Having got safely clear of the formidable Lord Edward, it didn’t take the wanderer from Picardy very long to reach Deadstone, and after an enjoyable night there, for Mother Wurzel’s middled-aged daughter, whose name was Puggie-Wuggie, had more deliciously wicked little ways when once you had her by your side in bed than any feminine being Petrus had ever known, he was allowed the privilege of meeting Lilith herself.
When once these two were together, however, things moved more crucially; and everything, at least for our student of magnetism, became much more complicated. In the first place there happened to him something that had never happened to him in his life before. He became completely infatuated with this fatal young lady.
The scrupulous chronicler of these agitating events has to endeavour in his narration of them to proceed as cautiously and meticulously as the events themselves seemed to be proceeding. As always with the actual impacts of life, there were so many different currents joining our special stream of events that this same stream was constantly being thickened here and thinned there, darkened here and lightened there, rendered bluish here and greenish there, and even splashed, it might be, with horrifying drops of blood at certain other places in its course.
At least that is how it all presented itself to Peter of Maricourt; and it did so with such ever-increasing, and now and then with such overlapping, overwhelming, overpowering, and almost drowning force, that he felt as he looked at her that, whether she yielded to his obsession or whether she didn’t yield to his obsession, it was now quite as important to him to remain in sight of her as it was to know that he, the gate-keeper’s son in the manor of Maricourt, was really and truly the long rumoured, long predicted, long prophesied Antichrist of sacred tradition.
The little red point of Peter’s tongue didn’t stay quiet any longer within the inner side of its menacing port-cullis. It came out; or, as a more elegant historian would say, it issued forth. What in plain words it did, this tongue of the enemy of Christ, was to lick both its upper lip and its lower lip, a proceeding that would have been a staggering sight for Peter’s only friend, his precious lodestone, if that object, now pressed so nervously against its owner’s organ of generation, had possessed the power of vision.
“You are asking me, my beautiful one,” he was now saying to Lilith, “what I want you to do for me at this juncture. Well! I’ll tell you exactly what’s in my mind. I think the thing for us to do is to go as quickly as possible to the Fortress, while this ex-bishop from Cologne is still there.
“Since I’ve found out how perfectly beautiful and irresistible you are, it has come over me that if I want to stop this man’s interference with everybody’s affairs in this part of the world — and you know how deep the gulf has already grown — down to the centre of the universe — between Bonaventura, and his dicegames with Satan, and Friar Bacon and his attempts to change the creative methods of God by getting some parcener of Eve to help him in the making of Adam. You know of course, my beautiful one, the difficulties we have to surmount if we really are to put a stop to this man’s meddling? But here is my plan, my dear, if you’ll help me to carry it out.
“In the first place we’ve got to pretend that we are horrified, beyond all expression, by this assault on Bacon’s Brazen Image, which must be to us of course the work of a loyal believer in Christ; and not only so but must contain within itself a splash, a spark, a breath, a sip, a sigh, a bubble, a dewdrop of that Spirit they believe in, who, at Pentecost, descended from Heaven in the shape of a thousand flames of fire and lodged on the heads of a crazy crowd of Jewish madmen.
“Of course it was in the shape of a dove that the Thing descended on Jesus himself at his baptism in Jordan. But by the time of Pentecost Jesus was already ‘ascended’, and when this Ghost they call ‘Holy’ ‘descended’, it came as a sort of Substitute for Jesus to keep things going till the event they call the ‘Crack of Doom’ or the ‘Last Day’.”
While Petrus was thus lecturing her on what, if they were to be successful in destroying it all, it was necessary for them to know, he was embracing her with every portion of his mind and not a few portions of his body.
“What we’ve got to do, my loveliest of all possible Eves, is to remember how long these confounded doctors of the church have been confusing our brains with their absurd problems about the embryo in the womb. This poor little urchin of a formless foetus begins by being on a par with the vegetable world, and has only got what they call a ‘vegetative soul’. Then, when it is a tiny bit bigger, and is being definitely fed upon the substance of its mother’s life, it is promoted to share the lives of all baby-creatures of the animal world and is allowed to possess what they call a ‘nutritive soul’. But just listen to this, my sweet,” and, as he spoke, his amorous caresses made it clear that he would not in the least object to becoming the begetter of the kind of creature he was describing.
“What we’ve got to remember is that this luckless infant only possesses a real soul when it is separated from its mother. What they try to drag in is the old Jewish Jehovah as the Creator of heaven and earth. And at this point, my beautiful one, we’ve got to remember that the great Aristotle, whom they all regard as the wisest of thinkers, taught that there never was a beginning, but that the matter out of which our world sprang into existence contained, and still contains in its own nature, all the creative energy that is needed. You do see, don’t you, my precious, how confusing these learned doctors are? You know, don’t you, how they tell us that we must hate the Jews because the Jewish Priests wanted Pilate to crucify Jesus?
“And yet they are always telling us that Jesus himself was the Son of David, and a descendant of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The truth is, my darling, we’ve got to make it clear to everyone we have any influence over that this whole business of the Christian religion is full of paradoxes, blunders, manias, idiocies, and ridiculous contradictions.
“Now listen, my pet; wouldn’t you like to come up with me now, as they say Satan was always wanting Jesus to go up with him, to the top of some high hill near here to see the wonders of the world and the glories of them?”
The simple-minded chronicler of these events can only record at this point that the daughter of Maldung of Lost Towers gave Petrus of Picardy a very piercing look. But with this piercing look there was mingled — and no other female in the wide world could so charge a single glance — an overpowering appeal and a desperate cry, a cry that was thrown into the very heart of her seduced-seducer, a cry that sounded like: “Take me! Take me! Take me! or I shall melt into thin air!”
“What about our visiting the Cerne Giant?” she whispered. No sooner did this murmur become audible than Petrus leapt to his feet elated and transported.
“Yes! yes! yes!” he cried; and began in his excitement to make a most curious gurgling noise, a noise which, if anyone who did not know him had heard it, would have suggested the bubbling and exploding, the bursting and dissolving, of a miraculous stream of salt water that had somehow or another got into the centre of a rushing waterfall of fresh water.
Nor did it take these two very long to climb up to the Cerne Giant, which was still as it had been for thousands of years — just a figure on the summit-slope of a grassy chalk hill where the grass had been religiously, though most heathenly, prevented from invading by the least fraction of an inch the preposterous picture, in white upon green, of a monstrous giant with his sexual organ erect, awaiting, you might say, the thousand-years-postponed arrival of his female partner, with whom he might play the immemorial game in full and shameless sight of the far-off sea and the eternally receding sky.