The tale tells how Florian de Puysange came in the dawn through
flowering gardens, and heard young people from afar, already about their
maying. Two by two he saw them from afar as they went with romping and
laughter into the tall woods behind Storisende to fetch back the
May-pole with dubious old rites. And as they went they sang, as was
customary, that song which Raimbaut de Vaqueiras made in the ancient
time in honor of May's ageless triumph.
Sang they:
"May shows with godlike showing
To-day for each that sees
May's magic overthrowing
All musty memories
In him whom May decrees
To be love's own. He saith,
_I wear love's liveries
Until released by death_.
"Thus all we laud May's sowing,
Nor heed how harvests please
When nowhere grain worth growing
Greets autumn's questing breeze,
And garnerers garner these--
Vain words and wasted breath
And spilth and tasteless lees--
Until released by death.
"Unwillingly foreknowing
That love with May-time flees,
We take this day's bestowing,
And feed on fantasies
Such as love lends for ease
Where none but travaileth,
With lean, infrequent fees,
Until released by death."
And Florian shook his sleek, black head. "A very foolish and
pessimistical old song, a superfluous song, and a song that is
particularly out of place in the loveliest spot in the loveliest of all
possible worlds."
Yet Florian took no inventory of the gardens. There was but a happy
sense of green and gold, with blue topping all; of twinkling, fluent,
tossing leaves and of the gray under side of elongated, straining
leaves; a sense of pert bird-noises, and of a longer shadow than usual
slanting before him, and a sense of youth and well-being everywhere.
Certainly it was not a morning wherein pessimism might hope to flourish.
Instead, it was of Adelaide that Florian thought: of the tall,
impulsive, and yet timid, fair girl who was both shrewd and innocent,
and of her tenderly colored loveliness, and of his abysmally unmerited
felicity in having won her. Why, but what, he reflected, grimacing--what
if he had too hastily married somebody else? For he had earlier fancied
other women for one reason or another: but this, he knew, was the great
love of his life, and a love which would endure unchanged as long as his
life lasted.