The Witch-Woman Trilogy

  And upon reflection, the unreasonableness of this out come for his long and honorable career was not its only troubling feature. For Odo of Valneres looked now toward the nearing huge white wharf beyond which gleamed the portal of Heaven. That entrance really was an enormous pearl, with a hole in it for you to go through, and above that hole, as he could now perceive, was carved the name “Levi.”

  Odo of Valneres recalled his Scriptural studies; and, with augmenting uneasiness, he poked at the plump velvet-soft ribs of his companion upon the little gold and salmon-colored cloud.

  “Do you wake up, my darling Ettarre, and tell me if this place is much like the Biblical description!”

  The lovely girl sat up obediently.

  “The Kingdom of Heaven is as Jehovah created it, and as His Scriptures have revealed it,” said Ettarre; and upon the less luscious lips of any other person her meditative slow smile would have seemed unfeeling.

  “Ah, well, but, in any event, I make no doubt that the Holy City has been modernized? and has been kept abreast, so to speak, with progress?”

  “In Heaven there is no variableness nor any shadow of turning, as you should well know who used to be so fond of preaching from that text.”

  “Oh, my God!” said the good Bishop Odo, from force of habit: and the benevolence went out of his plump face.

  For now contrition of the very sincerest sort had smitten him. He thought of his parishioners, of his misled lost flock, all decent, civilized, well-meaning communicants, entrapped, just by his over-fondness for rhetoric, into that fearful lair of multiheaded dragons and of all miscellaneous monstrosities. For these preposterous beasts, it seemed, were not mere figments of speech. There actually before him was one of the twelve pearls through which he had promised the flower of his little flock a glorious entry into Heaven: and the Book of the Revelation of St. John the Divine, in the teeth of all rational interpretation, was turning out to be something much worse than high-flown unintelligibility which you had to pretend to admire.

  Inside that shining wall the hapless peasantry and the burghers whom his oratory had betrayed were now looked after by no benevolent bishop but were abandoned to the whims of unaccountable overlords, with hair like wool and with feet made of brass, who spent their time in blowing trumpets, and in opening vials full of plague germs, and in affixing sealing-wax to the foreheads of the defenceless dead. His little flock were now the appalled associates of huge locusts with human heads, and of wild horses with the tails of serpents, and of calves with eyes inset in their posterior parts. Nor were the perplexing customs and the patchwork animal-life of this barbaric bedlam atoned for by its climate, because every moment or two there was—so near as the Bishop could recall his sacred studies,—an earthquake or an uncommonly severe hailstorm: every moment or two the sun turned black, or the moon red, or else the stars came tumbling loose like fruit from a shaken fig tree; and seven thunders were intermittently conversing, for the most part about indelicate topics.

  And Odo of Valneres, he also, who was so wholly dependent upon peaceful and refined surroundings, would presently be imprisoned in this awful place, for no real fault, but just through his well-meant endeavors to make life more orderly and more pleasant for his little flock. Already that infernal automatic cloud had moored itself.

10. OF HIS RIGHTEOUS ENDING

  Inasmuch as there seemed to be no alternative, the Bishop and the witch-woman disembarked, perforce, upon the bright wharf of Heaven. Now behind and below unhappy Odo of Valneres was only an endless gray abyss; beneath him showed great gleaming slabs like yellowish and bluish glass; and before him loomed inexorably the gate carved out of a giant pearl.

  “Come, come!” a somewhat desperate prelate cried aloud, “but even now there must be some way of escape from that existence which I used to promise, in the days of my rash disbelief, as a reward?”

  “There is,” Ettarre replied to him, very proudly and happily; “for against love nothing can prevail. Why, but do you not understand! I am permitted to tempt you. Upon a cloud, of course, one feels a trifle insecure. But here we touch firm jasper and lapis lazuli. And now, with such allurements as you have not yet, I do believe, my wonderful enormous darling, quite utterly forgotten the way of, now I am going to preserve you from all sorts of celestial horrors.”

  “Eh, and is it possible, even at the last, for the welldoer to evade his doom? Is there some other and more suitable place yet open, upon post-mortem repentance, to a well-thought-of bishop?”

  The dear child said then, still with that very touching fondness of which he felt himself to be unworthy: