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 Muirne of the Marshes,—or like plump, ardent, brown Utsume, 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 Credhe, 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. . . .
If you had only had a son, now, matters might be different. . . . Then Coth recollected that he did, in point of fact, have a son, somewhere. It had slipped his mind for the instant. But old people forget things, and he was very old. Yes, a fine lad, that: and he would be coming in for supper presently,—extremely late for supper, with his hat shoved a great way back on his black head, and with his boots all muddy,—and Azra would scold him. . . . Only, it seemed to Coth that Azra, or somebody, was dead. That was a pity, but it was too much trouble to remember all the pity and the dying that was in the world; it was a great deal too much trouble for, an old man to keep these wearying matters quite straight in his mind. And, besides, everybody died; there was for all an end of all adventuring: and nothing whatever could be done about it.
Well, but at least one more adventure was yet to come, for the Coth who could make no wheedling compromise with the fictions by which fools live and preserve alike their foolish hopes and their smirking amenities. He had, he felt, been sometimes rather brusque with these fools. But all that was over, too. They went their way; and he was going his. And, once that last adventure had been achieved, you might hope to settle down comfortably with the swaggering and great-hearted sinners, and to be stationed not too far from that gray squinting sinner who had been the most dear and admirable of earthly lords; and to foregather with all such fine rogues eternally among the genial and robustious flames, in which there was no more loneliness and no more cold and no more pettifogging talk about some Redeemer or another paying your scot, and where no more frightened servants would be spying on you always. . . .
The adventure came unheralded, for Coth died in his sleep, having outlived the wife of his youth by just four months.
BOOK SIX
IN THE SYLVAN’S HOUSE
“Is it time for you to dwell in your ceiled house, and this hose lies waste?”
—Haggai, i, 6
Chapter XXXIV. Something Goes Wrong: and Why
Now the tale is of Guivric of Perdigon, more generally called the Sage, who in the days after Anavalt went into Elfhame was chief of the lords of the Silver Stallion who yet remained in Poictesme. And the tale tells how it appeared to Guivric of Perdigon that something was going wrong.
He had not anything tangible to complain of. There was, indeed, no baron in Poictesme more powerful and honored than was Guivric the Sage. He had no need to bother over any notions about Manuel which in no way affected the welfare of Guivric of Perdigon, and he had no quarrel with the more staid and religious ordering of matters which now prevailed in Poictesme. Guivric had, howsoever frostily, adapted himself to these times, and in them a reasonably staid and religious Guivric had, thus, thrived.
As Heitman of Asch, he still held as rigorously as he had held in Manuel’s heyday, the fertile Piemontais between the Duardenez river and Perdigon. He had money and two castles, he lived in comeliness and splendor, he had wisdom and a high name and the finest vineyards anywhere in those regions. He had every reason to be proud of his tall prospering son Michael, a depressingly worthy young warrior, whose superabundant virtues, modeled with so much earnestness after the Manuel of the legend, caused Guivric to regard the amours of Michael’s wife (and Manuel’s daughter) with quiet and unregenerate amusement. And Guivric got on with his own wife as well, he flattered himself, as any person could hope to do upon the more animated side of deafness.
Yet something, this prim and wary Guivric knew, was somewhere going wrong. Things, even such prosaic common things as the chair he was seated in, or his own hands moving before him, were becoming dubious and remote. People spoke with thinner voices: and their bodies flickered now and then, as if these bodies were only appearances of colored vapor. The trees of Guivric’s flourishing woodlands would sometimes stretch and flatten in the wind like trails of smoke. The walls of Guivric’s fine home at Asch, and of his great fort at Perdigon also, were acquiring, as their conservative owner somewhat frettedly observed, a habit of moving, just by a thread’s width, when you were not quite looking at them; and of shifting in outline and in station as secretively as a cloud alters.