“From no one else, to be sure—”
“So, now, you see for yourself!”
“Yet the Master Philologist is nowadays a married man, and is ruled in everything by his wife. And this Queen Freydis has a mirror which must, they say, be faced by those persons who venture into the goal of all the gods of men—”
“That mirror, too,” said Gerald, airily, “I may be needing. Mirrors are employed in many branches of magic.”
Glaum now was speaking with rather more of graveness than there seemed any call for. And Glaum said:
“For one, I would not meddle with that mirror. Even in the land of Dersam, where a mirror is sacred, we do not desire any dealings with the Mirror of the Hidden Children and with those strange reflections which are unclouded by either good or evil.”
“I shall face the Mirror of the Hidden Children,” Gerald said, with his chin well up, “and should I see any particular need for it, I shall fetch that mirror also out of Antan. When a citizen of the United States of America takes up the pursuit of an art, sir, he does not shilly-shally about it.”
“For my part,” the Sylan answered, “I wearied, some centuries ago, of all magic: and I hanker, rather, after the more material things of life. For five hundred years and over, in my untroubled abode at Caer Omn, in the land of Dersam, I have reigned among the dreams of a god—”
“But how did you come by these dreams?”
“They forsook him, Gerald, when his hour was come to descend into Antan.”
“That saying, sir, I cannot understand.”
“It is not necessary, Gerald, that you should. Meanwhile, I admit, the life of a Sylan has no fret in it, a Sylan has nothing to be afraid of: and there is in me a mortal taint which cannot endure interminable contentment any longer. You conceive, I also was once a mortal man, with my deceivings and my fears and my doubts to spice my troubled deference to the ever-present folly of my fellows and to the ever-present ruthlessness of time and chance. And, as I remember it, Gerald, that Guivric, whom people so preposterously called the Sage, got more zest out of his subterfuges and compromises than I derive from being care-free and rather bored twenty-four hours to each insufferable day. Therefore, I repeat, I will take over your natural body—”
“But that, my dear fellow, would leave me without any carnal residence.”
“Why, Gerald, but I am surprised at such skepticism in you who pay your pew-rent so regularly! We have it upon old, fine authority that for every man there is a natural body and a spiritual body.”
Then Gerald colored up. He felt that both his erudition and his piety stood reproved. And he said, contritely:
“In fact, as a member of the Protestant Episcopal church, I am familiar with the Burial Service—Yes, you are right. I have no desire to take issue with St. Paul. The religion of my fathers assures me that I have two bodies. I can live in only one of them at a time. It is, for that matter, a bit ostentatious, it has a vaguely disreputable sound, for any unmarried man to be maintaining two establishments. So, let us get on!”
“Therefore, I repeat, I will take over your natural body, just as that first Glaum once took over my body; and I will take over all your body’s imbroglios, even with your mistress,—who can hardly be more tasking to get along with than are the seven official wives and the three hundred and fifty-odd concubines I am getting rid of.”
“You,” Gerald said, morosely, “do not know Evelyn Townsend.”
“I trust,” the Sylan stated, more gallantly, “to have that privilege to-morrow.”
It was in this way the bargain was struck. And then the Sylan who was called Glaum of the Haunting Eyes did what was requisite.
3 . Two Geralds
THE Sylan who was called Glaum of the Haunting Eyes, be it repeated, did that which was requisite.... To Gerald, as a student of magic, the most of the process was familiar enough: and if some curious grace-notes were, perhaps, excursions into the less wholesome art of goety, that was not Gerald’s affair. It was sufficient that, when the Sylan had ended, no Sylan was any longer visible. Instead, in Gerald Musgrave’s library, stood face to face two Geralds, each in a blue coat and a golden yellow waistcoat, each with a tall white stock and ruffles about his throat, and each clad in every least respect precisely like the other.
Nor did these two lean, red-headed Geralds differ in countenance. Each smiled at the other with the same amply curved, rather womanish mouth set above the same prominent, long chin; and each found just the same lazy and mildly humorous mockery in the large and very dark blue, the really purple, eyes of the other: for between these two Gerald Musgraves there was no visual difference whatever, One half of this quaint pair now sat down at the writing-table; and, fiddling with the papers there, he took up the pages of Gerald Musgrave’s unfinished romance, about the high loves of his famous ancestor Dom Manuel of Poictesme and Madame Niafer, the Soldan of Barbary’s daughter. Gerald had begun this tale in the days when he had intended to endow America with a literature superior to that of other countries; but for months now he had neglected it: and, in fact, ever since he set up as a student of magic he had lacked time, somehow, with every available moment given over to runes and cantraps and suffumigations, to get back to any really serious work upon this romance.
Then the seated Gerald, smiling almost sadly, looked up toward his twin.
“Thus it was,” said the seated Gerald, “a great while ago at Asch, when two Guivrics confronted each other and played shrewdly for the control of the natural body of Guivric of Perdigon. All which I lost on that day, through my over-human clinging to the Two Truths, I now have back, after five centuries of pleasure-seeking in the land of Dersam. And I find this second natural body of mine committed to the creating of yet more pleasure-giving nonsense, about, of all persons, that eternal Manuel of Poictesme! I find this body also enamored of the fig-leaf of romance!”
“It may be that I do not understand your simile,” said the standing Gerald, “for in the United States of America the fig-leaf is, rather, the nice symbol of decency, it is, indeed, the beginning and the end of democratic morality.”
“Nevertheless, and granting all this,” replied the now demon-haunted natural body of Gerald Musgrave, “the fig-leaf is a romance with which human optimism veils the only two eternal and changeless and rather unlovely realities of which any science can be certain.”
“Ah, now I comprehend! And without utterly agreeing with you, I cannot deny there is something in your metaphor. Yet I must tell you, sir, that I am perhaps peculiarly qualified to deal with Dom Manuel because of the fact that this famous hero was my lineal ancestor—”
“Oh, but, my poor Gerald, was he indeed!”
“Yes, through both the Musgrave and the Allonby lines. For my mother’s father was Gerald Allonby—”
And Gerald would have gone on to explain the precise connection, of which the Musgrave family was justifiably proud. But the unappreciative Sylan who now wore good Musgrave flesh and blood had remarked, of all conceivable remarks: