Something about Eve: A comedy of fig-leavesCabell, James Branch
Science
Something about Eve: A comedy of fig-leaves
Cabell, James Branch
Fantasy fiction; Historical fiction; Middle Ages -- Fiction
“Therefore, I repeat, I will take over your natural body, just as that
first Glaum once took over my body; and I will take over all your body’s
imbroglios, even with your mistress,—who can hardly be more tasking to
get along with than are the seven official wives and the three hundred
and fifty-odd concubines I am getting rid of.”
“You,” Gerald said, morosely, “do not know Evelyn Townsend.”
“I trust,” the Sylan stated, more gallantly, “to have that privilege
to-morrow.”
It was in this way the bargain was struck. And then the Sylan who was
called Glaum of the Haunting Eyes did what was requisite.
3.
Two Geralds
THE Sylan who was called Glaum of the Haunting Eyes, be it repeated,
did that which was requisite.... To Gerald, as a student of magic, the
most of the process was familiar enough: and if some curious grace-notes
were, perhaps, excursions into the less wholesome art of goety, that was
not Gerald’s affair. It was sufficient that, when the Sylan had ended,
no Sylan was any longer visible. Instead, in Gerald Musgrave’s library,
stood face to face two Geralds, each in a blue coat and a golden yellow
waistcoat, each with a tall white stock and ruffles about his throat,
and each clad in every least respect precisely like the other.
Nor did these two lean, red-headed Geralds differ in countenance. Each
smiled at the other with the same amply curved, rather womanish mouth
set above the same prominent, long chin; and each found just the same
lazy and mildly humorous mockery in the large and very dark blue, the
really purple, eyes of the other: for between these two Gerald Musgraves
there was no visual difference whatever.
One half of this quaint pair now sat down at the writing-table; and,
fiddling with the papers there, he took up the pages of Gerald
Musgrave’s unfinished romance, about the high loves of his famous
ancestor Dom Manuel of Poictesme and Madame Niafer, the Soldan of
Barbary’s daughter. Gerald had begun this tale in the days when he had
intended to endow America with a literature superior to that of other
countries; but for months now he had neglected it: and, in fact, ever
since he set up as a student of magic he had lacked time, somehow, with
every available moment given over to runes and cantraps and
suffumigations, to get back to any really serious work upon this
romance.
Then the seated Gerald, smiling almost sadly, looked up toward his twin.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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