pleasure-seeking, their religious duty of permitting no man to pass by
unpleased. Go to them, therefore, you will be welcome. Yonder at this
instant a religious festival is preparing. Yonder sweet-voiced Leucosia,
who hereabouts is called Evadne, waits for you—”
“But I have not the honor of knowing this Evadne—”
“She is easily known, by her violet hair and her sharp teeth. Moreover,
Gerald, her wise sisters—Telês, and Parthenopê, and Radnê, and Ligeia,
and Molpê,—all these will greet you with ardor. They will deny to you
no secret of their pious rites; they will share with you esoteric joys
religiously. They will incite you to perform among their choir, in the
most secret shrine of Koleos Koleros—”
“But, really now, my dear fellow! I have no talent whatever for music. I
would be quite out of place in any choir.”
“These flute-players are very ingenious. They will find for you some
suitable instrument. And there will be strange harmonies and much soft
laughter at this festival: each reveller will pour out libations
copiously: cups will be refilled and emptied until dawn. There will be
for you perfumes and rose garlands and the most exquisite of wines and
the most savory of dishes and other delicacies. Due homage will be paid
to Koleos Koleros.”
“Nevertheless,” said Gerald, “there is a phrase which haunts me—”
“That dusky grove of laurels yonder is the hall of this pious feast.
Nothing will be lacking to you at this feast if you attend it with
proper religious exaltation; and you will discover abilities there which
will surprise you.”
“Ah, as to that now, Horvendile—! Yes, I have a man’s proper share of
ability, I have quite enough ability for two persons. Nevertheless,
there is a patriotic phrase which haunts me, and that phrase is _E
pluribus unum_. For I have compunctions, Horvendile, which are
translating that same phrase, a little freely, as ‘One among so many.’”
“It seems to me a harmless phrase even in your paraphrase. More harm may
very well come of the fact that these learned ladies will endeavor to
cajole you out of the divine steed, so that he may be added to their
trained pets—”
“Oh! oh, indeed!” said Gerald. “But that is nonsense. The rider upon
Kalki, and none other, has to fulfil that estimable old prophecy: and a
deal of good such wheedlings will do any woman breathing, with a fine
kingdom like that of mine set against a mere kiss or, it may be, a few
tears!”
“That matter remains to be attested in due time. Meanwhile, I can but
repeat that if you do not render a man’s homage to the ruler of this
place there is no doubt whatever that the slighted goddess will avenge
herself.”
“Sir,” Gerald now replied, with appropriate dignity, “I am, as were my
fathers before me, a member of the Protestant Episcopal church. Is it
thinkable that a communicant of this persuasion would worship a goddess
of the benighted heathen? Do you but answer me that very simple
question!”
“In Lichfield,” Horvendile retorted, “to adhere to the religion of your
fathers is tactful, and in this place also, as in every other place,
tactfulness ought to be every wise man’s religion. Otherwise, you will
be running counter to that which is expected of the descendants of
Manuel and of Jurgen; and you may by and by have cause to regret it.”
But Gerald thought of his church, and of its handsome matters of faith
in the way of organ music and of saints’ days and of broad-mindedness
and of delightful lawn-sleeved bishops and of majestic rituals. He
thought of newly washed choir-boys and of his prayer-book’s wonderful
mouth-filling phrases, of rogation days and of ember days and of Trinity
Sunday. He thought about pulpits and hassocks and stained glass and
sextons, and about the Thirty-nine Articles, and about those
unpredictable, superb mathematics which early in every spring
collaborated with the new moon to afford him an Easter: and these things
Gerald could not abandon.
So he said: “No. No, Horvendile! I pay no homage to the wrinkled
goddess.”
Then Horvendile warned him again, “You may find that decision costly.”
“That is as it may be!” said Gerald, with his chin well up. “For a good
Episcopalian, sir, finds in the petulance of no heathen goddess anything
to blench the cheek and make the heart go pitapat.”
Still, he looked rather fondly through the dusk. And now his shoulders
also went up, shruggingly.
“Yet I concede,” said Gerald, “that, howsoever firm my churchmanship,
and even with a princess waiting for me, I am tempted. For yonder
flute-player who still delays to join her companions—who are now, no
doubt, already about their merry games with one another and with their
trained pets,—has charms. Yes, she has charms which give my thoughts,
as it were, a locally religious turn, and make the notion of joining her
a rather beautiful idea. I deplore, of course, her feathered legs. Even
so, she displays, as you too may observe, in her so leisurely retreat,
an opulence in that most engaging kind of beauty which once got for
Aphrodite the epithet of Callipygê. I contemplate, with at least locally
pious joy, the curving of those reins, the whiteness and the fineness of
the skin, and the graciousness of those superb contours, designed
without any stinting or exaggeration, into the perfection of those fair
twin moons of delight—”
But in a moment Gerald said, “Still, there is something vaguely
familiar, a something which chills me—”
And Gerald said also: “Or, rather, in their so gentle undulations as she
walks unhurriedly away from us, in their so amiable convulsions,—in
their heavings, their twitchings, their ripplings and their
twinklings,—rather, do the bewitching and multitudinous movements of
those silvery spheres resemble, to my half dazzled eyes, the
unarithmeticable smiling of the sunlit sea, to which, as you will
remember, Horvendile, old Æschylos has so finely referred. I feel that I
could compose a not discreditable sonnet to that most beautiful of
backsides. There is nothing more poetical than is the backside of a
naked woman who is walking away from you. Its movements awaken the
yearnings of all elegiac verse.... And I do not doubt, sir, that the
front of this feathery-legged lady is fully as enchanting as the rear.
Yes, I imagine that the façade too has its own peculiar attractions: and
I admit, in a word, that I am tempted to confront her—”
Horvendile glanced toward the woman who alone remained within reach.
“That is Evadne, who in the days of her sea-faring was called Leucosia.
And it is plain enough that she waits for temptation to inflame and to
uplift you into raptures somewhat more practical than all this talking.”
“She waits,” said Gerald, “in vain. At this distance she is a rather
beautiful idea: nearer, she would be only another woman with her clothes
off. Moreover, sir, I am a self-respecting member of the Protestant
Episcopal church: and besides that, as I now perceive, it is of Evelyn
Townsend’s figure that this woman’s half-seen figure reminds me. That
resemblance makes for every sedentary virtue. I have learned only too
well what comes of permitting any female person to trust you and to give
you all. Then, too, I am called to duties of more honor and
responsibility in my appointed kingdom. And for the rest, I prefer to
disappoint these ladies by failing in ardor at such a distance as will
not provoke my blushes. No, Horvendile: no, I am still haunted by that
patriotic phrase _E pluribus unum_; and I shall not just now presume to
render a man’s homage to Koleos Koleros, among quite so many
flute-players. Moreover, you assert that a princess is waiting for me,
to whom I prefer to present the member of another royal house in the
full possession of all faculties. So I do not elect, just now, to share
in these—if you will permit the criticism,—somewhat un-American
methods of religious exercise. I ask, instead, that you conduct me to
the impatient princess about whom you keep talking so obstinately that,
I perceive, there is no least hope of my stopping you.”
It was in this way that Gerald began his journey by putting an affront
upon Koleos Koleros.
PART THREE
THE BOOK OF DOONHAM
“Though a Woman’s Tongue be but Three
Inches Long, It can kill a Six-foot Man.”
7.
Evasherah of the First Water-Gap
“A GOOD-MORNING to you, ma’am,” Gerald had begun. His horse was
tethered to a palm-tree, and Horvendile was gone, so that there now was
only the Princess to be considered. “And in what way can I be of any
service?”
Yet his voice shook, as he stood there beside the alabaster couch....
For Gerald was enraptured. The Princess Evasherah was, in the dawn of
this superb May morning, so surpassingly lovely that she excelled all
the other women his gaze had ever beheld. Her face was the proper shape,
it was appropriately colored everywhere, and it was surmounted with an
adequate quantity of hair. Nor was it possible to find any defect in her
features. The colors of this beautiful young girl’s two eyes were nicely
matched, and her nose stood just equidistant between them. Beneath this
was her mouth, and she had also a pair of ears. In fine, the girl was
young, she exhibited no deformity anywhere, and the enamored glance of
the young man could perceive in her no fault. She reminded him, though,
of someone that he had known....
Such were the ardent reflections which had passed through Gerald’s mind
in the while that he said decorously, “A good-morning, ma’am: and in
what way can I be of any service?”
But the Princess, in her impetuous royal fashion, had wasted no time
upon the formal preliminaries which were more or less customary in
Lichfield. And while Gerald’s patriotic republican rearing had been
explicit enough as to the goings-on in monarchical families, he was
whole-heartedly astounded by the animation and candor which here
confronted him. There was no possible doubting that the Princess
Evasherah was prepared to trust him and to give him all.
“But, oh, indeed, ma’am,” Gerald said, “you quite misunderstand me!”
For he had it now. This woman was uncommonly like Evelyn Townsend.
Gerald sighed. All ardor had departed from him. And with a few
well-chosen words he placed their relationship upon a more decorous
basis.
Now the Princess Evasherah, that most lovely Lady of the Water-Gap, was
lying down even when Gerald first came to her, just after sunrise. She
was lying upon a couch of alabaster, which had four legs made of
elephants’ tusks. Upon this couch was a mattress covered with green
satin and embroidered with red gold; upon the mattress was the Princess
Evasherah in a brief shirt of apricot colored silk; and, over all, was a
saffron canopy adorned with fig-leaves worked in pearls and emeralds.
This couch was furthermore shaded by three palm-trees, and it stood near
to the bank of the river called Doonham. And by the sparkling ripples of
that river’s deep waters—as the Princess Evasherah explained, some
while after she and Gerald had reached a friendly and clean-minded
understanding, with no un-American nonsense about it,—was hidden the
residence of the Princess, where presently they would have breakfast.
“But,” Gerald said, a little dejectedly, “I have just now no appetite of
any kind.”
“That will not matter,” said the Princess: and for no reason at all she
laughed.
“—And to live under the water, ma’am, appears a virtually unprecedented
form of royal eccentricity—”
“Ah, but I must tell you, lord of the age, and most obdurate averter
from the desirer of union with him, that very long ago, because of a
girlish infatuation for a young man whose name I have forgotten, I
suffered a fiery downfalling from the Home of the Heavenly Ones, into
the waters of this river. For I had offended my Father (whose name be
exalted!) by stealing six drops of quite another kind of water, of the
water from the Churning of the Ocean—”
“Eh?” Gerald said, “but do you mean the divine Amrita?”
“Garden of my joys, and summit of sagacity,” the Princess remarked, “you
are learned. You have knowledge of heavenly matters, you have traversed
the Nine Spaces. And I perceive that you who travel overburdened with
unresponsiveness upon this road of the gods are yet another god in
disguise.”
“Oh, no, ma’am, it is merely that, as a student of magic, one picks up
such bits of information. I am the heir apparent to a throne, I cannot
honestly declare myself any more than that: and I am upon my way to
enter into my kingdom, but it is not, I am tolerably certain, a
celestial kingdom.”
The Princess was not convinced. “No, my preceptor and my only idol, it
is questionless you are a god, all perfect in eloquence and in grace, a
temptation unto lovers, and showing as a visible paradise to the
desirous. Here, in any event, out of my keen regard for your virtues,
and in exchange for that great gawky horse of yours which reveals in
every feature its entire unworthiness of contact with divine buttocks,
here are the five remaining drops, in this little vial—”
Gerald inspected the small crystal bottle quite as sceptically as the
Princess had regarded his disclaimer of being a god. “Well, now, ma’am,
to me this looks like just ordinary water.”
She placed one drop of the water upon her finger-tip. She drew upon his
forehead the triangle of the male principle, she drew the female
triangle, so that one figure interpenetrated the other, and she invoked
Monachiel, Ruach, Achides, and Degaliel. No student of magic could fail
to recognize her employment of an interesting if uncanonical variant of
the Third Pentacle of Venus, but Gerald made no comment.
After that the Princess Evasherah laughed merrily. “Now, then, companion
of my heart, now that you have promised me that utterly contemptible
horse of yours, I unmask you. For I perceive that you, O my master, more
comely than the moon, are the predestined Redeemer of Antan—”
“That much, ma’am, I already know—”
“In short,” said the Princess, “you are Fair-haired Hoo, the Helper and
Preserver, the Lord of the Third Truth, the Well-beloved of Heavenly
Ones, thus masked in human flesh and in human forgetfulness and in
peculiarly unhuman coldness. Yet very soon the power of the Amrita will
have bestowed unfailing vigorousness upon your thinking, and presently
the hounds of recollection will have run down the hare of your
inestimable glory.”
“That is well said, ma’am. It is spoken with a fine sense of style. And
I conjecture that, although the better stylists usually omit this
ingredient, it has some meaning also.... Yes, you do allude to my having
red hair, but the hare of my inestimable glory, which you likewise
mention, is not capillary, but zoölogical,—in addition to being also
metaphorical.... You state, in brief, in a figurative Oriental way, that
by and by I shall recollect something which I have forgotten.... But
just what is it, ma’am, that you so confidently expect me to recollect?”
“My lord, and acme of my contentment, you will recall, for one matter,
the love that was between us in this world’s infancy, when you did not
avert from me the inspiring glances of fond affection. For you, the
bright-tressed, the resplendent, are unmistakably the Well-beloved of
Heavenly Ones. I perfectly remember you, by your high nose, by your
jutting chin, and by the eminence of yet another feature whose noble
proportions also very deeply delighted me during my visit to your
Dirghic paradise, and which I perceive to remain unabatedly heroic.”
Gerald, gently, but with decision, took hold of her hand. It seemed to
him quite time.
Then the fair Lady of the Water-Gap, she who would have been so adorable
if only she had not reminded Gerald more and more of Evelyn Townsend,
began to talk about matters which Gerald as yet really did not remember.
She spoke of Gerald’s golden and high-builded home, in which, it seemed,
this Princess had trusted him and had given him all: and she spoke also
of the unresting love for mankind which had led Gerald to quit that
exalted home, among the untroubled lotus-ponds of Vaikuntha, upon nine
earlier occasions, and of his nine fine exploits in the way of
redemption.
She spoke of how Gerald had visited men sometimes in his present heroic
and elegant form, at other times in the appearance of a contemptible
looking dwarf, and upon yet other occasions as a tortoise and as a boar
pig and as a lion and as a large fish. His taste in apparel seemed as
fickle as his charitableness was firm. For over and over again, the
Princess said, it had been the power of Gerald, as Helper and Preserver,
which had prevented several nations and a dynasty or two of gods from
being utterly destroyed by demons whom Gerald himself had destroyed. It
was Gerald, as he learned now, who had preserved this earth alike from
depopulation and from ignorance, when during the first great flood the
Lord of the Third Truth, in his incarnation as a great fish, had carried
through the deluge seven married couples and four books containing the
cream of earth’s literature: whereas, later, during a yet more severe
inundation, Gerald had held up the earth itself between his tusks,—this
being, of course, in the time of his incarnation as a boar pig,—and
swimming thus, had preserved the endangered planet from being as much as
mildewed.
And Evasherah spoke also of how when Gerald was a tortoise he had
created such matters as the first elephant, the first cow, and the first
wholly amiable woman. He had created at the same time, she added, the
moon and the great jewel Kaustubha and a tree called Parijata, which
yielded whatever was desired of it, and it was then also that
Fair-haired Hoo, the Well-beloved Lord of the Third Truth, had invented
drunkenness. There had been, in all, Evasherah concluded, nineteen
supreme and priceless benefits invented by Gerald at this time, but she
confessed her inability to recall offhand everyone of them—
“It is sufficient,—oh, quite sufficient!” Gerald assured her, with
wholly friendly condescension, “for already, ma’am, it embarrasses me to
have my modest philanthropies catalogued.”
Yet Gerald, howsoever lightly he spoke, was thrilled with not
uncomplacent pride in his past. He was not actually surprised, of
course, because logic had already pointed out that the ruler of Antan
would very naturally be a divine personage with just such a magnificent
past. To be a god appeared to him a rather beautiful idea. So he first
asked what was the meaning of that skull over yonder in the grass: the
Princess explained that it was not her skull, but had been left there by
a visitor some two months earlier: and then Gerald, after having agreed
with her that people certainly ought to be more careful about their
personal belongings, went on with what was really in his mind.
“In any event, ma’am,” he hazarded, with the brief cough of diffidence,
“it seems there have been tender passages between us before this
morning—”
“I trusted you! I gave you all!” she said, reproachfully. “But you,
disposer of supreme delights, and fair vase of my soul, you have
forgotten even the way you used to take advantage of my confidence! For
how can the modesty of a frail woman avail against the brute strength of
a determined man!”
“No, Evelyn, not to-night—I beg your pardon, ma’am! My mind was astray.
What I meant to say was that I really must request you to desist.” Then
Gerald went on, tenderly: “To the contrary, my dear lady, our love stays
unforgettable. I recall every instant of it, I bear in mind even that
sonnet which I made for you on the evening of my first respectful
declaration of undying affection.”
“Ah, yes, that lovely sonnet!” the Princess remarked, with the
uneasiness manifested by every normal woman when a man begins to talk
about poetry.
“—And to prove it, I will now recite that sonnet,” Gerald said.
And he did.
Yet his voice was so shaken with emotion that, when he had completed the
octave, Gerald paused, because it was never within Gerald’s power to
resist the beauty of a sublime thought when it was thus adequately
expressed in flawless verse. So for an instant he stayed silent.
He caught up the lovely, always straying hands of the Princess
Evasherah, of this impulsive and investigatory lady, who so troublingly
resembled Evelyn Townsend, and Gerald pressed these hands to his
trembling lips. This lovely girl, returned to him almost miraculously,
it might seem, out of his well-nigh forgotten past, was not merely
intent once more to trust him and to give him all. She trusted also, as
Gerald felt with that keen penetration which is natural to divine
beings, to delude and to wheedle him into some material loss. What the
Princess desired to cajole him out of was, perhaps, not wholly clear.
Nevertheless, he felt that, in some way or another way, Evasherah was
attempting to deceive him. It might be that neither her explanation as
to that skull nor even her so candid seeming adoration of his wisdom and
his comeliness was entirely sincere. For women were like that: they did
not always mean every word they said, not even when they were addressing
a god. And so, the gods had over-painful duties laid upon them, Gerald
decided.
After that he sighed: and he continued the reciting of his sonnet with
an air of lofty resignation, with which was intermingled a certain
gustatory approval of really good verse.
“Light of my universe, that is a very beautiful sonnet,” the Princess
remarked, when he had finished, “and I am proud to have inspired it, and
I am almost equally proud of the fact that you (through whose supreme
elegance and amiable aspect my heart is once more rent with ecstasy)
should remember it so well after these thousands of years.”
“Years mean very little, ma’am, to Fair-haired Hoo, the Helper and
Preserver, the Lord of the Third Truth, the Well-beloved of Heavenly
Ones: and centuries are, quite naturally, powerless to dim my memories
of any matter in any way pertaining to you. Yet affairs of minor
importance do rather tend to become a bit ambiguous as the æons slip
by.... For example, what, in the intervals between my redemptory
exploits—upon mere week days, as it were,—what do I happen to be the
god of?”
“That,” said the Princess, “O my master, and pure fountain-head of every
virtue, is a peculiarly silly question to be coming from you, who are,
as everybody knows, the Lord of the Third Truth.”
“Ah, yes, to be sure,—of the Third Truth! My divine interests are
invested in veracity. Well, that is highly gratifying. Yet, ma’am, there
are a great many gods, and it is a rather beautiful idea to observe
that, even where their professional spheres are the same, these gods
differ remarkably. Thus, Vulcan is the lord of one fire, and Vesta of
another, but Agni and Fudo and Satan rule over yet other fires, each
wholly individual. Cupid and Lucina traffic in the same port, but not in
the same way. Æolus controls twelve winds, and Tezcatlipoca four winds,
and Crepitus only one wind—”
“Director of my life, and comely shepherd of my soul, I know. Few gods
are strange to me or to my embraces. Many a Heavenly One has invited me
to love, and I have yielded piously: my kisses have written the tale of
my religious transports upon many divine cheeks.”
“—And I imagine that this water from the Churning of the Ocean was not
intended, in the first place, to further my apotheosis. I mean, ma’am, I
do not suppose you went to the trouble of stealing six drops of the
Amrita in order just to recall to me that divinity which, in the press
of other affairs, I had somehow permitted to slip my mind?”
“Disposer and sole archetype of the seven magnanimities, you speak the
truth. For the five remaining drops, as I was trying to tell you when
you kept interrupting me, O my lord, and beloved of my heart, and joy of
both my eyes, were intended for the five human senses of the young man
about whom I was then rather foolish; and upon whom I meant to bestow
immortality and eternal youth. The first drop, inasmuch as the Amrita
confers a never-ending vigorousness, I had of course already placed. So
my Father (whose name be exalted!) smote us both with lightnings, in his
impetuous way, and tumbled us both from out of the Home of the Heavenly
Ones into this river. My young man was thus drowned before I had the
chance to confer upon him any of the favors which I greatly fear your
superior strength and your pertinacity are now about to force from me—”