“Oho!” said Gerald, and, as became a student of magic, he also made the needful sign, “oho, but a most potent goddess is this Koleos Koleros!”
“Now, then,” continued Horvendile, “all they who in this place serve eternally this most whimsical divinity are a loving and a peculiarly happy people. Their amorousness, which here is not ever blighted by shrill reprobation, has need at no time to fear either the chastisement of human law nor the anathemas of any other religion anywhere in the quiet brakes and lowlands of the moist realm of Koleos Koleros. For, you conceive, these feminine myths who now are flute-players in and about the shrine of the wrinkled goddess, and who through so many centuries have been trained in all the arts of pleasure, came by and by into a certain confusion—”
“But what sort of confusion, Horvendile, do you mean? For I find your speaking another sort. And I am rather more interested in that princess—”
“I mean that their religion, which ranks pleasure above all else, permits no man to pass by unpleased.”
“Ah, now I understand you!”
“—I mean that, through the duties of their religious faith, their way of living has been given over to an assiduous and an empirical study of all the charms peculiar to a woman, the more particularly as these charms are employed—”
“Let us say, in the exercise of their religion,” Gerald suggested, “for I wholly understand you, sir.”
“It has followed that the taste of these ladies has become more delicate. It has followed that, by force of considering their own feminine loveliness, always unveiled and in lively employment, and by comparing it so intimately and so jealously with the loveliness of their female rivals in the service of the wrinkled goddess, they have become connoisseurs of the beauties peculiar to their sex. They have acquired a refinement of taste—”
“To be refined in one’s taste is eminently praiseworthy. Ah, my dear fellow, if you but knew what shocking examples of bad taste we kings are continually encountering among our sycophants! And that reminds me, you said something about a princess...”
“They have learned to despise the hasty and boisterous and, between ourselves, the very often disappointing ways of men—”
“Ah, yes, no doubt!” said Gerald. “Men are a bad lot. But we were speaking of a princess—”
“—And they have lovingly contrived more finespun and more rococo diversions without the crude assistance of any man. Then also they delight in playing with many well-trained pets,—with goats and large dogs and asses and, they tell me, with rams and with bulls also. The surprising and mysterious joys which blaze up among these flute-players are, thus, very violent and delicious.”
Gerald said then that kindness to dumb animals was generally reckoned a most estimable trait in the United States of America, Whereas, in all quarters of that enlightened and hospitable republic, Gerald estimated, a princess—
“Yet,” Horvendile went on, “these learned women do not forget, in mere pleasure-seeking, their religious duty of permitting no man to pass by unpleased. Go to them, therefore, you will be welcome. Yonder at this instant a religious festival is preparing. Yonder sweet-voiced Leucosia, who hereabouts is called Evadne, waits for you—”
“But I have not the honor of knowing this Evadne—”
“She is easily known, by her violet hair and her sharp teeth. Moreover, Gerald, her wise sisters—Teles, and Parthenope, and Radne, and Ligeia, and Molpe,—all these will greet you with ardor. They will deny to you no secret of their pious rites; they will share with you esoteric joys religiously. They will incite you to perform among their choir, in the most secret shrine of Koleos Koleros—”
“But, really now, my dear fellow! I have no talent whatever for music. I would be quite out of place in any choir.”
“These flute-players are very ingenious. They will find for you some suitable instrument. And there will be strange harmonies and much soft laughter at this festivaclass="underline" each reveller will pour out libations copiously: cups will be refilled and emptied until dawn. There will be for you perfumes and rose garlands and the most exquisite of wines and the most savory of dishes and other delicacies. Due homage will be paid to Koleos Koleros.”
“Nevertheless,” said Gerald, “there is a phrase which haunts me—”
“That dusky grove of laurels yonder is the hall of this pious feast. Nothing will be lacking to you at this feast if you attend it with proper religious exaltation; and you will discover abilities there which will surprise you.”
“Ah, as to that now, Horvendile—! Yes, I have a man’s proper share of ability, I have quite enough ability for two persons. Nevertheless, there is a patriotic phrase which haunts me, and that phrase is E pluribus unum. For I have compunctions, Horvendile, which are translating that same phrase, a little freely, as ‘One among so many.’”
“It seems to me a harmless phrase even in your paraphrase. More harm may very well come of the fact that these learned ladies will endeavor to cajole you out of the divine steed, so that he may be added to their trained pets—”
“Oh! oh, indeed!” said Gerald. “But that is nonsense. The rider upon Kalki, and none other, has to fulfill that estimable old prophecy: and a deal of good such wheedlings will do any woman breathing, with a fine kingdom like that of mine set against a mere kiss or, it may be, a few tears!”
“That matter remains to be attested in due time. Meanwhile, I can but repeat that if you do not render a man’s homage to the ruler of this place there is no doubt whatever that the slighted goddess will avenge herself.”
“Sir,” Gerald now replied, with appropriate dignity, “I am, as were my fathers before me, a member of the Protestant Episcopal church. Is it thinkable that a communicant of this persuasion would worship a goddess of the benighted heathen? Do you but answer me that very simple question?”
“In Lichfield,” Horvendile retorted, “to adhere to the religion of your fathers is tactful, and in this place also, as in every other place, tactfulness ought to be every wise man’s religion. Otherwise, you will be running counter to that which is expected of the descendants of Manuel and of Jurgen; and you may by and by have cause to regret it.”
But Gerald thought of his church, and of its handsome matters of faith in the way of organ music and of saints’ days and of broad-mindedness and of delightful lawn-sleeved bishops and of majestic rituals. He thought of newly washed choir-boys and of his prayer-book’s wonderful mouth-filling phrases, of rogation days and of ember days and of Trinity Sunday. He thought about pulpits and hassocks and stained glass and sextons, and about the Thirty-nine Articles, and about those unpredictable, superb mathematics which early in every spring collaborated with the new moon to afford him an Easter: and these things Gerald could not abandon.
So he said: “No. No, Horvendile! I pay no homage to the wrinkled goddess.”
Then Horvendile warned him again, “You may find that decision costly.”
“That is as it may be!” said Gerald, with his chin well up. “For a good Episcopalian, sir, finds in the petulance of no heathen goddess anything to blench the cheek and make the heart go pitapat.”
Still, he looked rather fondly through the dusk. And now his shoulders also went up, shruggingly.
“Yet I concede,” said Gerald, “that, howsoever firm my churchmanship, and even with a princess waiting for me, I am tempted. For yonder flute-player who still delays to join her companions—who are now, no doubt, already about their merry games with one another and with their trained pets,—has charms. Yes, she has charms which give my thoughts, as it were, a locally religious turn, and make the notion of joining her a rather beautiful idea. I deplore, of course, her feathered legs. Even so, she displays, as you too may observe, in her so leisurely retreat, an opulence in that most engaging kind of beauty which once got for Aphrodite the epithet of Callipyge. I contemplate, with at least locally pious joy, the curving of those reins, the whiteness and the fineness of the skin, and the graciousness of those superb contours, designed without any stinting or exaggeration, into the perfection of those fair twin moons of delight—”