"Now, Jurgen, pray remember that you speak of a very generally respected myth, and that you are being irreverent--"

"--And moreover, I take the liberty of repeating, my darling, that even though this Ba of Mendes is your cousin, it honestly does embarra.s.s me to have to meet three-quarters of a goat socially--"

"But, Jurgen, I must as a master of course invite prolific Ba to my feasts of the Sacae--"

"Even so, my dear, in issuing invitations a hostess may fairly presuppose that her guests will not make beasts of themselves. I often wish that this mere bit of ordinary civility were more rigorously observed by Ba and Hortanes and Fricco and Vul and Baal-Peor, and by all your other cousins who come to visit you in such a zoologically muddled condition.

It shows a certain lack of respect for you, my darling."

"Oh, but it is all in the family, Jurgen--"

"Besides, they have no conversation. They merely bellow--or twitter or bleat or low or gibber or purr, according to their respective incarnations,--about unspeakable mysteries and monstrous pleasures until I am driven to the verge of virtue by their imbecility."

"If you were more practical, Jurgen, you would realize that it speaks splendidly for anyone to be really interested in his vocation--"

"And your female relatives are just as annoying, with their eternal whispered enigmas, and their crescent moons, and their mystic roses that change color and require continual gardening, and their pathetic belief that I have time to fool with them. And the entire pack practises symbolism until the house is positively littered with asherahs and combs and phalloses and linghams and yonis and arghas and pulleiars and talys, and I do not know what other idiotic toys that I am continually stepping on!"

"Which of those minxes has been making up to you?" says Anatis, her eyes snapping.

"Ah, ah! now many of your female cousins are enticing enough--"

"I knew it! Oh, but you need not think you deluded me--!"

"My darling, pray consider! be reasonable about it! Your feminine guests at present are Sekhmet in the form of a lioness, Io incarnated as a cow, Hekt as a frog, Derceto as a sturgeon, and--ah, yes!--Thoueris as a hippopotamus. I leave it to your sense of justice, dear Anatis, if of ladies with such tastes in dress a lovely myth like you can reasonably be jealous."

"And I know perfectly well who it is! It is that Ephesian hussy, and I had several times noticed her behavior. Very well, oh, very well, indeed! nevertheless, I shall have a plain word or two with her at once, and the sooner she gets out of my house the better, as I shall tell her quite frankly. And as for you, Jurgen--!"

"But, my dear Lisa--!"

"What do you call me? Lisa was never an epithet of mine. Why do you call me Lisa?"

"It was a slip of the tongue, my pet, an involuntary but not unnatural a.s.sociation of ideas. As for the Ephesian Diana, she reminds me of an animated pine-cone, with that eruption of b.r.e.a.s.t.s all over her, and I can a.s.sure you of your having no particular reason to be jealous of her. It was merely of the female myths in general I spoke. Of course they all make eyes at me: I cannot well help that, and you should have antic.i.p.ated as much when you selected such an attractive Prince Consort. What do these poor enamored creatures matter when to you my heart is ever faithful?"

"It is not your heart I am worrying over, Jurgen, for I believe you have none. Yes, you have quite succeeded in worrying me to distraction, if that is any comfort to you. However, let us not talk about it. For it is now necessary, absolutely imperative, that I go into Armenia to take part in the mourning for Tammouz: people would not understand it at all if I stayed away from such important orgies. And I shall get no benefit whatever from the trip, much as I need the change, because, without speaking of that famous heart of yours, you are always up to some double-dealing, and I shall not know into what mischief you may be thrusting yourself."

Jurgen laughed, and kissed her. "Be off, and attend to your religious duties, dear, by all means. And I promise you I will stay safe locked in the Library till you come back."

Thus Jurgen abode among the offspring of heathen perversity, and conformed to their customs. Death ends all things for all, they contended, and life is brief: for how few years do men endure, and how quickly is the most subtle and appalling nature myth explained away by the Philologists! So the wise person, and equally the foreseeing nature myth, will take his glut of pleasure while there is yet time to take anything, and will waste none of his short lien upon desire and vigor by asking questions.

"Oh, but by all means!" said Jurgen, and he docilely crowned himself with a rose garland, and drank his wine, and kissed his Anatis.

Then, when the feast of the Sacae was at full-tide, he would whisper to Anatis, "I will be back in a moment, darling," and she would frown fondly at him as he very quietly slipped from his ivory dining couch, and went, with the merest suspicion of a reel, into the Library. She knew that Jurgen had no intention of coming back: and she despaired of his ever taking the position in the social life of Cocaigne to which he was ent.i.tled no less by his rank as Prince Consort than by his personal abilities. For Anatis did not really think that, as went natural endowments, her Jurgen had much reason to envy even such a general favorite as Priapos, say, from what she knew of both.

So it was that Jurgen honored custom. "Because these beastly nature myths may be right," said Jurgen; "and certainly I cannot go so far as to say they are wrong: but still, at the same time--!"

For Jurgen was content to dismiss no riddle with a mere "I do not know." Jurgen was no more able to give up questioning the meaning of life than could a trout relinquish swimming: indeed, he lived submerged in a flood of curiosity and doubt, as his native element.

That death ended all things might very well be the case: yet if the outcome proved otherwise, how much more pleasant it would be, for everyone concerned, to have aforetime established amicable relations with the overlords of his second life, by having done whatever it was they expected of him here.

"Yes, I feel that something is expected of me," says Jurgen: "and without knowing what it is, I am tolerably sure, somehow, that it is not an indulgence in endless pleasure. Besides, I do not think death is going to end all for me. If only I could be quite certain my encounter with King Smoit, and with that charming little Sylvia Tereu, was not a dream! As it is, plain reasoning a.s.sures me I am not indispensable to the universe: but with this reasoning, somehow, does not travel my belief. No, it is only fair to my own interests to go graveward a little more openmindedly than do these nature myths, since I lack the requisite credulity to become a free-thinking materialist. To believe that we know nothing a.s.suredly, and cannot ever know anything a.s.suredly, is to take too much on faith."

And Jurgen paused to shake his sleek black head two or three times, very sagely.

"No, I cannot believe in nothingness being the destined end of all: that would be too futile a climax to content a dramatist clever enough to have invented Jurgen. No, it is just as I said to the brown man: I cannot believe in the annihilation of Jurgen by any really thrifty overlords; so I shall see to it that Jurgen does nothing which he cannot more or less plausibly excuse, in case of supernal inquiries. That is far safer."

Now Jurgen was shaking his head again: and he sighed.

"For the pleasures of Cocaigne do not satisfy me. They are all well enough in their way; and I admit the truism that in seeking bed and board two heads are better than one. Yes, Anatis makes me an excellent wife. Nevertheless, her diversions do not satisfy me, and gallantly to make the most of life is not enough. No, it is something else that I desire: and Anatis does not quite understand me."

24.

Of Compromises in Cocaigne

Thus Jurgen abode for a little over two months in Cocaigne, and complied with the customs of that country. Nothing altered in Cocaigne: but in the world wherein Jurgen was reared, he knew, it would by this time be September, with the leaves flaring gloriously, and the birds flocking southward, and the hearts of Jurgen's fellows turning to not unpleasant regrets. But in Cocaigne there was no regret and no variability, but only an interminable flow of curious pleasures, illumined by the wandering star of Venus Mechanitis.

"Why is it, then, that I am not content?" said Jurgen. "And what thing is this which I desire? It seems to me there is some injustice being perpetrated upon Jurgen, somewhere."

Meanwhile he lived with Anatis the Sun's daughter very much as he had lived with Lisa, who was daughter to a p.a.w.nbroker. Anatis displayed upon the whole a milder temper: in part because she could confidently look forward to several centuries more of life before being explained away by the Philologists, and so had less need than Dame Lisa to worry over temporal matters; and in part because there was less to ruin one's disposition in two months than in ten years of Jurgen's company. Anatis nagged and sulked for a while when her Prince Consort slackened in the pursuit of strange delights, as he did very soon, with frank confession that his tastes were simple and that these outlandish refinements bored him. Later Anatis seemed to despair of his ever becoming proficient in curious pleasures, and she permitted Jurgen to lead a comparatively normal life, with only an occasional and half-hearted remonstrance.

What puzzled Jurgen was that she did not seem to tire of him: and he would often wonder what this lovely myth, so skilled and potent in arts wherein he was the merest bungler, could find to care for in Jurgen. For now they lived together like any other humdrum married couple, and their occasional exchange of endearments was as much a matter of course as their meals, and hardly more exciting.

"Poor dear, I believe it is simply because I am a monstrous clever fellow. She distrusts my cleverness, she very often disapproves of it, and yet she values it as queer, as a sort of curiosity. Well, but who can deny that cleverness is truly a curiosity in Cocaigne?"

So Anatis petted and pampered her Prince Consort, and took such open pride in his queerness as very nearly embarra.s.sed him sometimes. She could not understand his att.i.tude of polite amus.e.m.e.nt toward his a.s.sociates and the events which befell him, and even toward his own doings and traits. Whatever happened, Jurgen shrugged, and, delicately avoiding actual laughter, evinced amus.e.m.e.nt. Anatis could not understand this at all, of course, since Asian myths are remarkably dest.i.tute of humor. To Jurgen in private she protested that he ought to be ashamed of his levity: but none the less, she would draw him out, when among the b.e.s.t.i.a.l and grim nature myths, and she would glow visibly with fond pride in Jurgen's queerness.

"She mothers me," reflected Jurgen. "Upon my word, I believe that in the end this is the only way in which females are capable of loving.

And she is a dear and lovely creature, of whom I am sincerely fond.

What is this thing, then, that I desire? Why do I feel life is not treating me quite justly?"

So the summer had pa.s.sed; and Anatis travelled a great deal, being a popular myth in every land. Her sense of duty was so strong that she endeavored to grace in person all the peculiar festivals held in her honor, and this, now the harvest season was at hand, left her with hardly a moment disengaged. Then, too, the mission of Anatis was to divert; and there were so many people whom she had personally to visit--so many notable ascetics who were advancing straight toward canonization, and whom her underlings were unable to divert,--that Anatis was compelled to pa.s.s night after night in unwholesomely comfortless surroundings, in monasteries and in the cells and caves of hermits.

"You are wearing yourself out, my darling," Jurgen would say: "and does it not seem, after all, a game that is hardly worth the candle?

I know that, for my part, before I would travel so many miles into a desert, and then climb a hundred foot pillar, just to whisper diverting notions into an anchorite's very dirty ear, I would let the gaunt rascal go to Heaven. But you a.s.sociate so much with saintly persons that you have contracted their incapacity for seeing the humorous side of things. Well, you are a dear, even so. Here is a kiss for you: and do you come back to your adoring husband as soon as you conveniently can without neglecting your duty."

"They report that this Stylites is very far gone in rect.i.tude," said Anatis, absent-mindedly, as she prepared for the journey, "but I have hopes for him."

Then Anatis put purple powder on her hair, and hastily got together a few beguiling devices, and went into the Thebaid. Jurgen went back to the Library, and the _System of Worshipping a Girl_, and the unique ma.n.u.scripts of Astyana.s.sa and Elephantis and Sotades, and the Dionysiac Formulae, and the Chart of Postures, and the _Litany of the Centre of Delight_, and the Spintrian Treatises, and the _Thirty-two Gratifications_, and innumerable other volumes which he found instructive.

The Library was a vaulted chamber, having its walls painted with the twelve Asan of Cyrene; the ceiling was frescoed with the arched body of a woman, whose toes rested upon the cornice of the east wall, and whose out-stretched finger-tips touched the cornice of the western wall. The clothing of this painted woman was remarkable: and to Jurgen her face was not unfamiliar.

"Who is that?" he inquired, of Anatis.

Looking a little troubled, Anatis told him this was aesred.

"Well, I have heard her called otherwise: and I have seen her in quite other clothing."

"You have seen aesred!"