But time might yet be confounded: and it was about that task he set. For Mephistophilus had allotted him twenty-four years of wholly untrammeled living, and into that period might be heaped the spoilage of centuries. He took unto himself eagle’s wings and strove to fathom all the causes of the misery which was upon earth and of the enviousness of Heaven. That which time had destroyed, Johan Faustus brought back into being: he was a poet who worked in necromancy, his puppets were the most admirable and lovely of the dead. Presently he was restoring through art magic even those lost nineteen books in which were the secrets of all beauty and all knowledge and all contentment, the secrets for which Prometheus had paid. But the professors at the university would have nothing to do with these nineteen books. It was feared that into these books restored by the devil’s aid, the devil might slily have inserted something pernicious: and besides, the professors said, there were already enough books from which the students could learn Greek and Hebrew and Latin. So they let perish again all those secrets of beauty and knowledge and contentment which the world had long lost. Now Johan Faustus laughed at the ineradicable folly with which Heaven had smitten all men, a folly against which the clear-sighted poet fought in vain. But Johan Faustus at least was wise, and there had never been any other beauty like this which now stood before him within arm’s reach (as surely as did death), now that with a yet stronger conjuration he had wrested from all-devouring time even the beauty of Argive Helen.
But when he would have touched the Swan’s daughter, the delight of gods and men, she vanished, precisely as a touched bubble is shattered into innumerable sparkling bits, and over three thousand of them he pursued and captured in all quarters of the earth, for, as he said of himself, Don Juan Tenorio had the heart of a poet, which is big enough to be in love with the whole world, and like Alexander he could but wish for other spheres to which he might extend his conquests, and each one of these sparkling bits of womanhood glittered with something of that lost Helen’s loveliness, yet, howsoever various and resistless were their charms, and howsoever gaily he pursued them, singing ever-new songs, and swaggeringly gallant, in his fair, curly wig and his gold-laced coat adorned with flame-colored ribbons, yet he, the eternal pursuer, was in turn pursued by the malevolence of Heaven, in, as it seemed, the shape of an avenging horseman who drew ever nearer unhurriedly, until at last the clash of rapiers and the pleasant strumming of mandolins were not any longer to be heard in that golden and oleander-scented twilight,—because of those ponderous, unhurried hoofbeats, which had made every other noise inaudible,—and until at last he perceived that both the rider and the steed were of moving stone, of an unforgotten stone which was gray and lichen-crusted.
But when fearlessly he encountered the overtowering statue, and had grasped the horse about its round cold neck, he saw that the stone rider was lifeless, and was but the dumb and staring effigy of a big man in armor which was inset with tinsel and with bits of colored glass. It was the bungled copy and the parody of a magnanimous, great-hearted dream that he was grasping, and yet it was a part of him, who had been a poet once, but was now a battered old pawnbroker, for in some way, as he incommunicably knew, this parodied and not ever comprehended Redeemer and he were blended, and they were, somehow, laboring in unison to serve a shared purpose. He derided and he came too near to a mystery which he distrusted, and which yet (without his preference having been consulted in the affair) remained a part of him, as it was a part of all poets, even of a cashiered poet, and a part very vitally necessary to the existence of a Jurgen. A Jurgen had best not meddle with such matters one half-second sooner than that dimly foreseen, inevitable need arose for a Jurgen also to be utilized in the service of this mystery, without having his preference in the affair consulted. The aging pawnbroker was a little afraid. He climbed gingerly down from the tall pedestal of Manuel the Redeemer, he descended from that ambiguous tomb upon which he was trampling, he stepped rather hastily backward from that carved fragment of the crag of Prometheus. He stepped backward, treading beyond the confines of the golden mirror which was worshipped at Caer Omn; and he was thus released from its magic.
13.
Colophon of a God
NOW before him the mirror still glowed goldenly, and now a hunchback held out both his hands toward Gerald, whom he was trying to allure into the form and mind of this sardonic, cracker-jawed, sly knave who had such melancholy eyes. Gerald was much tempted to become this Punch, and to relive for a little the rascal’s defiant and ever-restless life. And then too, behind Punch waited tall Merlin, crowned with mistletoe, he that created all chivalry, and that, being himself the great fiend’s son, first taught men how to live as became the children of God. It would be quite entertaining to enter into Merlin’s dark heart. Moreover, to the other hand of Punch, stood a glittering suave gentleman with a blue beard, in whose uxoricides it might be vastly interesting to share....
Yet Gerald, facing these three rather beautiful ideas, was of two minds. “For I am a god, with a throne awaiting me in Antan, where all the other gods will be my lackeys,—and, for that matter, with no doubt a whole cosmos of my own twirling and burning to unheeded clinkers somewhere in space, which I ought at this moment to be looking after and embellishing. And in this particular small world which I am quitting, the powers of Heaven do quite honestly seem—when you look at them from a perhaps biassed standpoint, that is,—and only to a certain extent, of course,—and if you are so ill-advised as to consider matters in a pessimistic, morbid, wholly un-American way—”
Gerald paused. He smilingly shook his red head. “No. It is far better for us gods not to criticize the handiwork of one another. So I shall without one word of reproof permit my fellows to play as they like with this planet called Earth. I shall of course, very probably, make new planets a bit more conformable to my personal fancy. But I shall say nothing about the planet I am now quitting at all likely to hurt anybody’s feelings. No: I shall, rather, rely upon the appealing eloquence of a dignified silence reinforced by a decisive departure.”
And Gerald said also: “As for this mirror which is worshipped in the land of Dersam, it pleases me as a toy. But I who am a Savior and a sun god with nine such very fine exploits behind me, in the way of swimming and of decimating devils, and of restoring warmth and making moons, and of really remarkable broad-mindedness as to what particular animal I may happen to look like,—I, the Helper and the Preserver, who am called to reign over the goal of all the gods of men,—why, I must necessarily lose by exchanging such a tremendous destiny for anything to be found in this mirror.”
Then Gerald said: “No. I must never forget that, whether I am a Savior or a sun deity, or whether I am habitually used to discharge both functions, I in any case remain Fair-haired Hoo, the Helper and Preserver, the Lord of the Third Truth, and so on. I am a most notable figure, of some sort or another sort, in Dirghic mythology. I am the appointed rider of the silver stallion. I am destined to inherit from the Master Philologist the great and best words of magic, and after that poor hospitable fellow’s downfall to reign in his stead over the place beyond good and evil which is the goal of all the gods of men and the reward of their meritorious exertions. I cannot forsake such a majestic destiny in order to play with the droll and pretty figures that move about in the depths of this mirror. And whether or not this is a mirror which I may require hereafter, when I have come into my kingdom and have resumed my exalted divine estate in my appropriate mythology, is a matter which I shall settle in due time who have all eternity wherein to do whatever I may prefer.”