Something About Eve

    Gerald watched the two pass out of his sight. His arms lifted after them ever so slightly. His arms seemed to ache as he recalled the feel of that small body and the warmth and yieldingness of it, which were now lost forever. Theodorick Quentin Musgrave was only an illusion contrived by forces which it was not comfortable to think about. Gerald knew that now with certainty. And it did not matter. Nor did it cheer him to reflect—as he did,—that he was in no worse case than all other fathers, no one of whom might ever retain the child that was little and helpless, and was loved for no reason at all, as nobody could quite love the hobbledehoy thumping schoolboy or even the estimable young man into whom that warm and yielding, sturdy, so small body might develop.....

    Then Gerald turned to Maya. “I have only you. But that which I have suffices me. I have been lucky, O my dearest, very far beyond my merits.”

    She was regarding him with a sort of troubled fondness; and her speech now was hardly snappish at all. “You really are, my poor Gerald, quite too ridiculous about the child! You talk, you actually do talk, as though he were not ever coming back,—and in good time for supper, too, unless he wants a spanking.”

    At that, Gerald raised a protesting hand. “Do you not trick me into optimism, also! Too much ambition and high dreams and that which was perhaps divine have now departed forever. The illusion which you created to be our son has departed, forever. But use and wont and a great deal of honest love remain. I do not say these things are heroic. I do say that these suffice. So do you let the strong bonds which are about me content you, my darling, without wreathing them in the paper flowers of optimism.”

    “But are you, also,” Maya said, “content?” Gerald answered: “I am well content. Day in, day out, let there be between us faith, and aid, and a great fondness, O my dear, and no parting! For I am content and very contrite. I know that any life without you would be a maimed business. I know that I desire only to continue in our quiet way of living upon Mispec Moor. For the middle way of life is best. What need have I to be a god or to be seeking unfamiliar places so that I may rule over them? That way is troubled, and too full of noise and striving. It is better to be content. It is better to be content with the dear, common happenings of human life, shared loyally with the one woman whose love for you is limitless and does not change, for all that it is blind to none of your failings; and to know that these things are enough and very far beyond your deserts; and not to be insanely hankering after any more high-hearted manner of living which is out of your reach or, at any rate, is attained through more trouble than it is probably worth. Ah, yes, the middle way of life is best.”

    “At least it is some comfort,” Maya said, “to hear you talking almost sensibly.”

    Then she reached up, still with a grave and rather tender smiling upon her beloved, homely face; and she took away from Gerald’s eyes the rose-colored spectacles.

    “In fact,” said a male voice, “the woman’s task is ended.”

43. Economics of Redemption

    FOR now had come to them, traveling back from Antan, the brown man. This brown man came, he said, to summon Maya to her appointed task of transforming yet other men into domestic animals.

    “—For women,” he said, also, “have always their fond task and their beneficent labor. Here, I repeat, the woman’s task is ended. But yonder many men go untamed and unbroken to the sane ways of compromise.”

    Then Maya a bit absent-mindedly assented, as she put away those spectacles of hers for future use, that, in point of fact, she supposed she had done everything that was actually necessary in Gerald’s case, although nobody ever would really know what a trial he had been to her.

    And Gerald for one instant looked at his wife. He found in his wife’s face that which it is the doom of most husbands to find there at one time or another. And it caused Gerald to laugh a little.

    “Nevertheless,” Gerald said, quietly, “I am Fair-haired Hoo, the Helper and the Preserver, the Well-beloved of Heavenly Ones. I am Lord of the Third Truth, in this world which knows of only two truths and of the compromises which they beget.”

    The brown man greeted that with a thin smile. “You have been long expected. Oh, very long have scepticism and despair, with somewhat varying voices, invoked your name, saying, ‘Who will overthrow the Master Philologist!’”

    “Well, and now,” said Gerald, with the outline of a swagger, for he was getting himself more in hand, “now that prophecy is about to be fulfilled, for I am Hoo, and none other.”

    “But, really, friend, I do not see how you can be an interrogative pronoun.”

    “To a god, and more particularly to a Dirghic god, all incarnations are possible. There is no reason whatever why I should not be an interrogative pronoun. It is merely a matter of divine election.”