Something about Eve: A comedy of fig-leaves

by James Branch Cabell

For the Fox-Spirit, as Gerald saw, was still about the brutish magic of the wu, which drives men mad, and she now spoke of more and yet more evil matters such as were very well adapted to incite Gerald to brutality. She spoke of the battle of life, and of the feast of reason, and of the irony of fate, and of the lap of luxury. She talked of the writing on the wall, and of the scroll of fame, and of the lexicon of youth, and of the cloud that had a silver lining. She touched upon the two seas, of troubles and of upturned faces. She discussed the durance that was vile, and the hours that were wee and sma’, and the consummation that was devoutly to be wished for, and the light that was dim and religious, and the heat which was not the humidity. She indicated the balm in Gilead, the place in the sun, and the safety in numbers. She afterward gave succinctly the recipes for making a mountain out of a molehill, a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, and a virtue out of a necessity. For no evil phrase of any sort was hidden from the wisdom of Evaine, who knew all things, and who served all gods, and who was now intent to exercise upon Gerald the magic of the wu, which drives men mad.

But Gerald only smiled, almost approvingly. This woman was reminding him more and more of Evelyn Townsend, and his pulses had not ever been calmer.

“I perceive,” said Gerald, “that you have a great deal of knowledge, with the vocabulary of a dear friend to back it devastatingly. Therefore, ma’am, to avail myself of your knowledge alone may serve my divine ends much better than your really most flattering proffers in other fields.”

For now it was Gerald’s turn to speak. So now he revealed to the baffled Fox-Spirit the fact that he was Fair-haired Hoo, the Helper and Preserver, the Lord of the Third Truth, the Well-beloved of Heavenly Ones, a very potent god who had temporarily mislaid his mythology. He told the omniscient Fox-Spirit, who knew all things excepting only how and at what hour her knowledge would end, of Gerald’s adventures during the rather crowded twenty-four hours since he had left Lichfield.

And now she was smiling over his obtuseness. For to all-wise Evaine it was at once apparent that Fair-haired Hoo, the Helper and Preserver, the Lord of the Third Truth, the Well-beloved of Heavenly Ones, was a culture hero like Quat or Quetzalcoatl or Cagn or Osiris or Dionysos. All these were former acquaintances of hers: she knew, she said, every inch of them, for each one of these had stopped to visit her who served all gods, as each had passed downward toward Antan. Evaine, if anybody, would thus know a culture hero wherever she saw a culture hero.

Every mythology contained one of these glorious philanthropists, born of a mysterious and superior race, just as Gerald had been born in the United States of America, a philanthropist, as the learned Fox-Spirit said, very usually theriomorphic, who came in the appearance of a jackass or of some other animal among less favored peoples to teach them strange new arts and mysteries, and to endow them with every kind of cultural advantage and prosperity, just as Gerald had benefited the people of Dersam and of Lytreia, and was preparing to benefit Antan.

She pointed out, furthermore, that a culture hero was in no way un-American. There had been, for example, Quetzalcoatl. She also remembered quite clearly Yetl,—because a deity in the form of a bird was always, she said, rather difficult,—and Poshaiyankya, and Coyote, and Esaugetuh, and that other waggish Indian deity—his name at present evaded her,—who had traveled incognito in the shape of a large spider. For all these aboriginal American culture heroes had visited Evaine as they passed downward toward Antan, and every one of them had been in a somewhat earlier generation Gerald’s fellow countryman.

“In the light of your forceful logic, ma’am, I concede that, over and above being a Savior and a sun god, it seems probable I must be a culture hero too.”

“But yet, in any case,—dear, unresponsive, frigid child,” said the Fox-Spirit, speaking far more simply than she had done before,—“do you not know that all mythologies are controlled by the Master Philologist, so that he alone may say in which one of them and in what capacity you belong?”

“I find that saying obscure.”