Something About Eve

    This child wailed broken-heartedly: “A blasphemer is come up against the Two Truths; a vainglorious fool derides the pair that endure where all else perishes; and life is denied to me by his wrong-headedness.”

    Gerald had put down the ax. He was trembling. He did not like the love and the great yearning which had awakened in his heart. He folded his arms very tightly: he seemed tense and rather frightened looking as he waited there peering side-wise toward this boy.

    “Child,” Gerald said, “what is your will that you cry out for life from the glorification tree?”

    “My father, I demand the life which you have not given me, that life which you owe to me, and that life which is denied me so long as you deny the Two Truths.”

    “I serve the demands of my appointed kingdom, child. I serve the needs of no other truth and the needs of no pawing women who would keep me out of that kingdom.”

    “My father, your kingdom is a doubtful dream, but the flesh of my mother is real.”

    “My dream is lovelier than any woman. Oh, and a doubtfulness also is more lovely than the body of a woman, for I know the shaping of that body over-well.”

    “My father, you refuse the pleasures which will not ever be returning.”

    “I am a god. I serve the needs of my own will.”

    “The gods also pass, my father, they also pass without any returning, upon the road which you now tread.”

    “Let us pass, then, unhindered! But no woman permits it.”

    “That is because these women, O my father, have a very rational wisdom.”

    “Such is, perhaps, the case. But a god has his irrational dream. And that is better.”

    “It is well enough, my father, for that dream to end contentedly in the arms of some woman.”

    “It is well enough. It is customary. But I am Fair-haired Hoo, the Helper and the Preservers I go to my appointed kingdom: and I am Lord of a Third Truth, whose mightiness I must help and preserve.”

    Then Gerald hewed on: and as the tree fell, the child vanished.

    Now Gerald set fire to the tree: and when a tidy blaze was crackling, he spoke the needed words, and into the heart of this fire he tossed the strange white gem. Straightway you heard a loud screeching. Out of the tomb of Peter the Builder came a vixen fox, screaming and shuddering quite horribly, but not ever ceasing to approach the fire. She entered the flames. Silence followed, and the dawn of a superb May morning which was marred only by an unpleasant odor of singed hair and burning flesh.

    Gerald after that went back into the tomb from which the omniscient Fox-Spirit had been dispossessed. He looked rather sentimentally upon the empty disordered bed: then he passed beyond the brazier, in which the ruins of fig-leaves yet smouldered, toward the Mirror of the Two Truths.

    The fact no longer mattered, perhaps, that any man who looked into this mirror straightway found himself transformed into two stones: but it very greatly mattered what effect this mirror would have upon a sun god and a Savior and a culture hero. So he removed the flesh-colored veil.

19. Beyond the Veil

    BUT he was not turned into two stones. Nor was there confronting him any mirror. Beyond the flesh-colored veil he found only an ancient painting very carefully done, but upon an un-human scale which made this painting monstrous. The subject of the picture, however, is not known, because Gerald never told anybody.

    But it is known that Gerald shook his head at this painting.

    “Laborious daub of prevaricating pigment!” he remarked. “O futile painting, which so many foolish believers in Lytreia think to be the Mirror of the Two Truths! I question your arithmetic. For I myself am the Lord of a Third Truth, for all that I have just at present no precise idea as to its nature. In consequence, I know the two objects which you magnify are not all which exists. And I deny that their never-ending search of each other is the one gesture of life. No: I at least, I feel assured, am destined to take part in some quite other gesture, of a more graceful and more cleanly and more dignified nature,—a gesture of, it well may be, eternal importance....”

    Yet Gerald glanced about him a little forlornly. This place was now rather lonesome and ambiguous looking. In the crypt immediately beneath him, Gerald knew, lay all that remained of King Peter and the most of his numerous family; dozens upon dozens of peculiarly ugly objects were there, all that remained of a great conqueror and of the queens who had delighted him, all that attestedly remained now anywhere of a strong hero’s pride and famous warfaring and of his many women’s loveliness....