Something about Eve: A comedy of fig-leaves

by James Branch Cabell

Yet Gerald, after all, was now more deeply interested in that huge mirror than in anything else. He saw that the mirror which they worshipped in the land of Dersam was not in any way dreadful. If only the mirror of Freydis was like this, then every inheritance which awaited him in his appointed kingdom might well be pleasant enough.

For now the Mirror of Caer Omn shone with a golden clear glowing, and in its depths he viewed with lively admiration a throng of strange and lovely beings such as he had not known in Lichfield.

12.
Confusions of the Golden Travel

BUT when three huge men beckoned to him, and Gerald had moved forward, he found, with wholly tolerant surprise, that this mirror was in reality a warmish golden mist, through which he entered into the power of these three giant blacksmiths, and into the shackles of adamant with which they bound him fast to a gray, lichen-crusted crag, the topmost crag above a very wide ravine, among a desert waste of mountain tops; and he entered, too, into that noble indignation which now possessed Gerald utterly. For it was Heaven he was defying, he who was an apostate god, a god unfrightened by the animosity of his divine fellows. He had preserved, somehow,—in ways which he could not very clearly recall, but of which he stayed wholly proud,—all men and women from destruction by the harshness and injustice of Heaven. He only of the gods had pitied that futile, naked, cowering race which lived, because of their defencelessness among so many other stronger animals, in dark and shallow caverns, like ants in an ant-hill. He had made those timid, scatter-brained, two-legged animals human: he had taught them to build houses and boats; to make and to employ strong knives and far-smiting arrows against the fangs and claws with which Heaven had equipped the other animals; and to tame horses and dogs to serve them in their hunting for food. He had taught them to write and to figure and to compound salves and medicines for their hurts, and even to foresee the future more or less. All arts that were among the human race had come from Prometheus, and all these benefits were now preserved for his so inadequate, dear puppets, through the nineteen books in which Prometheus had set down the secrets of all knowledge and all beauty and all contentment,—he who after he had discovered to mortals so many inventions had no invention to preserve himself. Prometheus, in brief, had created and had preserved men and women, in defiance of Heaven’s fixed will. For that sacrilege Prometheus atoned, among the ends of earth, upon this lichen-crusted gray crag. He suffered for the eternal redemption of mankind, the first of all poets, of those makers who delight to shape and to play with puppets, and the first of men’s Saviors. And his was a splendid martyrdom, for the winged daughters of old Ocean fluttered everywhere about him in the golden Scythian air, like wailing seagulls, and a grief-crazed woman with the horns of a cow emerging from her disordered yellow hair paused too to cherish him, and then went toward the rising place of the sun to endure her allotted share of Heaven’s injustice.

But he who was the first of poets burst Heaven’s shackles like packthread, ridding himself of all ties save the little red band which yet clung about one finger, and rising, passed to his throne between the bronze lions which guarded each of its six steps, and so sat beneath a golden disk. All wisdom now belonged to the rebel against Heaven, and his was all earthly power: the fame of the fine poetry and the comeliness and the grandeur of Solomon was known in Assyria and Yemen, in both Egypts and in Persepolis, in Karnak and in Chalcedon, and among all the isles of the Mediterranean. He sported with genii and with monsters of the air and of the waters; the Elementals served King Solomon when he began to build, as a bribe to Heaven, a superb temple which was engraved and carved and inlaid everywhere with cherubim and lions and pineapples and oxen and the two triangles. There was no power like Solomon’s: his ships returned to him three times each year with the tribute of Nineveh and Tyre and Parvaam and Mesopotamia and Katuar; the kings of all the world were the servants of King Solomon: the spirits of fire and the lords of the air brought tribute to him, too, from behind the Pleiades. His temple now was half completed. But upon his ring finger stayed always the band of blood-colored asteria upon which was written, “All things pass away.” These glittering and soft and sweet-smelling things about him, as he knew always, were only loans which by and by would be taken away from him by Heaven. He turned from these transient things to drunkenness and to the embraces of women, he hunted forgetfulness upon the breasts of nine hundred women, he quested after oblivion between the thighs of the most beautiful women of Judea and Israel, of Moab and of Ammon and of Bactria, of Baalbec and of Babylon: he turned to wantoning with boys and with beasts and with bodies of the dead. These madnesses enraptured the flesh of Solomon, but always the undrugged vision of his mind regarded the fixed will of Heaven, “These things shall pass away.” The temple which he had been building lacked now only one log to be completed. He cast that gray and lichen-crusted cedar log into the Pool of Bethesda: it sank as though it had been a stone: and Solomon bade his Israelites set fire to the temple which all these years he had been building as a bribe to Heaven.

But when the temple burned, it became more than a temple, for not only the flanks of Mt. Moriah were ablaze, a whole city was burning there, and its name was Ilion. He aided in the pillaging of it: the golden armor of Achilles fell to his share. In such heroic gear, he, like a fox hidden in a slain lion’s skin, took ship to Ismaurus, which city he treacherously laid waste and robbed: thence he passed to the land of the Lotophagi, where he viewed with mildly curious, cool scorn the men who fed upon oblivion. He was captured by a very bad-smelling, one-eyed giant, from whom he through his wiles escaped. There was no one anywhere more quick in wiles than was Odysseus, Laertes’ son. He toiled unhurt through a nightmare of pitfalls and buffetings, among never-tranquil seas, outwitting the murderous Laestrigonians, and hoodwinking Circe and the feathery-legged Sirens and fond Calypso: he evaded the man-eating ogress with six heads: he passed among the fluttering, gray, squeaking dead, and got the better of Hades’ sullen overlords and ugly spectres, through his unfailing wiliness,—he who was still a poet, making the supreme poem of each man’s journeying through an everywhere inimical and betraying world, he who was pursued by the wrath of Heaven which Poseidon had stirred up against Odysseus. But always the wiles of much-enduring Odysseus evaded the full force of Heaven’s buffetings, so that in the end he won home to Ithaca and to his meritorious wife; and then, when the suitors of Penelope had been killed, he went, as dead Tiresias had commanded, into a mountainous country carrying upon his shoulder an oar, and leading a tethered ram, for it was yet necessary to placate Heaven. Beyond Epirus, among the high hills of the Thesproteans, he sat the oar upright in the stony ground, and turning toward the ram which he now meant to sacrifice to Poseidon, he found Heaven’s amiability to remain unpurchased, because the offering of Odysseus, who was a rebel against Heaven’s will to destroy him, had been refused, and the ram had vanished.

But in his hand was still the rope with which he had led this ram, and in his other hand was a bag containing silver money, and in his heart, now that he had again turned northerly, to find in place of the oar an elder-tree in flower, now in his heart was the knowledge that no man could travel beyond him in hopelessness and in infamy. He remembered all that he had put away, all which he had denied and betrayed, all the kindly wonders which he had witnessed between Galilee and Jerusalem, where the carpenters of the Sanhedrin were now fashioning, from a great lichen-crusted cedar log found floating in the Pool of Bethesda, that cross which would be set up to-morrow morning upon Mt. Calvary. Then Judas flung down the accursed silver and the rope with which he had come hither to destroy himself, because an infamy so complete as his must first be expressed with fitting words. It was a supreme infamy, it was man’s masterpiece in the way of iniquity, it was the reply of a very fine poet to Heaven’s proffered truce after so many æons of tormenting men causelessly: it was a thing not to be spoken of but sung. He heaped great sheets of lead upon his chest, he slit the cord beneath his tongue, he tormented himself with clysters and with purges and in all other needful ways, so that his voice might be at its most effective when he sang toward Heaven about his infamy.

But when he sang of his offence against Heaven, he likened his hatefulness to that of very horrible offenders in yet elder times, he compared his sin to that of Œdipus who sinned inexpiably with his mother, and to that of Orestes whom Furies pursued forever because he had murdered his mother. But it was not of any Jocasta or of any Clytemnestra he was thinking, rather it was of his own mother, of that imperious, so beautiful Agrippina whom he had feared and had loved with a greater passion than anyone ought to arouse in an emperor, and whom he had murdered. Nothing could put Agrippina out of his thoughts. It availed no whit that he was lord of all known lands, and the owner of the one house in the world fit for so fine a poet to live in, a house entirely overlaid with gold and adorned everywhere with jewels and with mother of pearl, a house that quite dwarfed the tawdry little Oriental hovel which Solomon had builded as a bribe to Heaven, because this was a house so rich and ample that it had three-storied porticos a mile in length, and displayed upon its front portico not any such trumpery as an Ark of the Covenant but a colossal statue of that Nero Claudius Cæsar who was the supreme poet the world had ever known. Yet nothing could put Agrippina out of Nero’s thoughts. From the satiating of no lust, howsoever delicate or brutal, and from the committing of no enormity, and from the loveliness of none of his poems, could he get happiness and real peace of mind. He hungered only for Agrippina, he wanted back her detested scoldings and intermeddlings, he reviled the will of Heaven which had thwarted the desires of a fine poet by making this so beautiful, proud woman his mother, and he practised those magical rites which would summon Agrippina from the dead.

But when she returned to him, incredibly beautiful, and pale and proud, and quite naked, just as he had last seen her when his sword had ripped open this woman’s belly so that he might see the womb in which he had once lain, then the divine Augusta drew him implacably downward among the dead, and so into the corridors of a hollow mountain. This place was thronged with all high-hearted worshippers of the frightening, discrowned, imperious, so beautiful woman who had drawn him thither resistlessly, and in this Hörselberg he lived in continued splendor and in a more dear lewdness, and he still made songs, only now it was as Tannhäuser that the damned acclaimed him as supreme among poets. But Heaven would not let him rest even among these folk who had put away all thought of Heaven. Heaven troubled Tannhäuser with doubts, with premonitions, even with repentance. Heaven with such instruments lured this fine poet from the scented Hörselberg into a bleak snow-wrapped world: and presently he shivered too under the cold wrath of Pope Urban, bells rang, a great book was cast down upon the pavement of white and blue slabs, and the candles were being snuffed out, as the now formally excommunicated poet fled westerly from Rome pursued by the ever-present malignity of Heaven.

But from afar he saw the sapless dry rod break miraculously into blossom, and he saw the messengers of a frightened Bishop of Rome (with whom also Heaven was having its malicious sport) riding everywhither in search of him, bearing Heaven’s pardon to the sinner whom they could not find. For the poet sat snug in a thieves’ kitchen, regaling himself with its sour but very potent wines and with its frank, light-fingered girls. Yet a gibbet stood uncomfortably near to the place: upon bright days the shadow of this gallows fell across the threshold of the room in which they rather squalidly made merry. Death seemed to wait always within arm’s reach, pilfering all, with fingers more light and nimble than those which a girl runs furtively through the pockets of the put-by clothing of her client in amour. Death nipped the throats of ragged poor fellows high in the air yonder, and death very lightly drew out of the sun’s light and made at one with Charlemagne all the proud kings of Aragon and Cyprus and Bohemia, and death casually tossed aside the tender sweet flesh which had been as white as the snows of last winter, and was as little regarded now, of such famous tits as Héloïse and Thaïs and Queen Bertha Broadfoot. Time was a wind which carried all away. Time was preparing by and by (still at the instigation of ruthless Heaven) to make an end even to François Villon, who was still so fine a poet, for all that time had made of him a wine-soaked, rickety, hairless, lice-ridden and diseased sneakthief whose food was paid for by the professional earnings of a stale and flatulent harlot. For time ruined all: time was man’s eternal strong ravager, time was the flail with which Heaven pursued all men whom Heaven had not yet destroyed, ruthlessly.