GERALD came thus into the library in which, no more than four months ago, as it appeared to him, he had quitted his natural body. Lights burned there, but the room was empty.

Nor did he perceive any marked signs of change. Most of his books were very much as he had left them. Upon the bookcases were still ranged his porcelain and brass animals and birds and reptiles. Investigation, though, revealed the addition to this diminutive fauna of a rather charming china cat,—a black cat, fast asleep, with a red ribbon about its neck,—and of a small ivory elephant, which also was black, but had white tusks.

The chairs, he saw, had been recovered, but it was with a figured stuff of much the same design and color. The rug that once had been his mother’s was still underfoot; and the curtains, while new looking, were of just the same repulsive shade of green velvet that by candle light turned yellowish.

“It is a quite detestable color. I had always intended to change those curtains so soon as I could afford it, for a green with some real life in it. I can but deduce that my body has remained remarkably conservative through all these thirty years which have seemed to me only a month or two. My body has evinced commendable industry, also, for here are dozens upon dozens of books by Gerald Musgrave.”

It seemed a bit droll thus to be confronted with so much strange work performed by his own natural body,—thought out in his own brain cells, and written with his own hand,—during the time that these chattels had been entrusted to the Sylan. Yet the results were gratifying.

For here were not any folderol romances such as Gerald himself, he felt uneasily, might have perhaps contrived with those brain cells and that hand, romances which at best would have wasted his readers’ time, and at worst might have incited unedifying and improper notions. Instead, these quartos were all serious and learned and scholastic works. Gerald therefore regarded these large quartos with a justifiable pride and with profound respect. Their very bindings were in themselves as incompatible with anything frivolous as were their contents with any unscientific double meanings. These books had the fine clarity of a physician in conference with a midwife. Moreover, Gerald’s admiring eyes found nearly every page empedestalled upon the most impressive looking kind of footnotes: upon tall footnotes in almost illegibly small type; upon huge polyglottic footnotes very full of numerals and brackets, which flatteringly assumed your acquaintance with all human tongues and your possession of all printed books, so that you could be referred offhand to such and such a page of an especial edition; and upon footnotes which appeared to quote from the literature of every known language after having abbreviated the title of each cited volume into unintelligibility.

For these quartos dealt with no romantic nonsense such as the phantasms with which novels vitiate the intelligence and the morals of their readers, Gerald observed, but with really worth-while ethnographic matters like the marriage customs of all lands, and the ways of male and female prostitution among the different races, and with the history in each country of paederasty, and of lesbianism, and of bestiality, and of necrophily, and of incest, and of sodomy, and of onanism, and of all manifestations of the sexual impulse in every era. There, in a more imaginative vein, were the Tentative Restoration of the Lost Books of Elephantis, the handsomely illustrated Seed of Minos, the doctoral thesis upon Lingham Worship, the Fertility Rites of the Sabbat, the privately published Myth of Anistar and Calmoora, the Study of Priapos, and the various other monumental works which, although Gerald did not know this, had already made Gerald Musgrave’s name familiar to the lecture halls of all universities and the pages of the more learned reviews.

These quartos were, in fine, the books which had made Gerald Musgrave the most famous and widely read of American ethnologists; and by his body’s industry and erudition and broad-mindedness Gerald was properly impressed. Here seemed, indeed, to be at least one complete and scholarly treatise devoted to the historical development and the mechanics and the literature of every known manifestation of the great forces which had created all life.

“Yes, it is really edifying to note with what zeal and common-sense my body—while I was a-gypsying with over-ambitious follies,—has decorously set up as the recorder of historical and scientific truths.”

Then Gerald found upon the next shelf some fourteen tall scrapbooks. They were full of what the newspapers had printed in laudation and in the most respectful criticism of the books of Gerald Musgrave. They contained, also, accounts of the academic honors conferred upon Gerald Musgrave. They were interleaved with the letters which had been written—the majority, of course, by that strange race which writes habitually to authors, but many of them, apparently, by persons of some consequence,—to Gerald Musgrave about his books.

“My body in my absence has become, thanks to my body’s books, a reputable and even a looked-up-to citizen. My body is by way of being, indeed, a personage. I note, too, with that interest appropriate to the foibles of the great, that my body has also become a somewhat vain old magpie, gathering up through thirty years every scrap of paper which happens to display my name.”

Next Gerald lighted on a black box with silver corners, and inside it was a time-discolored manuscript. This Gerald carried to the writing-table. And he found it that unfinished romance about his heroic ancestor, Dom Manuel of Poictesme, just ninety-three pages of it, precisely as Gerald had left it, with no word changed or added.

“There was not in my natural body sufficient power to sustain the high inspiration of my youth. So, very sensibly, my body has found other pursuits, and through them it has become a personage. I do not complain. Not every body becomes a personage. Even so, it seems a pity to have denied to mankind the loveliness already created in this fragment.”

But it was just then that the door opened. In the doorway stood a man in late middle life. And Gerald now for one instant regarded his natural body and all the dilapidations which time had performed upon that body.

And Gerald somehow comprehended the penned-in and eventless and self-sacrificing, arduous life of the famous scholar, the life which had been lived so long by the natural body of Gerald Musgrave. That blinking magpie, in this somewhat stuffy room,—in the midst of this childish menagerie of small cats and elephants and dogs and parrots and chickens and camels and other imbecile toys,—day after day compiled the valuable and interesting matter in those quartos and the trivial magniloquence in those scrapbooks. And that, virtually, was all he ever did. Such was his living in a world profuse in so many agreeabilities,—to be tasted and seen, to be smelt and heard and handled, at absolutely your own discretion, in this so opulent world wherein anyone could live very royally, and with never-failing ardor, upon every person’s patrimony of the five human senses.

Meanwhile, such self-devotion had paid, under time’s grasping governance, an exorbitant tax. The impaired shrunk body was unhealthy looking. Under each of the wavering dim eyes showed a peculiar white splotch. The skin of the noted scholar was pasty and seemed greasy. He had hardly any hair except those gray and untended whiskers. Everywhere he was shrivelled and lean, except for the abrupt, the surprising, protrusion of a large paunch. He self-evidently had inadequate kidneys, and an impaired heart, and defective teeth, and a sluggish liver, and approximately every other drawback to a sedentary person’s late middle life.

The body of this ornament to scholarship and letters was, in fine, a quite disgusting bit of wreckage, in need of patching up everywhere; and a fallen god, when thus confronted by the work of time and of much study and of intramural living, might very well shake his red ever-busy head over the one refuge now remaining to down-tumbled divinity.

Nevertheless, Gerald spoke the queer word of power which Horvendile had given him. There followed for Gerald an instant of dizziness, of a moment’s blindness....

Then Gerald found that it was he who stood at the door of the library peering into the quiet lamp-lit room. Before him waited a red-headed, slim young man in a blue coat and a golden yellow waistcoat, with a tall white stock and very handsome ruffles about his throat. And the young fellow was smiling at Gerald Musgrave with a rather womanish mouth, and in the eyes of the boy was a half-lazy, mildly humorous mockery.

Old Gerald Musgrave adored him with an ardor which was half hatred. Then he saw that the young fellow did not matter, and that Gerald Musgrave had bargained well.

“THAT is a strange and glorious word for you to be telling me,” the boy began. “That is a disastrous bargain for you to be seeking. For your own will has spoken the revealing word which buys back your natural body now that your outworn crumbling body is of no more worth.”

Gerald answered: “I, who have left the Marches of Antan forever, have bought freedom from the ever-meddling magic of the Two Truths. At my first sight of no other female body which is not positively deformed will I become enraptured. I have bought feet too old for errancy, ears that are deaf to the high gods, and to the heart-stirring music of great myths, and to the soft wheedling of women also, and I have bought eyes too dim to note whether or not Antan still gleams on the horizon. It is a good bargain.”

Then he took up again the pages of that thirty-year-old romance. That too remains, he reflected, unfinished, like all else which I have ever undertaken....

Some day it will be completed by other hands than the thin wrinkled hands before me. Somebody else,—not born, as yet, it may be,—will be writing out,—intelligibly, anyhow,—the story of Poictesme and of the Redeemer of Poictesme and of his fine followers and many children,—but not half so splendidly as I was going to write it. Somebody else will, by and by, be beleaguering and entering into—by means of the little, yet the not wholly despicable, art of letters,—that wonder-haunted province which—yes, that also,—was a part of my appointed kingdom.... Somebody else will be laying open the fair ways to Bellegarde and to Amneran and to Storisende, and will be making free these ways to every person, so that, through the lean lesser art of letters, Poictesme may become in some sort another Antan,—an Antan perhaps considerably abated in splendor, but graced at least with easy accessibility....

Yet not even such slight triumphs were to be won by aged feet, and by ears no longer acute, and by dimming eyes, and by pulses which would not be riotous ever any more. He tore up the pages one by one, just as, he recollected now, in the land of Lytreia, Evaine had torn up the sacred fig-leaves. Glaum had said that the fig-leaf was the true symbol of romance. Gerald meditatively dropped the destroyed fragments of his romance into the waste-basket.

Gerald spoke then without any too great hopefulness. “Has my body, during your inhabitancy of it, my dear fellow, escaped from Evelyn Townsend? and gone free from the unmerited blessing of a good woman’s love?”

The red-headed boy before him replied, discreetly: “Your body and the body of your Cousin Evelyn have always been such good friends!”

And Gerald smiled. “I recognize that phrase. So throughout thirty years Lichfield has never once forgotten its polite formula for exorcising the inadmissible!”

“It has been generally felt,” the youngster answered, “that a prominent man of letters was entitled to his Egeria. Of recent years, to be sure, your friendship has not been—we will say,—so ardent nor so frequently manifested. But there has been, to hold you two together, the boy begotten by your body upon her body. There has been the long usage to hold you two together. So your friendship has remained unshattered.”

“I had forgotten,” Gerald said, “the boy. Yes, I remember hearing that you had thoughtfully provided me with offspring during my absence. I know not quite how to thank you, my dear fellow, for a favor so delicate and so personal. We will therefore cough and drop the subject.”

Then Gerald leaned back in the chair. He put together his finger-tips, and smilingly he looked at them with rather tired, old eyes.

“So I stay faithful to one woman, after all! I have been kept in everything a model American citizen. I have gracefully adhered to the code of a gentleman. In my private life I have evinced every proper respect for the chivalrous sacrament of adultery between social equals. In the field of my professional labors I have composed no puerile and lascivious romances, but only serious and instructive works. I am, in brief, in all respects, a credit to my native Lichfield, and, more generally, to the United States of America.”

He shrugged. He spread out those old-looking, futile hands.

“Well, certainly I must not spoil the miracle. So I submit. I yield to the demands of propriety. I accept my personal good behavior; I accept my success; and I accept also my measure of actual famousness.”

Then Gerald said: “Therefore I must, so long as my life lasts, continue faithfully your work as the recorder of historical and scientific truths, since it was such truths which brought my name into famousness. Oh, yes, you may depend upon it, I shall henceforward honor these fine truths within the limits advisable for anybody now nearing sixty. I shall serve them, that is, with my pen rather than with other instruments now perhaps more fallible. For the trained intelligence of such a famous scholar as I have become cannot deny their proper importance to those scientific and historical truths which brought him into famousness,—nor would, of course, my admirers care to have me abandoning my métier.”

And Gerald said also: “Even in the private relations which you have chivalrously preserved for me, my dear fellow, one must not ask everything. Wheresoever a man lives, there will be a thornbush near his door: and I can manage well enough, I daresay, to put up with the continuance of this illicit love-affair,—in which, after all, my advanced age now protects me from being put to any frequent or far-reaching inconvenience. Meanwhile, the legend of a life-long illicit love-affair is a very splendid preservative for the fame of any writer. It would have been even better, of course, if in conjugating the verb to love, you had managed to make a few mistakes in gender; that is more piquant; that is infallible: still, I repeat, one must not ask everything. I have my satisfying legend of private immorality, created without any least trouble on my part. Men will remember it. So all ends very well indeed. I am content with what I have found upon Mispec Moor. I am content with what I have found in Lichfield. And I shall not bother any more about Antan, wherein, for one reason and another, I have found nothing.”

“Do you not be speaking lightly of Antan! For I—do you not understand?”—the young man spoke with an almost frightened elation,—“it is I who am called to reign in Antan. You have brought me the revealing word and the dreadful summons of Horvendile. Antan is my appointed kingdom, into which I shall now be entering upon the silver stallion famous in old prophecies.”

“Oh, oh!” said Gerald, “so that is how it is! All ends, again, with that rather hackneyed scoring Da capo. And the eternal quest of Antan continues, for all that I have no part in it....”

Yet the boy’s joyousness and proud faith appeared to old Gerald Musgrave pitiable beyond thought. Gerald, now that he was fifty-eight, was of course not really troubled by that pitiableness, because all actual commiseration and sympathy for other persons had withered in him along with the rest of youth’s over-upsetting emotions. Besides, Gerald saw that, in logic, as a plain question of arithmetic, the boy did not matter. A million or so other lads more or less like this enthusiastic young fellow were at that instant preparing for the same downcasting and failure; and by and by these lads also would be facing their own unimportance with equanimity. For, as you—howsoever suddenly,—got older, there was less bitterness, there was hardly any bitterness at all, to be derived of the knowledge that in human living very much amounted to nothing, because you saw even more clearly and more constantly that nothing amounted to very much....

So Gerald said only: “You are young. At least, you are living in a young body. So do you beware! For, so long as you go about the Marches of Antan in any conveyance so perilous, the lying half-magic of the Two Truths will beset that young body, and the Princess will await you at every turn. She will encounter you under many names, for it is true that, just as you said very long ago, women do vary in their given names. She will encounter you in varying shapes. But in any case, she waits for every young romantic everywhere, as a rather lovable and as an interestingly formed and colored impediment.... I think it, therefore, highly improbable that you will complete the journey to Antan. I, in any case, am middle-aged. And I cry, not discontentedly, my personal farewell to the half-magic of racing pulses and of distended nerves—”

For an instant Gerald was silent. In his old eyes awoke that gleam which anybody familiar with Gerald would have recognized at once.

“You see,” he continued, with large affability, “while you have been theorizing, my dear fellow,—oh, very charmingly, and with a thoroughness which does you credit, great credit,—well, my investigations meanwhile have taken a rather more practical turn. I am not, of course, at liberty to speak of my love-affairs out yonder, with any real explicitness. No, here, as always, noblesse oblige. Still, if you only knew! If you but knew half as much as I do about that droll escapade with the Lady Sigid of Audierne and her cousin the Abbess! about what happened to me in the harem of Caliph Mizraim! about Beatrice and Henriette and Madame Pamela and Vittoria and Elspeth! about the three girls at the tanner’s! or if you knew the truth as to what her Majesty and I were about that night we came so near being caught—!”

“I see,” the boy said, rather wistfully. “You have been a devil of a fellow and a sad rip among the ladies.”

“Oh, dear me, not at all!” said Gerald. And the old fellow now wore the expression which, sometimes, accompanies a blush. “It is merely that I have talked a bit too freely. It is only that this rash tongue of mine was running away with me. So I can but ask you to forget every word I have uttered. For exalted names ought, really, not to be repeated thus lightly. I shall therefore say nothing whatever about the eight other queens with whom my name has been coupled,—with how good reason I, you understand, must be the last person in the world to admit,—nor about any of the empresses either. In fact, a great deal of the scandal about my intimacy with one of them was exaggerated. No: I most certainly must not voice any indiscretions about dear Caroline. So I merely point out—without mentioning any names whatever,—that my experience has been considerable: and I can assure you, my dear fellow, that in the end these half-magics produce, after all, no very prodigious miracles.”

“But—” said the boy.

“No,” Gerald protested, “no, really, you must not tempt me with such eloquence! It suffices that during the thirty years that you have sat here theorizing,—and have, as it were, blossomed forth with all these delightful books,—these half-magics have led me day after day from one affair to its twin; they have led me into more or less jealously guarded lowlands, which were not markedly dissimilar; they have led then from one valley to another valley which looked and felt and, for that matter, smelt very much the same; finally they led me to the fair breasts of Maya. And I fell away into domesticity, I went no farther. But I was wholly content there.... So I do not complain. I have lost through these half-magics my appointed kingdom in Antan,—or so, at least, it appears to me, in a world wherein perhaps nothing is indisputable except, of course, historical and scientific truths. Yet the losing of my kingdom has, none the less, been pleasant. I have had, under the harryings of these half-magics—always, I mean, upon the whole,—an agreeable time. To-night the half-magics whose appointed duty it is to keep all us romantics from attaining to Antan have ceased bothering about me. After to-night I am no longer formidable. I am, in a word, now that I approach sixty, almost middle-aged. It follows that Antan does not concern me any longer: and I shall think no more about Antan, wherein, for one reason and another, I have found nothing.”

With that, gray Gerald Musgrave dipped his pen. He put the boy quite out of mind. And the well-thought-of old scholar began to write, just where his natural body had left off a bit earlier in the evening, setting down decorously the historical and scientific truth as to the rules governing pre-nuptial intercourse in the bedchambers of New Guinea and the Tonga Islands.

THE boy waited, looking down at this old fellow who sat there making small scratches upon paper, the most of which he presently canceled with yet other scratches, all the while with the air of a person who is about something intelligent and of actual importance. Then the boy shrugged. For, as always, to an onlooker the motions of creative writing revealed that flavor of the grotesque which is attendant upon every form of procreation.

And besides, to him for whom the silver stallion waited without, and for whom his appointed kingdom waited also, such time-wasting appeared futile. He, who was young, and who retained as yet the untroubled faith of every boy in his own abilities and in his own importance,—and who, of course, might not foresee the fate which awaited him in the arms of Evadne of the Dusk,—could not regard without impatience such time-wasting. What made it even worse was that this dilapidated remnant of a man was so plainly enjoying himself. For he chuckled as he wrote; he had self-evidently found what he considered a rather beautiful idea to play with, for now he had cocked his battered, so nearly bald, old head to one side, and that which he had just written down was being regarded by his dimmed and peering eyes with entire admiration: and it was all somewhat pitiable to the young eyes of the observer.

For it did not seem possible that anybody should sit here, thus stuffily immured, and with no exercise more profitable than writing, when yonder, as all youth knew, the way lay open to the unimaginable splendors of Antan. It was, for that matter, an unthrifty wantonness for Gerald Musgrave’s young observer to be lingering here, in the cold company of books and china animals, when yonder (as all youth knew) along the pleasant way to Antan were waiting so many dear, fond, loving women eager to cheer and to inspire and to trust and to give all to speed the high-hearted adventurer in that glorious journeying toward his appointed kingdom. Decidedly, the old fellow was lost: for now he was infatuated by the contentment to be got out of writing, which remained always, in its own way, as bedrugging as the contentment to be got out of domesticity; and there was no help for this preposterous, doomed, chuckling Gerald Musgrave,—who would always now be finding one or another rather beautiful idea to play with, and who must remain, so long as life remained, a poet whose one real delight was to shape and to play with puppets....

Yet it mattered very little, to any person who was already for every practical purpose a reigning monarch, that all which pertained to this Gerald Musgrave was somewhat droll, the smiling red-haired boy decided, as he passed toward Evadne of the Dusk, and out of sight of that gray-fringed bald head bent over that incessant pen scratching.

Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in punctuation have been maintained.