4.
That Devil in the Library
YET Gerald looked back for an instant at that unfortunate devil, in the appearance of a sedate young red-haired man, who remained in the library. To regard this Gerald Musgrave, now, was like looking at a droll acquaintance in whom Gerald was not, after all, very deeply interested.
For this Gerald Musgrave, the one who remained in the library, was really droll in well-nigh every respect. About the Gerald who was now—it might be, a bit nobly,—yielding up his life in preference to violating the code of a gentleman, and who was now quitting Lichfield, in order to become a competent magician, there was not anything ludicrous. That Gerald was an honorable and intelligent person who sought a high and rational goal.
But that part of Gerald Musgrave which remained behind, that part which was already marshaling more words in order the more pompously to inter the exploits of Dom Manuel of Poictesme, appeared droll. There was, for one thing, no sensible compulsion upon that red-haired young fellow thus to be defiling clean paper with oak-gall, when he might at that very instant be comfortably drunk at the Vartreys’ dinner, or he might be getting pleasurable excitement out of the turns of fortune at Dorn’s gaming-parlors, or he might be diverting himself in his choice of four bedrooms with a lively companion.
But, instead, he sat alone with bookshelves rising stuffily to every side of him,—rather low bookshelves upon the tops of which were perched a cherished horde of porcelain and brass figures representing one or another beast or fowl or reptile. Among the shiny toys, which in themselves attested his childishness, the young fellow sat of his own accord thus lonely. And his antics, incontestably, were queer. He fidgeted. He shifted his rump. He hunched downward, as if with a sudden access of rage, over the paper before him. He put back his head, to stare intently at a white china hen. He pulled at the lobe of his left ear; and he then rather frantically scratched the interior of this ear with his little finger.
Between these bodily exercises he, who was so precariously seated upon the crust of a planet teetering unpredictably through space, was making upon the paper before him, with his much nibbled-at black pen, small scratches, the most of which he presently canceled with yet other scratches, all the while with the air of a person who was about something intelligent and of actual importance. The spectacle was queer; it was unspeakably irrational: for, as always, to an onlooker, the motions of creative writing revealed that flavor of the grotesque which is attendant upon every form of procreation.
Yet it was upon a graver count that Gerald felt honestly sorry for the inheritor of Gerald Musgrave’s natural body. For Gerald was giving up his life out of deference to the code of a gentleman with rather more of relief than he had permitted the Sylan to suspect. And the poor devil who had so rashly taken over this life would—howsoever acute his diabolical intelligence,—he too would, in the end, Gerald reflected, be powerless against that unreasonable Evelyn Townsend and that even more unreasonable code of a gentleman.
Nobody, Gerald’s thoughts ran on, now that he had found a rather beautiful idea to play with, nobody who had not actually indulged in the really dangerous dalliance of adultery in Lichfield could quite understand the hopelessness of the unfortunate fiend’s position. For in the chivalrous Lichfield of 1805 adultery had its inescapable etiquette. Your exact relations with the woman were in the small town a matter of public knowledge familiar to everybody: but no person in Lichfield would ever formally grant that any such relations existed. Eyes might meet with perfect understanding: but from the well-bred lips of no Southern gentleman or gentlewoman would ever come more than a suave and placid “Evelyn and Gerald have always been such good friends.” For you were second cousins, to begin with: and—in a Lichfield wherein, as everywhere else in this human world, most people unaffectedly disliked, and belittled, and kept away from their cousins,—that relationship was considered a natural reason for you two being much together. Moreover, every woman in Lichfield was, by another really rather staggering social convention, assumed to be beautiful and accomplished and chaste: it was an assumption which needed hardly to be stated: it was merely among all Southern gentry an axiom in the vast code of being well-bred.
It followed that, when you were once involved in a liaison, your one salvation was for your co-partner in iniquity to become tired of you, and to cease dwelling upon the fact that she had trusted you and had given you all. That remained, of course, by the dictates of Southern chivalry, at any moment her privilege: but in this case the inconsiderate woman only grew fonder and fonder of Gerald, and repeated the dreadful observation more and more frequently.... And it remained, too, the privilege of the technically aggrieved husband to pick a quarrel with you, provided only that the grounds of this quarrel in no way involved a mention of his wife’s name. Then, still by the set rules of Lichfield’s etiquette, there would be a duel. After the duel you either were dispiritingly dead or, else, if you happened to be the more assuredly luckless survivor, you were compelled, merely by the silent force of everybody’s assumption that a gentleman could not do otherwise, to marry the widow. To do this was your debt to society at large, in atonement for having “compromised” a lady, where, bewilderingly enough, she was unanimously granted never to have been concerned at all. For never, in either outcome, would the occurrence of anything “wrong” be conceded, nor would ever the possibility of a lady’s having committed adultery be so much as hinted at in any speech or act of the chivalrous gentry of Lichfield.
Meanwhile you were trapped. There was no way whatever of avoiding that bleated “Oh, and I trusted you! I gave you all!” You were not even privileged to avoid the woman. It was not considered humanly possible that you were bored, and upon some occasions frenziedly annoyed, by the society of a beautiful and accomplished and chaste gentlewoman who honored you with her friendship. There was, instead, compressing you everywhere, the tacit but vast force of the general assumption that your indebtedness to her could not ever be discharged in full. The deplorable—and sometimes, too, the rather dear—fond woman’s inability to keep her hands off you was conscientiously not noticed. So your Cousin Evelyn pawed at you in public without an eyebrow’s going up: hostesses smilingly put you together: other men affably quitted her side whensoever you appeared. Her husband was no different: Frank Townsend, also, genially accepted—in the teeth of whatsoever rationality the man might privately harbor,—the axiom that “Evelyn and Gerald have always been such good friends.”