The Cream of the Jest - James Branch Cabell (life changing books to read TXT) 📗

it not written that they only were assuredly blessed who were persecuted for righteousness’ sake?⁠—Why, martyrdom was the one certain road to Heaven; and a religion which is patronized by potentates, obviously, breeds no martyrs.

So Charicles mingled poison in Caesar’s drink, that Caesar might die, and crazed Caligula succeed him, to put all Christians to the sword. And Charicles young Caius Caesar Caligula⁠—Child of the Camp, Father of Armies, Beloved of the Gods⁠—killed first of all.

Then a lean man, white-robed, and clean-shaven as to his head, was arranging a complicated toy. He labored in a gray-walled room, lit only by one large circular window opening upon the sea. There was an alcove in this room, and in the alcove stood a large painted statue.

This prefigured a crowned woman, in bright particolored garments of white and red and yellow, under a black mantle embroidered with small sparkling stars. Upon the woman’s forehead was a disk, like a round glittering mirror; seen closer, it was engraved with tiny characters, and Kennaston viewed it with a thrill of recognition. To the woman’s right were vipers rising from the earth, and to the left were stalks of ripe corn, all in their proper colors. In one hand she carried a golden boat, from which a coiled asp raised its head threateningly. From the other hand dangled three or four slender metal rods, which were not a part of the statue, but were loosely attached to it, so that the least wind caused them to move and jangle. There was nothing whatever in the gray-walled room save this curious gleaming statue and the lean man and the mechanical toy on which he labored.

He explained its workings, willingly enough. See now! you kindled a fire in this little cube-shaped box. The air inside expanded through this pipe into the first jar of water, and forced the water out, through this other pipe, into this tiny bucket. The bucket thus became heavier and heavier, till its weight at last pulled down the string by which the bucket was swung over a pulley, and so, moved this lever.

Oh, yes, the notion was an old one; the priest admitted he had copied the toy from one made by Hero of Alexandria, who died years ago. Still, it was an ingenious trifle: moreover⁠—and here was the point⁠—enlarge the scale, change the cube-shaped box into the temple altar, fasten the lever to the temple doors, and you had the mechanism for a miracle. People had only to offer burnt sacrifices to the Goddess, and before their eyes the All-Mother, the holy and perpetual preserver of the human race, would stoop to material thaumaturgy, and would condescend to animate her sacred portals.

“We very decidedly need some striking miracle to advertise our temple,” he told Kennaston. “Folk are flocking like sheep after these barbarous new Galilean heresies. But the All-Mother is compassionate to human frailty; and this device will win back many erring feet to the true way.”

And Kennaston saw there were tears in this man’s dark sad eyes. The trickster was striving to uphold the faith of his fathers; and in the attempt he had constructed a practicable steam-engine.

XXIV Deals with Pen Scratches

Then Kennaston was in Alexandria when John the Grammarian pleaded with the victorious Arabian general Amrou to spare the royal library, the sole repository at this period of many of the masterworks of Greek and Roman literature.

But Amrou only laughed, with a practical man’s contempt for such matters. “The Koran contains all that is necessary to salvation: if these books teach as the Koran teaches they are superfluous; if they contain anything contrary to the Koran they ought to be destroyed. Let them be used as fuel for the public baths.”

And this was done. Curious, very curious, it was to Kennaston, to witness this utilitarian employment of a nation’s literature; and it moved him strangely. He had come at this season to believe that individual acts can count for nothing, in the outcome of things. Whatever might happen upon earth, during the existence of that midge among the planets, affected infinitesimally, if at all, the universe of which earth was a part so inconceivably tiny. To figure out the importance in this universe of the deeds of one or another nation temporarily clustering on earth’s surface, when you considered that neither the doings of Assyria or of Rome, or of any kingdom, had ever extended a thousand feet from earth’s surface, was a task too delicate for human reason. For human faculties to attempt to estimate the individuals of this nation, in the light of the relative importance of their physical antics while living, was purely and simply ridiculous. To assume, as did so many well-meaning persons, that Omniscience devoted eternity to puzzling out just these minutiæ, seemed at the mildest to postulate in Omniscience a queer mania for trivialities. With the passage of time, whatever a man had done, whether for good or evil, with the man’s bodily organs, left the man’s parish unaffected: only man’s thoughts and dreams could outlive him, in any serious sense, and these might survive with perhaps augmenting influence: so that Kennaston had come to think artistic creation in words⁠—since marble and canvas inevitably perished⁠—was the one, possibly, worthwhile employment of human life. But here was a crude corporal deed which bluntly destroyed thoughts, and annihilated dreams by wholesale. To Kennaston this seemed the one real tragedy that could be staged on earth.⁠ ⁠…

Curious, very curious, it was to Kennaston, to see the burning of sixty-three plays written by Aeschylus, of a hundred and six by Sophocles, and of fifty-five by Euripides⁠—masterworks eternally lost, which, as Kennaston knew, the world would affect to deplore eternally, whatever might be the world’s real opinion in the matter.

But of these verbal artificers something at least was to endure. They would fare better than Agathon and Ion and Achæus, their admitted equals in splendor, whose whole lifework was passing, at the feet of Horvendile, into