The Cream of the Jest by James Branch Cabell

Author:James Branch Cabell
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: Standard Ebooks
Published: 2020-05-15T22:35:17+00:00

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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.

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