with your story if you were to keep both of these like this. The
position, you see, is much more American: it lacks that earlier air of
such personal freedom as a democracy does not think well of.”
“Light of the age, I hear and I obey. Yet all my tale has been revealed
to your consideration—”
“Yes,” Gerald assented, “but your history interests me far more—”
“Far more than what, O cruel and resplendent one?”
“Why, far more than I can say, of course. So let us get on with it!”
“But my sad history is now as refined glass before your discerning
glance. It suffices to add that the immortal part of my young man was
happily removed from the waters of this river, and is now worshipped as
a god in Lytreia. But for me, alas! the squirrel of calamity continued
to revolve in the cage of divine wrath. For, so perfectly ridiculous is
the way my Father (whose name be exalted!) behaves when the least thing
upsets him, that I was condemned through the length of nine thousand
years to assume certain official duties in the waters of this river, in
the repugnant shape of a crocodile.”
But with that statement Gerald took prompt issue. “What may be your
official duties as the guardian of these waters I can no more guess than
I can guess how your visitors happen to be so careless about leaving
their skulls behind. That really is a sort of slapdash and inconsiderate
behavior which I cannot condone without considerable reflection. But I
do know that the shape which I have beheld, and still see a great deal
of, in nothing resembles the shape of a crocodile.”
“Epitome of every excellence, and exalted zenith of my existence, that
is because the nine thousand years of my doom have now happily expired.
The proof of this is that already my luckless substitute arrives. We
shall now behold her encounter with the terminator of delights and the
separator of companions. Thereafter, when we have had breakfast, O vital
spirit of my heart, whom my unmitigated love incites me to devour out of
pure affection, I shall ride hence upon the horse with which you have so
gallantly presented me, to enter again into the Home of the Heavenly
Ones.”
With that, the Princess pointed.
8.
The Mother of Every Princess
WITH that, the Princess pointed. And Gerald also now looked toward the
river.... He viewed an unsolid-seeming world of dimly colored movings.
Directly before him the deep river sparkled and rippled eastward with
unhurried, very shallow undulations. But, under the sun’s warmth, mists
rising everywhere above the waters streamed eastward too, unhastily, and
in such unequal volume that now this and now another portion of the wide
landscape beyond the river was irregularly glimpsed and then, gradually
but with a surprising quickness, veiled. Very lovely medallions of green
lawns and shrubbery and distant hills thus seemed to take form and then
to dissolve into the mists’ incessant gray flowing, toward the newly
risen sun....
And Gerald also saw that, some fifty feet away from him, an unusually
unclad elderly woman was approaching the river bank, carrying in her
thin arms a child. The woman trudged forward toward the river like a
drugged person, because of the doom which was upon her.
Now this woman seemed to stumble, and she fell into the water, but in
falling she cast the child from her, so that it remained safe in the
coarse tall-growing grass.
The woman whom divine will had led hither to serve as a scapegoat for
the Princess Evasherah proceeded to drown satisfactorily, and with
indeed a sort of decorum. She sank twice, with hardly any beating or
splashing of the waters, because of that doom which was upon her. The
child, though, whom no long years of living had taught to accept a
preponderance of unpleasant happenings, screamed continuously, in
candid, mewing disapproval of divine will.
Out of the near-by reeds came a bright-eyed jackal; and it furtively
approached the child.
The Princess rose from the alabaster couch and from Gerald’s partially
detaining arms. She stood for an instant irresolute. In her lovely face
was trouble. Her mouth, a little open, trembled. Gerald liked that. Here
was revealed the ever-tender heart of womanhood and the quick generous
sympathy with all afflicted persons which living had taught him to look
for only in the best literature.
The Princess quitted Gerald. She hastened to the river bank. The jackal
backed from her, crouching in a half-circle, with bared teeth, and the
reeds swallowed the beast. The Princess leaned down, and with a lovely
gesture of compassion the Princess caught the drowning woman by one hand
and assisted her ashore.
It was then that the Princess Evasherah cried out in wordless surprise.
Then too her raised hands clenched, and her little fists jerked downward
in a gesture of candid exasperation.
And then also the woman whom the Princess had just saved from drowning
unfastened the small copper bowl and the knife which hung by copper
chains about her waist. The Princess took these, she approached the
wailing child, she stooped, and the crying ceased. The Princess returned
to the strange woman, calling out, “Hrang, hrang!” To the gray lips of
this woman Evasherah applied the blood which was now in the copper bowl,
and the remainder of the child’s blood she sprinkled over the woman’s
unveiled breasts and between the woman’s legs, which were held wide
apart for this fecundation.
“Hail, Mother!” said Evasherah. “All hail, O red and wrinkled Mother of
Every Princess! Hail, patient and insatiable Havvah! A salutation to
thee! Spheng, spheng! a salutation to thee, and all delight to thee for
a thousand years of thy Wednesdays! Drink deep, beloved and wise Mother,
for an oblation of blood which has been rendered pure by holy texts is
more sweet than ambrosia.”
At first the elder lady had seemed peculiarly red and inflamed and
hideous among her tousled tresses. Now she was placated, she panted, and
her eyes rolled languorously. She began, with aggrieved reproach, “But,
O my dearie! you have relapsed into a masculine display of clemency such
as has flung away your allotted chance of redemption.”
“Sorrow and mourning reside in my heart, O my Mother: my limbs are
rendered infirm by remorse. For I had no least notion it was you. I
thought only that some mortal woman was to take over my duties in the
repulsive shape of a crocodile; and I could not bear to hear the small
voice of the little child crying out as the sharp jackal teeth drew
nearer, and to reflect that I was destroying two lives in order to
purchase my freedom from this endless love-making and over-eating.”
“But it was a boy child. Dearie, you are talking as though these sons of
Adam were of real importance. And to hear you, nobody would ever give
you your due credit for having piously ended the ambitions of so many
hundreds of them, since you have protected the entrance to the road of
gods and myths against the impudence of these romantics.”
“Yet, refuge of the uplifted, and asylum of the vigorous, the persons
whose blood has nourished my exile were all young men aflame with impure
intentions. And a child is different. It is not right that the stainless
flesh of a little boy, which is an offering acceptable to all our
exalted race, should be torn by the long teeth of an undomesticated
dog.”
“That is true. That is alike a truthful and a pious reflection. A child
is different from all other afflictions, because a child alone can
always be an endless and a quite new sort of trouble. That nobody knows
better than I who am the Mother of Every Princess, with my daughters
everywhere policing the wild dreams of men so inadequately. Yet a thing
done has an end. And it may be that by and by I can get around your
Father—”
“Whose name be exalted!” remarked Evasherah.
“That also, dearie, is a wholly proper observation,—though, as I was
saying, you know as well as I do how pig-headed he is. Meanwhile, there
is nothing left for you, for the present, save another incarnation, and
another century or two of seductiveness upon the verge of Doonham.”
“But I have been,” observed the Princess, “a crocodile professionally
for nine thousand years, for all that my chest is so delicate. The cats
of conjecture are therefore abroad in the meadows of my meditation
purring that this time I would prefer something a little less damp.”
“Dearie, since your next incarnation is but a matter of form, do you by
all means please yourself, so that you stay a destruction to young men
and to their upsetting aspirations. You have been wholly inadequate this
morning, I observe—”
“Why, but—” said the abashed Princess.
Her voice sank as she went on rather ruefully with a talking which to
Gerald was now inaudible. He could merely see that the elder lady had
hazarded a suggestion which Evasherah at once dismissed with an emphatic
toss of her lovely head. He saw too the Princess place together the
palms of her hands and then draw them about seven inches apart.
“Oh, fully that, at first!” she stated, in the raised tones of mild
exasperation, “so that, altogether, this unresponsive person (within
whose ancestral tomb may all goats propagate!) remains quite
incomprehensible.”
The old woman replied: “In any event, you have failed; but that does not
really matter. He travels, you assure me, with his assured betrayer. And
the road he follows, that also, is lively enough and long enough to
betray him in the end. For he will meet others of my daughters; and if
all else fails, he will meet me.”
“The ship of my enduring resolution is not yet wrecked upon the iceberg
of his indifference; and I am not through with him, by any means. I am
returning to this unremunerative occupier of my couch,—for breakfast, O
my Mother,” the Princess added, with a merry laugh.
And the old lady answered her with a mother’s ever-responsive
tenderness. “That is my own child. One has to persevere with these
romantics, no matter how hard the task may seem. For none of us knows
yet what these romantic men desire. 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 so many of these
men nurse strange desires which do not know their aim? for how can any
of my daughters content such desires?”
“One can but summon, O my Mother, the terminator of delights and the
separator of companions and the ender of all desires.”
“There are other ways, my dearie, which are more subtle. That way is of
the East, that way is old and crude. Still, that way also quiets
over-ambitious dreaming; and that way serves.”
Gerald blinked. He was a bit troubled by the matter-of-fact occurrence
before his eyes of a perfectly incredible happening.
For the elder lady became transfigured. She became larger, all ruddiness
went away from her, and she took on the black and livid coloring of a
thunder cloud. In her left hand she now carried a pair of scales and a
yardstick. Her face smiled rather terribly as she steadily grew larger.
Her necklace, you perceived, was made of human skulls, and each of her
earrings was the dangling corpse of a hanged man in a very poor state of
preservation. Altogether, it was not a grief to Gerald when the Mother
of Every Princess had attained to her full heavenly stature, and had
vanished.
But the Lady of the Water-Gap was changed in quite another fashion.
Where she had stood now fluttered a large black and yellow butterfly.
9.
How One Butterfly Fared
SO it was in the shape of a large butterfly that Evasherah returned
toward Gerald, to careen and drift affectionately about him, in a
bewildering medley of bright colors. He cried to her adoringly, “My
darling—!” He grasped at her: and she did not avoid him.
Gerald now held this lovely creature, by the throat, at arm’s length. He
began the compelling words, “Schemhamphoras—” And in Gerald’s face was
no adoration whatever.
Instead, he continued, rather sadly, “—Eloha, Ab, Bar, Ruachaccocies—”
and so went through the entire awful list, ending by and by with
“Cados.”
His prey was now struggling frantically. The unreflective girl had not
allowed for her lover’s being a student of magic. And her restiveness
was—well, it might be, pardonably,—a bit interfering with Gerald’s
æsthetic delight, now that he paused to admire the splendor of the
trapped Princess’s last incarnation, before he used the fatal Hausa
charm.
For Evasherah’s wings were of a wonderful velvety black and a fiery
orange color, her body was golden, and her breast crimson. He noted also
that Evasherah, in her increasing agitation of mind, had thrust out from
the back of her neck a soft forked horn which diffused a horrible odor.
And those curved, strong, needle-sharp fangs which were striking vainly
at him were so adroitly designed that Gerald fell now to marveling,
still a little sadly, at their superb efficiency. A yellowish oil oozed
from their tips. They had, he saw, just the curve of two cat claws:
whensoever such fangs struck flesh, their victim’s recoil would but
clamp fangs which were shaped like that more deeply and more venomously;
it was a quite ingenious arrangement. It perfectly explained, too, how
the visitors of this soft-spoken, cuddling and utterly adorable Princess
happened to leave their skulls in the thick grass around her alabaster
couch.
Then Gerald said: “O Butterfly, O Gleaming One, your breakfast this day
is disappointment, your fork is agony, and your napkin death. O
Butterfly, repent truly, abandon falsehood, put away deceit and
flattery, cease thinking about your deluded lovers even remorsefully.
Repent in verity, do not repent like the wildcat which repents with the
fowl in its mouth without putting the fowl down. Where now is the
artfulness which was yours, where are the high-hearted, tricked
lovers?—To-day all lies in the tomb. This world, O Butterfly, is a
market-place: everyone comes and goes, both stranger and citizen. The
last of your lovers is a pious friend, he assists the decreed course of
this world.”
Still, it was rather strange that the body she had chosen appeared to
belong to the species _Onithoptera crœsus_,—Gerald decided, as his foot
crushed the squeaking soft remnants and rubbed all into a smeared paste
of blood and gold-dust,—because, of course, this kind of butterfly was
more properly indigenous to the Malay Archipelago than to these parts,
over and above the fact that for any butterfly to have the fangs of a
serpent was false entomology.
However, the geography and local customs and all else which pertained to
the Marches of Antan were tinged with some perceptible inconsequence,
Gerald reflected, as he returned to his tethered stallion. He mounted
then, cheered with the yet further reflection that he had got from
Evasherah the rather beautiful idea of being a god, and had got also the
four remaining drops from the Churning of the Ocean. The properties of
this water were sufficiently well known to every student of magic.
PART FOUR
THE BOOK OF DERSAM
“What Has a Blind Man
to Do with Any Mirror?”
10.
Wives at Caer Omn
NOW Gerald mounted on the stallion Kalki, and Gerald traveled upon the
way of gods and myths, down a valley of cedar-trees, into the realm of
Glaum of the Haunting Eyes. The land of Dersam was already falling away
into desolation, because of the disappearance of its liege-lord into
mortal living. And at Caer Omn, which formerly had been the Sylan’s
royal palace, and where Gerald got his breakfast, the three hundred and
fifty-odd concubines of Glaum were about their cooking and cleaning and
nursing, but the seven wives of Glaum sat together in a walled garden.
Six of these wives were young and comely, but the seventh seemed—to
Gerald’s finding,—as wrinkled as a wet fishnet, and as old as envy.
By the half-dozen who retained their youth, however, Gerald was
enraptured. As he looked from one of them to the other, each in her turn
appeared so surpassingly lovely that she excelled all the other women
his gaze had ever beheld.... But, no! Glaum was his benefactor. Glaum at
this instant, in Lichfield, was toiling away at that unfinished romance
about Dom Manuel of Poictesme which by and by was to make the name of
Gerald Musgrave famous everywhere. It would, therefore, never do to
encourage these so shapely and chromatically meritorious dears to follow
out the dictates of womanly confidence and generosity to the point where
they could bleat about it. No, to permit them all to deceive one husband
would be an unfriendly and injudicious pleonasm, Gerald reflected. And
Gerald sighed whole-heartedly.
The seven women had sighed earlier. “What else is now come to trouble
us?” said the wives of the Sylan when Gerald came.
He answered them, with a great voice: “Ladies, I am Fair-haired Hoo, the
Helper and the Preserver, the Lord of the Third Truth, the Well-beloved
of Heavenly Ones. Yet, I pray you, do not be unduly alarmed by this
revelation! I am not a ruthless deity, I deal fiercely with none save my
misguided opponents. I, in a word, am he of whom it was prophesied that
I, my dear ladies, or perhaps I ought to say that he—although, to be
sure, it does not really matter which pronoun a strict grammarian would
prefer, since in any case the meaning is unmistakable and very
sublime,—would at his or at my appointed season appear, in unexampled
and appropriate splendor, to reign over Antan, riding upon the silver
stallion Kalki.”
But the wives of Glaum seemed unimpressed. “Your meaning, sir,” said one
of them, “may be terrible, but certainly it is not plain.”
This wife had reddish golden hair, uncovered: she wore a blue gown, so
fashioned that it left her right breast wholly uncovered also; and,
doubtless for some sufficient purpose, she carried an iron candlestick
with seven branches.
Gerald asked, with indignation tempered by her good looks: “And do you
doubt my divine word? Do you dispute my Dirghic godhead?”
Another wife answered him, a glorious dark sultry creature in purple,
who wore a semi-circular crown and had about the upper part of each bare
arm two broad gold bands.
She said: “Why should we question that? Gods by the score and by the
hundreds, gods in battalions, have passed through the land of Dersam,
going downward toward Antan, to enter into well-earned rest after their
long labors in this world.”
“Ah, so it appears that Antan is the heaven of all deserving gods, and
that I am to rule a celestially populated kingdom well worthy of me!”
“We have not ever been to Antan. We thus know nothing of its customs. We
know only that many gods have passed us, traveling upon all manner of
steeds as they went down into Antan. Bes rode upon a cat, and Tlaloc
upon a stag, and Siva upon a bull: we have seen Kali pass upon the back
of a tiger: above our heads Zeus has gone by upon the back of an eagle,
as he traveled abreast with Amen-Ra upon the back of a very large
beetle. We therefore think it likely enough that you who pass upon this
shining horse are yet another one of these gods. What are the gods to
us, in this our season of unexampled trouble?”
Then the seven wives fell into a lamentation, and their complaining was
that, since Glaum of the Haunting Eyes had left them, the sacred mirror
reflected only the person who stood before it.
“And is not such the nature of all mirrors?” Gerald asked.
“Oh, sir,” replied the wife who carried a bunch of keys, and who wore
that unaccountable tall bifurcated orange-colored headdress, “but until
yesterday ours was the mirror which showed things as they ought to be.”
“And what did one discover in it?”
Now the old wife spoke. Her head was wrapped in a white turban; her face
had no more color than has the belly of a fish; and a sprinkling of
white hairs, so long that they had grown into spirals and half-circles,
glittered upon her shaking chin. “To the aged, such as I have now
become, the Mirror of Caer Omn reveals nothing any more: but to the
young, such as we all were before Glaum left us, it was used to reveal
that which may not be described.”
“Then why do you not place before it some young person—?”
“Alas, sir, but there is no longer any co-respondent youth in the
mirror!”
The speaker was the brown-haired and alluringly plump wife who wore
nothing at all anywhere, and whose delicious body had been depilated in
every needful place.
Then the seven wives of Glaum of the Haunting Eyes raised a lament; and
now the pallid sharp-nosed wife who was far gone in pregnancy, and who
wore that maroon-colored headdress shaped like a cone, began to speak of
the young fellows who had been used to come to them out of the sacred
mirror.
She spoke of very handsome, tall, brisk, nimble, impudent young fellows,
that had been always jolly and buxom and jaunty, and not ever grumpish
like a husband; of over-rash young fellows who must have their flings,
who stuck at nothing, who went to all lengths, who had a finger in every
pie, who kept the pot a-boiling; of what forward, eager, pushing,
plodding, thwacking, negligent of no corner, business-like,
never-wearying, soul-stirring workmen they had been at every job they
undertook; of what great plagues they had been, too, without the least
bit of any patience or of any modesty; and of how unreasonably you
missed these sad rapscallions now that there was no longer any
co-respondent youth remaining in the sacred Mirror of Caer Omn.
Gerald replied: “Your plaint is very moving. I regard a mirror which
begets any such young fellows as a rather beautiful idea. It is true
that I am a bachelor who therefore object to no reasonable mitigation of
matrimony. But I am also a god, dear ladies, a god who brings all youth
with me here in this vial.”
At that the last wife spoke. Her hair was flaxen; her body was
everywhere engagingly visible through her gown, of a transparent soft
green tissue; she carried a small golden-hilted sword. And this wife
said:
“You differ, then, from those other gods who have passed this way. No
youth went with these gods, who had themselves grown old and tired and
more feeble, and who journeyed toward a resting from all miracles and
away from a world wherein they were no longer worshipped.”
“But I,” said Gerald, “I am a god who is, moreover, a citizen of the
United States of America, wherein every sort of religion yet flourishes
as it can never do in an effete and sophisticated monarchy. So do you
show me the way to the temple of the sacred Mirror of Caer Omn!”
11.
The Glass People
THE seven wives conducted Fair-haired Hoo, the Helper and the
Preserver, to the Temple of the Mirror. It was the old wife who now
lifted from the mirror a blue veil embroidered with tiny fig-leaves
worked in gold thread. You saw then that this mirror was splotched and
clouded and mildewed. It reflected sallowly a distorted and rather
speckled Gerald: it glistened with an unwholesome iridescence.
Thereafter Fair-haired Hoo, the Helper and Preserver, the Lord of the
Third Truth, when he had announced his various titles, with such due
ceremony as befits an exchange of amenities between divine powers,
moistened his finger-tip with one drop of water from the Churning of the
Ocean. Upon the sacred Mirror of Caer Omn he drew with his finger-tip
the triangle of the male and of the female principle, so that the one
interpenetrated the other: and he invoked Monachiel, Ruach, Achides, and
Degaliel.
Then there was never a more inconsequent rejoicing witnessed anywhere
than was made by the seven wives of Glaum of the Haunting Eyes, now that
the sacred mirror was altered, for these seven ungrateful
scatter-brained women were now singing a sort of hymn in honor of the
charitableness and the vigorous procreative powers of the sun.
“But what under the sun has the sun,” said Gerald, a little flustered,
“to do with the not inconsiderable favor which I have conferred upon
this country? And do you think such anatomical details as you are
singing about quite the proper theme for an opera?”