because of your given word was very nobly done, and with heroic
unreason. Coth, you are heroic, but the others are wise.”
“Master, there was an oath.” Coth’s voice now broke a little. “Master,
it was not only the oath. There was a great love, also, in a worsening
land, where lesser persons ruled, and there remained nobody like
Manuel.”
But Manuel said: “The others are wise. You follow still the Manuel who
went about Poictesme. Now in Poictesme all are forgetting that Manuel,
and our poets are busied with quite another Manuel, and my own wife has
builded a great tomb for that other Manuel.... Coth, that is always so.
It is love, not carelessness, which bids us forget our dead, so that we
may love them the more whole-heartedly. Unwelcome memories must be
recolored and reshaped, the faults and blunders and the vexing ways
which are common to all men must be put out of mind, and strange
excellencies must be added, until the compound in nothing resembles the
man that is dead. Such is love’s way, Coth, to keep love immortal....
Coth, oh, most bungling Coth!” said Manuel, very tenderly, “you lack the
grace even to honor your loved dead in a decorous and wise fashion!”
“I follow the true Manuel,” Coth replied, “because to do that was my
oath. There was involved, I cannot deny it, sir, some affection.” Coth
gulped. “I, for the rest, am not interested in these new-fangled, fine
lies they are telling about you nowadays.”
Then there was silence. A small wind went about the pepper plants; and
it seemed to whisper of perished things.
Now Manuel said: “Coth, I repeat to you, the others are wise. I have
gone, forever. But another Manuel abides in Poictesme, and he is
nourished by these fictions. Yearly he grows in stature, this Manuel who
redeemed Poictesme from the harsh Northmen’s oppression and lewd
savagery. Already this Manuel the Redeemer has become a most notable
hero, without fear or guile or any other blemish: and with each
generation he will increase in virtue. It is this dear Redeemer whom
Poictesme will love and emulate: men will be braver because this Manuel
was so very brave; and men, in one or another moment of temptation, will
refrain from folly because his wisdom was so well rewarded;
and—sometimes, at least,—a few men will refrain from baseness, too,
because all his living was stainless.”
“I,” Coth said, heavily, “do not recall this Manuel.”
“Nor do I recall him either, old grumbler. I can remember only one who
dealt with each obligation as he best might, and that was always rather
inefficiently. I remember many doings which I would prefer not to
remember. And I remember a soiled struggler who reeled blunderingly from
one half-solved riddle to another, thwarted and vexed, and hiding very
jealously his hurt.... Well, it is better that such a person should be
forgotten! And so I come from my last home to release you from your oath
of service. I release you now, forever, dear Coth, and I now bid you do
as all the others have done, and I now lay upon you my last orders. I
order that you too forget me, Coth, as those have forgotten who might
have known me better than you did.”
Coth said, with a queer noise which was embarrassingly like a sob: “I
cannot forget the most dear and admirable of earthly lords. You are
requiring, sir, the impossible.”
“Nevertheless, it is necessary that you too—bald realist!—should serve
this other Manuel; and should forget, as your fellows have forgotten,
that muddied and not ever quite efficient bull-necked straggler who has
gone out of life and vigor and out of all persons’ memory. For now is
come upon me my last obligation: it is that the figure which I made in
the world shall not endure anywhere in any particle; and I accept this
obligation also, and I submit to the common lot of all men, without
struggling any longer.”
Coth said, “Return to us, dear master! return, and with the brave truth
do you make an end of your people’s bragging and vain lies!”
But Manuel said: “No. For Poictesme has now, as every land must have,
its faith and its legend, to lead men more nobly and more valorously
than ever any living man may do. I, who was strong, had not the strength
to beget this legend: but it has been created, Coth, it has been created
by the folly of a woman and the wild babble of a frightened child; and
it will endure.”
Coth replied, brokenly: “But, master, we are men of this world, a world
made of dirt. Oh, my dear master, we pick our way about that dirt as we
best can! The results need surprise nobody. The results are rather
often, in a pathetic fashion, very admirable. Should this truth be
disregarded for a vainglorious dream!”
And Manuel answered: “The dream is better. For man alone of animals
plays the ape to his dreams.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_26._
_The Realist in Defeat_
══════════════════════════════════════════════════
HERE Yaotl ended thinking, and put aside the scrying-stone. And his
thought was no longer of Manuel, and nothing was apparent in the Place
of the Dead save Yaotl and the image of Yaotl and Coth standing there,
in the apparel of an emperor, alone and small and remarkably subdued
looking, between the vast black naked twins.
“It would appear,” said Yaotl, “that some men are no more tractable than
are the gods when the affair concerns a keeping of oaths. And so Toveyo
will be remembered in this land for a long while.”
And Coth answered, rather drearily: “Yes; it is such fools as you and I,
Messire Yaotl, who create unnecessary trouble everywhere. Well, I also
am now released from my oath! And my master has spoken bitter good
sense. The famousness of Manuel is but a dream and a loud jingling of
words which happen to sound well together; it is a vanity and a great
talking by his old wife and my gray peers: and yet, this nonsense, it
may be, will hearten people, and will serve all people always, better
than would the truth. And my faith is a foolishness, in that, because of
a mere oath,—like your Star Warriors’ Word of the Thingumajigs, sir,—I
have followed after the truth, across this windy planet upon which every
person is nourished by one or another lie.”
“Each to his creed,” said Yaotl. “So do men choose between hope and
despair.”
“Yet creeds mean very little,” Coth answered the dark god, still
speaking almost gently. “The optimist proclaims that we live in the best
of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true. So I elect
for neither label. I merely know that, at the end of all my journeying,
there remains for me only to settle down, in my comfortable castles
yonder in Poictesme, and to live contentedly with my fine-looking wife
Azra and with my son Jurgen,—that innocent dear lad, whom his old
hypocrite of a father will by and by, beyond any doubt, be exhorting to
imitate a Manuel who never lived! And I know, too, that this is not the
ending which I would have chosen for my saga. For I also, I suppose,
must now decline into fat ease and high thinking, and I would have
preferred the truth.” Coth meditated for a while: he shrugged: and he
laughed without hilarity. “Capricious Lord, I pray you, what sort of
creatures do men seem to the gods?”
“Let us think of more pleasant matters,” Yaotl replied. “For one, I am
already thinking of the way in which I can most speedily get you, O
insatiable grumbler, again to your far home, and out of my too long
afflicted country.”
He turned his naked huge back toward Coth, as Coth supposed, to indulge
in meditation. Coth, was, however, almost instantly disabused, by a
miracle.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
BOOK FIVE
“MUNDUS VULT DECIPI”
“_Not only in this world, but also in that which is to come._”
—EPHESIANS, i, 21.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_27._
_Poictesme Reformed_
══════════════════════════════════════════════════
NOW the tale, for one reason and another, does not record the miracle
which Yaotl performed. The Gods of Tollan were always apt to be misled
by their queer notions of humor. Instead, the tale is of that Poictesme
to which—borne by that favorable if malodorous wind which Yaotl provided
and aimed,—Coth now perforce returned alone.
During the years of Coth’s absence there had been many changes.
Nominally it was the Countess Niafer who ruled over this land, but she
in everything seemed to be controlled by St. Holmendis of Philistia.
About the intimacy between the Countess and her lean but sturdy adviser
there was now no longer any gossip nor shrugging: people had grown used
to this alliance, just as they were becoming reconciled to the reforms
and the prohibitions which were its fruitage.
For now that Manuel was gone, Coth found, the times were changing for
the better at a most uncomfortable rate. To Coth of the Rocks these days
seemed to breed littler men, who, to be sure, if you cared about such
kickshaws, lived more decorously than had lived their fathers, now that
this overbearing St. Holmendis had come out of Philistia with his
miracles: for this sacrosanct person would put up with no irregularity
anywhere, and would hardly so much as tolerate the mildest form of
wonder-working by anybody else. Even Guivric the Sage, who in the elder
and more candid times had attended to all of Dom Manuel’s conjuring, now
found it expedient to restrict his thaumaturgies to a wholly
confidential practice.
For the rest, you could go for days now without encountering a warlock
or a fairy; the people of Audela but rarely came out of the fire to make
sport for and with mankind; and, while many persons furtively brewed
spells at home, all traffic with spirits had to be conducted secretly.
In fine, Poictesme was everywhere upon its most sedate behavior, because
there was no telling when Holy Holmendis might be dealing with you for
your own good; and the cowed province, just as Guivric had prophesied,
stayed subject nowadays to a robustious saint conceived and nurtured and
made holy in Philistia.
But yet another unsettling influence was abroad, nefariously laboring to
keep everybody sanctimonious and genteel,—Coth said,—for over the entire
land Coth found, and fretted under, the all-enveloping legend of Manuel
the Redeemer. Coth found the land’s most holy place, now, to be that
magnificent tomb which, in Coth’s absence, the Countess Niafer had
reared at Storisende to the memory of her husband. And that this
architectural perjury was handsome enough, even Coth admitted.
The intricately carved lower half of the sepulchre displayed eight
alcoves in each of which was sealed the relic of one or another saint.
The upper portion was the pedestal of a very fine equestrian statue of
Dom Manuel with his lance raised, and in full armor, but wearing no
helmet, so that the hero’s face was visible as he sat there, waiting, it
seemed, and watching the North. Thus Manuel appeared to keep eternal
guard against whatever enemy might dare molest the country which he had
once redeemed from the Northmen. And there was never a more splendid
looking champion than was this mimic Manuel, for the armor of this
effigy was everywhere inset with jewels of every kind and color.
How Madame Niafer, who was, moreover, by ordinary a notably parsimonious
person, had ever managed to pay for all these gems nobody could declare
with certainty, but it was believed that Holy Holmendis had provided
them through one or another pious miracle. Coth of the Rocks voiced an
exasperated aspersion that they were paste; and declared paste gems to
be wholly appropriate to the mortuary imposture. In any event, the
Redeemer of Poictesme had been accorded the most magnificent sepulchre
these parts had ever known.
And Coth found all this jewelry and tortured stone-work, as a work of
art, to be wholly admirable, if you cared for such kickshaws. But as a
tomb he considered it to lack at least one essential feature, in that it
was empty.
Yet to most persons the emptiness of the great tomb was its peculiar
sanctity. This spacious and proud glittering void was, to most persons,
a perpetual reminder that Dom Manuel had ascended into heaven while yet
alive, uncorrupted by the ignominy of death, and taking with him every
heroic bone and bit of flesh, and every tiniest sinew, unmarred. That
miracle—no more, to be sure, than the great Redeemer’s just due—most
satisfactorily and most awfully accounted for the lack of any corpse, as
surely as the lack of a corpse was the firm proof of the miracle;
sublime verities here interlocked: and that miracle had been set above
cavil when it was first revealed, by Heaven’s wisdom, through the
unsullied innocence of a little child, lest in this world, men and women
being what they are, by any scoffer the testimony of an adult evangelist
might be suspected.
Coth, after hearing these axioms,—so unshakably established as axioms
during the seven years of Coth’s absence,—would look meditatively at his
young Jurgen, to whose extreme youth and comparative innocence this
revelation had been accorded. The boy was now nearing manhood, he fell
short in many respects of the virtues appropriate to an evangelist, and
he confessed to remembering very faintly now that tremendous experience
of his infancy. That hardly mattered, though, Coth would reflect, when
Poictesme at large was so industriously preserving and embroidering the
tale which the dear brat had brought down from Upper Morven to explain
away an over-night truancy from home.
“There is but one Manuel,” Coth would remark, to himself, “and—of all
persons!—my Jurgen is his prophet. That kickshaw creed seems to content
everybody, now that the rogue no longer bothers to provide an excuse for
staying out all night.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_28._
_Fond Motto of a Patriot_
══════════════════════════════════════════════════
EVERYWHERE, indeed, during the while of Coth’s vain adventuring after
the real Manuel, the legend had grown steadily. Coth found it wholly
maddening to hear of the infallible and perfect Redeemer with whom he
had formerly lived in daily converse of a painstakingly quarrelsome and
uncivil nature: and he found too that, of his confrères of the Silver
Stallion who yet remained in Poictesme, Ninzian and Donander at least
were beginning to lie about Manuel with as pious a lack of restraint as
anybody. Guivric the Sage, of course, would chillily assent to
whatsoever the best-thought-of people affirmed, because the
self-centered old knave did not ever really bother about what other
persons thought: whereas Holden and Anavalt sought, rather markedly, to
turn the conversation to other topics. These aging champions had, in
fine, encountered, in this legend as to their former glories and
privileges, an unconquerable adversary with which they, each according
to his nature, were of necessity compromising.
For Manuel the great Redeemer, who had first carnally redeemed Poictesme
in battle with the Northmen, and later had redeemed Poictesme in more
exalted fields, when at his passing he had taken all his people’s sins
upon his proud gray head,—this Manuel was to return and was to bring
again with him the golden age which, everybody now asserted, had existed
under Manuel’s ruling of Poictesme. That was the sweet and
reason-drugging allure of the legend, that was the prediction
transmitted by Coth’s young scapegrace, who nowadays had averted so
whole-heartedly from prophecy to petticoats. There was no sense in
arguing against such vaticinatory fanfaronade, since it promised to all
inefficient persons that which they preferred to believe in. Everywhere
in the world people were expecting the latter coming of one or another
kickshaw messiah who would remove the discomforts which they themselves
were either too lazy or too incompetent to deal with; and nobody had
anything whatever to gain by electing for peculiarity among one’s fellow
creatures and a gloomier outlook.
Even Coth saw that. So the bald realist looked over his cellar and the
later produce among his vassals in the way of likely girls; he gave such
orders as seemed best in the light of both inspections; and he settled
down as comfortably as might be to the task of making old bones in this
land of madmen. He might at least look forward to the requisite creature
comforts to be derived from these bins and amiable spry bedfellows. His
Azra was no more trying than most wives; and his young Jurgen, after
all, might turn out better than seemed probable.
So Coth in the end let maudlin imbeciles proclaim whatsoever they
elected about the glorious stay upon earth and the second coming of
Manuel the Redeemer, and Coth answered them at worst with inarticulate
growlings. But that the old bear’s love for Poictesme remained unchanged
was evinced by the zeal with which he now caused his two homes
superabundantly to be adorned with the arms of Poictesme, so that at
every turn your eye fell upon the rampant silver stallion and the land’s
famous motto, _Mundus vult decipi_. Such patriotism showed, said
everybody, that, for all his fault-finding, Coth’s heart was in the
right place.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_29._
_The Grumbler’s Progress_
══════════════════════════════════════════════════
AND the tale is still of Coth, telling how he avoided Niafer’s court,
and the decorums and the pieties which were in fashion there, and how he
debauched reasonably in his own citadels.
He fought no more, but he did not lack for other pleasures. He hunted in
the Forest of Acaire; and, in his rich coat of fox fur, he rode
frequently with hounds and falcons about the plains of the Roigne. He
maintained an excellent pit in which wild boars and bears contended and
killed one another for his diversion. When the weather was warm he
drank, and he amused himself at dice and backgammon in his well-ordered
orchard: in winter he sat snug under the carved hood of his huge
fireplace; and it was thus that for his health’s sake he was cozily
cupped and bled, while the Alderman of St. Didol drank quietly and
insatiably.
Then, too, it amused Coth now and then to execute a vassal or so upon
his handsome gallows,—that notorious gallows supported with four posts,
although his rank as Alderman entitled him to only two posts,—because
this bit of arrogance, in the matter of those two extra posts, was a
continuous great source of anger to his nominal sovereign, Madame
Niafer. But his main recreation, after all, Coth found in emulating
those very ancient and most famous monarchs Jupiter and David in a
constant change of women; and the fine girls of Poictesme remained as
always a lively joy to him.
And daily, too, the Alderman of St. Didol squabbled with his wife and
son; and, since he could discover profuse grounds everywhere for
fault-finding, was comfortable enough.
To his sardonic bent it was at this period amusing to note how staidly
Poictesme thrived by virtue of the land’s faith in Poictesme’s Redeemer,
who had removed all troubles and obligations in the past, and who by and
by would be coming again, no doubt to wipe similarly clean the moral
slate; so that there was no real need to worry about the future, nor
about any little personal misdemeanor (which had not become
embarrassingly public), since this would of course be included in the
general amnesty when Manuel returned to take charge of his people’s
affairs.
And yet there was another and more troubling side. The younger, here and
there, were beginning, within moderation, to emulate that Manuel who had
never lived. For Coth saw that too. He saw young persons—here and
there,—displaying traits and customs strange if not virtually unknown to
the old reprobate’s varied experience. Civility, for one thing, was
rather sickeningly pandemic: you saw fine strapping lads, differing in
opinion about this, that or the other, who, instead of resorting
sensibly to a duel, stopped—who positively sat down side by side—to
examine each the other’s point of view, and after that, as often as not,
talked themselves out of fighting at all. That was because of the fame
of Manuel’s uniform civility, which, indeed, the rogue had displayed,
and had made excellent profit of.
But you saw, too, people pardoning and even befriending persons who had
affronted or injured them, and doing this because of the fame of
Manuel’s loving kindliness toward his fellows: everywhere you saw that
wholly groundless notion flowering also into a squeamishness about
taking any other person’s property away from him, even when you really
wanted it. You saw bodily sound young men avoiding, or at any rate
stinting, the normal pleasures of youth, alike among their peers and in
bed, because of the famousness of Dom Manuel’s sobriety and chastity:
and you saw milksops, in fine, giving up all the really intelligent
vices because of that slanderous rumor about Manuel’s addiction to the
virtues.
It was not, either—not altogether,—that the young fools thought they had
much to gain by these eccentricities. They had, somehow, been tempted
into emulation by this nonsense about Manuel’s virtues. And then they
had—still somehow, still quite unexplainably,—found pleasure in it. Coth
granted this rather forlornly: these young people were getting a calm
and temperate, but a positive, gratification out of being virtuous.
There must, then, lurk somewhere deep hidden in humanity a certain trend
to perverse delight in thus denying and curbing its own human appetites.
And since the comparatively intelligent and unregenerate persons were
all profiting by their fellows’ increased forbearance, altogether
everybody was reaping benefit.
This damnable new generation was, because of its insane aspiring,
happier than its fathers had been under the reign of candor and
common-sense. This moonstruck legend of Manuel was bringing, not to be
sure any omnipresent and unendurable perfection, but an undeniable
increase of tranquillity and contentment to all Poictesme. Coth saw that
too.
He remembered what his true liege-lord had said to him in the Place of
the Dead: and Coth admitted that, say what you might as to the Manuel
who had really lived, the squinting rascal did as a rule know what he
was talking about.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_30._
_Havoc of Bad Habits_
══════════════════════════════════════════════════
NEWS as to court affairs and the rest of the province came now to Coth,
in his two lairs at Haut Belpaysage, belatedly and rarely. Yet at this
time he heard that Anavalt the Courteous had gone out of Poictesme with
as little warning as the other lords of the Silver Stallion had accorded
their intimates when Gonfal and Kerin and Miramon, and Coth himself, had
each gone out of the land after Manuel’s passing.
These overnight evasions appeared to be becoming a habit, Coth said to
his wife Azra, so you had best cherish me in the night season while you
may, instead of shrieking out nonsense about my hands being so cold. She
replied with an uxorial generality as to sore-headed bears and
snapping-turtles and porcupines, which really was not misplaced. And it
was not for a long while that any tidings were had of Anavalt the
Courteous, and the riddle of his evasion was unraveled,[1] but at the
last the news came as to the end which Anavalt had found near a windmill
in the Wood of Elfhame, in his courtship of the mistress of that
sinister and superficial forest.
Footnote 1:
Among other places, in a volume called _Straws and Prayer-Books_.
“At his age, too! and with a woman too thin to keep him warm!” said
Coth. “It simply shows you, my dear son, what comes of lecherous habits,
and I trust you may profit by it, for the world is very full of such
deceits.”
And Coth, for his Jurgen’s benefit, piously indicated the motto which
you encountered at well-nigh every turn in Coth’s two homes, along with
the stallion rampant in every member.