Something About Eve

    For, after all, Gerald decided to stay over the week-end, since Maya was so unflatteringly eager to be rid of him. It was an eagerness troubling to his self-respect. Here was he, a god whom women had always run after, and had pestered beyond reasonable endurance, here was he, of all persons, being treated with unconcealed indifference by a mere hedge-sorceress, by a creature who had not even any remarkable good looks or wit to justify her impudence. This Maya of the Fair Breasts needed taking down quite a large number of pegs. So Gerald fell to wooing her with an ardor that somewhat surprised him. For it was eminently necessary, it was, indeed, a rather beautiful idea, to win the woman, and then to jilt her, so as to teach her, once for all, not ever again to make free and easy with the will of a god.

    Meanwhile, Maya had suggested that he conceal the fact he was a god; and that she should introduce him to the local gentry of Turoine as a visiting sorcerer.

    “For I must tell you, Gerald,” Maya said, “all the best-thought-of people hereabouts are in one or another branch of sorcery. We have, thus, never had any relations with Heaven. All our connections have been with another quarter. And it is not that we are unduly conceited and exclusive, it is simply that it has just happened so. Nevertheless, so many gods have straggled by, on their way to an ambiguous end, as they went down to encounter the Master Philologist, and whatever it is that he does to them, that there is a tendency among the best people hereabouts, as I will not conceal from you, to regard them as not quite the sort that one meets socially.”

    “But I—I” said Gerald, in uncontrolled indignation.

    “I know, my poor boy, you are entirely different. And I am perfectly broad-minded about it, myself. But other people are not. And it would sound much better.”

    Then Gerald spoke with dignity and firmness. Gerald said that not for one moment would he stoop to such a subterfuge. Not for an instant would he who was a lord of all exalted white magics pretend to be a sorcerer soiled with infernal traffics and patronized by mere devils. After that, Gerald passed as a visiting sorcerer.

26. “Qualis Artifex!”

    AND Gerald used to amuse himself by talking with the travelers who passed by the neat log and plaster cottage of Maya the wise woman, upon their way to the court of Queen Freydis and her consort the Master Philologist. For it was a good and shrewd policy, Gerald felt, for a monarch to familiarize himself with his future subjects: so he would sit by the wayside, in the shade of a conveniently placed chestnut-tree,—incognito, as it were,—and would artfully allure them into conversation.

    “Hail, friends! And what business draws you to the city of all marvels?” said Gerald, on the first morning that he fell into this long-sighted course.

    He was told—by the big-bellied, yellow-haired man, whose skin was so curiously spotted,—that they were two poets upon their way to Antan, the goal of all the gods, and the friendly haven of true poets, where poets might hope to find at last that loveliness which they desired and could nowhere discover in their everyday life upon earth. To Gerald this was excellent news, since it increased the number of his future subjects very gratifyingly.

    But he said nothing, while the big-bellied, spotted, thin-legged gentleman in the purple robe adorned with golden stars, went on in his answer to Gerald’s first question, by explaining that the speaker was Nero Claudius Caesar, the king of all poets, and that his scrawny companion, in a brown doublet of which both elbows needed patching, was an artist of considerable talent from out of the Gallic provinces, who was called Francois Villon.

    Gerald found this also of some interest, in view of what he remembered about the Mirror of Caer Omn. Not often did you thus come face to face with two discarded personalities. But Gerald said nothing about this either. Instead, he questioned Nero yet further, and he thus learned that these two poets were on their way to the court of Freydis, because there alone in the universe was art properly regarded: for there, indeed, true artists were manufactured out of common clay, and were informed with the fire of Audela.

    It was one or another old hero from out of Poictesme, Nero had heard, who had first modeled these earthen images; and Freydis, as occasion served, gave life to these images and set them to live upon earth, as changelings. But, above all, said Nero, in Antan the true poets of this world fared happily among the myths and the gods who once had afforded to these poets such fine themes, so that to-day of course these poets wrote even more splendid poems now that they composed with the eye upon the object.