the days when these two had served together under the banner of the
Silver Stallion. It seemed to Coth that in dark Elfhame a handsome and
fine-spoken and kindly rascal had been trapped and devoured rather
wastefully. Nor was it cheering to consider that, now, but five of the
great fellowship remained alive.... Meanwhile, in rearing a son
judiciously, one must preserve the proper moral tone.
And Coth heard also, at about this time, of the magic which had been put
upon King Helmas the Deep-Minded, that monarch whom, as people said, Dom
Manuel in the old days had bamboozled into giving Manuel a fine start in
life. Coth heard of how this magic had been put upon Helmas by his own
daughter Mélusine, and of the notable transfer of the king’s castle and
person and entire entourage from out of Albania to the high place at
Brunbelois, in the impenetrable Forest of Acaire, where the ill-fated
court of Helmas now all stayed enchanted, people said.
And Coth drew the moral. “It shows you what parents may expect of their
children,” he remarked, with a malevolent glance toward his adored
Jurgen. “It shows you what comes of this habit of indulging children.”
“Now, Father—” said the boy.
“Stop storming at me! How dare you attempt to bulldoze me, sir! Do you
take me for another Helmas!”
“But, Father—”
“Get out of my sight, you quarrelsome puppy! I will not be thus
deafened. Get back to that Dorothy of yours! You care for nobody else,”
said jealous old Coth.
“Now, Father—”
“And must you still be arguing with me! Do you think there is no end to
my patience? What is there to argue about? The puppy follows the bitch.
That is natural.”
“But, Father, how can you—!”
“Get out of my sight before I break every bone in your body! Get back to
that cold sanctimonious court and to your hot wench!” said Coth.
Yet all the while that he spoke with such fluency Coth’s heart was
troubled. Of course, in rearing a son judiciously, one must preserve the
proper moral tone. Nevertheless, Coth felt, at heart, that he might be
taking the wrong way with the boy, and was being almost brusque.
But Coth was Coth. That was his doom. He had only one way.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_31._
_Other Paternal Apothegms_
══════════════════════════════════════════════════
NOW Jurgen went very often to court, since the boy at twenty-one was
fathoms deep in love with Count Manuel’s second daughter, whom they
called Dorothy la Désirée. Coth saw her but once: and, even over and
above his rage at the thought of sharing Jurgen with anybody, Coth was
honestly moved, in the light of his considerable boudoir experience, to
uncivil prophecy. He was upon this occasion, in the main hall at
Bellegarde, with dozens of persons within earshot, most embarrassingly
explicit with Jurgen, alike as to the quality of Jurgen’s intelligence
and the profession which Coth desired no daughter-in-law of his to
practice.
The two quarreled. That nowadays was no novelty. The difference was that
into this quarrel Jurgen put all his heart. So the insolent,
overbearing, bulldozing young scoundrel was packed off to serve under
the Vidame de Soyecourt: and before the year was out Coth heard that
this Dorothy la Désirée was married to Guivric’s son Michael.
“This Michael is but the first served at an entertainment preparing for
the general public,” was Coth’s epithalamium.
And many rumors came back to Haut Belpaysage as to Jurgen’s doings in
Gâtinais, and, while they all seemed harmless enough, not all were
precisely what a father would have elected to hear. Coth considered, for
example, that Jurgen had acted with imprudence in thus hastily making
Coth a grandfather with the assistance of the third wife of the Vidame
de Soyecourt. Husbands had a sad way of being provoked by such
offspring, upon the wholly illogical ground that the provocation was not
mutual. Still, young people needed their diversions, and husbands, to
Coth’s experience, were not a dangerous tribe. What really fretted a
somewhat aging Alderman, however, was that such stories reached him
casually, and that from Jurgen himself he heard nothing.
Yet other gossip came too from the court at Bellegarde and Storisende,
as to how Manuel’s oldest daughter, Madame Melicent, was now betrothed
to King Theodoret, and how upon the eve of her marriage she had
disappeared out of Poictesme: and she was next heard of as living in
unchristian splendor far oversea, as—if you elected to put it more
gracefully than Coth did,—the wife of Miramon Lluagor’s son and
murderer, Demetrios.
“Why not?” said Coth. “Why should not snub-nosed Miramon’s swarthy lad
be having his wenches when convenient? Parricide is no bar to
fornication. They are sins committed with quite different weapons. And,
for the rest, all sons are intent to do what this one has succeeded in
doing. How, for that matter, did Dom Manuel, that famous Redeemer of
yours, deal with his own father Oriander the Swimmer?”
That, it was hastily explained to him by his wife Azra, was but a part
of the great Redeemer’s abnegation and self-denial. That was the
atonement, and the immolation of his only beloved father, in order to
expiate the gross sins of Poictesme—
“To expiate the sins of one person by killing another person,” replied
Coth, “is not an atonement. It is nonsense.”
Well, but, it was furthermore explained, this atonement was a great and
holy mystery; and, as such, it should be approached with reverence
rather than mere rationality. Yet this high mystery of the atonement
must undoubtedly symbolize the fact that, in order to attain perfection,
Manuel had put off the ties of his flesh—
To which Coth answered, staring moodily at his wife Azra: “I saw that
fight. He put off those ties of his flesh, and Oriander’s head from his
body, with such pleasure as Manuel showed in no other combat. And all
sons are like him. Have we not a son? Why do you keep pestering me?”
“I only meant—”
“Stop contradicting me!” But very swiftly Coth added, with a sort of
gulp, “—my dear.”
For Coth was changing. He hunted no more, he had closed up his bear-pit.
He seemed to prefer to be alone. Azra would very often find him huddled
in his chair, not doing anything, but merely thinking: and then he would
glare at her ferociously, without speaking; and she would go away from
him, without speaking, because she also thought too frequently about
their son for her own comfort.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_32._
_Time Gnaws at All_
══════════════════════════════════════════════════
THEN Emmerick came of age, and Madame Niafer’s rule was over, men said,
because the Count would be swayed in all things by his cousin, the
Bishop Ayrart of Montors, the same that afterward was Pope.
“The young church rat drives out the old one,” said Coth. “Now limping
Niafer must learn to do without a night-light and to sleep without a
halo on her pillow.”
But Ayrart’s supremacy was not for long, and Holy Holmendis remained
about the court, after all, because, at just this time, lean Holden the
Brave appeared at Storisende with a beautiful young gray-eyed stranger
whom he introduced as the widow of Elphànor, King of Kings. People felt
that for this Radegonde thus to be surviving her husband by more than
thirteen centuries was a matter meritorious of explanation, but neither
she nor Holden offered any.
The history of the love which had been between Radegonde and Holden is
related elsewhere[2]: at this time it remained untold. But now, at this
love’s ending, Radegonde found favor in the small greedy eyes of Count
Emmerick, and she married him, nor was there ever at any season
thereafter during the lifetime of Radegonde a question as to what
person, howsoever flightily, ruled over Poictesme and Emmerick. And
Radegonde—after a very prettily worded but frank proviso as to the
divine right of princes, which rendered them and their wives responsible
to Heaven directly, and to nobody else, as she felt sure dear Messire
Holmendis quite understood,—Radegonde thereafter favored Holmendis and
his wonder-working reforms, among the appropriate class of people,
because she considered that his halo was distinctly decorative, and that
a practicing saint about the court lent it, as she phrased the matter,
an air.
Footnote 2:
See note upon page 145.
Coth heard of these things; and he nodded his great dome-shaped head
complacently enough. “A tree may be judged by its fruit. Now in England
Dom Manuel’s long-legged bastard by Queen Alianora has returned his
young wife to the nursery. He is to-day, they tell me,—in the approved
fashion of all sons,—junketing about foreign courts with the Lord of
Bulmer’s daughter. He, in brief, while the Barons steal England from
him, is intent upon begetting his own bastards—”
“But you also, my husband—”
“Do you stop deafening me with your talk about irrelevant matters! In
Philistia, Dom Manuel’s most precious bantling by Queen Freydis is
working every manner of pagan iniquity, and has brought about the
imprisonment, in infamous Antan, of his own mother, after having lived
with her for some while in incest—”
“Nevertheless—”
“Azra, you have, as I tell you for your own good, a sad habit, and a
very ill-bred habit also, of interrupting people, and that habit is
quite insufferable. A tree, I repeat to you, may be judged by its fruit!
Everybody knows that. Now, in our Poictesme, the increase of Dom
Manuel’s body has, thus far, produced two strumpets and a guzzling
cuckold—”
“But, even so—”
“You are talking nonsense. A tree, I say to you, may be judged by its
fruit! I consider this exhibit very eloquently convincing as to the true
nature of our Redeemer.”
Azra now answered nothing. And Coth fell to looking at his motto, rather
gloomily.
“It was not that I meant,” he said, heroically, by and by, “to be rude,
my dear. But I do hate a fool, and, in particular, an obstinate fool.”
Here too it must be recorded that upon the night of Radegonde’s marriage
old Holden had the ill taste to die. That it was by his own hand, nobody
questioned, but the affair was hushed up: and Count Emmerick’s married
life thus started with gratifyingly less scandal than it culminated in.
Coth heard of this thing also. He looked at his motto, he recalled the
love which he had borne for Holden in the times when Coth had not yet
given over loving anybody: and he mildly wondered that Holden, at his
age, should still be clinging to the fallacy that one wench was much
more desirable than another. By and large, thought Coth, they had but
one use, for which any one of them would serve, if you still cared for
such kickshaws. For himself, he was growing abstemious; and as often as
not, found it rather a nuisance when any of his vassals married, and the
Alderman of St. Didol was expected to do his seignorial duty by the new
made wife. Things everywhere were dwindling and deteriorating.
Even the great Fellowship of the Silver Stallion was wearing away, thus
steadily, under the malice and greed of time. Donander of Évre was
to-day the only one of Manuel’s barons who yet rode about the world, now
and then, in search of good fighting and fine women. All the best of the
fellowship were gone from life: the hypocrites and the fools alone
remained, Coth estimated modestly. For he and that boy Donander were, at
least, not hypocrites....
And very often, too, Coth would look at his wife Azra, and would
remember the girl that she had been in the times when Coth had not yet
given over loving anybody. He rather liked her now. It was a felt loss
that she no longer had the spirit to quarrel with anything like the
fervor of their happier days: not for two years or more had Azra flung a
really rousing taunt or even a dinner plate in his direction: and Coth
pitied the poor woman’s folly in for an instant bothering about that
young scoundrel of a Jurgen, who had set up as a poet, they said, and—in
the company, one heard, of a grand duchess,—was rampaging everywhither
about Italy, with never a word for his parents. Coth, now, did not worry
over such ingratitude at all: not less than twenty times a day he
pointed out to his wife that he, for one, never wasted a thought upon
the lecherous runagate.
His wife would smile at him, sadly: and after old Coth had been
particularly abusive of Jurgen, she would, without speaking, stroke her
husband’s knotted, stubby, splotched hand, or his tense and just not
withdrawing cheek, or she would tender one or another utterly
uncalled-for caress, quite as though this illogical and broken-spirited
creature thought Coth to be in some sort of trouble. The woman, though,
had never understood him....
Then Azra died. Coth was thus left alone. It seemed to him a strange
thing that the Coth who had once been a fearless champion and a crowned
emperor and a contender upon equal terms with the High Gods, should be
locked up in this quiet room, weeping like a small, punished, frightened
child.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_33._
_Economics of Coth_
══════════════════════════════════════════════════
IN the months that followed, Coth wore a puzzled and baffled look. His
servants reported that he talked to himself almost incessantly. But it
was incoherent, uncharacteristic stuff, without any quarreling in it,
they said.... Coth at the last had well-nigh given over fault-finding.
He was merely puzzled.
For life, somehow, in some as yet undetected fashion, seemed to have
cheated him. It was not possible that, with fair play everywhere, life
would be affording you, as the sum and harvest of all, no more than
this. No sort of pleasure remained: girls left, and for that matter
found, you wholly frigid; wine set you to vomiting. You wanted, as if in
a cold cemetery of desires, one thing alone, nowadays.
Yet the son Jurgen whom Coth’s tough heart remembered and desired was
still frolicking about the pleasant and famous places of the world, with
no time to waste in sedate Poictesme: and Coth rather suspected that,
even now, in this sick unimaginable loneliness, were Jurgen to return, a
feebly raging Coth would storm at the lad and turn him out of doors. For
that was Coth’s way. He had only one way.... He reflected, now, Jurgen
was no longer a lad: it well might be, indeed, that pock-marked,
greasy-headed roisterer had ended living, with some husband’s dagger in
his ribs. The last news heard of Jurgen, though, was that he was making
songs in Byzantium with the aid of a runaway abbess, who at least had no
husband. And in any event, Jurgen would not ever return, because Coth
had come between the boy that had been and the leering, high-nosed
strumpet at Asch, who was reported to be rivaling even that poor Kerin’s
widow, Saraïde, in the great number of her co-partners in lectual
exercise.
“A pert pirate in all men’s affairs, a mere cockboat sailing under the
Jolly Roger!” was Coth’s verdict, as repeated by an eavesdropping page.
“This Madame Dorothy has had in her more”—he mumbled so that something
was lost—“than there are trees in Acaire. All the trees in Acaire are
judged by their fruits. This Dorothy is a very betraying fruit from the
rank tree of the Redeemer. This Dorothy has inherited from Dom Manuel
such lewdness as is advantageously suited to a warrior, but misbecomes a
young woman. It seems rather a pity that this light wagtail should ever
have come between me and Jurgen.”
Coth said this without any raging. He was merely puzzled.
For all, everywhere, appeared to have failed and deserted him. This Coth
had been in his day a hero: and none of that far-off adventuring seemed
much to matter now, nor could he quite believe that these things had
happened to the tired old fellow who went muttering about the lonely
Château des Roches, and was kept alive with slops of gruel and
barley-water. This tremulous frail wreckage was not, assuredly, the Coth
who had killed single-handed the three Turks at Lacre Kai, and who had
kidnapped the fat King of Cyprus and in the sight of two armies had hung
the crown of yet another king on the thorn-bush at Piaja, and who had
been himself an emperor, and who had held the White Tower at Skeaf
against the Comprachos, and who had put that remarkable deception upon
the enamored one-legged tyrant of Ran Reigan, and who had shared in so
many other splendid rough-and-tumble happenings.
There had been a host of women in these happenings, fine women, not to
be had at anybody’s whistle like the tow-headed Dorothys whom these
sanctimonious times were spawning everywhere to come between a father
and a boy with no real harm in him. And none of these dear women
mattered now.... Besides, it was not true to say that Jurgen had no real
harm in him. Jurgen had been violent and headstrong from the very first:
that was another pity, but Jurgen had taken after his mother in this,
old Coth reflected, and his mother had always been injudicious alike in
pampering and in rebuking Jurgen, with the result that Jurgen was
nowadays a compendium of all iniquity.
And the Manuel too whom Coth had loved was gone now, and was utterly
ousted from every person’s memory by that glittering tomb at Storisende,
where a Manuel who had never lived was adored as a god is worshiped. Yet
that, also, seemed not to matter. It was preposterous. But all the world
was preposterous: and nothing whatever could be done about it, by a
tired muttering old man.
People, no doubt, were living more quietly and more decorously because
of this fictitious Manuel whom they loved and this gaunt ranting
Holmendis whom they feared. But that too, to Coth, seemed not to matter.
People nowadays were such fools that their doings and the upshot of
these doings were equally unimportant, Coth estimated. If they succeeded
in worming their way into heaven by existing here as spiritlessly as
worms, Coth had not any objection, since he himself was bound for hell
and for the company of his peers in a more high-hearted style of living.
Coth fell a little complacently to thinking about hell, and about the
fine great sinners who would make room for him there, on account of the
Coth that had been, and about the genial flames in which nobody was
pestered by milksops prattling about their damned Redeemer. And
Manuel—the real Manuel, that squinting swaggering gray rogue whose
thefts and bastards and killings had been innumerous,—that Manuel would
be there too, of course; and he and Coth would make very excellent mirth
over those reforms which had ensnared all the milksops into heaven, even
at the high price of spoiling the Poictesme of Coth’s youth.
For those elder heroic days were quite over. Of the great fellowship
there remained, beside the hulk that was Coth, only Guivric and Donander
and Ninzian. Donader of Évre was now, they said, in the far kingdom of
Marabon, combining the pleasures of knight-errantry with a pious
pilgrimage to the tomb of St. Thomas. And while Coth had always admired
Donander as a fighting-machine, in all other respects Coth considered
him a deplorable young fool, nor, after holding this opinion steadfastly
for twenty-five years, was Coth prepared to change it. Ninzian was a
sleek hypocrite, a half-hearted fellow who had stinted himself to one
poor pale adultery with a pawnbroker’s wife; and who flourished in the
sanctimonious atmosphere of these abominable times because he truckled
to Holmendis nowadays just as formerly he had toadied to Manuel. That
prim and wary Guivric, whom people called the Sage, Coth had always most
cordially detested: and when Coth heard—from somebody, as he cloudily
remembered, but it was too much trouble to recall from whom,—that old
Guivric too was now departed from Poictesme, it seemed not to matter.
Perhaps, Coth speculated, one of those troubled-looking servants had
told him Guivric was dead. Almost everybody was dead. And in any event,
it did not matter about Guivric. Nothing really mattered any longer....
All that Coth had ever loved was gone out of life. Gray Manuel, the most
superb and admirable of earthly lords (howsoever often the man had
needed a little candid talking to, for his own good), and peevish
tender-hearted wise Miramon, and courteous Anavalt, and pedantic
innocent Kerin (who had been used to blink at you once or twice, like
the most amiable of owls, before he gave his opinion upon any subject),
and Holden, the most brave where all were fearless, and indolent gay
Gonfal, whom you might even permit, within limits, to rally you, because
Gonfal was the world’s playmate,—all these were gone, the dearest of
comrades that any warrior had ever known, in that lost, far-off season
when the Fellowship of the Silver Stallion had kept earth noisy with the
clashing of their swords, and had darkened heaven with the smoke of the
towns they were sacking, and when throughout the known world men had
talked about the wonders which these champions were performing with Dom
Manuel to lead them.
And so many splendid women too were gone: these days produced only your
flibbertigibbet Melicents and Dorothys and such trash. There were no
women nowadays like Azra, nor like Gunnhilda, nor like Muirnê of the
Marshes,—or like plump, ardent, brown Utsumé, or like Orgeleuse, that
proud lady of Cyprus, who had yet yielded in the end, or like Azra....
And Coth, chewing meditatively at nothingness, with sunken and toothless
lips, thought also about great-hearted Dame Abonde, and about little
Fleurette, and about Azra, and about Credhê, that jolly if remarkably
exigent Irish girl, and about tall Asgerda, and about Azra, and about
Bar, that treacherous but very lovely sea-wife, and about Oriande, and
about poor Felfel Rhasif Yedua, who had given all the hair of her body
and afterward her life, to preserve his life, and about Azra.
He remembered the girl that Azra had been, and he thought without any
joy about the scores of other delectable persons which Coth had known,
amorously and intricately, so very long ago. All these women were gone
out of living: one or two of them might perhaps as yet pretend to
survive in the repulsive skins of shriveled old lean ugly hags, and in
some remote chimney-corner or another might as yet be mumbling—with
sunken and toothless lips, like his own lips,—over nothingness; for
nothingness was now their portion too; and those close-kissing,
splendid, satiated, half-swooning girls whom Coth remembered, with
indelicate precision, now no longer existed anywhere.
And Jurgen, the unparalleled of babies, and that cuddling little lad
prattling his childish lies about Dom Manuel and ascents into heaven and
other nonsense to ward off a spanking, and that fine upstanding boy just
graduating into pimples in whom Coth had so exulted when Coth returned
from Tollan and the throne of Tollan,—his Jurgen in dozens upon dozens
of stages of growth,—now every one of these dear sons was gone. There
remained only a dissolute and heartless wastrel bellowing rhymed
nonsense and rampaging about the world wherever the grand duchesses and
the abbesses made most of him. Coth looked at his motto.
Life then, at utmost, after all the prizes of life had been gained, and
you were a looked-up-to and prosperous alderman, amounted to just this.
It profited nothing that you had been a tender and considerate father,
or a dutiful and long-suffering son who had boxed your father’s jaws,
when you last parted from him, only after considerable provocation,—or a
loving and faithful husband to the full extent of human frailty, or a
fearless champion killing off brawny adversaries like flies, or even an
emperor crowned with that queer soft gold of Tollan and dragging black
corrupted gods about the public highways. In the end you were, none the
less, a withered hulk, with no more of pride nor any hope of pleasure
nor any real desire alive in you; and you felt cold always, even while
you nodded here beside the fire; and there was not anybody to talk to,
except those perturbed-looking servants who never came very near you....