33.Economics of Coth
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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: andnone 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 excellentmirth 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 matterabout 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 hadyet 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 soexulted 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 slippedhis 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 aboutsome 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 SIXIN THE SYLAN’S HOUSE“Is it time for you to dwell in your ceiled houses, and this house lie waste?”—Haggai, i, 4.
BOOK SIXIN THE SYLAN’S HOUSE“Is it time for you to dwell in your ceiled houses, and this house lie waste?”—Haggai, i, 4.
BOOK SIX
IN THE SYLAN’S HOUSE
“Is it time for you to dwell in your ceiled houses, and this house lie waste?”
—Haggai, i, 4.