Far-darting Helios and Freyr the Fond Wooer and the Elder Horus and
Marduk of the Bright Glance, all of whom have ridden this way as they
passed down toward Antan. Sir, it is clear that the Lord of the Third
Truth, also, is a god whose mission it is to awaken warmth and humidity
and a renewal of life in all that he touches—”
“But,” Gerald said, “but with my finger!”
“—Just as,” they concluded, “you have done to this mirror. Therefore,
sir, we are praising your charitableness and your vigorous procreative
powers.”
“Ah, now I comprehend you! Still, let us, in these public choral odes,
let us adhere strictly to the charitableness! Those other solar traits I
would describe as far better adapted to chamber music, in some duet
form. Meanwhile, since this somewhat un-American hymn is intended as a
personal tribute, I accept your really very personal arithmetic in the
proper spirit, dear ladies, as a pious exaggeration. For of course, just
as you say, it does seem fairly obvious I am a sun god.”
Yet Gerald, after all, was now more deeply interested in that huge
mirror than in anything else. He saw that the mirror which they
worshipped in the land of Dersam was not in any way dreadful. If only
the mirror of Freydis was like this, then every inheritance which
awaited him in his appointed kingdom might well be pleasant enough.
For now the Mirror of Caer Omn shone with a golden clear glowing, and in
its depths he viewed with lively admiration a throng of strange and
lovely beings such as he had not known in Lichfield.
12.
Confusions of the Golden Travel
BUT when three huge men beckoned to him, and Gerald had moved forward,
he found, with wholly tolerant surprise, that this mirror was in reality
a warmish golden mist, through which he entered into the power of these
three giant blacksmiths, and into the shackles of adamant with which
they bound him fast to a gray, lichen-crusted crag, the topmost crag
above a very wide ravine, among a desert waste of mountain tops; and he
entered, too, into that noble indignation which now possessed Gerald
utterly. For it was Heaven he was defying, he who was an apostate god, a
god unfrightened by the animosity of his divine fellows. He had
preserved, somehow,—in ways which he could not very clearly recall, but
of which he stayed wholly proud,—all men and women from destruction by
the harshness and injustice of Heaven. He only of the gods had pitied
that futile, naked, cowering race which lived, because of their
defencelessness among so many other stronger animals, in dark and
shallow caverns, like ants in an ant-hill. He had made those timid,
scatter-brained, two-legged animals human: he had taught them to build
houses and boats; to make and to employ strong knives and far-smiting
arrows against the fangs and claws with which Heaven had equipped the
other animals; and to tame horses and dogs to serve them in their
hunting for food. He had taught them to write and to figure and to
compound salves and medicines for their hurts, and even to foresee the
future more or less. All arts that were among the human race had come
from Prometheus, and all these benefits were now preserved for his so
inadequate, dear puppets, through the nineteen books in which Prometheus
had set down the secrets of all knowledge and all beauty and all
contentment,—he who after he had discovered to mortals so many
inventions had no invention to preserve himself. Prometheus, in brief,
had created and had preserved men and women, in defiance of Heaven’s
fixed will. For that sacrilege Prometheus atoned, among the ends of
earth, upon this lichen-crusted gray crag. He suffered for the eternal
redemption of mankind, the first of all poets, of those makers who
delight to shape and to play with puppets, and the first of men’s
Saviors. And his was a splendid martyrdom, for the winged daughters of
old Ocean fluttered everywhere about him in the golden Scythian air,
like wailing seagulls, and a grief-crazed woman with the horns of a cow
emerging from her disordered yellow hair paused too to cherish him, and
then went toward the rising place of the sun to endure her allotted
share of Heaven’s injustice.
But he who was the first of poets burst Heaven’s shackles like
packthread, ridding himself of all ties save the little red band which
yet clung about one finger, and rising, passed to his throne between the
bronze lions which guarded each of its six steps, and so sat beneath a
golden disk. All wisdom now belonged to the rebel against Heaven, and
his was all earthly power: the fame of the fine poetry and the
comeliness and the grandeur of Solomon was known in Assyria and Yemen,
in both Egypts and in Persepolis, in Karnak and in Chalcedon, and among
all the isles of the Mediterranean. He sported with genii and with
monsters of the air and of the waters; the Elementals served King
Solomon when he began to build, as a bribe to Heaven, a superb temple
which was engraved and carved and inlaid everywhere with cherubim and
lions and pineapples and oxen and the two triangles. There was no power
like Solomon’s: his ships returned to him three times each year with the
tribute of Nineveh and Tyre and Parvaam and Mesopotamia and Katuar; the
kings of all the world were the servants of King Solomon: the spirits of
fire and the lords of the air brought tribute to him, too, from behind
the Pleiades. His temple now was half completed. But upon his ring
finger stayed always the band of blood-colored asteria upon which was
written, “All things pass away.” These glittering and soft and
sweet-smelling things about him, as he knew always, were only loans
which by and by would be taken away from him by Heaven. He turned from
these transient things to drunkenness and to the embraces of women, he
hunted forgetfulness upon the breasts of nine hundred women, he quested
after oblivion between the thighs of the most beautiful women of Judea
and Israel, of Moab and of Ammon and of Bactria, of Baalbec and of
Babylon: he turned to wantoning with boys and with beasts and with
bodies of the dead. These madnesses enraptured the flesh of Solomon, but
always the undrugged vision of his mind regarded the fixed will of
Heaven, “These things shall pass away.” The temple which he had been
building lacked now only one log to be completed. He cast that gray and
lichen-crusted cedar log into the Pool of Bethesda: it sank as though it
had been a stone: and Solomon bade his Israelites set fire to the temple
which all these years he had been building as a bribe to Heaven.
But when the temple burned, it became more than a temple, for not only
the flanks of Mt. Moriah were ablaze, a whole city was burning there,
and its name was Ilion. He aided in the pillaging of it: the golden
armor of Achilles fell to his share. In such heroic gear, he, like a fox
hidden in a slain lion’s skin, took ship to Ismaurus, which city he
treacherously laid waste and robbed: thence he passed to the land of the
Lotophagi, where he viewed with mildly curious, cool scorn the men who
fed upon oblivion. He was captured by a very bad-smelling, one-eyed
giant, from whom he through his wiles escaped. There was no one anywhere
more quick in wiles than was Odysseus, Laertes’ son. He toiled unhurt
through a nightmare of pitfalls and buffetings, among never-tranquil
seas, outwitting the murderous Laestrigonians, and hoodwinking Circe and
the feathery-legged Sirens and fond Calypso: he evaded the man-eating
ogress with six heads: he passed among the fluttering, gray, squeaking
dead, and got the better of Hades’ sullen overlords and ugly spectres,
through his unfailing wiliness,—he who was still a poet, making the
supreme poem of each man’s journeying through an everywhere inimical and
betraying world, he who was pursued by the wrath of Heaven which
Poseidon had stirred up against Odysseus. But always the wiles of
much-enduring Odysseus evaded the full force of Heaven’s buffetings, so
that in the end he won home to Ithaca and to his meritorious wife; and
then, when the suitors of Penelope had been killed, he went, as dead
Tiresias had commanded, into a mountainous country carrying upon his
shoulder an oar, and leading a tethered ram, for it was yet necessary to
placate Heaven. Beyond Epirus, among the high hills of the Thesproteans,
he sat the oar upright in the stony ground, and turning toward the ram
which he now meant to sacrifice to Poseidon, he found Heaven’s
amiability to remain unpurchased, because the offering of Odysseus, who
was a rebel against Heaven’s will to destroy him, had been refused, and
the ram had vanished.
But in his hand was still the rope with which he had led this ram, and
in his other hand was a bag containing silver money, and in his heart,
now that he had again turned northerly, to find in place of the oar an
elder-tree in flower, now in his heart was the knowledge that no man
could travel beyond him in hopelessness and in infamy. He remembered all
that he had put away, all which he had denied and betrayed, all the
kindly wonders which he had witnessed between Galilee and Jerusalem,
where the carpenters of the Sanhedrin were now fashioning, from a great
lichen-crusted cedar log found floating in the Pool of Bethesda, that
cross which would be set up to-morrow morning upon Mt. Calvary. Then
Judas flung down the accursed silver and the rope with which he had come
hither to destroy himself, because an infamy so complete as his must
first be expressed with fitting words. It was a supreme infamy, it was
man’s masterpiece in the way of iniquity, it was the reply of a very
fine poet to Heaven’s proffered truce after so many æons of tormenting
men causelessly: it was a thing not to be spoken of but sung. He heaped
great sheets of lead upon his chest, he slit the cord beneath his
tongue, he tormented himself with clysters and with purges and in all
other needful ways, so that his voice might be at its most effective
when he sang toward Heaven about his infamy.
But when he sang of his offence against Heaven, he likened his
hatefulness to that of very horrible offenders in yet elder times, he
compared his sin to that of Œdipus who sinned inexpiably with his
mother, and to that of Orestes whom Furies pursued forever because he
had murdered his mother. But it was not of any Jocasta or of any
Clytemnestra he was thinking, rather it was of his own mother, of that
imperious, so beautiful Agrippina whom he had feared and had loved with
a greater passion than anyone ought to arouse in an emperor, and whom he
had murdered. Nothing could put Agrippina out of his thoughts. It
availed no whit that he was lord of all known lands, and the owner of
the one house in the world fit for so fine a poet to live in, a house
entirely overlaid with gold and adorned everywhere with jewels and with
mother of pearl, a house that quite dwarfed the tawdry little Oriental
hovel which Solomon had builded as a bribe to Heaven, because this was a
house so rich and ample that it had three-storied porticos a mile in
length, and displayed upon its front portico not any such trumpery as an
Ark of the Covenant but a colossal statue of that Nero Claudius Cæsar
who was the supreme poet the world had ever known. Yet nothing could put
Agrippina out of Nero’s thoughts. From the satiating of no lust,
howsoever delicate or brutal, and from the committing of no enormity,
and from the loveliness of none of his poems, could he get happiness and
real peace of mind. He hungered only for Agrippina, he wanted back her
detested scoldings and intermeddlings, he reviled the will of Heaven
which had thwarted the desires of a fine poet by making this so
beautiful, proud woman his mother, and he practised those magical rites
which would summon Agrippina from the dead.
But when she returned to him, incredibly beautiful, and pale and proud,
and quite naked, just as he had last seen her when his sword had ripped
open this woman’s belly so that he might see the womb in which he had
once lain, then the divine Augusta drew him implacably downward among
the dead, and so into the corridors of a hollow mountain. This place was
thronged with all high-hearted worshippers of the frightening,
discrowned, imperious, so beautiful woman who had drawn him thither
resistlessly, and in this Hörselberg he lived in continued splendor and
in a more dear lewdness, and he still made songs, only now it was as
Tannhäuser that the damned acclaimed him as supreme among poets. But
Heaven would not let him rest even among these folk who had put away all
thought of Heaven. Heaven troubled Tannhäuser with doubts, with
premonitions, even with repentance. Heaven with such instruments lured
this fine poet from the scented Hörselberg into a bleak snow-wrapped
world: and presently he shivered too under the cold wrath of Pope Urban,
bells rang, a great book was cast down upon the pavement of white and
blue slabs, and the candles were being snuffed out, as the now formally
excommunicated poet fled westerly from Rome pursued by the ever-present
malignity of Heaven.
But from afar he saw the sapless dry rod break miraculously into
blossom, and he saw the messengers of a frightened Bishop of Rome (with
whom also Heaven was having its malicious sport) riding everywhither in
search of him, bearing Heaven’s pardon to the sinner whom they could not
find. For the poet sat snug in a thieves’ kitchen, regaling himself with
its sour but very potent wines and with its frank, light-fingered girls.
Yet a gibbet stood uncomfortably near to the place: upon bright days the
shadow of this gallows fell across the threshold of the room in which
they rather squalidly made merry. Death seemed to wait always within
arm’s reach, pilfering all, with fingers more light and nimble than
those which a girl runs furtively through the pockets of the put-by
clothing of her client in amour. Death nipped the throats of ragged poor
fellows high in the air yonder, and death very lightly drew out of the
sun’s light and made at one with Charlemagne all the proud kings of
Aragon and Cyprus and Bohemia, and death casually tossed aside the
tender sweet flesh which had been as white as the snows of last winter,
and was as little regarded now, of such famous tits as Héloïse and Thaïs
and Queen Bertha Broadfoot. Time was a wind which carried all away. Time
was preparing by and by (still at the instigation of ruthless Heaven) to
make an end even to François Villon, who was still so fine a poet, for
all that time had made of him a wine-soaked, rickety, hairless,
lice-ridden and diseased sneakthief whose food was paid for by the
professional earnings of a stale and flatulent harlot. For time ruined
all: time was man’s eternal strong ravager, time was the flail with
which Heaven pursued all men whom Heaven had not yet destroyed,
ruthlessly.
But time might yet be confounded: and it was about that task he set. For
Mephistophilus had allotted him twenty-four years of wholly untrammeled
living, and into that period might be heaped the spoilage of centuries.
He took unto himself eagle’s wings and strove to fathom all the causes
of the misery which was upon earth and of the enviousness of Heaven.
That which time had destroyed, Johan Faustus brought back into being: he
was a poet who worked in necromancy, his puppets were the most admirable
and lovely of the dead. Presently he was restoring through art magic
even those lost nineteen books in which were the secrets of all beauty
and all knowledge and all contentment, the secrets for which Prometheus
had paid. But the professors at the university would have nothing to do
with these nineteen books. It was feared that into these books restored
by the devil’s aid, the devil might slily have inserted something
pernicious: and besides, the professors said, there were already enough
books from which the students could learn Greek and Hebrew and Latin. So
they let perish again all those secrets of beauty and knowledge and
contentment which the world had long lost. Now Johan Faustus laughed at
the ineradicable folly with which Heaven had smitten all men, a folly
against which the clear-sighted poet fought in vain. But Johan Faustus
at least was wise, and there had never been any other beauty like this
which now stood before him within arm’s reach (as surely as did death),
now that with a yet stronger conjuration he had wrested from
all-devouring time even the beauty of Argive Helen.
But when he would have touched the Swan’s daughter, the delight of gods
and men, she vanished, precisely as a touched bubble is shattered into
innumerable sparkling bits, and over three thousand of them he pursued
and captured in all quarters of the earth, for, as he said of himself,
Don Juan Tenorio had the heart of a poet, which is big enough to be in
love with the whole world, and like Alexander he could but wish for
other spheres to which he might extend his conquests, and each one of
these sparkling bits of womanhood glittered with something of that lost
Helen’s loveliness, yet, howsoever various and resistless were their
charms, and howsoever gaily he pursued them, singing ever-new songs, and
swaggeringly gallant, in his fair, curly wig and his gold-laced coat
adorned with flame-colored ribbons, yet he, the eternal pursuer, was in
turn pursued by the malevolence of Heaven, in, as it seemed, the shape
of an avenging horseman who drew ever nearer unhurriedly, until at last
the clash of rapiers and the pleasant strumming of mandolins were not
any longer to be heard in that golden and oleander-scented
twilight,—because of those ponderous, unhurried hoofbeats, which had
made every other noise inaudible,—and until at last he perceived that
both the rider and the steed were of moving stone, of an unforgotten
stone which was gray and lichen-crusted.
But when fearlessly he encountered the overtowering statue, and had
grasped the horse about its round cold neck, he saw that the stone rider
was lifeless, and was but the dumb and staring effigy of a big man in
armor which was inset with tinsel and with bits of colored glass. It was
the bungled copy and the parody of a magnanimous, great-hearted dream
that he was grasping, and yet it was a part of him, who had been a poet
once, but was now a battered old pawnbroker, for in some way, as he
incommunicably knew, this parodied and not ever comprehended Redeemer
and he were blended, and they were, somehow, laboring in unison to serve
a shared purpose. He derided and he came too near to a mystery which he
distrusted, and which yet (without his preference having been consulted
in the affair) remained a part of him, as it was a part of all poets,
even of a cashiered poet, and a part very vitally necessary to the
existence of a Jurgen. A Jurgen had best not meddle with such matters
one half-second sooner than that dimly foreseen, inevitable need arose
for a Jurgen also to be utilized in the service of this mystery, without
having his preference in the affair consulted. The aging pawnbroker was
a little afraid. He climbed gingerly down from the tall pedestal of
Manuel the Redeemer, he descended from that ambiguous tomb upon which he
was trampling, he stepped rather hastily backward from that carved
fragment of the crag of Prometheus. He stepped backward, treading beyond
the confines of the golden mirror which was worshipped at Caer Omn; and
he was thus released from its magic.
13.
Colophon of a God
NOW before him the mirror still glowed goldenly, and now a hunchback
held out both his hands toward Gerald, whom he was trying to allure into
the form and mind of this sardonic, cracker-jawed, sly knave who had
such melancholy eyes. Gerald was much tempted to become this Punch, and
to relive for a little the rascal’s defiant and ever-restless life. And
then too, behind Punch waited tall Merlin, crowned with mistletoe, he
that created all chivalry, and that, being himself the great fiend’s
son, first taught men how to live as became the children of God. It
would be quite entertaining to enter into Merlin’s dark heart. Moreover,
to the other hand of Punch, stood a glittering suave gentleman with a
blue beard, in whose uxoricides it might be vastly interesting to
share....
Yet Gerald, facing these three rather beautiful ideas, was of two minds.
“For I am a god, with a throne awaiting me in Antan, where all the other
gods will be my lackeys,—and, for that matter, with no doubt a whole
cosmos of my own twirling and burning to unheeded clinkers somewhere in
space, which I ought at this moment to be looking after and
embellishing. And in this particular small world which I am quitting,
the powers of Heaven do quite honestly seem—when you look at them from
a perhaps biassed standpoint, that is,—and only to a certain extent, of
course,—and if you are so ill-advised as to consider matters in a
pessimistic, morbid, wholly un-American way—”
Gerald paused. He smilingly shook his red head. “No. It is far better
for us gods not to criticize the handiwork of one another. So I shall
without one word of reproof permit my fellows to play as they like with
this planet called Earth. I shall of course, very probably, make new
planets a bit more conformable to my personal fancy. But I shall say
nothing about the planet I am now quitting at all likely to hurt
anybody’s feelings. No: I shall, rather, rely upon the appealing
eloquence of a dignified silence reinforced by a decisive departure.”
And Gerald said also: “As for this mirror which is worshipped in the
land of Dersam, it pleases me as a toy. But I who am a Savior and a sun
god with nine such very fine exploits behind me, in the way of swimming
and of decimating devils, and of restoring warmth and making moons, and
of really remarkable broad-mindedness as to what particular animal I may
happen to look like,—I, the Helper and the Preserver, who am called to
reign over the goal of all the gods of men,—why, I must necessarily
lose by exchanging such a tremendous destiny for anything to be found in
this mirror.”
Then Gerald said: “No. I must never forget that, whether I am a Savior
or a sun deity, or whether I am habitually used to discharge both
functions, I in any case remain Fair-haired Hoo, the Helper and
Preserver, the Lord of the Third Truth, and so on. I am a most notable
figure, of some sort or another sort, in Dirghic mythology. I am the
appointed rider of the silver stallion. I am destined to inherit from
the Master Philologist the great and best words of magic, and after that
poor hospitable fellow’s downfall to reign in his stead over the place
beyond good and evil which is the goal of all the gods of men and the
reward of their meritorious exertions. I cannot forsake such a majestic
destiny in order to play with the droll and pretty figures that move
about in the depths of this mirror. And whether or not this is a mirror
which I may require hereafter, when I have come into my kingdom and have
resumed my exalted divine estate in my appropriate mythology, is a
matter which I shall settle in due time who have all eternity wherein to
do whatever I may prefer.”
14.
Evarvan of the Mirror
THEN Gerald perceived that the wives of Glaum were not yet through
with their wonder-workings, for these seven women were now about a
ceremony which they called Asvamedha. They led into the temple a brown
horse. Before the mirror they struck down this horse with pole-axes. The
tail was cut off by the flaxen-haired wife in green, and the naked wife
carried it away, Gerald did not know whither. The horse’s head also was
severed from the body, by that wife who was with child; the head was
then adorned with a chaplet made of small loaves of bread. This head was
afterward impaled upon a stake and thus was set upright before the
mirror, but not facing it. Then the six wives of Glaum who yet remained
in the temple mixed the blood of the horse with the blood of unborn
calves; they turned the stake: and they showed Gerald what he must do.
When he had obeyed, and when they had all invoked Evarvan, then the
golden glowing of the sacred mirror was turned into a paler haze like
that of moonshine. Out of this silvery mistiness came a crowned woman.
She was clothed in white, and about her head shone an aureole.