Something About Eve

    Some day it will be completed by other hands than the thin wrinkled hands before me. Somebody else,—not born, as yet, it may be,—will be writing out,—intelligibly, anyhow,—the story of Poictesme and of the Redeemer of Poictesme and of his fine followers and many children,—but not half so splendidly as I was going to write it. Somebody else will, by and by, be beleaguering and entering into—by means of the little, yet the not wholly despicable, art of letters,—that wonder-haunted province which—yes, that also,—was a part of my appointed kingdom.... Somebody else will be laying open the fair ways to Bellegarde and to Amneran and to Storisende, and will be making free these ways to every person, so that, through the lean lesser art of letters, Poictesme may become in some sort another Antan,—an Antan perhaps considerably abated in splendor, but graced at least with easy accessibility....

    Yet not even such slight triumphs were to be won by aged feet, and by ears no longer acute, and by dimming eyes, and by pulses which would not be riotous ever any more. He tore up the pages one by one, just as, he recollected now, in the land of Lytreia, Evaine had torn up the sacred fig-leaves. Glaum had said that the fig-leaf was the true symbol of romance. Gerald meditatively dropped the destroyed fragments of his romance into the waste-basket.

    Gerald spoke then without any too great hopefulness. “Has my body, during your inhabitancy of it, my dear fellow, escaped from Evelyn Townsend? and gone free from the unmerited blessing of a good woman’s love?”

    The red-headed boy before him replied, discreetly: “Your body and the body of your Cousin Evelyn have always been such good friends!”

    And Gerald smiled. “I recognize that phrase. So throughout thirty years Lichfield has never once forgotten its polite formula for exorcising the inadmissible!”

    “It has been generally felt,” the youngster answered, “that a prominent man of letters was entitled to his Egeria. Of recent years, to be sure, your friendship has not been—we will say,—so ardent nor so frequently manifested. But there has been, to hold you two together, the boy begotten by your body upon her body. There has been the long usage to hold you two together. So your friendship has remained unshattered.”

    “I had forgotten,” Gerald said, “the boy. Yes, I remember hearing that you had thoughtfully provided me with offspring during my absence. I know not quite how to thank you, my dear fellow, for a favor so delicate and so personal. We will therefore cough and drop the subject.”

    Then Gerald leaned back in the chair. He put together his finger-tips, and smilingly he looked at them with rather tired, old eyes.

    “So I stay faithful to one woman, after all! I have been kept in everything a model American citizen. I have gracefully adhered to the code of a gentleman. In my private life I have evinced every proper respect for the chivalrous sacrament of adultery between social equals. In the field of my professional labors I have composed no puerile and lascivious romances, but only serious and instructive works. I am, in brief, in all respects, a credit to my native Lichfield, and, more generally, to the United States of America.”

    He shrugged. He spread out those old-looking, futile hands.

    “Well, certainly I must not spoil the miracle. So I submit. I yield to the demands of propriety. I accept my personal good behavior; I accept my success; and I accept also my measure of actual famousness.”

    Then Gerald said: “Therefore I must, so long as my life lasts, continue faithfully your work as the recorder of historical and scientific truths, since it was such truths which brought my name into famousness. Oh, yes, you may depend upon it, I shall henceforward honor these fine truths within the limits advisable for anybody now nearing sixty. I shall serve them, that is, with my pen rather than with other instruments now perhaps more fallible. For the trained intelligence of such a famous scholar as I have become cannot deny their proper importance to those scientific and historical truths which brought him into famousness,—nor would, of course, my admirers care to have me abandoning my métier.”