James Branch Cabell

“ Gerald answered: “I, who have left the Marches of Antan forever, have bought freedom from the ever-meddling magic of the Two Truths. At my first sight of no other female body which is not positively deformed will I become enraptured. I have bought feet too old for errancy, ears that are deaf to the high gods, and to the heart-stirring music of great myths, and to the soft wheedling of women also, and I have bought eyes too dim to note whether or not Antan still gleams on the horizon. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A fool with so many fine words at his tongue’s tip, a fool also is not to be argued with. For it is a foolishness beyond any describing, to believe that Antan can be destroyed by you or by anybody else. Ah, no! your kingdom awaited you, poor Gerald: but you faltered, you fell away into domesticity,—and you talked! Now it is the Master Philologist who, through the might of that word which was in the beginning, and which will be when all else has perished, has removed your kingdom from your reach, and from your seeing, and even from your quite whole-hearted belief, forever. ”

“ Even so, there was an obligation upon a god. To be contented, to have no cares to worry you by day, to lack for nothing by day, and every night to induce decorously through connubial affection a profound and refreshing slumber,—that was not everything a god desired. Yonder there was a third truth. Yonder was Gerald’s appointed kingdom, and not here upon Mispec Moor.
Besides, Gerald had begun to wonder more and more about Freydis. By all reports, it was she who really ruled those hills and lowlands yonder, which to-morrow—or at least, next week,—would be Gerald’s hills and lowlands ”

“ He showed thus the tip of his forefinger touching the tip of his thumb so that they formed a circle. And Horvendile said:
“She varies even as the moon varies. Yet equally is this divine small monster the bestower of life and of all joy; she charms in defiance of reason: and whensoever Koleos Koleros appears, red and inflamed and hideous among her tousled tresses, a man is moved willy-nilly to place in her his chief delight.”
“Oho!” said Gerald, and, as became a student of magic, he also made the needful sign, “oho, but a most potent goddess is this Koleos Koleros!” ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Thereafter I settled down,—just temporarily, to be sure, but still I have settled down,—in no lewd and feverish Hörselberg, but here, where a contented husband risks no further chance of becoming useful to romantic art.”
“It is possible for one to exist, but not for anybody to live, here!” replied Tannhäuser, scornfully, as his wild gaze swept over the still stretches of Mispec Moor.
“Allow me!” said Gerald, with the tiniest of smiles; and he perched his rose-colored spectacles upon the beaked high nose of Tannhäuser. ”

“ Of course when you saw him grazing upon Mispec Moor just after a rain-shower his back would be dark and sleek, and his broad sides would be streaked with wavering, oily-looking bands. But at all other times he kept his glowing silver color, which was unlike that of any other horse Gerald had ever seen.
Meanwhile the divine steed grazed with the geldings who once had been the human lovers of Maya. He went as they did, lifting each hoof with somewhat droll carefulness as he grazed forward on the sloping ground about the cottage. For Gerald would often watch this grazing. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The spectacle was queer; it was unspeakably irrational: for, as always, to an onlooker, the motions of creative writing revealed that flavor of the grotesque which is attendant upon every form of procreation.
Yet it was upon a graver count that Gerald felt honestly sorry for the inheritor of Gerald Musgrave’s natural body. For Gerald was giving up his life out of deference to the code of a gentleman with rather more of relief than he had permitted the Sylan to suspect. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ And Gerald himself, having decorously laid down his life rather than violate this dreadful code of a gentleman, was now fairly in train to become a competent magician.
Not ever again would he sit writing among those bookshelves, engrossed, and rubbing at his chin or forehead, or scratching his head, or sticking his little finger into his ear, or restively shifting his weight from one buttock to the other buttock, in his multiform efforts to quicken, somehow, the flow of lagging thought. ”

“ But again Gerald had interrupted him, saying: “Yet I have read, moreover, that this modest and retired Koleos Koleros, alone of eternal beings, is ever ardent to quench the ardor of her servitors; and that—still to praise merit where merit appears,—in her untiring warfare with all men that rise up to oppose her, she displays the magnanimity to favor, and to embrace lovingly, the adversary that attacks her most often and most deeply.” ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ Whereas, upon yet other occasions,—when my turn of mind takes on a more scholastic turn,—I shall know that in Antan awaits me each paragraph of the profound, wide erudition of Evaine.... But more often, Horvendile, I shall think of yet another woman and of a boy child, who were not wonderful in anything, but who for a while seemed mine. And I shall believe that these two wait for me, in a much more prosaic Antan; and I shall know that no magic, howsoever mightier than the less aspiring dreams of my manhood, can afford to me anything more dear.... ”

“ For Gerald did not really enjoy trouble of any kind, and said frankly that he found it uncongenial.
“But these,” said Gerald, by and by, “all these, my dear fellow, I had thought to have perished a long while ago.”
“You travel, Gerald, on the road of the greater myths. Such myths do not perish speedily. And, besides, nothing is true anywhere in the Marches of Antan. All is a seeming and an echo: and through this superficies men come to know the untruth which makes them free. It follows, in my logic, that to-day these women are the flute-players of Koleos Koleros. ”

“ Gerald stated. “For the one way for a poet to appreciate the true loveliness of a place is not ever to go to it. No, Horvendile, a poet is not to be fobbed off with facts. No matter what the surrounding facts might be, all poets from Prometheus to Jurgen have preferred a beautiful idea to play with. So a logical poet will always destroy his appointed kingdom, because in this way only can he convert it into a beautiful idea. Therefore for me, who am a poet of sorts, to have entered into my appointed kingdom would have been woefully shiftless. ”

“ And Gerald sometimes wondered if Maya had over-ambitiously designed to make permanent this mere parenthesis in his career. She had attempted, to be sure, no magic such as that with which she had transformed his predecessors. No sorceress would dare, for that matter, thus to presume against a god.... Gerald knew that, instead, it was his Maya’s wholesome simplicity and the prosaic human comfort which he did get, after all, from living with this middle-aged and fault-finding and not in the least beautiful woman that had detained him, just for the while of this parenthesis in his career. ”

“ Gerald therefore said: “My good Gaston, that your meaning is excellent, I do not doubt. And it is not your fault of course that, in your merely human condition, you do not quite understand these matters, and certainly cannot view them with an omniscient eye.”
The older man said: “I understand, in any event, that through all these years you have stayed here bewitched with terrible half-magics, and that your own eyes are blinded with the woman’s rose-colored spectacles. And I seek to preserve you.”
“You would preserve me for the provincial life of your little Lichfield! ”