Something About Eve

    Gerald was very proud of Theodorick’s cleverness in noticing the shaping of these hills, which Gerald himself had not ever observed, in the entire three weeks he had spent upon Mispec Moor. But when this odd accident of nature was pointed out to Maya, she only said that she saw what you meant of course, but that, after all, it was only two hills, and that hills looked much more like hills than they looked like anything else.

PART NINE THE BOOK OF MISPEC MOOR

33. Limitations of Gaston

    “To tame the wolf you must marry him.”

    IT WAS at this time, toward the middle of June, that Gaston Bulmer came from Lichfield. Gerald was sitting, as was his daily custom now, under the chestnut-tree beside the road which led to Antan. He waited there to engage in conversation the next of his future subjects who might pass by in that perpetual journeying toward Antan. Gerald, under this same chestnut-tree, had by this time talked with many such unearthly wayfarers: and if the rather interesting things they had told him were all written down, it would make a book unutterably enormous and utterly incredible.

    In such circumstances it was, just after two not unfamiliar mountebanks had gone by carrying with them the paraphernalia of their Punch and Judas show, that Gerald noticed a small sulphur-colored cloud sweeping rapidly from the east. It descended: and when it was near to Gerald, it unclosed. Gaston Bulmer then stepped, a bit rheumatically, from its glowing depths, and he laid down a rod of cedar wood tipped with an apple carved in blue-stone. There was not in all this anything in itself astonishing, since Gaston Bulmer was an adept in the arts of which Gerald, in the strange days before he knew that he was a god, had been a student. But to note how Gaston had aged in the last week or so was astounding. Yet Gerald, in any case, was wholly delighted to see again his old friend and preceptor, and a person who had for so long been virtually his father-in-law.

    Gaston would not come up to the cottage, though, for dinner, because, as he confessed, he preferred not to encounter Maya. Rather, it was his wish, and it seemed, indeed, to be his errand, to free Gerald from what Gaston Bulmer, surprisingly enough, described as the wise woman’s pernicious magic.

    Gerald said: “Oh, bosh! For really now, Gaston, if such nonsense were not heart-breaking it would be side-splitting. I am inexpressibly shocked by your hallucination, which is, I trust, of a most transitory nature. However, let us not discuss my wife, if you please. Instead, do you tell me how my body is faring.”

    So they sat down together under the chestnut-tree. And Gaston Bulmer answered, “That body, Gerald, since you quitted it, has become a noted scholar and a man of letters.”

    “Ah! ah!” said Gerald, greatly pleased, “so my romance about Dom Manuel of Poictesme has been completed, and is now being admired everywhere!”

    “No, for your body has become, just as I said, a scholar. Scholars do not write romances.”

    “Yet you referred to a man of letters—?”

    “Your body is now a rather famous ethnologist. Your body deals with historical and scientific truths. Your body thus writes large quartos upon topics to which no romance, howsoever indelicate, could afford to devote a sentence.”

    Gerald fell to stroking that long chin of his. “Still, I recall that the present informant of my body once informed me there were only two truths of which any science could be certain.”

    “And what were these two truths?”

    Gerald named them.

    Gaston said then: “The demon is consistent. For these two are precisely your body’s scientific specialty. To-day your body writes invaluable books in which the quaint and interesting customs that accompany an interplay of these two truths, and the various substitutes for that interplay, are cataloged and explained, as these customs have existed in all lands and times. Lichfield to-day is wholly proud of the scholarship and the growing fame of Gerald Musgrave.”

    “I am glad that my body has turned out so splendidly. And I trust that all goes equally well with your daughter Evelyn?”

    “Gerald,” the older man replied, looking more seriously troubled than Gerald ever liked to have anybody seeming in his company, “Gerald, it is an unfair thing that your Cousin Evelyn, without knowing it, should be living upon terms of such close friendship with a demon-haunted body.”

    “Ah, so that friendship continues!”

    “It continues,” said Gaston, “unaltered. It may interest you, Gerald, by the way, to hear that your Cousin Evelyn has now a son, quite a fine red-headed boy, born just a year after you relinquished your body to that treacherous Sylan.”

    Gerald answered affably: “Why, that is perfectly splendid! Frank always wanted a boy.”

    “My son-in-law, in fact, is much pleased. It is about my daughter I was thinking. It seemed to me the situation is hardly fair to her, Gerald.”