Something about Eve: A comedy of fig-leaves

by James Branch Cabell

“Oh, oh!” said Gerald, “so that is how it is! All ends, again, with that rather hackneyed scoring Da capo. And the eternal quest of Antan continues, for all that I have no part in it....”

Yet the boy’s joyousness and proud faith appeared to old Gerald Musgrave pitiable beyond thought. Gerald, now that he was fifty-eight, was of course not really troubled by that pitiableness, because all actual commiseration and sympathy for other persons had withered in him along with the rest of youth’s over-upsetting emotions. Besides, Gerald saw that, in logic, as a plain question of arithmetic, the boy did not matter. A million or so other lads more or less like this enthusiastic young fellow were at that instant preparing for the same downcasting and failure; and by and by these lads also would be facing their own unimportance with equanimity. For, as you—howsoever suddenly,—got older, there was less bitterness, there was hardly any bitterness at all, to be derived of the knowledge that in human living very much amounted to nothing, because you saw even more clearly and more constantly that nothing amounted to very much....

So Gerald said only: “You are young. At least, you are living in a young body. So do you beware! For, so long as you go about the Marches of Antan in any conveyance so perilous, the lying half-magic of the Two Truths will beset that young body, and the Princess will await you at every turn. She will encounter you under many names, for it is true that, just as you said very long ago, women do vary in their given names. She will encounter you in varying shapes. But in any case, she waits for every young romantic everywhere, as a rather lovable and as an interestingly formed and colored impediment.... I think it, therefore, highly improbable that you will complete the journey to Antan. I, in any case, am middle-aged. And I cry, not discontentedly, my personal farewell to the half-magic of racing pulses and of distended nerves—”

For an instant Gerald was silent. In his old eyes awoke that gleam which anybody familiar with Gerald would have recognized at once.

“You see,” he continued, with large affability, “while you have been theorizing, my dear fellow,—oh, very charmingly, and with a thoroughness which does you credit, great credit,—well, my investigations meanwhile have taken a rather more practical turn. I am not, of course, at liberty to speak of my love-affairs out yonder, with any real explicitness. No, here, as always, noblesse oblige. Still, if you only knew! If you but knew half as much as I do about that droll escapade with the Lady Sigid of Audierne and her cousin the Abbess! about what happened to me in the harem of Caliph Mizraim! about Beatrice and Henriette and Madame Pamela and Vittoria and Elspeth! about the three girls at the tanner’s! or if you knew the truth as to what her Majesty and I were about that night we came so near being caught—!”

“I see,” the boy said, rather wistfully. “You have been a devil of a fellow and a sad rip among the ladies.”

“Oh, dear me, not at all!” said Gerald. And the old fellow now wore the expression which, sometimes, accompanies a blush. “It is merely that I have talked a bit too freely. It is only that this rash tongue of mine was running away with me. So I can but ask you to forget every word I have uttered. For exalted names ought, really, not to be repeated thus lightly. I shall therefore say nothing whatever about the eight other queens with whom my name has been coupled,—with how good reason I, you understand, must be the last person in the world to admit,—nor about any of the empresses either. In fact, a great deal of the scandal about my intimacy with one of them was exaggerated. No: I most certainly must not voice any indiscretions about dear Caroline. So I merely point out—without mentioning any names whatever,—that my experience has been considerable: and I can assure you, my dear fellow, that in the end these half-magics produce, after all, no very prodigious miracles.”

“But—” said the boy.

“No,” Gerald protested, “no, really, you must not tempt me with such eloquence! It suffices that during the thirty years that you have sat here theorizing,—and have, as it were, blossomed forth with all these delightful books,—these half-magics have led me day after day from one affair to its twin; they have led me into more or less jealously guarded lowlands, which were not markedly dissimilar; they have led then from one valley to another valley which looked and felt and, for that matter, smelt very much the same; finally they led me to the fair breasts of Maya. And I fell away into domesticity, I went no farther. But I was wholly content there.... So I do not complain. I have lost through these half-magics my appointed kingdom in Antan,—or so, at least, it appears to me, in a world wherein perhaps nothing is indisputable except, of course, historical and scientific truths. Yet the losing of my kingdom has, none the less, been pleasant. I have had, under the harryings of these half-magics—always, I mean, upon the whole,—an agreeable time. To-night the half-magics whose appointed duty it is to keep all us romantics from attaining to Antan have ceased bothering about me. After to-night I am no longer formidable. I am, in a word, now that I approach sixty, almost middle-aged. It follows that Antan does not concern me any longer: and I shall think no more about Antan, wherein, for one reason and another, I have found nothing.”

With that, gray Gerald Musgrave dipped his pen. He put the boy quite out of mind. And the well-thought-of old scholar began to write, just where his natural body had left off a bit earlier in the evening, setting down decorously the historical and scientific truth as to the rules governing pre-nuptial intercourse in the bedchambers of New Guinea and the Tonga Islands.