“That, though, is not at all what I said. And for any full-grown man to be talking such nonsense—”
“So now you see for yourself! Therefore I shall be leaving you both next Tuesday, and it is quite useless for you to implore me to stay a half-second longer than that. Besides, I rather like him.”
Yet the child showed peculiarities. For one thing, his tongue had no red in it, but was formed of perfectly white flesh. When Gerald noticed this odd fact he said nothing about it, though, because Gerald comprehended the limitations of gray magic. And for another thing, on the third day of Theodorick’s existence, Gerald happened to lay aside his rose-colored spectacles while he was playing with his son. Then the boy was not there. Gerald shrugged, just in time to avoid shuddering. He replaced his spectacles, and all was as before, to every freckle and each red hair.
After that, Gerald wore his spectacles always.
For Theodorick Quentin Musgrave had become very dear to him. No more than any other father could Gerald rationally explain this dearness or justify it by any common-sense logic. He only knew that the brat aroused in him a tenderness which came appreciably near to being unselfish; that it worried him to have the brat go unchristened in this neighborhood so full of sorcerers and wizards; that when he touched the brat it pleased him, for no assignable reason; and that when the brat displayed the mildest gleam of intelligence, it at once seemed quite brilliant and profound, and inexpressibly beyond all other people’s children.
For Theodorick noticed everything. And Gerald delighted particularly in the child’s intelligence and powers of observation, because, since no sort of cleverness could possibly be inherited from poor dear stupid Maya, all the boy’s more excellent mental traits were obviously paternal.
For example, “There is a lady,” Theodorick had stated, pointing toward Antan.
“Oh, any number of ladies, my son,” Gerald assented, as he thought of the many beautiful goddesses and feminine myths who (for all that, he reflected, he had never seen any female creature pass toward Antan) must be aiding to make yet more glorious that kingdom over which Gerald would be traveling in that direction.”
And Gerald’s hand went to the shoulder of the freckled brat whom, after next week, he would not ever be seeing any more: and Gerald wondered at the wholly illogical pleasure he derived just from touching this child.
“Oh, yes, there are no doubt a great many ladies in Antan,” said Gerald, “and the coincidence is truly quaint that I have not yet seen any woman traveling in that direction.”
But the boy explained he meant the very large lady lying down over yonder as if she were dead, but not dead, because her heart was breathing.
Then Gerald saw that, in point of fact, the hill toward the southwest had, from this station, the shaping of a woman’s body. She seemed to lie flat on her back, with her long hair outspread everywhither about her head, of which the profile, now that you look for it, was complete and quite definitely formed. Also you saw her throat and her high breasts, whence the hills sloped downward into the contour of a relatively smallish, flat belly. Just here the outline of the vast violet-tinted figure was broken by the nearer green hill immediately across the road which led to Antan, but all that you could see of this womanlike figure was complete and perfectly moulded. Moreover, Gerald noted that, near where the heart would have been, a forest fire was sending up its languid smoke, which was, of course, what Theodorick Quentin Musgrave had meant by saying that the lady’s heart was breathing.
Gerald was very proud of Theodorick’s cleverness in noticing the shaping of these hills, which Gerald himself had not ever observed, in the entire three weeks he had spent upon Mispec Moor. But when this odd accident of nature was pointed out to Maya, she only said that she saw what you meant of course, but that, after all, it was only two hills, and that hills looked much more like hills than they looked like anything else.
PART NINE THE BOOK OF MISPEC MOOR
33. Limitations of Gaston
“To tame the wolf you must marry him.”
IT WAS at this time, toward the middle of June, that Gaston Bulmer came from Lichfield. Gerald was sitting, as was his daily custom now, under the chestnut-tree beside the road which led to Antan. He waited there to engage in conversation the next of his future subjects who might pass by in that perpetual journeying toward Antan. Gerald, under this same chestnut-tree, had by this time talked with many such unearthly wayfarers: and if the rather interesting things they had told him were all written down, it would make a book unutterably enormous and utterly incredible.
In such circumstances it was, just after two not unfamiliar mountebanks had gone by carrying with them the paraphernalia of their Punch and Judas show, that Gerald noticed a small sulphur-colored cloud sweeping rapidly from the east. It descended: and when it was near to Gerald, it unclosed. Gaston Bulmer then stepped, a bit rheumatically, from its glowing depths, and he laid down a rod of cedar wood tipped with an apple carved in blue-stone. There was not in all this anything in itself astonishing, since Gaston Bulmer was an adept in the arts of which Gerald, in the strange days before he knew that he was a god, had been a student. But to note how Gaston had aged in the last week or so was astounding. Yet Gerald, in any case, was wholly delighted to see again his old friend and preceptor, and a person who had for so long been virtually his father-in-law.
Gaston would not come up to the cottage, though, for dinner, because, as he confessed, he preferred not to encounter Maya. Rather, it was his wish, and it seemed, indeed, to be his errand, to free Gerald from what Gaston Bulmer, surprisingly enough, described as the wise woman’s pernicious magic.
Gerald said: “Oh, bosh! For really now, Gaston, if such nonsense were not heart-breaking it would be side-splitting. I am inexpressibly shocked by your hallucination, which is, I trust, of a most transitory nature. However, let us not discuss my wife, if you please. Instead, do you tell me how my body is faring.”
So they sat down together under the chestnut-tree. And Gaston Bulmer answered, “That body, Gerald, since you quitted it, has become a noted scholar and a man of letters.”
“Ah! ah!” said Gerald, greatly pleased, “so my romance about Dom Manuel of Poictesme has been completed, and is now being admired everywhere!”
“No, for your body has become, just as I said, a scholar. Scholars do not write romances.”
“Yet you referred to a man of letters—?”
“Your body is now a rather famous ethnologist. Your body deals with historical and scientific truths. Your body thus writes large quartos upon topics to which no romance, howsoever indelicate, could afford to devote a sentence.”
Gerald fell to stroking that long chin of his. “Still, I recall that the present informant of my body once informed me there were only two truths of which any science could be certain.”
“And what were these two truths?”
Gerald named them.
Gaston said then: “The demon is consistent. For these two are precisely your body’s scientific specialty. To-day your body writes invaluable books in which the quaint and interesting customs that accompany an interplay of these two truths, and the various substitutes for that interplay, are cataloged and explained, as these customs have existed in all lands and times. Lichfield to-day is wholly proud of the scholarship and the growing fame of Gerald Musgrave.”