Jurgen. A Comedy of Justice

by James Branch Cabell

  And Jurgen kept away from the damned, of course, because he and Florimel were living respectably. They paid a visit to Jurgen's father, however, very shortly after they were married, because this was the proper thing to do. And Coth was civil enough, for Coth, and voiced a hope that Florimel might have a good influence upon Jurgen and make him worth his salt, but did not pretend to be optimistic. Yet this visit was never returned, because Coth considered his wickedness was too great for him to be spared a moment of torment, and so would not leave his flame.

  "And really, your majesty," said Florimel, "I do not wish for an instant to have the appearance of criticizing your majesty's relatives. But I do think that your majesty's father might have called upon us, at least once, particularly after I offered to have a fire made up for him to sit on any time he chose to come. I consider that your majesty's father assumes somewhat extravagant airs, in the lack of any definite proof as to his having been a bit more wicked than anybody else: and the child-like candor which has always been with me a leading characteristic prevents concealment of my opinion."

  "Oh, it is just his conscience, dear."

  "A conscience is all very well in its place, your majesty; and I, for one, would never have been able to endure the interminable labor of seducing and assassinating so many fine young fellows if my conscience had not assured me that it was all the fault of my sister-in-law. But, even so, there is no sense in letting your conscience make a slave of you: and when conscience reduces your majesty's father to ignoring the rules of common civility and behaving like a candle-wick, I am sure that matters are being carried too far."

  "And right you are, my dear. However, we do not lack for company. So come now, make yourself fine, and shake the black dog from your back, for we are spending the evening with the Asmodeuses."

  "And will your majesty talk politics again?"

  "Oh, I suppose so. They appear to like it."

  "I only wish that I did, your majesty," observed Florimel, and she yawned by anticipation.

  For with the devils Jurgen got on garrulously. The religion of Hell is patriotism, and the government is an enlightened democracy. This contented the devils, and Jurgen had learned long ago never to fall out with either of these codes, without which, as the devils were fond of observing, Hell would not be what it is.

  They were, to Jurgen's finding, simple-minded fiends who allowed themselves to be deplorably overworked by the importunate dead. They got no rest because of the damned, who were such persons as had been saddled with a conscience, and who in consequence demanded interminable torments. And at the time of Jurgen's coming into Hell political affairs were in a very bad way, because there was a considerable party among the younger devils who were for compounding the age-old war with Heaven, at almost any price, in order to get relief from this unceasing influx of conscientious dead persons in search of torment. For it was well-known that when Satan submitted to be bound in chains there would be no more death: and the annoying immigration would thus be ended. So said the younger devils: and considered Grandfather Satan ought to sacrifice himself for the general welfare.

  Then too they pointed out that Satan had been perforce their presiding magistrate ever since the settlement of Hell, because a change of administration is inexpedient in war-time: so that Satan must term after term be re-elected: and of course Satan had been voted absolute power in everything, since this too is customary in wartime. Well, and after the first few thousand years of this the younger devils began to whisper that such government was not ideal democracy.

  But their more conservative elders were enraged by these effete and wild new notions, and dealt with their juniors somewhat severely, tearing them into bits and quite destroying them. The elder devils then proceeded to inflict even more startling punishments.

  * * * * *

  So Grandfather Satan was much vexed, because the laws were being violated everywhere: and a day or two after Jurgen's advent Satan issued a public appeal to his subjects, that the code of Hell should be better respected. But under a democratic government people do not like to be perpetually bothering about law and order, as one of the older and stronger devils pointed out to Jurgen.

  Jurgen drew a serious face, and he stroked his chin. "Why, but look you," says Jurgen, "in deploring the mob spirit that has been manifesting itself sporadically throughout this country against the advocates of peace and submission to the commands of Heaven and other pro-Celestial propaganda,—and in warning loyal citizenship that such outbursts must be guarded against, as hurtful to the public welfare of Hell,—why, Grandfather Satan should bear in mind that the government, in large measure, holds the remedy of the evil in its own hands." And Jurgen looked very severely toward Satan.

  "Come now," says Phlegeton, nodding his head, which was like that of a bear, except for his naked long, red ears, inside each of which was a flame like that of a spirit-lamp: "come now, but this young emperor in the fine shirt speaks uncommonly well!"

  "So we spoke together in Pandemonium," said Belial, wistfully, "in the brave days when Pandemonium was newly built and we were all imps together."

  "Yes, his talk is of the old school, than which there is none better. So pray continue, Emperor Jurgen," cried the elderly devils, "and let us know what you are talking about."

  "Why, merely this," says Jurgen, and again he looked severely toward Satan: "I tell you that as long as sentimental weakness marks the prosecution of offences in violation of the laws necessitated by war-time conditions; as long as deserved punishment for overt acts of pro-Celestialism is withheld; as long as weak-kneed clemency condones even a suspicion of disloyal thinking: then just so long will a righteously incensed, if now and then misguided patriotism take into its own hands vengeance upon the offenders."

  "But, still—" said Grandfather Satan.

  "Ineffectual administration of the law," continued Jurgen, sternly, "is the true defence of these outbursts: and far more justly deplorable than acts of mob violence is the policy of condonation that furnishes occasion for them. The patriotic people of Hell are not in a temper to be trifled with, now that they are at war. Conviction for offenses against the nation should not be behedged about with technicalities devised for over-refined peacetime jurisprudence. Why, there is no one of you, I am sure, but has at his tongue's tip the immortal words of Livonius as to this very topic: and so I shall not repeat them. But I fancy you will agree with me that what Livonius says is unanswerable."

  So it was that Jurgen went on at a great rate, and looking always very sternly at Grandfather Satan.

  "Yes, yes!" said Satan, wriggling uncomfortably, but still not thinking of Jurgen entirely: "yes, all this is excellent oratory, and not for a moment would I decry the authority of Livonius. And your quotation is uncommonly apropos and all that sort of thing. But with what are you charging me?"

  "With sentimental weakness," retorted Jurgen. "Was it not only yesterday one of the younger devils was brought before you, upon the charge that he had said the climate in Heaven was better than the climate here? And you, sir, Hell's chief magistrate—you it was who actually asked him if he had ever uttered such a disloyal heresy!"

  "Now, but what else was I to do?" said Satan, fidgeting, and swishing his great bushy tail so that it rustled against his horns, and still not really turning his mind from that ancient thought.

  "You should have remembered, sir, that a devil whose patriotism is impugned is a devil to be punished; and that there is no time to be prying into irrevelant questions of his guilt or innocence. Otherwise, I take it, you will never have any real democracy in Hell."

  Now Jurgen looked very impressive, and the devils were all cheering him.

  "And so," says Jurgen, "your disgusted hearers were wearied by such frivolous interrogatories, and took the fellow out of your hands, and tore him into particularly small bits. Now I warn you, Grandfather Satan, that it is your duty as a democratic magistrate just so to deal with such offenders first of all, and to ask your silly questions afterwa
rd. For what does Rudigernus say outright upon this point? and Zantipher Magnus, too? Why, my dear sir, I ask you plainly, where in the entire history of international jurisprudence will you find any more explicit language than these two employ?"

  "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.

  39. Of Compromises in Hell

  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—"

  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 eve
r 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.