First Published in 1927

Made and Printed in Great Britain by

Tonbridge Printers Peach Hall Works Tonbridge

CONTENTS

PART ONE: THE BOOK OF OUTSET

PART TWO: THE BOOK OF TWILIGHT

PART THREE: THE BOOK OF DOONHAM

PART FOUR: THE BOOK OF DERSAM

PART FIVE: THE BOOK OF LYTREIA

PART SIX: THE BOOK OF TUROINE

PART SEVEN: THE BOOK OF POETS

PART EIGHT: THE BOOK OF MAGES

PART NINE: THE BOOK OF MISPEC MOOR

PART TEN: THE BOOK OF ENDINGS

PART ELEVEN: THE BOOK OF REMNANTS

PART TWELVE: THE BOOK OF ACQUIESCENCE

THE ARGUMENT OF THIS COMEDY

Set forth as clearly as discretion permits, for the convenience

of the intending reader

PART ONE

THE BOOK OF OUTSET

FOR some moments after he had materialized, and had become perceivable by human senses, the Sylan waited. He waited, looking down at the very busy, young, red-haired fellow who sat within arm’s reach at the writing-table. This boy, as yet, was so unhappily engrossed in literary composition as not to have noticed his ghostly visitant. So the Sylan waited....

And as always, to an onlooker, the motions of creative writing revealed that flavor of the grotesque which is attendant upon every form of procreation. The Sylan rather uneasily noted the boy’s writhing antics, which to a phantom seemed strange and eerie.... For this mortal world, as the Sylan well remembered, was remarkably opulent in things which gave pleasure when they were tasted or handled,—the world in which this pensive boy was handling, and now nibbled at, the tip-end of a black pen. Outside this somewhat stuffy room were stars or sunsets or impressive mountains, to be looked at from almost anywhere in this mortal world,—which would also afford to the investigative, who searched in appropriate places, such agreeable smells as that of vervain and patchouli, and of smouldering incense, and of hayfields under a large moon, and of pine woods, and the robustious salty odors of a wind coming up from the sea.

Likewise, at this very moment, you might encounter, in the prodigal world outside this somewhat stuffy room, those tinier, those mere baby winds which were continually whispering in the tree-tops about this world’s marvelousness now that April was departing; or you might hear the irrationally dear sound of a bird calling dubiously in the spring night, with a very piercing sweetness; or, if you went adventuring yet farther, you might hear the muffled delicious voice of a woman counterfeiting embarrassment and reproof of your enterprise.... Outside this book-filled room, in fine, was that unforgotten mortal world in which any conceivable young man could live very royally, and with never-failing ardor, upon every person’s patrimony of the five human senses.

And yet, in such a well-stocked world, this lean, red-headed boy was vexedly making upon paper (with that much nibbled-at black pen) small scratches, the most of which he almost immediately canceled with yet other scratches, all the while with the air of a person who is about something intelligent and of actual importance. This Gerald Musgrave therefore seemed to the waiting, spectral Sylan a somewhat excessively silly mortal, thus to be squandering a lad’s brief while of living in vigorous young human flesh, among so many readily accessible objects which a boy like this could always be seeing and tasting and smelling and hearing and handling, with unforgotten delight.

But the Sylan reflected, too, a bit wistfully, that his own mortal youth was now for some time overpast. It had, in fact, been nearly six hundred years since he had been really young, a good five and a half centuries since young Guivric and his nine tall comrades in the famous fellowship had so delighted in their patrimony of five human senses and had spent that inheritance rather notably. Yes, he was getting on, the Sylan reflected; he had quite lost touch with the ways of these latter-day young people.

Yet it was perhaps unavoidable that in the great while since he had gone about this world in a man’s natural body, the foibles of human youth had become somewhat strange to him; and it was not, after all, to appraise the wastefulness of authors that you had traveled a long way, from Caer Omn to Lichfield, at the command of another Author, to put this doomed red-headed boy out of living.

The Sylan spoke....

THE Sylan spoke. He spoke at some length. And the young man at the writing-table, after arising with the slight start which these supernatural visitations invariably evoked from him, had presently heard the Sylan’s proposal.

“Who is it,” said Gerald, then, “that tempts me to this sacrifice and to this partial destruction?”

The Sylan replied, “The name that I had in my mortal living was Guivric, but now I am called Glaum of the Haunting Eyes.”

That was a queer name, and it was a queer arrangement, too, which this vague wraith in the likeness of a man was proposing,—an arrangement, Gerald Musgrave decided, which, at least, was worth consideration....

For, as a student of magic, Gerald Musgrave in his time had dealt with many demons: but never had been made to him, before this final night in the April of 1805, such a queer, and yet rational, and even handsome offer as was now held out. Gerald pushed aside the manuscript of his unfinished romance about Dom Manuel of Poictesme; he straightened the ruffles about his throat; and for an instant he weighed the really quite alluring suggestion.... Most demons were obsessed by the notion of buying from you a soul which Gerald, in this age of reason, had no sure proof that he possessed. But this Glaum of the Haunting Eyes, it seemed, was empowered and willing to rid Gerald of all corporal obligations, and to take over Gerald’s physical life just as it stood,—even with all the plaguing complications of Gerald’s entanglement with Evelyn Townsend.

“I was once human,” the Sylan explained, “and wore a natural body. And old habits, in such trifles as apparel, cling. I feel at times, even nowadays, after five centuries of a Sylan’s care-free living, rather at a loss for human ties.”

“I find them,” Gerald stated, “vast nuisances. Candor is no more palatable than an oyster when either is out of season. And my relatives are all cursed with a very disastrous candor. They conceal from me nothing save that respect and envy with which they might, appropriately, regard my accomplishments and nobler qualities.”

“That has been the way with all relatives, Gerald, since Cain and Abel were brothers.”

“Still, but for one calamity, I could, it might be, endure my brothers. I could put up with my sisters’ voluble and despondent view of my future. I might even go so far in supererogation as to condone—upon alternate Thursdays, say,—a chorus of affectionate aunts who speak for my own good.”

“The first person, Gerald, that pretended to speak for the real good of anybody else was a serpent in a Garden, and ever since then that sort of talking has been venomous.”

“Yet all these afflictions I might,” said Gerald,—“conceivably, at least, I might be able to endure, if only the pursuit of my art had not been hampered, and the ease of my body blasted, by the greatest blessing which can befall any man.”

“You allude, I imagine,” said the Sylan, “to the love of a good woman?”

“That is it, that is precisely the unmerited and too irremovable blessing which may end, after all, in reducing me to your suggested vulgar fraction of a suicide.”

Now Gerald was silent. He leaned far back in his chair. He meditatively placed together the tips of his two little fingers, and then one by one the tips of his other fingers, until his thumbs also were in contact; and he regarded the result, upon the whole, with disapprobation.

“Every marriage gets at least one man into trouble,” he philosophised, “and it is not always the bridegroom. You see, sir, by the worst of luck, this Evelyn Townsend was already married, so that ours had necessarily to become an adulterous union. It is the tragedy of my life that I met my Cousin Evelyn too late to marry her. Any married person of real ingenuity and tolerable patience can induce his wife to divorce him. But there is no way known to me for a Southern gentleman to get rid of a lady whom he has possessed illegally, until she has displayed the decency to become tired of him. And Evelyn, sir, in this matter of continuing her immoral relations with me has behaved badly, very badly indeed—”

“All women—” Glaum began.

“No, but let us not be epigrammatic and aphoristic and generally flippant about a perverseness which is pestering me beyond any reasonable endurance! You know as well as I do that every pretty woman ought, by and by, to remember what she owes to her husband and to her marriage vows, and to act accordingly. Repentance when suitably timed in a liaison makes for everybody’s happiness. But some women, sir, some women stay more affectionately adhesive than an anaconda. They weep. They reply to their helpless paramours’ every least attempt at any rational statement, ‘And I trusted you! I gave you all!’ ”

Glaum nodded, not unsympathetically. “I also in my time have heard that observation without any active enjoyment. It is, I believe, unanswerable.”

Gerald shuddered. “There is, for a Southern gentleman at all events, no really satisfactory reply save murder. And against that solution there is of course a rather general prejudice. Therefore a woman of this bleating sort exacts fidelity, she makes every nature of unconscionable demand, and she pesters you to the verge of lunacy, always upon the unanswerable ground that her claim upon your gratitude, and upon your instant obedience in everything, ought not to exist. Oh, I assure you, my dear fellow, there is no more sensible piece of friendly counsel existent than is the Seventh Commandment!”

“Your aphorisms are more or less true, and your predicament I can understand. Nevertheless—”

But the Sylan hesitated.

“You also understand us Musgraves perfectly!” Gerald applauded. “For I perceive you are now about to wheedle me forward in this business by throwing obstacles in my way.”

“I was but going to point out the truism that, nevertheless, it may be wiser to put up with your Eve unresistingly—”

“The name,” emended Gerald, “is Evelyn.”

At that the Sylan smiled. “Yes, to be sure! Women do vary in their given names. It might be wiser, then, I was about to say, for you to put up with your Evelyn unresistingly, rather than for a student of magic, with so little real practical experience as yours, to go blundering about the doubtful road which leads to Antan.”

“But, sir, I have the soul of an artist! Once”—and Gerald pointed to his manuscript,—“once it was the little art of letters. Then, through my acquaintance with Gaston Bulmer, who is no doubt known to you—”

The Sylan shook his spectral head, like smoke in a veering wind. “I have not, I believe, that pleasure.”

“You astound me. I would have supposed the name of Gaston Bulmer to be in all infernal circles a household word, because the dear old rascal is an adept, sir, of wide parts, of taste, and of sound judgment. Then, too, since Mrs. Townsend is his daughter, he has now for some while been my father-in-law for all practical purposes—But, where was I? Ah, yes! Through Gaston Bulmer, I repeat, I became initiate into the greatest of all arts. Now I desire to excel in that art. I note that I falter in the little art of letters, that my prose is no longer superb and breath-taking in its loveliness, because my heart is not any longer really interested in writing, on account of my heart’s ever-pricking desire to revive in its full former glories the far nobler and—at all events, in the United States of America,—the unjustly neglected art of the magician. And from whom else—just as you have suggested, my dear fellow,—from whom else save the Master Philologist can I get the great and best words of magic? Do you but answer me that very simple question!”

“From no one else, to be sure—”

“So, now, you see for yourself!”

“Yet the Master Philologist is nowadays a married man, and is ruled in everything by his wife. And this Queen Freydis has a mirror which must, they say, be faced by those persons who venture into the goal of all the gods of men—”

“That mirror, too,” said Gerald, airily, “I may be needing. Mirrors are employed in many branches of magic.”

Glaum now was speaking with rather more of graveness than there seemed any call for. And Glaum said:

“For one, I would not meddle with that mirror. Even in the land of Dersam, where a mirror is sacred, we do not desire any dealings with the Mirror of the Hidden Children and with those strange reflections which are unclouded by either good or evil.”

“I shall face the Mirror of the Hidden Children,” Gerald said, with his chin well up, “and should I see any particular need for it, I shall fetch that mirror also out of Antan. When a citizen of the United States of America takes up the pursuit of an art, sir, he does not shilly-shally about it.”

“For my part,” the Sylan answered, “I wearied, some centuries ago, of all magic: and I hanker, rather, after the more material things of life. For five hundred years and over, in my untroubled abode at Caer Omn, in the land of Dersam, I have reigned among the dreams of a god—”

“But how did you come by these dreams?”

“They forsook him, Gerald, when his hour was come to descend into Antan.”

“That saying, sir, I cannot understand.”

“It is not necessary, Gerald, that you should. Meanwhile, I admit, the life of a Sylan has no fret in it, a Sylan has nothing to be afraid of: and there is in me a mortal taint which cannot endure interminable contentment any longer. You conceive, I also was once a mortal man, with my deceivings and my fears and my doubts to spice my troubled deference to the ever-present folly of my fellows and to the ever-present ruthlessness of time and chance. And, as I remember it, Gerald, that Guivric, whom people so preposterously called the Sage, got more zest out of his subterfuges and compromises than I derive from being care-free and rather bored twenty-four hours to each insufferable day. Therefore, I repeat, I will take over your natural body—”

“But that, my dear fellow, would leave me without any carnal residence.”

“Why, Gerald, but I am surprised at such scepticism in you who pay your pew-rent so regularly! We have it upon old, fine authority that for every man there is a natural body and a spiritual body.”

Then Gerald colored up. He felt that both his erudition and his piety stood reproved. And he said, contritely:

“In fact, as a member of the Protestant Episcopal church, I am familiar with the Burial Service—Yes, you are right. I have no desire to take issue with St. Paul. The religion of my fathers assures me that I have two bodies. I can live in only one of them at a time. It is, for that matter, a bit ostentatious, it has a vaguely disreputable sound, for any unmarried man to be maintaining two establishments. So, let us get on!”

“Therefore, I repeat, I will take over your natural body, just as that first Glaum once took over my body; and I will take over all your body’s imbroglios, even with your mistress,—who can hardly be more tasking to get along with than are the seven official wives and the three hundred and fifty-odd concubines I am getting rid of.”

“You,” Gerald said, morosely, “do not know Evelyn Townsend.”

“I trust,” the Sylan stated, more gallantly, “to have that privilege to-morrow.”

It was in this way the bargain was struck. And then the Sylan who was called Glaum of the Haunting Eyes did what was requisite.

THE Sylan who was called Glaum of the Haunting Eyes, be it repeated, did that which was requisite.... To Gerald, as a student of magic, the most of the process was familiar enough: and if some curious grace-notes were, perhaps, excursions into the less wholesome art of goety, that was not Gerald’s affair. It was sufficient that, when the Sylan had ended, no Sylan was any longer visible. Instead, in Gerald Musgrave’s library, stood face to face two Geralds, each in a blue coat and a golden yellow waistcoat, each with a tall white stock and ruffles about his throat, and each clad in every least respect precisely like the other.

Nor did these two lean, red-headed Geralds differ in countenance. Each smiled at the other with the same amply curved, rather womanish mouth set above the same prominent, long chin; and each found just the same lazy and mildly humorous mockery in the large and very dark blue, the really purple, eyes of the other: for between these two Gerald Musgraves there was no visual difference whatever.

One half of this quaint pair now sat down at the writing-table; and, fiddling with the papers there, he took up the pages of Gerald Musgrave’s unfinished romance, about the high loves of his famous ancestor Dom Manuel of Poictesme and Madame Niafer, the Soldan of Barbary’s daughter. Gerald had begun this tale in the days when he had intended to endow America with a literature superior to that of other countries; but for months now he had neglected it: and, in fact, ever since he set up as a student of magic he had lacked time, somehow, with every available moment given over to runes and cantraps and suffumigations, to get back to any really serious work upon this romance.

Then the seated Gerald, smiling almost sadly, looked up toward his twin.

“Thus it was,” said the seated Gerald, “a great while ago at Asch, when two Guivrics confronted each other and played shrewdly for the control of the natural body of Guivric of Perdigon. All which I lost on that day, through my over-human clinging to the Two Truths, I now have back, after five centuries of pleasure-seeking in the land of Dersam. And I find this second natural body of mine committed to the creating of yet more pleasure-giving nonsense, about, of all persons, that eternal Manuel of Poictesme! I find this body also enamored of the fig-leaf of romance!”

“It may be that I do not understand your simile,” said the standing Gerald, “for in the United States of America the fig-leaf is, rather, the nice symbol of decency, it is, indeed, the beginning and the end of democratic morality.”

“Nevertheless, and granting all this,” replied the now demon-haunted natural body of Gerald Musgrave, “the fig-leaf is a romance with which human optimism veils the only two eternal and changeless and rather unlovely realities of which any science can be certain.”

“Ah, now I comprehend! And without utterly agreeing with you, I cannot deny there is something in your metaphor. Yet I must tell you, sir, that I am perhaps peculiarly qualified to deal with Dom Manuel because of the fact that this famous hero was my lineal ancestor—”

“Oh, but, my poor Gerald, was he indeed!”

“Yes, through both the Musgrave and the Allonby lines. For my mother’s father was Gerald Allonby—”

And Gerald would have gone on to explain the precise connection, of which the Musgrave family was justifiably proud. But the unappreciative Sylan who now wore good Musgrave flesh and blood had remarked, of all conceivable remarks:

“I honestly condole with you. Yet ancestors cannot be picked like strawberries. And my luck was even worse, for I was of Manuel’s fellowship. I knew the tall swaggerer himself throughout his blundering career. And I can assure you that, apart from his unhuman gift for keeping his mouth shut, there was nothing a bit wonderful about the cock-eyed, gray impostor.”

This was surprising news. Still, Gerald reflected, a demon did, in the way of business, meet many persons in circumstances in which the better side of their natures was not to the fore. Gerald therefore flew to defend the honor of his race quite civilly.

“My progenitor, in any event, carried through his imposture. He died very well thought of by his neighbors. That you will find to be a leading consideration with any citizen of the United States of America. And I in turn assure you that my account of the great Manuel’s exploits will be, when it is completed, an exceedingly fine romance. It will be a tale which has not its like in America. Loveliness lies swooning upon every page, illuminated by a never-ceasing coruscation of wit. It is a story which, as you might put it, grips the reader. There is no imaginable reader but will be instantly engaged, by my adroit depiction of the hardihood and the heroic virtues of Dom Manuel—”

“But,” said the really very handsomely disguised Sylan, “Manuel had always a cold in his head. Nobody can honestly admire an elderly fellow who is continually sneezing and spitting—”

“In American literature of a respectable cast no human being has any excretory functions. Should you reflect upon this statement, you will find it to be the one true test of delicacy. At most, some tears or a bead or two of perspiration may emanate, but not anything more, upon this side of pornography. That rule applies with especial force to love stories, for reasons we need hardly go into. And my romance is, of course, the story of Dom Manuel’s love for the beautiful Niafer, the Soldan of Barbary’s daughter—”

“Her father was a stable groom. She had a game leg. She was not beautiful. She was dish-faced, she was out and out ugly, apart from her itch to be reforming everybody and pestering them with respectability—”

“Faith, charity and hope are the three cardinal virtues,” said Gerald, reprovingly. “And I think that a gentleman should exercise these three, in just this order, when he is handling the paternity or the looks or the legs of any lady.”

“—And she smelt bad. Every month she seemed to me to smell worse. I do not know why, but I think the Countess simply hated to wash.”

“My dear fellow! really now, I can but refer you to my previously cited rule as to the anatomy of romance. A heroine who smells bad every month—No, upon my word, I can find nothing engaging in that notion. I had far rather play with some wholly other and more beautiful idea than with a notion so utterly lacking in seductiveness. For this, I repeat, is a romance. It is a romance such as has not its like in America. I therefore consider that I display considerable generosity in presenting you with those quite perfect ninety-three pages, and in permitting you to complete this romance and to take the credit for writing all of it. Why, your picture will be in the newspapers, and learned professors will annotate your fornications, and oncoming ages will become familiar with every mean act you ever committed!”

To that the Sylan replied: “I shall complete your balderdash, no doubt, since all your functions are now my functions. I shall complete it, if only my common-sense and my five centuries of living among the loveliest dreams of a god, and, above all, if my first-hand information as to these people, have not ruined me for the task of ascribing large virtues to human beings.”

“I envy you that task,” said Gerald, with real wistfulness, “but, very much as there was a geas upon my famous ancestor to make a figure in this world, just so there is a compulsion upon me. The compulsion is upon me to excel in my art; and to do this I must liberate the great and best words of the Master Philologist.”

Then the true Gerald went out of the room through a secret passage unknown to him until this evening.