“Well, well, do you, who are the Father and Master of All, have your own will with him, so far as you can get it,” Vanadis returned, still with that rather reminiscent smile. She had now lived for a great while with this sixth husband of hers, who had a human heart in him and human ways.
64.
Through the Oval Window
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SIDVRAR went then from Vanadis to Donander. But the Constrainer found there was no instant manner of constraining Donander Veratyr into a conviction that Donander of Évre had died long ago, and had become an Ans. People, Donander stated, did not do such things; when people died they went either to heaven or to hell: and further reasoning with Donander seemed to accomplish no good whatever. For Donander, as a loyal son of the Church, now shrugged pityingly at the heathen nonsense talked by his father-in-law. He stroked the heads of Sidvrar’s attendant wolves, he listened to the Weaver and Constrainer with an indulgence more properly reserved for the feeble-minded; and he said, a little relishingly, that Messire Sidvrar would be wiser on the holy Morrow of Judgment.
Then Sidvrar Vafudir became Sidvrar Yggr, the Meditating and Terrible. Then Sidvrar fell about such magicking as he had not needed to use since he first entered into the eternal yew-vales of Ydalir. Then, in a word, Sidvrar unclosed the oval window in Reginlief that opened upon space and time and upon the frozen cinders which once had been worlds and suns and stars, and which their various creators had annihilated, as one by one the Ænseis had put away their childhood and its playing.
Among such wreckage sped pretentiously the yet living worlds which Donander had made. These toys, when seen thus closely through the magic of the oval window, were abristle with the spires of the temples and the cathedrals in which they that lived, as yet, upon these worlds were used to worship. In all these churches men invoked Donander Veratyr. Through that charmed window now, for the first time, came to his ears the outcry of his clergy and laity: nowhere was there talk of another god, not even where from many worlds arose the lecturing of those who explained away their ancestors’ quaint notions about Donander the Man-God, the Savior from Vain Desire, the Preserver from Bodily Affliction, and proved there could not be any such person. And to Donander, looking out of the window at Reginlief, all these things showed as a swarming of ants or as a writhing of very small maggots about the worlds which he had made to divert him: and in the face as in the heart of Donander awoke inquietation.
“If this be a true showing,” Donander said, by and by, “show now that Earth which is my home.”
After a while of searching, Sidvrar found for him the drifting clinker which had once been Earth. Upon its glistering nakedness was left no living plant nor any breathing creature, for the Morrow of Judgment was long past, and Earth’s affairs had been wound up. Upon no planet did any one remember the god whom Donander worshiped, now that Jahveh had ended playing, and his toys were broken or put away. Upon many planets were the temples of Donander Veratyr, and the rising smoke of his sacrifice, and the cries of his worshipers as they murdered one another in their disputing over points of theology which Donander could not clearly understand.
Nor did he think about these things. Instead, Donander Veratyr, who was the last of the Ænseis to play at this unprofitable sport of demiurgy, was now remembering the days and the moon-lighted nights of his youth, and the dear trivial persons whom he had then loved and revered. He did not think about the two wives whom he had married upon Earth, nor about his son Maugis, nor about any of the happenings of Donander’s manhood. He thought of, for no reason at all, the shabby little village priest who had confirmed him, and of the father and mother who had been all-wise and able to defend one from every evil, and of the tall girl whose lips had, once, and before any other lips, been sweeter than were the joys of Ydalir. And he thought of many other futile things, all now attested always to have been futile, which long ago had seemed so very important to the boy that, in serving famous Manuel of Poictesme, had postured so high-heartedly in one of the smallest provinces of an extinct planet.