Something About Eve

    “Oh, dear me, not at all!” said Gerald. And the old fellow now wore the expression which, sometimes, accompanies a blush. “It is merely that I have talked a bit too freely. It is only that this rash tongue of mine was running away with me. So I can but ask you to forget every word I have uttered. For exalted names ought, really, not to be repeated thus lightly. I shall therefore say nothing whatever about the eight other queens with whom my name has been coupled,—with how good reason I, you understand, must be the last person in the world to admit,—nor about any of the empresses either. In fact, a great deal of the scandal about my intimacy with one of them was exaggerated. No: I most certainly must not voice any indiscretions about dear Caroline. So I merely point out—without mentioning any names whatever,—that my experience has been considerable: and I can assure you, my dear fellow, that in the end these half-magics produce, after all, no very prodigious miracles.”

    “But—” said the boy.

    “No,” Gerald protested, “no, really, you must not tempt me with such eloquence! It suffices that during the thirty years that you have sat here theorizing,—and have, as it were, blossomed forth with all these delightful books,—these half-magics have led me day after day from one affair to its twin; they have led me into more or less jealously guarded lowlands, which were not markedly dissimilar; they have led then from one valley to another valley which looked and felt and, for that matter, smelt very much the same; finally they led me to the fair breasts of Maya. And I fell away into domesticity, I went no farther. But I was wholly content there. ... So I do not complain. I have lost through these half-magics my appointed kingdom in Antan,—or so, at least, it appears to me, in a world wherein perhaps nothing is indisputable except, of course, historical and scientific truths. Yet the losing of my kingdom has, none the less, been pleasant. I have had, under the harryings of these half-magics—always, I mean, upon the whole,—an agreeable time. To-night the half-magics whose appointed duty it is to keep all us romantics from attaining to Antan have ceased bothering about me. After to-night I am no longer formidable. I am, in a word, now that I approach sixty, almost middle-aged. It follows that Antan does not concern me any longer: and I shall think no more about Antan, wherein, for one reason and another, I have found nothing.”

    With that, gray Gerald Musgrave dipped his pen. He put the boy quite out of mind. And the well-thought-of old scholar began to write, just where his natural body had left off a bit earlier in the evening, setting down decorously the historical and scientific truth as to the rules governing pre-nuptial intercourse in the bedchambers of New Guinea and the Tonga Islands.

50. Exodus of Glaum

    THE boy waited, looking down at this old fellow who sat there making small scratches upon paper, the most of which he presently canceled with yet other scratches, all the while with the air of a person who is about something intelligent and of actual importance. Then the boy shrugged. For, as always, to an onlooker the motions or creative writing revealed that flavor of the grotesque which is attendant upon every form of procreation.

    And besides, to him for whom the silver stallion waited without, and for whom his appointed kingdom waited also, such time-wasting appeared futile. He, who was young, and who retained as yet the untroubled faith of every boy in his own abilities and in his own importance,—and who, of course, might not foresee the fate which awaited him in the arms of Evadne of the Dusk,—could not regard without impatience such time-wasting. What made it even worse was that this dilapidated remnant of a man was so plainly enjoying himself. For he chuckled as he wrote; he had self-evidently found what he considered a rather beautiful idea to play with, for now he had cocked his battered, so nearly bald, old head to one side, and that which he had just written down was being regarded by his dimmed and peering eyes with entire admiration: and it was all somewhat pitiable to the young eyes of the observer.