Something About Eve

    And Gerald said: “Very dreadful is the name of Koleos Koleros! Yet, quite apart from the fact that I am a member of the Protestant Episcopal church, I owe this Koleos Koleros no homage. And I, very certainly, shall not linger to pay any, with a princess waiting for me! Rather, do I elect to pass hastily through this land of quags and underbrush, and to leave this somewhat unsanitarily odored neighborhood, in which, I perceive, misguided persons yet live—”

    For these two young men were no longer alone in this ambiguous valley. Through the twilight Gerald now saw many women passing furtively toward a dark laurel grove; and from out of that grove came a queer music.

    Then Horvendile spoke of these women.

6. Evadne of the Dusk

    NOW all the while that Horvendile talked it was to the accompaniment of that remote queer music: and Gerald was troubled. He came, at least, as near to being troubled as Gerald ever permitted himself to do. 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. They serve to-day, forever unsatiated, that most insatiable divinity who is shaggy and evil-odored, and who can taste no pleasure until after bloodshed—”

    “I have read, also,” Gerald broke in, with the slight smile of one who is not unpleased to display his learning, “that this Koleos Koleros is a somewhat contradictory goddess, producing the less the more constantly that she is cultivated and stirred up—”

    “Oho, but a most potent goddess is this Koleos Koleros!” continued Horvendile. “She is wrinkled and flabby in appearance, yet the most stout of heroes falls at last before her. Infants perish nightly her gloomy vaults, and plagues and diseases in harbor there—”

    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.”

    Horvendile thereupon held out his hand. 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!”

    “Now, then,” continued Horvendile, “all they who in this place serve eternally this most whimsical divinity are a loving and a peculiarly happy people. Their amorousness, which here is not ever blighted by shrill reprobation, has need at no time to fear either the chastisement of human law nor the anathemas of any other religion anywhere in the quiet brakes and lowlands of the moist realm of Koleos Koleros. For, you conceive, these feminine myths who now are flute-players in and about the shrine of the wrinkled goddess, and who through so many centuries have been trained in all the arts of pleasure, came by and by into a certain confusion—”

    “But what sort of confusion, Horvendile, do you mean? For I find your speaking another sort. And I am rather more interested in that princess—”

    “I mean that their religion, which ranks pleasure above all else, permits no man to pass by unpleased.”

    “Ah, now I understand you!”

    “—I mean that, through the duties of their religious faith, their way of living has been given over to an assiduous and an empirical study of all the charms peculiar to a woman, the more particularly as these charms are employed—”

    “Let us say, in the exercise of their religion,” Gerald suggested, “for I wholly understand you, sir.”

    “It has followed that the taste of these ladies has become more delicate. It has followed that, by force of considering their own feminine loveliness, always unveiled and in lively employment, and by comparing it so intimately and so jealously with the loveliness of their female rivals in the service of the wrinkled goddess, they have become connoisseurs of the beauties peculiar to their sex. They have acquired a refinement of taste—”