Something About Eve

    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.