Something About Eve

    THE Sylan who was called Glaum of the Haunting Eyes, be it repeated, did that which was requisite.... To Gerald, as a student of magic, the most of the process was familiar enough: and if some curious grace-notes were, perhaps, excursions into the less wholesome art of goety, that was not Gerald’s affair. It was sufficient that, when the Sylan had ended, no Sylan was any longer visible. Instead, in Gerald Musgrave’s library, stood face to face two Geralds, each in a blue coat and a golden yellow waistcoat, each with a tall white stock and ruffles about his throat, and each clad in every least respect precisely like the other.

    Nor did these two lean, red-headed Geralds differ in countenance. Each smiled at the other with the same amply curved, rather womanish mouth set above the same prominent, long chin; and each found just the same lazy and mildly humorous mockery in the large and very dark blue, the really purple, eyes of the other: for between these two Gerald Musgraves there was no visual difference whatever, One half of this quaint pair now sat down at the writing-table; and, fiddling with the papers there, he took up the pages of Gerald Musgrave’s unfinished romance, about the high loves of his famous ancestor Dom Manuel of Poictesme and Madame Niafer, the Soldan of Barbary’s daughter. Gerald had begun this tale in the days when he had intended to endow America with a literature superior to that of other countries; but for months now he had neglected it: and, in fact, ever since he set up as a student of magic he had lacked time, somehow, with every available moment given over to runes and cantraps and suffumigations, to get back to any really serious work upon this romance.

    Then the seated Gerald, smiling almost sadly, looked up toward his twin.

    “Thus it was,” said the seated Gerald, “a great while ago at Asch, when two Guivrics confronted each other and played shrewdly for the control of the natural body of Guivric of Perdigon. All which I lost on that day, through my over-human clinging to the Two Truths, I now have back, after five centuries of pleasure-seeking in the land of Dersam. And I find this second natural body of mine committed to the creating of yet more pleasure-giving nonsense, about, of all persons, that eternal Manuel of Poictesme! I find this body also enamored of the fig-leaf of romance!”

    “It may be that I do not understand your simile,” said the standing Gerald, “for in the United States of America the fig-leaf is, rather, the nice symbol of decency, it is, indeed, the beginning and the end of democratic morality.”

    “Nevertheless, and granting all this,” replied the now demon-haunted natural body of Gerald Musgrave, “the fig-leaf is a romance with which human optimism veils the only two eternal and changeless and rather unlovely realities of which any science can be certain.”

    “Ah, now I comprehend! And without utterly agreeing with you, I cannot deny there is something in your metaphor. Yet I must tell you, sir, that I am perhaps peculiarly qualified to deal with Dom Manuel because of the fact that this famous hero was my lineal ancestor—”

    “Oh, but, my poor Gerald, was he indeed!”

    “Yes, through both the Musgrave and the Allonby lines. For my mother’s father was Gerald Allonby—”

    And Gerald would have gone on to explain the precise connection, of which the Musgrave family was justifiably proud. But the unappreciative Sylan who now wore good Musgrave flesh and blood had remarked, of all conceivable remarks:

    “I honestly condole with you. Yet ancestors cannot be picked like strawberries. And my luck was even worse, for I was of Manuel’s fellowship. I knew the tall swaggerer himself throughout his blundering career. And I can assure you that, apart from his unhuman gift for keeping his mouth shut, there was nothing a bit wonderful about the cock-eyed, gray impostor.”

    This was surprising news. Still, Gerald reflected, a demon did, in the way of business, meet many persons in circumstances in which the better side of their natures was not to the fore. Gerald therefore flew to defend the honor of his race quite civilly.

    “My progenitor, in any event, carried through his imposture. He died very well thought of by his neighbors. That you will find to be a leading consideration with any citizen of the United States of America. And I in turn assure you that my account of the great Manuel’s exploits will be, when it is completed, an exceedingly fine romance. It will be a tale which has not its like in America. Loveliness lies swooning upon every page, illuminated by a never-ceasing coruscation of wit. It is a story which, as you might put it, grips the reader. There is no imaginable reader but will be instantly engaged by my adroit depiction of the hardihood and the heroic virtues of Dom Manuel—”

    “But,” said the really very handsomely disguised Sylan, “Manuel had always a cold in his head. Nobody can honestly admire an elderly fellow who is continually sneezing and spitting—”