of no other truth and the needs of no pawing women who would keep me out
of that kingdom.”
“My father, your kingdom is a doubtful dream, but the flesh of my mother
is real.”
“My dream is lovelier than any woman. Oh, and a doubtfulness also is
more lovely than the body of a woman, for I know the shaping of that
body over-well.”
“My father, you refuse the pleasures which will not ever be returning.”
“I am a god. I serve the needs of my own will.”
“The gods also pass, my father, they also pass without any returning,
upon the road which you now tread.”
“Let us pass, then, unhindered! But no woman permits it.”
“That is because these women, O my father, have a very rational wisdom.”
“Such is, perhaps, the case. But a god has his irrational dream. And
that is better.”
“It is well enough, my father, for that dream to end contentedly in the
arms of some woman.”
“It is well enough. It is customary. But I am Fair-haired Hoo, the
Helper and the Preserver. I go to my appointed kingdom: and I am Lord of
a Third Truth, whose mightiness I must help and preserve.”
Then Gerald hewed on: and as the tree fell, the child vanished.
Now Gerald set fire to the tree: and when a tidy blaze was crackling, he
spoke the needed words, and into the heart of this fire he tossed the
strange white gem. Straightway you heard a loud screeching. Out of the
tomb of Peter the Builder came a vixen fox, screaming and shuddering
quite horribly, but not ever ceasing to approach the fire. She entered
the flames. Silence followed, and the dawn of a superb May morning which
was marred only by an unpleasant odor of singed hair and burning flesh.
Gerald after that went back into the tomb from which the omniscient
Fox-Spirit had been dispossessed. He looked rather sentimentally upon
the empty disordered bed: then he passed beyond the brazier, in which
the ruins of fig-leaves yet smouldered, toward the Mirror of the Two
Truths.
The fact no longer mattered, perhaps, that any man who looked into this
mirror straightway found himself transformed into two stones: but it
very greatly mattered what effect this mirror would have upon a sun god
and a Savior and a culture hero. So he removed the flesh-colored veil.
19.
Beyond the Veil
BUT he was not turned into two stones. Nor was there confronting him
any mirror. Beyond the flesh-colored veil he found only an ancient
painting very carefully done, but upon an unhuman scale which made this
painting monstrous. The subject of the picture, however, is not known,
because Gerald never told anybody.
But it is known that Gerald shook his head at this painting.
“Laborious daub of prevaricating pigment!” he remarked. “O futile
painting, which so many foolish believers in Lytreia think to be the
Mirror of the Two Truths! I question your arithmetic. For I myself am
the Lord of a Third Truth, for all that I have just at present no
precise idea as to its nature. In consequence, I know the two objects
which you magnify are not all which exists. And I deny that their
never-ending search of each other is the one gesture of life. No: I at
least, I feel assured, am destined to take part in some quite other
gesture, of a more graceful and more cleanly and more dignified
nature,—a gesture of, it well may be, eternal importance....”
Yet Gerald glanced about him a little forlornly. This place was now
rather lonesome and ambiguous looking. In the crypt immediately beneath
him, Gerald knew, lay all that remained of King Peter and the most of
his numerous family; dozens upon dozens of peculiarly ugly objects were
there, all that remained of a great conqueror and of the queens who had
delighted him, all that attestedly remained now anywhere of a strong
hero’s pride and famous warfaring and of his many women’s loveliness....
“Oh, yes, it may be,” Gerald conceded, half frettedly, because he did
not like to be troubled with such reflections, “it may be that I am
wrong in this belief. And that seems to me yet another reason for
adhering to this belief. I, standing here alone upon the remnants of so
many utter strangers, admit indeed to some depression of spirits. It
seems to me, at this exact instant, that just conceivably I may be
neither a Savior nor a sun god nor a culture hero, but merely another
bull-headed Musgrave, for whom death waits, and after death, perhaps,
oblivion. Nevertheless, I find it a more beautiful and a much more
entertaining idea to believe in than to deny the immortality even of a
mere Musgrave. There is to my mind nothing at all interesting in the
idea of my own extinction. And it appears that my belief in this matter,
with no assured knowledge anywhere to go on, must be simply a question
of personal taste. Modesty even suggests that my belief is an affair of
irrelevance.”
And Gerald said also: “Therefore it furthermore appears to me, O
peculiarly unimaginative painting, a sheer waste of opportunity to
assume that anything is ever going to end even for a mere Musgrave all
conscious experience. I had far rather play with a beautiful idea than
with one utterly lacking in seductiveness. I very much prefer to believe
that I at least am, in one way or another, reserved to take part in some
enduring and rather superb performance,—somewhere, by and by,—in a
performance concerned with some third truth, more august and
æsthetically more pleasing than are the only ever-enduring truths
apparent to us here. We copulate and die, and that is all?—Well,
perhaps! But, then again, perhaps not! One must, you see, be
broad-minded about the matter.”
He for a moment kept silence. That regrettably candid painting and all
the other adjuncts of this place were certainly very depressing, now
that the learned diableries of the Fox-Spirit no longer enlivened this
tomb. Nevertheless, Gerald kept his long chin well up.
“Yes, every man ought to be broad-minded about this matter, and ought to
cherish always, if only as a diverting and inexpensive plaything, this
pungent notion of being immortal. It is really inexpensive, because,
should your notion prove ungrounded, you run no risk, no tiniest risk,
of being twitted, by and by, for credulity, or even of ever discovering
your error. Meanwhile this faith in your own durability and potential
importance is in some sense a cordial; and is in sundry ways a fine toy.
It renders life, and dying too, endurable: and it offers against all
vacant half-hours a variety of diverting speculations... as to that
possible third truth.”
Again Gerald paused. For it seemed to him, as he unwittingly repeated
the age-old self-persuasions of so many of his ancestors, that he had
found now another facet in this jewel of an idea that he was playing
with; and this fact considerably cheered Gerald.
“Then, too,” said he, “then, too, that rather wide-spread expectation of
an oncoming triumph—somewhere, in some hazed roseate arena, beyond the
discomforts of death and the incredible impudence of the mortician’s
titivating,—that triumph which is to be a perpetual triumphing of
justice and of rationality and of kindliness and of all the other
canonical virtues, this rumored triumph yet cows many persons, not
infrequently, into one or another thrifty-minded practice of these
generally beneficent virtues.”
Gerald said then: “It thus makes for, at any rate, terrestrial ease and
stability and repose: it gives people, as the phrase runs, something to
go by, in that it supports the most of every nation’s social and legal
rules of thumb. And it tends appreciably to limit men’s common greed and
viciousness, and all the harsher lusts of human beings, to exercises
through which there seems some quite tangible gain within tolerably safe
reach.”
And Gerald said also: “Yes: it is much better for men to believe in some
third truth which will be revealed to them after the death of their
bodies; and a general faith in the immortality even of mere Musgraves
appears to me, thus, very plainly, because of its happy blending of the
functions of a narcotic and of a policeman, a generally desirable
assumption. It remains in all ways a desirable faith, no matter whether
or not there be any grounds for it. And if this careful painting
presents the entire truth, that fact is but another excellent reason for
paying no attention to it.”
Gerald now felt quite comfortable through having listened so
respectfully to his own relentless logic.
“For these reasons, O foolish painting of the Two Truths, I deny your
fleshly significance. Whether I happen to be a sun god or a Savior or a
culture hero or just another bull-headed Musgrave, I deny that you
present to me any truth whatever. I snap my fingers at your materialism;
I turn up my nose at your indecorous anatomical studies; and I send the
divine foot of the Lord of the Third Truth smashing through your ancient
canvas. These things I do to proclaim the majesty of the Third Truth.
And I depart from this Peter and this Peter’s Tomb, to seek my appointed
kingdom.”
It was in this way that Gerald yet again put an affront upon Koleos
Koleros and upon the Holy Nose of Lytreia.
PART SIX
THE BOOK OF TUROINE
“Weathercocks Turn more Easily
when Placed very High.”
20.
Thaumaturgists in Labor
GERALD passed on, still riding upon the silver stallion, which Evaine
the Fox-Spirit had not, after all, demanded of him that morning as her
promised honorarium. And the next place he came to, and where he got his
breakfast, was Turoine. This was a small free city given to sorceries of
two colors.
To every side of him the inhabitants of Turoine were about their arts:
and Gerald, as a former student of magic, quite naturally observed their
various activities with interest.
Now the first sorcerer that he encountered was making a figure out of
pink wax with which was mixed baptismal oil and the ashes of a
consecrated wafer. The next sorcerer was murmuring charms over a very
fat toad which was imprisoned in a net rudely woven out of the golden
hairs from the head of some luckless, unresponsive woman, who was now
about to meet a not wholly desirable doom after that toad had been
buried at her threshold. And the third sorcerer huddled over a small
fire wherein burned cypress branches and broken crucifixes and portions
of a gibbet. In his hand was a skull filled with dark wine which had
been seasoned with hemp and with the fat of a girl child and with poppy
seed: and his familiar, in the shape of a large dun-colored cat, was
lapping up that bitter drink.
No sorcerer anywhere in Turoine was idle upon this fine May morning. And
in this small, ever-busy city—where all the buildings were quaintly
marked with stars and pentagrams and the signs of the zodiac and the two
kinds of triangles, and were cozily overgrown with honeysuckle and arum
lilies and black poppies and deadly nightshade,—these sorcerers were
about a bewildering variety of studies.
“I,” one of them told Gerald, “am learning the secrets which proceed
from Saturn, that ashy lord of the greater infortune. I have especial
power over all husbandmen and beggars, over grandfathers and monks of
every order and ministers of the gospel, over all potters, and miners,
and gardeners, and cow-tenders. I have learned how to make men envious,
covetous, slow of thought, suspicious, and stubborn. And I am also able
to afflict whatsoever person I elect with toothache and dropsy and black
jaundice and leprosy and hemorrhoids, either severally or in unison.”
Another said: “I study to divine and to make smooth the approach of
every evil fortune,—with smoke and arrows and wax, with an egg, with
mice, and with the simulacra of dead persons;—but, above all, as you
may perceive, I have been most successful with the head of an ass in a
brazier of live coals. And my guide is not any bow-legged, swarthy
eunuch, but Leonard, the Grand Master of the Sabbat.”
“I,” said a third, “have found in Turoine the Great Juggle Bag, for my
guide is Baalberith. So have I mastered all kinds of unheard-of, secret,
merry feats and mysteries and inventions—”
“But what,” asked Gerald, “what purpose does your knowledge serve?”
“By means of it, sir, those who are favored by my lord Baalberith, the
Master of Alliances, may make real the sin performed in a dream; may
open the locked door of any jail or bedchamber or counting house; may
smite a husband with embarrassing weakness; may inspire strange maids
and married women with flaming desires; may increase his natural height
here by seven ells and here by three inches; may make himself invisible
or invulnerable; may change his form into that of a cat or a hare or a
wolf; may control thunder and lightning; may collect and talk with
snakes; and”—here the sorcerer coughed,—“and may perform five other
advantageous, extravagant and authentic devices.”
But Gerald shrugged. “These sciences are well enough for a sorcerer; and
I perceive that the industrious may pick up much useful information in
Turoine. But I am a god who travels toward his appointed kingdom, and
toward the mastery of secrets rather more vital than any of these. For
your arts are of that black magic which hurts but cannot help; your
guides are devils; and you deal only in misfortune and destructiveness.”
“Then perhaps, sir, you may be better pleased by the enchanters who live
at the other end of this city. For these enchanters have no guides save
restlessness and foiled desires and impotence; they get no direct aid
from hell, but from somewhat less ancient intellectual centres; and they
work all their magic, such as it is, with words.”
“And what does the magic of these same enchanters create?”
“It creates, sir, a comfortable sense of equality with your betters
wherever there is least reason for it.”
“I find that saying obscure. Nevertheless, I will visit these
enchanters,” said Gerald.
And he rode on.
21.
They That Wore Blankets
THUS Gerald came to the enchanters who were used to perform all their
magic with words. And they greeted his coming with a very cordial
enthusiasm for creatures so gray and vague and bedraggled looking as
they sat huddled there, each one of them clothed in a blanket, and
thoroughly drenched as though with sour smelling rain.
Now the first enchanter to speak wore a violet blanket. He arose; and
dripping bilge-water everywhere about him in the while that he smiled
with wholly friendly condescension, he observed:
“Here is another rider on the silver stallion. Here is yet another
figure of papier mâché which Horvendile has despatched upon a profitless
journeying.”
“But I—” said Gerald.
Without at all heeding Gerald, a second enchanter, in a well soaked
green blanket, laid down his scissors; and he addressed the first
enchanter with some fervor, saying:
“Let us not speak harshly of our good Horvendile’s magic, for everybody
ought to respect the impotence of the aging. We must concede, of course,
that his magic is no longer fresh. It is not possible to deny that a
woefully infirm magic has set this papier mâché figure on a hackneyed
journeying. Candor compels us to grant that this journeying crosses once
sparkling rivers which have long ago run dry. We, as intelligent
enchanters, must admit that a wearying fog lowers thickly about this
journeying, that above it the sun of romance shines very pale and cold,
and that this journeying is sterile and empty of gusto. Nevertheless,
this journeying, as we ought not to ignore, is no doubt an afterthought,
it is the belated invention of a tired mind, and a desperate and
ill-advised proceeding. For these reasons, howsoever sorrowfully we, as
Horvendile’s fellow artists and well-wishers, must always deplore among
ourselves the kindergarten notions of this poor Horvendile, and his
ponderous playfulness, and the limitations of his few and unenterprising
ideas, still we must be careful not to apply to his magic one single
harsh word.”
“Yet—” Gerald stated.
Nodding in profound and entire approbation, with which Gerald was not in
any way connected, an enchanter in a sopping yellow blanket now
remarked:
“I, too, am always ready to defend the magic of our fellow practitioner.
My conscience forces me to grant that his magic is not faultless. In
mere honesty I have to confess that his magic is stupid and stilted and
silly; that it is sniggering and sly and nasty; that it wallows in a
morass of self-satisfaction; and that it is steeped and soaked in
ever-fretful egoism, in spite of our friendly candor in all dealings
with him from the very first. Nor can I dispute that our confrère
behaves too much like a decadent small boy who is proud of having been
haled into the police court for chalking dirty words on a wall. Apart,
though, from his stinking filth and his vileness and his tinsel
cynicisms, and aside from his bestiality and his vulgar frippery and his
dabblings in cesspools and his vapid sophistries, I stand always ready
to defend the magic of Horvendile, because it is not, after all, as if
he were a mage of any real importance, and one ought always to be
indulgent to persons of third and fourth rate ability.”
“Even so—” Gerald pointed out.
But now an enchanter in a thoroughly drenched scarlet blanket was
saying, as he meditatively unclosed his pastepot:
“I quite agree with you. Nobody admires the merits of our esteemed
confrère more whole-heartedly than I do. It would be merely silly to
deny that he has weakened his always rather wishy-washy magic potions by
too frequent blendings. It is impossible to ignore that his magic has
become a cloying weariness and a mincing indecency. We are forced to
acknowledge that Horvendile is insincere, that he very irritatingly
poses as a superior person, that he is labored beyond endurance, that he
smells of the lamp, that his art is dull and tarnished and trivial and
intolerable, but, even so, we ought also to admit that he does as well
as could be expected of anybody who combines a lack of any actual talent
with ignorance of actual life.”
“However—” Gerald explained.
The fifth enchanter to interrupt Gerald wore a black blanket; and he,
too, appeared to drip with wisdom and bilge-water and judicious
amiability in the while that he said:
“It is, in fact, alike our duty and our privilege to be most lenient
with this laborious bungler who, after all, is probably doing the best
he can. So I, for one, I never dwell even fleetingly upon the awkward
fact that the banality of his magic is no excuse for the way he botches
its execution. Indeed, I do not know but that a person of very lively
imagination might conceive of our confrère’s turning out worse work than
he does. Nor do I think I am being over-charitable. For, upon my
word,—while I can see that his magic is morbid, that it is sophomoric,
that it is malignant, that it is plagiarized, that it is intolerably
insipid, that it is sacrilegious, that it is naïve, that it is pseudo
whatever or other may happen to sound best, that it is over brutal in
cynicism, that it is incurably sentimental, and that it bores me beyond
description,—yet otherwise I can, at just this moment, think of no
especial other fault to find with his magic.”
So it was that these dripping and affable enchanters went on defending
Horvendile with such generous volubility that Gerald could get in no
word.
Then each took off the single garment which he wore, and so vanished,
because without their wet blankets these enchanters were in no way
noticeable. And Gerald rode away from that place contentedly, because it
was a natural comfort to know that he traveled with a guide and a patron
who was so well thought of by the best judges.
22.
The Paragraph of the Sphinx
NOW upon the outskirts of Turoine, after Gerald had ridden through
this city, Gerald paused to talk with the Sphinx who lay there writing
with a black pen in a large black-covered book like a ledger. The
monster had so long couched in this place as to be half-imbedded in the
red earth.
“This partially buried condition, ma’am,” Gerald began,—“or perhaps one
ought to say ‘sir’—”
“Either form of address,” replied the Sphinx, “may be applicable,
according to which half of me you are considering.”
“—This semi-interment, then, madam and sir, is untidy looking, and
cannot be especially comfortable.”
“Yet I may not move,” replied the Sphinx, “in part because I have my
writing to complete, in part because I know all movement and all action
of every kind to be equally fruitless. So do I retain eternal bodily as
well as mental poise.”
“Such acumen borders upon paralysis,” Gerald said: “and paralysis is
ugly.”
“Do you not despise ugliness!” the Sphinx exhorted, “who have traveled
thus far upon the road of gods and myths. For what things have you found
stable upon this road save only Koleos Koleros and the Holy Nose of
Lytreia? and what is there more ugly than these two?”
Gerald replied: “That nose I found it my Christian duty to describe as a
tongue; and the lady whom they call Koleos Koleros I have not yet seen.
But, in any case, you, ma’am—for, after all, it is not quite nice for
me to have your loins upon my mind—No, really, it does seem more
becoming for me to treat you as a lady—”
“So, and do you find me ugly?”
“You mistake my meaning. I was about to observe that you, ma’am, also
appear tolerably stable. And the Mirror of Caer Omn, that likewise
remains in worship.”
“Dreams pass eternally varying through that golden mirror. Thoughts pass
eternally varying through my wise head. But all these dreams and
thoughts stay barren, as barren as they are irresolute. For we create
nothing. We control no material thing. And we aspire toward no goal.
That is why we are permitted to endure powerlessly in realms wherein two
powers alone are never barren; wherein they control all; and wherein
neither may ever be uncertain of its goal so long as the other
survives.”
Gerald found this wholly incomprehensible and of no striking interest.
So he only shrugged.
“Nevertheless, in my worlds,” Gerald said, “there shall not be any
ugliness.”
“Do you, then, possess many worlds?”
“Not as yet, ma’am. I allude to the worlds I shall create by and by,
when I have come into my kingdom yonder, in the place beyond good and
evil, and have regained my proper station as the Lord of the Third Truth
in the Dirghic mythology.”
Now the Sphinx frowned. “I perceive you are only another downfallen god
upon your journey to the Master Philologist. I might have guessed it,
for Thor and Typhon and Rudra and the Maruts and all the other storm
gods who have gone blustering downward into Antan, all had red hair.”
Gerald slapped his thigh.
“Upon my word, ma’am, but that is a real clue! The storm gods did, in
every mythology known to me, have red hair. I incline to believe that
the wisdom of the Sphinx has solved the mystery of my being. I am no
doubt a storm god also; I am rapidly becoming a complete pantheon upon
two legs; and at this rate my waistcoat will end by embracing pure
monotheism. Meanwhile I really do wonder, ma’am, at your offhand way of
speaking about the gods, and I wonder, too, what grudge you can have
against us gods?”
“For one thing, it is said that the gods created those men who interrupt
me in my writing to plague me with just such silly questions.”
“Men naturally seek wisdom from you, ma’am, to whom the whole story of
human life is familiar.”
“But the story of human life is not one story. There are three stories
of human life.”
“Ah, ah! And what are they?”
“Why, there was once a traveling man who came one night to an inn—”
“I believe I have heard of his indecorous adventures there. So do you
spare my blushes, ma’am, and tell me the second story!”
“It seems, then, there were once two Irishmen—”
“That anecdote also, in all conceivable variants, I am quite certain I
have heard. So what is the third story?”
“There was once a young married couple. And it seems that on the first
night—”
“Yet that story, in a great number of versions, is equally familiar to
me. And really, ma’am, I question if these intolerably hackneyed tales
sum up all human wisdom.”