Chapter VII: Part FIVE: The Book of Lytreia

“Whether You Boil or Roast Snow,
You Can Have but Water of It.”

15.
At Tenjo’s Court

GERALD passed on, riding upon the stallion Kalki, down a valley of cedar-trees, into the realm of Tenjo of the Long Nose. This was the land of Lytreia, they told him. But, here too, dejection overbrooded all, and the atmosphere was elegiac, for people everywhere were lamenting that vigor and resiliency and liveliness had gone out of their noses, so that no man in Lytreia was able to sneeze or to employ his nose in any other normal way.

“Well, now, suppose you take me to this king of yours,” said Gerald, “for it may be I can re-awaken hereabouts all the lost joys of influenza.”

“And who shall we say to him has come into Lytreia, red-headed and riding upon the back of this huge and sparkling horse with the splendid nose?”

“You will say to your king that this land is honored by a visit from Fair-haired Hoo, the Helper and Preserver, the Lord of the Third Truth, the Well-beloved of Heavenly Ones, as he passes toward his appointed kingdom in Antan, riding in very terrible estate upon the back of his famous silver stallion Kalki, a beast which, strictly speaking, has no nose, but only nostrils at the tip of his long, noble head.”

They also seemed unimpressed. “No god is of terrible estate except the Holy Nose of Lytreia; nor do we concede the existence of any kingdom not his. Nevertheless, you may come with us.”

“Upon my word,” thought Gerald, “but in these parts the people pay very inadequate homage to us gods and are little better than heretics.”

But he went with these over-sceptical persons quietly to their King Tenjo.

And Tenjo received the Well-beloved of Heavenly Ones more affably. First, though, the grave, white-bearded King shared with the visiting god a quite excellent dinner, which was handsomely served to them by ten pages in ermine and a seneschal in vermilion silk: not until dinner was over, and the two sat drinking their spiced wine out of gold goblets, would the King talk about his troubles. Then Tenjo complained that his nose was fallen and flabby. It was no longer worshipful. That was in all ways deplorable, said the King, refilling his goblet, inasmuch as his people worshipped a nose, and could respect no male creature who had not a large and high-standing and robust and succulent nose.

Gerald was a little puzzled, because this seemed to him a queer sort of calamity to be befalling anybody, unless it was caused by the magic of the wu. But Gerald made no comment. He asked only how this sad state of affairs had come about.

He was told that all the youth and vigor had been taken out of the Holy Nose of Lytreia, and out of Tenjo’s nose, and out of the nose of every man in the kingdom, by the blighting magic of a sorceress who had lately established her residence in the tomb of King Peter the Builder.

“It is there,” said Tenjo, “the veiled Mirror of the Two Truths is hidden: but not even of that does this sorceress seem afraid.”

“Nor, for that matter, am I: for I am Lord of the Third Truth. Well, it is fairly evident this woman is a wu.”

“You may be right. I confess that dreadful possibility had not ever occurred to me—”

“Only we gods are omniscient, my dear Tenjo,” said Gerald, kindlily. “So there is no need for any mere king to be ashamed of his human blindness.”

“—Because, as I must tell you, before this minute I had not ever heard of a wu.”

“You have been lucky. The less one hears of such creatures, the better for everybody. So, how is this woman called?”

“She is called Evaine,” said Tenjo; “and she is called also the Lady of Peter’s Tomb, now that she has taken possession of it.”

Then Gerald finished his fourth goblet, and Gerald hiccoughed, and Gerald said: “Your case, my dear fellow, while perplexing, is not wholly desperate. For I bring youth with me, and I will renovate your withered noses. I am competent to deal with any wu. I give you, in fact, my divine word that you shall be rid of this wu. Yes, Lytreia shall be rid of her, even though it is necessary that to undo her hoodoo I do with due to-do woo the wu, too—”

“Would you be so kind,” said Tenjo, looking troubled, “as to repeat that, rather more slowly?”

Gerald obliged him, and continued: “Yes, I assure you, upon the most sacred oath of our Dirghic heaven,—known only to the gods, my dear fellow, so that you will, I trust, pardon my not repeating it,—that I will subject this wu and this mirror also to my divine inspection—”

“Ah, but I must tell you,” said Tenjo, seeming yet more troubled, “that the man who looks into that mirror straightway finds himself transformed into two stones. For that reason it is hidden away in Peter’s Tomb, and it is kept veiled, and of course no man has ever dared go near it.”

“How, then, did this mirror ever manage to change anybody into two stones if nobody ever dared go near it?”

“Why, but the mirror was compelled to change them into two stones because that was the law. It was not at all the mirror’s fault. Surely, you who are a god and are omniscient, and who are now nearly drunk enough to see everything double, can see that much?”

“So far as your explanation goes, I can see the mirror’s blamelessness in the face of an obdurate physical law. Nor does any god object to a physical law which concerns other people.”

“And they kept away from the mirror because they knew about this law. Surely, that too was natural?”

“In a way, yes. But how could they be certain about this law?”

“How could they help it, how could anybody be ignorant of one of our very oldest and most famous laws, which comes down to us, indeed, from sources so august and venerable that they antedate all history?”

“Why, then, who enacted this law?”

“How should I know, when, as I was just telling you, this law is older than any recorded history?”

“But in a thousand pounds of law there is not an ounce of pleasure, and there are entirely too many laws,” said Gerald, shaking his red head above his golden goblet rather despondently. “There is common, statutory, international, maritime, ecclesiastical, and martial law. There is the law of averages, the Salic law, and Grimm’s law of the permutations of consonants. There is Jewish sacred law; there is prize law; there is the law of gravity; there is John Law, who first developed the natural wealth of the Mississippi, and William Law, who was a great mystic. There are, in logic, the laws of thought, just as in astronomy and physics and political economy there are, severally, the well-known laws of Kepler and Prevost and Gresham. In fine, there are laws everywhere, and they are very often a nuisance. He that goes to law loses time and money and rest and friends. Law is a lottery, law is a bottomless pit, law is an ass which slaps his tail in every man’s face. So it very well may be, my dear fellow, that in a world so legally overstocked this law of yours is superfluous, and therefore wrong.”

But Tenjo was not convinced by Gerald’s relentless logic. Tenjo said only:

“I do not any more know what you are talking about than you do. But I do know that”—here Tenjo hiccoughed, with judicial graveness,—“that it does not alter the principle of the thing. So this mirror will continue to transform into two stones all men who look into it, although I cannot see how it matters the worth of one box of matches in hell, because so long as the law is such, no man will ever look into this mirror.”

“Yet, do you but answer me this very simple question! What if some intelligent, unsuperstitious person were to look into this mirror,—and were to come back not changed into stone, and not hurt in any way,—would that not prove to you the insanity of this law?”

“Of course it would not! That would only prove the man was a liar. The plain fact of his not being changed into two stones would be legal proof in any of our courts or in any law-respecting place anywhere that he had not ever looked into the Mirror of the Two Truths.”

“Oh, very well!” said Gerald. “No, thank you, my dear fellow, not another drop! Let us go to the temple! And let us each lean upon the other’s arm, for your most excellent wine does not seem to have clarified anything exactly.”

16.
The Holy Nose of Lytreia

NOW, when the grave, white-bearded King and the red-headed god had come to the Temple of the Holy Nose, they entered it arm in arm, followed by the King’s court. And when they approached the adytum, the head priestess came toward them exhibiting a cteis, or large copper comb, which she offered to Tenjo. The King accepted it, he parted her hair in the middle, and he spoke the Word of Entry.

Said Tenjo: “I enter, proud and erect. I take my fill of delight imperiously, irrationally, and none punishes.”

The head priestess replied, “Not yet.”

Tenjo said then, “But in three months, and in three months, and in three more months, the avenger comes forth, and mocks me by being as I am, and by being foredoomed to do as I have done, inevitably.”

This ceremony being discharged, they all entered the adytum, and then the three priestesses led Gerald toward the collapsed and shrivelled idol which was in the adytum. And Gerald whistled.

“—For do you call this,” said Gerald, “a nose?”

“Sir,” replied the priestesses, “we do. As, likewise, do all other well-conducted persons.”

“Yet, I would call it,” said Gerald, whose naturally fine color was now perceptibly heightened by Tenjo’s excellent wine, “another member.”

“Such, sir,” they answered him, “is not our custom.”

“Nevertheless,” said Gerald, waggling very gravely his red head, “nevertheless, it is written in the scriptures of the Protestant Episcopal church that, even as great ships are turned about in the sea’s roaring main with a very small helm, even so is every man guided in the main by a small member—”

They said, “Yet, sir—”

“And this member is not well spoken of by the Apostolic Fathers. This member has ruined virgins: its conquests are stained with blood: it has caused the widow to regret: it has deceived the wisest and most elderly of men. It is, in fine, a member whose blushing hue is wholly proper to its iniquitous history.”

They replied, “Still, sir—”

“It is an over proud and wild member. Most justly is it written that every kind of beasts and of birds and of serpents and of things in the sea is to be tamed, and has been tamed, by human kind; but that this member can no man tame; for it is an unruly member, seeking ruthlessly its prey; a rebellious member, prominent in uprisings; a member very often full of deadly poison.”

They said, “None the less, sir—”

“I deduce that this member here represented is not worshipful. I deduce that it is not well for you of Lytreia to worship this shrivelled image of a tongue, for all that you call it a nose.”

“But, sir, while there is much piousness and erudition in what you say, you must understand that the word ‘nose’ is a word with connotations and with a reputed correspondence in anatomy—”

“I do not at all understand that saying, and so I cannot quite see your point of view. I merely know that, in consonance with the words of St. James the Just, and according to the scriptures of the Protestant Episcopal church, this member is a tongue. And I admit that this tongue, which your heathenish upbringing induces you to call a nose, is in a peculiarly bad way. But the divine word of Fair-haired Hoo, the Helper and Preserver, the Lord of the Third Truth, has been pledged to help and to preserve this idol. So we will see what can be done about it.”

Then Gerald moistened his finger-tip with a drop of the water from the Churning of the Ocean. As the Lady of the First Water-Gap had done to Gerald’s forehead, so Gerald did to the shrivelled idol of Lytreia.

It was changed. Its limpness departed; its coloring quickened; corded large blue veins, very intricately forked and branched, arose about its now glowing surface, which revealed also many tiny veins that were brightly red and astonishingly tortuous. It became enormous and high-standing and robust and succulent. It throbbed and jerked. It was hot to the touch: and the roughened cartilage of its erect tip-end now glistened with imperial purple.

And everywhere at that same instant the magic of Evaine was lifted from Lytreia, and the nose of every man regained its proper proportions and vigor. Young couples to the right hand and to the left could be seen withdrawing to sneeze in private: the girls were already producing their handkerchiefs. And the three priestesses began to bathe the rejuvenated idol with refreshing water: they wreathed it with leaves of the Indian wood-apple; they placed before it flowers and incense and sweetmeats. Meanwhile they chaunted a contented song in honor of the Holy Nose.

Tenjo and all the older lords and dowagers of Tenjo’s court had kneeled in worship. Gerald only remained standing as arrogantly erect as was the idol which people worshipped in Lytreia.

“I honor in a civil way,” said Gerald, “the spirit of this tongue—”

“But this,” said Tenjo the King, now speaking almost peevishly, “is not a tongue. It is the Holy Nose of Lytreia.”

“Do you not be flying, my dear fellow, upon the wings of bad temper, into the face of scripture and of logic! In a civil way, I repeat, I honor this member. I personally am rather fond of talking. Nevertheless, as being myself a member of the Protestant Episcopal church, and as being also a self-respecting member of the Dirghic mythology, I must decline to worship this so restive and inflammable member of any man’s body.”

Tenjo at that got up from off his knees. He came toward Gerald: and the white-bearded, grave King then spoke with rather less of peevishness than of compassion.

“You will regret such sayings. For that also is a law of Lytreia. However, do you now ask what you will for the vigor which you have restored to our noses, and we will gladly pay that price. Yet for the blasphemies which you have uttered in this temple the spirit of the Holy Nose will by and by be asking a price: and that price nor you nor any other lad will ever pay gladly.”

Gerald replied, “For the renovation of your noses, and as a propitiatory trap for the doomed wu in Peter’s Tomb, you will pay me the price of one black rooster.”

“But what,” asked Tenjo, “is a rooster?”

“Why, a rooster is the herald of the dawn, it is the father of an omelet, it is the pullet’s first bit of real luck, it is the male of the _Gallus domesticus_.”

“We do not call a male chicken that—”

“No,” Gerald assented, “no, but you ought to. And not to do so is wholly un-American.”

“Yet why do you Americans call this particular bird a rooster, when everybody knows that all birds except ostriches and cassowaries roost, and that every flying bird everywhere is thus a rooster?”

“Well, I admit that we do not reason about it as you reason in Lytreia. I admit that the word ‘rooster’ is a word without connotations and without any correspondence in anatomy. Nevertheless, every nation has its customs. And it is as much our well-established American custom to call the male of the chicken a rooster as it is your custom to call that thing a nose.”

“But we call that a nose because it is, in point of fact, a nose. It is, as we have told you I do not know how many times, the Holy Nose of Lytreia.”

Gerald was honestly exasperated by the obstinacy of the people of this kingdom.

“Even so,” said he, “if you want the truth—”

He spoke then the truth about that tongue, as it appeared to him. But his remarks were lost to history through the circumstance that none of his hearers ever thought of setting them down in writing.

Instead, his hearers shuddered. They gave him a black cock, and they drove him out of that temple. It was in this way that Gerald put an affront upon the Holy Nose of Lytreia.

17.
Evaine of Peter’s Tomb

NOW Gerald rode upon the silver stallion toward the immemorial, moss-overgrown tomb of King Peter the Builder, and Gerald carried under his left arm the black cock. Gerald noted, with an interest natural to any student of magic, the glorification tree which grew beside this tomb. He once more whistled meditatively. Then he hitched his shining stallion to an over-candidly carved and painted post which stood at the door of the tomb, and he went in.

The interior of this spacious tomb was lighted with nineteen iron lamps swung from the ceiling. Gerald thus saw, first of all, the great four-square mirror covered with a flesh-colored cloth. Before it fumed a smoking brazier; and beside this stood the appearance of a woman. To her left hand was a broad bed, and to her right, a gilded pig-trough heaped with fig-leaves. These leaves this woman was crumpling and tearing into little pieces one by one before she destroyed them in the fire of the brazier.

She heard Gerald’s civil cough. She turned: and Gerald was enraptured.

For Evaine of Peter’s Tomb was so surpassingly lovely that she excelled all the other women his gaze had ever beheld. The colors of this beautiful young girl’s two eyes were nicely matched, and her nose stood just equidistant between them. Beneath this was her mouth, and she had also a pair of ears. The girl was young, she exhibited no deformity anywhere, and the enamored glance of the young man could perceive in her no fault. There was, to be sure, a puzzling likeness to somebody he had once known, but Gerald’s quick wits soon unriddled the mystery. This woman reminded him of Evelyn Townsend.

Nor was this all. He observed now that this woman was, just as he had suspected, a Fox-Spirit, for now from Evaine of Peter’s Tomb emanated the power of her magic. That magic which overmasters all animals now smote at Gerald; and in a mildly amusing way he found its assaults really quite interesting.

“For this is the goety of beasts,” he reflected. “This is the brutish half-magic of the wu which maddens men, along with all other animals in their rutting season, and robs them of self-control. This magic persuades me, almost, that I, too, am only a bundle of cellular matter upon its way to becoming manure. Yes, my life, too, at just this moment, seems but a grudged brief season of bewildered appetites and of baffled surmise such as is the life of a mortal man. I, too, seem a mere human being passing from the forgotten to the unforeseeable. Under the assaults of this small carnal magic, I seem again to go in that continuous masked loneliness which mortal persons in Lichfield and elsewhere call living. I long to put out of mind the frailness and the transiency of my hold upon living. The nonsensical notion has occurred to me that such forgetfulness may be hired by bringing the epidermis which masks me into superficial contact with the homogenous animal matter in which hides this Fox-Spirit.... Yes, I am being, as it were, maddened with desire; I am very rapidly becoming the prey of this Fox-Spirit’s irresistible powers of fascination, so to speak. And I find it really quite interesting to observe how this half-magic which destroys so many men now impiously strikes beyond its proper arena, at that which is divine; and how this foolish magic attempts to deceive even me, who am a Savior and a sun god.”

Such were the cursory reflections which passed through Gerald’s mind in the while that he said, aloud, “Good-evening, ma’am!”

The Fox-Spirit Evaine, without replying to him directly, took out of her bosom a white gem about the size of an orange. She tossed this up into the air, and caught it again. Gerald conjectured that this was her soul, but he made no comment.

He displayed to her his cock, saying, as was needful, “I entreat you to accept my rooster—”

“But what,” asked learned Evaine, “what did you call this tamed descendant of the wild Bankiva fowl,—whose original habitat was in Northern India from Sindh to Burma, and in Cochin China, and in many of the Malay Islands as far as Timor, and in the Philippines?”

“Why, in the United States of America, ma’am, we, rather more briefly, and for a variety of reasons, call this bird a rooster.”

“It has been well observed,” she replied, “by Pliny the Elder—a celebrated Roman naturalist, born 23 A.D., perished in the eruption of Vesuvius 79 A.D.,—that every nation has its customs.”

Then the Fox-Spirit dexterously cut off the head of Gerald’s cock with the sacrificial ax, and turning toward the East, she spoke the needed words three times. One entered now in a scarlet coat, a yellow vest, and pale green knee-breeches. His head was like that of a mastiff, with the addition of two horns and the ears of an ass, but he had the legs and hoofs of a calf. Such was he who carried off the black cock which Gerald had brought for the Fox-Spirit’s master, as a propitiatory offering and a trap.

Gerald smiled. Gerald shook hands, politely, with Evaine the learned Fox-Spirit.

“I am,” said Gerald, “a god.”

She replied: “I am one who serves all gods. I honor every tribe of those divine beings whose existence scholars have so variously accounted for as the products of physical and ethical and historical and etymological blunders abetted by homonymy and polonymy. But I require for my piety a honorarium.”

“And what is that honorarium?”

She told him.

And as she spoke, Evaine drew near to him, and yet nearer, and she was remarkably desirable. If only she had not now reminded Gerald more and more of Evelyn Townsend, she would have been resistless.

“Very well, then!” said Gerald, affably: “you shall have that honorarium to-morrow morning if you still care to demand a reward so trivial.”

Immediately afterward he said, “But, indeed, ma’am, you quite misunderstand me!”

Then with a few well-chosen words he placed their relationship upon a more decorous basis.

And Evaine the Fox-Spirit laughed. Such unresponsiveness she declared to be, when manifested by a god, wholly surprising, and comparable to the Seven Wonders of the World, namely: (1) the Pyramids of Egypt; (2) the Hanging Gardens of Babylon; (3) the Tomb of Mausolos; (4) the Temple of Diana at Ephesus; (5) the Colossus of Rhodes; (6) the Statue of Zeus by Phidias; and (7) the Pharos at Alexandria. Yet, Evaine continued, she perceived that she might trust him—

“You may do nothing of the sort!” said Gerald, decisively. “You may not even give me all. No, ma’am, it would be quite unadvisable, because, as I am forced to point out, you in your unfading youth and omniscient learning are many thousands of years older than I am in my present incarnation. Beside you, I am a mere boy. Now, it is often a great disadvantage to a boy, it is by and by a curse to him, to succumb to the loving confidence and generosity of a woman much older than himself. It is unwholesome. It is un-American.”

“Is it, then, inconsistent with the manners of a continent in the Western Hemisphere—first named America by Waldseemüller, a teacher of geography in the college of Saint-Dié among the Vosges, in a treatise called _Cosmographia_, published in 1507,—for me to like you so much that I just want to touch you and be near you?”

“No, ma’am, that, I regret to say, is universal. Besides, I did not particularly mean you. I only mean that there are such women, as we both know, dear lady, who prey upon young boys. They employ for this purpose all their confidence and generosity without the least scruple. And many a hard, bitter, cynical man has originally had his faith in and his regard for everything good and holy blasted in his very first boyhood by the confiding nature and generosity of some middle-aged woman or another and her subsequent references to the advantage he took of her.”

“It is possible that you speak with the clearness recommended by Quintilian as the chief virtue of speech,—born in Spain about 25 A.D., died about 95 A.D., patronized by Vespasian and Domitian,—but it is certain that I do not understand one word of your speaking.”

“—However,” Gerald continued, “when a boy has a nice, clean friendship with an older woman it is one of the most valuable and helpful experiences that can come into his life. A friendship such as this appears to me a rather beautiful idea. The older woman—particularly when she is older by many thousands of years,—can teach him, as his mother out of the superficial knowledge of a callow half-century or so cannot possibly do, about women. She can inspire and direct him. She can fire his ambition. She can encourage him. She can be to him in every way a liberal education.”

“Now, certainly, I shall never understand your American way of uttering so many platitudes—derived from the Greek word _platys_, meaning ‘flat,’—when I was attempting to do all these things!”

“Ah, but we must keep the education entirely oral, and we must keep, too, your little hands—So, now, that is very much better!”

“It is better still to permit a wilful person to have his way,—a remark attributed to Periander, an ancient sage, and Tyrant of Corinth during the sixth century B.C.,—since you elect to give me my honorarium for nothing,” Evaine said, rather sulkily.

Gerald elected to do nothing of the sort. But, since his real intentions would have been an awkward matter to explain, he kept silent about them.

After that Gerald questioned the learned Fox-Spirit. She explained to him willingly enough the laws of Lytreia and described the basket they were found in, and she made it plain just how these laws were enforced by a committee of midwives and stonemasons. She spoke of the magic she had put upon Lytreia. She spoke of Tenjo, telling how in the prime of his youth he came to be called Tenjo of the Long Nose; and her statistics were remarkable. She talked then about the wind between the stars, and about the grandeur that was Greece, and about Hobson’s choice, and about Davey Jones’s locker, and about the cause of volcanoes, and about the curate’s egg, and about the best cures for baldness. For no information anywhere was hidden from the wisdom of Evaine, who knew all things, and who served all gods.

“I perceive,” said Gerald, “that you have knowledge, and I like your reflections extremely. So do you speak yet further out of the stores of your omniscience!”

He had been glancing all the while toward the veiled Mirror of the Two Truths. But he of course said never a word about this mirror. His present task was simply to lure on this cultured and malefic creature to her complete ruin.

For the Fox-Spirit, as Gerald saw, was still about the brutish magic of the wu, which drives men mad, and she now spoke of more and yet more evil matters such as were very well adapted to incite Gerald to brutality. She spoke of the battle of life, and of the feast of reason, and of the irony of fate, and of the lap of luxury. She talked of the writing on the wall, and of the scroll of fame, and of the lexicon of youth, and of the cloud that had a silver lining. She touched upon the two seas, of troubles and of upturned faces. She discussed the durance that was vile, and the hours that were wee and sma’, and the consummation that was devoutly to be wished for, and the light that was dim and religious, and the heat which was not the humidity. She indicated the balm in Gilead, the place in the sun, and the safety in numbers. She afterward gave succinctly the recipes for making a mountain out of a molehill, a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, and a virtue out of a necessity. For no evil phrase of any sort was hidden from the wisdom of Evaine, who knew all things, and who served all gods, and who was now intent to exercise upon Gerald the magic of the wu, which drives men mad.

But Gerald only smiled, almost approvingly. This woman was reminding him more and more of Evelyn Townsend, and his pulses had not ever been calmer.

“I perceive,” said Gerald, “that you have a great deal of knowledge, with the vocabulary of a dear friend to back it devastatingly. Therefore, ma’am, to avail myself of your knowledge alone may serve my divine ends much better than your really most flattering proffers in other fields.”

For now it was Gerald’s turn to speak. So now he revealed to the baffled Fox-Spirit the fact that he was Fair-haired Hoo, the Helper and Preserver, the Lord of the Third Truth, the Well-beloved of Heavenly Ones, a very potent god who had temporarily mislaid his mythology. He told the omniscient Fox-Spirit, who knew all things excepting only how and at what hour her knowledge would end, of Gerald’s adventures during the rather crowded twenty-four hours since he had left Lichfield.

And now she was smiling over his obtuseness. For to all-wise Evaine it was at once apparent that Fair-haired Hoo, the Helper and Preserver, the Lord of the Third Truth, the Well-beloved of Heavenly Ones, was a culture hero like Quat or Quetzalcoatl or Cagn or Osiris or Dionysos. All these were former acquaintances of hers: she knew, she said, every inch of them, for each one of these had stopped to visit her who served all gods, as each had passed downward toward Antan. Evaine, if anybody, would thus know a culture hero wherever she saw a culture hero.

Every mythology contained one of these glorious philanthropists, born of a mysterious and superior race, just as Gerald had been born in the United States of America, a philanthropist, as the learned Fox-Spirit said, very usually theriomorphic, who came in the appearance of a jackass or of some other animal among less favored peoples to teach them strange new arts and mysteries, and to endow them with every kind of cultural advantage and prosperity, just as Gerald had benefited the people of Dersam and of Lytreia, and was preparing to benefit Antan.

She pointed out, furthermore, that a culture hero was in no way un-American. There had been, for example, Quetzalcoatl. She also remembered quite clearly Yetl,—because a deity in the form of a bird was always, she said, rather difficult,—and Poshaiyankya, and Coyote, and Esaugetuh, and that other waggish Indian deity—his name at present evaded her,—who had traveled incognito in the shape of a large spider. For all these aboriginal American culture heroes had visited Evaine as they passed downward toward Antan, and every one of them had been in a somewhat earlier generation Gerald’s fellow countryman.

“In the light of your forceful logic, ma’am, I concede that, over and above being a Savior and a sun god, it seems probable I must be a culture hero too.”

“But yet, in any case,—dear, unresponsive, frigid child,” said the Fox-Spirit, speaking far more simply than she had done before,—“do you not know that all mythologies are controlled by the Master Philologist, so that he alone may say in which one of them and in what capacity you belong?”

“I find that saying obscure.”

“It means only that sooner or later all gods save only Koleos Koleros and the upright spirit of the Holy Nose pass down into Antan.”

“Yes, for, as they told me at Caer Omn, Antan is the heaven of all deserving gods, where they rest from their divine labors.”

But the Fox-Spirit shook her head, rather forebodingly. “I, certainly, would not say that.”

“Do you, then, but answer me this very simple question! What becomes of them there? what fate befalls in that place all which men have found most beautiful and most worshipful?”

“How can one say, when no god has ever returned? It is known only that, in one way or another way, the Master Philologist disposes of every deity that men have served, save only the two supreme gods of all mammals,—a class of vertebrates embracing bats, the warm-blooded quadrupeds, seals, cetaceans, man, and sirenians.”

Gerald drew a long face. “Your account of the matter, ma’am, suggests that my predecessor upon the throne of Antan lacks piety. You imply that the creature is deficient in true religious feeling. That is a fault I would have to requite when I take from him his throne and all the great and best words of magic.”

“To do that, child, needs power such as has not been shown by any god among the many millions of gods that men have worshipped since the first infancy of Chronos,—a Greek personification of Time, usually depicted as carrying a sickle and an hourglass.”

“Ah, but, my dear lady, I, who am at once a culture hero and a sun deity and a Savior, must be a peculiarly powerful god. And, besides, ma’am, from what you tell me—Why, but, really now, it appears probable that the Master Philologist has damaged the Dirghic mythology to which I myself belong! No god can patiently endure such usage; and my divine wrath will, thus, redouble my power.”

“But, still,—but, still, you dear, nice-looking and vainglorious baby—!”

Evaine had paused. She was regarding him almost compassionately: and Gerald felt he could never get used to the flighty way in which people everywhere in the Marches of Antan seemed to pity the high gods. It was a quite friendly way they had of looking at you, but to extend commiseration where reverence was the proper thing savored almost of irreligion.

Gerald shrugged. He said:

“I shall therefore be resistless. I shall compel him to restore into general circulation the Dirghic mythology, after having amply repaired whatsoever damage he may have done to it, and then I shall assume, in addition to his throne, my proper station as a culture hero and a sun deity and a Savior in that mythology. So the affair is, virtually, settled: we may now turn to other matters: and in return for the gracious aid afforded by your large wisdom, I will make in your honor a sonnet.”

“It is a very beautiful sonnet,—consisting of fourteen decasyllabic lines, expressing two phases of a single thought or sentiment,” said Evaine the Fox-Spirit,—“and I am proud to have inspired it.”

“You forget,” said Gerald, “that I have not yet recited my sonnet. I will now do so.”

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 Evaine the Fox-Spirit, and as he pressed them to his trembling lips he noted that these hands smelled like hops drying in the sun. It seemed to him exceedingly pitiful he had given that promise to Tenjo. It seemed to him there was a certain sameness in the dear women who made colorful the Marches of Antan, and, to some extent, a similarity in their more intimate love passages with Fair-haired Hoo, the Helper and Preserver. He found it depressing to reflect that destruction waited, so very near, for so much loveliness. He found it perfectly dreadful to foreknow that he would often regret this omniscient Evaine and her fine stores of useful information, once he had kept the divine word given to Tenjo, and had put an end to her living before she could do any further damage to the men of Lytreia.

Gods ought to abstain from all love-affairs: for through love alone might a god look to be wounded,—upon rainy Sunday afternoons, perhaps, or after drinking a bit more than was good for one,—to be wounded, at such unavoidable seasons of low vitality, with recurrent, plaguing memories of his mortal playthings, so dear, so very dear, and so soon reft away from his immortal arms, irrevocably....

After these cursory reflections, Gerald sighed, and—with the thoughtful commentary that, since this was a Miltonic sonnet, his poem here went on with the same sentence,—he continued his reciting.

And when he had ended, the Fox-Spirit sighed contentedly. She spoke with acumen and authority as to the main events of Milton’s life and as to his principal works, and she added:

“That is a very beautiful sonnet,—a verse form of Italian origin, first used in English by Sir Thomas Wyatt in 1557,—and I am proud to have inspired it. That is the sort of poetry which would incline any living woman to trust you and to give you all the very moment you stopped reciting it. So now will you not come to bed?”

“No, Evelyn, not to-night—I beg your pardon, ma’am! My thoughts were wool-gathering. What I had meant to say was but that if you insist upon yet further displays of your great-hearted womanly confidence and generosity you shall be walloped with a broomstick—severely. No, do you retire now, my dear lady, by all means, and with my apologies for keeping you up so late because of the delight I have got from your instructive way of talking. But I shall pass the remainder of the night in the aloofness appropriate to a god, in this quite comfortable armchair.”

And this he did.

18.
End of a Vixen

WHEN Evaine was asleep, though, then Gerald rose softly from his chair. He approached the bed. Very carefully he inserted his hand between the young breasts of Evaine, and lightly he drew out the strange white gem. He waited now, looking down compassionately at this really very lovely girl....

But at his touch the learned Fox-Spirit had moved, so that she now lay flat upon her back, with her mouth a little open. Evelyn slept thus. And that was why Evelyn snored....

Gerald shrugged. He took up the sacrificial ax.

Now that the dawn was at hand, he went out from the tomb, to the glorification tree, and he began to fell the tree with this ax. At the first stroke blood gushed out of the gray bark copiously, and Gerald heard a wailing noise. Gerald looked upward. The appearance of a young child dressed in blue garments was to be seen in a cleft in the side of the tree. It had the seeming of a boy child about seven or eight years old, a freckled boy, with tousled red hair, and with as yet only one upper front tooth.

This child wailed broken-heartedly: “A blasphemer is come up against the Two Truths; a vainglorious fool derides the pair that endure where all else perishes; and life is denied to me by his wrongheadedness.”

Gerald had put down the ax. He was trembling. He did not like the love and the great yearning which had awakened in his heart. He folded his arms very tightly: he seemed tense and rather frightened looking as he waited there peering sidewise toward this boy.

“Child,” Gerald said, “what is your will that you cry out for life from the glorification tree?”

“My father, I demand the life which you have not given me, that life which you owe to me, and that life which is denied me so long as you deny the Two Truths.”

“I serve the demands of my appointed kingdom, child. I serve the needs of no other truth and the needs of no pawing women who would keep me out of that kingdom.”

“My father, your kingdom is a doubtful dream, but the flesh of my mother is real.”

“My dream is lovelier than any woman. Oh, and a doubtfulness also is more lovely than the body of a woman, for I know the shaping of that body over-well.”

“My father, you refuse the pleasures which will not ever be returning.”

“I am a god. I serve the needs of my own will.”

“The gods also pass, my father, they also pass without any returning, upon the road which you now tread.”

“Let us pass, then, unhindered! But no woman permits it.”

“That is because these women, O my father, have a very rational wisdom.”

“Such is, perhaps, the case. But a god has his irrational dream. And that is better.”

“It is well enough, my father, for that dream to end contentedly in the arms of some woman.”

“It is well enough. It is customary. But I am Fair-haired Hoo, the Helper and the Preserver. I go to my appointed kingdom: and I am Lord of a Third Truth, whose mightiness I must help and preserve.”

Then Gerald hewed on: and as the tree fell, the child vanished.

Now Gerald set fire to the tree: and when a tidy blaze was crackling, he spoke the needed words, and into the heart of this fire he tossed the strange white gem. Straightway you heard a loud screeching. Out of the tomb of Peter the Builder came a vixen fox, screaming and shuddering quite horribly, but not ever ceasing to approach the fire. She entered the flames. Silence followed, and the dawn of a superb May morning which was marred only by an unpleasant odor of singed hair and burning flesh.

Gerald after that went back into the tomb from which the omniscient Fox-Spirit had been dispossessed. He looked rather sentimentally upon the empty disordered bed: then he passed beyond the brazier, in which the ruins of fig-leaves yet smouldered, toward the Mirror of the Two Truths.

The fact no longer mattered, perhaps, that any man who looked into this mirror straightway found himself transformed into two stones: but it very greatly mattered what effect this mirror would have upon a sun god and a Savior and a culture hero. So he removed the flesh-colored veil.

19.
Beyond the Veil

BUT he was not turned into two stones. Nor was there confronting him any mirror. Beyond the flesh-colored veil he found only an ancient painting very carefully done, but upon an unhuman scale which made this painting monstrous. The subject of the picture, however, is not known, because Gerald never told anybody.

But it is known that Gerald shook his head at this painting.

“Laborious daub of prevaricating pigment!” he remarked. “O futile painting, which so many foolish believers in Lytreia think to be the Mirror of the Two Truths! I question your arithmetic. For I myself am the Lord of a Third Truth, for all that I have just at present no precise idea as to its nature. In consequence, I know the two objects which you magnify are not all which exists. And I deny that their never-ending search of each other is the one gesture of life. No: I at least, I feel assured, am destined to take part in some quite other gesture, of a more graceful and more cleanly and more dignified nature,—a gesture of, it well may be, eternal importance....”

Yet Gerald glanced about him a little forlornly. This place was now rather lonesome and ambiguous looking. In the crypt immediately beneath him, Gerald knew, lay all that remained of King Peter and the most of his numerous family; dozens upon dozens of peculiarly ugly objects were there, all that remained of a great conqueror and of the queens who had delighted him, all that attestedly remained now anywhere of a strong hero’s pride and famous warfaring and of his many women’s loveliness....

“Oh, yes, it may be,” Gerald conceded, half frettedly, because he did not like to be troubled with such reflections, “it may be that I am wrong in this belief. And that seems to me yet another reason for adhering to this belief. I, standing here alone upon the remnants of so many utter strangers, admit indeed to some depression of spirits. It seems to me, at this exact instant, that just conceivably I may be neither a Savior nor a sun god nor a culture hero, but merely another bull-headed Musgrave, for whom death waits, and after death, perhaps, oblivion. Nevertheless, I find it a more beautiful and a much more entertaining idea to believe in than to deny the immortality even of a mere Musgrave. There is to my mind nothing at all interesting in the idea of my own extinction. And it appears that my belief in this matter, with no assured knowledge anywhere to go on, must be simply a question of personal taste. Modesty even suggests that my belief is an affair of irrelevance.”

And Gerald said also: “Therefore it furthermore appears to me, O peculiarly unimaginative painting, a sheer waste of opportunity to assume that anything is ever going to end even for a mere Musgrave all conscious experience. I had far rather play with a beautiful idea than with one utterly lacking in seductiveness. I very much prefer to believe that I at least am, in one way or another, reserved to take part in some enduring and rather superb performance,—somewhere, by and by,—in a performance concerned with some third truth, more august and æsthetically more pleasing than are the only ever-enduring truths apparent to us here. We copulate and die, and that is all?—Well, perhaps! But, then again, perhaps not! One must, you see, be broad-minded about the matter.”

He for a moment kept silence. That regrettably candid painting and all the other adjuncts of this place were certainly very depressing, now that the learned diableries of the Fox-Spirit no longer enlivened this tomb. Nevertheless, Gerald kept his long chin well up.

“Yes, every man ought to be broad-minded about this matter, and ought to cherish always, if only as a diverting and inexpensive plaything, this pungent notion of being immortal. It is really inexpensive, because, should your notion prove ungrounded, you run no risk, no tiniest risk, of being twitted, by and by, for credulity, or even of ever discovering your error. Meanwhile this faith in your own durability and potential importance is in some sense a cordial; and is in sundry ways a fine toy. It renders life, and dying too, endurable: and it offers against all vacant half-hours a variety of diverting speculations... as to that possible third truth.”

Again Gerald paused. For it seemed to him, as he unwittingly repeated the age-old self-persuasions of so many of his ancestors, that he had found now another facet in this jewel of an idea that he was playing with; and this fact considerably cheered Gerald.

“Then, too,” said he, “then, too, that rather wide-spread expectation of an oncoming triumph—somewhere, in some hazed roseate arena, beyond the discomforts of death and the incredible impudence of the mortician’s titivating,—that triumph which is to be a perpetual triumphing of justice and of rationality and of kindliness and of all the other canonical virtues, this rumored triumph yet cows many persons, not infrequently, into one or another thrifty-minded practice of these generally beneficent virtues.”

Gerald said then: “It thus makes for, at any rate, terrestrial ease and stability and repose: it gives people, as the phrase runs, something to go by, in that it supports the most of every nation’s social and legal rules of thumb. And it tends appreciably to limit men’s common greed and viciousness, and all the harsher lusts of human beings, to exercises through which there seems some quite tangible gain within tolerably safe reach.”

And Gerald said also: “Yes: it is much better for men to believe in some third truth which will be revealed to them after the death of their bodies; and a general faith in the immortality even of mere Musgraves appears to me, thus, very plainly, because of its happy blending of the functions of a narcotic and of a policeman, a generally desirable assumption. It remains in all ways a desirable faith, no matter whether or not there be any grounds for it. And if this careful painting presents the entire truth, that fact is but another excellent reason for paying no attention to it.”

Gerald now felt quite comfortable through having listened so respectfully to his own relentless logic.

“For these reasons, O foolish painting of the Two Truths, I deny your fleshly significance. Whether I happen to be a sun god or a Savior or a culture hero or just another bull-headed Musgrave, I deny that you present to me any truth whatever. I snap my fingers at your materialism; I turn up my nose at your indecorous anatomical studies; and I send the divine foot of the Lord of the Third Truth smashing through your ancient canvas. These things I do to proclaim the majesty of the Third Truth. And I depart from this Peter and this Peter’s Tomb, to seek my appointed kingdom.”

It was in this way that Gerald yet again put an affront upon Koleos Koleros and upon the Holy Nose of Lytreia.