repentantly, and Hoprig said: “Why, after all, I have seen quite as
much of this modern world as interests a saint in the prime of life;
this halo certainly is, in ways we need not go into, sometimes in
inconvenience; and there is no real pleasure in being ministered unto
by unwilling angels. So that I am ready to leave it to the lady.”
Now Melior arose from beside the cradle, wherein the child was now once
more asleep. And Melior looked at Florian, without saying anything: but
she was smiling rather sadly; and Florian knew that nowhere in this
world, at any time, had there been any person more lovely than was his
disenchanted princess.
And Florian said: “A pest! but, in the name of earth and sky and
sea, in the name of Heaven and all the fiends, let this be done! For
the moment you are again a legend, madame, I shall recapture the dear
misery of my love for you and for that perfect beauty which should be
seen and not heard.”
“Indeed,” she replied, “I daresay that is the truth. So, for all our
sakes, Hoprig and I will go back to the time before I married you: and
then, on account of the baby, I suppose I will have to marry Hoprig,
who at least takes women as he finds them.”
“You speak, I assume, metaphorically,” observed the saint, “but, in any
case, I believe you exhibit good sense. So let us be going.”
Then Florian said farewell to Melior and to Hoprig also. Florian
had put aside his dapper look: he had quite lost his usual air of
tolerating a mixture of vexation and mirth: and for that moment he did
not show in anything as a jaunty little person of the very highest
fashion.
“Now that you two,” said Florian, “become again a legend and a symbol,
I can believe in and love and worship you once more. It is in vain,
it is with pitiable folly, that any man aspires to be bringing beauty
and holiness into his daily living. These things are excellent for
dilettanti to admire from afar. But they are not attainable, in any
quantity that suffices. We needs believe in beauty: and there needs
always flourish the notion that beauty exists in human living, so long
as memory transfigures what is past, and optimism what is to come. And
sometimes one finds beauty even in the hour which is passing, here and
there, at wide intervals: but it is mixed—as inextricably as is mixed
your speaking, bright-colored enemy of all romance,—with what is silly
and commonplace and trivial.”
“It seems so very vexatious,” Melior stated, as if from depths of long
deliberation, “when you can distinctly remember having brought your
hat, to be quite unable—Yes, go on talking, Florian. It is on the peg
by the door, and we are all listening.”
“And I would like to believe,” continued Florian, “that there is
holiness in human living; but I at least have always found this also
mixed with, I do not say hypocrisy, but ambiguity.... Mankind have
their good points, but—to my knowledge,—no firm claim of any sort on
admiration. I have been familiar with no person without finding that
intimacy made some liking inevitable and any real respect preposterous.
I deduce that in no virtue, and in no viciousness, does man excel:
his endowments, either way, are inadequate. So holiness and beauty
must remain to me just notions very pleasant to think about, and quite
harmless to aim at if you like, if only because such aiming makes no
noticeable difference anywhere. But they remain also unattained by
mortal living. I do not know why this should be the law. I merely know
that I overrode the law which says that only mediocrity may thrive in
any place; and that I have been punished, with derision and with too
clear seeing.”
“Yes, but,” said Janicot, “you are punishing everybody else with
verbosity—”
“I also can perceive no reason, my son,” declared St. Hoprig, “for
talking highflown bombast and attempting to drag an apologue from the
snarls of a most annoying affair. It should be sufficient to reflect
that your romantic hankerings have upset heaven, and have given rise—I
gather from the sneers of this brown fiend,—to unfavorable comment even
in hell. And there is simply no telling into what state my temple of
Llaw Gyffes may have got during the months you have held me in this
frivolous modern world.”
“Your temple of Llaw Gyffes!” said Florian, sadly. “But can it be,
monsieur, that, after having been a saint of the Calendar, now that you
return to heathen Brunbelois and the old time—?”
“My son, in any time,” Hoprig replied, “and in any place, my talents
are such as qualify me only for the best-thought-of church. My nature
craves stability and the support of tradition and of really nice
people. New faiths sometimes allure unthinking hot-heads like that
poor dear Horrig, but not ever me: for I find that any religion, when
once it is endowed and made respectable, works out in its effect
upon human living pretty much like any other religion. Meanwhile, of
course, one naturally prefers to retain a solid position in society.
So that really it does seem foolish to quarrel, in any time or place,
with the best-thought-of faith. No, Florian, creeds shift and alter in
everything except in promising salvation through church-work: but the
prelate remains immortal. And I will tell you another thing, Florian,
that you should remember when we are gone: and it is that all men and
all women are human beings, and that nothing can be done about it.” And
Hoprig at this point regarded Florian for some while with a sort of
pity. “In any case,” the saint said then, “do you look out for another
celestial patron, and for a second father in the spirit, now that
sunset approaches, and this is the last cloud going west.”
And Melior took up the still sleeping child, without saying anything,
but smiling very lovelily at Florian: and she and Hoprig entered into
a golden cloud, and these two went away from Florian forever. And they
went as a blurred shining: for Florian was recollecting a child’s
desire to be not in all unworthy of these bright, dear beings; and
Florian somewhat wistfully recalled that brave aspiring, and that glad
ignorance, which nothing now could ever reawaken any more.
_29._
_The Wonder Words_
“But now,” said Florian, “what now is to become of me, who have no
longer any standards of beauty and holiness?” And he looked expectantly
from Janicot to the archangel, and back again, to see when they would
begin their battling for possession of the Duke of Puysange. Both
spirits seemed almost unflatteringly unbellicose.
“I have no instructions about you,” replied Michael. “I did not come
hither in the way of official duty, but only at the summons of that
fellow—It is really a very great comfort to reflect that, now he has
gone back to the old time before he was canonized, he is no longer a
saint! Still, as for you, your ways have been atrocious, and it is
hardly doubtful that your end should be the same.”
Florian at that had out the magic sword Flamberge. “Then, Monseigneur
St. Michael, logic prompts one to make the best of this: and I entreat
that you do me the honor of crossing blades with me, so that I may
perish not ignobly.”
“Come,” Michael said, “so this shrimp challenges an archangel! That is
really a fine gesture.”
“Yes, there is spirit in this romantic,” Janicot declared. “It seems
to take the place of his intelligence. I cannot see it matters what
becomes of the creature, but, after all, old friends will welcome any
excuse to chat together. See, here is excellent wine in the saint’s
cupboard, and over a cup of it let us amicably decide what we should do
with this little Florian.”
“It is well thought of,” Michael estimated, “for I have been working
all day upon the new worlds behind Fomalhaut, with the air full of
comet dust. Yes, that rapscallion Hoprig fetched me a long way, and I
am thirsty.”
So these two sat down at the table to settle the fate of Florian.
Janicot poured for Florian also: and Florian took the proffered cup,
and a chair too, which he modestly placed against the log-and-plaster
wall at some distance from his judges.
Florian’s judges made an odd pair. For resplendent Michael showed in
everything as divine, and in his face was the untroubled magnanimity of
a great prince of Heaven. But Janicot had the appearance of a working
man, all a sober and practical brown, which would show no stains after
the performance of any necessary labor, and his face was the more
shrewd.
“First,” said Janicot, “let us drink. That is the proper beginning of
any dispute, for it makes each think his adversary a splendid fellow,
it promotes confidence and candor alike.”
“Nobody should lack confidence and candor when it comes to dealing with
sin,” replied Michael: and with one heroic draught he emptied his cup.
Florian sipped his more tentatively: for this seemed uncommonly queer
wine.
“Sin,” Janicot said now, as if in meditation, “is a fine and impressive
monosyllable.”
“Sin,” Michael said, with sternness, “is that which is forbidden by the
word of God.”
“But, to be sure!” Florian put in. “Sin is a very grave matter: and
to expiate it requires stained windows and candles and, above all,
repentance—”
“Ah, but a word,” said Janicot, “has no inherent meaning, it has
merely the significance a mutual agreement arbitrarily attaches to
that especial sound. Let me refill your cup, which I perceive to be
empty: and, Monsieur the Duke, do you stop talking to your judges. That
much—to resume,—is true of all words. And the word of your god has been
so variously pronounced, my good Michael, it has been so diversely
interpreted, that, really, men begin to wonder—”
“I did not sit down,” cried Michael, “to hear blasphemies, but to
settle the doom of this sinner. Nor will I chop logic with you. I am a
blunt soldier, and you are subtle. Yes, the world knows you are subtle,
but how far has your subtlety got you? Why, it has got you as far as
from heaven to hell.”
Florian vastly admired that just and pious summing-up as he leaned back
in his chair, and looked toward Janicot. Florian was feeling strangely
complacent, though, for Hoprig’s wine was extraordinarily potent tipple
to have come from the cupboard of a saint.
“Ah, friend,” returned Janicot, smiling, “and do you really put actual
faith in that sensational modern story that I was an angel who rebelled
against your Jahveh?”
“It was before my time, of course,” Michael conceded. “I only know
that my Lord created me with orders to conquer you, who call yourself
the Prince of this World. So I did this, though, to give the devil his
due, it was no easy task. But that is far-off stuff: a soldier bears no
malice when the fighting is over: and I drink to you.”
“Your health, bright adversary! Yet what if I were not conquered, but
merely patient? Why should not I, who have outlived so many gods,
remain as patient under the passing of this tribal god come out of
Israel as I stayed once under Baal and Beltane? Both of these have had
their adorers and tall temples hereabouts: and Mithra and Zeus and
Osiris and I know not how many thousands of other beautiful and holy
deities have had their dole of worship and neglect and oblivion. Now I
have never been omnipotent, I am not worshipped in any shining temple
even to-day; but always I have been served.”
Florian, through half-closed eyelids,—for he felt a trifle drowsy after
that extraordinary wine,—was admiring the curious proud look which
had come into the brown face of Janicot. Florian began complacently
to allow this fiend had his redeeming points. This Janicot was quite
distinguished looking.
“For I,” said Janicot, “am the Prince of this World, not to be ousted:
and I have in my time, good Michael, had need to practise patience.
You think with awed reverence of your Jahveh: and that in your station
is commendable. Yet you should remember, too, that to me, who saw but
yesterday your Jahveh’s start in life as a local storm-god upon Sinai,
he is just the latest of many thousands of adversaries whom I have seen
triumph and pass while I stayed patient under all temporary annoyances.
For in heaven they keep changing dynasties, and every transient ruler
of heaven is bent upon making laws for my little kingdom. Oh, I blame
nobody! The desire is natural in omnipotence: and many of these laws I
have admired, as academic exercises. The trouble seemed to be that they
were drawn up in heaven, where there is nothing quite like the nature
of my people—”
“A very sinful people!” said Michael.
“There, as in so many points, bright adversary, our opinions differ.
You perceive only that they are not what, in accordance with your
master’s theories, they ought to be. I am more practical: I accept them
as they are, and I make no complaint. That which you call their lust
and wantonness, I know to be fertility—” And Janicot spread out both
hands. “But it is an old tale. God after god has set rules to bridle
and to change the nature of my people. Meanwhile I do not meddle with
their natures, I urge them to live in concord with their natures,
and to make the most of my kingdom. To be content and to keep me
well supplied with subjects, is all that any reasonable prince would
require. And as for sin, I have admitted it is a fine word. But the
wages of sin—in any event, very often,” said Janicot, and with a smile
he illuminated the parenthesis,—“is life.”
“To all this,” said Michael, extending his empty cup, “the answer is
simple. You are evil, and you lie.”
“Before your days, before there were men like those of to-day,” said
Janicot, indulgently, as he poured sombre wine, “and when the dwarf
peoples served me in secret places, even they had other official
gods. When your Jahveh is forgotten, men will yet serve me, if but
in secrecy. Creeds pass, my friend, just as that little Hoprig said.
And it is true, too, that the prelate remains always, as my technical
opponent. But the lingham and the yoni do not pass, they do not change,
they keep their strong control of all that lives: and these serve me
alone.”
“If my Lord passes,” Michael answered, very nobly and very simply,
“I pass with Him. We that love Him could then desire no other fate.
Meanwhile I have faith in Him, and in His power and in His wisdom, and
my faith contents me.”
“Faith!” Janicot said, rather wistfully. “Ah, there we encounter
another fine word, a wonder word: and I admit that your anodyne
is potent. But it is not to my taste. However, this wine here is
emphatically to my taste. So let us drink!”
“It is a good wine. But it begets a treacherous softness of heart and
an unsuitable, a quite un-Hebraic tendency to let bygones be bygones. I
mean, unsuitable for one in my service. For, after all, old adversary,
without intending any disrespect, of course, we were originally for
martial law and military strictness, for smiting hip and thigh when
the least thing went wrong: and in spite of our recent coming over to
these new Christian doctrines—And, by the way, that reminds me of this
sinner here. We seem to keep wandering from the point.”
They had looked toward Florian, who discreetly remained lying back in
his chair, watching them between nearly closed lids.
“Indeed, we have so utterly neglected him that he has gone to sleep. So
let us drink, and be at ease,” said Janicot, “now that we are relieved
of his eavesdropping. This little Florian annoys me, rather. For he
makes something too much of logic: so he rebels against your creed of
faith and of set laws to be obeyed, asking Why? Did you never hear
the creature crying out, Let us be logical! in, of all places, this
universe? And he rebels against my creed, which he believes a mere
affair of the lingham and the yoni, saying This is not enough. Such
men as he continue to dream, my friend, and I confess such men are
dangerous: for they obstinately aspire toward a perfectibility that
does not exist, they will be content with nothing else; and when your
master and I do not satisfy the desire which is in their dreams, they
draw their appalling logical conclusions. To that humiliation, such as
it is, I answer Drink! For the Oracle of Bacbuc also—that oracle which
the little curé of Meudon was not alone in misunderstanding,—that
oracle speaks the true wonder word.”
Michael had listened, with one elbow on the table, and with one hand
propping his chin. Michael had listened with a queer mingling, in his
frank face, of admiration and distrust.
The archangel now slightly raised his head, just free of his hand, and
he asked rather scornfully, “But what have we to do with their dreams?”
“A great deal. Men go enslaved by this dream of beauty: but never yet
have they sought to embody it, whether in their wives or in their
equally droll works of art, without imperfect results, without results
that were maddening to the dreamer. Men are resolved to know that
which they may whole-heartedly worship. No, they are not bent upon
emulating what they worship: it is, rather, that holiness also is a
dream which allures mankind resistlessly. But thus far,—by your leave,
good Michael,—they have found nothing to worship which bears logical
inspection much better than does Hoprig. The dangerous part of all this
is that men, none the less, still go on dreaming.”
“They might be worse employed.” Michael himself refilled his cup. “For
I could tell you—”
“Pray spare my blushes! Yes, they obstinately go on dreaming. Your
master is strong, as yet, and I too am strong, but neither of us is
strong enough to control men’s dreams. Now, the dreaming of men—mark
you, I do not say of humankind, for women are rational creatures,—has
an aspiring which is ruthless. It goes beyond decency, it aspires
to more of perfectibility than any god has yet been able to provide
or even to live up to. So this quite insane aspiring first sets up
beautiful and holy gods in heaven, then in the dock; and, judging all
by human logic, decrees this god not to be good enough. Thus their
logic has dealt with Baal and Beltane and Mithra; thus it will deal—”
Janicot very courteously waved a brown and workmanlike hand. “But let
us not dwell upon reflections that you may perhaps find unpleasant. In
the meanwhile, me too this human dreaming thrusts aside, as not good
enough.”
It was plain that Michael distrusted Janicot in all and yet in some
sort admired him most unwillingly. Michael asked, with a reserved
smiling, “What follows, O subtle one?”
“It follows that all gods must pass until—perhaps—a god be found who
satisfies the requirements of this disastrously exigent human dreaming.
It follows that I must perforce go quietly about my kingdom because
of this insane toplofty dreaming.” And Janicot sighed. “Yes, it is
humiliating: but I also have my anodyne, I have my wonder word. And it
is Drink!”
“Of course it would be,” Michael replied, with the most dignified of
hiccoughs, “since drunkenness is a particularly low form of sin.”
“The drinking I advocate is not merely of the grape. No, it is from the
cup of space that I would have all drink, accepting all that is, in one
fearless draught. Some day, it may be, my people here will attain to
my doctrine: and even these fretful little men will see that life and
death, and the nature of their dreams, and of their bodies also, are
but ingredients in a cup from which the wise drink fearlessly.”
Janicot had risen now. He came toward Florian, and stood there, looking
down. And Florian discreetly continued his mimicry of untroubled
slumber.
“Meanwhile he does not drink, he merely dreams, this little Florian. He
dreams of beauty and of holiness fetched back by him to an earth which
everywhere fell short of his wishes, fetched down by him intrepidly
from that imagined high place where men attain to their insane desires.
He dreams of aspiring and joy and color and suffering and unreason, and
of those quaint taboos which you and he call sin, as being separate
things, not seeing how all blends in one vast cup. Nor does he see, as
yet, that this blending is very beautiful when properly regarded, and
very holy when approached without human self-conceit. What would you
have, good Michael? He and his like remain as yet just fretted children
a little rashly hungry for excitement.”
Michael stood now beside Janicot. Michael also was looking at Florian,
not unkindlily.
“Yes,” Michael said. “Yes, that is true. He is yet a child.”
Then the two faces which bent over Florian were somehow blended into
one face, and Florian knew that these two beings had melted into one
person, and that this person was prodding him very gently.
_30._
_The Errant Child_
His father, after all these years, was still wearing the blue stockings
with gold clocks. Florian noted that first, because his father’s foot
was gently prodding Florian into wakefulness, as Florian’s father sat
there under the little tree from the East. Beyond the Duke’s smiling
countenance, beyond the face which was at once the face of Michael and
of Janicot, Florian could now see a criss-crossery of stripped boughs,
each one of which was tipped with a small bud of green.
“Come, lazibones, but you will get your death of cold, sleeping here on
the bare ground, at harvest-time.”
“At harvest-time—I have been dreaming—” Florian sat erect, rubbing at
his eyes with a hand whose smallness he instantly noted with wonder.
The ground, too, seemed surprisingly close to him, the grass blades
looked bigger than was natural. He could feel sinking away from him
such childish notions about God and wickedness, and about being a grown
man, as the little boy—who was he, as he now recollected,—had blended
in his callow dreaming: and Florian sat there blinking innocent and
puzzled eyes. He was safe back again, he reflected, in the seventeenth
century: Louis Quatorze was King once more: and all the virtues were
again modish. And this really must be harvest-time, for the sleek
country of Poictesme appeared inexpressibly asleep, wrapped in a
mellowing haze.
Florian said, “It was a very queer dream, monsieur my father—”
“A pleasant dream, however, I hope, my son. No other sort of dream
is worth inducing by sleeping under what, they used to tell me, is a
charmed tree, and by using for your pillow a book that at least is
charming.”
And the Duke pointed to the book by Monsieur Perrault of the Academy,
in which Florian had that very morning read with approving interest
about the abominable Bluebeard and about the Cat with Boots and about
the Sleeping Beauty and about Cendrillon and about a variety of other
delightful persons.
But Florian just now was not for fairy tales, rather all his thoughts
still clung to his queer dream. And the child said, frowning:
“It was pleasant enough. But it was puzzling. For there were beautiful
ladies that nobody could stand living with, and a saint that was an
out-and-out fraud, and”—Florian slightly hesitated,—“and a wicked man,
as bad almost as Komorre the Cursed, that did everything he wanted to,
without ever being exactly punished, or satisfied either—”
“Behold now,” Monsieur de Puysange lamented, “how appalling are the
advances of this modern pessimism! My own child, at ten, advises
me that beauty and holiness are delusions, and that not even in
untrammeled wickedness is to be found contentment.”
“No: that was not the moral of my dream. That is what bothers me,
monsieur my father. There was not any moral: and nothing seemed to be
leading up to anything else in particular. I seemed to live a long
while, monsieur my father, I had got to be thirty-six and over, without
finding any logic and reasonableness anywhere—”
“Doubtless, at that advanced age, your faculties were blunted, and you
had become senile—”
“—And the people that wanted things did not want them any longer once
they had got them. They seemed rather to dislike them—”
“From your pronominal disorder,” the Duke stated, “I can deduce fancies
which are not a novelty here in Poictesme. Such was the crying, in a
somewhat more poetic and grammatical version, of our reputed begetters,
men say,—of Dom Manuel and of Jurgen also,—in the old days before there
was ever a Puysange.”