James Cabell - Jurgen. A Comedy of Justice

"Now certainly," says Satan, with his bleak smile, "you cite very respectable authority: and I shall take your reproof in good part. I will endeavor to be more strict in the future. And you must not blame my laxity too severely, Emperor Jurgen, for it is a long while since any man came living into Hell to instruct us how to manage matters in time of war. No doubt, precisely as you say, we do need a little more severity hereabouts, and would gain by adopting more human methods. Rudigernus, now?—yes, Rudigernus is rather unanswerable, and I concede it frankly. So do you come home and have supper with me, Emperor Jurgen, and we will talk over these things."

Then Jurgen went off arm in arm with Grandfather Satan, and Jurgen's erudition and sturdy common-sense were forevermore established among the older and more solid element in Hell. And Satan followed Jurgen's suggestions, and the threatened rebellion was satisfactorily discouraged, by tearing into very small fragments anybody who grumbled about anything. So that all the subjects of Satan went about smiling broadly all the time at the thought of what might befall them if they seemed dejected. Thus was Hell a happier looking place because of Jurgen's coming.

Now Grandfather Satan's wife was called Phyllis: and apart from having wings like a bat's, she was the loveliest little slip of devilishness that Jurgen had seen in a long while. Jurgen spent this night at the Black House of Barathum, and two more nights, or it might be three nights: and the details of what Jurgen used to do there, after supper, when he would walk alone in the Black House Gardens, among the artfully colored cast-iron flowers and shrubbery, and would so come to the grated windows of Phyllis's room, and would stand there joking with her in the dark, are not requisite to this story.

Satan was very jealous of his wife, and kept one of her wings clipped and held her under lock and key, as the treasure that she was. But Jurgen was accustomed to say afterward that, while the gratings over the windows were very formidable, they only seemed somehow to enhance the piquancy of his commerce with Dame Phyllis. This queen, said Jurgen, he had found simply unexcelled at repartee.

Florimel considered the saying cryptic: just what precisely did his majesty mean?

"Why, that in any and all circumstances Dame Phyllis knows how to take a joke, and to return as good as she receives."

"So your majesty has already informed me: and certainly jokes can be exchanged through a grating—"

"Yes, that was what I meant. And Dame Phyllis appeared to appreciate my ready flow of humor. She informs me Grandfather Satan is of a cold dry temperament, with very little humor in him, so that they go for months without exchanging any pleasantries. Well, I am willing to taste any drink once: and for the rest, remembering that my host had very enormous and intimidating horns, I was at particular pains to deal fairly with my hostess. Though, indeed, it was more for the honor and the glory of the affair than anything else that I exchanged pleasantries with Satan's wife. For to do that, my dear, I felt was worthy of the Emperor Jurgen."

"Ah, I am afraid your majesty is a sad scapegrace," replied Florimel: "however, we all know that the sceptre of an emperor is respected everywhere."

"Indeed," says Jurgen, "I have often regretted that I did not bring with me my jewelled sceptre when I left Noumaria."

She shivered at some unspoken thought: it was not until some while afterward that Florimel told Jurgen of her humiliating misadventure with the absent-minded Sultan of Garçao's sceptre. Now she only replied that jewels might, conceivably, seem ostentatious and out of place.

Jurgen agreed to this truism: for of course they were living very quietly, and Jurgen was splendid enough for any reasonable wife's requirements, in his glittering shirt.

So Jurgen got on pleasantly with Florimel. But he never became as fond of her as he had been of Guenevere or Anaïtis, nor one-tenth as fond of her as he had been of Chloris. In the first place, he suspected that Florimel had been invented by his father, and Coth and Jurgen had never any tastes in common: and in the second place, Jurgen could not but see that Florimel thought a great deal of his being an emperor.

"It is my title she loves, not me," reflected Jurgen, sadly, "and her affection is less for that which is really integral to me than for imperial orbs and sceptres and such-like external trappings."

And Jurgen would come out of Florimel's cleft considerably dejected, and would sit alone by the Sea of Blood, and would meditate how inequitable it was that the mere title of emperor should thus shut him off from sincerity and candor.

"We who are called kings and emperors are men like other men: we are as rightly entitled as other persons to the solace of true love and affection: instead, we live in a continuous isolation, and women offer us all things save their hearts, and we are a lonely folk. No, I cannot believe that Florimel loves me for myself alone: it is my title which dazzles her. And I would that I had never made myself the emperor of Noumaria: for this emperor goes about everywhere in a fabulous splendor, and is, very naturally, resistless in his semi-mythical magnificence. Ah, but these imperial gewgaws distract the thoughts of Florimel from the real Jurgen; so that the real Jurgen is a person whom she does not understand at all. And it is not fair."

Then, too, he had a sort of prejudice against the way in which Florimel spent her time in seducing and murdering young men. It was not possible, of course, actually to blame the girl, since she was the victim of circumstances, and had no choice about becoming a vampire, once the cat had jumped over her coffin. Still, Jurgen always felt, in his illogical masculine way, that her vocation was not nice. And equally in the illogical way of men, did he persist in coaxing Florimel to tell him of her vampiric transactions, in spite of his underlying feeling that he would prefer to have his wife engaged in some other trade: and the merry little creature would humor him willingly enough, with her purple eyes a-sparkle, and with her vivid lips curling prettily back, so as to show her tiny white sharp teeth quite plainly.

She was really very pretty thus, as she told him of what happened in Copenhagen when young Count Osmund went down into the blind beggar-woman's cellar, and what they did with bits of him; and of how one kind of serpent came to 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 hay-loft, just after the abbot had finished undressing—"