Something about Eve: A comedy of fig-leaves

2. Evelyn of Lichfield

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!”