48 Fruits of the Sylan’s Industry
Gerald came thus into the library in which, no more than four months ago, as it appeared to him, he had quitted his natural body. Lights burned there, but the room was empty.
Nor did he perceive any marked signs of change. Most of his books were very much as he had left them. Upon the bookcases were still ranged his porcelain and brass animals and birds and reptiles. Investigation, though, revealed the addition to this diminutive fauna of a rather charming china cat,—a black cat, fast asleep, with a red ribbon about its neck,—and of a small ivory elephant, which also was black, but had white tusks.
The chairs, he saw, had been recovered, but it was with a figured stuff of much the same design and color. The rug that once had been his mother’s was still underfoot; and the curtains, while new looking, were of just the same repulsive shade of green velvet that by candle light turned yellowish.
“It is a quite detestable color. I had always intended to change those curtains so soon as I could afford it, for a green with some real life in it. I can but deduce that my body has remained remarkably conservative through all these thirty years which have seemed to me only a month or two. My body has evinced commendable industry, also, for here are dozens upon dozens of books by Gerald Musgrave.”
It seemed a bit droll thus to be confronted with so much strange work performed by his own natural body,—thought out in his own brain cells, and written with his own hand,—during the time that these chattels had been entrusted to the Sylan. Yet the results were gratifying.
For here were not any folderol romances such as Gerald himself, he felt uneasily, might have perhaps contrived with those brain cells and that hand, romances which at best would have wasted his readers’ time, and at worst might have incited unedifying and improper notions. Instead, these quartos were all serious and learned and scholastic works. Gerald therefore regarded these large quartos with a justifiable pride and with profound respect. Their very bindings were in themselves as incompatible with anything frivolous as were their contents with any unscientific double meanings. These books had the fine clarity of a physician in conference with a midwife. Moreover, Gerald’s admiring eyes found nearly every page empedestalled upon the most impressive looking kind of footnotes: upon tall footnotes in almost illegibly small type; upon huge polyglottic footnotes very full of numerals and brackets, which flatteringly assumed your acquaintance with all human tongues and your possession of all printed books, so that you could be referred offhand to such and such a page of an especial edition; and upon footnotes which appeared to quote from the literature of every known language after having abbreviated the title of each cited volume into unintelligibility.
For these quartos dealt with no romantic nonsense such as the phantasms with which novels vitiate the intelligence and the morals of their readers, Gerald observed, but with really worth-while ethnographic matters like the marriage customs of all lands, and the ways of male and female prostitution among the different races, and with the history in each country of paederasty, and of lesbianism, and of bestiality, and of necrophily, and of incest, and of sodomy, and of onanism, and of all manifestations of the sexual impulse in every era. There, in a more imaginative vein, were the Tentative Restoration of the Lost Books of Elephantis, the handsomely illustrated Seed of Minos, the doctoral thesis upon Lingham Worship, the Fertility Rites of the Sabbat, the privately published Myth of Anistar and Calmoora, the Study of Priapos, and the various other monumental works which, although Gerald did not know this, had already made Gerald Musgrave’s name familiar to the lecture halls of all universities and the pages of the more learned reviews.
These quartos were, in fine, the books which had made Gerald Musgrave the most famous and widely read of American ethnologists; and by his body’s industry and erudition and broad-mindedness Gerald was properly impressed. Here seemed, indeed, to be at least one complete and scholarly treatise devoted to the historical development and the mechanics and the literature of every known manifestation of the great forces which had created all life.
“Yes, it is really edifying to note with what zeal and common-sense my body—while I was a-gypsying with over-ambitious follies,—has decorously set up as the recorder of historical and scientific truths.”
Then Gerald found upon the next shelf some fourteen tall scrapbooks. They were full of what the newspapers had printed in laudation and in the most respectful criticism of the books of Gerald Musgrave. They contained, also, accounts of the academic honors conferred upon Gerald Musgrave. They were interleaved with the letters which had been written—the majority, of course, by that strange race which writes habitually to authors, but many of them, apparently, by persons of some consequence,—to Gerald Musgrave about his books.
“My body in my absence has become, thanks to my body’s books, a reputable and even a looked-up-to citizen. My body is by way of being, indeed, a personage. I note, too, with that interest appropriate to the foibles of the great, that my body has also become a somewhat vain old magpie, gathering up through thirty years every scrap of paper which happens to display my name.”
Next Gerald lighted on a black box with silver corners, and inside it was a time-discolored manuscript. This Gerald carried to the writing-table. And he found it that unfinished romance about his heroic ancestor, Dom Manuel of Poictesme, just ninety-three pages of it, precisely as Gerald had left it, with no word changed or added.
“There was not in my natural body sufficient power to sustain the high inspiration of my youth. So, very sensibly, my body has found other pursuits, and through them it has become a personage. I do not complain. Not every body becomes a personage. Even so, it seems a pity to have denied to mankind the loveliness already created in this fragment.”
But it was just then that the door opened. In the doorway stood a man in late middle life. And Gerald now for one instant regarded his natural body and all the dilapidations which time had performed upon that body.
And Gerald somehow comprehended the penned-in and eventless and self-sacrificing, arduous life of the famous scholar, the life which had been lived so long by the natural body of Gerald Musgrave. That blinking magpie, in this somewhat stuffy room,—in the midst of this childish menagerie of small cats and elephants and dogs and parrots and chickens and camels and other imbecile toys,—day after day compiled the valuable and interesting matter in those quartos and the trivial magniloquence in those scrapbooks. And that, virtually, was all he ever did. Such was his living in a world profuse in so many agreeabilities,—to be tasted and seen, to be smelt and heard and handled, at absolutely your own discretion, in this so opulent world wherein anyone could live very royally, and with never-failing ardor, upon every person’s patrimony of the five human senses.
Meanwhile, such self-devotion had paid, under time’s grasping governance, an exorbitant tax. The impaired shrunk body was unhealthy looking. Under each of the wavering dim eyes showed a peculiar white splotch. The skin of the noted scholar was pasty and seemed greasy. He had hardly any hair except those gray and untended whiskers. Everywhere he was shrivelled and lean, except for the abrupt, the surprising, protrusion of a large paunch. He self-evidently had inadequate kidneys, and an impaired heart, and defective teeth, and a sluggish liver, and approximately every other drawback to a sedentary person’s late middle life.
The body of this ornament to scholarship and letters was, in fine, a quite disgusting bit of wreckage, in need of patching up everywhere; and a fallen god, when thus confronted by the work of time and of much study and of intramural living, might very well shake his red ever-busy head over the one refuge now remaining to down-tumbled divinity.
Nevertheless, Gerald spoke the queer word of power which Horvendile had given him. There followed for Gerald an instant of dizziness, of a moment’s blindness....
Then Gerald found that it was he who stood at the door of the library peering into the quiet lamp-lit room. Before him waited a red-headed, slim young man in a blue coat and a golden yellow waistcoat, with a tall white stock and very handsome ruffles about his throat. And the young fellow was smiling at Gerald Musgrave with a rather womanish mouth, and in the eyes of the boy was a half-lazy, mildly humorous mockery.
Old Gerald Musgrave adored him with an ardor which was half hatred. Then he saw that the young fellow did not matter, and that Gerald Musgrave had bargained well.