Chapter VI: Part FOUR: The Book of Dersam

“What Has a Blind Man
to Do with Any Mirror?”

10.
Wives at Caer Omn

NOW Gerald mounted on the stallion Kalki, and Gerald traveled upon the way of gods and myths, down a valley of cedar-trees, into the realm of Glaum of the Haunting Eyes. The land of Dersam was already falling away into desolation, because of the disappearance of its liege-lord into mortal living. And at Caer Omn, which formerly had been the Sylan’s royal palace, and where Gerald got his breakfast, the three hundred and fifty-odd concubines of Glaum were about their cooking and cleaning and nursing, but the seven wives of Glaum sat together in a walled garden.

Six of these wives were young and comely, but the seventh seemed—to Gerald’s finding,—as wrinkled as a wet fishnet, and as old as envy.

By the half-dozen who retained their youth, however, Gerald was enraptured. As he looked from one of them to the other, each in her turn appeared so surpassingly lovely that she excelled all the other women his gaze had ever beheld.... But, no! Glaum was his benefactor. Glaum at this instant, in Lichfield, was toiling away at that unfinished romance about Dom Manuel of Poictesme which by and by was to make the name of Gerald Musgrave famous everywhere. It would, therefore, never do to encourage these so shapely and chromatically meritorious dears to follow out the dictates of womanly confidence and generosity to the point where they could bleat about it. No, to permit them all to deceive one husband would be an unfriendly and injudicious pleonasm, Gerald reflected. And Gerald sighed whole-heartedly.

The seven women had sighed earlier. “What else is now come to trouble us?” said the wives of the Sylan when Gerald came.

He answered them, with a great voice: “Ladies, I am Fair-haired Hoo, the Helper and the Preserver, the Lord of the Third Truth, the Well-beloved of Heavenly Ones. Yet, I pray you, do not be unduly alarmed by this revelation! I am not a ruthless deity, I deal fiercely with none save my misguided opponents. I, in a word, am he of whom it was prophesied that I, my dear ladies, or perhaps I ought to say that he—although, to be sure, it does not really matter which pronoun a strict grammarian would prefer, since in any case the meaning is unmistakable and very sublime,—would at his or at my appointed season appear, in unexampled and appropriate splendor, to reign over Antan, riding upon the silver stallion Kalki.”

But the wives of Glaum seemed unimpressed. “Your meaning, sir,” said one of them, “may be terrible, but certainly it is not plain.”

This wife had reddish golden hair, uncovered: she wore a blue gown, so fashioned that it left her right breast wholly uncovered also; and, doubtless for some sufficient purpose, she carried an iron candlestick with seven branches.

Gerald asked, with indignation tempered by her good looks: “And do you doubt my divine word? Do you dispute my Dirghic godhead?”

Another wife answered him, a glorious dark sultry creature in purple, who wore a semi-circular crown and had about the upper part of each bare arm two broad gold bands.

She said: “Why should we question that? Gods by the score and by the hundreds, gods in battalions, have passed through the land of Dersam, going downward toward Antan, to enter into well-earned rest after their long labors in this world.”

“Ah, so it appears that Antan is the heaven of all deserving gods, and that I am to rule a celestially populated kingdom well worthy of me!”

“We have not ever been to Antan. We thus know nothing of its customs. We know only that many gods have passed us, traveling upon all manner of steeds as they went down into Antan. Bes rode upon a cat, and Tlaloc upon a stag, and Siva upon a bull: we have seen Kali pass upon the back of a tiger: above our heads Zeus has gone by upon the back of an eagle, as he traveled abreast with Amen-Ra upon the back of a very large beetle. We therefore think it likely enough that you who pass upon this shining horse are yet another one of these gods. What are the gods to us, in this our season of unexampled trouble?”

Then the seven wives fell into a lamentation, and their complaining was that, since Glaum of the Haunting Eyes had left them, the sacred mirror reflected only the person who stood before it.

“And is not such the nature of all mirrors?” Gerald asked.

“Oh, sir,” replied the wife who carried a bunch of keys, and who wore that unaccountable tall bifurcated orange-colored headdress, “but until yesterday ours was the mirror which showed things as they ought to be.”

“And what did one discover in it?”

Now the old wife spoke. Her head was wrapped in a white turban; her face had no more color than has the belly of a fish; and a sprinkling of white hairs, so long that they had grown into spirals and half-circles, glittered upon her shaking chin. “To the aged, such as I have now become, the Mirror of Caer Omn reveals nothing any more: but to the young, such as we all were before Glaum left us, it was used to reveal that which may not be described.”

“Then why do you not place before it some young person—?”

“Alas, sir, but there is no longer any co-respondent youth in the mirror!”

The speaker was the brown-haired and alluringly plump wife who wore nothing at all anywhere, and whose delicious body had been depilated in every needful place.

Then the seven wives of Glaum of the Haunting Eyes raised a lament; and now the pallid sharp-nosed wife who was far gone in pregnancy, and who wore that maroon-colored headdress shaped like a cone, began to speak of the young fellows who had been used to come to them out of the sacred mirror.

She spoke of very handsome, tall, brisk, nimble, impudent young fellows, that had been always jolly and buxom and jaunty, and not ever grumpish like a husband; of over-rash young fellows who must have their flings, who stuck at nothing, who went to all lengths, who had a finger in every pie, who kept the pot a-boiling; of what forward, eager, pushing, plodding, thwacking, negligent of no corner, business-like, never-wearying, soul-stirring workmen they had been at every job they undertook; of what great plagues they had been, too, without the least bit of any patience or of any modesty; and of how unreasonably you missed these sad rapscallions now that there was no longer any co-respondent youth remaining in the sacred Mirror of Caer Omn.

Gerald replied: “Your plaint is very moving. I regard a mirror which begets any such young fellows as a rather beautiful idea. It is true that I am a bachelor who therefore object to no reasonable mitigation of matrimony. But I am also a god, dear ladies, a god who brings all youth with me here in this vial.”

At that the last wife spoke. Her hair was flaxen; her body was everywhere engagingly visible through her gown, of a transparent soft green tissue; she carried a small golden-hilted sword. And this wife said:

“You differ, then, from those other gods who have passed this way. No youth went with these gods, who had themselves grown old and tired and more feeble, and who journeyed toward a resting from all miracles and away from a world wherein they were no longer worshipped.”

“But I,” said Gerald, “I am a god who is, moreover, a citizen of the United States of America, wherein every sort of religion yet flourishes as it can never do in an effete and sophisticated monarchy. So do you show me the way to the temple of the sacred Mirror of Caer Omn!”

11.
The Glass People

THE seven wives conducted Fair-haired Hoo, the Helper and the Preserver, to the Temple of the Mirror. It was the old wife who now lifted from the mirror a blue veil embroidered with tiny fig-leaves worked in gold thread. You saw then that this mirror was splotched and clouded and mildewed. It reflected sallowly a distorted and rather speckled Gerald: it glistened with an unwholesome iridescence.

Thereafter Fair-haired Hoo, the Helper and Preserver, the Lord of the Third Truth, when he had announced his various titles, with such due ceremony as befits an exchange of amenities between divine powers, moistened his finger-tip with one drop of water from the Churning of the Ocean. Upon the sacred Mirror of Caer Omn he drew with his finger-tip the triangle of the male and of the female principle, so that the one interpenetrated the other: and he invoked Monachiel, Ruach, Achides, and Degaliel.

Then there was never a more inconsequent rejoicing witnessed anywhere than was made by the seven wives of Glaum of the Haunting Eyes, now that the sacred mirror was altered, for these seven ungrateful scatter-brained women were now singing a sort of hymn in honor of the charitableness and the vigorous procreative powers of the sun.

“But what under the sun has the sun,” said Gerald, a little flustered, “to do with the not inconsiderable favor which I have conferred upon this country? And do you think such anatomical details as you are singing about quite the proper theme for an opera?”

They replied: “Sir, it is obvious that you are a sun god, of the clan of Far-darting Helios and Freyr the Fond Wooer and the Elder Horus and Marduk of the Bright Glance, all of whom have ridden this way as they passed down toward Antan. Sir, it is clear that the Lord of the Third Truth, also, is a god whose mission it is to awaken warmth and humidity and a renewal of life in all that he touches—”

“But,” Gerald said, “but with my finger!”

“—Just as,” they concluded, “you have done to this mirror. Therefore, sir, we are praising your charitableness and your vigorous procreative powers.”

“Ah, now I comprehend you! Still, let us, in these public choral odes, let us adhere strictly to the charitableness! Those other solar traits I would describe as far better adapted to chamber music, in some duet form. Meanwhile, since this somewhat un-American hymn is intended as a personal tribute, I accept your really very personal arithmetic in the proper spirit, dear ladies, as a pious exaggeration. For of course, just as you say, it does seem fairly obvious I am a sun god.”

Yet Gerald, after all, was now more deeply interested in that huge mirror than in anything else. He saw that the mirror which they worshipped in the land of Dersam was not in any way dreadful. If only the mirror of Freydis was like this, then every inheritance which awaited him in his appointed kingdom might well be pleasant enough.

For now the Mirror of Caer Omn shone with a golden clear glowing, and in its depths he viewed with lively admiration a throng of strange and lovely beings such as he had not known in Lichfield.

12.
Confusions of the Golden Travel

BUT when three huge men beckoned to him, and Gerald had moved forward, he found, with wholly tolerant surprise, that this mirror was in reality a warmish golden mist, through which he entered into the power of these three giant blacksmiths, and into the shackles of adamant with which they bound him fast to a gray, lichen-crusted crag, the topmost crag above a very wide ravine, among a desert waste of mountain tops; and he entered, too, into that noble indignation which now possessed Gerald utterly. For it was Heaven he was defying, he who was an apostate god, a god unfrightened by the animosity of his divine fellows. He had preserved, somehow,—in ways which he could not very clearly recall, but of which he stayed wholly proud,—all men and women from destruction by the harshness and injustice of Heaven. He only of the gods had pitied that futile, naked, cowering race which lived, because of their defencelessness among so many other stronger animals, in dark and shallow caverns, like ants in an ant-hill. He had made those timid, scatter-brained, two-legged animals human: he had taught them to build houses and boats; to make and to employ strong knives and far-smiting arrows against the fangs and claws with which Heaven had equipped the other animals; and to tame horses and dogs to serve them in their hunting for food. He had taught them to write and to figure and to compound salves and medicines for their hurts, and even to foresee the future more or less. All arts that were among the human race had come from Prometheus, and all these benefits were now preserved for his so inadequate, dear puppets, through the nineteen books in which Prometheus had set down the secrets of all knowledge and all beauty and all contentment,—he who after he had discovered to mortals so many inventions had no invention to preserve himself. Prometheus, in brief, had created and had preserved men and women, in defiance of Heaven’s fixed will. For that sacrilege Prometheus atoned, among the ends of earth, upon this lichen-crusted gray crag. He suffered for the eternal redemption of mankind, the first of all poets, of those makers who delight to shape and to play with puppets, and the first of men’s Saviors. And his was a splendid martyrdom, for the winged daughters of old Ocean fluttered everywhere about him in the golden Scythian air, like wailing seagulls, and a grief-crazed woman with the horns of a cow emerging from her disordered yellow hair paused too to cherish him, and then went toward the rising place of the sun to endure her allotted share of Heaven’s injustice.

But he who was the first of poets burst Heaven’s shackles like packthread, ridding himself of all ties save the little red band which yet clung about one finger, and rising, passed to his throne between the bronze lions which guarded each of its six steps, and so sat beneath a golden disk. All wisdom now belonged to the rebel against Heaven, and his was all earthly power: the fame of the fine poetry and the comeliness and the grandeur of Solomon was known in Assyria and Yemen, in both Egypts and in Persepolis, in Karnak and in Chalcedon, and among all the isles of the Mediterranean. He sported with genii and with monsters of the air and of the waters; the Elementals served King Solomon when he began to build, as a bribe to Heaven, a superb temple which was engraved and carved and inlaid everywhere with cherubim and lions and pineapples and oxen and the two triangles. There was no power like Solomon’s: his ships returned to him three times each year with the tribute of Nineveh and Tyre and Parvaam and Mesopotamia and Katuar; the kings of all the world were the servants of King Solomon: the spirits of fire and the lords of the air brought tribute to him, too, from behind the Pleiades. His temple now was half completed. But upon his ring finger stayed always the band of blood-colored asteria upon which was written, “All things pass away.” These glittering and soft and sweet-smelling things about him, as he knew always, were only loans which by and by would be taken away from him by Heaven. He turned from these transient things to drunkenness and to the embraces of women, he hunted forgetfulness upon the breasts of nine hundred women, he quested after oblivion between the thighs of the most beautiful women of Judea and Israel, of Moab and of Ammon and of Bactria, of Baalbec and of Babylon: he turned to wantoning with boys and with beasts and with bodies of the dead. These madnesses enraptured the flesh of Solomon, but always the undrugged vision of his mind regarded the fixed will of Heaven, “These things shall pass away.” The temple which he had been building lacked now only one log to be completed. He cast that gray and lichen-crusted cedar log into the Pool of Bethesda: it sank as though it had been a stone: and Solomon bade his Israelites set fire to the temple which all these years he had been building as a bribe to Heaven.

But when the temple burned, it became more than a temple, for not only the flanks of Mt. Moriah were ablaze, a whole city was burning there, and its name was Ilion. He aided in the pillaging of it: the golden armor of Achilles fell to his share. In such heroic gear, he, like a fox hidden in a slain lion’s skin, took ship to Ismaurus, which city he treacherously laid waste and robbed: thence he passed to the land of the Lotophagi, where he viewed with mildly curious, cool scorn the men who fed upon oblivion. He was captured by a very bad-smelling, one-eyed giant, from whom he through his wiles escaped. There was no one anywhere more quick in wiles than was Odysseus, Laertes’ son. He toiled unhurt through a nightmare of pitfalls and buffetings, among never-tranquil seas, outwitting the murderous Laestrigonians, and hoodwinking Circe and the feathery-legged Sirens and fond Calypso: he evaded the man-eating ogress with six heads: he passed among the fluttering, gray, squeaking dead, and got the better of Hades’ sullen overlords and ugly spectres, through his unfailing wiliness,—he who was still a poet, making the supreme poem of each man’s journeying through an everywhere inimical and betraying world, he who was pursued by the wrath of Heaven which Poseidon had stirred up against Odysseus. But always the wiles of much-enduring Odysseus evaded the full force of Heaven’s buffetings, so that in the end he won home to Ithaca and to his meritorious wife; and then, when the suitors of Penelope had been killed, he went, as dead Tiresias had commanded, into a mountainous country carrying upon his shoulder an oar, and leading a tethered ram, for it was yet necessary to placate Heaven. Beyond Epirus, among the high hills of the Thesproteans, he sat the oar upright in the stony ground, and turning toward the ram which he now meant to sacrifice to Poseidon, he found Heaven’s amiability to remain unpurchased, because the offering of Odysseus, who was a rebel against Heaven’s will to destroy him, had been refused, and the ram had vanished.

But in his hand was still the rope with which he had led this ram, and in his other hand was a bag containing silver money, and in his heart, now that he had again turned northerly, to find in place of the oar an elder-tree in flower, now in his heart was the knowledge that no man could travel beyond him in hopelessness and in infamy. He remembered all that he had put away, all which he had denied and betrayed, all the kindly wonders which he had witnessed between Galilee and Jerusalem, where the carpenters of the Sanhedrin were now fashioning, from a great lichen-crusted cedar log found floating in the Pool of Bethesda, that cross which would be set up to-morrow morning upon Mt. Calvary. Then Judas flung down the accursed silver and the rope with which he had come hither to destroy himself, because an infamy so complete as his must first be expressed with fitting words. It was a supreme infamy, it was man’s masterpiece in the way of iniquity, it was the reply of a very fine poet to Heaven’s proffered truce after so many æons of tormenting men causelessly: it was a thing not to be spoken of but sung. He heaped great sheets of lead upon his chest, he slit the cord beneath his tongue, he tormented himself with clysters and with purges and in all other needful ways, so that his voice might be at its most effective when he sang toward Heaven about his infamy.

But when he sang of his offence against Heaven, he likened his hatefulness to that of very horrible offenders in yet elder times, he compared his sin to that of Œdipus who sinned inexpiably with his mother, and to that of Orestes whom Furies pursued forever because he had murdered his mother. But it was not of any Jocasta or of any Clytemnestra he was thinking, rather it was of his own mother, of that imperious, so beautiful Agrippina whom he had feared and had loved with a greater passion than anyone ought to arouse in an emperor, and whom he had murdered. Nothing could put Agrippina out of his thoughts. It availed no whit that he was lord of all known lands, and the owner of the one house in the world fit for so fine a poet to live in, a house entirely overlaid with gold and adorned everywhere with jewels and with mother of pearl, a house that quite dwarfed the tawdry little Oriental hovel which Solomon had builded as a bribe to Heaven, because this was a house so rich and ample that it had three-storied porticos a mile in length, and displayed upon its front portico not any such trumpery as an Ark of the Covenant but a colossal statue of that Nero Claudius Cæsar who was the supreme poet the world had ever known. Yet nothing could put Agrippina out of Nero’s thoughts. From the satiating of no lust, howsoever delicate or brutal, and from the committing of no enormity, and from the loveliness of none of his poems, could he get happiness and real peace of mind. He hungered only for Agrippina, he wanted back her detested scoldings and intermeddlings, he reviled the will of Heaven which had thwarted the desires of a fine poet by making this so beautiful, proud woman his mother, and he practised those magical rites which would summon Agrippina from the dead.

But when she returned to him, incredibly beautiful, and pale and proud, and quite naked, just as he had last seen her when his sword had ripped open this woman’s belly so that he might see the womb in which he had once lain, then the divine Augusta drew him implacably downward among the dead, and so into the corridors of a hollow mountain. This place was thronged with all high-hearted worshippers of the frightening, discrowned, imperious, so beautiful woman who had drawn him thither resistlessly, and in this Hörselberg he lived in continued splendor and in a more dear lewdness, and he still made songs, only now it was as Tannhäuser that the damned acclaimed him as supreme among poets. But Heaven would not let him rest even among these folk who had put away all thought of Heaven. Heaven troubled Tannhäuser with doubts, with premonitions, even with repentance. Heaven with such instruments lured this fine poet from the scented Hörselberg into a bleak snow-wrapped world: and presently he shivered too under the cold wrath of Pope Urban, bells rang, a great book was cast down upon the pavement of white and blue slabs, and the candles were being snuffed out, as the now formally excommunicated poet fled westerly from Rome pursued by the ever-present malignity of Heaven.

But from afar he saw the sapless dry rod break miraculously into blossom, and he saw the messengers of a frightened Bishop of Rome (with whom also Heaven was having its malicious sport) riding everywhither in search of him, bearing Heaven’s pardon to the sinner whom they could not find. For the poet sat snug in a thieves’ kitchen, regaling himself with its sour but very potent wines and with its frank, light-fingered girls. Yet a gibbet stood uncomfortably near to the place: upon bright days the shadow of this gallows fell across the threshold of the room in which they rather squalidly made merry. Death seemed to wait always within arm’s reach, pilfering all, with fingers more light and nimble than those which a girl runs furtively through the pockets of the put-by clothing of her client in amour. Death nipped the throats of ragged poor fellows high in the air yonder, and death very lightly drew out of the sun’s light and made at one with Charlemagne all the proud kings of Aragon and Cyprus and Bohemia, and death casually tossed aside the tender sweet flesh which had been as white as the snows of last winter, and was as little regarded now, of such famous tits as Héloïse and Thaïs and Queen Bertha Broadfoot. Time was a wind which carried all away. Time was preparing by and by (still at the instigation of ruthless Heaven) to make an end even to François Villon, who was still so fine a poet, for all that time had made of him a wine-soaked, rickety, hairless, lice-ridden and diseased sneakthief whose food was paid for by the professional earnings of a stale and flatulent harlot. For time ruined all: time was man’s eternal strong ravager, time was the flail with which Heaven pursued all men whom Heaven had not yet destroyed, ruthlessly.

But time might yet be confounded: and it was about that task he set. For Mephistophilus had allotted him twenty-four years of wholly untrammeled living, and into that period might be heaped the spoilage of centuries. He took unto himself eagle’s wings and strove to fathom all the causes of the misery which was upon earth and of the enviousness of Heaven. That which time had destroyed, Johan Faustus brought back into being: he was a poet who worked in necromancy, his puppets were the most admirable and lovely of the dead. Presently he was restoring through art magic even those lost nineteen books in which were the secrets of all beauty and all knowledge and all contentment, the secrets for which Prometheus had paid. But the professors at the university would have nothing to do with these nineteen books. It was feared that into these books restored by the devil’s aid, the devil might slily have inserted something pernicious: and besides, the professors said, there were already enough books from which the students could learn Greek and Hebrew and Latin. So they let perish again all those secrets of beauty and knowledge and contentment which the world had long lost. Now Johan Faustus laughed at the ineradicable folly with which Heaven had smitten all men, a folly against which the clear-sighted poet fought in vain. But Johan Faustus at least was wise, and there had never been any other beauty like this which now stood before him within arm’s reach (as surely as did death), now that with a yet stronger conjuration he had wrested from all-devouring time even the beauty of Argive Helen.

But when he would have touched the Swan’s daughter, the delight of gods and men, she vanished, precisely as a touched bubble is shattered into innumerable sparkling bits, and over three thousand of them he pursued and captured in all quarters of the earth, for, as he said of himself, Don Juan Tenorio had the heart of a poet, which is big enough to be in love with the whole world, and like Alexander he could but wish for other spheres to which he might extend his conquests, and each one of these sparkling bits of womanhood glittered with something of that lost Helen’s loveliness, yet, howsoever various and resistless were their charms, and howsoever gaily he pursued them, singing ever-new songs, and swaggeringly gallant, in his fair, curly wig and his gold-laced coat adorned with flame-colored ribbons, yet he, the eternal pursuer, was in turn pursued by the malevolence of Heaven, in, as it seemed, the shape of an avenging horseman who drew ever nearer unhurriedly, until at last the clash of rapiers and the pleasant strumming of mandolins were not any longer to be heard in that golden and oleander-scented twilight,—because of those ponderous, unhurried hoofbeats, which had made every other noise inaudible,—and until at last he perceived that both the rider and the steed were of moving stone, of an unforgotten stone which was gray and lichen-crusted.

But when fearlessly he encountered the overtowering statue, and had grasped the horse about its round cold neck, he saw that the stone rider was lifeless, and was but the dumb and staring effigy of a big man in armor which was inset with tinsel and with bits of colored glass. It was the bungled copy and the parody of a magnanimous, great-hearted dream that he was grasping, and yet it was a part of him, who had been a poet once, but was now a battered old pawnbroker, for in some way, as he incommunicably knew, this parodied and not ever comprehended Redeemer and he were blended, and they were, somehow, laboring in unison to serve a shared purpose. He derided and he came too near to a mystery which he distrusted, and which yet (without his preference having been consulted in the affair) remained a part of him, as it was a part of all poets, even of a cashiered poet, and a part very vitally necessary to the existence of a Jurgen. A Jurgen had best not meddle with such matters one half-second sooner than that dimly foreseen, inevitable need arose for a Jurgen also to be utilized in the service of this mystery, without having his preference in the affair consulted. The aging pawnbroker was a little afraid. He climbed gingerly down from the tall pedestal of Manuel the Redeemer, he descended from that ambiguous tomb upon which he was trampling, he stepped rather hastily backward from that carved fragment of the crag of Prometheus. He stepped backward, treading beyond the confines of the golden mirror which was worshipped at Caer Omn; and he was thus released from its magic.

13.
Colophon of a God

NOW before him the mirror still glowed goldenly, and now a hunchback held out both his hands toward Gerald, whom he was trying to allure into the form and mind of this sardonic, cracker-jawed, sly knave who had such melancholy eyes. Gerald was much tempted to become this Punch, and to relive for a little the rascal’s defiant and ever-restless life. And then too, behind Punch waited tall Merlin, crowned with mistletoe, he that created all chivalry, and that, being himself the great fiend’s son, first taught men how to live as became the children of God. It would be quite entertaining to enter into Merlin’s dark heart. Moreover, to the other hand of Punch, stood a glittering suave gentleman with a blue beard, in whose uxoricides it might be vastly interesting to share....

Yet Gerald, facing these three rather beautiful ideas, was of two minds. “For I am a god, with a throne awaiting me in Antan, where all the other gods will be my lackeys,—and, for that matter, with no doubt a whole cosmos of my own twirling and burning to unheeded clinkers somewhere in space, which I ought at this moment to be looking after and embellishing. And in this particular small world which I am quitting, the powers of Heaven do quite honestly seem—when you look at them from a perhaps biassed standpoint, that is,—and only to a certain extent, of course,—and if you are so ill-advised as to consider matters in a pessimistic, morbid, wholly un-American way—”

Gerald paused. He smilingly shook his red head. “No. It is far better for us gods not to criticize the handiwork of one another. So I shall without one word of reproof permit my fellows to play as they like with this planet called Earth. I shall of course, very probably, make new planets a bit more conformable to my personal fancy. But I shall say nothing about the planet I am now quitting at all likely to hurt anybody’s feelings. No: I shall, rather, rely upon the appealing eloquence of a dignified silence reinforced by a decisive departure.”

And Gerald said also: “As for this mirror which is worshipped in the land of Dersam, it pleases me as a toy. But I who am a Savior and a sun god with nine such very fine exploits behind me, in the way of swimming and of decimating devils, and of restoring warmth and making moons, and of really remarkable broad-mindedness as to what particular animal I may happen to look like,—I, the Helper and the Preserver, who am called to reign over the goal of all the gods of men,—why, I must necessarily lose by exchanging such a tremendous destiny for anything to be found in this mirror.”

Then Gerald said: “No. I must never forget that, whether I am a Savior or a sun deity, or whether I am habitually used to discharge both functions, I in any case remain Fair-haired Hoo, the Helper and Preserver, the Lord of the Third Truth, and so on. I am a most notable figure, of some sort or another sort, in Dirghic mythology. I am the appointed rider of the silver stallion. I am destined to inherit from the Master Philologist the great and best words of magic, and after that poor hospitable fellow’s downfall to reign in his stead over the place beyond good and evil which is the goal of all the gods of men and the reward of their meritorious exertions. I cannot forsake such a majestic destiny in order to play with the droll and pretty figures that move about in the depths of this mirror. And whether or not this is a mirror which I may require hereafter, when I have come into my kingdom and have resumed my exalted divine estate in my appropriate mythology, is a matter which I shall settle in due time who have all eternity wherein to do whatever I may prefer.”

14.
Evarvan of the Mirror

THEN Gerald perceived that the wives of Glaum were not yet through with their wonder-workings, for these seven women were now about a ceremony which they called Asvamedha. They led into the temple a brown horse. Before the mirror they struck down this horse with pole-axes. The tail was cut off by the flaxen-haired wife in green, and the naked wife carried it away, Gerald did not know whither. The horse’s head also was severed from the body, by that wife who was with child; the head was then adorned with a chaplet made of small loaves of bread. This head was afterward impaled upon a stake and thus was set upright before the mirror, but not facing it. Then the six wives of Glaum who yet remained in the temple mixed the blood of the horse with the blood of unborn calves; they turned the stake: and they showed Gerald what he must do.

When he had obeyed, and when they had all invoked Evarvan, then the golden glowing of the sacred mirror was turned into a paler haze like that of moonshine. Out of this silvery mistiness came a crowned woman. She was clothed in white, and about her head shone an aureole.

And Gerald was enraptured. For this Evarvan of the Mirror was so surpassingly lovely that she excelled all the other women his gaze had ever beheld. Yet somehow it was not the coloring nor the placing of her features that he was noting. Rather, he was observing himself and the thing which was happening to this careful, this well-poised, fastidious, parched, rather pitiable Gerald whom for so many years he had known. The creature had not for a great while, not since, indeed, the days of his first insanity about Evelyn, been visited by any real emotion: now, momentarily at least, he was ablaze: he was caught perhaps: and it was this imminent personal peril that Gerald was noting, aloofly, with a drugged sense of derisory exultation.

For this Gerald, as it seemed to him, had known quite well, a great while ago, before his lips had touched for pastime’s sake the lips of any woman anywhere, that this woman who, it seemed, was called Evarvan, existed in some place, and waited for him, and would by and by be found. That very important fact, which a boy had known, a thriftless, very silly young man had let slip out of mind. Throughout all the twenty-eight years of his living, it seemed to Gerald, this Evarvan had been the true and perfect love of his heart’s core.... To the extreme romanticism of this phrase he conceded a smile: that he should have concocted a phrase so abominable showed him just now to be neither fastidious nor well poised.... Nevertheless, here was the woman whose existence he, even in Lichfield, had always dimly divined, and of whom—he had it now,—of whom Evelyn Townsend had been a parodying shadow in human flesh. The likeness had been just sufficient to get him into a great deal of trouble. He saw that likeness now, quite plainly.

“And this woman too is going to get me into trouble, I very much fear. For all my being cries out to her. Eh, Gerald, one needs caution here, my lad, you who find trouble uncongenial!”

Evarvan spoke. And she was speaking, oddly enough, as it seemed to him, of that Evelyn who went about Lichfield immured in the body which was a poor copy of Evarvan’s body. Yet Gerald was listening hardly at all. He did not like the strong, insane and over-youthful emotions which this woman roused in him. They endangered his welfare. For this woman was awakening in him those old, unforgotten fervors which he had once felt for Evelyn Townsend, and which had betrayed him into the horrid bondage of an illicit love-affair. This Evarvan was ensnaring him, he knew, into the insanities appropriate to youth and inexperience: and such nonsense had to be controlled.

So it was half dazedly Gerald protested that—quite apart from the claims of his divine duties as a Savior and a sun god, and apart too from the obligations he was under to ascend the throne of Antan,—he could no longer endure the stupidities and the fretfulness and the jealousies of the Evelyn who had made adultery wholly unendurable.

“If she were but a bit like you, ma’am,” Gerald gallantly remarked,—with somewhat increasing composure now that this woman reminded him the more closely that he observed her yet more and more of Evelyn,—“the case would be different.”

“But I,” said Evarvan of the Mirror, “will remain with you always, if you indeed desire to become my lover. For there is a way, Gerald, there is for you through my mirror’s aid an open way to contentment. You shall know an untruth, and that untruth will make you free: the doings of the world, and all the bustling that is made by merchants and by warriors and by well-thought-of persons talking about important matters, will then run by you like a little stream of shallow, bickering waters: and you will heed none of these things, but only that loveliness which all youth desires and no man ever finds save through my mirror’s aid. You will live among bright shadows very futilely: yes: but you will be happy.”

Gerald replied hoarsely: “I desire only you. I cannot think of thrones, nor of any gods, now that you stand here within arm’s reach. All my life-long I have desired you, as I know now, my dearest, throughout the dreary while of over-much playing and laughter that I have lived in ever-dwindling faith I would yet win to you by and by. But now I am again as Johan Faustus,—or, rather, I am as Jurgen in that other old story, when he had come at last to Helen, the delight of gods and men: only I am more favored than was Jurgen, for my Helen speaks....”

“Oh, and I speak for your own good, my darling, for there is a condition to be fulfilled before I may trust you and may give you all.”

Gerald answered: “No, Evelyn, not to-night—But indeed I entreat your pardon, my dear. My mind must have been wandering. Yes, yes! as I was saying, the difference is that Helen speaks!”

“For your own good, my dearest.”

“Yes; you speak, naturally, of a condition for my own good, just as Glaum hinted that so many more or less friendly persons would be doing in these parts.”

“I speak, though, of a very easy condition. You must yourself perform a tiny Asvamedha; and you must immolate before my mirror, not any really valuable horse, of course, nor even a good-looking horse, but only that hideous and wholly worthless horse which you have brought with you into the land of Dersam.”

Then Gerald said: “And that is a small price to pay for the attainment of the one thing which my heart quite earnestly desires, is it not? For all my life I have hungered, as I believe that all poets hunger, for that unflawed beauty, seemingly not ever to be found upon this earth, which now stands revealed in the form of a woman, and which now speaks to me with the voice of a woman—oh, quite with the voice of a woman!—and speaks, too, for my own good. Yes, it is a small price, such as any boy of nineteen or thereabouts would pay gladly. For I must tell you, who are the delight of gods and—well! of adolescent boys, at least, in every quarter of the world,—that all this very strongly reminds me of that first sonnet which I made about you when I was a boy of nineteen.”

Evarvan did not wholly conceal her uneasiness over the prospect of hearing this sonnet. But there was none the less in her voice a tenderness almost motherly now that she asked of Gerald, “And did you make verses, then, about me, dear, so early?”

“To prove it,” Gerald replied, “I will now recite to you that identical sonnet.”

And he did.

But his voice was so shaken with emotion that, when he had completed the octave, he paused, because it was never within Gerald’s power to resist the beauty of a sublime thought when it was thus adequately expressed in flawless verse. So for an instant he stayed silent. He caught up the lovely hands of Evarvan of the Mirror, and he pressed them to his trembling lips.

For this beguiling bright dream was now become a snare to delay him in journeying onward to his appointed kingdom, and to betray him again into bondage to the rather beautiful ideas and tinsel notions of youth. Presently he would be seeing no more of this traitorous dream woman, who was preparing to trust him and to give him all, and who none the less was more lovely and more dear than any real thing anywhere. Afterward he would regret her, he knew: always he would regret Evarvan, among whatsoever delights they were which awaited Gerald in his appointed kingdom. Nevertheless, this dream was an impediment in the way of a Savior and a sun deity, with whose appropriate functions this dream was interfering: and the most painful duty which confronted Gerald was not precisely to be discourteous to a lady, but to discourage sacrilege.

Dismissing these cursory reflections, Gerald sighed: and he continued the reciting of his sonnet with an air of lofty resignation intermingled with a gustatory approval of really good verse.

“That,” said Evarvan of the Mirror, when he had ended, “is a very beautiful sonnet, and I am proud to have inspired it. But we were talking about something else, I have quite forgotten what—”

“I,” Gerald said, “have not forgotten.”

“Oh, yes, now I do remember! We were talking about the lucky chance afforded you to get rid of that dreadful horse of yours.”

Gerald looked for one instant at the most lovely of all the illusions he had found in the Mirror of Caer Omn. Then he began to recite the multiplication tables.

You saw that she was frightened. She said, “Oh, and I trusted you! I gave you all!”

She bleated now; her beauty was dimmed: and she seemed just the Evelyn Townsend who had pestered Gerald beyond any reasonable endurance.

But Gerald, howsoever heavy was the heart of Gerald who quite honestly objected to being troubled by anything, went on inexorably to exorcise Evarvan with the old runes of common-sense. He spoke of the elephant that is the largest of beasts, and of the very dissimilar household economy practised by a King of Israel and by Elijah the Tishbite, and of the straight line that is the shortest distance between two points; and the old magic was potent.

Before his eyes Evarvan of the Mirror was changed. Of the degradation which was put upon her, it suffices to report that this lovely lady went backward in the course of every mortal woman’s living. She passed from girlhood into a lank-legged childhood, and thence into drooling and feebly puking infancy, and after that into the shapes she had worn in her mother’s womb. In the end there remained of the most dear illusion which Gerald had found in the Mirror of Caer Omn only two pink figures in the form of a soft throbbing egg and of a creature like a tadpole darting lustfully about it: and these melted back into the moonshine of the Sacred Mirror of Caer Omn.

Nor was that all. The wives of Glaum and the Temple of the Mirror and all that was about Gerald began to waver. All the material things about him showed now like paintings on a gauze curtain which was moving and crinkling in a very gentle breeze. The shaping of the six wives became longer and more attenuated: they were shaped like the shadows of women in a fine sunset. These so prettily tinted shadows strained toward the mirror and entered it precisely as you may see smoke drift toward and out of an opened window. Then all the temple followed them collapsingly, as if colored waters were running into a hole. The mirror swallowed all. Caer Omn was gone: the land of Dersam was a ruined land without inhabitants. Afterward the pale glass blinked seven times like summer lightning, and the mirror was not there.

Gerald stood alone in a cedar-shadowed way. He was weeping quite unaffectedly. His very deepest poetic sensibilities had been touched by the rather beautiful idea that he had loved this woman all his life-long, and that now he had lost her forever: but a little way behind Gerald the silver stallion stayed unimmolated, and grazed placidly.