“Mother Guggery said that Lady Lilt would run screaming up and down all the stairs and through all the passages and anterooms and corridors of the entire Castle of Lost Towers whenever she saw one of Sir Maldung’s dogs with its tongue hanging out. ‘Someone has hurt that angel of a dog!’ she would cry. And Guggery says that whenever Sir Maldung feels bad from eating too much oatmeal or barley-meal or bread-pudding, and begs her to let him kill a rabbit for a change, she refuses to go to bed with him until he has walked to the furthest northern border of the forest, where there’s a marshy swamp with rushes growing so thick that they hide every sign of the water.
“When once he’s there, Mother Guggery says, he has to make a vow to animals and birds and fishes and reptiles and worms and insects that he will eat nothing but what’s made out of the bodies of these vegetation-demons; yes! nothing but what’s made of wheat, made of barley, made of oats; yes! made of every root that exists which isn’t poisonous! That’s what Mother Guggery told me.
“Lady Lilt swore, that she wouldn’t sleep with him till he’d uttered his vow at the forest’s end that he wouldn’t eat anything except this devilish vegetation.
“No! She wouldn’t let him touch her till he’d sworn his faithful oath to eat nothing but grain and fruit and seeds and leaves and buds and stalks and peelings and parings and roots and bulbs and everything of that kind in the world that isn’t poisonous, and that he’ll bite them up and crunch them up and munch them up, and roll them round in his mouth and chew, chew, chew them, and reduce them to messy mush, till he has taught them, yes! taught them utterly and thoroughly, to be what they are and what in their effrontery they think they are, and what in their devilish violence they actually suppose they were created to be, that is to say these shrinking, stinking, crawling, sprawling, climbing, binding, twining, sprouting and outing, knotting and rotting, sliding and hiding, shivering and quivering, tangling and strangling, burrowing and billowing, racing and facing, threading and spreading and doing all this in the pure unspoilt, original paradise of the blessed inanimates and the holy elements, where men and beasts and birds and fish and reptiles and worms and insects lived happily on the sacred flesh of one another between rocks and water, and between earth and sky before this loathsome multitude — such were the words Mother Guggery told me the Lady used — of vegetation-devils with their horrible juices ensorcerized saps, skins without flesh, pulps without bones, that originally came out of some infernal crack in the floor of the ocean!
“Lady Lilt said she wouldn’t sleep with him again till he’d sworn his oath by the edge of that marsh at the forest’s end that he would teach these vegetable monstrosities to be what they were by grinding them between his teeth, squeezing them between his tongue and his palate, sucking and squashing them between his healthy natural animal jaws, wringing their insides out, draining their inmost juices to the last distillation — so Mother Guggery told me the Lady said — till all their demonic greenery-sap and all the devilish sappy greenery of their entire selves had been completely dissolved and disposed of in the good sound moving bodies of creatures with hungry bellies and with legs and arms and scales and fur and feathers and with the life-breathing bodies of wholesome earth-worms and the motions and melodies of exquisite insects!
“Such,” concluded Lil-Umbra with a gasp, “such were the very words Mother Guggery swore Lady Lilt used.”
There was something in the exhausted gasp with which the girl ended this torrent of fantastic rodomontade that made the giant at her side seriously troubled as to what he ought to do. The climax of her elaborate litany as to what Guggery said and the Lady did really seemed to have brought Lil-Umbra to the verge of a complete collapse. Her dainty little head was now resting against Peleg’s side like a wood-anemone against the trunk of a solitary sycamore.
“O my dear child!” groaned the huge Mongoclass="underline" “I tell you it scares me like Hell to hear you talk in that way! It gives me the feeling that some evil influence has come over you. Dear God! but I wish to Heaven you had never asked that old bitch Guggery to talk about it at all! On my life it seemed to me as I listened to you just now that you’d got the exact intonation of Lady Lilt! I hate her; and I think she hates me. She’s one of those strange ladies who are up to anything in the way of dangerous magic games! Think of her considering all the grain we eat, whether wheat, barley, oats, or rye, as horrible demons! It’s pure craziness, child!”
With an almost indignant jerk he pulled her to her feet. Then, as they both stood with their backs to the paleolithic throne, they had the golden blaze of the now fully risen sun irradiating both the man’s enormity and the girl’s delicacy.
“I like looking at the waning Moon,” murmured Lil-Umbra, “a lot better than facing the rising Sun! But, Peleg, when I said I wanted you to show me both of them together, I thought I should see them side by side. Aren’t they ever side by side, for us to compare them with each other, one so timid, so escaping, so slipping away, and the other so bursting and bubbling with blazing gold?”
The Mongolian giant looked down at her with a very queer look, a look that she recognized and in every fibre of her being wholly accepted, but which she could not have interpreted to anyone in human words, whether such words were written or spoken.
“O most dear and most simple of little ladies!” the giant burst out. “Don’t you see that the whole idea of this mad world is to be found in opposites! Everything, I tell you, my dear little lady, is a Double Opposite.”
They both were forced to turn their eyes away from the full blaze of the Sun; but though Peleg turned his head as well as his eyes, so that he saw — but at that moment he saw it without seeing it — a small feathery wisp of white cloud resting against one of the horns of the waning Moon, Lil-Umbra kept her head unmoved while with lowered eyes she stared at her own clasped hands.
“I don’t understand,” she said now, though with some hesitation, for she hated to appear stupid in this man’s sight, “how a thing can be a Double Opposite.”
The Tartar giant did see the Moon now, towards which his head was turned, and he saw it with his intelligence as well as with his senses; and not only so, for he felt as if with his outstretched fingers he could touch the inside edge of that fading boat-shaped rim while his head and neck, for both were bare, felt a distinctly pleasurable sensation from the warmth of the Sun’s increasing radiance.
“I’ll soon show you how it is, little lady of my master,” he said gravely. “Take ourselves. Take me for example. The first of my two Opposites is in myself, that is to say, my greedy-grasping body on one side and my obedient, faithful and well-behaved soul on the other side. But the second of my two Opposites is my whole self, body and soul together, as opposed to entire Creation or the total universe of which I am a living part.”
Lil-Umbra’s head, with its light soft, silky hair bound up so tightly with broad bands of blue satin that the compact shape of the small skull beneath them, such as any imaginable head-dress would have totally disfigured, was emphasized rather than nullified, lifted itself with an abrupt jerk.
“Oh! of course I see! I see entirely! There’s a bad Lil-Umbra, ready to tease things and torment things, and pinch things and pull things to bits and to eat too many pears and sing and hum and drum when Mother is nervous or Father’s tired. And there’s a good Lil-Umbra feeling sorry for Mother and wanting to do everything I can to please Father. And there’s me in myself, both bad and good, both Opposites joined in one, who have, as my Opposite now, the entire universe! O I see, I see! I see the whole thing now! I carry two Opposites about with me wherever I go; but I myself am a perpetual living Opposite to the entire world, so that I really am, just as you said just now everything was, a double pair of Opposites!