“I honestly condole with you. Yet ancestors cannot be picked like strawberries. And my luck was even worse, for I was of Manuel’s fellowship. I knew the tall swaggerer himself throughout his blundering career. And I can assure you that, apart from his unhuman gift for keeping his mouth shut, there was nothing a bit wonderful about the cock-eyed, gray impostor.”
This was surprising news. Still, Gerald reflected, a demon did, in the way of business, meet many persons in circumstances in which the better side of their natures was not to the fore. Gerald therefore flew to defend the honor of his race quite civilly.
“My progenitor, in any event, carried through his imposture. He died very well thought of by his neighbors. That you will find to be a leading consideration with any citizen of the United States of America. And I in turn assure you that my account of the great Manuel’s exploits will be, when it is completed, an exceedingly fine romance. It will be a tale which has not its like in America. Loveliness lies swooning upon every page, illuminated by a never-ceasing coruscation of wit. It is a story which, as you might put it, grips the reader. There is no imaginable reader but will be instantly engaged by my adroit depiction of the hardihood and the heroic virtues of Dom Manuel—”
“But,” said the really very handsomely disguised Sylan, “Manuel had always a cold in his head. Nobody can honestly admire an elderly fellow who is continually sneezing and spitting—”
“In American literature of a, respectable cast no human being has any excretory functions. Should you reflect upon this statement, you will find it to be the one true test of delicacy. At most, some tears or a bead or two of perspiration may emanate, but not anything more, upon this side of pornography. That rule applies with especial force to love stories, for reasons we need hardly go into. And my romance is, of course, the story of Dom Manuel’s love for the beautiful Niafer, the Soldan of Barbary’s daughter—”
“Her father was a stable groom. She had a game leg. She was not beautiful. She was dish-faced, she was out and out ugly, apart from her itch to be reforming everybody and pestering them with respectability—”
“Faith, charity and hope are the three cardinal virtues,” said Gerald, reprovingly. “And I think that a gentleman should exercise these three, in just this order, when he is handling the paternity or the looks or the legs of any lady.”
“—And she smelt bad. Every month she seemed to me to smell worse. I do not know why, but I think the Countess simply hated to wash.”
“My dear fellow! really now, I can but refer you to my previously cited rule as to the anatomy of romance. A heroine who smells bad every month—No, upon my word, I can find nothing engaging in that notion. I had far rather play with some wholly other and more beautiful idea than with a notion so utterly lacking in seductiveness. For this, I repeat, is a romance. It is a romance such as has not its like in America. I therefore consider that I display considerable generosity in presenting you with those quite perfect ninety-three pages, and in permitting you to complete this romance and to take the credit for writing all of it. Why, your picture will be in the newspapers, and learned professors will annotate your fornications, and oncoming ages will become familiar with every mean act you ever committed!”
To that the Sylan replied: “I shall complete your balderdash, no doubt, since all your functions are now my functions. I shall complete it, if only my common-sense and my five centuries of living among the loveliest dreams of a god, and, above all, if my firsthand information as to these people, haw not ruined me for the task of ascribing large virtues to human beings.”
“I envy you that task,” said Gerald, with real wistfulness, “but, very much as there was a geas upon my famous ancestor to make a figure in this world, just so there is a compulsion upon me. The compulsion is upon me to excel in my art; and to do this I must liberate the great and best words of the Master Philologist.”
Then the true Gerald went out of the room through a secret passage unknown to him until this evening.
4. That Devil in the Library
YET Gerald looked back for an instant at that unfortunate devil, in the appearance of a sedate young red-haired man, who remained in the library. To regard this Gerald Musgrave, now, was like looking at a droll acquaintance in whom Gerald was not, after all, very deeply interested.
For this Gerald Musgrave, the one who remained in the library, was really droll in well-nigh every respect. About the Gerald who was now—it might be, a bit nobly,—yielding up his life in preference to violating the code of a gentleman, and who was now quitting Lichfield, in order to become a competent magician, there was not anything ludicrous. That Gerald was an honorable and intelligent person who sought a high and rational goal.
But that part of Gerald Musgrave which remained behind, that part which was already marshaling more words in order the more pompously to inter the exploits of Dom Manuel of Poictesme, appeared droll. There was, for one thing, no sensible compulsion upon that red-haired young fellow thus to be defiling clean paper with oak-gall, when he might at that very instant be comfortably drunk at the Vartreys’ dinner, or he might be getting pleasurable excitement out of the turns of fortune at Dorn’s gaming-parlors, or he might be diverting himself in his choice of four bedrooms with a lively companion.
But, instead, he sat alone with bookshelves rising stuffily to every side of him,—rather low bookshelves upon the tops of which were perched a cherished horde of porcelain and brass figures representing one or another beast or fowl or reptile. Among the shiny toys, which in themselves attested his childishness, the young fellow sat of his own accord thus lonelily. And his antics, incontestably, were queer. He fidgeted. He shifted his rump. He hunched downward, as if with a sudden access of rage, over the paper before him. He put back his head, to stare intently at a white china hen. He pulled at the lobe of his left ear; and he then rather frantically scratched the interior of this ear with his little finger.
Between these bodily exercises he, who was so precariously seated upon the crust of a planet teetering unpredictably through space, was making upon the paper before him, with his much nibbled-at black pen, small scratches, the most of which he presently canceled with yet other scratches, all the while with the air of a person who was about something intelligent and of actual importance. The spectacle was queer; it was unspeakably irrationaclass="underline" for, as always, to an onlooker, the motions of creative writing revealed that flavor of the grotesque which is attendant upon every form of procreation.
Yet it was upon a graver count that Gerald felt honestly sorry for the inheritor of Gerald Musgrave’s natural body. For Gerald was giving up his life out of deference to the code of a gentleman with rather more of relief than he had permitted the Sylan to suspect. And the poor devil who had so rashly taken over this life would—howsoever acute his diabolical intelligence,—he too would, in the end, Gerald reflected, be powerless against that unreasonable Evelyn Townsend and that even more unreasonable code of a gentleman.
Nobody, Gerald’s thoughts ran on, now that he had found a rather beautiful idea to play with, nobody who had not actually indulged in the really dangerous dalliance of adultery in Lichfield could quite understand the hopelessness of the unfortunate fiend’s position. For in the chivalrous Lichfield of 1805 adultery had its inescapable etiquette. Your exact relations with the woman were in the small town a matter of public knowledge familiar to everybody: but no person in Lichfield would ever formally grant that any such relations existed. Eyes might meet with perfect understanding: but from the well-bred lips of no Southern gentleman or gentlewoman would ever come more than a suave and placid “Evelyn and Gerald have always been such good friends.” For you were second cousins, to begin with: and—in a Lichfield wherein, as everywhere else in this human world, most people unaffectedly disliked, and belittled, and kept away from their cousins,—that relationship was considered a natural reason for you two being much together. Moreover, every woman in Lichfield was, by another really rather staggering social convention, assumed to be beautiful and accomplished and chaste: it was an assumption which needed hardly to be stated: it was merely among all Southern gentry an axiom in the vast code of being well-bred.