Something About Eve

    “Then perhaps, sir, you may be better pleased by the enchanters who live at the other end of this city. For these enchanters have no guides save restlessness and foiled desires and impotence; they get no direct aid from hell, but from somewhat less ancient intellectual centres; and they work all their magic, such as it is, with words.”

    “And what does the magic of these same enchanters create?”

    “It creates, sir, a comfortable sense of quality with your betters wherever there is least reason for it.”

    “I find that saying obscure. Nevertheless, I will visit these enchanters,” said Gerald.

    And he rode on.

21. They That Wore Blankets

    THUS Gerald came to the enchanters who were used to perform all their magic with words. And they greeted his coming with a very cordial enthusiasm for creatures so gray and vague and bedraggled looking as they sat huddled there, each one of them clothed in a blanket, and thoroughly drenched as though with sour smelling ram.

    Now the first enchanter to speak wore a violet blanket. He arose; and dripping bilge-water everywhere about him in the while that he smiled with wholly friendly condescension, he observed:

    “Here is another rider on the silver stallion. Here is yet another figure of papier mâché which Horvendile has dispatched upon a profitless journeying.”

    “But!—”said Gerald.

    Without at all heeding Gerald, a second enchanter, in a well soaked green blanket, laid down his scissors; and he addressed the first enchanter with some fervor, saying:

    “Let us not speak harshly of our good Horvendile’s magic, for everybody ought to respect the impotence of the aging. We must concede, of course, that his magic is no longer fresh. It is not possible to deny that a woefully infirm magic has set this papier mâché figure on a hackneyed journeying. Candor compels us to grant that this journeying crosses once sparkling rivers which have long ago run dry. We, as intelligent enchanters, must admit that a wearying fog lowers thickly about this journeying, that above it the sun of romance shines very pale and cold, and that this journeying is sterile and empty of gusto. Nevertheless, this journeying, as we ought not to ignore, is no doubt an afterthought, it is the belated invention of a tired mind, and a desperate and ill-advised proceeding. For these reasons, howsoever sorrowfully we, as Horvendile’s fellow artists and well-wishers, must always deplore among ourselves the kindergarten notions of this poor Horvendile, and his ponderous playfulness, and the limitations of his few and unenterprising ideas, still we must be careful not to apply to his magic one single harsh word.”

    “Yet—” Gerald stated.

    Nodding in profound and entire approbation, with which Gerald was not in any way connected, an enchanter in a sopping yellow blanket now remarked:

    “I, too, am always ready to defend the magic of our fellow practitioner. My conscience forces me to grant that his magic is not faultless. In mere honesty I have to confess that his magic is stupid and stilted and silly; that it is sniggering and sly and nasty; that it wallows in a morass of self-satisfaction; and that it is steeped and soaked in ever-fretful egoism, in spite of our friendly candor in all dealings with him from the very first. Nor can I dispute that our confrere behaves too much like a decadent small boy who is proud of having been haled into the police court for chalking dirty words on a wall. Apart, though, from his stinking filth and his vileness and his tinsel cynicisms, and aside from his bestiality and his vulgar frippery and his dabblings in cesspools and his vapid sophistries, I stand always ready to defend the magic of Horvendile, because it is not, after all, as if he were a mage of any real importance, and one ought always to be indulgent to persons of third and fourth rate ability.”

    “Even so—” Gerald pointed out.

    But now an enchanter in a thoroughly drenched scarlet blanket was saying, as he meditatively unclosed his pastepot:

    “I quite agree with you. Nobody admires the merits of our esteemed confrere more whole-heartedly than I do. It would be merely silly to deny that he has weakened his always rather wishy-washy magic potions by too frequent blendings. It is impossible to ignore that his magic has become a cloying weariness and a mincing indecency. We are forced to acknowledge that Horvendile is insincere, that he very irritatingly poses as a superior person, that he is labored beyond endurance, that he smells of the lamp, that his art is dull and tarnished and trivial and intolerable, but, even so, we ought also to admit that he does as well as could be expected of anybody who combines a lack of any actual talent with ignorance of actual life.”

    “However—” Gerald explained.

    The fifth enchanter to interrupt Gerald wore a black blanket; and he, too, appeared to drip with wisdom and bilge-water and judicious amiability in the while that he said: