“Child,” Gerald said, “what is your will that you cry out for life from the glorification tree?”
“My father, I demand the life which you have not given me, that life which you owe to me, and that life which is denied me so long as you deny the Two Truths.”
“I serve the demands of my appointed kingdom, child. I serve the needs of no other truth and the needs of no pawing women who would keep me out of that kingdom.”
“My father, your kingdom is a doubtful dream, but the flesh of my mother is real.”
“My dream is lovelier than any woman. Oh, and a doubtfulness also is more lovely than the body of a woman, for I know the shaping of that body over-well.”
“My father, you refuse the pleasures which will not ever be returning.”
“I am a god. I serve the needs of my own will.”
“The gods also pass, my father, they also pass without any returning, upon the road which you now tread.”
“Let us pass, then, unhindered! But no woman permits it.”
“That is because these women, O my father, have a very rational wisdom.”
“Such is, perhaps, the case. But a god has his irrational dream. And that is better.”
“It is well enough, my father, for that dream to end contentedly in the arms of some woman.”
“It is well enough. It is customary. But I am Fair-haired Hoo, the Helper and the Preservers I go to my appointed kingdom: and I am Lord of a Third Truth, whose mightiness I must help and preserve.”
Then Gerald hewed on: and as the tree fell, the child vanished.
Now Gerald set fire to the tree: and when a tidy blaze was crackling, he spoke the needed words, and into the heart of this fire he tossed the strange white gem. Straightway you heard a loud screeching. Out of the tomb of Peter the Builder came a vixen fox, screaming and shuddering quite horribly, but not ever ceasing to approach the fire. She entered the flames. Silence followed, and the dawn of a superb May morning which was marred only by an unpleasant odor of singed hair and burning flesh.
Gerald after that went back into the tomb from which the omniscient Fox-Spirit had been dispossessed. He looked rather sentimentally upon the empty disordered bed: then he passed beyond the brazier, in which the ruins of fig-leaves yet smouldered, toward the Mirror of the Two Truths.
The fact no longer mattered, perhaps, that any man who looked into this mirror straightway found himself transformed into two stones: but it very greatly mattered what effect this mirror would have upon a sun god and a Savior and a culture hero. So he removed the flesh-colored veil.
19. Beyond the Veil
BUT he was not turned into two stones. Nor was there confronting him any mirror. Beyond the flesh-colored veil he found only an ancient painting very carefully done, but upon an un-human scale which made this painting monstrous. The subject of the picture, however, is not known, because Gerald never told anybody.
But it is known that Gerald shook his head at this painting.
“Laborious daub of prevaricating pigment!” he remarked. “O futile painting, which so many foolish believers in Lytreia think to be the Mirror of the Two Truths! I question your arithmetic. For I myself am the Lord of a Third Truth, for all that I have just at present no precise idea as to its nature. In consequence, I know the two objects which you magnify are not all which exists. And I deny that their never-ending search of each other is the one gesture of life. No: I at least, I feel assured, am destined to take part in some quite other gesture, of a more graceful and more cleanly and more dignified nature,—a gesture of, it well may be, eternal importance....”
Yet Gerald glanced about him a little forlornly. This place was now rather lonesome and ambiguous looking. In the crypt immediately beneath him, Gerald knew, lay all that remained of King Peter and the most of his numerous family; dozens upon dozens of peculiarly ugly objects were there, all that remained of a great conqueror and of the queens who had delighted him, all that attestedly remained now anywhere of a strong hero’s pride and famous warfaring and of his many women’s loveliness....
“Oh, yes, it may be,” Gerald conceded, half-frettedly, because he did not like to be troubled with such reflections, “it may be that I am wrong in this belief. And that seems to me yet another reason for adhering to this belief. I, standing here alone upon the remnants of so many utter strangers, admit indeed to some depression of spirits. It seems to me, at this exact instant, that just conceivably I may be neither a Savior nor a sun god nor a culture hero, but merely another bull-headed Musgrave, for whom death waits, and after death, perhaps, oblivion. Nevertheless, I find it a more beautiful and a much more entertaining idea to believe in than to deny the immortality even of a mere Musgrave. There is to my mind nothing at all interesting in the idea of my own extinction. And it appears that my belief in this matter, with no assured knowledge anywhere to go on, must be simply a question of personal taste. Modesty even suggests that my belief is an affair of irrelevance.”
And Gerald said also: “Therefore it furthermore appears to me, O peculiarly unimaginative painting, a sheer waste of opportunity to assume that anything is ever going to end even for a mere Musgrave all conscious experience. I had far rather play with a beautiful idea than with one utterly lacking in seductiveness. I very much prefer to believe that I at least am, in one way or another, reserved to take part in some enduring and rather superb performance,—somewhere, by and by,—in a performance concerned with some third truth, more august and aesthetically more pleasing than are the only ever-enduring truths apparent to us here. We copulate and die, and that is all?—Well, perhaps I But, then again, perhaps not! One must, you see, be broad-minded about the matter.—”
He for a moment kept silence. That regrettably candid painting and all the other adjuncts of this place were certainly very depressing, now that the learned diablories of the Fox-Spirit no longer enlivened this tomb. Nevertheless, Gerald kept his long chin well up.
“Yes, every man ought to be broad-minded about this matter, and ought to cherish always, if only as a diverting and inexpensive plaything, this pungent notion of being immortal. It is really inexpensive, because, should your notion prove ungrounded, you run no risk, no tiniest risk, of being twitted, by and by, for credulity, or even of ever discovering your error. Meanwhile this faith in your own durability and potential importance is in some sense a cordial; and is in sundry ways a fine toy. It renders life, and dying too, endurable: and it offers against all vacant half-hours a variety of diverting speculations ... as to that possible third truth.”
Again Gerald paused. For it seemed to him, as he unwittingly repeated the age-old self-persuasions of so many of his ancestors, that he had found now another facet in this jewel of an idea that he was playing with; and this fact considerably cheered Gerald.
“Then, too,” said he, “then, too, that rather wide-spread expectation of an oncoming triumph—somewhere, in some hazed roseate arena, beyond the discomforts of death and the incredible impudence of the mortician’s titivating,—that triumph which is to be a perpetual triumphing of justice and of rationality and of kindliness and of all the other canonical virtues, this rumored triumph yet cows many persons, not infrequently, into one or another thrifty-minded practice of these generally beneficent virtues.”
Gerald said then: “It thus makes for, at any rate, terrestrial ease and stability and repose: it gives people, as the phrase runs, something to go by, in that it supports the most of every nation’s social and legal rules of thumb. And it tends appreciably to limit men’s common greed and viciousness, and all the harsher lusts of human beings, to exercises through which there seems some quite tangible gain within tolerably safe reach.”