surpassingly lovely that she excelled all the other women his gaze had
ever beheld. Yet somehow it was not the coloring nor the placing of her
features that he was noting. Rather, he was observing himself and the
thing which was happening to this careful, this well-poised, fastidious,
parched, rather pitiable Gerald whom for so many years he had known. The
creature had not for a great while, not since, indeed, the days of his
first insanity about Evelyn, been visited by any real emotion: now,
momentarily at least, he was ablaze: he was caught perhaps: and it was
this imminent personal peril that Gerald was noting, aloofly, with a
drugged sense of derisory exultation.
For this Gerald, as it seemed to him, had known quite well, a great
while ago, before his lips had touched for pastime’s sake the lips of
any woman anywhere, that this woman who, it seemed, was called Evarvan,
existed in some place, and waited for him, and would by and by be found.
That very important fact, which a boy had known, a thriftless, very
silly young man had let slip out of mind. Throughout all the
twenty-eight years of his living, it seemed to Gerald, this Evarvan had
been the true and perfect love of his heart’s core.... To the extreme
romanticism of this phrase he conceded a smile: that he should have
concocted a phrase so abominable showed him just now to be neither
fastidious nor well poised.... Nevertheless, here was the woman whose
existence he, even in Lichfield, had always dimly divined, and of
whom—he had it now,—of whom Evelyn Townsend had been a parodying
shadow in human flesh. The likeness had been just sufficient to get him
into a great deal of trouble. He saw that likeness now, quite plainly.
“And this woman too is going to get me into trouble, I very much fear.
For all my being cries out to her. Eh, Gerald, one needs caution here,
my lad, you who find trouble uncongenial!”
Evarvan spoke. And she was speaking, oddly enough, as it seemed to him,
of that Evelyn who went about Lichfield immured in the body which was a
poor copy of Evarvan’s body. Yet Gerald was listening hardly at all. He
did not like the strong, insane and over-youthful emotions which this
woman roused in him. They endangered his welfare. For this woman was
awakening in him those old, unforgotten fervors which he had once felt
for Evelyn Townsend, and which had betrayed him into the horrid bondage
of an illicit love-affair. This Evarvan was ensnaring him, he knew, into
the insanities appropriate to youth and inexperience: and such nonsense
had to be controlled.
So it was half dazedly Gerald protested that—quite apart from the
claims of his divine duties as a Savior and a sun god, and apart too
from the obligations he was under to ascend the throne of Antan,—he
could no longer endure the stupidities and the fretfulness and the
jealousies of the Evelyn who had made adultery wholly unendurable.
“If she were but a bit like you, ma’am,” Gerald gallantly
remarked,—with somewhat increasing composure now that this woman
reminded him the more closely that he observed her yet more and more of
Evelyn,—“the case would be different.”
“But I,” said Evarvan of the Mirror, “will remain with you always, if
you indeed desire to become my lover. For there is a way, Gerald, there
is for you through my mirror’s aid an open way to contentment. You shall
know an untruth, and that untruth will make you free: the doings of the
world, and all the bustling that is made by merchants and by warriors
and by well-thought-of persons talking about important matters, will
then run by you like a little stream of shallow, bickering waters: and
you will heed none of these things, but only that loveliness which all
youth desires and no man ever finds save through my mirror’s aid. You
will live among bright shadows very futilely: yes: but you will be
happy.”
Gerald replied hoarsely: “I desire only you. I cannot think of thrones,
nor of any gods, now that you stand here within arm’s reach. All my
life-long I have desired you, as I know now, my dearest, throughout the
dreary while of over-much playing and laughter that I have lived in
ever-dwindling faith I would yet win to you by and by. But now I am
again as Johan Faustus,—or, rather, I am as Jurgen in that other old
story, when he had come at last to Helen, the delight of gods and men:
only I am more favored than was Jurgen, for my Helen speaks....”
“Oh, and I speak for your own good, my darling, for there is a condition
to be fulfilled before I may trust you and may give you all.”
Gerald answered: “No, Evelyn, not to-night—But indeed I entreat your
pardon, my dear. My mind must have been wandering. Yes, yes! as I was
saying, the difference is that Helen speaks!”
“For your own good, my dearest.”
“Yes; you speak, naturally, of a condition for my own good, just as
Glaum hinted that so many more or less friendly persons would be doing
in these parts.”
“I speak, though, of a very easy condition. You must yourself perform a
tiny Asvamedha; and you must immolate before my mirror, not any really
valuable horse, of course, nor even a good-looking horse, but only that
hideous and wholly worthless horse which you have brought with you into
the land of Dersam.”
Then Gerald said: “And that is a small price to pay for the attainment
of the one thing which my heart quite earnestly desires, is it not? For
all my life I have hungered, as I believe that all poets hunger, for
that unflawed beauty, seemingly not ever to be found upon this earth,
which now stands revealed in the form of a woman, and which now speaks
to me with the voice of a woman—oh, quite with the voice of a
woman!—and speaks, too, for my own good. Yes, it is a small price, such
as any boy of nineteen or thereabouts would pay gladly. For I must tell
you, who are the delight of gods and—well! of adolescent boys, at
least, in every quarter of the world,—that all this very strongly
reminds me of that first sonnet which I made about you when I was a boy
of nineteen.”
Evarvan did not wholly conceal her uneasiness over the prospect of
hearing this sonnet. But there was none the less in her voice a
tenderness almost motherly now that she asked of Gerald, “And did you
make verses, then, about me, dear, so early?”
“To prove it,” Gerald replied, “I will now recite to you that identical
sonnet.”
And he did.
But his voice was so shaken with emotion that, when he had completed the
octave, he 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 hands of Evarvan of the Mirror, and he pressed them to his
trembling lips.
For this beguiling bright dream was now become a snare to delay him in
journeying onward to his appointed kingdom, and to betray him again into
bondage to the rather beautiful ideas and tinsel notions of youth.
Presently he would be seeing no more of this traitorous dream woman, who
was preparing to trust him and to give him all, and who none the less
was more lovely and more dear than any real thing anywhere. Afterward he
would regret her, he knew: always he would regret Evarvan, among
whatsoever delights they were which awaited Gerald in his appointed
kingdom. Nevertheless, this dream was an impediment in the way of a
Savior and a sun deity, with whose appropriate functions this dream was
interfering: and the most painful duty which confronted Gerald was not
precisely to be discourteous to a lady, but to discourage sacrilege.
Dismissing these cursory reflections, Gerald sighed: and he continued
the reciting of his sonnet with an air of lofty resignation intermingled
with a gustatory approval of really good verse.
“That,” said Evarvan of the Mirror, when he had ended, “is a very
beautiful sonnet, and I am proud to have inspired it. But we were
talking about something else, I have quite forgotten what—”
“I,” Gerald said, “have not forgotten.”
“Oh, yes, now I do remember! We were talking about the lucky chance
afforded you to get rid of that dreadful horse of yours.”
Gerald looked for one instant at the most lovely of all the illusions he
had found in the Mirror of Caer Omn. Then he began to recite the
multiplication tables.
You saw that she was frightened. She said, “Oh, and I trusted you! I
gave you all!”
She bleated now; her beauty was dimmed: and she seemed just the Evelyn
Townsend who had pestered Gerald beyond any reasonable endurance.
But Gerald, howsoever heavy was the heart of Gerald who quite honestly
objected to being troubled by anything, went on inexorably to exorcise
Evarvan with the old runes of common-sense. He spoke of the elephant
that is the largest of beasts, and of the very dissimilar household
economy practised by a King of Israel and by Elijah the Tishbite, and of
the straight line that is the shortest distance between two points; and
the old magic was potent.
Before his eyes Evarvan of the Mirror was changed. Of the degradation
which was put upon her, it suffices to report that this lovely lady went
backward in the course of every mortal woman’s living. She passed from
girlhood into a lank-legged childhood, and thence into drooling and
feebly puking infancy, and after that into the shapes she had worn in
her mother’s womb. In the end there remained of the most dear illusion
which Gerald had found in the Mirror of Caer Omn only two pink figures
in the form of a soft throbbing egg and of a creature like a tadpole
darting lustfully about it: and these melted back into the moonshine of
the Sacred Mirror of Caer Omn.
Nor was that all. The wives of Glaum and the Temple of the Mirror and
all that was about Gerald began to waver. All the material things about
him showed now like paintings on a gauze curtain which was moving and
crinkling in a very gentle breeze. The shaping of the six wives became
longer and more attenuated: they were shaped like the shadows of women
in a fine sunset. These so prettily tinted shadows strained toward the
mirror and entered it precisely as you may see smoke drift toward and
out of an opened window. Then all the temple followed them collapsingly,
as if colored waters were running into a hole. The mirror swallowed all.
Caer Omn was gone: the land of Dersam was a ruined land without
inhabitants. Afterward the pale glass blinked seven times like summer
lightning, and the mirror was not there.
Gerald stood alone in a cedar-shadowed way. He was weeping quite
unaffectedly. His very deepest poetic sensibilities had been touched by
the rather beautiful idea that he had loved this woman all his
life-long, and that now he had lost her forever: but a little way behind
Gerald the silver stallion stayed unimmolated, and grazed placidly.
PART FIVE
THE BOOK OF LYTREIA
“Whether You Boil or Roast Snow,
You Can Have but Water of It.”
15.
At Tenjo’s Court
GERALD passed on, riding upon the stallion Kalki, down a valley of
cedar-trees, into the realm of Tenjo of the Long Nose. This was the land
of Lytreia, they told him. But, here too, dejection overbrooded all, and
the atmosphere was elegiac, for people everywhere were lamenting that
vigor and resiliency and liveliness had gone out of their noses, so that
no man in Lytreia was able to sneeze or to employ his nose in any other
normal way.
“Well, now, suppose you take me to this king of yours,” said Gerald,
“for it may be I can re-awaken hereabouts all the lost joys of
influenza.”
“And who shall we say to him has come into Lytreia, red-headed and
riding upon the back of this huge and sparkling horse with the splendid
nose?”
“You will say to your king that this land is honored by a visit from
Fair-haired Hoo, the Helper and Preserver, the Lord of the Third Truth,
the Well-beloved of Heavenly Ones, as he passes toward his appointed
kingdom in Antan, riding in very terrible estate upon the back of his
famous silver stallion Kalki, a beast which, strictly speaking, has no
nose, but only nostrils at the tip of his long, noble head.”
They also seemed unimpressed. “No god is of terrible estate except the
Holy Nose of Lytreia; nor do we concede the existence of any kingdom not
his. Nevertheless, you may come with us.”
“Upon my word,” thought Gerald, “but in these parts the people pay very
inadequate homage to us gods and are little better than heretics.”
But he went with these over-sceptical persons quietly to their King
Tenjo.
And Tenjo received the Well-beloved of Heavenly Ones more affably.
First, though, the grave, white-bearded King shared with the visiting
god a quite excellent dinner, which was handsomely served to them by ten
pages in ermine and a seneschal in vermilion silk: not until dinner was
over, and the two sat drinking their spiced wine out of gold goblets,
would the King talk about his troubles. Then Tenjo complained that his
nose was fallen and flabby. It was no longer worshipful. That was in all
ways deplorable, said the King, refilling his goblet, inasmuch as his
people worshipped a nose, and could respect no male creature who had not
a large and high-standing and robust and succulent nose.
Gerald was a little puzzled, because this seemed to him a queer sort of
calamity to be befalling anybody, unless it was caused by the magic of
the wu. But Gerald made no comment. He asked only how this sad state of
affairs had come about.
He was told that all the youth and vigor had been taken out of the Holy
Nose of Lytreia, and out of Tenjo’s nose, and out of the nose of every
man in the kingdom, by the blighting magic of a sorceress who had lately
established her residence in the tomb of King Peter the Builder.
“It is there,” said Tenjo, “the veiled Mirror of the Two Truths is
hidden: but not even of that does this sorceress seem afraid.”
“Nor, for that matter, am I: for I am Lord of the Third Truth. Well, it
is fairly evident this woman is a wu.”
“You may be right. I confess that dreadful possibility had not ever
occurred to me—”
“Only we gods are omniscient, my dear Tenjo,” said Gerald, kindlily. “So
there is no need for any mere king to be ashamed of his human
blindness.”
“—Because, as I must tell you, before this minute I had not ever heard
of a wu.”
“You have been lucky. The less one hears of such creatures, the better
for everybody. So, how is this woman called?”
“She is called Evaine,” said Tenjo; “and she is called also the Lady of
Peter’s Tomb, now that she has taken possession of it.”
Then Gerald finished his fourth goblet, and Gerald hiccoughed, and
Gerald said: “Your case, my dear fellow, while perplexing, is not wholly
desperate. For I bring youth with me, and I will renovate your withered
noses. I am competent to deal with any wu. I give you, in fact, my
divine word that you shall be rid of this wu. Yes, Lytreia shall be rid
of her, even though it is necessary that to undo her hoodoo I do with
due to-do woo the wu, too—”
“Would you be so kind,” said Tenjo, looking troubled, “as to repeat
that, rather more slowly?”
Gerald obliged him, and continued: “Yes, I assure you, upon the most
sacred oath of our Dirghic heaven,—known only to the gods, my dear
fellow, so that you will, I trust, pardon my not repeating it,—that I
will subject this wu and this mirror also to my divine inspection—”
“Ah, but I must tell you,” said Tenjo, seeming yet more troubled, “that
the man who looks into that mirror straightway finds himself transformed
into two stones. For that reason it is hidden away in Peter’s Tomb, and
it is kept veiled, and of course no man has ever dared go near it.”
“How, then, did this mirror ever manage to change anybody into two
stones if nobody ever dared go near it?”
“Why, but the mirror was compelled to change them into two stones
because that was the law. It was not at all the mirror’s fault. Surely,
you who are a god and are omniscient, and who are now nearly drunk
enough to see everything double, can see that much?”
“So far as your explanation goes, I can see the mirror’s blamelessness
in the face of an obdurate physical law. Nor does any god object to a
physical law which concerns other people.”
“And they kept away from the mirror because they knew about this law.
Surely, that too was natural?”
“In a way, yes. But how could they be certain about this law?”
“How could they help it, how could anybody be ignorant of one of our
very oldest and most famous laws, which comes down to us, indeed, from
sources so august and venerable that they antedate all history?”
“Why, then, who enacted this law?”
“How should I know, when, as I was just telling you, this law is older
than any recorded history?”
“But in a thousand pounds of law there is not an ounce of pleasure, and
there are entirely too many laws,” said Gerald, shaking his red head
above his golden goblet rather despondently. “There is common,
statutory, international, maritime, ecclesiastical, and martial law.
There is the law of averages, the Salic law, and Grimm’s law of the
permutations of consonants. There is Jewish sacred law; there is prize
law; there is the law of gravity; there is John Law, who first developed
the natural wealth of the Mississippi, and William Law, who was a great
mystic. There are, in logic, the laws of thought, just as in astronomy
and physics and political economy there are, severally, the well-known
laws of Kepler and Prevost and Gresham. In fine, there are laws
everywhere, and they are very often a nuisance. He that goes to law
loses time and money and rest and friends. Law is a lottery, law is a
bottomless pit, law is an ass which slaps his tail in every man’s face.
So it very well may be, my dear fellow, that in a world so legally
overstocked this law of yours is superfluous, and therefore wrong.”
But Tenjo was not convinced by Gerald’s relentless logic. Tenjo said
only:
“I do not any more know what you are talking about than you do. But I do
know that”—here Tenjo hiccoughed, with judicial graveness,—“that it
does not alter the principle of the thing. So this mirror will continue
to transform into two stones all men who look into it, although I cannot
see how it matters the worth of one box of matches in hell, because so
long as the law is such, no man will ever look into this mirror.”
“Yet, do you but answer me this very simple question! What if some
intelligent, unsuperstitious person were to look into this mirror,—and
were to come back not changed into stone, and not hurt in any
way,—would that not prove to you the insanity of this law?”
“Of course it would not! That would only prove the man was a liar. The
plain fact of his not being changed into two stones would be legal proof
in any of our courts or in any law-respecting place anywhere that he had
not ever looked into the Mirror of the Two Truths.”
“Oh, very well!” said Gerald. “No, thank you, my dear fellow, not
another drop! Let us go to the temple! And let us each lean upon the
other’s arm, for your most excellent wine does not seem to have
clarified anything exactly.”
16.
The Holy Nose of Lytreia
NOW, when the grave, white-bearded King and the red-headed god had
come to the Temple of the Holy Nose, they entered it arm in arm,
followed by the King’s court. And when they approached the adytum, the
head priestess came toward them exhibiting a cteis, or large copper
comb, which she offered to Tenjo. The King accepted it, he parted her
hair in the middle, and he spoke the Word of Entry.
Said Tenjo: “I enter, proud and erect. I take my fill of delight
imperiously, irrationally, and none punishes.”
The head priestess replied, “Not yet.”
Tenjo said then, “But in three months, and in three months, and in three
more months, the avenger comes forth, and mocks me by being as I am, and
by being foredoomed to do as I have done, inevitably.”
This ceremony being discharged, they all entered the adytum, and then
the three priestesses led Gerald toward the collapsed and shrivelled
idol which was in the adytum. And Gerald whistled.
“—For do you call this,” said Gerald, “a nose?”
“Sir,” replied the priestesses, “we do. As, likewise, do all other
well-conducted persons.”
“Yet, I would call it,” said Gerald, whose naturally fine color was now
perceptibly heightened by Tenjo’s excellent wine, “another member.”
“Such, sir,” they answered him, “is not our custom.”
“Nevertheless,” said Gerald, waggling very gravely his red head,
“nevertheless, it is written in the scriptures of the Protestant
Episcopal church that, even as great ships are turned about in the sea’s
roaring main with a very small helm, even so is every man guided in the
main by a small member—”
They said, “Yet, sir—”
“And this member is not well spoken of by the Apostolic Fathers. This
member has ruined virgins: its conquests are stained with blood: it has
caused the widow to regret: it has deceived the wisest and most elderly
of men. It is, in fine, a member whose blushing hue is wholly proper to
its iniquitous history.”
They replied, “Still, sir—”
“It is an over proud and wild member. Most justly is it written that
every kind of beasts and of birds and of serpents and of things in the
sea is to be tamed, and has been tamed, by human kind; but that this
member can no man tame; for it is an unruly member, seeking ruthlessly
its prey; a rebellious member, prominent in uprisings; a member very
often full of deadly poison.”
They said, “None the less, sir—”
“I deduce that this member here represented is not worshipful. I deduce
that it is not well for you of Lytreia to worship this shrivelled image
of a tongue, for all that you call it a nose.”
“But, sir, while there is much piousness and erudition in what you say,
you must understand that the word ‘nose’ is a word with connotations and
with a reputed correspondence in anatomy—”
“I do not at all understand that saying, and so I cannot quite see your
point of view. I merely know that, in consonance with the words of St.
James the Just, and according to the scriptures of the Protestant
Episcopal church, this member is a tongue. And I admit that this tongue,
which your heathenish upbringing induces you to call a nose, is in a
peculiarly bad way. But the divine word of Fair-haired Hoo, the Helper
and Preserver, the Lord of the Third Truth, has been pledged to help and
to preserve this idol. So we will see what can be done about it.”
Then Gerald moistened his finger-tip with a drop of the water from the
Churning of the Ocean. As the Lady of the First Water-Gap had done to
Gerald’s forehead, so Gerald did to the shrivelled idol of Lytreia.
It was changed. Its limpness departed; its coloring quickened; corded
large blue veins, very intricately forked and branched, arose about its
now glowing surface, which revealed also many tiny veins that were
brightly red and astonishingly tortuous. It became enormous and
high-standing and robust and succulent. It throbbed and jerked. It was
hot to the touch: and the roughened cartilage of its erect tip-end now
glistened with imperial purple.
And everywhere at that same instant the magic of Evaine was lifted from
Lytreia, and the nose of every man regained its proper proportions and
vigor. Young couples to the right hand and to the left could be seen
withdrawing to sneeze in private: the girls were already producing their
handkerchiefs. And the three priestesses began to bathe the rejuvenated
idol with refreshing water: they wreathed it with leaves of the Indian
wood-apple; they placed before it flowers and incense and sweetmeats.
Meanwhile they chaunted a contented song in honor of the Holy Nose.
Tenjo and all the older lords and dowagers of Tenjo’s court had kneeled
in worship. Gerald only remained standing as arrogantly erect as was the
idol which people worshipped in Lytreia.
“I honor in a civil way,” said Gerald, “the spirit of this tongue—”
“But this,” said Tenjo the King, now speaking almost peevishly, “is not
a tongue. It is the Holy Nose of Lytreia.”
“Do you not be flying, my dear fellow, upon the wings of bad temper,
into the face of scripture and of logic! In a civil way, I repeat, I
honor this member. I personally am rather fond of talking. Nevertheless,
as being myself a member of the Protestant Episcopal church, and as
being also a self-respecting member of the Dirghic mythology, I must
decline to worship this so restive and inflammable member of any man’s
body.”
Tenjo at that got up from off his knees. He came toward Gerald: and the
white-bearded, grave King then spoke with rather less of peevishness
than of compassion.