However, do you now ask what you will for the vigor which you have
restored to our noses, and we will gladly pay that price. Yet for the
blasphemies which you have uttered in this temple the spirit of the Holy
Nose will by and by be asking a price: and that price nor you nor any
other lad will ever pay gladly.”
Gerald replied, “For the renovation of your noses, and as a propitiatory
trap for the doomed wu in Peter’s Tomb, you will pay me the price of one
black rooster.”
“But what,” asked Tenjo, “is a rooster?”
“Why, a rooster is the herald of the dawn, it is the father of an
omelet, it is the pullet’s first bit of real luck, it is the male of the
_Gallus domesticus_.”
“We do not call a male chicken that—”
“No,” Gerald assented, “no, but you ought to. And not to do so is wholly
un-American.”
“Yet why do you Americans call this particular bird a rooster, when
everybody knows that all birds except ostriches and cassowaries roost,
and that every flying bird everywhere is thus a rooster?”
“Well, I admit that we do not reason about it as you reason in Lytreia.
I admit that the word ‘rooster’ is a word without connotations and
without any correspondence in anatomy. Nevertheless, every nation has
its customs. And it is as much our well-established American custom to
call the male of the chicken a rooster as it is your custom to call that
thing a nose.”
“But we call that a nose because it is, in point of fact, a nose. It is,
as we have told you I do not know how many times, the Holy Nose of
Lytreia.”
Gerald was honestly exasperated by the obstinacy of the people of this
kingdom.
“Even so,” said he, “if you want the truth—”
He spoke then the truth about that tongue, as it appeared to him. But
his remarks were lost to history through the circumstance that none of
his hearers ever thought of setting them down in writing.
Instead, his hearers shuddered. They gave him a black cock, and they
drove him out of that temple. It was in this way that Gerald put an
affront upon the Holy Nose of Lytreia.
17.
Evaine of Peter’s Tomb
NOW Gerald rode upon the silver stallion toward the immemorial,
moss-overgrown tomb of King Peter the Builder, and Gerald carried under
his left arm the black cock. Gerald noted, with an interest natural to
any student of magic, the glorification tree which grew beside this
tomb. He once more whistled meditatively. Then he hitched his shining
stallion to an over-candidly carved and painted post which stood at the
door of the tomb, and he went in.
The interior of this spacious tomb was lighted with nineteen iron lamps
swung from the ceiling. Gerald thus saw, first of all, the great
four-square mirror covered with a flesh-colored cloth. Before it fumed a
smoking brazier; and beside this stood the appearance of a woman. To her
left hand was a broad bed, and to her right, a gilded pig-trough heaped
with fig-leaves. These leaves this woman was crumpling and tearing into
little pieces one by one before she destroyed them in the fire of the
brazier.
She heard Gerald’s civil cough. She turned: and Gerald was enraptured.
For Evaine of Peter’s Tomb was so surpassingly lovely that she excelled
all the other women his gaze had ever beheld. 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. The girl was young, she exhibited no deformity
anywhere, and the enamored glance of the young man could perceive in her
no fault. There was, to be sure, a puzzling likeness to somebody he had
once known, but Gerald’s quick wits soon unriddled the mystery. This
woman reminded him of Evelyn Townsend.
Nor was this all. He observed now that this woman was, just as he had
suspected, a Fox-Spirit, for now from Evaine of Peter’s Tomb emanated
the power of her magic. That magic which overmasters all animals now
smote at Gerald; and in a mildly amusing way he found its assaults
really quite interesting.
“For this is the goety of beasts,” he reflected. “This is the brutish
half-magic of the wu which maddens men, along with all other animals in
their rutting season, and robs them of self-control. This magic
persuades me, almost, that I, too, am only a bundle of cellular matter
upon its way to becoming manure. Yes, my life, too, at just this moment,
seems but a grudged brief season of bewildered appetites and of baffled
surmise such as is the life of a mortal man. I, too, seem a mere human
being passing from the forgotten to the unforeseeable. Under the
assaults of this small carnal magic, I seem again to go in that
continuous masked loneliness which mortal persons in Lichfield and
elsewhere call living. I long to put out of mind the frailness and the
transiency of my hold upon living. The nonsensical notion has occurred
to me that such forgetfulness may be hired by bringing the epidermis
which masks me into superficial contact with the homogenous animal
matter in which hides this Fox-Spirit.... Yes, I am being, as it were,
maddened with desire; I am very rapidly becoming the prey of this
Fox-Spirit’s irresistible powers of fascination, so to speak. And I find
it really quite interesting to observe how this half-magic which
destroys so many men now impiously strikes beyond its proper arena, at
that which is divine; and how this foolish magic attempts to deceive
even me, who am a Savior and a sun god.”
Such were the cursory reflections which passed through Gerald’s mind in
the while that he said, aloud, “Good-evening, ma’am!”
The Fox-Spirit Evaine, without replying to him directly, took out of her
bosom a white gem about the size of an orange. She tossed this up into
the air, and caught it again. Gerald conjectured that this was her soul,
but he made no comment.
He displayed to her his cock, saying, as was needful, “I entreat you to
accept my rooster—”
“But what,” asked learned Evaine, “what did you call this tamed
descendant of the wild Bankiva fowl,—whose original habitat was in
Northern India from Sindh to Burma, and in Cochin China, and in many of
the Malay Islands as far as Timor, and in the Philippines?”
“Why, in the United States of America, ma’am, we, rather more briefly,
and for a variety of reasons, call this bird a rooster.”
“It has been well observed,” she replied, “by Pliny the Elder—a
celebrated Roman naturalist, born 23 A.D., perished in the eruption of
Vesuvius 79 A.D.,—that every nation has its customs.”
Then the Fox-Spirit dexterously cut off the head of Gerald’s cock with
the sacrificial ax, and turning toward the East, she spoke the needed
words three times. One entered now in a scarlet coat, a yellow vest, and
pale green knee-breeches. His head was like that of a mastiff, with the
addition of two horns and the ears of an ass, but he had the legs and
hoofs of a calf. Such was he who carried off the black cock which Gerald
had brought for the Fox-Spirit’s master, as a propitiatory offering and
a trap.
Gerald smiled. Gerald shook hands, politely, with Evaine the learned
Fox-Spirit.
“I am,” said Gerald, “a god.”
She replied: “I am one who serves all gods. I honor every tribe of those
divine beings whose existence scholars have so variously accounted for
as the products of physical and ethical and historical and etymological
blunders abetted by homonymy and polonymy. But I require for my piety a
honorarium.”
“And what is that honorarium?”
She told him.
And as she spoke, Evaine drew near to him, and yet nearer, and she was
remarkably desirable. If only she had not now reminded Gerald more and
more of Evelyn Townsend, she would have been resistless.
“Very well, then!” said Gerald, affably: “you shall have that honorarium
to-morrow morning if you still care to demand a reward so trivial.”
Immediately afterward he said, “But, indeed, ma’am, you quite
misunderstand me!”
Then with a few well-chosen words he placed their relationship upon a
more decorous basis.
And Evaine the Fox-Spirit laughed. Such unresponsiveness she declared to
be, when manifested by a god, wholly surprising, and comparable to the
Seven Wonders of the World, namely: (1) the Pyramids of Egypt; (2) the
Hanging Gardens of Babylon; (3) the Tomb of Mausolos; (4) the Temple of
Diana at Ephesus; (5) the Colossus of Rhodes; (6) the Statue of Zeus by
Phidias; and (7) the Pharos at Alexandria. Yet, Evaine continued, she
perceived that she might trust him—
“You may do nothing of the sort!” said Gerald, decisively. “You may not
even give me all. No, ma’am, it would be quite unadvisable, because, as
I am forced to point out, you in your unfading youth and omniscient
learning are many thousands of years older than I am in my present
incarnation. Beside you, I am a mere boy. Now, it is often a great
disadvantage to a boy, it is by and by a curse to him, to succumb to the
loving confidence and generosity of a woman much older than himself. It
is unwholesome. It is un-American.”
“Is it, then, inconsistent with the manners of a continent in the
Western Hemisphere—first named America by Waldseemüller, a teacher of
geography in the college of Saint-Dié among the Vosges, in a treatise
called _Cosmographia_, published in 1507,—for me to like you so much
that I just want to touch you and be near you?”
“No, ma’am, that, I regret to say, is universal. Besides, I did not
particularly mean you. I only mean that there are such women, as we both
know, dear lady, who prey upon young boys. They employ for this purpose
all their confidence and generosity without the least scruple. And many
a hard, bitter, cynical man has originally had his faith in and his
regard for everything good and holy blasted in his very first boyhood by
the confiding nature and generosity of some middle-aged woman or another
and her subsequent references to the advantage he took of her.”
“It is possible that you speak with the clearness recommended by
Quintilian as the chief virtue of speech,—born in Spain about 25 A.D.,
died about 95 A.D., patronized by Vespasian and Domitian,—but it is
certain that I do not understand one word of your speaking.”
“—However,” Gerald continued, “when a boy has a nice, clean friendship
with an older woman it is one of the most valuable and helpful
experiences that can come into his life. A friendship such as this
appears to me a rather beautiful idea. The older woman—particularly
when she is older by many thousands of years,—can teach him, as his
mother out of the superficial knowledge of a callow half-century or so
cannot possibly do, about women. She can inspire and direct him. She can
fire his ambition. She can encourage him. She can be to him in every way
a liberal education.”
“Now, certainly, I shall never understand your American way of uttering
so many platitudes—derived from the Greek word _platys_, meaning
‘flat,’—when I was attempting to do all these things!”
“Ah, but we must keep the education entirely oral, and we must keep,
too, your little hands—So, now, that is very much better!”
“It is better still to permit a wilful person to have his way,—a remark
attributed to Periander, an ancient sage, and Tyrant of Corinth during
the sixth century B.C.,—since you elect to give me my honorarium for
nothing,” Evaine said, rather sulkily.
Gerald elected to do nothing of the sort. But, since his real intentions
would have been an awkward matter to explain, he kept silent about them.
After that Gerald questioned the learned Fox-Spirit. She explained to
him willingly enough the laws of Lytreia and described the basket they
were found in, and she made it plain just how these laws were enforced
by a committee of midwives and stonemasons. She spoke of the magic she
had put upon Lytreia. She spoke of Tenjo, telling how in the prime of
his youth he came to be called Tenjo of the Long Nose; and her
statistics were remarkable. She talked then about the wind between the
stars, and about the grandeur that was Greece, and about Hobson’s
choice, and about Davey Jones’s locker, and about the cause of
volcanoes, and about the curate’s egg, and about the best cures for
baldness. For no information anywhere was hidden from the wisdom of
Evaine, who knew all things, and who served all gods.
“I perceive,” said Gerald, “that you have knowledge, and I like your
reflections extremely. So do you speak yet further out of the stores of
your omniscience!”
He had been glancing all the while toward the veiled Mirror of the Two
Truths. But he of course said never a word about this mirror. His
present task was simply to lure on this cultured and malefic creature to
her complete ruin.
For the Fox-Spirit, as Gerald saw, was still about the brutish magic of
the wu, which drives men mad, and she now spoke of more and yet more
evil matters such as were very well adapted to incite Gerald to
brutality. She spoke of the battle of life, and of the feast of reason,
and of the irony of fate, and of the lap of luxury. She talked of the
writing on the wall, and of the scroll of fame, and of the lexicon of
youth, and of the cloud that had a silver lining. She touched upon the
two seas, of troubles and of upturned faces. She discussed the durance
that was vile, and the hours that were wee and sma’, and the
consummation that was devoutly to be wished for, and the light that was
dim and religious, and the heat which was not the humidity. She
indicated the balm in Gilead, the place in the sun, and the safety in
numbers. She afterward gave succinctly the recipes for making a mountain
out of a molehill, a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, and a virtue out of
a necessity. For no evil phrase of any sort was hidden from the wisdom
of Evaine, who knew all things, and who served all gods, and who was now
intent to exercise upon Gerald the magic of the wu, which drives men
mad.
But Gerald only smiled, almost approvingly. This woman was reminding him
more and more of Evelyn Townsend, and his pulses had not ever been
calmer.
“I perceive,” said Gerald, “that you have a great deal of knowledge,
with the vocabulary of a dear friend to back it devastatingly.
Therefore, ma’am, to avail myself of your knowledge alone may serve my
divine ends much better than your really most flattering proffers in
other fields.”
For now it was Gerald’s turn to speak. So now he revealed to the baffled
Fox-Spirit the fact that he was Fair-haired Hoo, the Helper and
Preserver, the Lord of the Third Truth, the Well-beloved of Heavenly
Ones, a very potent god who had temporarily mislaid his mythology. He
told the omniscient Fox-Spirit, who knew all things excepting only how
and at what hour her knowledge would end, of Gerald’s adventures during
the rather crowded twenty-four hours since he had left Lichfield.
And now she was smiling over his obtuseness. For to all-wise Evaine it
was at once apparent that Fair-haired Hoo, the Helper and Preserver, the
Lord of the Third Truth, the Well-beloved of Heavenly Ones, was a
culture hero like Quat or Quetzalcoatl or Cagn or Osiris or Dionysos.
All these were former acquaintances of hers: she knew, she said, every
inch of them, for each one of these had stopped to visit her who served
all gods, as each had passed downward toward Antan. Evaine, if anybody,
would thus know a culture hero wherever she saw a culture hero.
Every mythology contained one of these glorious philanthropists, born of
a mysterious and superior race, just as Gerald had been born in the
United States of America, a philanthropist, as the learned Fox-Spirit
said, very usually theriomorphic, who came in the appearance of a
jackass or of some other animal among less favored peoples to teach them
strange new arts and mysteries, and to endow them with every kind of
cultural advantage and prosperity, just as Gerald had benefited the
people of Dersam and of Lytreia, and was preparing to benefit Antan.
She pointed out, furthermore, that a culture hero was in no way
un-American. There had been, for example, Quetzalcoatl. She also
remembered quite clearly Yetl,—because a deity in the form of a bird
was always, she said, rather difficult,—and Poshaiyankya, and Coyote,
and Esaugetuh, and that other waggish Indian deity—his name at present
evaded her,—who had traveled incognito in the shape of a large spider.
For all these aboriginal American culture heroes had visited Evaine as
they passed downward toward Antan, and every one of them had been in a
somewhat earlier generation Gerald’s fellow countryman.
“In the light of your forceful logic, ma’am, I concede that, over and
above being a Savior and a sun god, it seems probable I must be a
culture hero too.”
“But yet, in any case,—dear, unresponsive, frigid child,” said the
Fox-Spirit, speaking far more simply than she had done before,—“do you
not know that all mythologies are controlled by the Master Philologist,
so that he alone may say in which one of them and in what capacity you
belong?”
“I find that saying obscure.”
“It means only that sooner or later all gods save only Koleos Koleros
and the upright spirit of the Holy Nose pass down into Antan.”
“Yes, for, as they told me at Caer Omn, Antan is the heaven of all
deserving gods, where they rest from their divine labors.”
But the Fox-Spirit shook her head, rather forebodingly. “I, certainly,
would not say that.”
“Do you, then, but answer me this very simple question! What becomes of
them there? what fate befalls in that place all which men have found
most beautiful and most worshipful?”
“How can one say, when no god has ever returned? It is known only that,
in one way or another way, the Master Philologist disposes of every
deity that men have served, save only the two supreme gods of all
mammals,—a class of vertebrates embracing bats, the warm-blooded
quadrupeds, seals, cetaceans, man, and sirenians.”
Gerald drew a long face. “Your account of the matter, ma’am, suggests
that my predecessor upon the throne of Antan lacks piety. You imply that
the creature is deficient in true religious feeling. That is a fault I
would have to requite when I take from him his throne and all the great
and best words of magic.”
“To do that, child, needs power such as has not been shown by any god
among the many millions of gods that men have worshipped since the first
infancy of Chronos,—a Greek personification of Time, usually depicted
as carrying a sickle and an hourglass.”
“Ah, but, my dear lady, I, who am at once a culture hero and a sun deity
and a Savior, must be a peculiarly powerful god. And, besides, ma’am,
from what you tell me—Why, but, really now, it appears probable that
the Master Philologist has damaged the Dirghic mythology to which I
myself belong! No god can patiently endure such usage; and my divine
wrath will, thus, redouble my power.”
“But, still,—but, still, you dear, nice-looking and vainglorious
baby—!”
Evaine had paused. She was regarding him almost compassionately: and
Gerald felt he could never get used to the flighty way in which people
everywhere in the Marches of Antan seemed to pity the high gods. It was
a quite friendly way they had of looking at you, but to extend
commiseration where reverence was the proper thing savored almost of
irreligion.
Gerald shrugged. He said:
“I shall therefore be resistless. I shall compel him to restore into
general circulation the Dirghic mythology, after having amply repaired
whatsoever damage he may have done to it, and then I shall assume, in
addition to his throne, my proper station as a culture hero and a sun
deity and a Savior in that mythology. So the affair is, virtually,
settled: we may now turn to other matters: and in return for the
gracious aid afforded by your large wisdom, I will make in your honor a
sonnet.”
“It is a very beautiful sonnet,—consisting of fourteen decasyllabic
lines, expressing two phases of a single thought or sentiment,” said
Evaine the Fox-Spirit,—“and I am proud to have inspired it.”
“You forget,” said Gerald, “that I have not yet recited my sonnet. I
will now do so.”
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 Evaine the Fox-Spirit, and as he
pressed them to his trembling lips he noted that these hands smelled
like hops drying in the sun. It seemed to him exceedingly pitiful he had
given that promise to Tenjo. It seemed to him there was a certain
sameness in the dear women who made colorful the Marches of Antan, and,
to some extent, a similarity in their more intimate love passages with
Fair-haired Hoo, the Helper and Preserver. He found it depressing to
reflect that destruction waited, so very near, for so much loveliness.
He found it perfectly dreadful to foreknow that he would often regret
this omniscient Evaine and her fine stores of useful information, once
he had kept the divine word given to Tenjo, and had put an end to her
living before she could do any further damage to the men of Lytreia.
Gods ought to abstain from all love-affairs: for through love alone
might a god look to be wounded,—upon rainy Sunday afternoons, perhaps,
or after drinking a bit more than was good for one,—to be wounded, at
such unavoidable seasons of low vitality, with recurrent, plaguing
memories of his mortal playthings, so dear, so very dear, and so soon
reft away from his immortal arms, irrevocably....
After these cursory reflections, Gerald sighed, and—with the thoughtful
commentary that, since this was a Miltonic sonnet, his poem here went on
with the same sentence,—he continued his reciting.
And when he had ended, the Fox-Spirit sighed contentedly. She spoke with
acumen and authority as to the main events of Milton’s life and as to
his principal works, and she added:
“That is a very beautiful sonnet,—a verse form of Italian origin, first
used in English by Sir Thomas Wyatt in 1557,—and I am proud to have
inspired it. That is the sort of poetry which would incline any living
woman to trust you and to give you all the very moment you stopped
reciting it. So now will you not come to bed?”
“No, Evelyn, not to-night—I beg your pardon, ma’am! My thoughts were
wool-gathering. What I had meant to say was but that if you insist upon
yet further displays of your great-hearted womanly confidence and
generosity you shall be walloped with a broomstick—severely. No, do you
retire now, my dear lady, by all means, and with my apologies for
keeping you up so late because of the delight I have got from your
instructive way of talking. But I shall pass the remainder of the night
in the aloofness appropriate to a god, in this quite comfortable
armchair.”
And this he did.
18.
End of a Vixen
WHEN Evaine was asleep, though, then Gerald rose softly from his
chair. He approached the bed. Very carefully he inserted his hand
between the young breasts of Evaine, and lightly he drew out the strange
white gem. He waited now, looking down compassionately at this really
very lovely girl....
But at his touch the learned Fox-Spirit had moved, so that she now lay
flat upon her back, with her mouth a little open. Evelyn slept thus. And
that was why Evelyn snored....
Gerald shrugged. He took up the sacrificial ax.
Now that the dawn was at hand, he went out from the tomb, to the
glorification tree, and he began to fell the tree with this ax. At the
first stroke blood gushed out of the gray bark copiously, and Gerald
heard a wailing noise. Gerald looked upward. The appearance of a young
child dressed in blue garments was to be seen in a cleft in the side of
the tree. It had the seeming of a boy child about seven or eight years
old, a freckled boy, with tousled red hair, and with as yet only one
upper front tooth.
This child wailed broken-heartedly: “A blasphemer is come up against the
Two Truths; a vainglorious fool derides the pair that endure where all
else perishes; and life is denied to me by his wrongheadedness.”
Gerald had put down the ax. He was trembling. He did not like the love
and the great yearning which had awakened in his heart. He folded his
arms very tightly: he seemed tense and rather frightened looking as he
waited there peering sidewise toward this boy.
“Child,” Gerald said, “what is your will that you cry out for life from
the glorification tree?”
“My father, I demand the life which you have not given me, that life
which you owe to me, and that life which is denied me so long as you
deny the Two Truths.”