33 Limitations of Gaston
It was at this time, toward the middle of June, that Gaston Bulmer came from Lichfield. Gerald was sitting, as was his daily custom now, under the chestnut-tree beside the road which led to Antan. He waited there to engage in conversation the next of his future subjects who might pass by in that perpetual journeying toward Antan. Gerald, under this same chestnut-tree, had by this time talked with many such unearthly wayfarers: and if the rather interesting things they had told him were all written down, it would make a book unutterably enormous and utterly incredible.
In such circumstances it was, just after two not unfamiliar mountebanks had gone by carrying with them the paraphernalia of their Punch and Judas show, that Gerald noticed a small sulphur-colored cloud sweeping rapidly from the east. It descended: and when it was near to Gerald, it unclosed. Gaston Bulmer then stepped, a bit rheumatically, from its glowing depths, and he laid down a rod of cedar wood tipped with an apple carved in blue-stone.
There was not in all this anything in itself astonishing, since Gaston Bulmer was an adept in the arts of which Gerald, in the strange days before he knew that he was a god, had been a student. But to note how Gaston had aged in the last week or so was astounding. Yet Gerald, in any case, was wholly delighted to see again his old friend and preceptor, and a person who had for so long been virtually his father-in-law.
Gaston would not come up to the cottage, though, for dinner, because, as he confessed, he preferred not to encounter Maya. Rather, it was his wish, and it seemed, indeed, to be his errand, to free Gerald from what Gaston Bulmer, surprisingly enough, described as the wise woman’s pernicious magic.
Gerald said: “Oh, bosh! For really now, Gaston, if such nonsense were not heart-breaking it would be side-splitting. I am inexpressibly shocked by your hallucination, which is, I trust, of a most transitory nature. However, let us not discuss my wife, if you please. Instead, do you tell me how my body is faring.”
So they sat down together under the chestnut-tree. And Gaston Bulmer answered, “That body, Gerald, since you quitted it, has become a noted scholar and a man of letters.”
“Ah! ah!” said Gerald, greatly pleased, “so my romance about Dom Manuel of Poictesme has been completed, and is now being admired everywhere!”
“No, for your body has become, just as I said, a scholar. Scholars do not write romances.”
“Yet you referred to a man of letters—?”
“Your body is now a rather famous ethnologist. Your body deals with historical and scientific truths. Your body thus writes large quartos upon topics to which no romance, howsoever indelicate, could afford to devote a sentence.”
Gerald fell to stroking that long chin of his. “Still, I recall that the present informant of my body once informed me there were only two truths of which any science could be certain.”
“And what were these two truths?”
Gerald named them.
Gaston said then: “The demon is consistent. For these two are precisely your body’s scientific specialty. To-day your body writes invaluable books in which the quaint and interesting customs that accompany an interplay of these two truths, and the various substitutes for that interplay, are catalogued and explained, as these customs have existed in all lands and times. Lichfield to-day is wholly proud of the scholarship and the growing fame of Gerald Musgrave.”
“I am glad that my body has turned out so splendidly. And I trust that all goes equally well with your daughter Evelyn?”
“Gerald,” the older man replied, looking more seriously troubled than Gerald ever liked to have anybody seeming in his company, “Gerald, it is an unfair thing that your Cousin Evelyn, without knowing it, should be living upon terms of such close friendship with a demon-haunted body.”
“Ah, so that friendship continues!”
“It continues,” said Gaston, “unaltered. It may interest you, Gerald, by the way, to hear that your Cousin Evelyn has now a son, quite a fine red-headed boy, born just a year after you relinquished your body to that treacherous Sylan.”
Gerald answered affably: “Why, that is perfectly splendid! Frank always wanted a boy.”
“My son-in-law, in fact, is much pleased. It is about my daughter I was thinking. It seems to me the situation is hardly fair to her, Gerald.”
Gerald replied: “My body is all of me that she was ever acquainted with, Gaston. So I fail to perceive that anything is altered.”
“Yet, when I reflect that a beautiful and accomplished and chaste gentlewoman, Gerald—”
“Ah, ah! But, yes, to be sure! you speak in the time-hallowed terms of Lichfield. And I really do not know why I interrupted you.”
“—When I reflect that, without knowing it, a gentlewoman is living upon terms of such close friendship with a mere demon-haunted body—”
“And is, in fact, trusting and giving all?”
“All her friendship and the natural affection of a kinswoman. Yes, that is a sad spectacle. It is an unsuitable spectacle. So it seems to me your duty as a Musgrave, and as a Southern gentleman, to return forthwith to mortal living and to your mortal obligations, and in particular to the obligations of your life-long friendship with your Cousin Evelyn.”
Gerald said, for the second time, “Oh, bosh!”
For the notions and the chivalrous assumptions of Gaston Bulmer all now appeared to Gerald out of reason, in view of the divine predestination which was upon him. A god had no concern with such slight imbroglios as the code of a merely terrestrial gentleman and the proper maintenance upon Earth of polite adultery. It would, indeed, be positively ill-bred for a Dirghic god to meddle with any of the affairs of a planet which, according to Gerald’s Protestant Episcopal faith, had been created and was controlled by an Episcopalian deity; for Gerald had of course retained, provisionally, that religion in which he was a communicant until he could find out something rather more definite about the religion in which he was a god.
Gerald therefore said: “My good Gaston, that your meaning is excellent, I do not doubt. And it is not your fault of course that, in your merely human condition, you do not quite understand these matters, and certainly cannot view them with an omniscient eye.”
The older man said: “I understand, in any event, that through all these years you have stayed here bewitched with terrible half-magics, and that your own eyes are blinded with the woman’s rose-colored spectacles. And I seek to preserve you.”
“You would preserve me for the provincial life of your little Lichfield! You would make me just another chivalrous, bull-headed, rather nice-looking and wholly stupid Musgrave! In fine, you would urge me to become genteel and to deny my glorious destiny. Yet to do that would be cowardly, Gaston: for, whether I like it or not, there is upon me the divine obligation to fulfil some very ancient prophecies.”
“What sort of prophecies are these?”
“They are Dirghic prophecies. But, then, it is not the language in which a prophecy is uttered that matters, rather it is—Well, it is the spirit of the thing! For you must know—although, in view of my wife’s social position, I have compelled her, after some little argument, to introduce me hereabouts as a visiting sorcerer,—yet I may tell you, in strict confidence, Gaston, it is decreed that, as the Lord of the Third Truth, I am to reign in Antan.”
“And who told you any such unlikely nonsense?”
“Some people that I met upon the road. Oh, quite honest looking people, Gaston!”
“And who told you that you were the Lord of any Third Truth?”
“There my authority is unimpeachable. For I had it from the lips of a beautiful and accomplished and chaste gentlewoman, Gaston, who was speaking with all the frankness begotten by our being in bed together at the time.”
“And how can you reign in Antan, or anywhere else, when you do not ever go there? Through all these years, I gather, you have loitered here within a man’s arm’s reach of Antan!”
Gerald said, with the slight frown of one who finds trouble uncongenial: “I am puzzled, my dear friend, by your continued references to all these years. And I admit that various matters have a bit hindered my technical and merely formal entry into my kingdom. Yet I shall be leaving Mispec Moor the instant that this week’s washing is in, on Thursday afternoon—”
“But, my poor Gerald! you will not go, either forward to Antan or back to Lichfield, on what you think to be next Thursday. You have lost here all sense of time, you do not even know that the days you have spent in this place have counted as four years in Lichfield. I tell you that the wise woman, with her half-magics and her accursed spectacles, holds you here bewitched. And I now perceive that nothing whatever can be done for you, who are ensnared by the most fatal of all the magics of the wrinkled goddess.”
—To which Gerald, for the third time, replied: “Oh, bosh! No sorceress has any power over a god. And so completely do you misunderstand my wife, Gaston, that I must tell you hardly a day passes without her urging me to hurry on to Antan.”
Gaston Bulmer was still regarding him with that extraordinary and wholly uncalled-for look of compassion.
“How completely,” he remarked, “she understands you Musgraves! Yes, you are lost, my poor Gerald.”
“—It follows that your notions are preposterous. Oh, that is not your fault, my dear fellow, and not for an instant am I blaming you. Your conduct, from your human point of view, is very right, very friendly, very proper. So your rather laughable blunder does not offend me in the least. And if, as you declare, I have lingered here for some four years as you human beings estimate time, what do four years amount to with an immortal who has at his disposal all eternity? Come now, Gaston, do you but answer me that very simple question!”
But Gaston answered only: “You are content. You are lost.”