Certainly, there was a difference: and the nearest I could come to defining this difference was to say it lay paradoxically housed in the circumstance that the artist, precisely like the most zealous of Christians, is in this material, four-square world not ever utterly at home. The Christian's desiderated home, we knew, was heaven: but the artist, as I had suggested, looked to a somewhat different savior. Meanwhile the artist went among men as a visitor, evincing at once the astonished interest and the detachment of a tourist in a foreign country. His home, and his fundamental desire, stayed elsewhere. This world of men and women did not content nor even vitally concern him: and always he wanted—no matter with what nebulousness he envisaged his need,—something else, which, somehow, was his heritage.
Some day, the artist felt, he would set forth to seek and find this needed something, like Anavalt in the old tale which I had once retold. And I fell here to recalling the story of Anavalt's last quest. For I had been assured time and again that this tale was a parable of a withdrawal from life to the solaces of art, and that there was some obvious symbolism, toward the end, in a seemingly off-hand reference to the tenuity of canvas and of paper. And I could only reply with the admission which youth finds it impossible to make about anything, but which with age comes easier. I said, I do not know. Nescience seemed alike the end and the beginning of the old story, which narrated why so many silken ladies wept....
§ 38
For even just how many silken ladies wept, well out of eyeshot of their husbands, when it was known that courteous Anavalt had left Count Emmerick's court, remains an indeterminable matter. But it is certain the number was large. There were, in addition, the tale tells, three women whose grieving for him was not ever to be ended: these did not weep. In the meanwhile, with all this furtive sorrowing some leagues behind him, and with a dead horse at his feet, tall Anavalt stood at a sign-post, and doubtfully considered a rather huge dragon.
"No," the dragon was saying, comfortably, "no, for I have just had dinner, and exercise upon a full stomach is unwholesome. So I shall not fight you, and you are welcome, for all of me, to go your ways into the Wood of Elfhame."
"Yet what," says Anavalt, "what if I were to be more observant than you of your duty and of your hellish origin? and what if I were to insist upon a fight to the death?"
When dragons shrug in sunlight their bodies are one long green glittering ripple. "I would be conquered. It is my business to be conquered in this world, where there are two sides to everything, and where one must look for reverses. I tell you frankly, tired man, that all we terrors who keep colorful the road to the Elle Maid are here for the purpose of being conquered. We make the way seem difficult, and that makes you who have souls in your bodies the more determined to travel on it. Our thin Queen found out long ago that the most likely manner of alluring men to her striped windmill was to persuade men she is quite inaccessible."
Said Anavalt, "That I can understand; but I need no such baits."
"Aha, so you have not been happy out yonder where people have souls? You probably are not eating enough: so long as one can keep on eating regularly, there is not much the matter. In fact, I see the hunger in your eyes, tired man."
Anavalt said: