tip, a fool also is not to be argued with. For it is a foolishness
beyond any describing, to believe that Antan can be destroyed by you or
by anybody else. Ah, no! your kingdom awaited you, poor Gerald: but you
faltered, you fell away into domesticity,—and you talked! Now it is the
Master Philologist who, through the might of that word which was in the
beginning, and which will be when all else has perished, has removed
your kingdom from your reach, and from your seeing, and even from your
quite whole-hearted belief, forever. Now it is your only comfort to
poultice your failure with such foolish phrases. And now also it is I
who tell you that for such faltering and for such failure, and for such
phrases, there is possible but one answer.”
Thereafter Horvendile gave Gerald a queer word of power, and Horvendile
took out of his pocket a little mirror three inches square. You heard in
the duskiness a flapping of small vigorous wings. Then three white
pigeons stood among the swine, at the feet of Horvendile. He did what
was requisite: and Gerald thus came straightway into a place which was
not unfamiliar.
PART TWELVE
THE BOOK OF ACQUIESCENCE
“Candor is no More Palatable than an
Oyster when Either is Out of Season.”
48.
Fruits of the Sylan’s Industry
GERALD came thus into the library in which, no more than four months
ago, as it appeared to him, he had quitted his natural body. Lights
burned there, but the room was empty.
Nor did he perceive any marked signs of change. Most of his books were
very much as he had left them. Upon the bookcases were still ranged his
porcelain and brass animals and birds and reptiles. Investigation,
though, revealed the addition to this diminutive fauna of a rather
charming china cat,—a black cat, fast asleep, with a red ribbon about
its neck,—and of a small ivory elephant, which also was black, but had
white tusks.
The chairs, he saw, had been recovered, but it was with a figured stuff
of much the same design and color. The rug that once had been his
mother’s was still underfoot; and the curtains, while new looking, were
of just the same repulsive shade of green velvet that by candle light
turned yellowish.
“It is a quite detestable color. I had always intended to change those
curtains so soon as I could afford it, for a green with some real life
in it. I can but deduce that my body has remained remarkably
conservative through all these thirty years which have seemed to me only
a month or two. My body has evinced commendable industry, also, for here
are dozens upon dozens of books by Gerald Musgrave.”
It seemed a bit droll thus to be confronted with so much strange work
performed by his own natural body,—thought out in his own brain cells,
and written with his own hand,—during the time that these chattels had
been entrusted to the Sylan. Yet the results were gratifying.
For here were not any folderol romances such as Gerald himself, he felt
uneasily, might have perhaps contrived with those brain cells and that
hand, romances which at best would have wasted his readers’ time, and at
worst might have incited unedifying and improper notions. Instead, these
quartos were all serious and learned and scholastic works. Gerald
therefore regarded these large quartos with a justifiable pride and with
profound respect. Their very bindings were in themselves as incompatible
with anything frivolous as were their contents with any unscientific
double meanings. These books had the fine clarity of a physician in
conference with a midwife. Moreover, Gerald’s admiring eyes found nearly
every page empedestalled upon the most impressive looking kind of
footnotes: upon tall footnotes in almost illegibly small type; upon huge
polyglottic footnotes very full of numerals and brackets, which
flatteringly assumed your acquaintance with all human tongues and your
possession of all printed books, so that you could be referred offhand
to such and such a page of an especial edition; and upon footnotes which
appeared to quote from the literature of every known language after
having abbreviated the title of each cited volume into
unintelligibility.
For these quartos dealt with no romantic nonsense such as the phantasms
with which novels vitiate the intelligence and the morals of their
readers, Gerald observed, but with really worth-while ethnographic
matters like the marriage customs of all lands, and the ways of male and
female prostitution among the different races, and with the history in
each country of paederasty, and of lesbianism, and of bestiality, and of
necrophily, and of incest, and of sodomy, and of onanism, and of all
manifestations of the sexual impulse in every era. There, in a more
imaginative vein, were the _Tentative Restoration of the Lost Books of
Elephantis_, the handsomely illustrated _Seed of Minos_, the doctoral
thesis upon _Lingham Worship_, the _Fertility Rites of the Sabbat_, the
privately published _Myth of Anistar and Calmoora_, the _Study of
Priapos_, and the various other monumental works which, although Gerald
did not know this, had already made Gerald Musgrave’s name familiar to
the lecture halls of all universities and the pages of the more learned
reviews.
These quartos were, in fine, the books which had made Gerald Musgrave
the most famous and widely read of American ethnologists; and by his
body’s industry and erudition and broad-mindedness Gerald was properly
impressed. Here seemed, indeed, to be at least one complete and
scholarly treatise devoted to the historical development and the
mechanics and the literature of every known manifestation of the great
forces which had created all life.
“Yes, it is really edifying to note with what zeal and common-sense my
body—while I was a-gypsying with over-ambitious follies,—has
decorously set up as the recorder of historical and scientific truths.”
Then Gerald found upon the next shelf some fourteen tall scrapbooks.
They were full of what the newspapers had printed in laudation and in
the most respectful criticism of the books of Gerald Musgrave. They
contained, also, accounts of the academic honors conferred upon Gerald
Musgrave. They were interleaved with the letters which had been
written—the majority, of course, by that strange race which writes
habitually to authors, but many of them, apparently, by persons of some
consequence,—to Gerald Musgrave about his books.
“My body in my absence has become, thanks to my body’s books, a
reputable and even a looked-up-to citizen. My body is by way of being,
indeed, a personage. I note, too, with that interest appropriate to the
foibles of the great, that my body has also become a somewhat vain old
magpie, gathering up through thirty years every scrap of paper which
happens to display my name.”
Next Gerald lighted on a black box with silver corners, and inside it
was a time-discolored manuscript. This Gerald carried to the
writing-table. And he found it that unfinished romance about his heroic
ancestor, Dom Manuel of Poictesme, just ninety-three pages of it,
precisely as Gerald had left it, with no word changed or added.
“There was not in my natural body sufficient power to sustain the high
inspiration of my youth. So, very sensibly, my body has found other
pursuits, and through them it has become a personage. I do not complain.
Not every body becomes a personage. Even so, it seems a pity to have
denied to mankind the loveliness already created in this fragment.”
But it was just then that the door opened. In the doorway stood a man in
late middle life. And Gerald now for one instant regarded his natural
body and all the dilapidations which time had performed upon that body.
And Gerald somehow comprehended the penned-in and eventless and
self-sacrificing, arduous life of the famous scholar, the life which had
been lived so long by the natural body of Gerald Musgrave. That blinking
magpie, in this somewhat stuffy room,—in the midst of this childish
menagerie of small cats and elephants and dogs and parrots and chickens
and camels and other imbecile toys,—day after day compiled the valuable
and interesting matter in those quartos and the trivial magniloquence in
those scrapbooks. And that, virtually, was all he ever did. Such was his
living in a world profuse in so many agreeabilities,—to be tasted and
seen, to be smelt and heard and handled, at absolutely your own
discretion, in this so opulent world wherein anyone could live very
royally, and with never-failing ardor, upon every person’s patrimony of
the five human senses.
Meanwhile, such self-devotion had paid, under time’s grasping
governance, an exorbitant tax. The impaired shrunk body was unhealthy
looking. Under each of the wavering dim eyes showed a peculiar white
splotch. The skin of the noted scholar was pasty and seemed greasy. He
had hardly any hair except those gray and untended whiskers. Everywhere
he was shrivelled and lean, except for the abrupt, the surprising,
protrusion of a large paunch. He self-evidently had inadequate kidneys,
and an impaired heart, and defective teeth, and a sluggish liver, and
approximately every other drawback to a sedentary person’s late middle
life.
The body of this ornament to scholarship and letters was, in fine, a
quite disgusting bit of wreckage, in need of patching up everywhere; and
a fallen god, when thus confronted by the work of time and of much study
and of intramural living, might very well shake his red ever-busy head
over the one refuge now remaining to down-tumbled divinity.
Nevertheless, Gerald spoke the queer word of power which Horvendile had
given him. There followed for Gerald an instant of dizziness, of a
moment’s blindness....
Then Gerald found that it was he who stood at the door of the library
peering into the quiet lamp-lit room. Before him waited a red-headed,
slim young man in a blue coat and a golden yellow waistcoat, with a tall
white stock and very handsome ruffles about his throat. And the young
fellow was smiling at Gerald Musgrave with a rather womanish mouth, and
in the eyes of the boy was a half-lazy, mildly humorous mockery.
Old Gerald Musgrave adored him with an ardor which was half hatred. Then
he saw that the young fellow did not matter, and that Gerald Musgrave
had bargained well.
49.
Triumph of the Two Truths
“THAT is a strange and glorious word for you to be telling me,” the
boy began. “That is a disastrous bargain for you to be seeking. For your
own will has spoken the revealing word which buys back your natural body
now that your outworn crumbling body is of no more worth.”
Gerald answered: “I, who have left the Marches of Antan forever, have
bought freedom from the ever-meddling magic of the Two Truths. At my
first sight of no other female body which is not positively deformed
will I become enraptured. I have bought feet too old for errancy, ears
that are deaf to the high gods, and to the heart-stirring music of great
myths, and to the soft wheedling of women also, and I have bought eyes
too dim to note whether or not Antan still gleams on the horizon. It is
a good bargain.”
Then he took up again the pages of that thirty-year-old romance. That
too remains, he reflected, unfinished, like all else which I have ever
undertaken....
Some day it will be completed by other hands than the thin wrinkled
hands before me. Somebody else,—not born, as yet, it may be,—will be
writing out,—intelligibly, anyhow,—the story of Poictesme and of the
Redeemer of Poictesme and of his fine followers and many children,—but
not half so splendidly as I was going to write it. Somebody else will,
by and by, be beleaguering and entering into—by means of the little,
yet the not wholly despicable, art of letters,—that wonder-haunted
province which—yes, that also,—was a part of my appointed kingdom....
Somebody else will be laying open the fair ways to Bellegarde and to
Amneran and to Storisende, and will be making free these ways to every
person, so that, through the lean lesser art of letters, Poictesme may
become in some sort another Antan,—an Antan perhaps considerably abated
in splendor, but graced at least with easy accessibility....
Yet not even such slight triumphs were to be won by aged feet, and by
ears no longer acute, and by dimming eyes, and by pulses which would not
be riotous ever any more. He tore up the pages one by one, just as, he
recollected now, in the land of Lytreia, Evaine had torn up the sacred
fig-leaves. Glaum had said that the fig-leaf was the true symbol of
romance. Gerald meditatively dropped the destroyed fragments of his
romance into the waste-basket.
Gerald spoke then without any too great hopefulness. “Has my body,
during your inhabitancy of it, my dear fellow, escaped from Evelyn
Townsend? and gone free from the unmerited blessing of a good woman’s
love?”
The red-headed boy before him replied, discreetly: “Your body and the
body of your Cousin Evelyn have always been such good friends!”
And Gerald smiled. “I recognize that phrase. So throughout thirty years
Lichfield has never once forgotten its polite formula for exorcising the
inadmissible!”
“It has been generally felt,” the youngster answered, “that a prominent
man of letters was entitled to his Egeria. Of recent years, to be sure,
your friendship has not been—we will say,—so ardent nor so frequently
manifested. But there has been, to hold you two together, the boy
begotten by your body upon her body. There has been the long usage to
hold you two together. So your friendship has remained unshattered.”
“I had forgotten,” Gerald said, “the boy. Yes, I remember hearing that
you had thoughtfully provided me with offspring during my absence. I
know not quite how to thank you, my dear fellow, for a favor so delicate
and so personal. We will therefore cough and drop the subject.”
Then Gerald leaned back in the chair. He put together his finger-tips,
and smilingly he looked at them with rather tired, old eyes.
“So I stay faithful to one woman, after all! I have been kept in
everything a model American citizen. I have gracefully adhered to the
code of a gentleman. In my private life I have evinced every proper
respect for the chivalrous sacrament of adultery between social equals.
In the field of my professional labors I have composed no puerile and
lascivious romances, but only serious and instructive works. I am, in
brief, in all respects, a credit to my native Lichfield, and, more
generally, to the United States of America.”
He shrugged. He spread out those old-looking, futile hands.
“Well, certainly I must not spoil the miracle. So I submit. I yield to
the demands of propriety. I accept my personal good behavior; I accept
my success; and I accept also my measure of actual famousness.”
Then Gerald said: “Therefore I must, so long as my life lasts, continue
faithfully your work as the recorder of historical and scientific
truths, since it was such truths which brought my name into famousness.
Oh, yes, you may depend upon it, I shall henceforward honor these fine
truths within the limits advisable for anybody now nearing sixty. I
shall serve them, that is, with my pen rather than with other
instruments now perhaps more fallible. For the trained intelligence of
such a famous scholar as I have become cannot deny their proper
importance to those scientific and historical truths which brought him
into famousness,—nor would, of course, my admirers care to have me
abandoning my métier.”
And Gerald said also: “Even in the private relations which you have
chivalrously preserved for me, my dear fellow, one must not ask
everything. Wheresoever a man lives, there will be a thornbush near his
door: and I can manage well enough, I daresay, to put up with the
continuance of this illicit love-affair,—in which, after all, my
advanced age now protects me from being put to any frequent or
far-reaching inconvenience. Meanwhile, the legend of a life-long illicit
love-affair is a very splendid preservative for the fame of any writer.
It would have been even better, of course, if in conjugating the verb to
love, you had managed to make a few mistakes in gender; that is more
piquant; that is infallible: still, I repeat, one must not ask
everything. I have my satisfying legend of private immorality, created
without any least trouble on my part. Men will remember it. So all ends
very well indeed. I am content with what I have found upon Mispec Moor.
I am content with what I have found in Lichfield. And I shall not bother
any more about Antan, wherein, for one reason and another, I have found
nothing.”
“Do you not be speaking lightly of Antan! For I—do you not
understand?”—the young man spoke with an almost frightened
elation,—“it is I who am called to reign in Antan. You have brought me
the revealing word and the dreadful summons of Horvendile. Antan is my
appointed kingdom, into which I shall now be entering upon the silver
stallion famous in old prophecies.”
“Oh, oh!” said Gerald, “so that is how it is! All ends, again, with that
rather hackneyed scoring _Da capo_. And the eternal quest of Antan
continues, for all that I have no part in it....”
Yet the boy’s joyousness and proud faith appeared to old Gerald Musgrave
pitiable beyond thought. Gerald, now that he was fifty-eight, was of
course not really troubled by that pitiableness, because all actual
commiseration and sympathy for other persons had withered in him along
with the rest of youth’s over-upsetting emotions. Besides, Gerald saw
that, in logic, as a plain question of arithmetic, the boy did not
matter. A million or so other lads more or less like this enthusiastic
young fellow were at that instant preparing for the same downcasting and
failure; and by and by these lads also would be facing their own
unimportance with equanimity. For, as you—howsoever suddenly,—got
older, there was less bitterness, there was hardly any bitterness at
all, to be derived of the knowledge that in human living very much
amounted to nothing, because you saw even more clearly and more
constantly that nothing amounted to very much....
So Gerald said only: “You are young. At least, you are living in a young
body. So do you beware! For, so long as you go about the Marches of
Antan in any conveyance so perilous, the lying half-magic of the Two
Truths will beset that young body, and the Princess will await you at
every turn. She will encounter you under many names, for it is true
that, just as you said very long ago, women do vary in their given
names. She will encounter you in varying shapes. But in any case, she
waits for every young romantic everywhere, as a rather lovable and as an
interestingly formed and colored impediment.... I think it, therefore,
highly improbable that you will complete the journey to Antan. I, in any
case, am middle-aged. And I cry, not discontentedly, my personal
farewell to the half-magic of racing pulses and of distended nerves—”
For an instant Gerald was silent. In his old eyes awoke that gleam which
anybody familiar with Gerald would have recognized at once.
“You see,” he continued, with large affability, “while you have been
theorizing, my dear fellow,—oh, very charmingly, and with a
thoroughness which does you credit, great credit,—well, my
investigations meanwhile have taken a rather more practical turn. I am
not, of course, at liberty to speak of my love-affairs out yonder, with
any real explicitness. No, here, as always, _noblesse oblige_. Still, if
you only knew! If you but knew half as much as I do about that droll
escapade with the Lady Sigid of Audierne and her cousin the Abbess!
about what happened to me in the harem of Caliph Mizraim! about Beatrice
and Henriette and Madame Pamela and Vittoria and Elspeth! about the
three girls at the tanner’s! or if you knew the truth as to what her
Majesty and I were about that night we came so near being caught—!”
“I see,” the boy said, rather wistfully. “You have been a devil of a
fellow and a sad rip among the ladies.”
“Oh, dear me, not at all!” said Gerald. And the old fellow now wore the
expression which, sometimes, accompanies a blush. “It is merely that I
have talked a bit too freely. It is only that this rash tongue of mine
was running away with me. So I can but ask you to forget every word I
have uttered. For exalted names ought, really, not to be repeated thus
lightly. I shall therefore say nothing whatever about the eight other
queens with whom my name has been coupled,—with how good reason I, you
understand, must be the last person in the world to admit,—nor about
any of the empresses either. In fact, a great deal of the scandal about
my intimacy with one of them was exaggerated. No: I most certainly must
not voice any indiscretions about dear Caroline. So I merely point
out—without mentioning any names whatever,—that my experience has been
considerable: and I can assure you, my dear fellow, that in the end
these half-magics produce, after all, no very prodigious miracles.”
“But—” said the boy.
“No,” Gerald protested, “no, really, you must not tempt me with such
eloquence! It suffices that during the thirty years that you have sat
here theorizing,—and have, as it were, blossomed forth with all these
delightful books,—these half-magics have led me day after day from one
affair to its twin; they have led me into more or less jealously guarded
lowlands, which were not markedly dissimilar; they have led then from
one valley to another valley which looked and felt and, for that matter,
smelt very much the same; finally they led me to the fair breasts of
Maya. And I fell away into domesticity, I went no farther. But I was
wholly content there.... So I do not complain. I have lost through these
half-magics my appointed kingdom in Antan,—or so, at least, it appears
to me, in a world wherein perhaps nothing is indisputable except, of
course, historical and scientific truths. Yet the losing of my kingdom
has, none the less, been pleasant. I have had, under the harryings of
these half-magics—always, I mean, upon the whole,—an agreeable time.
To-night the half-magics whose appointed duty it is to keep all us
romantics from attaining to Antan have ceased bothering about me. After
to-night I am no longer formidable. I am, in a word, now that I approach
sixty, almost middle-aged. It follows that Antan does not concern me any
longer: and I shall think no more about Antan, wherein, for one reason
and another, I have found nothing.”
With that, gray Gerald Musgrave dipped his pen. He put the boy quite out
of mind. And the well-thought-of old scholar began to write, just where
his natural body had left off a bit earlier in the evening, setting down
decorously the historical and scientific truth as to the rules governing
pre-nuptial intercourse in the bedchambers of New Guinea and the Tonga
Islands.
50.
Exodus of Glaum
THE boy waited, looking down at this old fellow who sat there making
small scratches upon paper, the most of which he presently canceled with
yet other scratches, all the while with the air of a person who is about
something intelligent and of actual importance. Then the boy shrugged.
For, as always, to an onlooker the motions of creative writing revealed
that flavor of the grotesque which is attendant upon every form of
procreation.
And besides, to him for whom the silver stallion waited without, and for
whom his appointed kingdom waited also, such time-wasting appeared
futile. He, who was young, and who retained as yet the untroubled faith
of every boy in his own abilities and in his own importance,—and who,
of course, might not foresee the fate which awaited him in the arms of
Evadne of the Dusk,—could not regard without impatience such
time-wasting. What made it even worse was that this dilapidated remnant
of a man was so plainly enjoying himself. For he chuckled as he wrote;
he had self-evidently found what he considered a rather beautiful idea
to play with, for now he had cocked his battered, so nearly bald, old
head to one side, and that which he had just written down was being
regarded by his dimmed and peering eyes with entire admiration: and it
was all somewhat pitiable to the young eyes of the observer.