That Very Mab

'Oh no,' replied the Owl, with some condescending pity for the foreigner's ignorance. 'But the Dragon has grown vastly like St. George.'

'Is that all they worship?' said Queen Mab.

'Oh no, there are plenty of other patent religions. A hundred religions and only one sauce – melted butter, as the Frenchman said, but the sauce has outlived many of the patent religions.'

'I don't understand how religions are patent.' remarked her inquisitive Majesty.

'We call it a patent religion.' said the Owl, 'when it has only been recently invented, and is so insufficiently advertised, that it is only to be found in a very few houses indeed, and is not a commodity in general request. The Patentees then call themselves a Church, and devote their energies to advertising the new "Cult," as they generally style it. For example, you have Esoteric Buddhism, so named because it is not Buddhism, nor Esoteric. It is imported by an American company with a manufactory in Thibet, and has had some success among fashionable people.'

'What do the Esoteric Buddhists worship?'

'Teacups and cigarettes, standing where they ought not.' replied the owl; 'but I believe these things are purely symbolical, and that au fond the Priestess of Esoteric Buddhism herself adores the Dragon.'

'That is enough about that. Are there no patent religions warranted free from Dragon worship?'

'Well.' said the Owl dubiously, 'there are the Altruists. 'They worship humanity. As a rule, you may have noticed that adorers think the object of adoration better than themselves, – an unexpected instance in most cases, of the modesty of their species. But the Altruists worship Humanity.'

'And they don't think Humanity better than themselves?'

'Far from it. Their leading idea is that they are the cream of Humanity. Their principal industry is to scold and lecture Humanity. Whatever Humanity may be doing – making war or making peace, or making love to its Deceased Wife's Sister – the Altruists cry out, "Don't do that." And they preach sermons to Humanity, always beginning, "We think;" and they publish their remarks in high-class periodicals, and they invariably show that everyone, and especially Mr. Herbert Spencer, is in the wrong, and nobody pays the slightest attention to them. In their way the Altruists do to others as they would have others do to them, To my mind, while they pretend that Humanity is what they worship, they really want to be worshipped by Humanity.'

'Are there many of this sect?' asked Mab.

'There were twenty-seven of them.' said the Owl, 'but they quarrelled about canonising the Emperor Tiberius, and now there are only thirteen and a half.'

'Where do you get the fraction?' said Mab.

'That is a mystery.' said the Owl. 'Every religion should have its mystery, and the Altruists possess only this example; it is a cheap one, but they are not a luxurious sect.'

'Well.' said Mab mournfully at last, 'I must go back to Samoa; there is too much mystery here for me. But who is that?'

She broke off suddenly, for a new and mysterious object had just entered the glade, and was advancing towards the pool.

'Hush!' said the Owl. 'Do take care. It is a scientific man – a philosopher.'

It was a tall, thin personage, with spectacles and a knapsack, and what reminded Queen Mab of a small green landing-net, but was really intended to catch butterflies. He came up to the pond, and she imagined he was going to fish; but no, he only unfastened his knapsack and took some small phials and a tin box out of it Then, bending down to the edge of the water, he began to skim its surface cautiously with a ladle and empty the contents into one of his phials. Suddenly a look of delight came into his face, and he uttered a cry – 'Stephanoceros!'

Queen Mab thought it was an incantation, and, trembling with fear, she relaxed her hold of the bough and fell. Not into the pond! She had wings, of course, and half petrified with horror though she was, she yet fluttered away from that stagnant water. But alas, in the very effort to escape, she had caught the eye of the Professor; he sprang up – pond, animalcule all forgotten in the chase of this extraordinary butterfly. The fairy's courage failed her: her presence of mind vanished, and the wild gyrations of the owl, who, too late, realised the peril of his companion, only increased her confusion. In another moment she was a prisoner under the butterfly-net.

Beaming with delight, the philosopher turned her carefully into the tin box, shut the lid and hastened home, too much enraptured with his prize even to pause to secure the valuable Stephanoceros.

But Queen Mab had fainted, as even fairies must do at such a terrible crisis; and perhaps it was as well that she had, for the professor forbore to administer chloroform, under the impression that his lovely captive had completely succumbed. He put her, therefore, straight into a tall glass bottle, and began to survey her carefully, walking round and round. Truly, he had never seen such a remarkable butterfly.

CHAPTER III. – THE ORIGIN OF RELIGION

'Rough draughts of Man's Beginning God!'

    Swinburne.

When Queen Mab recovered consciousness she heard the sound of violent voices in the room before she opened her eyes, which she did half hoping to find herself the victim of some terrible delusion. But the sight of the professor, standing not a yard away, brought a fatal conviction to her heart. It was too true. Was there ever a more undesirable position for a fairy, accustomed to perfect freedom, and nourished by honey and nectar, than to be closely confined in a tall bottle, with smooth hard slippery walls that she could not pierce, and nothing to live upon but a glass-stopper! It was absurd; but it was also terrible. How fervently she wished, now, that the missionaries had never come to Polynesia.

But the professor was not alone, two of his acquaintances were there – a divine veering towards the modern school, and a poet – the ordinary poet of satire and Mr. Besant's novels, with an eye-glass, who held that the whole duty of poets at least was to transfer the meanderings of the inner life, or as much of them as were in any degree capable of transmission, to immortal foolscap..Unfortunately, as he observed with a mixture of pride and regret, the workings of his soul were generally so ethereal as to baffle expression and comprehension; and, he was wont to say, mixing up metaphors at a great rate, that he could only stand, like the High Priest of the Delphic oracle, before the gates of his inner life, to note down such fragmentary utterances as 'foamed up from the depths of that divine chaos.' for the benefit of inquiring minds with a preference for the oracular. He added that cosmos was a condition of grovelling minds, and that while the thoughts, faculties, and emotions of an ordinary member of society might fitly be summed up in the epithet 'microcosm.' his own nature could be appropriately described only by that of 'microchaos.' In which opinion the professor always fully coincided.

With the two had entered the professor's little boy, a motherless child of eight, who walked straight up to the bottle.

No sooner did the child's eyes light on the vessel than a curious thing occurred. He fell down on his knees, bowed his head, and held up his hands.

'Great Heavens!' cried the professor, forgetting himself, 'what do I behold! My child is praying (a thing he never was taught to do), and praying to a green butterfly! Hush! hush!' the professor went on, turning to his friends. 'This is terrible, but most important. The child has never been allowed to hear anything about the supernatural – his poor mother died when he was in the cradle – and I have scrupulously shielded him from all dangerous conversation. There is not a prayer-book in the house, the maids are picked Agnostics, from advanced families, and I am quite certain that my boy has never even heard of the existence of a bogie.'

The poet whistled: the divine took up his hat, and, with a pained look, was leaving the room.

'Stop, stop!' cried the professor, 'he is doing something odd.'

The child had taken out of his pocket certain small black stones of a peculiar shape. So absorbed was he that he never noticed the presence of the men.

He kissed the stones and arranged them in a curious pattern on the floor, still kneeling, and keeping his eye on Mab in her bottle. At last he placed one strangely shaped pebble in the centre, and then began to speak in a low, trembling voice, and in a kind of cadence:

'Oh! you that I have tried to see,
Oh! you that I have heard in the night,
Oh! you that live in the sky and the water;
Now I see you, now you have come:
Now you will tell me where you live,
And what things are, and who made them.
Oh Dala, these stones are yours;
These are the goona stones I find,
And play with when I think of you.
Oh Dala, be my friend, and never leave me
Alone in the dark night.'

'As I live, it's a religious service, the worship of a green butterfly!' said the professor. At his voice the child turned round, and seeing the men, looked very much ashamed of himself.

'Come here, my dear old man.' said the professor to the child, who came on being called.

'What were you doing? – who taught you to say all those funny things?'

The little fellow looked frightened.

'I didn't remember you were here.' he said; 'they are things I say when I play by myself.'

'And who is Dala?'

The boy was blushing painfully.

'Oh, I didn't mean you to hear, it's just a game of mine. I play at there being somebody I can't see, who knows what I am doing; a friend.'

'And nobody taught you, not Jane or Harriet?'

Now Harriet and Jane were the maids.