had put in the boat, and found what a bad time starlight is for
pitching a tent, Rodriguez and Morano had rowed for four hours each and
Perez had rowed for five. They carried no timber in the boat but used
the oars for tent-poles and cut tent-pegs with a small hatchet that
Perez had brought.
They stumbled on rocks, tore the canvas on bushes, lost the same thing
over and over again; in fact they were learning the craft of wandering.
Yet at last their tent was up and a good fire comforting them outside,
and Morano had cooked the food and they had supped and talked, and
after that they slept. And over them sleeping the starlight faded away,
and in the greyness that none of them dreamed was dawn five clear notes
were heard so shrill in the night that Rodriguez half waking wondered
what bird of the darkness called, and learned from the answering chorus
that it was day.
He woke Morano who rose in that chilly hour and, striking sparks among
last night's embers, soon had a fire: they hastily made a meal and
wrapped up their tent and soon they were going onward against the tide
of the Segre. And that day Morano rowed more skilfully; and Rodriguez
unwrapped his mandolin and played, reclining in the boat while he
rested from rowing. And the mandolin told them all, what the words of
none could say, that they fared to adventure in the land of Romance, to
the overthrow of dullness and the sameness of all drear schemes and the
conquest of discontent in the spirit of man; and perhaps it sang of a
time that has not yet come, or the mandolin lied.
That evening three wiser men made their camp before starlight. They
were now far up the Segre.
For thirteen hours next day they toiled at the oars or lay languid. And
while Rodriguez rested he played on his mandolin. The Segre slipped by
them.
They seemed like no men on their way to war, but seemed to loiter as
the bright river loitered, which slid seaward in careless ease and was
wholly freed from time.
On this day they heard men speak of the Pyrenees, two men and a woman
walking by the river; their voices came to the boat across the water,
and they spoke of the Pyrenees. And on the next day they heard men
speak of war. War that some farmers had fled from on the other side of
the mountain. When Rodriguez heard these chance words his dreams came
nearer till they almost touched the edges of reality.
It was the last day of Perez' rowing. He rowed well although they
neared the cradle of the Segre and he struggled against them in his
youth. Grey peaks began to peer that had nursed that river. Grey faces
of stone began to look over green hills. They were the Pyrenees.
When Rodriguez saw at last the Pyrenees he drew a breath and was unable
to speak. Soon they were gone again below the hills: they had but
peered for a moment to see who troubled the Segre.
And the sun set and still they did not camp, but Perez rowed on into
the starlight. That day he rowed six hours.
They pitched their tent as well as they could in the darkness; and,
breathing a clear new air all crisp from the Pyrenees, they slept
outside the threshold of adventure.
Rodriguez awoke cold. Once more he heard the first blackbird who sings
clear at the edge of night all alone in the greyness, the nightingale's
only rival; a rival like some unknown in the midst of a crowd who for a
moment leads some well-loved song, in notes more liquid than a
master-singer's; and all the crowd joins in and his voice is lost, and
no one learns his name. At once a host of birds answered him out of dim
bushes, whose shapes had barely as yet emerged from night. And in this
chorus Perez awoke, and even Morano.
They all three breakfasted together, and then the wanderers said
good-bye to Perez. And soon he was gone with his bright blue sash,
drifting homewards with the Segre, well paid yet singing a little sadly
as he drifted; for he had been one of a quest, and now he left it at
the edge of adventure, near solemn mountains and, beyond them,
romantic, near-unknown lands. So Perez left and Rodriguez and Morano
turned again to the road, all the more lightly because they had not
done a full day's march for so long, and now a great one unrolled its
leagues before them.
The heads of the mountains showed themselves again. They tramped as in
the early days of their quest. And as they went the mountains,
unveiling themselves slowly, dropping film after film of distance that
hid their mighty forms, gradually revealed to the wanderers the
magnificence of their beauty. Till at evening Rodriguez and Morano
stood on a low hill, looking at that tremendous range, which lifted far
above the fields of Earth, as though its mountains were no earthly
things but sat with Fate and watched us and did not care.
Rodriguez and Morano stood and gazed in silence. They had come twenty
miles since morning, they were tired and hungry, but the mountains held
them: they stood there looking neither for rest nor food. Beyond them,
sheltering under the low hills, they saw a little village. Smoke
straggled up from it high into the evening: beyond the village woods
sloped away upwards. But far above smoke or woods the bare peaks
brooded. Rodriguez gazed on their austere solemnity, wondering what
secret they guarded there for so long, guessing what message they held
and hid from man; until he learned that the mystery they guarded among
them was of things that he knew not and could never know.
Tinkle-ting said the bells of a church, invisible among the houses of
that far village. Tinkle-ting said the crescent of hills that sheltered
it. And after a while, speaking out of their grim and enormous silences
with all the gravity of their hundred ages, Tinkle-ting said the
mountains. With this trivial message Echo returned from among the homes
of the mighty, where she had run with the small bell's tiny cry to
trouble their crowned aloofness.
Rodriguez and Morano pressed on, and the mountains cloaked themselves
as they went, in air of many colours; till the stars came out and the
lights of the village gleamed. In darkness, with surprise in the tones
of the barking dogs, the two wanderers came to the village where so few
ever came, for it lay at the end of Spain, cut off by those mighty
rocks, and they knew not much of what lands lay beyond.
They beat on a door below a hanging board, on which was written "The
Inn of the World's End": a wandering scholar had written it and had
been well paid for his work, for in those days writing was rare. The
door was opened for them by the host of the inn, and they entered a
room in which men who had supped were sitting at a table. They were all
of them men from the Spanish side of the mountains, farmers come into
the village on the affairs of Mother Earth; next day they would be back
at their farms again; and of the land the other side of the mountains
that was so near now they knew nothing, so that it still remained for
the wanderers a thing of mystery wherein romance could dwell: and
because they knew nothing of that land the men at the inn treasured all
the more the rumours that sometimes came from it, and of these they
talked, and mine host listened eagerly, to whom all tales were brought
soon or late; and most he loved to hear tales from beyond the mountains.
Rodriguez and Morano sat still and listened, and the talk was all of
war. It was faint and vague like fable, but rumour clearly said War,
and the other side of the mountains. It may be that no man has a crazy
ambition without at moments suspecting it; but prove it by the
touchstone of fact and he becomes at once as a woman whose invalid son,
after years of seclusion indoors, wins unexpectedly some athletic
prize. When Rodriguez heard all this talk of wars quite near he thought
of his castle as already won; his thoughts went further even, floating
through Lowlight in the glowing evening, and drifting up and down past
Serafina's house below the balcony where she sat for ever.
Some said the Duke would never attack the Prince because the Duke's
aunt was a princess from the Troubadour's country. Another said that
there would surely be war. Others said that there was war already, and
too late for man to stop it. All said it would soon be over.
And one man said that it was the last war that would come, because
gunpowder made fighting impossible. It could smite a man down, he said,
at two hundred paces, and a man be slain not knowing whom he fought.
Some loved fighting and some loved peace, he said, but gunpowder suited
none.
"I like not the sound of that gunpowder, master," said Morano to
Rodriguez.
"Nobody likes it," said the man at the table. "It is the end of war."
And some sighed and some were glad. But Rodriguez determined to push on
before the last war was over.
Next morning Rodriguez paid the last of his silver pieces and set off
with Morano before any but mine host were astir. There was nothing but
the mountains in front of them.
They climbed all the morning and they came to the fir woods. There they
lit a good fire and Morano brought out his frying-pan. Over the meal
they took stock of their provisions and found that, for all the store
Morano had brought from the forest, they had now only food for three
days; and they were quite without money. Money in those uplifted wastes
seemed trivial, but the dwindling food told Rodriguez that he must
press on; for man came among those rocky monsters supplied with all his
needs, or perished unnoticed before their stony faces. All the
afternoon they passed through the fir woods, and as shadows began to
grow long they passed the last tree. The village and all the fields
about it and the road by which they had come were all spread out below
them like little trivial things dimly remembered from very long ago by
one whose memory weakens. Distance had dwarfed them, and the cold
regard of those mighty peaks ignored them. And then a shadow fell on
the village, then tiny lights shone out. It was night down there. Still
the two wanderers climbed on in the daylight. With their faces to the
rocks they scarce saw night climb up behind them. But when Rodriguez
looked up at the sky to see how much light was left, and met the calm
gaze of the evening star, he saw that Night and the peaks were met
together, and understood all at once how puny an intruder is man.
"Morano," said Rodriguez, "we must rest here for the night."
Morano looked round him with an air of discontent, not with his
master's words but with the rocks' angular hardness. There was scarce a
plant of any kind near them now. They were near the snow, which had
flushed like a wild rose at sunset but was now all grey. Grey cliffs
seemed to be gazing sheer at eternity; and here was man, the creature
of a moment, who had strayed in the cold all homeless among his
betters. There was no welcome for them there: whatever feeling great
mountains evoke, THAT feeling was clear in Rodriguez and Morano. They
were all amongst those that have other aims, other ends, and know
naught of man. A bitter chill from the snow and from starry space drove
this thought home.
They walked on looking for a better place, as men will, but found none.
And at last they lay down on the cold earth under a rock that seemed to
give shelter from the wind, and there sought sleep; but cold came
instead, and sleep kept far from the tremendous presences of the peaks
of the Pyrenees that gazed on things far from here.
An ageing moon arose, and Rodriguez touched Morano and rose up; and the
two went slowly on, tired though they were. Picture the two tiny
figures, bent, shivering and weary, walking with clumsy sticks cut in
the wood, amongst the scorn of those tremendous peaks, which the moon
showed all too clearly.
They got little warmth from walking, they were too weary to run; and
after a while they halted and burned their sticks, and got a little
warmth for some moments from their fire, which burned feebly and
strangely in those inhuman solitudes.
Then they went on again and their track grew steeper. They rested again
for fatigue, and rose and climbed again because of the cold; and all
the while the peaks stared over them to spaces far beyond the thought
of man.
Long before Spain knew anything of dawn a monster high in heaven smiled
at the sun, a peak out-towering all its aged children. It greeted the
sun as though this lonely thing, that scorned the race of man since
ever it came, had met a mighty equal out in Space. The vast peak
glowed, and the rest of its grey race took up the greeting leisurely
one by one. Still it was night in all Spanish houses.
Rodriguez and Morano were warmed by that cold peak's glow, though no
warmth came from it at all; but the sight of it cheered them and their
pulses rallied, and so they grew warmer in that bitter hour.
And then dawn came, and showed them that they were near the top of the
pass. They had come to the snow that gleams there everlastingly.
There was no material for a fire but they ate cold meats, and went
wearily on. They passed through that awful assemblage of peaks. By noon
they were walking upon level ground.
In the afternoon Rodriguez, tired with the journey and with the heat of
the sun, decided that it was possible to sleep, and, wrapping his cloak
around him, he lay down, doing what Morano would have done, by
instinct. Morano was asleep at once and Rodriguez soon after. They
awoke with the cold at sunset.
Refreshed amazingly they ate some food and started their walk again to
keep themselves warm for the night. They were still on level ground and
set out with a good stride in their relief at being done with climbing.
Later they slowed down and wandered just to keep warm. And some time in
the starlight they felt their path dip, and knew that they were going
downward now to the land of Rodriguez' dreams.
When the peaks glowed again, first meeting day in her earliest
dancing-grounds of filmy air, they stood now behind the wanderers.
Below them still in darkness lay the land of their dream, but hitherto
it had always faded at dawn. Now hills put up their heads one by one
through films of mist; woods showed, then hedges, and afterwards
fields, greyly at first and then, in the cold hard light of morning,
becoming more and more real. The sight of the land so long sought, at
moments believed by Morano not to exist on earth, perhaps to have faded
away when fables died, swept their fatigue from the wanderers, and they
stepped out helped by the slope of the Pyrenees and cheered by the
rising sun. They came at last to things that welcome man, little shrubs
flowering, and--at noon--to the edge of a fir wood. They entered the
wood and lit a merry fire, and heard birds singing, at which they both
rejoiced, for the great peaks had said nothing.
They ate the food that Morano cooked, and drew warmth and cheer from
the fire, and then they slept a little: and, rising from sleep, they
pushed on through the wood, downward and downward toward the land of
their dreams, to see if it was true.
They passed the wood and came to curious paths, and little hills, and
heath, and rocky places, and wandering vales that twisted all awry.
They passed through them all with the slope of the mountain behind
them. When level rays from the sunset mellowed the fields of France the
wanderers were walking still, but the peaks were far behind them,
austerely gazing on the remotest things, forgetting the footsteps of
man. And walking on past soft fields in the evening, all tilted a
little about the mountain's feet, they had scarcely welcomed the sight
of the evening star, when they saw before them the mild glow of a
window and knew they were come again to the earth that is mother to
man. In their cold savagery the inhuman mountains decked themselves out
like gods with colours they took from the sunset; then darkened, all
those peaks, in brooding conclave and disappeared in the night. And the
hushed night heard the tiny rap of Morano's hands on the door of the
house that had the glowing window.
THE NINTH CHRONICLE
HOW HE WON A CASTLE IN SPAIN
The woman that came to the door had on her face a look that pleased
Morano.
"Are you soldiers?" she said. And her scared look portended war.
"My master is a traveller looking for the wars," said Morano. "Are the
wars near?"
"Oh, no, not near," said the woman; "not near."
And something in the anxious way she said "not near" pleased Morano
also.
"We shall find those wars, master," he said.
And then they both questioned her. It seemed the wars were but twenty
miles away. "But they will move northward," she said. "Surely they will
move farther off?"
Before the next night was passed Rodriguez' dream might come true!
And then the man came to the door anxious at hearing strange voices;
and Morano questioned him too, but he understood never a word. He was a
French farmer that had married a Spanish girl, out of the wonderful
land beyond the mountains: but whether he understood her or not he
never understood Spanish. But both Rodriguez and the farmer's wife knew
the two languages, and he had no difficulty in asking for lodging for
the night; and she looked wistfully at him going to the wars, for in
those days wars were small and not every man went. The night went by
with dreams that were all on the verge of waking, which passed like
ghosts along the edge of night almost touched by the light of day. It
was Rodriguez whom these dreams visited. The farmer and his wife
wondered awhile and then slept; Morano slept with all his wonted
lethargy; but Rodriguez with his long quest now on the eve of
fulfilment slept a tumultuous sleep. Sometimes his dreams raced over
the Pyrenees, running south as far as Lowlight; and sometimes they
rushed forward and clung like bats to the towers of the great castle
that he should win in the war. And always he lay so near the edge of
sleep that he never distinguished quite between thought and dream.
Dawn came and he put by all the dreams but the one that guided him
always, and went and woke Morano. They ate hurriedly and left the
house, and again the farmer's wife looked curiously at Rodriguez, as
though there were something strange in a man that went to wars: for
those days were not as these days. They followed the direction that had
been given them, and never had the two men walked so fast. By the end
of four hours they had done sixteen miles. They halted then, and Morano
drew out his frying-pan with a haughty flourish, and cooked in the
grand manner, every movement he made was a triumphant gesture; for they
had passed refugees! War was now obviously close: they had but to take
the way that the refugees were not taking. The dream was true: Morano
saw himself walking slowly in splendid dress along the tapestried
corridors of his master's castle. He would have slept after eating and
would have dreamed more of this, but Rodriguez commanded him to put the
things together: so what remained of the food disappeared again in a
sack, the frying-pan was slung over his shoulders, and Morano stood
ready again for the road.
They passed more refugees: their haste was unmistakable, and told more
than their lips could have told had they tarried to speak: the wars
were near now, and the wanderers went leisurely.
As they strolled through the twilight they came over the brow of a
hill, a little fold of the earth disturbed eras ago by the awful
rushing up of the Pyrenees; and they saw the evening darkening over the
fields below them and a white mist rising only just clear of the grass,
and two level rows of tents greyish-white like the mist, with a few
more tents scattered near them. The tents had come up that evening with
the mist, for there were men still hammering pegs. They were lighting
fires now as evening settled in. Two hundred paces or so separated each
row. It was two armies facing each other.
The gloaming faded: mist and the tents grew greyer: camp-fires blinked
out of the dimness and grew redder and redder, and candles began to be
lit beside the tents till all were glowing pale golden: Rodriguez and
Morano stood there wondering awhile as they looked on the beautiful
aura that surrounds the horrors of war.
They came by starlight to that tented field, by twinkling starlight to
the place of Rodriguez' dream.
"For which side will you fight, master?" said Morano in his ear.
"For the right," said Rodriguez and strode on towards the nearest
tents, never doubting that he would be guided, though not trying to
comprehend how this could be.
They met with an officer going among his tents. "Where do you go?" he
shouted.
"Señor," Rodriguez said, "I come with my mandolin to sing songs to you."
And at this the officer called out and others came from their tents;
and Rodriguez repeated his offer to them not without confidence, for he
knew that he had a way with the mandolin. And they said that they
fought a battle on the morrow and could not listen to song: they heaped
scorn on singing for they said they must needs prepare for the fight:
and all of them looked with scorn on the mandolin. So Rodriguez bowed
low to them with doffed hat and left them; and Morano bowed also,
seeing his master bow; and the men of that camp returned to their
preparations. A short walk brought Rodriguez and his servant to the
other camp, over a flat field convenient for battle. He went up to a
large tent well lit, the door being open towards him; and, having
explained his errand to a sentry that stood outside, he entered and saw
three persons of quality that were sitting at a table. To them he bowed
low in the tent door, saying: "Señors, I am come to sing songs to you,
playing the while upon my mandolin."
And they welcomed him gladly, saying: "We fight tomorrow and will
gladly cheer our hearts with the sound of song and strengthen our men
thereby."
And so Rodriguez sang among the tents, standing by a great fire to
which they led him; and men came from the tents and into the circle of
light, and in the darkness outside it were more than Rodriguez saw. And
he sang to the circle of men and the vague glimmer of faces. Songs of
their homes he sang them, not in their language, but songs that were
made by old poets about the homes of their infancy, in valleys under
far mountains remote from the Pyrenees. And in the song the yearnings
of dead poets lived again, all streaming homeward like swallows when
the last of the storms is gone: and those yearnings echoed in the
hearts that beat in the night around the campfire, and they saw their
own homes. And then he began to touch his mandolin; and he played them
the tunes that draw men from their homes and that march them away to
war. The tunes flowed up from the firelight: the mandolin knew. And the
men heard the mandolin saying what they would say.
In the late night he ended, and a hush came down on the camp while the
music floated away, going up from the dark ring of men and the fire-lit
faces, touching perhaps the knees of the Pyrenees and drifting thence
wherever echoes go. And the sparks of the camp-fire went straight
upwards as they had done for hours, and the men that sat around it saw
them go: for long they had not seen the sparks stream upwards, for
their thoughts were far away with the mandolin. And all at once they
cheered. And Rodriguez bowed to the one whose tent he had entered, and
sought permission to fight for them in the morning.
With good grace this was accorded him, and while he bowed and well
expressed his thanks he felt Morano touching his elbow. And as soon as
he had gone aside with Morano that fat man's words bubbled over and
were said.
"Master, fight not for these men," he exclaimed, "for they listen to
song till midnight while the others prepare for battle. The others will
win the fight, master, and where will your castle be?"
"Morano," said Rodriguez, "there seems to be truth in that. Yet must we
fight for the right. For how would it be if those that have denied song
should win and thrive? The arm of every good man must be against them.
They have denied song, Morano! We must fight against them, you and I,
while we can lay sword to head."
"Yes, indeed, master," said Morano. "But how shall you come by your
castle?"
"As for that," said Rodriguez, "it must some day be won, yet not by
denying song. These have given a welcome to song, and the others have
driven it forth. And what would life be if those that deny song are to
be permitted to thrive unmolested by all good men?"
"I know not, master," said Morano, "but I would have that castle."
"Enough," said Rodriguez. "We must fight for the right."