37 Contentment of the Mislaid God
Now life contented Gerald as he lived it through this recognized parenthesis in his divine career. Very soon this little episode of his stay upon Mispec Moor would be ended: it would even be forgotten, perhaps, in the press of regal and superhuman affairs. Meanwhile he lived in quite tolerable ease. He had nothing to trouble him. Hardly a morning passed without his finding some more or less interesting celestial outcast to talk to under his chestnut-tree. Maya continued to be an excellent cook, in her plain, unpretentious way: and she saw to it that the cottage was kept comfortable and efficient in all appointments.
And Maya was dear to him. She nowadays found fault with virtually everything that Gerald did. And whenever he ventured any suggestion, as to Theodorick or the economics of the cottage or their social engagements in Turoine,—or even if Gerald as much as suggested opening or closing a window,—Maya at once produced at least nine grounds upon which the suggestion was plainly very foolish and would never have occurred to anyone of real intelligence. And she cherished the most imaginative views as to the extent of Gerald’s selfishness and lack of consideration for other people, and of his habit of never doing anything whatever for her pleasure.
Sometimes, though, she would go for as much as an hour without dwelling, at especial length, upon what a trial Gerald was to her in one way or another. And in all respects she was a capable woman who made him an excellent wife, and treated him far better than she could have found any excuse for doing in what she said about him.
And Gerald loved Theodorick Quentin Musgrave, also, with an affection which rather troubled Gerald. The child, he knew, displayed no extraordinary charm nor talent: no course of reasoning could justify any extreme fondness for Theodorick upon the ground of his physical or mental gifts. Theodorick Quentin Musgrave was not brilliant, he was not lovely, he was not especially amiable: he was, indeed, by way of being a particularly selfish small tyrant, continually adding to the disorder of the cottage, to the dismay of Gerald’s finicky liking for neatness, and continually devising unneeded trouble and commandeering manual tasks from his parents because of the droll pleasure which Theodorick appeared to derive from seeing his parents fetch and carry in his service.
Yet, whensoever Gerald put his arm about the small, warm, yielding, sturdy, but so helpless body, it was as though Gerald’s own body were melting in a grateful glow of what was—bewilderingly—a sort of panic terror. He loved this freckled, fragile creature with an unwisdom which was, as Gerald knew, an assuredness of more or less future discomfort and, it well might be, of anguish, for him who quite honestly disliked trouble of any kind. Since this child had been created, Gerald’s well-being was not any longer a matter which Gerald could hope to control or even to protect: his happiness was now risked upon what might befall this imp. It was the helplessness of the child which frightened Gerald with a sense of his own helplessness. Life was so cruel to children. Life damaged and hurt children in so many ways inevitably. And every hurt to this child, now, would be an anguish to Gerald, who could avoid none of them. He could not even manage to get the child properly christened, in this neighborhood so profuse in sorcerers and wizards, who used, as everybody knew, unchristened children in horrible ways which it was not comfortable to think about....
Then, too, Gerald was not certain Theodorick Quentin Musgrave was real. Gerald remembered always, at the back of his mind, that frightful instant when he had removed his spectacles, to find the child had vanished. Gerald assured himself that the cause was a slight indigestion, and that the moment’s blur of vision came from a disordered stomach. But he was wholly careful not ever again to look at Theodorick except through the rose-colored spectacles which made visible the magics of Maya. He kept resolutely out of his full attention the fact that Theodorick might be an illusion which Maya had created. And he grew accustomed to that unusual milk-colored tongue, which showed like a white snake within the red moist little mouth whenever the child laughed.
And Gerald sometimes wondered if Maya had over-ambitiously designed to make permanent this mere parenthesis in his career. She had attempted, to be sure, no magic such as that with which she had transformed his predecessors. No sorceress would dare, for that matter, thus to presume against a god.... Gerald knew that, instead, it was his Maya’s wholesome simplicity and the prosaic human comfort which he did get, after all, from living with this middle-aged and fault-finding and not in the least beautiful woman that had detained him, just for the while of this parenthesis in his career. He of course would pass on, to enter into his kingdom, by and by. And there was no conceivable hurry about it, now that his journeying to Antan was for every practical purpose finished, and now that whensoever he elected he might within the next half-hour or so be taking over the realm and all the powers of the Master Philologist.
Meanwhile, though, Gerald would now and then wonder amusedly if his dear, stupid Maya could perhaps have struck upon the device of detaining him by not using any magic whatever: if she in secret flattered herself that this device was succeeding: and if she actually cherished the delusion that she was hoodwinking omniscient Fair-haired Hoo, the Helper and Preserver, the Lord of the Third Truth, the Well-beloved of Heavenly Ones?
Anyhow, his life here very amiably contented him for the while. The local circles of sorcerers and wizards were pleasant enough, barring only that haunting memory as to how they used unchristened children. Gerald and Maya did not go out a great deal; but they were on friendly terms with the neighbors; they attended an occasional Sabbat; and they kept in touch generally with the affairs of Turoine. And for the rest, the little happenings of his home life temporarily contented the Lord of the Third Truth.
And he began to reflect that, just possibly, Antan might be to him, after he had entered into his kingdom, a disappointment. From here Antan seemed uniformly wonderful. It was astonishingly pleasant to sit upon the western porch of the small cottage, especially toward evening, when your shoes propped up before you on the porch railing reflected a pinkish glow from the sunset, and to imagine what was going on in that broad expanse of yet unvisited fields and hills which now were turning into gray and purple mists directly beneath the gold and crimson of the sunset. The trouble was that you, who were gifted with the imagination of a god, were very certainly imagining more wonderful happenings for that mysterious theatre than could by any chance be enacted there.
For one matter, after dark, Antan always displayed eight lights, six of them grouped together in the middle of the vista with the general effect of a cross, and the other two showing much farther off to the northwest. About those never-varying huge lights Gerald had formed at least twenty delightful theories, all plausible as long as you remained upon Mispec Moor, whereas if you went to Antan not more at most than one of these theories could prove true.
To go to Antan thus meant the destruction of no less than nineteen rather beautiful ideas as to those lights alone. However, Gerald felt, there was no help for this: and he whole-heartedly meant to take over his appointed kingdom without any unpleasant criticizing, no matter what might be the deficiencies of the place, by and by. Meanwhile, there was no great hurry: and it was, indeed, a prudent and long-sighted course for him to be pausing here to enjoy these fine scenic effects, because by and by he would not ever again be seeing Antan from this distance.
After nightfall those eight lights never varied. But by day there was always a different and, as it seemed, a more lovely display of rounded, parti-colored, cleared hills, which here and there were darklier streaked, no doubt with orchards. Beyond them many flat-topped mountains showed, yet farther to the west, like a sleeping herd of gigantic blue crocodiles all couched across the west and facing north. And above so much terrestrial graciousness moved an incessant pageant of clouds, not a bit like the flat clouds which you looked up at from Lichfield, because the clouds which brooded over Antan were seen, from Gerald’s station upon Mispec Moor, as on a level with you: and, when they were thus considered sidewise, they resembled moving walls and crags and drifting curtains through which the sunlight smote in slanting and huge and pallid and quite tangible looking shafts.
Always, too, you noticed, nowadays, that vast and violet-shrouded, high-breasted woman’s figure lying yonder, motionless, with that ever-burning heart; and you were visited by an odd fancy. You fancied that Queen Freydis, the as yet unwon-to queen of your appointed kingdom, was like that woman. And this fancy came to you none the less often because of your plain perception of its illogic.
“Come, now!” said Gerald, “a mistress of that size would be unsuitable. Charms of so diffuse an acreage would create, even in a god, a sense of inadequacy. Nevertheless, I am falling rather ardently in love with those two hills. I begin to adore the casual play of lights and shadows upon yonder piled-up dirt, which when seen from any other station than this would not in the least resemble a woman. And such amorous notions, apart from their insanity, are not befitting in a contentedly, if temporarily, married person.”
The transience of his comforts made them very dear. It was well worth the inconvenience of sleeping in his spectacles (as Gerald, for his own reasons, did) so that in the night season he could awaken, to see Maya’s tranquil brown head yonder beside the smaller and tousled and livelily red head of Theodorick Quentin Musgrave,—both visible yonder because of the lamp which the child demanded at night, and because of his insistence that Mother was to sleep with him instead of with Father.
Outside, Gerald would hear those of his transformed predecessors who now were horses, shuffling and restively stamping, and at times snorting and whinnying, in the chill outer darkness; or a misguided gentleman who lived nowadays as a steer would low, much farther off; or Gerald would hear yet another one of Maya’s former husbands coughing, with the far-reaching and morose scornfulness peculiar to a sheep. And then the difference between the estate of Gerald’s predecessors and the snug warmth of his so comfortable soft bed, and his knowledge of that unmarred bodily ease which, just now, was his through every hour of the day, would trouble Gerald, because he knew it all to be so satisfying and so transient.
PART TEN
THE BOOK OF ENDINGS
“Trust Nobody but Thyself, and
None Other will Betray Thee.”