that they combine resistlessly the pious and the platitudinous. There is
no well-thought-of Fundamentalist in Inis Dahut, nor in any of the Isles
of Wonder, who will dare dispute that the riches of this world are but a
loan, because that is the doctrine of Pygé-Upsízugos and of all endowed
religions everywhere. These over-busy, pushing ugly little pests that
ride impertinently about the world, and get their own way in every
place, have insulted me. By rights,”—the Queen said, rather
hopefully,—“by rights, I ought to have their heads chopped off?”
“But these heroic imps are princes, madame. Thus, to pursue your very
natural indignation, would entail a war with their fathers: and to be
bothered with seven wars, according to my mathematics, would be a
nuisance.”
Morvyth saw the justice of this; and said, with ever so faint a sighing:
“Very well, then! I approve of your mathematics. I shall pardon their
impudence, with the magnanimity becoming to a queen; and I shall have
the quest cried for another year and another day.”
“That,” Gonfal estimated, still with his odd smiling, “will do nicely.”
“And, besides,” she added, “now you will have a chance with the others!”
“That,” Gonfal assented, without any trace of a smile or any other token
of enthusiasm, “will be splendid.”
But Morvyth smiled as, with that habitual gesture, she tidied her hair:
and she sent for her seven heroic lovers, and spoke to them, as she
phrased it, frankly.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_7._
_Fatality the Second_
══════════════════════════════════════════════════
THUS all was to do again. The champions pulled rather long faces, and
the lower orders were disappointed in missing the gratis entertainments
attendant on a royal marriage. But the clergy and the well-thought-of
laity and the leading tax-payers applauded the decision of Queen Morvyth
as a most glorious example in such feverish and pleasure-loving days of
soulless materialism.
So again the eight lovers of Morvyth met in the cathedral, to have their
swords appropriately consecrated by the Imaun of Bulotu. And that
beneficent and justly popular old prelate, after he had cut the throats
of the three selected children, began the real ceremony with a prayer to
Pygé-Upsízugos, as to Him whose transformations are hidden in all
temples patronized by the best-thought-of people, and saying, as was
customary and polite:
“The height of the firmament is subservient unto thee, O Pygé-Upsízugos!
thy throne is very high! the ornaments upon the seat of thy blue
trousers are the bright stars which never diminish! Every man makes
offering unto that portion of thee which is revealed, and thou art the
Sedentary Master commemorated in heaven and upon earth. Thou art a
shining noble seated above all nobles, permanent in thy high station,
established in thy stern sovereignty, and the callipygous Prince of the
Company of Gods.”
Nobody quite believed this, of course, but in Inis Dahut, as in all
other places, the Fundamentalists took a proper pride in their tribal
deity, and, whenever they could spare time for religious matters, made
as much of him as possible. So they now tendered to Pygé-Upsízugos a
fine offering of quails and cinnamon and bullocks’ hearts, and they
raised the Hymn of the Star Spangled Buttock in the while that the two
ewers containing the blood of the children were placed upon his altar.
Thus everything at first went nicely enough. But when the company of
Morvyth’s lovers, with all their swords drawn, had approached the altar,
for the consecrating, and in the while that they ascended the smooth
porphyry steps, then limping Gonfal stumbled or else he slipped. He thus
dropped his sword. The tall champion, clutching hastily at this sword as
it fell, caught up the weapon by the newly sharpened blade; and he
grasped it with such rather unaccountable vigor that he cut open his
right hand to the bone, and cut also the muscles of his fingers.
“Decidedly,” said Gonfal, with a wried smile, “there is some fatality in
this; and the quest of Morvyth is not for me.”
He spoke the truth, for his sword-bearing days were over. Gonfal must
seek for a physician and bandages, while his rivals’ swords were being
consecrated. The Queen noted his going, and, from a point midway between
complacence and religious scruples, said under her breath, “One must
perforce somewhat admire this realist.”
She heard, from afar, a dwindling resonance of horns and knew that once
more the seven heroic lovers of Queen Morvyth had ridden forth to
ransack the world of its chief riches. But fair-bearded Gonfal stayed in
the pagan Isles of Wonder, and beneath the same roof that covered
Morvyth, and cared for no riches except the loveliness of Morvyth, whom
he saw daily. And with time the hurt in his hand was cured, but the
fingers on that hand he could not ever move again. And for the rest, if
people whispered here and there, the susurrus was a phenomenon familiar
enough to the economy of court life.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_8._
_How the Princes Bragged_
══════════════════════════════════════════════════
NOW, when the year was over, and the south wind was come again into Inis
Dahut, the seven lovers returned, bringing with them yet other prodigies
acquired by heroic exploits.
Here, for example, was the effigy of a bird carved in jade and
carnelian.
“With the aid of this inestimable bird,” explained Prince Chedric of
Lorn,—who, upon a very dreadfully inhabited peninsula, if one elected to
believe him, had wrested this talisman from Morskoï of the Depths,—“you
may enter the Sea Market, and may go freely among a folk that dwell in
homes builded of coral and tortoise-shell, and tiled with fishes’
scales. Their wisdom is beyond the dry and arid wisdom of earth: their
knowledge derides the fictions which we call time and space: and their
children prattle of mysteries unknown to any of our major prophets and
most expert geomancers.”
“Ah, but,” cried Prince Balein of Targamon, “but I have here a
smoke-colored veil embroidered with tiny gold stars and ink-horns; and
it enables one to pass through the ardent gateway of Audela, the country
that lies behind the fire. This is the realm of Sesphra: there is no
grieving in this land, and happiness and infallibility are common to
everybody there, because Sesphra is the master of an art which corrodes
and sears away all error, whether it be human or divine.”
Prince Duneval of Orc said nothing. His mutely tendered offering was a
small mirror about three inches square. Morvyth looked into this mirror:
and what she saw in it was very little like a sumptuous dark young girl.
She hastily put aside that gleaming and over-wise counselor: and the
Queen’s face was troubled, because there was no need to ask what mirror
Duneval had fetched to her from out of Antan.
But Thorgny of Vigeois did not love silence. And he was the next suitor.
“Such knickknacks as I notice at your feet, my princess,” stated Thorgny
of Vigeois, “have their merits. Nobody denies their merits. But I, who
may now address you with the frankness which ought to exist between two
persons already virtually betrothed, I bring that sigil which gave
wisdom and all power to Apollonius, and later to Merlin Ambrosius. It
displays, as you observe, an eye encircled with scorpions and stags
and”—he coughed,—“with winged objects which do not ordinarily have
wings: and it controls the nine million spirits of the air. I need say
no more.”
“I need to,” said Prince Gurguint. “I say that I have here the shining
triangle of Thorston. And to say that, is to say a great deal more than
Thorgny has said. For this triangle is master of the wisdom of the
Duergar and of all peoples that dwell underground. Moreover, madame,
when this triangle is inverted—thus,—it enables you to bless and curse
at will, to converse with dead priests, and to control the power and the
seven mysteries of the moon.”
“To such hole and corner wisdom, to such cave-men devices, and more
especially to your lunar vaporings, I cry out like a bird upon the
house-tops, and I cry, Cheap, cheap!” observed Prince Clofurd. “For I
have here, in this shagreen case, the famous and puissant and
unspeakably sacrosanct ring of Solomon, to whose wearer are subject the
Djinns and the ass-footed Nazi-keen and fourteen of Jahveh’s most
discreet and trustworthy seraphim.”
Prince Grimauc said: “Solomon had, in his archaic way, his wisdom, a
good enough sort of workaday wisdom, but yet a limited wisdom, as it was
meted out to him by the god of Judea: but I have here an altar carved
from a block of selenite. Within this altar you may hear the moving and
the dry rustlings of an immortal. Let us not speak of this immortal:
neither the sun’s nor the moon’s light has ever shone upon him, and his
name is not lovable. But here is the Altar of the Adversary; and the
owner of this little altar may, at a paid price, have access to the
wisdom that defies restraint and goes beyond the bounds permitted by any
god.”
Such were the gifts they brought to Morvyth. And, for reasons of at
least two kinds, the Queen found difficulty in saying which of these
offerings was the worthiest to be her bridal gift.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_9._
_The Loans of Wisdom_
══════════════════════════════════════════════════
BUT Gonfal, when the Queen consulted him in private, as she was now apt
to do about most matters, tall handsome Gonfal shrugged. He said that,
to his finding,—as a, no doubt, unpractical realist,—her lovers had,
once more, fetched back no gifts, but only loans of very dubious value.
“For I have seen Dom Manuel purchase a deal of just such wisdom from
unwholesome sources: and I have seen too what came of it when the
appointed season was at hand for that gray knave to be stripped of his
wisdom. Just so, madame, must every sort of wisdom be reft away from
everybody. These wise men that had all this knowledge in the old time,
do they retain it now? The question is absurd, since the dirt that once
was Solomon keeps no more sentiency than does the mud which formerly was
Solomon’s third under-scullion. Indomitable persons have, before to-day,
won to the wisdom of Audela or of the Sea Market; and that Freydis with
whom Dom Manuel lived for a while in necromantic iniquity, and that
unscriptural Herodias who was Tana’s daughter, these women, once,
attained to the wisdom of Antan: but might they carry any of this wisdom
into the grave?”
“I see,” said Morvyth, reflectively; and she smiled.
“Equally,” Gonfal continued, “where now is your Thorston or your Merlin?
All which to-day remains of any one of these thaumaturgists may well, at
this very instant, be passing us as dust in that bland and persistent
wind which now courses over Inis Dahut: but the mage goes undiscerned,
unhonored, impotent, and goes as the wind wills, not as he elects. Ah,
no, madame! These quaint, archaic toys may for a little while lend
wisdom and understanding: but, none the less, within four-score of
years—”
“Oh, have done with your arithmetic!” she begged of him. “It serves
handily, and I approve of your mathematics. I really do consider it is
perfectly wonderful, sweetheart, how quickly you realists can think of
suitable truisms. But, just the same, I begin to dislike that wind: and
I would much rather talk about something else.”
“Let us talk about, then,” Gonfal said, “the different way I feel
concerning you, as compared with all other women.”
“That is not a new topic. But it is invariably interesting.”
So they discussed this matter at some length. Then they went on to other
matters. And Morvyth asked Gonfal if he was sure that he respected her
just as much as ever, and Morvyth tidied her hair, and she summoned the
Imaun of Bulotu, and sent also for Masu the prime minister.
“The wisdom of this world is as a dust that passes,” said Morvyth. “The
wise men that had wisdom in the old time, do they retain it now?”
She then repeated the rest of Gonfal’s observations with applaudable
accuracy.
And her hearers did applaud, in unfeigned emotion. “For this prying into
matters which Pygé-Upsízugos has not seen fit to reveal has always
seemed to me unwholesome,” remarked the prime minister.
“In fact, the claims of science, so-called—” began the Imaun; and spoke
for the usual twenty minutes.
All was thus settled edifyingly. The offerings of the kings’ sons were
decreed to be no true gifts; the quest was cried again; and once more
the seven champions rode forth. There was no thought of tall Gonfal
going with the little heroes, for a cripple who could not bear a sword
was not fitted to ransack the treasures of the world. Instead,
fair-bearded Gonfal stayed in Inis Dahut, and lived uneventfully in the
pagan Isles of Wonder. And if people now talked outright, a queen can
never hope to go wholly free of criticism.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_10._
_Relative to Gonfal’s Head_
══════════════════════════════════════════════════
IT followed through the two mischances already recorded that, when
spring came again, and when once more the south wind was coursing over
Inis Dahut, Gonfal of Naimes sat, as it happened, with his handsome head
in Morvyth’s lap, and waited for her less ill-starred lovers to return.
“What gifts, I wonder, will they be bringing me,” Queen Morvyth said,
“at about this time to-morrow?”
And Gonfal, without moving, sighed stupendously, and answered: “To me,
madame, they will be bringing bitter gifts. For, whosoever wins in this
quest, I lose: and whatsoever he may bring to you, to me he brings
disseverance from content, and to me he brings a poignant if brief
period of loneliness before you decide to have my head off.”
Now she caressed that head maternally. “Why, but what a notion!” said
Morvyth, now that the man himself spoke of the nearing social duty whose
imminence had for some while been fretting her. “As if, sweetheart, I
would ever think of such a thing!”
“Undoubtedly, that will happen, madame. Marriage entails many
obligations, not all of them pleasant. Queens in particular have to
preserve appearances, they have to ensure the discretion of those whom
they have trusted.”
“That,” she said, sorrowfully, “is what the dear old Imaun has been
telling me,—lately, you know. And Masu talks about what a married woman
owes to religion and setting a fine moral example.”
Then Gonfal, still smiling up at her, went on: “And yet it seems an odd
thing, delight of my delights, that I shall leave you—for the
headsman,—without any real regret. For I am content. While my shrewd
fellows rode about the world to seek and to attain to power and wisdom,
I have elected, as an unpractical realist, to follow after beauty. I
have followed, to be sure, in the phrase of that absurd young Grimauc,
at a paid price, yet, at that price, I have won, maimed and foredoomed,
to beauty. And I am content.”
The Queen put on the proper air of diffidence. “But what, my friend,
what, after all, is mere beauty?”
And he replied with the neatness which she always rather distrusted.
“Beauty, madame, is Morvyth. It is not easy to describe either of these
most dear and blinding synonyms, as how many reams of ruined paper
attest!”
She waited, still stroking him: and in her mind was the old question,
whether it was possible that, even now, this man was laughing at her?
She said: “But would it not grieve you unendurably, sweetheart, to see
me the wife of another man? And so, would it not be really a kindness—?”
But the obtuse fellow did not chivalrously aid in smoothing her way to
that nearing social duty. Instead, he replied, oddly enough:
“The Morvyth that I see, and in my manner worship, can be no man’s wife.
All poets learn this truth in their vexed progress to becoming
realists.”
For yet another while the young Queen was silent. And then she said:
“I do not quite understand you, my dear, and probably I never shall. But
I know that through your love of me you have twice maimed yourself, and
have, as though it were a trifle, put aside your chance of winning honor
and great wealth and all that gentle persons most prize—”
“I am,” he replied, “a realist. To get three utterly pleasant years one
pays, of course. But realists pay without grumbling.”
“My dearest,” the Queen continued,—now breathing quicklier, and with the
sort of very happy sobbing which she felt the occasion demanded,—“you
alone of all the men who have talked and postured so much, you alone
have given me whole-hearted and undivided love, not weighing even your
own knightly honor and worldly fame against the utterness of that love.
And while of course, just as the Imaun says, if I were ever to marry
anybody else, as I suppose I did promise to do,—in a way, that
is,—still, it is not as if I cared one snap of my fingers about
appearances, and I simply will not have it cut off! For such utterly
unselfish love as yours, dear Gonfal, is the gift which is worthiest to
be my bridal gift: and, no matter what anybody says, it is you who shall
be my husband!”
“Ah, but the cried quest, madame!” he answered, “and your promise to
those seven other idiots!”
“I shall proclaim to those detestable third sons, and to the Imaun, and
to Masu, and to everybody,” the Queen said, “a very weighty and indeed a
sacred truth. I shall tell them that there is no gift more great than
love.”
But the tall man who now stood before her shared in nothing in the
exaltedness of her sentiments; and his dismay was apparent. “Alas,
madame, you propose an enormity! for we are all so utterly the slaves of
our catchwords that everybody would agree with you. There is no hope in
‘what anybody may say.’ Imbeciles everywhere will be saying that you
have chosen wisely.”
Morvyth now sat peculiarly erect upon the ivory couch. “I am sure, I am
really quite sure, Gonfal, that I do not understand you.”
“I mean, madame, that—while of course your offer is all that is most
kind and generous,—that I must, here again, in mere honesty, I must
distinguish. I mean that I think you know, as well as I do, love is not
a gift which any man can give nor any person hope long to retain. Ah,
no, madame! we shrug, we smilingly allow romanticists their catchwords:
meanwhile it remains the veriest axiom, among realists like you and me,
that love too is but a loan.”
“So you have come back,” the Queen remarked, with an approach to
crossness, “to your eternal loans!”
He slightly flung out both hands, palms upward. “Love is that loan, my
dear, which we accept most thankfully. But at the same time let us
concede, as rational persons, the impermanence of all those materials
which customarily provoke the erotic emotions.”
“Gonfal,” the young Queen said, “now you talk stupidly. You talk with a
dangerous lack of something more important than discretion.”
“My love, I talk, again, as a widower.” Then for a while he said
nothing: and it appeared to Morvyth that this incomprehensible ingrate
had shivered. He said: “And still, still, I talk of mathematical
certainties! For how can you hope to remain in anything a lovable
object? In a score of years, or within at most two-score, you will have
become either fat or wrinkled, your teeth will rot and tumble out, your
eyes will blear; your thighs will be most unenticingly mottled, your
breath will be unpleasant, and your breasts will have become flabby
bags. All these impairments, I repeat, my dear, are mathematical
certainties.”
To such horrid and irrelevant nonsense the Queen replied, with dignity,
“I am not your dear; and I simply wonder at your impudence in ever for
one moment thinking I was.”
“Then, too,” the ill-mannered wretch had gone on, meditatively, “you
have not much intelligence. That is very well for the present, because
intelligence in youth, for some reason or another, is bad for the hair
and muddies the complexion. Yet an aging woman who is stupid, such as
Madame Niafer or such as another woman whom I remember, is also quite
unendurable.”
“But what,” she asked him, rationally, “have I to do with stupid old
women? I am Morvyth, I am Queen of the Isles of Wonder. I have the
secrets which control all wealth and—if I should ever take a fancy to
such things,—all wisdom too. There is no beauty like my beauty, nor any
power like my power—”
“I know, I know!” he returned,—“and for the present I of course adore
you. But nevertheless, did I fall in with your very dreadful suggestion,
and permit you to place me, quite publicly, at your dear side, upon the
terraced throne of Inis Dahut,—why, then, within a terribly brief while,
I would not mind your being stupid, I would not actually notice your
dilapidated looks, I would accept all your shortcomings complacently.
And I would be contented enough with you, who, once, were the despair
and joy of my living. No, Morvyth, no, my child! I, who was once a poet
of sorts, could not again endure to live in contentment with a stupid
and querulous woman who was unattractive to look at. And, very
certainly, within two-score of years—”
But a queenly gesture had put a check to such wild talk, and Morvyth too
had arisen, saying:
“Your arithmetic becomes tiresome. One can afford to honor truisms in
their proper place, and about suitable persons: but there is, and always
must be, a limit to the scope of such trite philosophy. Your audience is
over, Messire Gonfal. And it is your last audience, because I consider
you quite unutterably a beast.”
He kissed the imperious little hand which dismissed him. “You at all
events, my dear,” he stated, “are quite unutterably human.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_11._
_Economics of Morvyth_
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THIS it came about, to the Imaun’s vast relief,—and, as it seemed to the
pious kindly old man, perhaps in direct answer to his prayers that this
matter might be settled agreeably all around and without any
unpleasantness,—that the next day at noon, just as the seven champions
were returning with their gifts, an attendant brought to Queen Morvyth
the severed head of Gonfal.
This was in the vaulted hall of Tothmes, whose building was a famous
tale, and of whose splendors travelers, come homeward, spoke without
real hope to be believed. There Morvyth waited, crowned, upon the
terraced throne: and without, on that bright April morning, the trumpets
sounded through the narrow streets and over the bronze and lacquer
roofs, proclaiming that the mightiest and most shrewd of champions were
riding toward Inis Dahut from all kingdoms of the earth, through their
desire of the young Queen of the Isles of Wonder whose beauty was the
marvel of the world, and a legend in far lands not known to her even by
their names.
Thus Morvyth sat: and at her feet one placed the severed head of Gonfal.
There was blood on the fair beard: but still the lips were smiling,
pallidly, over something of no great importance. And in her mind was the
old question, whether it was possible that—even now,—this man was
laughing at her? Or, was it possible, she wondered (as she of a sudden
recollected that first talk of theirs), that blondes did sometimes last
very damnably? and that some little washed-out fly-by-night princess of
nowhere in particular might thus get, in one way or another, even from
her grave, the better of a great queen?
Well, but there was no need for a great queen to think as yet about
graves, and their most unpleasant contents. For Morvyth sat high, as
yet, superb and young and all powerful, in this fine palace of hers,
about which so many lovers sighed, and the bland winds of April went
caressingly.... Nobody denied that this very tiresome wind would every
year be coming up from the South,—the lovely girl reflected, as she fell
meditatively to prodding with her toe at what remained of Gonfal,—nor
that, just so, this most persistent wind would be coursing over Inis
Dahut, when there was no Morvyth and no palace in this place any
longer.... Nobody denied, and nobody except insane and very rude persons
thought at all seriously about, such truisms.