Now Grandfather Satan's wife was called Phyllis: and apart from
having wings like a bat's, she was the loveliest little slip of
devilishness that Jurgen had seen in a long while. Jurgen spent this
night at the Black House of Barathum, and two more nights, or it
might be three nights: and the details of what Jurgen used to do
there, after supper, when he would walk alone in the Black House
Gardens, among the artfully colored cast-iron flowers and shrubbery,
and would so come to the grated windows of Phyllis's room, and would
stand there joking with her in the dark, are not requisite to this
story.
Satan was very jealous of his wife, and kept one of her wings
clipped and held her under lock and key, as the treasure that she
was. But Jurgen was accustomed to say afterward that, while the
gratings over the windows were very formidable, they only seemed
somehow to enhance the piquancy of his commerce with Dame Phyllis.
This queen, said Jurgen, he had found simply unexcelled at repartee.
Florimel considered the saying cryptic: just what precisely did his
majesty mean?
"Why, that in any and all circumstances Dame Phyllis knows how to
take a joke, and to return as good as she receives."
"So your majesty has already informed me: and certainly jokes can be
exchanged through a grating--"
"Yes, that was what I meant. And Dame Phyllis appeared to appreciate
my ready flow of humor. She informs me Grandfather Satan is of a
cold dry temperament, with very little humor in him, so that they go
for months without exchanging any pleasantries. Well, I am willing
to taste any drink once: and for the rest, remembering that my host
had very enormous and intimidating horns, I was at particular pains
to deal fairly with my hostess. Though, indeed, it was more for the
honor and the glory of the affair than anything else that I
exchanged pleasantries with Satan's wife. For to do that, my dear, I
felt was worthy of the Emperor Jurgen."
"Ah, I am afraid your majesty is a sad scapegrace," replied
Florimel: "however, we all know that the sceptre of an emperor is
respected everywhere."
"Indeed," says Jurgen, "I have often regretted that I did not bring
with me my jewelled sceptre when I left Noumaria."
She shivered at some unspoken thought: it was not until some while
afterward that Florimel told Jurgen of her humiliating misadventure
with the absent-minded Sultan of Garçao's sceptre. Now she only
replied that jewels might, conceivably, seem ostentatious and out of
place.
Jurgen agreed to this truism: for of course they were living very
quietly, and Jurgen was splendid enough for any reasonable wife's
requirements, in his glittering shirt.
So Jurgen got on pleasantly with Florimel. But he never became as
fond of her as he had been of Guenevere or Anaïtis, nor one-tenth as
fond of her as he had been of Chloris. In the first place, he
suspected that Florimel had been invented by his father, and Coth
and Jurgen had never any tastes in common: and in the second place,
Jurgen could not but see that Florimel thought a great deal of his
being an emperor.
"It is my title she loves, not me," reflected Jurgen, sadly, "and
her affection is less for that which is really integral to me than
for imperial orbs and sceptres and such-like external trappings."
And Jurgen would come out of Florimel's cleft considerably dejected,
and would sit alone by the Sea of Blood, and would meditate how
inequitable it was that the mere title of emperor should thus shut
him off from sincerity and candor.
"We who are called kings and emperors are men like other men: we are
as rightly entitled as other persons to the solace of true love and
affection: instead, we live in a continuous isolation, and women
offer us all things save their hearts, and we are a lonely folk.
No, I cannot believe that Florimel loves me for myself alone: it is
my title which dazzles her. And I would that I had never made myself
the emperor of Noumaria: for this emperor goes about everywhere
in a fabulous splendor, and is, very naturally, resistless in his
semi-mythical magnificence. Ah, but these imperial gewgaws distract
the thoughts of Florimel from the real Jurgen; so that the real
Jurgen is a person whom she does not understand at all. And it is
not fair."
Then, too, he had a sort of prejudice against the way in which
Florimel spent her time in seducing and murdering young men. It was
not possible, of course, actually to blame the girl, since she was
the victim of circumstances, and had no choice about becoming a
vampire, once the cat had jumped over her coffin. Still, Jurgen
always felt, in his illogical masculine way, that her vocation was
not nice. And equally in the illogical way of men, did he persist in
coaxing Florimel to tell him of her vampiric transactions, in spite
of his underlying feeling that he would prefer to have his wife
engaged in some other trade: and the merry little creature would
humor him willingly enough, with her purple eyes a-sparkle, and with
her vivid lips curling prettily back, so as to show her tiny white
sharp teeth quite plainly.
She was really very pretty thus, as she told him of what happened
in Copenhagen when young Count Osmund went down into the blind
beggar-woman's cellar, and what they did with bits of him; and
of how one kind of serpent came to have a secret name, which,
when cried aloud in the night, with the appropriate ceremony, will
bring about delicious happenings; and of what one can do with small
unchristened children, if only they do not kiss you, with their
moist uncertain little mouths, for then this thing is impossible;
and of what use she had made of young Sir Ganelon's skull, when he
was through with it, and she with him; and of what the young priest
Wulfnoth had said to the crocodiles at the very last.
"Oh, yes, my life has its amusing side," said Florimel: "and one
likes to feel, of course, that one is not wholly out of touch with
things, and is even, in one's modest way, contributing to the
suppression of folly. But even so, your majesty, the calls that are
made upon one! the things that young men expect of you, as the price
of their bodily and spiritual ruin! and the things their relatives say
about you! and, above all, the constant strain, the irregular hours,
and the continual effort to live up to one's position! Oh, yes, your
majesty, I was far happier when I was a consumptive seamstress and took
pride in my buttonholes. But from a sister-in-law who only has you in
to tea occasionally as a matter of duty, and who is prominent in
churchwork, one may, of course, expect anything. And that reminds
me that I really must tell your majesty about what happened in the
hay-loft, just after the abbot had finished undressing--"
So she would chatter away, while Jurgen listened and smiled
indulgently. For she certainly was very pretty. And so they kept
house in Hell contentedly enough until Florimel's vacation was at an
end: and then they parted, without any tears but in perfect
friendliness.
And Jurgen always remembered Florimel most pleasantly, but not as a
wife with whom he had ever been on terms of actual intimacy.
Now when this lovely Vampire had quitted him, the Emperor Jurgen, in
spite of his general popularity and the deference accorded his
political views, was not quite happy in Hell.
"It is a comfort, at any rate," said Jurgen, "to discover who
originated the theory of democratic government. I have long wondered
who started the notion that the way to get a wise decision on any
conceivable question was to submit it to a popular vote. Now I know.
Well, and the devils may be right in their doctrines; certainly I
cannot go so far as to say they are wrong: but still, at the same
time--!"
For instance, this interminable effort to make the universe safe for
democracy, this continual warring against Heaven because Heaven
clung to a tyrannical form of autocratic government, sounded both
logical and magnanimous, and was, of course, the only method of
insuring any general triumph for democracy: yet it seemed rather
futile to Jurgen, since, as he knew now, there was certainly
something in the Celestial system which made for military
efficiency, so that Heaven usually won. Moreover, Jurgen could not
get over the fact that Hell was just a notion of his ancestors with
which Koshchei had happened to fall in: for Jurgen had never much
patience with antiquated ideas, particularly when anyone put them
into practice, as Koshchei had done.
"Why, this place appears to me a glaring anachronism," said Jurgen,
brooding over the fires of Chorasma: "and its methods of tormenting
conscientious people I cannot but consider very crude indeed. The
devils are simple-minded and they mean well, as nobody would dream
of denying, but that is just it: for hereabouts is needed some more
pertinacious and efficiently disagreeable person--"
And that, of course, reminded him of Dame Lisa: and so it was the
thoughts of Jurgen turned again to doing the manly thing. And he
sighed, and went among the devils tentatively looking and inquiring
for that intrepid fiend who in the form of a black gentleman had
carried off Dame Lisa. But a queer happening befell, and it was that
nowhere could Jurgen find the black gentleman, nor did any of the
devils know anything about him.
"From what you tell us, Emperor Jurgen," said they all, "your wife
was an acidulous shrew, and the sort of woman who believes that
whatever she does is right."
"It was not a belief," says Jurgen: "it was a mania with the poor
dear."
"By that fact, then, she is forever debarred from entering Hell."
"You tell me news," says Jurgen, "which if generally known would
lead many husbands into vicious living."
"But it is notorious that people are saved by faith. And there is no
faith stronger than that of a bad-tempered woman in her own
infallibility. Plainly, this wife of yours is the sort of person who
cannot be tolerated by anybody short of the angels. We deduce that
your Empress must be in Heaven."
"Well, that sounds reasonable. And so to Heaven I will go, and it
may be that there I shall find justice."
"We would have you know," the fiends cried, bristling, "that in Hell
we have all kinds of justice, since our government is an enlightened
democracy."
"Just so," says Jurgen: "in an enlightened democracy one has all
kinds of justice, and I would not dream of denying it. But you have
not, you conceive, that lesser plague, my wife; and it is she whom I
must continue to look for."
"Oh, as you like," said they, "so long as you do not criticize the
exigencies of war-time. But certainly we are sorry to see you going
into a country where the benighted people put up with an autocrat
Who was not duly elected to His position. And why need you continue
seeking your wife's society when it is so much pleasanter living in
Hell?"