He caught up the lovely, always straying hands of the Princess Evasherah, of this impulsive and investigatory lady, who so troublingly resembled Evelyn Townsend, and Gerald pressed these hands to his trembling lips. This lovely girl, returned to him almost miraculously, it might seem, out of his well-nigh forgotten past, was not merely intent once more to trust him and to give him all. She trusted also, as Gerald felt with that keen penetration which is natural to divine beings, to delude and to wheedle him into some material loss. What the Princess desired to cajole him out of was, perhaps, not wholly clear. Nevertheless, he felt that, in some way or another way, Evasherah was attempting to deceive him. It might be that neither her explanation as to that skull nor even her so candid seeming adoration of his wisdom and his comeliness was entirely sincere. For women were like that: they did not always mean every word they said, not even when they were addressing a god. And so, the gods had over-painful duties laid upon them, Gerald decided.
After that he sighed: and he continued the reciting of his sonnet with an air of lofty resignation, with which was intermingled a certain gustatory approval of really good verse.
“Light of my universe, that is a very beautiful sonnet,” the Princess remarked, when he had finished, “and I am proud to have inspired it, and I am almost equally proud of the fact that you (through whose supreme elegance and amiable aspect my heart is once more rent with ecstasy) should remember it so well after these thousands of years.”
“Years mean very little, ma’am, to Fair-haired Hoo, the Helper and Preserver, the Lord of the Third Truth, the Well-beloved of Heavenly Ones: and centuries are, quite naturally, powerless to dim my memories of any matter in any way pertaining to you. Yet affairs of minor importance do rather tend to become a bit ambiguous as the aeons slip by.... For example, what, in the intervals between my redemptory exploits—upon mere week days, as it were,—what do I happen to be the god of?”
“That,” said the Princess, “O my master, and pure fountain-head of every virtue, is a peculiarly silly question to be coming from you, who are, as everybody knows, the Lord of the Third Truth.”
“Ah, yes, to be sure,—of the Third Truth. My divine interests are invested in veracity. Well, that is highly gratifying. Yet, ma’am, there are a great many gods, and it is a rather beautiful idea to observe that, even where their professional spheres are the same, these gods differ remarkably. Thus, Vulcan is the lord of one fire, and Vesta of another, but Agni and Fudo and Satan rule over yet other fires, each wholly individual. Cupid and Lucina traffic in the same port, but not in the same way.”
“AEolus controls twelve winds, and Tezcatlipoca four winds, and Crepitus only one wind—”
“Director of my life, and comely shepherd of my soul, I know. Few gods are strange to me or to my embraces. Many a Heavenly One has invited me to love, and I have yielded piously: my kisses have written the tale of my religious transports upon many divine cheeks.”
“—And I imagine that this water from the Churning of the Ocean was not intended, in the first place, to further my apotheosis. I mean, ma’am, I do not suppose you went to the trouble of stealing six drops of the Amrita in order just to recall to me that divinity which, in the press of other affairs, I had somehow permitted to slip my mind?”
“Disposer and sole archetype of the seven magnanimities, you speak the truth. For the five remaining drops, as I was trying to tell you when you kept interrupting me, O my lord, and beloved of my heart, and joy of both my eyes, were intended for the five human senses of the young man about whom I was then rather foolish; and upon whom I meant to bestow immortality and eternal youth. The first drop, inasmuch as the Amrita confers a never-ending vigorousness, I had of course already placed. So my Father (whose name be exalted!) smote us both with lightnings, in his impetuous way, and tumbled us both from out of the Home of the Heavenly Ones into this river. My young man was thus drowned before I had the chance to confer upon him any of the favors which I greatly fear your superior strength and your pertinacity are now about to force from me—”
Gerald replied: “I really do think you would get on far more quickly with your story if you were to keep both of these like this. The position, you see, is much more American: it lacks that earlier air of such personal freedom as a democracy does not think well of.”
“Light of the age, I hear and I obey. Yet all my tale has been revealed to your consideration—”
“Yes,” Gerald assented, “but your history interests me far more—”
“Far more than what, O cruel and resplendent one?”
“Why, far more than I can say, of course. So let us get on with it!”
“But my sad history is now as refined glass before your discerning glance. It suffices to add that the immortal part of my young man was happily removed from the waters of this river, and is now worshipped as a god in Lytreia. But for me, alas! the squirrel of calamity continued to revolve in the cage of divine wrath. For, so perfectly ridiculous is the way my Father (whose name be exalted!) behaves when the least thing upsets him, that I was condemned through the length of nine thousand years to assume certain official duties in the waters of this river, in the repugnant shape of a crocodile.”
But with that statement Gerald took prompt issue. “What may be your official duties as the guardian of these waters I can no more guess than I can guess how your visitors happen to be so careless about leaving their skulls behind. That really is a sort of slapdash and inconsiderate behavior which I cannot condone without considerable reflection. But I do know that the shape which I have beheld, and still see a great deal of, in nothing resembles the shape of a crocodile.”
“Epitome of every excellence, and exalted zenith of my existence, that is because the nine thousand years of my doom have now happily expired. The proof of this is that already my luckless substitute arrives. We shall now behold her encounter with the terminator of delights and the separator of companions. Thereafter, when we have had breakfast, O vital spirit of my heart, whom my unmitigated love incites me to devour out of pure affection, I shall ride hence upon the horse with which you have so gallantly presented me, to enter again into the Home of the Heavenly Ones.”
With that, the Princess pointed.
8. The Mother of Every Princess
WITH that, the Princess pointed. And Gerald also now looked toward the river.... He viewed an unsolid-seeming world of dimly colored movings. Directly before him the deep river sparkled and rippled eastward with unhurried, very shallow undulations. But, under the sun’s warmth, mists rising everywhere above the waters streamed eastward too, unhastily, and in such unequal volume that now this and now another portion of the wide landscape beyond the river was irregularly glimpsed and then, gradually but with a surprising quickness, veiled. Very lovely medallions of green lawns and shrubbery and distant hills thus seemed to take form and then to dissolve into the mists’ incessant gray flowing, toward the newly risen sun.
And Gerald also saw that, some fifty feet away from him, an unusually unclad elderly woman was approaching the river bank, carrying in her thin arms a child. The woman trudged forward toward the river like a drugged person, because of the doom which was upon her.
Now this woman seemed to stumble, and she fell into the water, but in falling she cast the child from her, so that it remained safe in the coarse tall-growing grass.