthy. Ah, my dear
fellow, if you but knew what shocking examples of bad taste we kings are
continually encountering among our sycophants! And that reminds me, you
said something about a princess—”
“—They have learned to despise the hasty and boisterous and, between
ourselves, the very often disappointing ways of men—”
“Ah, yes, no doubt!” said Gerald. “Men are a bad lot. But we were
speaking of a princess—”
“—And they have lovingly contrived more finespun and more rococo
diversions without the crude assistance of any man. Then also they
delight in playing with many well-trained pets,—with goats and large
dogs and asses and, they tell me, with rams and with bulls also. The
surprising and mysterious joys which blaze up among these flute-players
are, thus, very violent and delicious.”
Gerald said then that kindness to dumb animals was generally reckoned a
most estimable trait in the United States of America. Whereas, in all
quarters of that enlightened and hospitable republic, Gerald estimated,
a princess—