Something About Eve

    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.