favor in her eyes when she came upon Donander refreshing himself after
the pleasant fatigues of that morning’s combat, and about his daily bath
in the shining waters of the river Gipul. So did the dead call that
stream which flowed from the antlers of the monstrous stag who stood
eternally nibbling and munching above the Hall of the Chosen.
“Here is an eminently suitable person,” Vanadis reflected. Aloud, she
said, “Hail, friend! and does a stout fine fellow of your length and of
your thickness go languidly shunning work or seeking work?”
Stalwart Donander climbed out of the clear stream of Gipul. He came,
smilingly and with a great exaltation, toward the first woman whom he
had seen in seven hundred years. And, so constant is the nature of
woman, that divine Vanadis regarded Donander in just the reflective
wonder with which, more than seven hundred years ago, barbarian Utsumé
had looked at Coth in the market-place of Porutsa.
Donander said, “What is your meaning, madame?”
Vanadis replied, “I have a desire which, a fine portent has informed me,
agrees with your desire.”
Then Vanadis, with god-like candor, made wholly plain her meaning. And
since Donander’s nature was affectionate, he assented readily enough to
the proposals of this somewhat ardent but remarkably handsome young
woman, who went abroad thus unconventionally in a car drawn by two cats,
and who, in her heathenish and figurative way, described herself as a
goddess. He stipulated only that, so soon as he was dressed, they be
respectably united according to whatever might be the marriage laws of
her country and diocese.
The Ænseis were not used in such matters to stand upon ceremony.
Nevertheless, they conferred together,—Aduna and Ord and Hleifner and
Rönn and Giermivul, and the other radiant sons of Sidvrar. It was they
who good-humoredly devised a ceremony, with candles and promises and
music and a gold ring, and all the other features which seemed expected
by the quaint sort of husband whom their beloved Vanadis had fetched up
from the Hall of the Chosen. But her sisters took no part in this
ceremony, upon the ground that they considered such public preliminaries
to be unheard-of and brazen.
Thus was Donander made free of Ydalir, the land that is above Lærath and
all the other heavens and paradises: and after Donander’s seven hundred
years of celibacy, he and his bride got on together in her bright palace
lovingly enough. Vanadis found that she too, comparatively speaking, had
lived with her five earlier husbands in celibacy.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_62._
_The Demiurgy of Donander Veratyr_
══════════════════════════════════════════════════
NOW the one change that Donander made an explicit point of was to fit
out in this palace of Reginlief a chapel. There he worshiped daily at
the correct hours, so near as one could calculate them in an endless
day, and there he prayed for the second coming of Manuel and for the
welfare of Donander’s soul upon the holy Morrow of Judgment.
“But, really, my heart,” his Vanadis would say, ineffectually, “you have
been dead for so long now! And, just looking at it sensibly, it does
seem such a waste of eternity!”
“Have done, my darling, with your heathen nonsense!” Donander would
reply. “Do I not know that in heaven there is no marrying or giving in
marriage? How then can heaven be this place in which two live so
friendlily and happily?”
Meanwhile, to the pagan priests wherever the Ænseis were adored, had
been revealed the sixth and the wholly successful marriage of blue-robed
Vanadis: her spouse had been duly deified: and new temples had been
builded in honor of the bright lady of Reginlief and of the Man-God,
Donander Veratyr, her tireless savior from vain desire and bodily
affliction. And time went stealthily as a stream flowing about and over
the worlds, and changing them, and wearing all away. But to Donander it
was as if he yet lived in the thrice-lucky afternoon on which he married
his Vanadis. For, since whatever any of the Ænseis desires must happen
instantly, thus Ydalir knows but one endless day; and immeasurably
beneath its radiance, very much as sullen and rain-swollen waters go
under a bridge upon which young lovers have met in the sunlight of
April, so passed wholly unnoted by any in Ydalir the flowing and all the
jumbled wreckage of time.
But it befell, too, after a great many of those æons which Ydalir
ignores and men cannot imagine, that Donander saw one of his smaller
brothers-in-law about a droll looking sport. Donander asked questions:
and he learned this dark brisk little Koshchei was about a game at which
the younger Ænseis were used to play.
“And how does one set about it?” Donander asked then.
“Why, thus and thus, my heart,” his wife replied. Fond Vanadis was glad
enough to find for him some outdoor diversion which would woo him from
that stuffy chapel and its depressing pictures of tortured persons and
its unwholesome fogs of stifling incense.
Then Donander broke away a bough from the tree called Lærath, saying
meanwhile the proper word of power. Sitting beside the fifth river of
Ydalir, he cut strips of bark from this bough, with the green-handled
knife which Vanadis had given him, and he cast these strips about at
random. He found it perfectly true that those scraps of barks which
touched the water became fish, those which he flung into the air became
birds, and those which fell upon the ground became animals and men.
He almost instantly, indeed, had enough creatures to populate a world,
but no world, of course, for them to animate and diversify. So Donander
destroyed these creatures, and placed one of the lighter weirds upon the
beetle Karu. That huge good-tempered insect fell at once to shaping a
ball of mud, and to carving it with mountains and plains and valleys.
Then Karu burrowed his way into the center of this ball of mud: and from
the hole into which Karu had entered came all kinds of living beings
needful for the animating and diversifying of a world; and these began
to breed and to kill one another and to build their appropriate lairs,
in nests and dens and cities.
This so excited another beetle, named Khypera, that he behaved in a
fashion not at all convenient to record; but many living creatures were
at once brought forth by his remarkable conduct, and plants and creeping
things and men and women, too, came out of the tears which Khypera let
fall.
That was the second demiurgy of Donander Veratyr. Then with a golden egg
Donander made another world: and from the entrails of a spider he drew
another; from the carrion of a dead cow he made a fifth world; and with
the aid of a raven Donander made yet one more. Thereafter he went on, in
turn attempting each method that any Ans had ever practiced.
These sports amused Donander for a long while and yet another while. And
Vanadis, apart from her natural pleasure in the augmented vigor he got
from so much open-air exercise, bright Vanadis smiled at his playing, in
the way of any wife who finds her husband occupied upon the whole less
reprehensibly than you would expect of the creature. And the sons of
Sidvrar also were used, as yet, to smile not unfriendlily when they
passed where Donander was busy with his toys. Even the sisters of
Vanadis only said that really of all things, and that of course they had
expected it from the very first. Thus everybody was content for a long
while and yet another while.
And throughout both these whiles Donander was pottering with his worlds,
keeping them bright with thunderbolts and volcanic eruptions, diligently
cleansing them of parasites with one or another pestilence, scouring
them with whirlwinds, and perpetually washing them with cloud-bursts and
deluges. His toys had constantly such loving care to keep them in
perfect condition. Meanwhile, his skill increased abreast with his
indulgence in demiurgy, and Donander thought of little else. He needed
now no aid from ravens and beetles. He had but, he found, to desire a
world, and at once his desire took form: its light was divided from its
darkness, the waters gathered into one place, the dry land appeared and
pullulated with living creatures, all in one dexterous complacent moment
of self-admiration.
His earlier made stars and comets and suns and asteroids Donander
Veratyr began destroying one by one, half vexedly, half in real
amusement at the archaic, bungling methods he had outgrown. In their
places he would set spinning, and glittering, and popping, quite other
planetary systems which, for the moment in any event, appeared to him
remarkably adroit craftsmanship. And everywhere upon the worlds which he
had made, and had not yet annihilated, men worshiped Donander Veratyr:
and in his pleasant home at Reginlief, high over Lærath and every other
heaven and paradise, Donander worshiped the god of the fathers and of
all the reputable neighbors of Donander of Évre; and in such pagan
surroundings as Heaven out of Heaven’s wisdom had selected for him,
awaited the second coming of Manuel and the holy Morrow of Judgment.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_63._
_Economics of Sidvrar_
══════════════════════════════════════════════════
THEN of a sudden gleaming Sidvrar Vafudir, the Weaver and Constrainer,
came with his wolves frisking about him. He came with his broad-brimmed
hat pulled down about his eyes decisively. He came thus to his daughter,
blue-robed Vanadis, and he stated that, while patience was a virtue,
there was such a thing as overdoing it, no matter how little he himself
might care for the talking of idle busybodies, because, however long she
might argue, and always had done from childhood, being in this and in
many other undesirable respects precisely like her mother, even so, no
sensible Ans could ever deny her husband’s conduct was ridiculous: and
that, said Sidvrar Vafudir, was all there was to it.
“Do not bluster so, my heart,” replied Vanadis, “about the facts of
nature. All husbands are ridiculous. Who should be surer of this than I,
who have had six husbands, unless it be you, who as goat and titmouse
and birch tree have been the husband of six hundred?”
“That is all very well,” said Sidvrar, “in addition to not being what we
were discussing. This Donander of yours is now one of the Ænseis, he is
an Ans of mature standing, and it is not right for him to be making
worlds. That is what we were discussing.”
“Yet what divine hands anywhere,” asked Vanadis, “are clean of
demiurgy?”
“That is not what we were discussing, either. When you brats of mine
were children you had your toys, and you played with and you smashed
your toys. Nobody denies that, because you all did, from Rönn to Aduna,
and even little Koshchei used to be having his fling at such nonsense.
Now do you look at the very fine and sober fellow he is, with all his
pranks behind him, and do you ask Koshchei what he thinks of that
husband of yours! But instead, you prefer to wander away from what we
were discussing, because you know as well as I do that for children to
be playing at such games is natural enough, besides keeping the young
out of grave mischief, now and then. Though, to be sure, nothing does
that very long nor very often, as I tell you plainly, my Vanadis, for do
you look, too, as a most grievous example, at the wasteful and untidy
way you destroy your husbands!”
“Donander Veratyr I shall not ever destroy,” replied Vanadis, smiling,
“because of the loving human heart and the maddening human ways he has
brought out of his Poictesme, and for two other reasons.”
“Then it is I who will put an end, if not to him, at least to his
nonsense. For this Donander of yours is still playing with stars and
planets, and setting off his comets, and exploding his suns, and that is
not becoming.”
“Well, well, do you, who are the Father and Master of All, have your own
will with him, so far as you can get it,” Vanadis returned, still with
that rather reminiscent smile. She had now lived for a great while with
this sixth husband of hers, who had a human heart in him and human ways.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_64._
_Through the Oval Window_
══════════════════════════════════════════════════
SIDVRAR went then from Vanadis to Donander. But the Constrainer found
there was no instant manner of constraining Donander Veratyr into a
conviction that Donander of Évre had died long ago, and had become an
Ans. People, Donander stated, did not do such things; when people died
they went either to heaven or to hell: and further reasoning with
Donander seemed to accomplish no good whatever. For Donander, as a loyal
son of the Church, now shrugged pityingly at the heathen nonsense talked
by his father-in-law. He stroked the heads of Sidvrar’s attendant
wolves, he listened to the Weaver and Constrainer with an indulgence
more properly reserved for the feeble-minded; and he said, a little
relishingly, that Messire Sidvrar would be wiser on the holy Morrow of
Judgment.
Then Sidvrar Vafudir became Sidvrar Yggr, the Meditating and Terrible.
Then Sidvrar fell about such magicking as he had not needed to use since
he first entered into the eternal yew-vales of Ydalir. Then, in a word,
Sidvrar unclosed the oval window in Reginlief that opened upon space and
time and upon the frozen cinders which once had been worlds and suns and
stars, and which their various creators had annihilated, as one by one
the Ænseis had put away their childhood and its playing.
Among such wreckage sped pretentiously the yet living worlds which
Donander had made. These toys, when seen thus closely through the magic
of the oval window, were abristle with the spires of the temples and the
cathedrals in which they that lived, as yet, upon these worlds were used
to worship. In all these churches men invoked Donander Veratyr. Through
that charmed window now, for the first time, came to his ears the outcry
of his clergy and laity: nowhere was there talk of another god, not even
where from many worlds arose the lecturing of those who explained away
their ancestors’ quaint notions about Donander the Man-God, the Savior
from Vain Desire, the Preserver from Bodily Affliction, and proved there
could not be any such person. And to Donander, looking out of the window
at Reginlief, all these things showed as a swarming of ants or as a
writhing of very small maggots about the worlds which he had made to
divert him: and in the face as in the heart of Donander awoke
inquietation.
“If this be a true showing,” Donander said, by and by, “show now that
Earth which is my home.”
After a while of searching, Sidvrar found for him the drifting clinker
which had once been Earth. Upon its glistering nakedness was left no
living plant nor any breathing creature, for the Morrow of Judgment was
long past, and Earth’s affairs had been wound up. Upon no planet did any
one remember the god whom Donander worshiped, now that Jahveh had ended
playing, and his toys were broken or put away. Upon many planets were
the temples of Donander Veratyr, and the rising smoke of his sacrifice,
and the cries of his worshipers as they murdered one another in their
disputing over points of theology which Donander could not clearly
understand.
Nor did he think about these things. Instead, Donander Veratyr, who was
the last of the Ænseis to play at this unprofitable sport of demiurgy,
was now remembering the days and the moon-lighted nights of his youth,
and the dear trivial persons whom he had then loved and revered. He did
not think about the two wives whom he had married upon Earth, nor about
his son Maugis, nor about any of the happenings of Donander’s manhood.
He thought of, for no reason at all, the shabby little village priest
who had confirmed him, and of the father and mother who had been
all-wise and able to defend one from every evil, and of the tall girl
whose lips had, once, and before any other lips, been sweeter than were
the joys of Ydalir. And he thought of many other futile things, all now
attested always to have been futile, which long ago had seemed so very
important to the boy that, in serving famous Manuel of Poictesme, had
postured so high-heartedly in one of the smallest provinces of an
extinct planet.
And Donander wrung immortal hands, saying, “If this be a true showing,
what thing have I become, who can no longer love or reverence anything!
who can have no care for any Morrow of Judgment! and to whom space
reveals only the living of these indistinguishable and unclean and
demented insects!”
The cry of his worshipers came up to him. “Thou art God, the Creator and
Preserver of all us Thy children! Thou art Donander Veratyr, in Whom is
our firm hope! Thou art the Man-God, That wilt grant unto us justice and
salvation upon the holy Morrow of Judgment!”
“Is it,” Donander said, “of Manuel that these little creatures speak?”
“We know not of any Manuel,” the universe replied to him. “We only know
that Thou art God, our Creator and Preserver.”
Then, after viewing again the vermin which swarmed about his worlds,
Donander said, like one a little frightened, “Is God thus?”
They answered him, fondly and reverently, “How can God be otherwise than
Thou art?”
At that Donander shuddered. But in the same moment he said, “If this be
a true showing, and if I be indeed a god, and the master of all things,
the human heart which survives in me wills now to create that to-morrow
for which these weaklings and I too have so long waited.”
Then Sidvrar pointed out, as patiently as outraged common-sense
permitted: “Still, still, you are talking nonsense! How can an Ans
create to-morrow?”
Donander asked, in turn, “Why not, if you be omnipotent?”
“It is because we are omnipotent. Thus in Ydalir there is but one day,
from which not even in imagination can any Ans escape. For, whatever any
of the Ænseis desires, even if it be a to-morrow, must instantly happen
and exist; and so must be to-day. That ought to be plain enough.”
“It is not plain,” Donander answered, “although, the way you put it, I
admit, it does sound logical. Therefore, if this indeed be the way of
omnipotence, and if none may escape his day, and if I be a trapped and
meager immortal, and the master only of those things which are to-day,
then now let all things end! For my heart stays human. To-day does not
know the runes of my heart’s contentment. My heart will not be satisfied
unless it enter into that morrow of justice and salvation which the
overlords of men, as you now tell me, cannot desire nor plan. So now, if
this be a true showing, now let all things end!”
Within the moment Donander saw that, while he was yet speaking, space
was emptied of life. Down yonder now were no more men and women
anywhere. None any longer awaited an oncoming day which was to content
one utterly with an assured bright heritage, divined in the dreams which
allured and derided all human living endlessly, and condemned the heart
of every man to be a stranger to contentment upon this side of
to-morrow. That ageless dream about to-morrow, and about the redeeming
which was to come—to-morrow—had passed, as the smoke of a little incense
passes; and with it had gone out of being, too, those whom it had
nourished and sustained. There were no more men or women anywhere.
Donander could see only many cinders adrift in a bleak loneliness: and
Donander of Évre must endure eternally as Donander Veratyr, a lonely and
uncomprehended immortal, among his many peers.
“So do you be sensible about it, my son-in-law,” said Sidvrar Vafudir,
when he had spoken the word of power which closed forever that cheerless
window, out of which nobody was ever to look any more,—“be sensible if
there indeed stay any root of intelligence in you. And do you
henceforward live more fittingly, as a credit to your wife’s family. And
do you put out of mind those cinders and those ashes and those clinkers
that were the proper sport of your youth. Such is the end of every wise
person’s saga.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_65._
_The Reward of Faith_
══════════════════════════════════════════════════
THEREAFTER the King and Father of the Ænseis departed, well pleased with
the lesson taught that whippersnapper. And Donander also smiled, and he
looked contentedly about his pleasant quarters in the everlasting vales
of Ydalir.
“Still, not for a great deal,” Donander reflected, “would I be treading
in that old sorcerer’s sandals; and it is a fair shame that I should
have such a person for a father-in-law.”
For, as a loyal son of the Church, Donander did not doubt that the
wonders which Sidvrar had just shown to him could only be an illusion
planned with some evil spirit’s aid to tempt Donander away from
respectability and the true faith. In consequence Donander Veratyr, that
had been the Creator and Destroyer of all things except the human heart
which survived in him, went now into the chapel of Reginlief. There he
decorously said the prayers to which Donander was accustomed, and he
prayed for the second coming of Manuel and for the welfare of Donander’s
soul upon the holy Morrow of Judgment.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
BOOK TEN
AT MANUEL’S TOMB
“_What hast thou here, that thou hast hewed thee out a sepulchre?_”
—ISAIAH, xxii, 16.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
—Salut, ami, dit Jurgen, si vous êtes une
créature de Dieu.
—Votre protase est du bien mauvais grec,
observa le Centaure, car en Hellade nous
nous abstenions de semblables réserves.
D’ailleurs mon origine vous intéresse
certes moins que ma destination.
—LA HAULTE HISTOIRE DE JURGEN.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_66._
_Old Age of Niafer_
══════════════════════════════════════════════════
NOW the tale is of crippled old Dame Niafer, who had reformed the
Poictesme which her husband redeemed, and of the thinking which came
upon her in the last days of her life. Until latterly Niafer had not,
with at every turn so many things requiring to be done, had very much
time for thinking. But now there was nothing more ever to be done by
Madame Niafer. Radegonde saw to that.
The gray-eyed minx ruled everything and everybody. That was not pleasant
for her mother-in-law to behold, after Niafer herself had ruled over
Poictesme for some twenty years, and all the while had kept frivolity
and disorder out of fashion. No mother could, in the first place,
honestly enjoy seeing her own son thus hoodwinked and led into perpetual
dissipation at all hours of the night, by a wife who, at thirteen
hundred and some years of age, might reasonably be expected to know
better. In the second place, Niafer could have managed things, and very
certainly poor Emmerick, with immeasurably more benefit to everybody,
and to common-sense too.
All that warring with Maugis, for instance, had been a sad mistake. Now,
under my regency, the aged Countess would reflect with complacence,
there was grumbling here and there,—men being what they are, with no
least idea as to what is actually good for them,—but never any armed
revolt. When people were dissatisfied, you sent for them, they came, you
had a sensible talk, you found out what was really wrong, and you
righted matters to the utmost extent that such a righting seemed
judicious; you eked out the remainder with a little harmless
soft-soaping, and that was all there was to it. No warrior in his sane
senses would go to war with an intelligent old lady who esteemed him
such a particularly fine fellow.
Now, if at the very beginning, that poor Maugis—quite a nice-looking
child, too, until he lost flesh under that continual plotting and
throat-cutting, with parents you had known for years,—had been had in to
dinner, just with the family, then all that killing and burning and
being awakened at unearthly hours by the misguided boy’s night attacks
upon Bellegarde would have been avoided.