Chapter XII: Part TEN: The Book of Endings

“Trust Nobody but Thyself, and
None Other will Betray Thee.”

38.
About the Past of a Bishop

SO GERALD stayed content enough, all through those pleasant summer days. It was odd to reflect that these days were counting as he did not know how many years in Lichfield. He would now and then contrast himself with his great ancestor Dom Manuel, the same about whom, in that quaint far-off time when Gerald had believed himself merely human, and was interested in such human nonsense, Gerald had intended to write a romance,—because the Redeemer of Poictesme, as Gerald remembered it, had passed a month with the wood demon Béda, in the forest of Dun Vlechlan, where the company consisted entirely of evil principles, and where the passing of each day left Manuel a year older.

Gerald would reflect how much more sensible and pleasant was the course which he was following, surrounded with every domestic virtue, where the days did not count at all. For Gerald was content, and certainly he had grown no older in body. He had become used to living upon Mispec Moor: he wondered sometimes if Antan could afford any splendor which he personally would find more to his taste; and he felt that he would honestly miss the simple wholesome ways of Maya’s log and plaster cottage after he had entered forever into the red-pillared palace of his kingdom beyond good and evil,—next week, perhaps, or at all events not later than September.

And it stayed diverting to observe those persons who almost every day passed beyond Mispec Moor in their journeying toward the goal of all the gods of men. Then by and by one of these wayfarers turned out to be a stalwart, white-bearded old gentleman dressed as a bishop. And the sight of him delighted Gerald: for here at last was somebody who could properly christen Theodorick Quentin Musgrave.

Meanwhile this traveler was asking hospitality of Maya. She, who disliked travelers, prepared the white and tender flesh of a calf, she kneaded cakes of fine meal and baked them upon the hearth, she fetched milk and butter. All these she set before the seeming bishop upon the front porch of her cottage quite affably. For this old gentleman, it appeared, had known Maya of the Fair Breasts a great while ago, at the very beginning of a career confessedly so populous in husbands that Gerald always felt a certain delicacy in asking questions about it.

“But there was never any reasoning with you, my dear,” said the old gentleman, as they all ate amicably together upon the porch. “So you eluded my purpose, and you preferred to content that first man of yours for his loss of the over-wilful beauty and the rebellious wisdom of your predecessor—”

Maya replied: “I do wish you would try just one more of those cakes, for I made them myself, exactly as you used to like them in the plains of Mamrê, when you were up to your nonsense with Sarah. Yes, I believe that a girl, a really nice girl, that is, should keep her caresses for her husband. Oh, I am casting no reflections upon either of your sweethearts. It is a matter every woman must decide for herself. I merely say that, for my part, I think a love-affair with a god while he is still in power is ostentatious and can only end in unhappiness—”

“But—!” Gerald had begun indignantly.

She patted his hand. “No, Gerald, I did not mean you. Your power is limitless, and you are quite different from all other gods, and nobody knows that better than I do. So please do not start any pouting while we have company! He thinks that he is a god, too,” Maya then stated, casually, to her visitor. “That is why his feelings are upset. He believes he is the Fair-haired Hoodoo, the Yelper and the Pretender, or something of that sort. As for that woman, Adam was very lucky to get rid of her.”

“I wonder,” said the white-bearded gentleman, smiling reminiscently, “I wonder if he always thought so?”

“My dear old friend! but you and I know quite well what the creatures are! Of course he cherished the memory of her for the rest of his life, long after the worthless piece had gone, just literally, to the devil. She was not bad looking: that much, anyhow, one can say in her favor: and so the poor fellow had always his memories of that beauty which he had known, once. He used to say it was too lovely to be retained by any man. And I agreed with him. No man had the least chance, with infernal connoisseurs about.... And his sons,” said Maya, as she reflectively scratched at her nose, “have, somehow, all preserved that memory. There is no one of them but now and then finds my daughters rather inadequate, and half remembers that woman and gets lackadaisical over her. It is just another thing about the creatures which my daughters have to put up with.”

“She too is yonder, they tell me,”—and the old gentleman nodded toward Antan. Then he continued: “And I suspect there is no one of your daughters but is jealous of this ever-living memory of that Lilith who stays always the first, never quite forgotten love of every son of Adam; and who prevents more of them than you would care to acknowledge, my dear, from ever utterly giving over their hearts to any of your daughters.”

“We are jealous, within limits,” Maya replied, in the while that she hospitably refilled his glass with fresh milk. “No woman likes playing second fiddle, even in the moonstruck brain of a poet. Yet my daughters know it does no real harm. And if men were not up to something, they would be up to something else. Besides, it gives them their nonsense to be romantic over in private, without pestering their poor sweethearts, and their wives too at first, to be romantic along with them, which is a thing no nice woman really feels comfortable about—”

But the old gentleman had sighed. “You touch upon a somewhat harrowing subject. For I fancy that no other luckless being has ever had to cater to the shifting needs of popular romance so arduously or so variously as I.”

And Maya now was beaming upon him quite fondly. “Yes, but how clever you have been about it! In fact, I suppose that nobody anywhere has ever had a more wonderful career than yours. And it seems only yesterday—does it not?—that we were all young together in the Garden, and your reputation was merely local. But you Jews are so adaptable!”

“I was not even a Jew, my dear, to begin with. Perhaps that is why I never quite got on with them. I was a storm deity of the Midianites. But the Jews kidnapped me, in some way or another, when I was just a godling playing happily with my thunderbolts upon the flanks of Sinai.”

“Even so, when I think of what a position you have attained in the best Christian circles, and of the perfect respectability of the church to which you now belong, and of all the splendid poetry you have inspired, and of how generally famous you have become everywhere, I am wholly proud that you once, when we were both younger”—and Gerald saw that Maya had colored up rather prettily,—“had other plans for me.”

“You,” said the old gentleman,—who, as Gerald now observed, was really quite Jewish looking,—“were the first of my disappointments. Yes, I suppose that in many respects my career has been unusual. Yet it has ended by placing me in a most awkward position: and nothing ever turned out in accordance with my plans, somehow.”

Then the stalwart, white-bearded old gentleman who was dressed as a bishop spoke of his first family, and of how his descendants through a son named Isaac went astray. He spoke of his efforts to retain the affection of his family, through the vigorous methods appropriate to a storm god. But nothing had seemed to avail. There had been fine plagues and deluges and captivities and decimations and devastating miracles by the score. He had sent the swords of Babylon and of Philistia and of dozens of other kingdoms to slay them, and huge dogs to tear their corpses, and many birds of prey and all the wild beasts of earth to devour and to destroy them, without arousing one ray of real affection. He had laid waste their cities; he had made their widows as the sands of the sea; he had starved them, and had smitten them with leprosy, and had burned them with lightnings; he had afflicted them with the most voluble and pessimistic prophets: he had, in a word, done absolutely everything he could think of as likely to requicken their waning affection. But the more he annoyed his descendants, the less they had seemed really to love him. Upon the heels of every warning, and immediately after each paternal correction, the survivors of it seemed only the more inclined to prefer some other patron: and it was all very discouraging.

And of his second son he spoke also. Here he became remarkably vague, and he talked as if muddled by the whole affair. There had been a great sacrifice and an atonement, the workings of which the old gentleman could not pretend to understand. He could not yet say just who had been put in a more amiable frame of mind by that atonement, since personally he imagined any father would have found it most distasteful and upsetting. Anyhow, the affair had resulted in a church with which he had felt it rather his duty to associate himself. And, awkwardly enough, after he had thus been persuaded by them formally to commit himself to a policy of peace and forgiveness and general loving-kindness, his incomprehensible servants had gone on squabbling and murdering, only much more often than before, because now they did it on high moral grounds. They had fought over transubstantiation, and over Greek diphthongs, and over the respective merits of complete and frontal baptism, and over infant damnation, and over redemption through faith alone, and over a number of other recondite matters which no Arabian storm god, very simply reared in the country during the really formative years of his life, and with no regular academic training, could well be expected to understand: and it was all very discouraging.

Nor to-day was his position much happier. He found himself ranked rather high in the church with which he was associated professionally. Yes, the old gentleman admitted, with plain bewilderment, his name was honored. But all his actions—even such quite notable actions as holding a conference with his disciples in a fiery furnace, and affording his messengers inter-urban transportation by means of a whale, and of causing the sun itself to stand still,—all these fine exploits, along with his every natural exhibition of the irascibility and truculence appropriate to a storm god, had been reduced to poetic inventions. His very existence had been complicated with a triplicity which, since the mind could not grasp it, prevented his existence from being, actually, believed in by anybody. That had seemed, from the first moment he heard of it, a doctrine a bit difficult for him personally to accept, after having been an undivided deity in regular practice for so many thousands of years. And eighteen centuries of pondering upon that doctrine of his triune nature, to which he was through his official position committed, had showed a matter so abstruse and puzzling to be far beyond the comprehension of any country-bred Arabian storm god, howsoever faithfully he had broadened his mind, at the courts of various Christian monarchs and in the larger nunneries, since the commencement of his religious training among the farming element of Seir and Sinai. Nor could he honestly say that he had ever been able to take quite kindly to the notion that his being was confessedly a mystery not to be understood by prelates graduated from the best seminaries, and that his actions were all poetic inventions. For that left of him, so far as could be seen by a plain-thinking Arabian storm god, nothing which the human mind could grasp as an actuality; it made every one of his really thorough-going servants who accepted utterly the teachings of his church, so far as he could infer, a devotee of vacuousness: and it was all very discouraging.

“Altogether,” said the old gentleman who was dressed as a bishop, “I feel that my present ranking in the Christian church is a perplexing and, in some sense, a false position for an Arabian storm god. I have aged under it. Oh, I have tried to be quite fair about the matter. Sometimes I even go so far as to concede that people who have never met a particular person might, just possibly, believe that person to be three persons whose actions were all poetic inventions. The human imagination is vigorous. I must point out to you, though, my friends, that nobody could conceivably believe that about himself. These very curious theories about me thus postulate the existence of at least one sceptic, and they hinge indeed upon the existence of that sceptic, in me. Now, I feel instinctively there must be an error in any such logic. I feel it unfair that I alone of all the persons connected with my church should be inevitably doomed to remain an atheist. And I have aged steadily under the injustice and unreason of it all. Otherwise, if I yet retained the vigor of my youth, I might yet, in my frank way, attempt to clean the slate, as it were, with whirlwinds and thunderbolts and another deluge or so, and to make a fresh start all around. But, alas, I have aged, my dear Havvah, since the days of our first acquaintance. The inexplicable theology and the rationalization, as they call it, to which I have been subjected by my incomprehensible servants, now for some eighteen centuries with ever increasing rigor, have brought me to the point that I cannot logically believe in my own existence. The things they tell me simply do not hold together. And so—”

He comprehensively waved his hand toward Antan.

But Gerald rose, and Gerald put aside his glass of milk and his veal sandwich.

And Gerald said, beamingly: “You who have traveled through the Marches of Antan, wherein only two truths endure, and the one teaching is that we copulate and die,—you at least, I know, must, as a leading official of the Protestant Episcopal church, look confidently forward to finding in the goal of all the gods a third truth. The fact emboldens me to ask that you do but answer me this very simple question—”

“Alas, my friend,” the badgered looking old gentleman broke in, “professionally, of course, my faith is all that it should be. But in my private capacity, as a plain-thinking Arabian storm god, now that I am retiring from active churchwork, I suspect that when anybody anywhere once understands the nature of any two truths, that will be quite time enough for him to be requiring a third truth to exercise his wits upon.”

“That truism, sir, is not to be denied,” said Gerald, rather crestfallen. “Yet that is likewise an evasion.”

“In fact,” said the bewildered old gentleman, shaking sadly his white head, “in fact, ever since I acquired triplicity, I have been accused of duplicity also. The Gnostics, I remember, said very unkind things about that: the Valentinians were no more charitable: whereas I would really hesitate to repeat, my friends, the remarks of the Priscillianists.”

“—And in any case,” Gerald said, emphatically, “howsoever you may evade me, it would not do for you to evade your duties to the Protestant Episcopal church. The world as yet has need of bishops and of all that they signify. I must point out to you, sir, that the wild talking of bishops yet frightens many persons into a thrifty-minded practice of generally beneficent virtues. Indeed, sir, bishops remind me rather of calomel in the effect which they have upon the run of men, because I find their effect also to be, ultimately, beneficial. There are also other points of resemblance. And if the strange ways of episcopal action now and then unavoidably upset you, sir, you ought to remember that it is, after all, for the general good. I, moreover, must point out that it absolutely would not do for you to go into Antan and be one of my subjects—”

“He thinks,” Maya once more explained, parenthetically, to her guest, “that he is a god, you understand.”

“But I am!” said Gerald. “These continual interruptions are really very awkward, my dear. And the present situation also is awkward, in view of my Protestant Episcopal upbringing. It is a situation which must at any cost be avoided. This gentleman simply must not go into Antan.”

“But what is to be done about it?”

“Oh, do you not be uneasy! Your age, sir, and its attendant delusions, such as wanting to go into Antan, are matters quite easily remedied by any competent Dirghic deity. You could not possibly have pursued a wiser course than to come to me for assistance. So, if you will permit me, sir—”

Thereafter Gerald, still in something of a flutter, baptized the old gentleman who was dressed as a bishop with the last remaining drop of water from the Churning of the Ocean.

39.
Baptism of a Musgrave

FORTHWITH the old white-bearded gentleman became a most personable looking youngish Oriental, who shone with a fiery radiance, and about whose head played a continual flashing like small lightnings. And he said, approvingly:

“That is a fine magic which has restored to me my youth and the vigorousness I had in Midian before I was kidnapped by those stiff-necked and unaffectionate Jews.”

“And will you now be going into Antan?” asked Gerald, rather anxiously.

“Not yet, my friend,” replied the merry, strong, young Arabian storm god. “Oh, very certainly, not yet! No, I have had quite enough of my illogical position as a Christian and of the worries of being rationalized by incomprehensible foreigners. I shall thankfully return to my Midianites and to my little shrines upon Seir and Sinai and Horeb, and to the quiet living of a local godling. I shall be hearing again my own people’s sane and intelligible prayers for rain, and I shall be snuffing up the smoke of such rational offerings as kids and goats and an occasional prisoner of war, just as I used to do, where I was given due credit for my actions, and where you heard no unpleasant personal scandal circulated about my being triplets. In the meanwhile, my benefactor, is there not any favor which, in my turn, I can do you?”

“Indeed, my dear sir,” Gerald answered, harking back to that worriment which in a neighborhood so full of sorcerers and wizards stayed always in the rear of Gerald’s mind, “there is a small one, now you mention it. For we have a boy, as you perceive. And it occurs to me that this is the first chance to have Theodorick Quentin Musgrave properly christened according to the rites of the Protestant Episcopal church—”

The storm god asked of Gerald, in good-humored surprise. “But do I now look to you much like an Episcopalian clergyman?”

“Well, sir, I admit the situation is perplexing. Nevertheless, you remain, so far as I can see, one of the three official heads of the Christian church, in every denomination. And as such, you must be wholly competent to administer the sacred rites of that baptism to which we Musgraves are accustomed.”

He who had been a bishop laughed again. For an instant he glanced sidewise at Maya, rather impishly. Then the god called to him Theodorick Quentin Musgrave.

The boy came forward without speaking. There had never been any dearer brat since time began, Gerald reflected, than was this sturdy droll red-headed jackanapes who waited there holding his small chin well up in order to look with politely puzzled interest at the storm god’s glittering face and the tiny lightnings which played about it. Gerald was abeam with the most fatuous sort of pride in Theodorick’s perfect behavior. Gerald glowed all over, now that awkward matter of the boy’s christening was being at last attended to, by the very highest authority. And Gerald nodded smilingly and with some inconsequence at his dear stupid Maya, so that she too might note how splendidly Theodorick was behaving. The boy was displaying the composure and the excellent manners of a true Musgrave.

Then the storm god dipped his fingers in his unfinished glass of milk, and upon Theodorick’s lifted forehead he drew a sign. Gerald was not wholly certain, afterward, that it was the sign of a cross.

“This is another sort of baptism than that which restored my youth. For youth this child already has,—to every seeming,” the god said, a bit unaccountably. “Therefore I now release this child whom I did not create, I release him from the bondage of the woman and of the Adversary who caused him to live upon this earth. I decree a forgiveness for the seven crimes. I cry a remission of the seven punishments.”

“I must say, though, you have been long enough about it,” Maya placidly observed....

As for Gerald, now that the ceremony was over, he was unaffectedly hugging Theodorick, and telling him that he was far too big a boy to be kissing people, and the vaguely puzzled, clinging child was asking, But who started it, Father?...

And the storm god was saying to Maya, “Do you forget, my dear Havvah, that it is from your service I am releasing him?”

She answered, still quite placidly: “So far as that goes, the imp has well earned a holiday; and it is not as if I were dependent upon him. No, but I confess to wondering—and not for the first time, either,—just what you may be up to.”

40.
On the Turn of a Leaf

SO THE Oriental storm god went back into the world of everyday, to look for his old shrines upon Sinai and Horeb: and Gerald was happily rid of a future subject whom, he could not but feel, it would have been a bit awkward to have as a subject. And the evening passed tranquilly, although it seemed to Gerald that Theodorick was rather moody and quiet after his christening.

But it was not until the next day that Theodorick, just after breakfast, spoke with a voice which seemed to Gerald not quite the voice of a child: and Theodorick told his parents he wanted to go down into Antan.

Gerald was troubled. Yet he suggested, with very careful levity, “If—?”

“If you please,” the but half-smiling, ugly, so dear brat now added, docilely.

“Why, it must be as your father says,” Maya replied. She had paused in her sweeping off of the porch, and for a moment she held the broom slantwise as she meditated over the boy’s notion. “But, for one, I see no great harm in your having a little outing, for I will put a protection on you. Only, you must promise to be back in good time to have your face and hands washed for supper.”

Gerald said forlornly, “But what are those small yellow things you are sweeping from the porch, my dear?”

“They are fallen leaves from a sycamore-tree, left here last night by that wind, Gerald: and I really do wish you would not ask such silly questions, when I was talking about something quite different.”

“But that means summer is ending, Maya. It means an end of all growing. It means that not anything now will become any larger or more lovely.”

“Upon my word, but I never did hear of any such nonsense as you do talk sometimes, for a grown man, Gerald, as if summer did not always end!”

“That is it, precisely. It always ends: and the warmth and comfort of it perish. Yes, there is death in the air. I do not find that cheering. And that is all, my darling.”

“Why, then, Gerald, if you are quite through with that up-in-the-air sort of talking—which may be very deep and clever indeed, only I happen not to understand it, and certainly have no wish to,—why, then, I was asking you about something entirely different.”

“Oh, yes, you were speaking of Theodorick! Well, boys do get restless without any playmates, I suppose. I will talk to him about his notion while you are making up the beds.”

Nothing could have been more prosaic. Yet Gerald was troubled. He could hear Maya inside the cottage, already thumping at the pillows. All about him seemed matter of fact, and comfortable, and familiar, and stable. And yet everything, as he somehow knew, was about to change. There awoke in him as yet no real unhappiness, but just a faint uneasiness mixed with resentment, now that he noted the fall of the first leaf in autumn, and knew he was powerless to stay the beginning change in everything about his small, snug home.

41.
Child of All Fathers

THEN Gerald followed the child down to the roadside. And they talked together under the chestnut-tree, just where Gerald had talked with so many strange beings who had passed beyond Mispec Moor in that continuous journeying toward Antan.

First Gerald performed that needful rite which would reveal the truth. The child watched quietly. By and by Theodorick began to smile. But he said never a word until his father was through with these droll doings.

Then Gerald questioned his small son. Theodorick replied. The appearance of a little child still sat there, and the soft red lips of a child were moving, but that curious tongue which was like a small white serpent was speaking about matters never known to any child.

No one of Gerald’s excursions into the darker magics had prepared him for what was now in part revealed. Something of the spaces outside the world apparent to human senses Gerald knew, and of the realms beyond Earth’s orbit he, as a former student of magic, was not ignorant. But now he understood from what remote abyss his wife had drawn the being which seemed his child: a bit unwillingly, he could even surmise with what kind of enchantments Maya had fetched this seeming into the happier superficial world which is apparent to human senses.

And Gerald was moved: he was, as so many husbands have been, before and since, now almost frightened by this glimpse of the unswerving and whole-hearted and unscrupulous love which women nourish for that man whom marriage has given them to look after. He was not worthy, he contritely felt, of being thus idolized and of being coddled at the fearful price of such unearthly indiscretions. And Gerald was sincerely touched, now that he comprehended to what lengths Maya had gone to gratify his whim of wanting a son, out of hand. She had warned him, too, that he was contriving for himself grief. Yes, her womanly intuition had, somehow, foreseen that to which all his cleverness had been blind. And yet, even so, Maya had not denied him his desire, because poor Maya pampered him in everything, to the accompaniment of a commentary howsoever tart.

And Gerald thought too of how, a moment since, his worst dread had been that the boy was an illusion. He looked at his beloved son, knowing now what inhabited that freckled and droll, sturdy little body. The boy had of a sudden become strange; he was now a threat of unimaginable danger, and a creature worse than evil: yet Gerald knew, with a dull wonder, that he loved Theodorick Quentin Musgrave even now....

Gerald by and by put yet another question to this dreadful parody of a child’s innocence and helplessness, to the being whom Gerald invoked as Abdel-Hareth.

“But I have served her purpose,—my father,” the child replied, with a rather perturbing smile. “Oh, but I know! She has had many husbands. Most of them desired a son. I have always been that son.”

Then, after an instant of silence, the being who was speaking through the child’s dear lips told of the bonds from which the Midianite storm god’s touch and absolution had released him. Gerald found this part of the story particularly unpleasant. And Theodorick Quentin Musgrave, whom Gerald still addressed as Abdel-Hareth, went on to tell why he must now go downward into Antan, to encounter, not the Master Philologist, but Queen Freydis.

Gerald asked, What was needed of Queen Freydis? The child told him. Then Gerald shivered. He felt, if only for the instant, physically cold and nauseated. Still, that this creature should desire to return to its unearthly home was natural enough.

“I comprehend,” said Gerald. “I comprehend a great deal which was unknown to me ten minutes ago. I confess to being surprised by much that I have learned from you. Nevertheless, my son,—if you will pardon the force of habit, sir, and the love I had for my own little, so dear son—! But I drift into emotional remarks which would be wholly out of place. My voice, as I note with sincere regret, evinces a distressing tendency—”

Gerald paused. He gulped. He spoke now in a voice that was light and high-pitched and rather hysterical.

“In fine, my dear Abdel-Hareth, as you see, I incline somewhat to blubber like a badly whipped baby. I can but ask you to respect the emotions of a suddenly bereaved parent, without bothering to understand his confused utterances. No: you have given me my desire, and my great happiness. A part of that dies now. But I have had it, utterly. I am content. I will see to it that you, in your turn, sir, get what you desire.”

42.
Theodorick Rides Forth

IT WAS after using his handkerchief a bit that Gerald returned to Maya. Nor did it surprise him she had already prepared a neatly wrapped up lunch for Theodorick Quentin Musgrave to be eating that day in Antan.

Gerald said, with painstaking carelessness, “Well, my dear, after talking the matter over, I have decided we may as well let the boy go.”

“Why, to be sure!” said Maya. “And a great deal of bother, too, there has been made this morning over nothing, as if I did not already have quite enough to bother me!”

And with that, she summoned from among her enchanted geldings the handsomer of the pair who formerly had been emperors.

“For a child of mine must go in proper state,” said Maya.

Then Gerald said: “No. An imperial steed is well enough, but a divine steed is better. Let him take Kalki!”

“Now, really, Gerald, your unreasonableness sometimes surprises even me! For you know perfectly well that Kalki is your own horse, and that you will be needing him yourself when you ride down to the appointed kingdom you are always talking your stuff and nonsense about.”

Gerald looked at her for some while. He was conscious of a hushed great exultation that in a world wherein all else seemed doubtful and unstable he had, somehow, through blind luck, won to his Maya and her snappishness and her unswerving and whole-hearted and quite unscrupulous love for him. She was not pretty, she was not brilliant, she was not even easy to live with. But Gerald knew now that he and this woman were one person; and that any living without Maya would be a maimed business; and that there could be nothing in Antan which could conceivably content him for the loss of this dear, ever-wrangling, dull-witted woman.

Then Gerald said: “But it is prophesied that the power of Antan shall pass to the rider upon Kalki. No harm can befall the rider upon Kalki. So we will let—we will let our son take Kalki. For in this way we will secure his protection, and we will remove the one chance of my ever leaving you, who are worth all the kingdoms that have ever been.”

Maya said, “But—”

Gerald, smiling, replied, “Nevertheless!”

Then the illusion called Theodorick Quentin Musgrave was lifted up by Gerald to the back of Kalki, and it was Gerald who adjusted the stirrups for his successor upon the divine steed. And the seeming of a child rode down toward the goal of all the gods, a rather quaintly pathetic little figure perched up there so high upon the back of the huge shining stallion.

Gerald watched the two pass out of his sight. His arms lifted after them ever so slightly. His arms seemed to ache as he recalled the feel of that small body and the warmth and yieldingness of it, which were now lost forever. Theodorick Quentin Musgrave was only an illusion contrived by forces which it was not comfortable to think about. Gerald knew that now with certainty. And it did not matter. Nor did it cheer him to reflect—as he did,—that he was in no worse case than all other fathers, no one of whom might ever retain the child that was little and helpless, and was loved for no reason at all, as nobody could quite love the hobbledehoy thumping schoolboy or even the estimable young man into whom that warm and yielding, sturdy, so small body might develop....

Then Gerald turned to Maya. “I have only you. But that which I have suffices me. I have been lucky, O my dearest, very far beyond my merits.”

She was regarding him with a sort of troubled fondness; and her speech now was hardly snappish at all. “You really are, my poor Gerald, quite too ridiculous about the child! You talk, you actually do talk, as though he were not ever coming back,—and in good time for supper, too, unless he wants a spanking.”

At that, Gerald raised a protesting hand. “Do you not trick me into optimism, also! Too much ambition and high dreams and that which was perhaps divine have now departed forever. The illusion which you created to be our son has departed, forever. But use and wont and a great deal of honest love remain. I do not say these things are heroic. I do say that these suffice. So do you let the strong bonds which are about me content you, my darling, without wreathing them in the paper flowers of optimism.”

“But are you, also,” Maya said, “content?”

Gerald answered: “I am well content. Day in, day out, let there be between us faith, and aid, and a great fondness, O my dear, and no parting! For I am content and very contrite. I know that any life without you would be a maimed business. I know that I desire only to continue in our quiet way of living upon Mispec Moor. For the middle way of life is best. What need have I to be a god or to be seeking unfamiliar places so that I may rule over them? That way is troubled, and too full of noise and striving. It is better to be content. It is better to be content with the dear, common happenings of human life, shared loyally with the one woman whose love for you is limitless and does not change, for all that it is blind to none of your failings; and to know that these things are enough and very far beyond your deserts; and not to be insanely hankering after any more high-hearted manner of living which is out of your reach or, at any rate, is attained through more trouble than it is probably worth. Ah, yes, the middle way of life is best.”

“At least it is some comfort,” Maya said, “to hear you talking almost sensibly.”

Then she reached up, still with a grave and rather tender smiling upon her beloved, homely face; and she took away from Gerald’s eyes the rose-colored spectacles.

“In fact,” said a male voice, “the woman’s task is ended.”

43.
Economics of Redemption

FOR now had come to them, traveling back from Antan, the brown man. This brown man came, he said, to summon Maya to her appointed task of transforming yet other men into domestic animals.

“—For women,” he said, also, “have always their fond task and their beneficent labor. Here, I repeat, the woman’s task is ended. But yonder many men go untamed and unbroken to the sane ways of compromise.”

Then Maya a bit absent-mindedly assented, as she put away those spectacles of hers for future use, that, in point of fact, she supposed she had done everything that was actually necessary in Gerald’s case, although nobody ever would really know what a trial he had been to her.

And Gerald for one instant looked at his wife. He found in his wife’s face that which it is the doom of most husbands to find there at one time or another. And it caused Gerald to laugh a little.

“Nevertheless,” Gerald said, quietly, “I am Fair-haired Hoo, the Helper and the Preserver, the Well-beloved of Heavenly Ones. I am Lord of the Third Truth, in this world which knows of only two truths and of the compromises which they beget.”

The brown man greeted that with a thin smile. “You have been long expected. Oh, very long have scepticism and despair, with somewhat varying voices, invoked your name, saying, ‘Who will overthrow the Master Philologist!’”

“Well, and now,” said Gerald, with the outline of a swagger, for he was getting himself more in hand, “now that prophecy is about to be fulfilled, for I am Hoo, and none other.”

“But, really, friend, I do not see how you can be an interrogative pronoun.”

“To a god, and more particularly to a Dirghic god, all incarnations are possible. There is no reason whatever why I should not be an interrogative pronoun. It is merely a matter of divine election.”

And the brown man civilly inclined his grave brown head, as he remarked:

“Do you have it your own way! Indeed, my people have very often derived their deities from less promising locations than the pages of a grammar. And upon the whole, your epiphany is most gratifying. For I try to keep my people content: yet it has been lamented, from the beginning, that no mythology revealed a god who might answer that word which the Master Philologist speaks to all the gods of men. And so, between despair and scepticism, those of my people who were so unwise as to exercise their minds in fields wherein thinking does not make for happiness, have very long been saying, ‘Who will redeem the goal of all the gods of men from the Master Philologist?’ Now it appears that this word also has become flesh; and that this interrogative pronoun Who? stands here before us. Yes, I consider that quite gratifying; for it is desirable that the sceptical and the despairing also should be contented, by being justified in their faith.”

“You quibble,” Gerald replied, “you quibble very tediously and frivolously, in the divine presence of a god who is about to take over his appointed kingdom, and to make known that Third Truth which is not known upon Mispec Moor, where the one teaching is that we copulate and die.”

“But uncelestial common-sense has always been my failing. So I must tell you, friend, that it seems to me, now that you have abandoned the Redeemer’s steed to a small freckled illusion, Antan has nothing to expect even from the mysterious awfulness of an interrogative pronoun. And yet, for one, I abandoned the place when your dwarfed deputy approached it—”

“And you acted wisely, sir,” Gerald replied, with simple dignity. “No matter how potent may be the impious sorceries of the Master Philologist, a child has entered into his domain, fearing nothing and loving all. The fact that the powers of evil cannot prevail against this conjunction is well known to every citizen of the United States of America.”

But the brown man still seemed rather moody. “I cannot say.... No, you and my friend Jahveh have, between you, loosed against Antan a power which is not of my kingdom. I therefore do not pretend to say what may come of the experiment. I merely await with lively interest, and at a reassuring distance, the upshot of this experiment, now that—of all the beings from beyond Earth’s orbit,—Abdel-Hareth has been deputed to ride upon the Redeemer’s steed.”

“And, in any case, it is always very certain, dearie,” Maya said, “that no real comfort can ever come of such foolish notions as I have ridded you of a little by a little. And in exchange for those toplofty dreams, I have trusted you as far as seemed expedient, and I have given you all that was really good for you. I have given you a season of content and every wholesome joy of domesticity now for some thirty years of mortal time. No man gets more from life, my poor dearie. None attempts to get more without ending in disappointment and discontent: and so no sane man tries to get any more than you have had. And the end finds even the most wise and reasonable son of Adam—though, to be sure, that is not saying much,—if he but lives rationally enough to survive all thirty of those quiet happy years, with a wife who is just as I am, whatever she may have seemed to begin with.”

Gerald saw, without any grief or horror, that he had now lost both his child and his wife. For Maya had become old. She was again the shrivelled and wrinkled creature, red and inflamed and hideous among her tousled tresses, that he had first found upon Mispec Moor. And fleetingly he reflected that she spoke the truth: all women, howsoever dear and beautiful, did become like that, provided they did not first die and become even more repulsive carrion.... But Gerald lacked time to discuss these generalities just now: for he had been looking toward Antan....

“To this chatter about domesticity and pessimism and content,” Gerald replied sternly, “I answer that the Well-beloved of Heavenly Ones is above all aphorisms. I answer that I am Hoo, the Lord of that Third Truth whose nature is unknown to you. Now that Third Truth is loosed. Do you look now upon Antan!”

The woman and the Adversary had turned when Gerald pointed, quite as majestically as though he knew just what he was talking about. In the midst of Antan they could see, as Gerald had already seen, a flaring green flame. Now this great flaming sunk earthward, much as the waters of a fountain descend; the flame spread evenly to every side, sweeping outward in an ever-widening circle; and now this flaming was no longer green, but red and glowing. You saw this flood of fire pass equably and swiftly, surging outward toward the horizon, where at once the mountains collapsed and disappeared. All that remained was flat and black and bare. Antan no longer existed.

It was from such a miracle that the woman and the Adversary looked back toward Gerald, with every sign of sincere respect.

And Gerald’s bewilderment was rather more profound than theirs. He could surmise only that the dreadful being to whom he had given Kalki had held to its plan, as voiced by the lips of a child, and had loosed elemental fires of a nature incomprehensible to Gerald, since they were drawn from beyond Earth’s orbit. Yet that seemed to Gerald no real reason for marring a fine attitude or for failing to preserve his self-respect before the woman and the Adversary. Tricked he might have been: that was a wholly different thing from ever admitting that he had been tricked. Gerald knew at least that the illusion which had appeared to be his son had entered the perhaps equally illusory place where Gerald now might never enter; and that, whatever had befallen the best loved but one of his illusions, the rider upon the silver stallion had destroyed Antan. And it seemed obvious, too, that Abdel-Hareth had returned homeward....

Therefore Gerald claimed with a clear conscience the miracle which Gerald had, in fact, actually performed, at one remove. And Gerald kept his long chin, resolutely, well up....

“So that,” observed the brown man, quietly, “that is the end of Antan. I do not complain.”

“I had forgotten,” then said the wrinkled old woman who had been Maya of the Fair Breasts, “I had forgotten how wilful is that Abdel-Hareth who got his being upon Earth from me. Something of this sort was to be looked for, the first moment that the headstrong wretch was freed from my control. Still, Jahveh has gained less than we have gained through Jahveh’s meddling. Abdel-Hareth has served me even at the last by removing Antan from the horizon. Earth will be quieter now; and my daughters will not be so hard put to it to keep men in reasonable order.”

“I forget nothing,” the brown man remarked, drily. “And so I did not await the coming of your first-born in the likeness of a child whose fearless innocence surmounts all evil. For it was the seeming of a little child who rode up against Antan, you conceive, with every appearance of that faith against which the snares of no sorcerer and of hardly nine women in ten can prevail. Such innocence is a quite dangerous counterfeit. For one, I do not meddle with it nor with any other unearthly phenomenon. I have my realm. It suffices me.”

The woman asked, “But what, what, Janicot, do you suppose has happened?”

“How shall we ever know, dear Havvah, when manifestly there are no survivors of that happening? Antan, in any case, is no loss to us.”

Here Gerald broke in upon their talking; and Gerald shook at them his red head lordlily.

“You little creatures guess in vain at the means which I have employed. And equally in vain will you supplicate me to reveal those means. For I shall tell you nothing. It is sufficient that the Well-beloved of Heavenly Ones has accomplished the mission of his tenth incarnation with a thoroughness not customary in interrogative pronouns. I came to redeem my appointed kingdom from the rule of usurpers. I came as the Lord of that Third Truth which is unknown to those who teach only that we copulate and die. That Third Truth has been loosed. No, I shall tell you nothing of its nature, for you are not fit to comprehend the Third Truth. But the mightiness of it your own eyes have witnessed. So Antan is now redeemed—”

His voice broke here. But Gerald presently continued:

“Antan is now redeemed at a great price. That woman and that child to whom my heart was given have perished. I remain. I know that these two were illusions. Nevertheless, I remain. There is no bond upon the Lord of the Third Truth to be happy: there is a strong bond upon every Helper and Preserver not to evade the full discharge of his mission. What, you may ask of me, is the mission of the Lord of the Third Truth? And I will reply to you out of my divine wisdom. It is the mission of the Lord of the Third Truth, howsoever he may palter or struggle against his doom, to destroy that which he most loves.”

44.
Economics of Common-Sense

NOW Gerald sat with his head bowed. He heard a talking between the old woman who had been his Maya and the brown man who was the Adversary of all the gods of men.

“What is it men desire?” said the woman. “My daughters prepare for them fine food and drink, my daughters see to it that their homes are snug, and at the end of each day my daughters love them dutifully. All things that men can ask for, my daughters furnish them. Why need men cherish strange desires which do not know their aims? for how can any of my daughters content such desires?”

“I also marvel at the desires of men,” replied the Adversary. “I, too, am ready to accord whatsoever a man can ask for sensibly and in plain words. I, who am the Prince of this world, remain a generous and ever-indulgent monarch. I will to make my people happy. My curious opulence awaits at every hand to afford my subjects whatsoever they can ask. But men want more. They desire that which was never in my kingdom. They have followed after impalpable gods: they have been enamored of phantoms. They have believed that their desire was in Antan, in part because they did not know what was their desire, and in part because they did not know what was Antan. Yes, it is well that Antan has perished.”

“This world is well enough,” the woman said. “It is well to be born into this world of an ever-loving mother. It is well to be a young man in this world wherein one may follow after young women and be cherished by them. There is soft living in this world when you have come as near discretion as men ever get and have had the wit to find a wife to take care of you. And at the end it is well to fare out of this world quietly and incuriously, with a deft-handed woman to nurse you and to wash your body afterward. But men want more.”

“This world is very good. My kingdom is a wholly sufficing kingdom,” agreed the Adversary. “The wise man, as goes human wisdom, will be content with the inexhaustible goodness of those material things which all are mine. For the five senses are an endless comfort; the five senses are an endless store of anodynes. A man may purchase bodily ease and a drugged brain with his five senses. But men want more.”

“So they have passed beyond my daughters,” the woman said. “One by one, a many have passed, perversely and so lonely, from all my daughters could contrive to content them: and one by one a host of demented romantic men have struggled toward Antan, and toward what befalls all mortals and immortals there. Yes, it is very well that Antan has perished.”

“One by one,” said the Adversary, “they have derided my kingdom. They have followed after impalpable gods. These gods passed futilely. But they drew many of my subjects from me, all to be lost forever in that beguiling Antan.”

“Men are great fools, and my daughters can hardly hamper their folly. That which my daughters can do they perform willingly. But not all men could my daughters preserve from the madness which drew men toward Antan and into ruinous desires to judge the goal of every god. At last, Antan has fallen: it is very well.”

The Adversary said, more leniently: “Men are, beyond doubt, great fools. But they are my people; and those that I can save I save. Yet many evade me. And their dreaming troubles all my realm and me, too, they trouble now and then. But Antan has fallen: and after that foolishness at least my people will not be following any more.”

“The daughters of Eve are not troubled now and then, they are troubled at every moment, by the dreams of men. Such of these blundering men as fond and eternal laboring may save, my daughters win away from their toplofty dreams. But the work is hard; the work is endless; and our losses are many.”

And then the Adversary said: “We two who began in the Garden to contrive for the happiness of men, and to be speaking always for the real good of men,—yes, certainly, our work is hard and endless. For men stay romantically minded creatures who aspire beyond my kingdom. Yet we do not despair.”

45.
Farewell to All Fair Welfare

WHEN Gerald raised his head he was alone on the naked moor, for the brown man had departed, and Maya had gone away with the first of all her lovers, and her illusions had vanished, including the neat log and plaster cottage. And mists were creeping up from the ruined kingdom of Antan, in billows of ever-thickening gray which seemed to be the smoke from that great burning.

Then Gerald said:

“I have come out of my native home on a gain-less journeying with no profit in it: yet there has been pleasure in that journeying. I do not complain. Let every man that must journey, without ever knowing why, from the dark womb of his mother to the dark womb of his grave, take pattern by me!

“For all that every pleasure is departed from me, I have had pleasure. I do not grieve because I have gained nothing in my journeying. The great and best words of the Master Philologist stay unrevealed; that supreme word which was in the beginning, and which will be when all else has perished, I may not surmise: but I have played with many words which were rather pretty. In the art of magic which I chose to be my art I have performed no earth-shaking wonders, yet in small thaumaturgies I have had some hand. I did not ride the divine steed to my journey’s end: but a part of the way I rode quite royally.

“That which I heard of from afar I have not won to in my foiled journeying. So I now cry farewell to that Queen Freydis whom, I suspect, I might have loved with a great love if lesser women had not solicited me. I cry farewell to the Mirror of the Hidden Children in which, I believe, I might have found myself as I am, and might have come to knowledge of the Third Truth. And I cry farewell to Antan, to that never-won-to goal of all the gods which was, I think, my appointed kingdom. I have surmised high things. I have gained none of them. My doom has been a little doom. It contents me.

“I may well be content, because all that a man may hope for I have had, who have learned at least that the lot of a man is more sure than the lot of any god. For the deceit which you put upon me, O venerable and subtle Æsred, I cry out my gratitude. There was the seeming of a home and of a woman who loved and tended me and of a child. I may not speak of my love for these illusions. Now they have perished. But my memories remain: and they are more dear to me than is any real thing.

“All, all, is perished! It may be that I have offended the two truths which I did not esteem sufficiently august. And I who willed to be Lord of the Third Truth have found no third truth anywhere. I have found only comfortably colored illusions. But I am content with that which I have found here upon Mispec Moor.”

In the while that Gerald had been speaking, the mists rose thicker and thicker from destroyed Antan. He had noted in the while that he spoke how the first wavering thin billows crept tentatively up the hills and along the roadway, creeping upon the ground, and under the low-swinging tree branches, with, as it seemed, a pre-meditated furtiveness; and then, as if emboldened by finding the way unopposed, these mists had risen up from the ground, always swiftlier, until now they had eclipsed all. Gerald, now that he ended his talking, could see nothing palpable anywhere save the little patch of intermingled stone and grass immediately beneath his feet; and about him everywhere were the cool mists, lighted with a diffused gray radiancy which seemed to come from all sides.