“You must adventure as they once adventured, who were your forefathers,
and you must go with me, who am called Horvendile, into Antan.”
“Were those evaporating gentlemen my forefathers?” asked Florian. “And
how does one go into Antan?”
“They were,” answered Horvendile. “And one goes in this way.” He
explained the way, and the need for traveling on it.
And Florian looked rather dubious and took snuff. He saw that Janicot
had vanished from the asherah stone, with that ostentatious simplicity
the brown creature seemed to affect. Then Florian shrugged, and said he
would go wherever Horvendile dared go, since this appeared now the only
chance of coming by the sword Flamberge.
“And as for those who were my forefathers, and begot me, I would of
course have said something civil to express my appreciation of their
exertions, if I had known. But between ourselves, Monsieur Horvendile,
I would have preferred to meet some of the more imposing progenitors
of Puysange,—say, heroic old Dom Manuel or the great Jurgen,—instead
of these commonplace people. It is depressing to find any of one’s own
ancestors just ordinary persons, persons too who seem quite down in the
mouth, and with so little life in them—”
“To be quite ordinary persons,” replied Horvendile, “is a failing
woefully common to all men and to the daughters of all men, nor does
that foible shock anybody who is not a romantic. As for having very
little life in them, what more do you expect of phantoms? The life
that was once in these persons to-day endures in you. For it is a
truism—preached to I do not, unluckily, know how many generations,—that
the life which informed your ancestor, tall Manuel the Redeemer, did
not perish when Manuel passed beyond the sunset, but remained here upon
earth to animate the bodies of his children and of their children after
them.”
“But by this time Manuel must have the progeny of a sultan or of a town
bull—”
“Yes,” Horvendile conceded, “in a great many bodies, and in countless
estates, that life has known a largish number of fruitless emotions. At
least, they appear to me to have been rather fruitless. And to-day that
life wears you, Monsieur de Puysange, as its temporary garment or, it
may be, as a mask: to-morrow you also will have been put by. For that
is always the ending of the comedy.”
“Well, so that the comedy wherein I figure be merry enough—”
“It is not ever a merry comedy,” replied Horvendile, “though, for one,
I find it amusing. For I forewarn you that the comedy does not vary.
The first act is the imagining of the place where contentment exists
and may be come to; and the second act reveals the striving toward,
and the third act the falling short of, that shining goal,—or else the
attaining of it to discover that happiness, after all, abides a thought
farther down the bogged, rocky, clogged, befogged heart-breaking road.”
“Ah, but,” said Florian, “these reflections are doubtless edifying,
since they combine gloom with verbosity and no exact meaning. Still,
it is not happiness I am looking for, but a sword to which all this
philosophizing brings us no step nearer. No, it is not happiness I
seek. For through that sword, when I have got it, will come such
misery as I cannot bear to think of, since its sharp edge must sever
me irrevocably from that perfect beauty which I have adored since
boyhood. None the less, I have given my word; and these old phantoms
have unanimously reassured me that it is better to have love end
at fulltide. So let us be logical, and let us go forward, Monsieur
Horvendile, as merrily as may be possible.”
_17._
_The Armory of Antan_
The way to Antan was made difficult by darkness and obstacles and
illusions, and the three that guarded the cedar-shadowed way were
called Glam of the Haunting Eyes and Ten-jo of the Long Nose and
Maya of the Fair Breasts. But these warders did not greatly bother
Horvendile, who passed them by the appointed methods and through means
which Florian found remarkable if not actually indelicate. In no other
way than through these cedar-groves and the local customs might you
win to Freydis, whom love brought out of Audela to suffer as a mortal
woman, and whom the druids and satirists had brought, through Sesphra’s
wicked aid, to Antan. Thus had she come to reign in Antan, and to
attest, with many dreadful instances, her ardor to do harm and work
great mischief.
Now this Antan was a queer place, all cloudiness and grayness, but
full of gleamings which reminded you of sparks that linger insecurely
among ashes: and there were no real noises, not even when you talked.
And when Horvendile had departed, you asked this gray and dimly golden
woman if the sword Flamberge was to be come by anywhere in madame’s
most charming and tasteful residence? She replied, a shadow speaking
with the shadow of a voice, that it was very probably somewhere in her
armory: and she led the way into a misty place wherein were the famous
swords whereby came many deaths and a little fame.
Very curious it was to see them coldly shining in the mistiness, and
to handle them. Here was long Durandal, with which Sir Roland split
a cleft in the Pyrenees; and beside it hung no less redoubtable
Haulte-Claire, with which Sir Oliver had held his own against Durandal
and Durandal’s fierce master, in that great battling which differed
from other military encounters by resulting in something memorable
and permanent, in the form of a proverb. Here was Lancelot’s sword
Aroundight, here was Ogier’s Courtain, and Siegfried’s Balmung. One saw
in this dim place the Cid’s Colada, Sir Bevis’s Morglay, the Crocea
Mors of Cæsar, and the Joyeuse of Charlemagne. Nor need one look in
vain for Curtana and Quernbiter, those once notable guardians of
England and Norway, nor for Mistelstein, nor Tizona, nor Greysteel, nor
Angurvadel, nor any other charmed sword of antiquity. All were here:
and beside Joyeuse was hung Flamberge; for Galas made both of them.
Well, you estimated, Flamberge was by no means the handsomest of the
lot: but it would serve your turn, you did not desire to seem grasping.
And since madame appeared somewhat oversupplied with cutlery—
Indeed that was the truth, as Freydis could not deny, in the thin tones
which people’s voices had in Antan, since not only these patrician
murderers harbored here. Here too were death’s plebeian tools in
every form. Here were Italian stilettoes heaped with Malay krisses,
the hooked Turkish scimitar with the Venetian schiavona; curved Arab
yataghans, sabres that Yoshimitzu had tempered, the Albanian cutlass,
and the notched blades of Zanzibar; the two-handed claymores of
Scotland, the espada of the Spanish matador, the scalping-knives of
the Red Indians and the ponderous glaives of executioners: swords from
all cities and all kingdoms of the world, from Ferrara and Toledo and
Damascus, from Dacia and Peru and Muscovy and Babylon.
To which you replied that, while you had never greatly cared for
the cataloguing method in literature, you allowed its merits in
conversation. These crisp little résumés indicated a really firm grasp
of the subject. For the rest, it was most interesting to note what
ingenuity people had displayed in contriving how to kill one another.
Freydis assented as to men’s whole-heartedness in malignity, but
was disposed to view without optimism the support it got from human
ingenuity. She considered these swords in any event to be outmoded
lumber, as concerned the needs of anybody who really desired to do harm
and work any actually great mischief.
Still, you, whose speaking seemed even to you a whisper in the
grayness, declined to be grasping: and Flamberge would serve your turn.
Therefore it was vexatious that, instead of gracefully presenting you
with the sword, the Queen of Antan went through a gray vague corridor,
wherein upon a table lay a handful of rusty iron nails and a spear, and
then into another twilit place.
Here, as you hastily observed, were madame’s pistols, cannons,
culverins, grenades, musketoons, harquebusses, bombs, petronels,
siege-guns, falconets, carbines, and jingals, and swivels. Yes, it was
most interesting.
Freydis looked at you somewhat queerly: and it was, again, as outmoded
lumber that she appraised this arsenal. Then Freydis almost proudly
showed the weapons she had in store for men’s needs when men should go
to war to-morrow, and such assistants would further every patriot’s
desire to do harm and work great mischief. And you felt rather
uncomfortable to see the sleek efficiency of these gleaming things in
this ambiguous place.
Yes, they were very interesting, and beside them, Flamberge certainly
seemed inadequate. Still, you admitted, you had never been grasping:
and Flamberge would serve your turn.
It was really maddening how the woman kept turning to irrelevant
matters. These engines of destruction, although ingenious and
devastating toys within their limits, should not be regarded
overseriously. A million or so of persons, or at most a few nations,
could be removed with these things, but that was all. So speaking, she
passed into a room wherein were books,—but not many books,—and four
figures modelled in clay, as she told you, by old Dom Manuel very long
ago. It was more important, her thin talking went on, that as occasion
served she was sending into the world these figures, to follow their
six predecessors, to all whom she had given a life empoisoned with
dreams, with dreams that were immortal and contagious; and so would
infect others and yet others eternally, and would make living as
unhappy and detestable a business as dying. What were these dreams? she
was asked: and she in turn asked, Why should I tell you? Your dream is
different, nor may you escape it. This must suffice: that these dreams
are the most subtle and destructive of poisons, and do harm and work
great mischief, in that they enable men to see that life and all which
life can afford is inadequate to men’s desires.
This seemed rather morbid talk. To evade it tactfully, the four
changelings as yet unborn were examined, with civil comments: and
indeed there was about one little hook-nosed figure a something which
quite took the fancy. He reminds me of a parrot, was your smilingly
tendered verdict: and Freydis, with her habitual tired shrugging,
replied that others, later, would detect, without much reticence, a
resemblance to that piratical and repetitious bird.
Now then, all this was very interesting, most interesting, and
you really regretted having to return to the topic of the sword
Flamberge—Freydis had not made up her mind: she might or might not give
the sword, and her deciding must pivot upon what harm you meant to do
with it. Her visitor from the more cheery world of daylight was thus
forced to make a clean breast of why he needed Flamberge, the only
sword that may spill the blood of the Léshy, so that he might give, by
the old ritual, his unborn child, and rid himself of his wife.
Whereon Queen Freydis expressed frank indignation, because the child
would by this plan be rescued from all, and the woman from much,
sorrow. Could even a small madman in bottle-green and silver suppose
that the Queen of Antan, after centuries of thriving malevolence, was
thus to be beguiled into flagrant philanthropy?
But it was not, in the long run, philanthropy, you insisted. It was
depressing to have to argue about anything in this gray, vague,
gleaming, endless place, wherein you seemed only to whisper: and you
were, privately, a little taken aback by the unaccustomed need to
prove an action, not amply precedented and for the general good, but
the precise contrary. Aloud,—though not actually aloud, but in the
dim speech one uses in Antan,—you contended that when a man thus rid
himself of his wife he did harm and worked great mischief, because
the spectacle made all beholders unhappy. Women of course had obvious
reasons for uneasiness lest the example be followed generally: and men
were roused to veritable frenzies of pious reprovings when they saw the
thing they had so often thought of doing accomplished by somebody else.
Did married men, then, at heart always desire to murder their wives?
was what Freydis wondered. No, you did not say that: not always;
some wives let weeks go by without provoking that desire. And to
appearances, most men became in the end more or less reconciled to
having their wives about. Still, let us not go wholly by appearances.
Let us be logical! Whom does any man most dislike?
Freydis had settled down, with faint golden shimmerings, upon a couch
that was covered with gray cushions, and she meditated. What person
does any man most dislike? Why, Freydis estimated, the person who most
frequently annoys him, the person with whom he finds himself embroiled
in the most bitter quarrels, the person whose imperfections are to him
most glaringly apparent, and, in fine, the person who most often and
most poignantly makes him uncomfortable.
Just so, you assented: and in the life of any possible married man,
who was that person? The question was rhetorical. You did not have
to answer it, any more than did most husbands. None the less, you
esteemed it a question which no married man had failed to consider, if
gingerly and as if from afar, with the mere tail of his mental eye, in
unacknowledged reveries. It was perhaps the memory of these cloistered
considerations which made married men acutely uncomfortable when any
other man disposed of his wife without all this half-hearted paltering
with the just half-pleasant notion that some day she would go so far as
to make justifiable—A gesture showed what, as plainly as one could show
anything in this vague endlessness of grays and gleamings. No, madame
might depend upon it, to assist any gentleman in permanently disposing
of his wife was not, in the long run, philanthropy. It really did make
the majority of other husbands uncomfortable, whether through envy or
though a conscience-stricken recalling of unacknowledged reveries, you
did not pretend to say.
All that might be true enough, Freydis admitted, from her dim nook
among the gray cushions, without alluring her into the charitable act
of preventing a child’s enduring the sorrows and fatigues of living.
Ah, but here again, madame must not reason so carelessly, nor be misled
by specious first appearances. Let us, instead, be logical! The child,
knowing nothing, would not know what it was escaping: and it would not
be grateful, it would derive no æsthetic pleasure from the impressive
ceremony of giving by the old ritual, it would even resent the moment’s
physical pain. But the beholders of the deed, and all that heard of it,
would be acutely uncomfortable, since the father that secured for his
child immunity from trouble and annoyance, did harm and worked great
mischief by setting an example which aroused people to those frenzies
evocable by no other prodigy than a display of common-sense.
For people would turn from this proof of paternal affection, to the
world from which the child was being removed: and people would
be unhappy, because, with all their natural human propensity for
fault-finding tugging them toward denunciation, nobody would be able
to deny the common-sense of rescuing a child from discomforts and
calamities. What professional perjurer anywhere, madame, whether in
prison or politics or the pulpit, could muster the effrontery to
declare life other than a long series of discomforts diversified
only by disasters? What dignity was possible in an arena we entered
in the manner of urine and left in the shape of ordure? What father
endowed with any real religious faith could, after the most cursory
glancing over of the sufferings he had got gratis in this life and
had laboriously earned in the next,—could then appraise without
conscience-stricken remorse the dilemma in which he had placed his
offspring?
Well, to see thus revealed the one sure way of rescuing the child from
this disastrous position, and to know himself too much a poltroon to
follow the example of which his judgment and all his better instincts
approved, was a situation that, madame, must make every considerate
parent actually and deeply miserable, through self-contempt. In one
manner alone might every man be made really miserable,—by preventing
him from admiring himself any longer.
For people would look, too, toward the nearest police officer and
toward the cowardice in their own hearts: and these commingled
considerations would prevent many fathers from doing their plain
duty. They would send many and it might be the hapless majority of
fathers to bed that night with clean hands, with the pallid hands of
self-convicted dastards: and self-contempt would make these fathers
always unhappy. No, here again, madame might depend upon it that to
assist a gentleman in this giving, by the old ritual, of his offspring
was not, in the long run, and whatever the deed might seem to a first
glance, philanthropy. It did some good: one could not deny that: but,
after all, the child was absolutely the only person who profited,
and through the benefits conferred upon the child was furthered the
greatest ill and discomfort for the greatest number, who, here as in
every other case, replied to any display of common-sense with frenzies
that did harm and everywhither splutteringly worked mischief.
And you spoke with such earnestness, and so much logic, that in the
end the vaguely golden Queen of Antan smiled through the gray mist,
and said that you reminded her of her own children. You were enamored
of words, you delighted in any nonsense which was sonorous. You were
like all her children, she told you, the children whom, in spite of
herself, she pitied. Here Freydis sighed.
Pity has kindred, you stated. Freydis leaned back among the gray
cushions of her couch, so as to listen in perfect ease, and bade you
explain that saying.
And as you sat down beside her, Puysange arose to the occasion.
Here was familiar ground at last, the ground on which Puysange
thrust forward with most firmness. And you reflected that it would
be inappropriate to lament, just now, that not even in Antan did a
rigidity of logic seem to get for anyone the victory which you foresaw
to be secured by your other gifts....
When Florian left Antan, the needed sword swung at his thigh.
_18._
_Problems of Holiness_
Thus it was not until Handsel Monday that Florian took the serious step
which led from the realm in which Queen Freydis ruled, to the world of
every day: and Florian found there, standing on the asherah stone upon
which Janicot had received homage, no other person than Holy Hoprig.
“So I catch you creeping out of Antan,” observed the saint, and his
halo glittered rather sternly. “I shall not pry into your actions
there, because Antan is not a part of this world, and it is only your
doings in this world which more or less involve my heavenly credit.
Upon account of that annoying tie I now admonish you. For now we
enter a new year, and this is the appropriate season for making good
resolutions. It would be wise for you to make a great many of them, my
son, for I warn you that I am a resolute spiritual father, and do not
intend to put up with any wickedness now that you return to the world
of men.”
This was to Florian a depressing moment. He had been to a deal of
trouble to get the sword Flamberge, upon whose powers depended his
whole future. And the instant he had it, here in his path was a far
stronger power, with notions which bid fair to play the very devil with
Florian’s plans. Now one could only try what might be done with logic
and politeness.
“Your interest in my career, Monsieur Hoprig, affects me more deeply
than I can well express; and I shall treasure your words. Still,
Monsieur Hoprig, in view of your own past, and in view of all your
abominable misdeeds as a priest of heathenry, one might anticipate a
little broad-mindedness—”
“My past is quite good enough for any saint in eternity, and so, my
son, ought not to be sneered at by any whippersnapper of a sorcerer—”
“Putting aside your delusion as to my necromantic accomplishments,
I had always supposed, monsieur, that the living of a saint would
be distinguished by meritorious actions, by actions worthy of our
emulation. And so—!”
Hoprig sat down, sitting where Janicot had sat, and Hoprig made himself
comfortable. “That is as it may be. People get canonized in various
ways, and people, if you have ever noticed it, are human—”
“Still, for all that, monsieur—”
“—With human frailties. Now my confrères, I find since the extension of
my acquaintance in heavenly circles, are no exception to this rule. St.
Afra, the patroness of Augsburg, was for many years a courtesan in that
city, conducting a brothel in which three other saints, the blessed
Digna, Eunomia and Eutropia, exerted themselves with equal vigor and
viciousness. St. Aglae and St. Boniface for a long while maintained
an illicit carnal connection. St. Andrea of Corsini conducted himself
in every respect abominably until his mother dreamed that she had
given birth to a wolf, and so, of course, converted him. As for
St. Augustine, I can but blush, my dear son, and refer you to his
Confessions—”
“Still, monsieur, I think—”
“You are quite wrong. St. Benedict led for fifteen years a sinful life,
precisely as St. Bavon was a profligate for fifty. St. Bernard Ptolemei
was a highly successful lawyer, than which I need say no more—”
“Yet, monsieur, if I be not mistaken—”
“You are mistaken,” replied Hoprig. “The Saints Constantine and
Charlemagne committed every sort of atrocity and abomination, excepting
only that of parsimony to the Church. St. Christopher made a pact with
Satan, and St. Cyprian of Antioch was, like you, my poor child, a most
iniquitous sorcerer until he was converted through his lust for the
very holy Justina—”
“Let us go no further in the alphabet, for there are twenty-six
letters, of which, I perceive, you have reached only the third. I was
merely about to observe,” said Florian, at a venture, “that you, after
living dishonestly—”
“Now, if you come to that, St. George of Cappadocia was an embezzler,
St. Guthlac of Croydon was by profession a cut-throat and a thief—”
“—After,” continued Florian, where guessing seemed to thrive, “I know
not how many escapades with women—”
“Whom I at worst accompanied in just the physical experiments through
which were graduated into eternal grace St. Margaret of Cortona, St.
Mary the Egyptian, St. Mary the Penitent, St. Mary Magdalene, and I
cannot estimate how many other ladies now canonized.”
“—And, worst of all, after your persecuting and murdering of real
Christians—”
“St. Paul stoned Stephen the Protomartyr, St. Vitalis of Ravenna and
St. Torpet of Pisa both served under Nero, that arch-persecutor of the
faithful, and St. Longinus conducted the Crucifixion. No, Florian: no,
I admit that at first I was a trifle uncertain. For I did remember some
incidents that were capable of misconstruction and exaggeration, and
people talk too much upon this side of the grave for burial quite to
cure them of the habit. But since moving more widely among the elect,
it has been extremely gratifying to find my past as blameless as that
of most other holy persons.”
“—You, after all these enormities, I say, have been canonized by the
lost tail of an R, and through mistake have been fitted out with a
legend in which there is no word of truth—”