the Fair Breasts, “I had forgotten how wilful is that Abdel-Hareth who
got his being upon Earth from me. Something of this sort was to be
looked for, the first moment that the headstrong wretch was freed from
my control. Still, Jahveh has gained less than we have gained through
Jahveh’s meddling. Abdel-Hareth has served me even at the last by
removing Antan from the horizon. Earth will be quieter now; and my
daughters will not be so hard put to it to keep men in reasonable
order.”
“I forget nothing,” the brown man remarked, drily. “And so I did not
await the coming of your first-born in the likeness of a child whose
fearless innocence surmounts all evil. For it was the seeming of a
little child who rode up against Antan, you conceive, with every
appearance of that faith against which the snares of no sorcerer and of
hardly nine women in ten can prevail. Such innocence is a quite
dangerous counterfeit. For one, I do not meddle with it nor with any
other unearthly phenomenon. I have my realm. It suffices me.”
The woman asked, “But what, what, Janicot, do you suppose has happened?”
“How shall we ever know, dear Havvah, when manifestly there are no
survivors of that happening? Antan, in any case, is no loss to us.”
Here Gerald broke in upon their talking; and Gerald shook at them his
red head lordlily.
“You little creatures guess in vain at the means which I have employed.
And equally in vain will you supplicate me to reveal those means. For I
shall tell you nothing. It is sufficient that the Well-beloved of
Heavenly Ones has accomplished the mission of his tenth incarnation with
a thoroughness not customary in interrogative pronouns. I came to redeem
my appointed kingdom from the rule of usurpers. I came as the Lord of
that Third Truth which is unknown to those who teach only that we
copulate and die. That Third Truth has been loosed. No, I shall tell you
nothing of its nature, for you are not fit to comprehend the Third
Truth. But the mightiness of it your own eyes have witnessed. So Antan
is now redeemed—”
His voice broke here. But Gerald presently continued:
“Antan is now redeemed at a great price. That woman and that child to
whom my heart was given have perished. I remain. I know that these two
were illusions. Nevertheless, I remain. There is no bond upon the Lord
of the Third Truth to be happy: there is a strong bond upon every Helper
and Preserver not to evade the full discharge of his mission. What, you
may ask of me, is the mission of the Lord of the Third Truth? And I will
reply to you out of my divine wisdom. It is the mission of the Lord of
the Third Truth, howsoever he may palter or struggle against his doom,
to destroy that which he most loves.”
44.
Economics of Common-Sense
NOW Gerald sat with his head bowed. He heard a talking between the old
woman who had been his Maya and the brown man who was the Adversary of
all the gods of men.
“What is it men desire?” said the woman. “My daughters prepare for them
fine food and drink, my daughters see to it that their homes are snug,
and at the end of each day my daughters love them dutifully. All things
that men can ask for, my daughters furnish them. Why need men cherish
strange desires which do not know their aims? for how can any of my
daughters content such desires?”
“I also marvel at the desires of men,” replied the Adversary. “I, too,
am ready to accord whatsoever a man can ask for sensibly and in plain
words. I, who am the Prince of this world, remain a generous and
ever-indulgent monarch. I will to make my people happy. My curious
opulence awaits at every hand to afford my subjects whatsoever they can
ask. But men want more. They desire that which was never in my kingdom.
They have followed after impalpable gods: they have been enamored of
phantoms. They have believed that their desire was in Antan, in part
because they did not know what was their desire, and in part because
they did not know what was Antan. Yes, it is well that Antan has
perished.”
“This world is well enough,” the woman said. “It is well to be born into
this world of an ever-loving mother. It is well to be a young man in
this world wherein one may follow after young women and be cherished by
them. There is soft living in this world when you have come as near
discretion as men ever get and have had the wit to find a wife to take
care of you. And at the end it is well to fare out of this world quietly
and incuriously, with a deft-handed woman to nurse you and to wash your
body afterward. But men want more.”
“This world is very good. My kingdom is a wholly sufficing kingdom,”
agreed the Adversary. “The wise man, as goes human wisdom, will be
content with the inexhaustible goodness of those material things which
all are mine. For the five senses are an endless comfort; the five
senses are an endless store of anodynes. A man may purchase bodily ease
and a drugged brain with his five senses. But men want more.”
“So they have passed beyond my daughters,” the woman said. “One by one,
a many have passed, perversely and so lonely, from all my daughters
could contrive to content them: and one by one a host of demented
romantic men have struggled toward Antan, and toward what befalls all
mortals and immortals there. Yes, it is very well that Antan has
perished.”
“One by one,” said the Adversary, “they have derided my kingdom. They
have followed after impalpable gods. These gods passed futilely. But
they drew many of my subjects from me, all to be lost forever in that
beguiling Antan.”
“Men are great fools, and my daughters can hardly hamper their folly.
That which my daughters can do they perform willingly. But not all men
could my daughters preserve from the madness which drew men toward Antan
and into ruinous desires to judge the goal of every god. At last, Antan
has fallen: it is very well.”
The Adversary said, more leniently: “Men are, beyond doubt, great fools.
But they are my people; and those that I can save I save. Yet many evade
me. And their dreaming troubles all my realm and me, too, they trouble
now and then. But Antan has fallen: and after that foolishness at least
my people will not be following any more.”
“The daughters of Eve are not troubled now and then, they are troubled
at every moment, by the dreams of men. Such of these blundering men as
fond and eternal laboring may save, my daughters win away from their
toplofty dreams. But the work is hard; the work is endless; and our
losses are many.”
And then the Adversary said: “We two who began in the Garden to contrive
for the happiness of men, and to be speaking always for the real good of
men,—yes, certainly, our work is hard and endless. For men stay
romantically minded creatures who aspire beyond my kingdom. Yet we do
not despair.”
45.
Farewell to All Fair Welfare
WHEN Gerald raised his head he was alone on the naked moor, for the
brown man had departed, and Maya had gone away with the first of all her
lovers, and her illusions had vanished, including the neat log and
plaster cottage. And mists were creeping up from the ruined kingdom of
Antan, in billows of ever-thickening gray which seemed to be the smoke
from that great burning.
Then Gerald said:
“I have come out of my native home on a gain-less journeying with no
profit in it: yet there has been pleasure in that journeying. I do not
complain. Let every man that must journey, without ever knowing why,
from the dark womb of his mother to the dark womb of his grave, take
pattern by me!
“For all that every pleasure is departed from me, I have had pleasure. I
do not grieve because I have gained nothing in my journeying. The great
and best words of the Master Philologist stay unrevealed; that supreme
word which was in the beginning, and which will be when all else has
perished, I may not surmise: but I have played with many words which
were rather pretty. In the art of magic which I chose to be my art I
have performed no earth-shaking wonders, yet in small thaumaturgies I
have had some hand. I did not ride the divine steed to my journey’s end:
but a part of the way I rode quite royally.
“That which I heard of from afar I have not won to in my foiled
journeying. So I now cry farewell to that Queen Freydis whom, I suspect,
I might have loved with a great love if lesser women had not solicited
me. I cry farewell to the Mirror of the Hidden Children in which, I
believe, I might have found myself as I am, and might have come to
knowledge of the Third Truth. And I cry farewell to Antan, to that
never-won-to goal of all the gods which was, I think, my appointed
kingdom. I have surmised high things. I have gained none of them. My
doom has been a little doom. It contents me.
“I may well be content, because all that a man may hope for I have had,
who have learned at least that the lot of a man is more sure than the
lot of any god. For the deceit which you put upon me, O venerable and
subtle Æsred, I cry out my gratitude. There was the seeming of a home
and of a woman who loved and tended me and of a child. I may not speak
of my love for these illusions. Now they have perished. But my memories
remain: and they are more dear to me than is any real thing.
“All, all, is perished! It may be that I have offended the two truths
which I did not esteem sufficiently august. And I who willed to be Lord
of the Third Truth have found no third truth anywhere. I have found only
comfortably colored illusions. But I am content with that which I have
found here upon Mispec Moor.”
In the while that Gerald had been speaking, the mists rose thicker and
thicker from destroyed Antan. He had noted in the while that he spoke
how the first wavering thin billows crept tentatively up the hills and
along the roadway, creeping upon the ground, and under the low-swinging
tree branches, with, as it seemed, a pre-meditated furtiveness; and
then, as if emboldened by finding the way unopposed, these mists had
risen up from the ground, always swiftlier, until now they had eclipsed
all. Gerald, now that he ended his talking, could see nothing palpable
anywhere save the little patch of intermingled stone and grass
immediately beneath his feet; and about him everywhere were the cool
mists, lighted with a diffused gray radiancy which seemed to come from
all sides.
PART ELEVEN
THE BOOK OF REMNANTS
“When Wages are Paid, Work is Over.”
46.
The Gray Quiet Way of Ruins
GERALD now was wandering among thick luminous gray mists, on a gray
way which led through long quieted places. It led him to a
weather-beaten pavilion of badly stained and tattered cloth which once
had been flesh-colored.
Within this pavilion was a masked skeleton. The gleaming bones sat
upright, and in unmarred order, in a gilded chair. A fan lay in the lap
of this skeleton, a fan that was painted with the gay amours of
Harlequin and Columbine, which Pierrot was observing, wistfully, through
a gap in a yew-hedge: and the skeleton wore a little black velvet
carnival mask, which covered all the upper front part of the skull,
about the eye-sockets.
And beyond that was a castle, whose exterior was overlaid with cracked
and peeling black-and-gold lacquer work. This castle was empty
everywhere of any inhabitant. Gerald passed through its courtyard and
about many large rooms and corridors, all hung with faded, very ancient
tapestries. He encountered nobody. Then he came to the inmost tower,
builded of horn, and so into the room which had been the bedchamber of
the lord of that castle, and he perceived the reason why not even mice
nor spiders dared to dwell in that place.
Afterward Gerald came to a dragon’s den. But the dragon was dead long
ago, and the cupboards of that den were as empty as had been the castle
of Vraidex, except for a pepper cruet and a salt cruet, both of
time-blackened silver, and a light golden semi-circular crown inset with
emeralds such as blonde princesses were used to wear in that dragon’s
heyday.
Thence Gerald passed to a jousting ground, and that too was tenantless
and fallen into decay. In the paved place where knights had tilted
against one another lay at random nineteen broken spears and three
tarnished shields. In the ladies’ gallery Gerald found only a chamber
pot. The hangings of this gallery were discolored and torn, but you
could yet see that these hangings had been of black cloth embroidered
with small rearing silver horses.
And Gerald came also to a green pasture through which flowed unruffled a
deep stream of still water. This pasture was strewn everywhere with many
curious objects. He noted a crozier, and a wheel, and a camel-hair
shirt, and a huge gridiron, and a copper dish containing the breasts of
a young woman. He found in that pasture also a porcelain box of
ointment, and a great saw, and a blue hat, and a large iron comb, which
like the saw had long-dried blood upon its teeth, and a palm branch, and
two enormous, very rusty keys marked with the monogram S. P.
Then Gerald passed where three crosses lay overturned.
And beyond that the way was yet more murky. To this hand and the other
hand Gerald could just dimly divine the ruined porticos and domes and
pylons of incredibly ancient buildings: he seemed to go among obelisks
and many-storied square towers. But all was very gray and dubious. He
wandered now in a cloudiness wherein not anything was indisputable.
He passed across a narrow bridge beneath which showed a dark and
sluggish river. In that water Gerald could see moving, many-colored
figures which were not strange to him. For Evasherah was there, and
Evaine, and Evarvan, and Evadne also, smiling at him now for the last
time, and he could see how notably they had all resembled one another.
And yet one more woman was there, a blue-clad woman in a crown just such
as Maya had worn before she became his wife, but the face of this woman
Gerald could not clearly discern.
And upon the farther bank of the dark river one sat among a herd of
black swine, and the eyes of all these swine gleamed meditatively at
Gerald through their ragged white lashes. The man arose: and Gerald saw
this swine-driver was that same young red-haired Horvendile who was Lord
of the Marches of Antan.
Then Horvendile began to speak.
47.
How Horvendile Gave Up the Race
HORVENDILE spoke of the race of Manuel, and of the joy, and the
vexation, too, which the antics of this so inadequate race had been to
Horvendile. And it was of Merlin that Gerald was thinking now, for it
seemed to him that here was yet another poet who did not any longer
delight to shape and to play with puppets, because Horvendile was
saying:
“Now I abandon a race whose needs are insatiable. For tall Manuel lived
always wanting what he had not ever found, and never, quite, knowing
what thing it was which he wanted, and without which he might not ever
be contented. And Jurgen also, after Heaven’s very best had been done to
grant him what he sought for, could reply only that he was Jurgen who
sought he knew not what. And all their descendants have been like these
maddening two in this at least, all seeking after they could not say
what. Nobody can do anything for such a race! For their needs have
stayed insatiable: their journeying has been, in every land and in every
time, a foiled journeying: and in the end, in the inevitable unvarying
end, each one of you treads that gray quiet way of ruins which leads
hither and to no other place.”
“Well, for that matter,” Gerald said, “it seems that you too,
Horvendile, have some engagement in this hog wallow.”
“I endeavor, in point of fact, to become familiar with this last stretch
of limbo, against the time of my own possible need not ever to be
remembered anywhere.”
“—And for my part, I came of my own choice and in self-protection,”
Gerald continued, with his chin well up. “For I must tell you,
Horvendile, that I have had little peace since our last meeting.”
Then Gerald (putting out of mind those attendant, very hungry looking
pigs) related the epic of his journeying, without reserving anything out
of false modesty, now that he talked with a confrère. He told of how he
had descended into the underwater palace of the Princess Evasherah and
of the orgies which he had shared in. He spoke, a bit contritely, of the
amorous excesses he had been led into by the wives and the three hundred
and fifty-odd concubines of Glaum during their master’s absence. With
unconcealed embarrassment he told of how the people of Lytreia had
endeavored to detain him in their temple, to reign there as their tribal
god, because they found his nose to be so much more majestic than the
idol they hitherto had worshipped. He confessed to his dalliance with
the enamored Fox-Spirit. He frankly admitted that he had not behaved
well in seducing Evarvan and then deserting her after her marvelous
beauty had become to him an old story. He told of how Queen Freydis had
come repeatedly to him with the most generous proffers of her realm and
person; and he spoke of this matter with visible compunction, because he
could not deny that after three or four bouts he had repulsed the
infatuated poor lady rather rudely.
In fine, said Gerald, since every man ought honestly to acknowledge his
own weaknesses, he could get no real peace in the Marches of Antan. So
at the last he had stolen away, into this quiet, gray untroubled place,
of his own accord, just to be rid of so many persons who took unfair
advantage of his over-amiable and fiery nature....
And Horvendile, at the end of Gerald’s repentant narrative, observed: “I
comprehend. You have been, in brief, the devil of a fellow and a sad rip
among the ladies.”
“Oh, but you wrong me! Such a suspicion is very horrifying and quite
unjust! No, it is merely that not even Fair-haired Hoo, the Helper and
Preserver, the Lord of the Third Truth, and the Well-beloved of Heavenly
Ones, is immune to over-constant temptation.”
And at that, Horvendile shrugged. “A god with so many fine titles is not
to be argued with. In any case, do you be of good cheer, for even after
all these regrettable amours, and beyond the mire that my swine delight
in, the Princess still awaits you.”
“But in what place?” said Gerald, “and how is she called?”
“She awaits in every place so long as youth remains—”
“Upon my word, now, Horvendile, but that is the truth, and a rather
plaguing truth!”
“—However, this especial Princess is called, as it chances,
Evangeline—”
“Oh, come!” said Gerald, “come now, but really, my dear fellow—!”
“—And at your first sight of her you will be enraptured. For this
Princess Evangeline is so surpassingly lovely that she excels all the
other women your gaze has ever beheld—”
“I know,” said Gerald. “Her face is the proper shape, it is
appropriately colored everywhere, and it is surmounted with an adequate
quantity of hair.”
“—Nor,” Horvendile went on, with rising enthusiasm, “is it possible to
find any defect in her features—”
“No: for, doubtless, the colors of this beautiful young girl’s two eyes
are nicely matched, and her nose stands just equidistant between them.
Beneath this is her mouth; and she has also a pair of ears.”
“In fine,” said Horvendile, with his hands aflourish above his attendant
pigs, “the Princess is young, she exhibits no absolute deformity
anywhere, and your enamored glance will therefore perceive in her no
fault, because of that magic which in the Marches of Antan the Two
Truths exercise over all vigorous young persons.”
“You very movingly depict a woman of extraordinary and, I have not the
least doubt, resistless charm. Nevertheless, I cannot any longer be
wandering about a place wherein there are only two truths, and where the
magic of these Two Truths is forever meddling with my young body, for
the gods of the Marches of Antan do not content me.”
Then Horvendile replied: “Men have found many gods. But these gods pass.
They descend into Antan, and they do not return. One god and one goddess
alone do not pass. They remain eternally, if but to weave eternally a
mist about the seeing and the thinking of the young, and thus to secure
the existence of yet other young persons within a month or so.”
“With observations to that same general effect,” Gerald answered, “I am
not unfamiliar. But let us make the thing complete! Do you now voice,
here in your murky pigsty, one or another long-winded restatement of the
fact that time disastrously affects all organic material. You will then,
I think, have summed up the entire philosophy of the Marches of Antan.
Perhaps it is a true philosophy. Nevertheless, that philosophy is a
morbid materialism such as does not amuse me, who am a self-respecting
citizen of the United States of America. No: I had far rather play with
a beautiful idea than with one utterly lacking in seductiveness. So I
prefer to think that the gods and the dreams of men pass to a noble and
a worthy goal—”
It was then that Horvendile sighed, a bit despondently. “Ah, Gerald, but
how may you presume to speak of such matters, who did not attain to
Antan?”
“My friend,” replied Gerald, affably, “I was too wise to risk any such
indiscretion. No: I did not enter into my appointed kingdom; and I have
destroyed it. Therefore it must remain, so long as I remain, whatever I
choose to imagine it. I retain the privilege of playing with a beautiful
idea, in just the proper half-remorseful frame of mind which begets the
most luxuriant fancies—”
“But—” Horvendile began.
“No, my dear fellow, you are quite wrong.”
Horvendile said, “Still—”
“Yes, there is something in that, at first glance, yet it does not
really touch the root of the matter.”
Horvendile protested, “I was but going to say—”
“I know! I perfectly comprehend your argument. And I admit that you
phrase it forcefully. The trouble is that you are wrong in your
underlying principle.”
Horvendile said, “However—”
“Yes, but not always,” Gerald stated. “For the one way for a poet to
appreciate the true loveliness of a place is not ever to go to it. No,
Horvendile, a poet is not to be fobbed off with facts. No matter what
the surrounding facts might be, all poets from Prometheus to Jurgen have
preferred a beautiful idea to play with. So a logical poet will always
destroy his appointed kingdom, because in this way only can he convert
it into a beautiful idea. Therefore for me, who am a poet of sorts, to
have entered into my appointed kingdom would have been woefully
shiftless. I would have had henceforward only one kingdom. But, as it
is, I can remake the destroyed place several times a day, in my
imaginings, and can every time rebuild it more beautifully. I have thus
a thousand kingdoms, each one of them more lovely than the other. To-day
it will be Evasherah who awaits me there, among all the splendor and the
perfume and the sunlit lewdness of the most ancient East: to-morrow the
sweet singing of feathery-legged Evadne will summon me to a quite
different Antan, which then will be a sea-engirdled, low-lying tropic
island: but the day after that, far more idyllic lures will be recalling
me to that pastel-colored, pastoral and rather populous Antan which is
inhabited by all the many dreams that I had in youth, and is to be made
my strictly personal heaven by the pure lips of Evarvan. Whereas, upon
yet other occasions,—when my turn of mind takes on a more scholastic
turn,—I shall know that in Antan awaits me each paragraph of the
profound, wide erudition of Evaine.... But more often, Horvendile, I
shall think of yet another woman and of a boy child, who were not
wonderful in anything, but who for a while seemed mine. And I shall
believe that these two wait for me, in a much more prosaic Antan; and I
shall know that no magic, howsoever mightier than the less aspiring
dreams of my manhood, can afford to me anything more dear.... For all
that one needs, Horvendile, I have had. Antan could boast of nothing
more desirable, to me, than that which I have had. So now not any power
can ever quell my thankfulness for those illusions which have made sport
with me for my allotted while. And I cry out defiantly, among your
waiting swine, in this gray place of endless ruining, I am content...!”