Chapter XI: Part NINE: The Book of Mispec Moor

“To Tame the Wolf You Must Marry Him.”

33.
Limitations of Gaston

IT WAS at this time, toward the middle of June, that Gaston Bulmer came from Lichfield. Gerald was sitting, as was his daily custom now, under the chestnut-tree beside the road which led to Antan. He waited there to engage in conversation the next of his future subjects who might pass by in that perpetual journeying toward Antan. Gerald, under this same chestnut-tree, had by this time talked with many such unearthly wayfarers: and if the rather interesting things they had told him were all written down, it would make a book unutterably enormous and utterly incredible.

In such circumstances it was, just after two not unfamiliar mountebanks had gone by carrying with them the paraphernalia of their Punch and Judas show, that Gerald noticed a small sulphur-colored cloud sweeping rapidly from the east. It descended: and when it was near to Gerald, it unclosed. Gaston Bulmer then stepped, a bit rheumatically, from its glowing depths, and he laid down a rod of cedar wood tipped with an apple carved in blue-stone.

There was not in all this anything in itself astonishing, since Gaston Bulmer was an adept in the arts of which Gerald, in the strange days before he knew that he was a god, had been a student. But to note how Gaston had aged in the last week or so was astounding. Yet Gerald, in any case, was wholly delighted to see again his old friend and preceptor, and a person who had for so long been virtually his father-in-law.

Gaston would not come up to the cottage, though, for dinner, because, as he confessed, he preferred not to encounter Maya. Rather, it was his wish, and it seemed, indeed, to be his errand, to free Gerald from what Gaston Bulmer, surprisingly enough, described as the wise woman’s pernicious magic.

Gerald said: “Oh, bosh! For really now, Gaston, if such nonsense were not heart-breaking it would be side-splitting. I am inexpressibly shocked by your hallucination, which is, I trust, of a most transitory nature. However, let us not discuss my wife, if you please. Instead, do you tell me how my body is faring.”

So they sat down together under the chestnut-tree. And Gaston Bulmer answered, “That body, Gerald, since you quitted it, has become a noted scholar and a man of letters.”

“Ah! ah!” said Gerald, greatly pleased, “so my romance about Dom Manuel of Poictesme has been completed, and is now being admired everywhere!”

“No, for your body has become, just as I said, a scholar. Scholars do not write romances.”

“Yet you referred to a man of letters—?”

“Your body is now a rather famous ethnologist. Your body deals with historical and scientific truths. Your body thus writes large quartos upon topics to which no romance, howsoever indelicate, could afford to devote a sentence.”

Gerald fell to stroking that long chin of his. “Still, I recall that the present informant of my body once informed me there were only two truths of which any science could be certain.”

“And what were these two truths?”

Gerald named them.

Gaston said then: “The demon is consistent. For these two are precisely your body’s scientific specialty. To-day your body writes invaluable books in which the quaint and interesting customs that accompany an interplay of these two truths, and the various substitutes for that interplay, are catalogued and explained, as these customs have existed in all lands and times. Lichfield to-day is wholly proud of the scholarship and the growing fame of Gerald Musgrave.”

“I am glad that my body has turned out so splendidly. And I trust that all goes equally well with your daughter Evelyn?”

“Gerald,” the older man replied, looking more seriously troubled than Gerald ever liked to have anybody seeming in his company, “Gerald, it is an unfair thing that your Cousin Evelyn, without knowing it, should be living upon terms of such close friendship with a demon-haunted body.”

“Ah, so that friendship continues!”

“It continues,” said Gaston, “unaltered. It may interest you, Gerald, by the way, to hear that your Cousin Evelyn has now a son, quite a fine red-headed boy, born just a year after you relinquished your body to that treacherous Sylan.”

Gerald answered affably: “Why, that is perfectly splendid! Frank always wanted a boy.”

“My son-in-law, in fact, is much pleased. It is about my daughter I was thinking. It seems to me the situation is hardly fair to her, Gerald.”

Gerald replied: “My body is all of me that she was ever acquainted with, Gaston. So I fail to perceive that anything is altered.”

“Yet, when I reflect that a beautiful and accomplished and chaste gentlewoman, Gerald—”

“Ah, ah! But, yes, to be sure! you speak in the time-hallowed terms of Lichfield. And I really do not know why I interrupted you.”

“—When I reflect that, without knowing it, a gentlewoman is living upon terms of such close friendship with a mere demon-haunted body—”

“And is, in fact, trusting and giving all?”

“All her friendship and the natural affection of a kinswoman. Yes, that is a sad spectacle. It is an unsuitable spectacle. So it seems to me your duty as a Musgrave, and as a Southern gentleman, to return forthwith to mortal living and to your mortal obligations, and in particular to the obligations of your life-long friendship with your Cousin Evelyn.”

Gerald said, for the second time, “Oh, bosh!”

For the notions and the chivalrous assumptions of Gaston Bulmer all now appeared to Gerald out of reason, in view of the divine predestination which was upon him. A god had no concern with such slight imbroglios as the code of a merely terrestrial gentleman and the proper maintenance upon Earth of polite adultery. It would, indeed, be positively ill-bred for a Dirghic god to meddle with any of the affairs of a planet which, according to Gerald’s Protestant Episcopal faith, had been created and was controlled by an Episcopalian deity; for Gerald had of course retained, provisionally, that religion in which he was a communicant until he could find out something rather more definite about the religion in which he was a god.

Gerald therefore said: “My good Gaston, that your meaning is excellent, I do not doubt. And it is not your fault of course that, in your merely human condition, you do not quite understand these matters, and certainly cannot view them with an omniscient eye.”

The older man said: “I understand, in any event, that through all these years you have stayed here bewitched with terrible half-magics, and that your own eyes are blinded with the woman’s rose-colored spectacles. And I seek to preserve you.”

“You would preserve me for the provincial life of your little Lichfield! You would make me just another chivalrous, bull-headed, rather nice-looking and wholly stupid Musgrave! In fine, you would urge me to become genteel and to deny my glorious destiny. Yet to do that would be cowardly, Gaston: for, whether I like it or not, there is upon me the divine obligation to fulfil some very ancient prophecies.”

“What sort of prophecies are these?”

“They are Dirghic prophecies. But, then, it is not the language in which a prophecy is uttered that matters, rather it is—Well, it is the spirit of the thing! For you must know—although, in view of my wife’s social position, I have compelled her, after some little argument, to introduce me hereabouts as a visiting sorcerer,—yet I may tell you, in strict confidence, Gaston, it is decreed that, as the Lord of the Third Truth, I am to reign in Antan.”

“And who told you any such unlikely nonsense?”

“Some people that I met upon the road. Oh, quite honest looking people, Gaston!”

“And who told you that you were the Lord of any Third Truth?”

“There my authority is unimpeachable. For I had it from the lips of a beautiful and accomplished and chaste gentlewoman, Gaston, who was speaking with all the frankness begotten by our being in bed together at the time.”

“And how can you reign in Antan, or anywhere else, when you do not ever go there? Through all these years, I gather, you have loitered here within a man’s arm’s reach of Antan!”

Gerald said, with the slight frown of one who finds trouble uncongenial: “I am puzzled, my dear friend, by your continued references to all these years. And I admit that various matters have a bit hindered my technical and merely formal entry into my kingdom. Yet I shall be leaving Mispec Moor the instant that this week’s washing is in, on Thursday afternoon—”

“But, my poor Gerald! you will not go, either forward to Antan or back to Lichfield, on what you think to be next Thursday. You have lost here all sense of time, you do not even know that the days you have spent in this place have counted as four years in Lichfield. I tell you that the wise woman, with her half-magics and her accursed spectacles, holds you here bewitched. And I now perceive that nothing whatever can be done for you, who are ensnared by the most fatal of all the magics of the wrinkled goddess.”

—To which Gerald, for the third time, replied: “Oh, bosh! No sorceress has any power over a god. And so completely do you misunderstand my wife, Gaston, that I must tell you hardly a day passes without her urging me to hurry on to Antan.”

Gaston Bulmer was still regarding him with that extraordinary and wholly uncalled-for look of compassion.

“How completely,” he remarked, “she understands you Musgraves! Yes, you are lost, my poor Gerald.”

“—It follows that your notions are preposterous. Oh, that is not your fault, my dear fellow, and not for an instant am I blaming you. Your conduct, from your human point of view, is very right, very friendly, very proper. So your rather laughable blunder does not offend me in the least. And if, as you declare, I have lingered here for some four years as you human beings estimate time, what do four years amount to with an immortal who has at his disposal all eternity? Come now, Gaston, do you but answer me that very simple question!”

But Gaston answered only: “You are content. You are lost.”

34.
Ambiguity of the Brown Man

AND Gaston said no more about the matter, because just here their talking was interrupted. For now, as these two still sat at the roadside, they were joined by a brown man, dressed completely in neat brown, who was journeying toward Antan.

“Hail, friend!” said Gerald, “and what business draws you to the city of all marvels?”

And the brown man, pausing, said that, in point of fact, it was upon a slight matter of business routine that he desired to consult with Queen Freydis. All gods, he said, had rather speedily passed downward to encounter the word which was in the beginning,—for it was thus that the brown man spoke, very much as King Solomon had spoken,—all gods, that is, save only one, who so bewilderingly altered his tenets that there was no telling where to have him.

The brown man thought that, nowadays, in a comparatively enlightened nineteenth century, was perhaps the appropriate time for something to be done about this celestial chameleon. And in any case, he said yet further, he always enjoyed his little conferences with Freydis, who was rather a dear—

“So, so!” said Gerald, “you, sir, have previously visited Antan?”

“Oh, very often. For I am the adversary of all the gods of men.”

And Gerald viewed with natural interest the one person who pretended to know at first-hand anything about Gerald’s appointed kingdom: yet, even so, if this brown gentleman, as Gerald had begun to suspect, happened to be the Father of All Lies, there was no real point to questioning him, inasmuch as you could believe none of his answers.

“—For, I infer,” said Gerald, “that you who travel on the road of gods and myths are that myth not unfamiliar to my Protestant Episcopal rearing; and that I have now the privilege, so frequently anticipated for me by my nearer relatives, of addressing the devil?”

“I retain of course in every mythology, including the Semitic, my niche,” replied the brown man, “from which to speak to intelligent persons in somewhat varying voices.”

Then Gaston Bulmer arose, and the aging adept shaped a sign which to Gerald was unfamiliar.

“I suspect, sir,” said Gaston Bulmer, “that my mother’s father, who was called Florian de Puysange, once heard the speaking of that voice.”

“It is a tenable hypothesis. I in my day have spoken much.”

“—As did, I believe, yet another forebear of mine, the great Jurgen, from whom descends the race of Puysange, and who once encountered someone rather like you in a Druid wood—”

“I cannot deny it. The Druids also knew me. I, who am the Prince of this world, meet however, as you will readily understand, so many millions of people during the course of my efforts to keep them contented with my kingdom that it is not always possible for me to recollect every one of my beneficiaries.”

“Still,” Gerald said, “you have played in large historical events a strange high part; you have known all the very best people: and you must have much of interest to tell me about. You, sir, at least shall dine with me, since my friend here is obdurate. My wife avoids the usual run of gods, but to devils I have never heard her voice the slightest objection. So, if you will do me the honor to accompany me to my temporary home, in that cottage—”

But the brown man smiled. And he excused himself.

“For your wife and I are not wholly strangers. And the circumstances in which we last parted were, I confess, a bit awkward. So I really believe it would be more pleasant, for everyone concerned, for me not to meet your wife just now. Do you present, none the less, my compliments.”

“And whose compliments shall I tell her that they are?”

“Do you say a friend of her earliest youth passed by, one somewhat intimately known to her before she first became a mother; and I make no doubt that Havvah will understand.”

“But my wife’s married name is Maya, and before our marriage it was Æsred—”

“Ah, yes!” the brown man said, precisely as Glaum had done, “women do vary in their given names. Do you present my compliments, then, to your wife: for that word, by and by, means the same thing to every husband.”

“I will convey the message,” Gerald promised: “but the aphorism I would prefer to have delivered by somebody else.”

And he so parted with both his guests.

For Gaston Bulmer embraced Gerald and then went sorrowfully back to Lichfield, in a cloud which the aging adept’s despondency made quite black: and the brown man leisurely strolled on toward Antan, with the ease of one who was well used to walking to and fro about the earth.

He did not hurry, nor did he look inquisitively about him, Gerald noticed, as has done the other travelers toward the city of all marvels. The brown man, alone of the many that had passed toward Antan, appeared to travel upon a road with which he was thoroughly acquainted, toward a familiar goal.

35.
Of Kalki and a Döppelganger

SO IT was that Gerald stayed yet a while longer upon Mispec Moor. July passed uneventfully. Each pleasant summer day found Gerald sitting beneath his chestnut-tree at the roadside: and he talked there with many wayfarers who have no part in this tale. For almost all these travelers told the same story. Nine out of every ten of them had yesterday been a god whom human beings served; each had been worshipped by mankind in one or another quarter of the world: to-day their human concerns were over, and they journeyed toward the goal of all the gods. What did they look to find there? Gerald would ask: and—to this very simple question,—every one of them replied evasively. They went to hear that word which was in the beginning, and which would be after everything else had perished, that word which was unknown to all the gods of men. They would say no more: and Gerald did not deeply bother about the matter, because he was nowadays quite well contented, and when he went to Antan would soon be clearing up every mystery for himself.

And the divine steed Kalki also appeared content enough, nor was his aspect altered by inaction. The horse retained that uniform strange shining and that metallic glitter which made him seem actually to be made of untarnished silver. Of course when you saw him grazing upon Mispec Moor just after a rain-shower his back would be dark and sleek, and his broad sides would be streaked with wavering, oily-looking bands. But at all other times he kept his glowing silver color, which was unlike that of any other horse Gerald had ever seen.

Meanwhile the divine steed grazed with the geldings who once had been the human lovers of Maya. He went as they did, lifting each hoof with somewhat droll carefulness as he grazed forward on the sloping ground about the cottage. For Gerald would often watch this grazing. And to him these horses as they moved slowly and irregularly windward seemed continually to pick up and to replace their hoofs upon the ground as though they believed each hoof to be a rather fragile parcel. The pendulous, stretched, heavy necks of these horses, each neck staying always monotonously parallel to all the other necks, appeared to him too heavy ever again to be lifted erect. To wonder in the drowsy summer afternoon how this lifting could possibly be achieved aroused an unpleasant sensation in Gerald’s collarbone.

So Kalki fed all day among the geldings, and on windy nights he huddled with them in the lee of the cottage. Each day Kalki went looking downward, grazing interminably, and without ever ceasing to move those wobbling, dark, prehensile, rotatory, snuffling lips as the divine steed fed upon the sparse grass of Mispec Moor. He, just as greedily as the geldings, would contort his lips and twist his head when he attempted to get at the longer and more luscious grass which grew almost inaccessibly about the fence posts. And to reflection there was something of the incongruous in the spectacle of a divine steed engrossed by this problem.

Now and again, as Gerald noted also, the stallion would raise his superb head, and Kalki would look almost wistfully toward Antan. But soon he would be back at his grazing: and, upon the whole, he seemed content enough with the pleasures appropriate to ordinary horses. And Gerald thought too that, nowadays, Kalki looked less often toward the goal of all the gods.

Yet Kalki turned out to be not wholly unique. For, one morning, as Gerald went toward his chestnut-tree, he noted the approach from afar of a traveler who rode upon a horse that had very much the appearance of Kalki. And when Gerald had reached the roadway he saw that the newcomer was in fact mounted upon a steed which might well have been Kalki’s twin.

“Hail, friend!” said Gerald, “And what business draws you to the city of all marvels?”

Then a regrettable thing happened; for the young horseman pretended not to have heard Gerald, and as the boy passed he looked investigatively about Mispec Moor, and he pretended not to have seen Gerald, who stood within a few feet of him.

He was a notably handsome boy, too, in a blue coat and a golden yellow waistcoat, with a tall white stock and ruffles about his throat. His hair seemed red: and Gerald noted, moreover, the lazy and mildly humorous, half-mocking gaze with which this boy regarded Mispec Moor, as he rode by unhurriedly toward Antan, without any pausing, and Gerald noted in particular the very lovely smiling of this boy’s so amply curved and rather womanish mouth, as the boy went by upon the horse which was astonishingly like Kalki.

Yes, he had quite the air of a gentleman: and it was a great pity that this young whippersnapper had not the manners of a gentleman also, Gerald reflected, as Gerald stood there, feeling unwarrantably snubbed, and blinking behind his rose-colored spectacles.

36.
Tannhäuser’s Troubled Eyes

AND upon yet another day Gerald talked with the comely but now aged knight Tannhäuser, as this famous myth passed by, in full armor, upon his journey into Antan.

“There,” said Tannhäuser, “there I may find again, it may be, the fair Dame Venus and all the brave and high-hearted sinners who would not compromise with the narrow and cruel ways of respectable persons.”

“My friend,” said Gerald, mildly, “there is considerable virtue to be found, here and there, among respectable persons. There is even a virtue in compromise.”

And Tannhäuser shouted: “That I deny! All my life denies that, and so long as my name lives I am that lie’s denial! For it was the good and the respectable who betrayed me. I found pride and worldliness and a lack of cordiality to exist among the bourgeoisie and even among those professional churchmen who should have been the first to sustain and guide a repentant sinner. And so I turned again to that frankly pagan beauty which is hateful to pious and small-minded persons.”

Then this resplendent gray-haired myth spoke heatedly of his own life history and of how his love for this frankly pagan beauty had led him into the hollow mountain called the Hörselberg, to live there as the lover of Dame Venus in all manner of frankly pagan pleasure-seeking; and of how, after seven years of frankly pagan recreations, when repentance smote him, abetted by the frailties of middle age, it was among the leading church members, and in the heart of the very head of the church, that he had found no sympathy. Therefore Tannhäuser was returning to those frankly pagan recreations, so far at least as they were consistent with late middle life, because he was disgusted by those whining and hypocritical, cruel church members.

And Gerald listened. He remembered how in the Mirror of Caer Omn he for a while had been Tannhäuser. Yet it was a queer thing, and a circumstance which made Gerald suspect time to be changing him, somehow, who used to be such a tremendous iconoclast, that now this old rebellious myth,—which represented yet another of Gerald’s discarded personalities,—appeared to Gerald remarkably over-colored and rather pitiably foolish. For here was a story which led to wrong conclusions. It ended by depicting a god at loggerheads with the head of his own church: and it begot, somewhat inevitably, those loud sneers at the bourgeois virtues, and those denunciations of people who, after all, had done nothing worse than to live quiet and common-sense lives which Tannhäuser was now declaiming, and which to Gerald appeared unutterably childish. There was no conceivable reason why a well-thought-of pope should be hobnobbing with and coddling a broken-down old lecher just come out of a superior brothel. In fact, in reproving Pope Urban so publicly, Heaven had been, to Gerald’s finding, rather tactless, and had violated the _esprit de corps_ which ought to be preserved among the fellow workers in every church. And in any case, Tannhäuser’s present reflections upon religion were not such as Gerald, now that he had become a god, could listen to with approval.

Still, Gerald did listen: and Gerald smiled, friendlily enough.

“I know, I know!” said Gerald. “I know, friend, all about you. When you repented of evil-doing,—and, really, you did take your time about that,—then you turned hopefully to religion, but, alas! you were repelled by its ministers. You found them to be human beings subject to human frailties. You found that—in Heaven’s eyes, anyhow,—even a pope might make a mistake. And so, quite naturally, you proceeded to drown the surprise and horror awakened by this discovery in out-and-out debauchery and in cutting reflections upon all pew-renters. For your discovery was revolutionary; no doubt the stars were shaken in their courses, to observe a human being making a mistake; and you also must have found the spectacle extremely trying. Still, you in this way became useful to romantic art.”

Then Gerald said: “Lord, man, but what a following you have had! and what a number of people have got harmless pleasure out of developing the discovery which Tannhäuser first made, that inconsistency and mean-spiritedness may be found among the clergy and the churchgoers! You will thus continue to be a benefactor of your kind for centuries, I have not a doubt. Yet I sometimes fancy that inconsistency and mean-spiritedness may be found even among recognizedly depraved persons who do not go to any church at all. I find that every religion cows a number of its devotees into a thrifty-minded practice of generally beneficent virtues. The average of desirable qualities in the congregation of every church appears to me, after all, quite perceptibly higher than is that average among the regular customers of any brothel or the clients of the public hangman. I do not deny that my discovery also is, from any æsthetic standpoint, revolutionary. I confess that it is nowhere represented in romance, as yet, and that no conceivable realist can ever regard such a grotesque fancy with anything save loathing. But I believe that some day an intrepid handling of this daring theme will prodigally repay some very great innovator, and will become useful to romantic art.”

And Gerald said also: “Moreover, you remain quite invaluable as a pretext and a palliation whenever youth hungers for its fling. Only, I must dare point out, my dear sir, that your second century-long fling was, by the best people, unavoidably, felt to be excessive. All of us, more or less, have had our flings: even so, a fling needs to be conducted, and above all to be wound up, with some discretion. It ought to be high-hearted and lyrical in every feature: it ought especially to have the briefness of the lyric. And it ought not, no, it really ought not, to wind up in the Hörselberg. Now I, too, my friend, for example, have had my fling. But I have had it in a quiet, self-controlled and gentlemanly way, without overdoing the thing. Thereafter I settled down,—just temporarily, to be sure, but still I have settled down,—in no lewd and feverish Hörselberg, but here, where a contented husband risks no further chance of becoming useful to romantic art.”

“It is possible for one to exist, but not for anybody to live, here!” replied Tannhäuser, scornfully, as his wild gaze swept over the still stretches of Mispec Moor.

“Allow me!” said Gerald, with the tiniest of smiles; and he perched his rose-colored spectacles upon the beaked high nose of Tannhäuser.

There was a pause. And Tannhäuser sighed.

“I see,” said the knight then, “a quiet little home of your own, in the country, with your wife and with the kiddies, too, I daresay. And with fresh vegetables, of course, right out of your own garden.”

“In just such a home, Messire Tannhäuser, as is the cornerstone of every nation, the cradle of all the virtues, and the guiding-star of I forget precisely what. It is also the brightest jewel in the crown of something or other, and it assists other desirable abstractions in the capacity of a bulwark, a spur, and an anchor. It is, you may depend upon it, the proper place in which to end one’s fling.”

“And I! I might, if only I had married that dear fine sweet girl Elizabeth, I, too, might have had such a home! For, after all, there is nothing like marriage and the love of a good woman. An endless round of perpetual pleasure-seeking rings hollow by and by, and one hungers for the simple sacred joys of home-life. I must, oh, very decidedly, I must settle down. I, too, must have just such a home as this.”

But the thought of all which he had been missing so affected Tannhäuser that he took off the spectacles and unaffectedly wiped his eyes. After that the aging, comely knight sat for a while silent and rather frightened looking. He stared again at the cottage and at the moor, and then he stared at Gerald.

“And you live in this hole, with a muddy brat and a dull-witted, middle-aged, not at all good-looking woman for your only company! I marvel at the enchantment which controls you. At least Dame Venus held me with an intelligible sort of sorcery.”

“That,” Gerald replied, as he contentedly put on his rose-colored spectacles again, “is nonsense.”

“It is a very dreadful nonsense. It is a soul-destroying and besotting nonsense, from which I flee to look for the less terrible enchantments of the Hörselberg.”

Then Gerald put his question. “You, who have traveled through the Marches of Antan, wherein only two truths endure, and the one teaching is that we copulate and die,—do you not look to find in the goal of all the gods some third truth?”

But the comely knight seemed not to have heard this question, in his frank terror of domesticity. Tannhäuser had mounted his horse, and he now rode galloping like a madman toward Antan.

37.
Contentment of the Mislaid God

NOW life contented Gerald as he lived it through this recognized parenthesis in his divine career. Very soon this little episode of his stay upon Mispec Moor would be ended: it would even be forgotten, perhaps, in the press of regal and superhuman affairs. Meanwhile he lived in quite tolerable ease. He had nothing to trouble him. Hardly a morning passed without his finding some more or less interesting celestial outcast to talk to under his chestnut-tree. Maya continued to be an excellent cook, in her plain, unpretentious way: and she saw to it that the cottage was kept comfortable and efficient in all appointments.

And Maya was dear to him. She nowadays found fault with virtually everything that Gerald did. And whenever he ventured any suggestion, as to Theodorick or the economics of the cottage or their social engagements in Turoine,—or even if Gerald as much as suggested opening or closing a window,—Maya at once produced at least nine grounds upon which the suggestion was plainly very foolish and would never have occurred to anyone of real intelligence. And she cherished the most imaginative views as to the extent of Gerald’s selfishness and lack of consideration for other people, and of his habit of never doing anything whatever for her pleasure.

Sometimes, though, she would go for as much as an hour without dwelling, at especial length, upon what a trial Gerald was to her in one way or another. And in all respects she was a capable woman who made him an excellent wife, and treated him far better than she could have found any excuse for doing in what she said about him.

And Gerald loved Theodorick Quentin Musgrave, also, with an affection which rather troubled Gerald. The child, he knew, displayed no extraordinary charm nor talent: no course of reasoning could justify any extreme fondness for Theodorick upon the ground of his physical or mental gifts. Theodorick Quentin Musgrave was not brilliant, he was not lovely, he was not especially amiable: he was, indeed, by way of being a particularly selfish small tyrant, continually adding to the disorder of the cottage, to the dismay of Gerald’s finicky liking for neatness, and continually devising unneeded trouble and commandeering manual tasks from his parents because of the droll pleasure which Theodorick appeared to derive from seeing his parents fetch and carry in his service.

Yet, whensoever Gerald put his arm about the small, warm, yielding, sturdy, but so helpless body, it was as though Gerald’s own body were melting in a grateful glow of what was—bewilderingly—a sort of panic terror. He loved this freckled, fragile creature with an unwisdom which was, as Gerald knew, an assuredness of more or less future discomfort and, it well might be, of anguish, for him who quite honestly disliked trouble of any kind. Since this child had been created, Gerald’s well-being was not any longer a matter which Gerald could hope to control or even to protect: his happiness was now risked upon what might befall this imp. It was the helplessness of the child which frightened Gerald with a sense of his own helplessness. Life was so cruel to children. Life damaged and hurt children in so many ways inevitably. And every hurt to this child, now, would be an anguish to Gerald, who could avoid none of them. He could not even manage to get the child properly christened, in this neighborhood so profuse in sorcerers and wizards, who used, as everybody knew, unchristened children in horrible ways which it was not comfortable to think about....

Then, too, Gerald was not certain Theodorick Quentin Musgrave was real. Gerald remembered always, at the back of his mind, that frightful instant when he had removed his spectacles, to find the child had vanished. Gerald assured himself that the cause was a slight indigestion, and that the moment’s blur of vision came from a disordered stomach. But he was wholly careful not ever again to look at Theodorick except through the rose-colored spectacles which made visible the magics of Maya. He kept resolutely out of his full attention the fact that Theodorick might be an illusion which Maya had created. And he grew accustomed to that unusual milk-colored tongue, which showed like a white snake within the red moist little mouth whenever the child laughed.

And Gerald sometimes wondered if Maya had over-ambitiously designed to make permanent this mere parenthesis in his career. She had attempted, to be sure, no magic such as that with which she had transformed his predecessors. No sorceress would dare, for that matter, thus to presume against a god.... Gerald knew that, instead, it was his Maya’s wholesome simplicity and the prosaic human comfort which he did get, after all, from living with this middle-aged and fault-finding and not in the least beautiful woman that had detained him, just for the while of this parenthesis in his career. He of course would pass on, to enter into his kingdom, by and by. And there was no conceivable hurry about it, now that his journeying to Antan was for every practical purpose finished, and now that whensoever he elected he might within the next half-hour or so be taking over the realm and all the powers of the Master Philologist.

Meanwhile, though, Gerald would now and then wonder amusedly if his dear, stupid Maya could perhaps have struck upon the device of detaining him by not using any magic whatever: if she in secret flattered herself that this device was succeeding: and if she actually cherished the delusion that she was hoodwinking omniscient Fair-haired Hoo, the Helper and Preserver, the Lord of the Third Truth, the Well-beloved of Heavenly Ones?

Anyhow, his life here very amiably contented him for the while. The local circles of sorcerers and wizards were pleasant enough, barring only that haunting memory as to how they used unchristened children. Gerald and Maya did not go out a great deal; but they were on friendly terms with the neighbors; they attended an occasional Sabbat; and they kept in touch generally with the affairs of Turoine. And for the rest, the little happenings of his home life temporarily contented the Lord of the Third Truth.

And he began to reflect that, just possibly, Antan might be to him, after he had entered into his kingdom, a disappointment. From here Antan seemed uniformly wonderful. It was astonishingly pleasant to sit upon the western porch of the small cottage, especially toward evening, when your shoes propped up before you on the porch railing reflected a pinkish glow from the sunset, and to imagine what was going on in that broad expanse of yet unvisited fields and hills which now were turning into gray and purple mists directly beneath the gold and crimson of the sunset. The trouble was that you, who were gifted with the imagination of a god, were very certainly imagining more wonderful happenings for that mysterious theatre than could by any chance be enacted there.

For one matter, after dark, Antan always displayed eight lights, six of them grouped together in the middle of the vista with the general effect of a cross, and the other two showing much farther off to the northwest. About those never-varying huge lights Gerald had formed at least twenty delightful theories, all plausible as long as you remained upon Mispec Moor, whereas if you went to Antan not more at most than one of these theories could prove true.

To go to Antan thus meant the destruction of no less than nineteen rather beautiful ideas as to those lights alone. However, Gerald felt, there was no help for this: and he whole-heartedly meant to take over his appointed kingdom without any unpleasant criticizing, no matter what might be the deficiencies of the place, by and by. Meanwhile, there was no great hurry: and it was, indeed, a prudent and long-sighted course for him to be pausing here to enjoy these fine scenic effects, because by and by he would not ever again be seeing Antan from this distance.

After nightfall those eight lights never varied. But by day there was always a different and, as it seemed, a more lovely display of rounded, parti-colored, cleared hills, which here and there were darklier streaked, no doubt with orchards. Beyond them many flat-topped mountains showed, yet farther to the west, like a sleeping herd of gigantic blue crocodiles all couched across the west and facing north. And above so much terrestrial graciousness moved an incessant pageant of clouds, not a bit like the flat clouds which you looked up at from Lichfield, because the clouds which brooded over Antan were seen, from Gerald’s station upon Mispec Moor, as on a level with you: and, when they were thus considered sidewise, they resembled moving walls and crags and drifting curtains through which the sunlight smote in slanting and huge and pallid and quite tangible looking shafts.

Always, too, you noticed, nowadays, that vast and violet-shrouded, high-breasted woman’s figure lying yonder, motionless, with that ever-burning heart; and you were visited by an odd fancy. You fancied that Queen Freydis, the as yet unwon-to queen of your appointed kingdom, was like that woman. And this fancy came to you none the less often because of your plain perception of its illogic.

“Come, now!” said Gerald, “a mistress of that size would be unsuitable. Charms of so diffuse an acreage would create, even in a god, a sense of inadequacy. Nevertheless, I am falling rather ardently in love with those two hills. I begin to adore the casual play of lights and shadows upon yonder piled-up dirt, which when seen from any other station than this would not in the least resemble a woman. And such amorous notions, apart from their insanity, are not befitting in a contentedly, if temporarily, married person.”

The transience of his comforts made them very dear. It was well worth the inconvenience of sleeping in his spectacles (as Gerald, for his own reasons, did) so that in the night season he could awaken, to see Maya’s tranquil brown head yonder beside the smaller and tousled and livelily red head of Theodorick Quentin Musgrave,—both visible yonder because of the lamp which the child demanded at night, and because of his insistence that Mother was to sleep with him instead of with Father.

Outside, Gerald would hear those of his transformed predecessors who now were horses, shuffling and restively stamping, and at times snorting and whinnying, in the chill outer darkness; or a misguided gentleman who lived nowadays as a steer would low, much farther off; or Gerald would hear yet another one of Maya’s former husbands coughing, with the far-reaching and morose scornfulness peculiar to a sheep. And then the difference between the estate of Gerald’s predecessors and the snug warmth of his so comfortable soft bed, and his knowledge of that unmarred bodily ease which, just now, was his through every hour of the day, would trouble Gerald, because he knew it all to be so satisfying and so transient.