Jurgen - James Branch Cabell (reading a book TXT) 📗

have a secret name, which, when cried aloud in the night, with the appropriate ceremony, will bring about delicious happenings; and of what one can do with small unchristened children, if only they do not kiss you, with their moist uncertain little mouths, for then this thing is impossible; and of what use she had made of young Sir Ganelon’s skull, when he was through with it, and she with him; and of what the young priest Wulfnoth had said to the crocodiles at the very last.

“Oh, yes, my life has its amusing side,” said Florimel: “and one likes to feel, of course, that one is not wholly out of touch with things, and is even, in one’s modest way, contributing to the suppression of folly. But even so, your majesty, the calls that are made upon one! the things that young men expect of you, as the price of their bodily and spiritual ruin! and the things their relatives say about you! and, above all, the constant strain, the irregular hours, and the continual effort to live up to one’s position! Oh, yes, your majesty, I was far happier when I was a consumptive seamstress and took pride in my buttonholes. But from a sister-in-law who only has you in to tea occasionally as a matter of duty, and who is prominent in churchwork, one may, of course, expect anything. And that reminds me that I really must tell your majesty about what happened in the hayloft, just after the abbot had finished undressing⁠—”

So she would chatter away, while Jurgen listened and smiled indulgently. For she certainly was very pretty. And so they kept house in Hell contentedly enough until Florimel’s vacation was at an end: and then they parted, without any tears but in perfect friendliness.

And Jurgen always remembered Florimel most pleasantly, but not as a wife with whom he had ever been on terms of actual intimacy.

Now when this lovely vampire had quitted him, the Emperor Jurgen, in spite of his general popularity and the deference accorded his political views, was not quite happy in Hell.

“It is a comfort, at any rate,” said Jurgen, “to discover who originated the theory of democratic government. I have long wondered who started the notion that the way to get a wise decision on any conceivable question was to submit it to a popular vote. Now I know. Well, and the devils may be right in their doctrines; certainly I cannot go so far as to say they are wrong: but still, at the same time⁠—!”

For instance, this interminable effort to make the universe safe for democracy, this continual warring against Heaven because Heaven clung to a tyrannical form of autocratic government, sounded both logical and magnanimous, and was, of course, the only method of insuring any general triumph for democracy: yet it seemed rather futile to Jurgen, since, as he knew now, there was certainly something in the Celestial system which made for military efficiency, so that Heaven usually won. Moreover, Jurgen could not get over the fact that Hell was just a notion of his ancestors with which Koshchei had happened to fall in: for Jurgen had never much patience with antiquated ideas, particularly when anyone put them into practice, as Koshchei had done.

“Why, this place appears to me a glaring anachronism,” said Jurgen, brooding over the fires of Chorasma: “and its methods of tormenting conscientious people I cannot but consider very crude indeed. The devils are simple-minded and they mean well, as nobody would dream of denying, but that is just it: for hereabouts is needed some more pertinacious and efficiently disagreeable person⁠—”

And that, of course, reminded him of Dame Lisa: and so it was the thoughts of Jurgen turned again to doing the manly thing. And he sighed, and went among the devils tentatively looking and inquiring for that intrepid fiend who in the form of a black gentleman had carried off Dame Lisa. But a queer happening befell, and it was that nowhere could Jurgen find the black gentleman, nor did any of the devils know anything about him.

“From what you tell us, Emperor Jurgen,” said they all, “your wife was an acidulous shrew, and the sort of woman who believes that whatever she does is right.”

“It was not a belief,” says Jurgen: “it was a mania with the poor dear.”

“By that fact, then, she is forever debarred from entering Hell.”

“You tell me news,” says Jurgen, “which if generally known would lead many husbands into vicious living.”

“But it is notorious that people are saved by faith. And there is no faith stronger than that of a bad-tempered woman in her own infallibility. Plainly, this wife of yours is the sort of person who cannot be tolerated by anybody short of the angels. We deduce that your Empress must be in Heaven.”

“Well, that sounds reasonable. And so to Heaven I will go, and it may be that there I shall find justice.”

“We would have you know,” the fiends cried, bristling, “that in Hell we have all kinds of justice, since our government is an enlightened democracy.”

“Just so,” says Jurgen: “in an enlightened democracy one has all kinds of justice, and I would not dream of denying it. But you have not, you conceive, that lesser plague, my wife; and it is she whom I must continue to look for.”

“Oh, as you like,” said they, “so long as you do not criticize the exigencies of wartime. But certainly we are sorry to see you going into a country where the benighted people put up with an autocrat Who was not duly elected to His position. And why need you continue seeking your wife’s society when it is so much pleasanter living in Hell?”

And Jurgen shrugged. “One has to do the manly thing sometimes.”

So the fiends told him the way to Heaven’s frontiers, pitying him. “But the crossing of the frontier must be your affair.”

“I have a cantrap,” said Jurgen; “and my stay in Hell has taught me how