Something About Eve

    “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 Burmah, 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.”