GARIN SEEKS HIS FORTUNE
ONE day, from sunrise to sunset, Garin kept company with the train of
the Abbot of Saint Pamphilius. As the day dropped toward eve the road
touched a stream that, reflecting the western sky, blushed like a piece
of coral. It was the monks’ home stream. The ford passed, their abbey
would ere long rise before them. Some were tired of travel and had been
homesick for garden and refectory, cell and chapel—homesick as a dog
for its master, a child for its mother, a plant for its sunshine. Some
were not tired of travel and were not homesick. So there were both
glad and sorry in the fellowship that, midway of the ford, checked
the fat abbey mules and horses to let them drink. The beasts stooped
their necks to the pink water; monks and lay brothers and abbey knaves
looked at the opposite slope. When they reached its crest they would
see before them Saint Pamphilius, grey and rich. The abbot’s mule
drank first as was proper, raised its head first, and with a breath of
satisfaction splashed forward. The two monks immediately attendant upon
the Reverend Father must pull up their horses’ heads before they had
half drunken and follow their superior.
The abbot, mounting the gently shelving bank, looked at his sons in
God, yet dotting the small bright river. He just checked his mule.
“That limping youth is no longer in our company.”
The monk nearest him spoke. “Reverend Father, as we came through the
wood a mile back, he gave Brother Anselm thanks, then slipped from
behind him. Brother Bartholomew called to him, but he went away among
the trees.”
“Ah!” said the abbot; “in which direction?”
“Reverend Father, southwardly.”
Abbot Arnaut sat silent a moment, then shook the reins and his mule
climbed on toward the hill-top. “Ah,” he said to himself, and he said
it piously. “He is young, and when you are young perils do not imperil!
When you are young, you are an eel to slip through—I have done what I
could! Doubtless he will escape.”
That night there rose a great round moon. It lighted Garin through the
wood until he was ready to sleep,—it showed him where he could find
the thickest bed and covering of leaves,—and when he waked in the
night he saw it like a shield overhead. All day, riding behind Brother
Anselm, the monks about him, black as crows, he had felt dull and
dead. Waking now in the night, forest around him and moon above, sheer
unfamiliarity and wonder at his plight made him shiver and start like
a lost child. All that he had lost passed before him. Foulque passed,
transfigured in his eyes, he was so lonely and sick for home. Raimbaut
the Six-fingered passed, transfigured. The rude hall in Raimbaut’s
keep, the smoky fire and the lounging men—they were desirable to
him; he felt a cold pang when it crossed him that he would never win
back. He strove to plunge, head to heel, into the rich depths of the
feeling before this feeling, to recall the glow out of which he had
spoken at Castel-Noir, to go back to the nightingale’s singing. It was
there, that feeling; he knew that it had been born and was living. But
to-night half a chill and empty world was between him and it. There
in the forest, beneath the round moon, he had a bewildered brain and
an aching heart. Then at last he crossed the half-world to some faint
sweetness, and so slept.
With the dawn he was afoot. He had a piece of bread in his pouch, and
as he walked he ate this, and a streamlet gave him drink. The wood
thinned. In the first brightness of the day he came upon a road of so
fair a width and goodness that he saw it must be a highway and beaded
with towns. Apparently it ran northeast and southwest, though so broken
was the country that at short range it rounded almost any corner you
might choose. Where he was going he did not know, but he took the trend
that led him south by west. Dimly he thought of making his way into
Spain. Barcelona—there was a great town—and King Alfonso of Aragon
was known for a gallant king, rich, liberal and courtly. Garin looked
down at his serf’s tunic and torn shoon—but then he felt within his
breast. Foulque’s purse was there.
When he waked, it had been first to bewilderment and then to mere
relief in warmth and sunlight. Now as he walked courage returned,
the new energy and glow. Early as it was, the road had its travel
which increased with the strengthening day. It was a country rich in
beauty. He had never been so far from home. The people upon the road
were like people he had seen before. Yet there existed small, regional
differences, and his eye was quick at noting these. They pleased him;
imagination played. The morning was fair without and within.
A driver of mules—twenty with twenty loads of sawn wood and sacks of
salt and other matters—caught up with him. Garin and he walked side
by side and the former learned whence the road came and where it went.
As for the world hereabouts, it belonged to Count Raymond of Toulouse.
Garin, walking, began to sing.
“You sing well, brother,” said the muleteer. “If you dwelt with animals
as I do, your voice would crack! They do not understand me when I sing.
They think that I mean that they may stand still and admire.—Ha! May
God forget and the devil remember you there! Get up!”
They travelled with pauses, jerks, and starts, so at last Garin said,
“Farewell, brother!” and swung on alone. Half an hour later he, in
turn, came up with a pedlar, a great pack wrapt in cloth on his back,
sitting resting by the wayside. “Who’ll buy?” called the pedlar.
“Here’s your fine pennyworths!”
Garin stopped beside him and considered the pack. Travelling merchants
of a different grade, going with laden horses from fair to fair, might
have with them, cut, fashioned and sewed, a dress that would do for an
esquire. But not a poor pack-aback like this. He shook his head.
“No money?” asked the pedlar. “Thumb of Lazarus! how this sickness
spreads!”
Other wayfarers came in sight. “Who’ll buy?” called the pedlar. “Here’s
your fine pennyworths!”
Garin left him chaffering with a rich villein, and went his own way
along the sunny road.
Toward noon, rounding a hill, he came upon a little village. He bought
from the nearest house bread and cheese and a cup of goat’s milk, and
sat down under a mulberry tree to eat and drink. As he made an end of
the feast, two girls came and stood in the house door. They studied his
appearance, and it seemed to find favour. He smiled back at them.
“Where do you live?” asked one.
“In the moon.”
“Ha!” said the girl. “It was as round as an egg last night. You must
have dropped out. And where are you going?”
“To the sun.”
“Hè! You will be sunburned. Whose man are you?”
“Lord Love’s.”
The girls laughed for joy in him. “Hè! We see his collar around your
neck! What does he make you do?”
“He makes me to serve a lady.”
“‘Ladies!’ We do not like ‘ladies’! They are as proud as they were made
of sugar!”
“In the court of Lord Love,” said Garin, “every woman mounts into a
lady.”
One of the girls laughed more silently than the other. “Oh, the
pleasant fool!” she said. “You go on a long pilgrimage when you go to
Compostella. But to that court would be the longest I have ever heard
tell of!”
The other dug her bare foot into the ground. “If you are in no hurry,
the house can give you work to do, and for it supper and lodging.”
“I have to reach the sun. And who would do that,” said Garin, “must be
travelling.”
He stood up, left the mulberry tree, and because they were young and
not unfair, and there was to be seen in it no harm or displeasure, he
kissed them both. They laughed and pushed him away, then, their hands
on his shoulders, each kissed back.
Leaving them and the hamlet behind, he came again into fair country
where the blue sky touched the hill-tops. Morning had slipped into
afternoon. Not far away would be a town he had heard of. He meant to
get there a different dress. It was necessary to do that. Wandering
so, in this serf’s wear, he might at any hour be taken up, called to
account, made to name his master. “Lord Love” would not answer far. Say
that, without fathomless trouble, he got the dress, what was going to
follow upon the getting? He did not know.
Ahead of him walked a thin figure wrapped in a black mantle and wearing
a wide hat somewhat like a palmer’s. Garin lessened the distance
between them. The black-clad one was talking, or more correctly,
chanting to himself as he walked, and that with such abstraction from
the surrounding world that he did not hear the other moving close
behind him. Garin listened before speaking.
“In Ethiopia is found basilisk, cockatrice, and phœnix; in certain
parts of Greece the centaur, and in the surrounding seas mermaiden.
The dolphin is of all beasts the tenderest-hearted. Elephants worship
the sun.... Pliny tells us that there are eleven kinds of lightning.
Clap your hands when it lightens.... The elements are four—earth, air,
fire and water. To each of these pertaineth a spirit—gnome, sylph,
salamander, ondine. By long and great study a scholar at last may
perceive sylph or salamander. Such an one rises to strange wisdom....
The earth is not a plain as we were taught. Impossible for our human
mind to conceive how it may be round, and yet the most learned hold
that it is so. Holy Church denieth, _in toto_, the Antipodes, and
one must walk warily. Yet, if it is fancied a square, there are
difficulties. Aristotle—”
Garin came even with him. “God save you, sir!”
The black mantle started violently, returned the salutation, but looked
around him nervously. Then, seeing in a neighbouring field half a dozen
peasants, men and women, he recovered his equanimity. Moreover, when
he looked at him closely, the youth had not the face of a robber. He
addressed Garin in a slightly sing-song voice. “Do you know this road?
How far is it to the town?”
“I do not know the road. It is not much further, I think.”
The man in the black mantle was a thin, pale, ascetic-looking person.
He had a hungry look, or what, at first, Garin thought was such. The
esquire had seen hungry men, peasants starved and wolfish, prisoners
with a like aspect, fasting penitents. But it was the man’s eyes, Garin
decided, that gave him the look, and it was not one of hunger for
bread. They were large and clear, and they seemed to seek something
afar.
Their owner at first looked askance and with a somewhat peevish pride
at the peasant keeping beside him. Garin had forgotten his garb and the
station it assigned him. But the feeling, such as it was, seemed to
drift out of the black-clad’s mind. “I grow weary,” he said, “and shall
be glad to beg a night’s shelter.”
“Have you travelled far?”
“From Bologna.”
“Bologna! That is in Italy.”
“Yes. The University there. I am going to Paris. It may be that I shall
go to Oxford.”
“Ah,” said Garin, with respect. “I understand now why you were talking
to yourself. You are a student.”
“That am I. One day I may be Magister or Doctor.” He walked with a
lifted gaze. “I serve toward that—and toward the gaining of Knowledge.”
Garin was silent; then he said with some wistfulness, “I, too, would
have learning and knowledge.”
The other walked with a rapt gaze. “It is the true goddess,” he said,
“it is the Great Love.”
But Garin dissented from that with a shake of the head and a short
laugh of rapture.
The student turned his large eyes upon him. “You love a woman.—What is
her name?”
“I do not know,” said Garin. “Nor the features of her face, nor where
she lives.” Suddenly as he moved, he made a name. “The Fair Goal,” he
said, “I have named her now.”
The interest of the man in black had been but momentary. “Study is a
harsh mistress,” he said; “fair, but terrible! It would irk any pitying
saint to see how we students fare! Hunger and cold and nakedness.
Books, without warmth or cheer or light where we can con them. And we
often want books and nowhere can procure them. We live in booths or in
corners of other men’s dwellings, and none care to give us livelihood
while we master knowledge. There were several thousand of us in
Bologna, and in Paris there are more, and at Oxford they say there are
many thousands. I have seen us go blind, and I have seen us die of
hunger, and I have seen us unwitted—”
“But you go on,” said Garin.
“It is the only life,” answered the black mantle.
They walked in silence. After a few moments a thought seemed to occur
to the journeyer from Bologna. He looked more closely at his companion.
“By your dress you are out of the fields. But your tongue speaks
castle-wise.”
Garin had his vanity of revealment. “My tongue is my own, but this
dress is not,” he said; then, repenting his rashness, “Do not betray
me! I am fleeing from trouble.”
“No, I will not,” answered the student with simplicity. “I know
trouble, and he is hard to escape. You are, perchance, a young knight?”
“I was my lord’s esquire. But it is my meaning to become a knight.—I
would make poems, too.”
“Ah!” said the student, “a troubadour.”
Garin made no answer, but the word sank in. He had a singing heart
to-day. You could be knight and troubadour both. He wished now to write
a beautiful song for the Fair Goal.
They came in sight of the town. It was fairly large, massed, like most
towns, about a castle. As in all towns, you saw churches and churches
rising above the huddled houses.
“I will find,” said the student, “some house of monks. I will give
them all the news I know, and they will give me food and a pallet. Best
come with me.”
But Garin would not try the monastery.
The afternoon was waning. They entered the town not more than an hour
before the gates would shut, and parted in the shadow of the wall. When
Garin had gone twenty paces, he looked back. The student was standing
where he had left him, in a brown study, but now he spoke across the
uneven, unpaved way. “Choose knowledge!” he said.
Garin, going on through a narrow, dark, and tortuous lane, found
in his mind the jongleur to whom he had talked on the road from
Roche-de-Frêne. “Choose love!” had said the jongleur. Garin laughed. “I
choose what I must!” The dark way seemed to blossom with roses; jewels
and perfumes were in his hands.
He found, after an hour of wandering and enquiry, lodging in a high,
old, ruinous house above a black alley. Here he got a Spartan supper,
and went to bed, tired but hopeful. Morning seemed to come at once. He
rose in a high, clear dawn, ate what they gave him, sallied forth, and
in the first sunshine came to a shop where was standing a Jew merchant
in a high cap. Garin bought shirt, hose and breeches, tunic and mantle,
shoes and cap. The Jew looked questions out of his small, twinkling
black eyes, but asked none with his tongue.
Back to his lodging went Garin, his purchases under his arm, shifted
from serf’s garb into these, and stood forth in russet and blue—a
squire again to the eye, though not the squire of any knight or lord of
wealth. He counted over the moneys yet in his purse, and then, having
paid to a half-blind old woman the price of his lodging, went forth
again, and at a place for weapons bought a dagger with sheath and belt.
Near the weapon shop was a church porch. Garin wished to think things
out a little, so he went across to this and took his seat upon the
steps in the sunshine, his back to a pillar.