Something About Eve

    “Yes, but not always,” Gerald stated. “For the one way for a poet to appreciate the true loveliness of a place is not ever to go to it. No, Horvendile, a poet is not to be fobbed off with facts. No matter what the surrounding facts might be, all poets from Prometheus to Jurgen have preferred a beautiful idea to play with. So a logical poet will always destroy his appointed kingdom, because in this way only can he convert it into a beautiful idea. Therefore for me, who am a poet of sorts, to have entered into my appointed kingdom would have been woefully shiftless. I would have had henceforward only one kingdom. But, as it is, I can remake the destroyed place several times a day, in my imaginings, and can every time rebuild it more beautifully. I have thus a thousand kingdoms, each one of them more lovely than the other. To-day it will be Evasherah who awaits me there, among all the splendor and the perfume and the sunlit lewdness of the most ancient East: to-morrow the sweet singing of feathery-legged Evadne will summon me to a quite different Antan, which then will be a sea-engirdled, low-lying tropic island: but the day after that, far more idyllic lures will be recalling me to that pastel-colored, pastoral and rather populous Antan which is inhabited by all the many dreams that I had in youth, and is to be made my strictly personal heaven by the pure lips of Evarvan. Whereas, upon yet other occasions,—when my turn of mind takes on a more scholastic turn,—I shall know that in Antan awaits me each paragraph of the profound, wide erudition of Evaine.... But more often, Horvendile, I shall think of yet another woman and of a boy child, who were not wonderful in anything, but who for a while seemed mine. And I shall believe that these two wait for me, in a much more prosaic Antan; and I shall know that no magic, howsoever mightier than the less aspiring dreams of my manhood, can afford to me anything more dear.... For all that one needs, Horvendile, I have had. Antan could boast of nothing more desirable, to me, than that which I have had. So now not any power can ever quell my thankfulness for those illusions which have made sport with me for my allotted while. And I cry out defiantly, among your waiting swine, in this gray place of endless ruining, I am content ...!”

    Then Horvendile replied: “A fool with so many fine words at his tongue’s tip, a fool also is not to be argued with. For it is a foolishness beyond any describing, to believe that Antan can be destroyed by you or by anybody else. Ah, no! your kingdom awaited you, poor Gerald: but you faltered, you fell away into domesticity,—and you talked! Now it is the Master Philologist who, through the might of that word which was in the beginning, and which will be when all else has perished, has removed your kingdom from your reach, and from your seeing, and even from your quite whole-hearted belief, forever. Now it is your only comfort to poultice your failure with such foolish phrases. And now also it is I who tell you that for such faltering and for such failure, and for such phrases, there is possible but one answer.

    Thereafter Horvendile gave Gerald a queer word of power, and Horvendile took out of his pocket a little mirror three inches square. You heard in the duskiness a flapping of small vigorous wings. Then three white pigeons stood among the swine, at the feet of Horvendile. He did what was requisite: and Gerald thus came straightway into a place which was not unfamiliar.

PART TWELVE THE BOOK OF ACQUIESCENCE

48. Fruits of the Sylan’s Industry

    “Candor is no more palatable than an oyster when either is out of season.”

    GERALD came thus into the library in which, no more than four months ago, as it appeared to him, he had quitted his natural body. Lights burned there, but the room was empty.

    Nor did he perceive any marked signs of change. Most of his books were very much as he had left them. Upon the bookcases were still ranged his porcelain and brass animals and birds and reptiles. Investigation, though, revealed the addition to this diminutive fauna of a rather charming china cat,—a black cat, fast asleep, with a red ribbon about its neck,—and of a small ivory elephant, which also was black, but had white tusks.

    The chairs, he saw, had been recovered, but it was with a figured stuff of much the same design and color. The rug that once had been his mother’s was still underfoot; and the curtains, while new looking, were of just the same repulsive shade of green velvet that by candle light turned yellowish.