Indeed that was the truth, as Freydis could not deny, in the thin tones which people’s voices had in Antan, since not only these patrician murderers harbored here. Here too were death’s plebeian tools in every form. Here were Italian stilettoes heaped with Malay krisses, the hooked Turkish scimitar with the Venetian schiavona; curved Arab yataghans, sabres that Yoshimitzu had tempered, the Albanian cutlass, and the notched blades of Zanzibar; the two-handed claymores of Scotland, the espada of the Spanish matador, the scalping-knives of the Red Indians and the ponderous glaives of executioners: swords from all cities and all kingdoms of the world, from Ferrara and Toledo and Damascus, from Dacia and Peru and Muscovy and Babylon.
To which you replied that, while you had never greatly cared for the cataloguing method in literature, you allowed its merits in conversation. These crisp little resumes indicated a really firm grasp of the subject. For the rest, it was most interesting to note what ingenuity people had displayed in contriving how to kill one another.
Freydis assented as to men’s whole-heartedness in malignity, but was disposed to view without optimism the support it got from human ingenuity. She considered these swords in any event to be outmoded lumber, as concerned the needs of anybody who really desired to do harm and work any actually great mischief.
Still, you, whose speaking seemed even to you a whisper in the grayness, declined to be grasping: and Flamberge would serve your turn. Therefore it was vexatious that, instead of gracefully presenting you with the sword, the Queen of Antan went through a gray vague corridor, wherein upon a table lay a handful of rusty iron nails and a spear, and then into another twilit place.
Here, as you hastily observed, were madame’s pistols, cannons, culverins, grenades, musketoons, harquebusses, bombs, petronels, siege-guns, falconets, carbines, and jingals, and swivels. Yes, it was most interesting.
Freydis looked at you somewhat queerly: and it was, again, as outmoded lumber that she appraised this arsenal. Then Freydis almost proudly showed the weapons she had in store for men’s needs when men should go to war to-morrow, and such assistants would further every patriot’s desire to do harm and work great mischief. And you felt rather uncomfortable to see the sleek efficiency of these gleaming things in this ambiguous place.
Yes, they were very interesting, and beside them, Flamberge certainly seemed inadequate. Still, you admitted, you had never been grasping: and Flamberge would serve your turn.
It was really maddening how the woman kept turning to irrelevant matters. These engines of destruction, although ingenious and devastating toys within their limits, should not be regarded over-seriously. A million or so of persons, or at most a few nations, could be removed with these things, but that was all. So speaking, she passed into a room wherein were books,—but not many books,—and four figures modelled in clay, as she told you, by old Dom Manuel very long ago. It was more important, her thin talking went on, that as occasion served she was sending into the world these figures, to follow their six predecessors, to all whom she had given a life empoisoned with dreams, with dreams that were immortal and contagious; and so would infect others and yet others eternally, and would make living as unhappy and detestable a business as dying. What were these dreams? she was asked: and she in turn asked, Why should I tell you ? Your dream is different, nor may you escape it. This must suffice: that these dreams are the most subtle and destructive of poisons, and do harm and work great mischief, in that they enable men to see that life and all which life can afford is inadequate to men’s desires.
This seemed rather morbid talk. To evade it tactfully, the four changelings as yet unborn were examined, with civil comments: and indeed there was about one little hook-nosed figure a something which quite took the fancy. He reminds me of a parrot, was your smilingly tendered verdict: and Freydis, with her habitual tired shrugging, replied that others, later, would detect, without much reticence, a resemblance to that piratical and repetitious bird.
Now then, all this was very interesting, most interesting, and you really regretted having to return to the topic of the sword Flamberge—Freydis had not made up her mind: she might or might not give the sword, and her deciding must pivot upon what harm you meant to do with it. Her visitor from the more cheery world of daylight was thus forced to make a clean breast of why he needed Flamberge, the only sword that may spill the blood of the Leshy, so that he might give, by the old ritual, his unborn child, and rid himself of his wife.
Whereon Queen Freydis expressed frank indignation, because the child would by this plan be rescued from all, and the woman from much, sorrow. Could even a small madman in bottle-green and silver suppose that the Queen of Antan, after centuries of thriving malevolence, was thus to be beguiled into flagrant philanthropy?
But it was not, in the long run, philanthropy, you insisted. It was depressing to have to argue about anything in this gray, vague, gleaming, endless place, wherein you seemed only to whisper: and you were, privately, a little taken aback by the unaccustomed need to prove an action, not amply precedented and for the general good, but the precise contrary. Aloud,—though not actually aloud, but in the dim speech one uses in Antan,—you contended that when a man thus rid himself of his wife he did harm and worked great mischief, because the spectacle made all beholders unhappy. Women of course had obvious reasons for uneasiness lest the example be followed generally: and men were roused to veritable frenzies of pious reprovings when they saw the thing they had so often thought of doing accomplished by somebody else.
Did married men, then, at heart always desire to murder their wives? was what Freydis wondered. No, you did not say that: not always; some wives let weeks go by without provoking that desire. And to appearances, most men became in the end more or less reconciled to having their wives about. Still, let us not go wholly by appearances. Let us be logical! Whom does any man most dislike ?
Freydis had settled down, with faint golden shimmerings, upon a couch that was covered with gray cushions, and she meditated. What person does any man most dislike? Why, Freydis estimated, the person who most frequently annoys him, the person with whom he finds himself embroiled in the most bitter quarrels, the person whose imperfections are to him most glaringly apparent, and, in fine, the person who most often and most poignantly makes him uncomfortable.
Just so, you assented: and in the life of any possible married man, who was that person? The question was rhetorical. You did not have to answer it, any more than did most husbands. None the less, you esteemed it a question which no married man had failed to consider, if gingerly and as if from afar, with the mere tail of his mental eye, in unacknowledged reveries. It was perhaps the memory of these cloistered considerations which made married men acutely uncomfortable when any other man disposed of his wife without all this halfhearted paltering with the just half-pleasant notion that some day she would go so far as to make justifiable— A gesture showed what, as plainly as one could show anything in this vague endlessness of grays and gleamings. No, madame might depend upon it, to assist any gentleman in permanently disposing of his wife was not, in the long run, philanthropy. It really did make the majority of other husbands uncomfortable, whether through envy or though a conscience-stricken recalling of unacknowledged reveries, you did not pretend to say.
All that might be true enough, Freydis admitted, from her dim nook among the gray cushions, without alluring her into the charitable act of preventing a child’s enduring the sorrows and fatigues of living.)