Chapter IX: Book SEVEN: What Saraïde Wanted

“_None shall want her mate._”
—ISAIAH, xxxiv, 16.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

_42._
_Generalities at Ogde_

══════════════════════════════════════════════════

NOW the tale tells that it was in the winter after Guivric’s encounter with the Sylan that Kerin of Nointel returned into Poictesme to become yet another convert to the great legend of Manuel; and tells also of how for the first time men learned why and in what fashion Kerin had gone out of Poictesme.

Therefore the tale harks back to very ancient days, in the May month which followed the passing of Manuel, and the tale speaks of a season wherein it appeared to Kerin of Nointel that he could understand his third wife no better than he had done the others. But for that perhaps unavoidable drawback to matrimony, he was then living comfortably enough with this Saraïde, whom many called a witch, in her ill-spoken-of, eight-sided home beside the notorious dry Well of Ogde. This home was gray, with a thatched roof upon which grew abundant mosses and many small wild plants; a pair of storks nested on the gable; and elder-trees shaded all.

It was a very quiet and peaceful place, in which, so Kerin estimated, two persons might well have lived in untroubled serenity, now that the Fellowship of the Silver Stallion was disbanded, and a younger Kerin’s glorious warfaring under Dom Manuel was done with forever.

Mild-mannered, blinking Kerin, for one, did not regret Dom Manuel’s passing. The man had kept you fighting always, whether it was with the Easterlings or the Northmen, or with Othmar Black-Tooth or with old yellow Sclaug or with Manuel’s father, blind Oriander. It was a life which left you no time whatever for the pursuit of any culture. Kerin liked fighting, within moderation, with persons of admitted repute. But Kerin, after four years of riding into all quarters of the earth at the behest of this never-resting Manuel, was heartily tired of killing strangers in whom Kerin was in no way interested.

So, upon the whole, it was a relief to be rid of Manuel and to be able once more to marry, and to settle down at Ogde in the eight-sided house under the elder-trees. Yet, even in this lovely quietude, the tale repeats, the third wife of Kerin seemed every night to bother herself, and in consequence her husband, about a great many incomprehensible matters.

Now of the origin of Saraïde nothing can here be told with profit and decorum: here it is enough to say that an ambiguous parentage had provided this Saraïde with a talisman by which you might know the truth when truth was found. And one of the many things about Kerin’s wife which Kerin could not quite understand, was her constant complaining that she had not found out assuredly the truth about anything, and, in particular, the truth as to Saraïde.

“I exist,” she would observe to her husband, “and I am in the main as other women. Therefore, this Saraïde is very certainly a natural phenomenon. And in nature everything appears to be intended for this, that or the other purpose. Indeed, after howsoever hasty consideration of the young woman known as Saraïde, one inevitably deduces that so much of loveliness and wit and aspiration, of color and perfume and tenderness, was not put together haphazardly; and that the compound was painstakingly designed to serve some purpose or another purpose. It is about that purpose I want knowledge.”

And Kerin would reply, “As you like, my dear.”

So this young Saraïde, whom many called a witch, had sought, night after night, for the desired knowledge, in widely various surroundings, from the clergy, from men of business, from poets, and from fiends; and had wakened in her talisman every color save only that golden shining which would proclaim her capture of the truth. This clear soft yellow ray, as she explained to Kerin, would have to be evoked, if ever, in the night season, because by day its radiance might pass unnoticed and her perception of the truth be lost.

Kerin could understand the common-sense of this, at any rate. And so young Saraïde was unfailingly heartened in all such nocturnal experiments by the encouragement of her fond husband.

“And do not be discouraged, wife,” he would exhort her, as he was now exhorting upon this fine spring evening, “for women and their belongings are, beyond doubt, of some use or another, which by and by will be discovered. Meanwhile, my darling, what were you saying there is for supper? For that at least is a matter of real importance—”

But Saraïde said only, in that quick, inconsequential childish way of hers, “O Kerin of my heart, I do so want to know the truth about this, and about all other matters!”

“Come, come, Saraïde! let us not despair about the truth, either; for they tell me that truth lies somewhere at the bottom of a well, and at virtually the door of our home is a most notable if long dried well. Our location is thus quite favorable, if we but keep patience. And sooner or later the truth comes to light, they tell me, also,—out of, it may be, the darkness of this same abandoned Well of Ogde,—because truth is mighty and will prevail.”

“No doubt,” said Saraïde: “but throughout all the long while between now and then, my Kerin, you will be voicing just such sentiments!”

“—For truth is stranger than fiction. Yes, and as Lactantius tells us, truth will sometimes come even out of the devil’s mouth.”

Saraïde fidgeted. And what now came out of her own angelic mouth was a yawn.

“Truth is not easily found,” her Kerin continued. “The truth is hard to come to: roses and truth have thorns about them.”

“Perhaps,” said Saraïde. “But against banalities a married woman has no protection whatever!”

“Yet truth,” now Kerin went on with his kindly encouragement, “may languish, but can never perish. Isidore of Seville records the fine saying that, though malice may darken truth, it cannot put it out.”

“Husband of mine,” said Saraïde, “sometimes I find your wisdom such that I wonder how I ever came to marry you!”

But Kerin waved aside her tribute modestly. “It is merely that I, too, admire the truth. For truth is the best buckler. Truth never grows old. Truth, in the words of Tertullian, seeks no corners. Truth makes the devil blush.”

“Good Lord!” said Saraïde. And for no reason at all she stamped her foot.

“—So everybody, in whatsoever surroundings, ought to be as truthful as I am now, my pet, in observing that this hour is considerably past our usual hour for supper, and that I have had rather a hard day of it—”

But Saraïde had gone from him, as if in meditation, toward the curbing about the great and bottomless Well of Ogde. “Among these general observations, about devils and bucklers and supper time, I find only one which may perhaps be helpful. Truth lies, you tell me, at the bottom of a well just such as this well.”

“That is the contention alike of Cleanthes and of Democritos the derider.”

“May the truth not lie indeed, then, just as you suggested, at the bottom of this identical well? For the Zhar-Ptitza alone knows the truth about all things, and I recall an old legend that the bird who has the true wisdom used to nest in this part of Poictesme.”

Kerin looked over the stone ledge about the great and bottomless Well of Ogde, peering downward as far as might be. “I consider it improbable, dear wife, that the Zhar-Ptitza, who is everywhere known to be the most wise and most ancient of birds and of all living creatures, would select such a cheerless looking hole to live in. Still, you never can tell: the wise affect profundity; and this well is known to be deep beyond the knowledge of man. Now nature, as Cicero informs us, _in profundo veritatem penitus abstruserit_—”

“Good Lord!” said Saraïde again, but with more emphasis. “Do you slip down there, then, like a dear fellow, and find the truth for me.”

Saying this, she clapped both hands to his backside, and she pushed her husband into the great and bottomless Well of Ogde.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

_43._
_Prayer and the Lizard Maids_

══════════════════════════════════════════════════

THE unexpectedness of it all, alike of Saraïde’s assault and of the astonishing discovery that you could fall for hundreds after hundreds of feet, full upon your head, without getting even a bruise, a little bewildered Kerin when he first sat up at the bottom of the dry well. He shouted cheerily, “Wife, wife, I am not hurt a bit!” because the fact seemed so remarkably fortunate and so unaccountable.

But at once large stones began to fall everywhere about him, as though Saraïde upon hearing his voice had begun desperately to heave these stones into the well. Kerin thought this an inordinate manner of spurring him onward in the quest of knowledge and truth, because the habitual impetuosity of Saraïde, when thus expressed with cobblestones, would infallibly have been his death had he not sought shelter in the opening he very luckily found to the southwest side. There was really no understanding these women who married you, Kerin reflected, as after crawling for a while upon hands and feet, he came to a yet larger opening, in which he could stand erect.

But this passage led Kerin presently to an underground lake, which filled all that part of the cavern, so that he could venture no farther. Instead, he sat down upon the borders of these gloomy and endless looking waters. He could see these waters because of the many ignes fatui, such as are called corpse candles, which flickered and danced above the dark lake’s surface everywhere.

Kerin in such dismal circumstances began to pray. He loyally gave precedence to his own faith, and said, first, all the prayers of his church that he could remember. He addressed such saints as seemed appropriate, and when, after the liveliest representation of Kerin’s plight, sixteen of them had failed, in any visible way to intervene, then Kerin tried the Angels, Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, Dominions, Virtues, Powers, Principalities, and Archangels.

Yet later, when no response whatever was vouchsafed by any member of this celestial hierarchy, Kerin inferred that he had, no doubt, in falling so far, descended into heretical regions and into the nefarious control of unchristian deities. So he now prayed to all the accursed gods of the heathen that he could remember as being most potent in dark places. He prayed to Aïdoneus the Laughterless, the Much-Receiving, the People-Collecting, the Invincible and the Hateful; to the implacable Kerês, those most dreadful cave-dwellers who are nourished by the blood of slain warriors; to the gloom-roaming Erinnyes, to the Gray-Maids, to the Snatchers, and, most fervently, to Korê, that hidden and very lovely sable-vested Virgin to whom belonged, men said, all the dim underworld.

But nothing happened.

Then Kerin tried new targets for his praying. He addressed himself to Susanoö, that emperor of darkness who was used to beget children by chewing up a sword and spitting out the pieces; to Ekchuah, the Old Black One, who at least chewed nothing with his one tooth; to the red Maruts, patched together from the bits of a shattered divine embryo; to Onniont, the great, horned, brown and yellow serpent, whose lair might well be hereabouts; to Tethra, yet another master of underground places; to Apep also, and to Set, and to Uhat, the Chief of Scorpions; to Camazotz, the Ruler of Bats; to Fenris, the wolf who waited somewhere in a cave very like this cave, against the oncoming time when Fenris will overthrow and devour God the All-Mighty Father; and to Sraosha, who has charge of all worlds during the night season.

And still nothing happened: and Kerin could see only endless looking waters and, above them, those monotonously dancing corpse candles.

Kerin nevertheless well knew, as a loyal son of the Church, the efficacy of prayer; and he now began, in consequence, to pray to the corpse candles, because these might, he reflected, rank as deities in this peculiarly depressing place. And his comfort was considerable when, after an ave or two, some of these drifting lights came flitting toward him; but his surprise was greater when he saw that each of the ignes fatui was a living creature like a tiny phosphorescent maiden in everything except that each had the head of a lizard.

“What is your nature?” Kerin asked, “and what are you doing in this cold dark place?”

“Should we answer either of those questions,” one of the small monsters said, in a shrill little voice, as though a cricket were talking, “it would be the worse for you.”

“Then, by all means, do not answer! Instead, do you tell me if knowledge and truth are to be found hereabouts, for it is of them that I go in search.”

“How should we know? It was not in pursuit of these luxuries that we came hither, very unwillingly.”

“Then, how does one get out of this place?”

Now they all twittered together, and they flitted around Kerin with small squeakings. “One does not get out of this place.”

Kerin did not cry pettishly, as Saraïde would have done, “Good Lord!” Instead, he said, “Dear me!”

“Nor have we any wish to leave this place,” said the small lizard-women. “These waters hold us here with the dark loveliness of doom; we have fallen into an abiding hatred of these waters; we may not leave them because of our fear. It is not possible for any man to imagine the cruelty of these waters. Therefore we dance above them; and all the while that we dance we think about warmth and food instead of about these waters.”

“And have you no food here nor any warmth, not even brimstone? For I remember that, up yonder in Poictesme, our priests were used to threaten—”

“We do not bother about priests any longer. But a sort of god provides our appointed food.”

“Come, come now, that is much better. For, as I was just saying to my wife, supper is a matter of vital importance, after a rather hard day of it— But who is this sort of god?”

“We do not know. We only know that he has nineteen names.”

“My very dear little ladies,” said Kerin, “your information appears so limited, and your brightness so entirely physical, that I now hesitate to ask if you know for what reason somebody is sounding that far-off gong which I can hear?”

“That gong means, sir, that our appointed food is ready.”

“Alas, my friends, but it is quite unbearable,” declared Kerin, “that food should be upon that side of the dark water, and I, who have had rather a hard day of it, should be upon this side!”

“No, no!” they reassured him, “it is not unbearable, for we do not mind it in the least.”

Then the squeaking little creatures all went away from Kerin, flitting and skimming and twinkling over broad waters which seemed repellently cold and very dreadfully deep. Nevertheless, Kerin, in his desperation,—now that no god answered his prayer, and even the ignes fatui had deserted him, and only a great hungering remained with Kerin in the darkness,—Kerin now arose and went as a diver speeds into those most unfriendly looking waters.

The result was surprising and rather painful: for, as Kerin thus discovered, these waters were not more than two feet in depth. He stood up, a bit sheepishly, dripping wet, and rubbing his head. Then Kerin waded onward in a broad shallow puddle about which there was no conceivable need to bother any god.

Kerin thus came without any hindrance to dry land, and to a place where the shining concourse of lizard-women had already begun to nibble and tug and gulp. But Kerin, after having perceived the nature of their appointed food, and after having shivered, walked on beyond this place, toward the light he detected a little above him.

“For supper,” he observed, “is a matter of vital importance; and it really is necessary to draw the line somewhere.”

------------------------------------------------------------------------

_44._
_Fine Cordiality of Sclaug_

══════════════════════════════════════════════════

NOW Kerin seemed in the dark to be mounting a flight of nineteen stairs. He came thus into a vast gray corridor, inset upon the left side with nineteen alcoves: each alcove was full of books, and beside each alcove stood a lighted, rather large candle as thick about as a stallion’s body. And Kerin’s surprise was great to find, near the first alcove, that very Sclaug with whom Kerin pleasurably remembered having had so much chivalrous trouble and such fine combats before, some years ago, this Sclaug had been killed and painstakingly burned.

Nevertheless, here was the old yellow gentleman intact and prowling about restively on all fours, in just the wolflike fashion he had formerly affected. But after one brief snarl of surprise he stood erect; and, rubbing together the long thin hands which were webbed between the fingers like the feet of a frog, Sclaug asked whatever could have brought Kerin so far down in the world.

For Kerin this instant was a bit awkward, since he knew not quite what etiquette ought to govern re-encounters with persons whom you have killed. Yet Kerin was always as ready as anybody to let bygones be cast off. So Kerin frankly told his tale.

Then Sclaug embraced Kerin, and bade him welcome, and Sclaug laughed with the thin, easy, neighing laughter of the aged.

“As for what occurred at Lorcha, dear Kerin, do not think of it any more than I do. It was in some features unpleasant at the time: but, after all, you burned my body without first driving a stake through my rebellious and inventive heart, and so since then I have not lacked amusements. And as for this knowledge and truth of which you go in search, here is all knowledge, in the books that I keep watch over in this Naraka,—during the intervals between my little amusements,—for a sort of god.”

Kerin scratched among the wiry looking black curls of Kerin’s hair, and he again glanced up and down the corridor. “There are certainly a great many of them. But Saraïde desired, I think, all knowledge, so near as I could understand her.”

“Let us take things in the order of their difficulty,” replied Sclaug. “Do you acquire all knowledge first, and hope for understanding later.”

The courteous old gentleman then provided Kerin with white wine and with food very gratefully unlike that of the ignes fatui, and Sclaug placed before Kerin one of the books.

“Let us eat first,” said Kerin, “for supper, in any event, is a matter of vital importance, where knowledge and truth may turn out to be only a womanish whim.”

He ate. Then Kerin began comfortably to read, after, as he informed Sclaug, rather a hard day of it.

Now the book which Kerin had was the book written by the patriarch Abraham in the seventy-first year of his age: and by and by Kerin looked up from it, and said, “Already I have learned from this book one thing which is wholly true.”

“You progress speedily!” answered Sclaug. “That is very nice.”

“Well,” Kerin admitted, “such is one way of describing the matter. But no doubt other things are equally true: and optimism, anyhow, costs nothing.”

------------------------------------------------------------------------

_45._
_The Gander Also Generalizes_

══════════════════════════════════════════════════

SO began a snug life for Kerin. The nineteen candles remained always as he had first seen them, tranquilly lighting the vast windless corridor, burning, but not ever burning down, nor guttering, nor even needing to be snuffed: and Kerin worked his way from one candle to another, as Kerin read each book in every alcove. When Kerin was tired he slept: all the while that he waked he gave to acquiring knowledge: he had no method nor any necessity of distinguishing between his daily and his nocturnal studies.

Sclaug went out and came back intermittently, bringing food for Kerin. Sclaug returned as a rule with blood upon his lips and chin. When Sclaug was away, Kerin had to make the best—a poor best,—of the company of the garrulous large gander which lived in the brown cage.

Then, also, unusual creatures, many of them not unlike men and women, would come sometimes, during these absences of Sclaug,—whom, for some reason or another, they seemed to dislike,—and they invoked the gander, and paid his price, and ceremonies would ensue. Ever-busy Kerin could not, of course, spare from his reading much time to notice these ornithomantic and probably pagan rites. Yet he endured such interruptions philosophically; because, at least, he reflected, they put an end for that while to the gander’s perilously sweet and most distracting singing.

And several years thus passed; and Kerin had no worries in any manner to interrupt him except the gander. That inconsiderate bird insisted upon singing, with a foolish, damnable sort of charm: and so, was continually checking Kerin’s pursuit of knowledge, with anserine rhapsodies about beauty and mystery and holiness and heroism and immortality, and about a variety of other unscientific matters.

“For life is very marvelous,” this gander was prone to remark, “and to the wonders of earth there is no end appointed.”

“Well, I would not say that, precisely,” Kerin would reply, good-temperedly looking up for the while from his book, “because geology has made great progress of late. And so, Messire Gander, I would not say quite that. Rather, I would say that Earth is a planet infested with the fauna best suited to survive in this particular stage of the planet’s existence. In any case, I finished long ago with earth, and with all ordinary terrestrial phenomena, such as earthquakes, and the formation of continents, and elevation of islands, and with stars and meteorics and with cosmography in general.”

“—And of all creatures man is the most miraculous—”

“The study of anthropology is of course important. So I have learned too about man, his birth and organization, his invention and practice of the arts, his polities at large, and about the sidereal influences which control the horoscope and actions of each person as an individual.”

“—A child of god, a brother to the beasts—!”

“Well, now, I question too the scientific value of zoömorphism: yet the facts about beasts, I admit, are interesting. For example, there are two kinds of camels; the age of the stag can be told by inspection of his horns; the period of gestation among sheep is one hundred and fifty days; and in the tail of the wolf is a small lock of hair which is a supreme love charm.”

“You catalogue, poor Kerin,” said the gander; “you collect your bits of knowledge as a magpie gathers shining pebbles; you toil through one book to another book as methodically as a worm gnaws out the same advance: but you learn nothing, in the wasted while that your youth goes.”

“To the contrary, I am at this very moment learning,” replied Kerin. “I am learning about the different kinds of stone and marble, including lime and sand and gypsum. I am learning that the artists who excelled in sculpture were Phidias, Scopas and Praxiteles. The last-named, I have just learned also, left a son called Cephisodotos, who inherited much of his father’s talent, and made a notably fine Group of Wrestlers.”

“You and your wrestlers,” said the gander, “are profoundly absurd! But time is the king of wrestlers; and he already prepares to try a fall with you.”

“Now, indeed, those Wrestlers were not absurd,” replied Kerin. “And the proof of it is that they were for a long while the particular glory of Pergamos.”

At that the gander seemed to give him up, saying, after a little hissing: “Very well, then, do you catalogue your facts about Pergamos and stag-horns and planets! But I shall sing.”

Kerin now for a while regarded his fellow prisoner with a trace of mild disapproval. And Kerin said:

“Yet I catalogue verities which are well proven and assured. But you, who live in a brown cage that is buried deep in this gray and lonely corridor, you can have no first-hand information as to beauty and mystery and holiness and heroism and immortality, you encourage people in a business of which you are ignorant, and you sing about ardors and raptures and, above all, about a future of which you can know nothing.

“That may very well be just why I sing of these things so movingly. And in any event, I do not seek to copy nature. I, on the contrary, create to divert me such faith and dreams as living among men would tend to destroy. But as it is, my worshipers depart from me drunk with my very potent music; they tread high-heartedly, in this gray corridor, and they are devoid of fear and parvanimity; for the effect of my singing, like that of all great singing, is to fill my hearers with a sentiment of their importance as moral beings and of the greatness of their destinies.”

“Oh, but,” said Kerin, “but I finished long ago with the various schools of morals, and I am now, as I told you, well forward in petrology. Nor shall I desist from learning until I have come by all knowledge and all truth which can content my Saraïde. And she, Messire Gander, is a remarkably clear-sighted young woman, to whom the romantic illusions which you provide could be of no least importance.”

“Nothing,” returned the gander, “nothing in the universe, is of importance, or is authentic to any serious sense, except the illusions of romance. For man alone of animals plays the ape to his dreams. These axioms—poor, deaf and blinded spendthrift!—are none the less valuable for being quoted.”

“Nor are they, I suspect,” replied Kerin, “any the less generally quoted for being bosh.”

With that he returned to his books; and the gander resumed its singing.

And many more years thus passed: overhead, the legend of Manuel had come into being and was flourishing, and before its increase the brawling bleak rough joyous times which Kerin had known, were, howsoever slowly, passing away from Poictesme, not ever to return. Overhead, Count Emmerick was ruling—inefficiently enough, but at least with a marked bent toward the justice and mercy and kindliness imposed upon him by the legend,—where Dom Manuel had ruled according to his own will alone. Overhead, Dame Niafer and Holmendis were building everywhere their shrines and convents and hospitals; and were now beginning, a little by a little, to persecute, with the saint’s rather ruthless miracle-working, the fairies and the demons and all other unorthodox spirits aboriginal to this land; and were beginning, too, to extirpate the human heretics who here and there had showed such a lack of patriotism and of religious faith as to question the legend of Manuel and the transcending future of Poictesme.

The need of doing this was a grief to Niafer and Holmendis, as well as a troubling tax upon their hours of leisure: but, nevertheless, as clear-headed philanthropists, they here faced honestly the requirements of honest faith in any as yet revealed religion,—by which all unbelievers must be regarded as lost in any event, and cannot be permitted to continue in life except as a source of yet other immortal souls’ pollution and ruin.

Meanwhile the gander also exalted the illusions of romance: and Kerin read. His eyes journeyed over millions upon millions of pages in the while that Kerin sat snug: and except for the gander’s perilously sweet and most distracting singing, Kerin had no worries in any manner to interrupt him, and no bothers whatever, save only the increasing infirmities of his age.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

_46._
_Kerin Rises in the World_

══════════════════════════════════════════════════

THEN old Sclaug said to Kerin, who now seemed so much older than Sclaug seemed: “It is time for you and me to cry quits with studying: for you have worked your way as a worm goes through every alcove in this place, you have read every book that was ever written; and I have seen that vigor which destroyed me destroyed. I go into another Naraka: and you must now return, omniscient Kerin, into the world of men.”

“That is well,” said Kerin, “because, after all, I have been away from home a long while. Yes, that is well enough, although I shall regret to leave the books of that god of whom you told me,—and whom, by the way, I have not yet seen.”

“I said, of a sort of god. He is not worshiped, I must tell you, by the very learned nor by the dull. However!” Sclaug said, after a tiny silence, “however, I was wondering if you have found in these books the knowledge you were looking for?”

“I suppose so,” Kerin answered, “because I have acquired all knowledge.”

“And have you found out also the truth?”

“Oh, yes!” said Kerin, speaking now without hesitancy.

Kerin took down from its place the very first book which Sclaug had given him to read, when Kerin was yet young, the book which had been written—upon leaves of tree bark, with the assistance of a divine collaborator,—by the patriarch Abraham when an horror of great darkness fell upon him in the plain of Mamrê. This book explained the wisdom of the temple, the various master-words of chance, the seven ways of thwarting destiny, and one thing which is wholly true. And Kerin half opened this book, at the picture of an old naked eunuch who with a scythe was hacking off the feet of a naked youth gashed everywhere with many small wounds; then turned to a picture of a serpent crucified; and, shrugging, put by the book.

“—For it appears,” said Kerin, “that, after all, only one thing is wholly true. I have found nowhere any other truth: and this one truth, revealed to us here, is a truth which nobody will blame the patriarch for omitting from his more widely circulated works. Nevertheless, I have copied out every word of it, upon this bit of paper, to show to and make glad the dear bright eyes of my young wife.”

But Sclaug replied, without looking at the proffered paper, “The truth does not matter to the dead, who have done with all endeavor, and who can change nothing.”

Then he told Kerin good-by; and Kerin opened the door out of which Sclaug was used to go in search of Sclaug’s little amusements. When Kerin had passed through this door he drew it to behind him: and in that instant the door vanished, and Kerin stood alone in a dim winter-wasted field, fingering no longer a copper door-knob but only the chill air.

Leafless elder-trees rose about him, not twenty paces before Kerin was the Well of Ogde: and beyond its dilapidated curbing, a good half of which somebody had heaved down into the well, he saw, through wintry twilight, the gray eight-sided house in which he had been used to live with the young Saraïde whom many called a witch.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

_47._
_Economics of Saraïde_

══════════════════════════════════════════════════

KERIN went forward, beneath naked elder boughs, toward his dear home; and he saw coming out of the door of the gray house the appearance of a man who vaguely passed to the right hand of Kerin in the twilight. But a woman’s figure waited at the door; and Kerin, still going onward, came thus, in the November twilight, again to Saraïde.

“Who is that man?” said Kerin, first of all. “And what is he doing here?”

“Does that matter?” Saraïde answered him, without any outcry or other sign of surprise.

“Yes, I think it matters that a naked man with a red shining about his body should be seen leaving here at this hour, in the dead of winter, for it is a thing to provoke great scandal.”

“But nobody has seen him, Kerin, except my husband. And certainly my own husband would not stir up any scandal about me.”

Kerin scratched his white head. “Yes, that,” said Kerin, “that seems reasonable, according to the best of my knowledge. And the word ‘knowledge’ reminds me, Saraïde, that you sent me in search of knowledge as to why life is given to human beings, so that you might in the light of this knowledge appropriately dispose of your youth. Well, I have solved your problem, and the answer is, Nobody knows. For I have acquired all knowledge. All that any man has ever known, I am now familiar with, from the medicinal properties of the bark aabec to the habits of the dragonfly called zyxomma: but no man, I find, has ever known for what purpose life was given him, nor what ends he may either help or hinder in any of his flounderings about earth and water.”

“I remember,” Saraïde said now, as if in a faint wonder. “I wanted, once, when I was young and when the eye of no man went over me without lingering, then I wanted to know the truth about everything. Yet the truth does not really matter to the young, who are happy; and who in any case have not the shrewdness nor the power to change anything: and it all seems strange and unimportant now. For you have been a long time gone, my Kerin, and I have lived through many years, with many and many a companion, in the great while that you have been down yonder getting so much knowledge from the bird who has the true wisdom.”

“Of whatever bird can you be talking?” said Kerin, puzzled. “Oh, yes, now I also remember! But, no, there is nothing in that old story, my darling, and there is no Zhar-Ptitza in the Well of Ogde. Instead, there is a particularly fine historical and scientific library: and from it I have acquired all knowledge, and have thus happily solved your problem. Nor is that the end of the tale: for you wanted not merely knowledge but truth also, and in consequence I have found out for you the one thing which—according to Abraham’s divine collaborator, in a moment of remarkable and, I suppose, praiseworthy candor,—is wholly true. And that truth I have neatly copied out for you upon this bit of paper—”

But there was really no understanding these women who despatched you upon hazardous and quite lengthy quests. For Saraïde had interrupted him without the least sign of such delight and satisfaction, or even of pride in her husband’s exploits, as would have seemed only natural. And Saraïde said:

“The truth does not matter to the aged. Of what good is the truth to you or to me either, now that all the years of our youth are gone, and nothing in our living can be changed?”

“Well, well!” observed Kerin, comfortably, and passing over her defects in appreciation, “so the most of our lifetime has slipped by since I slipped over that well-curbing! But how time flies, to be sure! Did you say anything, my dear?”

“I groaned,” replied Saraïde, “to have you back again with your frayed tags of speech and the desolation of your platitudes: but that does not matter either.”

“No, of course not: for all is well, as they say, that ends well. So out with your talisman, and let us quicken the golden shining which will attest the truth I have fetched back to you!”

She answered rather moodily: “I have not that talisman any longer. A man wanted it. And I gave it to him.”

“Since generosity is a virtue, I have no doubt that you did well. But to what man, Saraïde, did you give the jewel that in youth you thought was priceless?”

“Does that matter, now? and, indeed, how should I remember? There have been so many men, my Kerin, in the tumultuous and merry years that are gone by forever. And all of them—” Here Saraïde breathed deeply. “Oh, but I loved them, my Kerin!”

“It is our Christian duty to love our neighbors. So I do not doubt that, here again, you have done well. Still, one discriminates, one is guided, even in philanthropy, by instinctive preferences. And therefore I am wondering for what especial reason, Saraïde, did you love these particular persons?”

“They were so beautiful,” she said, “so young, so confident in what was to be, and so pitiable! And now some of them are gone away into the far-off parts of earth, and some of them are gone down under the earth in their black narrow coffins, and the husks of those that remain hereabouts are strange and staid and withered and do not matter any longer. Life is a pageant that passes very quickly, going hastily from one darkness to another darkness with only ignes fatui to guide; and there is no sense in it. I learned that, Kerin, without moiling over books. But life is a fine ardent spectacle; and I have loved the actors in it: and I have loved their youth and their high-heartedness, and their ungrounded faiths, and their queer dreams, my Kerin, about their own importance and about the greatness of the destiny that awaited them,—while you were piddling after, of all things, the truth!”

“Still, if you will remember, my darling, it was you yourself who said, as you no doubt recall, just as you shoved me—”

“Well! I say now that I have loved too utterly these irrational fine things to have the heart, even now, to disbelieve in them, entirely: and I am content.”

“Yes, yes, my dear, we two may both well be content. For we at last can settle down and live serenely in this place, without undue indulgence in philanthropy; and we two alone will know the one truth which is wholly true.”

“Good Lord!” said Saraïde; and added, incoherently, “But you were always like that!”

------------------------------------------------------------------------

_48._
_The Golden Shining_

══════════════════════════════════════════════════

THEY went then, silently, from the twilight into the darkness of the house which had been their shared home in youth, and in which now there was no youth and no sound and no assured light anywhere. Yet a glow of pallidly veiled embers, not quite extinct where all else seemed dead, showed where the hearth would be. And Saraïde said:

“It is droll that we have not yet seen each other’s faces! Give me your foolish paper, Kerin of my heart, that I may put it to some use and light this lamp.”

Kerin, a bit disconsolately, obeyed: and Saraïde touched the low red embers with the paper which told about the one thing which is wholly true. The paper blazed. Kerin saw thus speedily wasted the fruit of Kerin’s long endeavor. Saraïde had lighted her lamp. The lamp cast everywhither now a golden shining: and in its clear soft yellow radiancy, Saraïde was putting fresh wood upon the fire, and making tidy her hearth.

After that necessary bit of housework she turned to her husband, and they looked at each other for the first time since both were young. Kerin saw a bent, dapper, not unkindly witch-woman peering up at him, with shrewd eyes, over the handle of her broom. But through the burning of that paper, as Kerin saw also, their small eight-sided home had become snug and warm and cozy looking, it even had an air of durability: and Kerin laughed, with the thin, easy, neighing laughter of the aged.

For, after all, he reflected, it could benefit nobody ever to recognize—either in youth or in gray age or after death—that time, like an old envious eunuch, must endlessly deface and maim, and make an end of, whatever anywhere was young and strong and beautiful, or even cozy; and that such was the one truth which had ever been revealed to any man, assuredly. Saraïde, for that matter, seemed to have found out for herself, somewhere in philanthropic fields, the one thing which was wholly true; and she seemed, also, to prefer to ignore it, in favor of life’s unimportant, superficial, familiar tasks.... Well, and Saraïde, as usual, was in the right! It was the summit of actual wisdom to treat the one thing which was wholly true as if it were not true at all. For the truth was discomposing, and without remedy, and was too chillingly strange ever to be really faced: meanwhile, in the familiar and the superficial, and in temperate bodily pleasures, one found a certain cheerfulness....

He temperately kissed his wife, and he temperately inquired, “My darling, what is there for supper?”

------------------------------------------------------------------------

_49._
_They of Nointel_

══════════════════════════════════════════════════

THUS, then, it was that, in the November following Guivric’s encounter with the Sylan, Kerin of Nointel came back into Poictesme, to become yet another convert to the great legend of Manuel.

Kerin was converted almost instantaneously. For when the news of Kerin’s return was public, Holmendis soon came that way, performing very devastating miracles en route among the various evil and ambiguous spirits which yet lurked in the rural districts of Poictesme. The saint was now without any mercy imprisoning all such detected immortals right and left, in tree-trunks and dry wells and consecrated bottles, and condemning them in such exiguous sad quarters to await the holy Morrow of Judgment. With Holmendis, as his coadjutor in these praiseworthy labors, traveled the appearance of Guivric the Sage.

And when St. Holmendis and Glaum-Without-Bones (in Guivric’s stolen body) had talked to Kerin of Nointel about the great cult of Manuel the Redeemer which had sprung up during Kerin’s pursuit of knowledge underground, and had showed him the holy sepulchre at Storisende and Manuel’s bright jewel-encrusted effigy, and had told about Manuel’s ascent into heaven, then old Kerin only blinked, with mild, considerate, tired eyes.

“It is very likely,” Kerin said, “since it was Manuel who gave to us of Poictesme our law that all things must go by tens forever.”

“Now, what,” said Glaum, in open but wholly amiable surprise, “has that to do with it?”

“I have learned that a number of other persons have entered alive into heaven. I allude of course to Enoch, whose smell the cherubim found so objectionable that they recoiled from him a distance of five thousand, three hundred and eighty miles. I allude also to Elijah; to Eliezer, the servant of Abraham; to Hiram, King of Tyre; to Ebed Melek the Ethiop; to Jabez, the son of Prince Jehuda; to Bathia, the daughter of a Pharaoh; to Sarah, the daughter of Asher; and to Yoshua, the son of Levi, who did not go in by the gateway, but climbed over the wall. And I consider it quite likely that Dom Manuel would elect to make of this company, as he did of everything else, a tenth.”

Thereafter Holmendis said, rather dubiously, “Well—!” And Holmendis talked again of Manuel....

“That too seems likely enough,” Kerin agreed. “I have learned that these messengers from the gods to our race upon earth are sent with commendable regularity every six hundred years. The Enoch of whom I was speaking but a moment since was the first of them, in the six-hundredth year after Adam. Then, as the happy upshot of a love affair between a Mongolian empress and a rainbow, came into this world Fo-hi, six hundred years after Enoch’s living; and six hundred years after the days of Fo-hi was Brighou sent to the Hindoos. At the same interval of time or thereabouts have since come Zoroaster to the Persians, and Thoth the Thrice Powerful to the Egyptians, and Moses to the Jews, and Lao Tseu to the men of China, and Paul of Tarsus to the Gentiles, and Mohammed to the men of Islam. Mohammed flourished just six hundred years before our Manuel. Yes, Messire Holmendis, it seems likely enough that, here too, Manuel would elect to make a tenth.”

Then pious gentle old Glaum-Without-Bones began to speak with joy and loving reverence about the glories of Manuel’s second coming....

“No doubt, dear Guivric: for I have learned that all the great captains are coming again,” said Kerin, almost wearily. “There is Arthur, there is Ogier, there is Charlemagne, there is Barbarossa, there is Finn, the son of Cumhal,—there is in every land, in fine, a foreknowledge of that hero who will return at his appointed time and bring with him all glory and prosperity. Prince Siddartha also is to return, and Saoshyant, and Alexander of Macedon, and Satan too, for that matter, is expected to return, for his last fling, a little before the holy Morrow of Judgment. Here again, therefore, I consider it quite likely that Dom Manuel may elect to make a tenth.”

In short, the old fellow took Poictesme’s epiphany almost too calmly.... Glaum was satisfied, on the ground that a conversion was a conversion, and an outing for all the angels in heaven. But it was apparent that Holy Holmendis did not quite like the posture of affairs.... You could not, of course, detect in this incurious receptiveness any skepticism; nor could a person who went ten times too far in the way of faith be, very rationally, termed an unbeliever. It was, rather, as if Kerin viewed the truth without joy: it was as if Kerin had, somehow, become over-familiar with the sublime truths about Manuel the Redeemer some while before he heard them; and so, was hearing them, now at long last, without the appropriate upliftedness and flow of spirits. Kerin merely accepted these tremendous truths; and seemed upon the whole to be more interested in life’s unimportant, superficial, familiar tasks, and in his food.

Holmendis must have felt that the desiderata here were intangible. In any event, he shook his aureoled head; and, speaking in the tongue of his native Philistia, he said something to Glaum-Without-Bones—which Glaum could not at all understand,—about “the intelligentsia, so-called.” But Holmendis did not resort to any dreadful miracle by which old Kerin might have been appalled into a more proper excitement and joyousness....

Yet it was a very unbounded joy, and a joy indeed at which all beholders wondered, to Kerin of Nointel, when he saw and embraced the fine son, named Fauxpas, who had been born to Saraïde during the fifth year of Kerin’s studies underground. For Kerin’s studies had informed him that such remarkably prolonged gestations are the infallible heralds of one or another form of greatness,—a fact evinced by the birth of Osiris and of several other gods and of all elephants,—and he deduced that his son would in some way or another rise to worldly preëminence.

And that inference proved to be reasonably true, since it was this Fauxpas de Nointel who led Count Emmerick’s troops for him in the evil days of Maugis d’Aigremont’s rebellion, and held Poictesme for Manuel’s son until aid came from the Comte de la Fôret. For twelve years at least this son of Kerin was thus preëminent among most of his associates, and twelve years is a reasonable slice out of any man’s life. And the eldest son of Fauxpas de Nointel was that Ralph who married Madame Adelaide, the daughter of the Comte de la Fôret, and the granddaughter of Dom Manuel, and who builded at Nointel the great castle with seven towers which still endures.

------------------------------------------------------------------------