Jurgen, James Branch Cabell [ebook reader computer .txt] 📗

As for you, you are either a delusion or a god or a degraded Realist. But whatever you are, you have lied to me, and I know that you have lied, and I will not believe in the insignificance of Jurgen.”

Chillingly came the whisper of the brown man: “Poor fool! O shuddering, stiff-necked fool! and have you not just seen that which you may not ever quite forget?”

“None the less, I think there is something in me which will endure. I am fettered by cowardice, I am enfeebled by disastrous memories; and I am maimed by old follies. Still, I seem to detect in myself something which is permanent and rather fine. Underneath everything, and in spite of everything, I really do seem to detect that something. What role that something is to enact after the death of my body, and upon what stage, I cannot guess. When fortune knocks I shall open the door. Meanwhile I tell you candidly, you brown man, there is something in Jurgen far too admirable for any intelligent arbiter ever to fling into the dustheap. I am, if nothing else, a monstrous clever fellow: and I think I shall endure, somehow. Yes, cap in hand goes through the land, as the saying is, and I believe I can contrive some trick to cheat oblivion when the need arises,” says Jurgen, trembling, and gulping, and with his eyes shut tight, but even so, with his mind quite made up about it. “Of course you may be right; and certainly I cannot go so far as to say you are wrong: but still, at the same time⁠—”

“Now but before a fool’s opinion of himself,” the brown man cried, “the Gods are powerless. Oh, yes, and envious, too!”

And when Jurgen very cautiously opened his eyes the brown man had left him physically unharmed. But the state of Jurgen’s nervous system was deplorable.

XX Efficacy of Prayer

Jurgen went in a tremble to the Cathedral of the Sacred Thorn in Cameliard. All night Jurgen prayed there, not in repentance, but in terror. For his dead he prayed, that they should not have been blotted out in nothingness, for the dead among his kindred whom he had loved in boyhood, and for these only. About the men and women whom he had known since then he did not seem to care, or not at least so vitally. But he put up a sort of prayer for Dame Lisa⁠—“wherever my dear wife may be, and, O God, grant that I may come to her at last, and be forgiven!” he wailed, and wondered if he really meant it.

He had forgotten about Guenevere. And nobody knows what were that night the thoughts of the young Princess, nor if she offered any prayers, in the deserted Hall of Judgment.

In the morning a sprinkling of persons came to early mass. Jurgen attended with fervor, and started doorward with the others. Just before him a merchant stopped to get a pebble from his shoe, and the merchant’s wife went forward to the holy-water font.

“Madame, permit me,” said a handsome young esquire, and offered her holy water.

“At eleven,” said the merchant’s wife, in low tones. “He will be out all day.”

“My dear,” says her husband, as he rejoined her, “and who was the young gentleman?”

“Why, I do not know, darling. I never saw him before.”

“He was certainly very civil. I wish there were more like him. And a fine looking young fellow, too!”

“Was he? I did not notice,” said the merchant’s wife, indifferently.

And Jurgen saw and heard and regarded the departing trio ruefully. It seemed to him incredible the world should be going on just as it went before he ventured into the Druid forest.

He paused before a crucifix, and he knelt and looked up wistfully. “If one could only know,” says Jurgen, “what really happened in Judea! How immensely would matters be simplified, if anyone but knew the truth about You, Man upon the Cross!”

Now the Bishop of Merion passed him, coming from celebration of the early mass. “My Lord Bishop,” says Jurgen, simply, “can you tell me the truth about this Christ?”

“Why, indeed, Messire de Logreus,” replied the Bishop, “one cannot but sympathize with Pilate in thinking that the truth about Him is very hard to get at, even nowadays. Was He Melchisedek, or Shem, or Adam? or was He verily the Logos? and in that event, what sort of a something was the Logos? Granted He was a god, were the Arians or the Sabellians in the right? had He existed always, co-substantial with the Father and the Holy Spirit, or was He a creation of the Father, a kind of Israelitic Zagreus? Was He the husband of Acharamoth, that degraded Sophia, as the Valentinians aver? or the son of Pantherus, as say the Jews? or Kalakau, as contends Basilidês? or was it, as the Docetês taught, only a tinted cloud in the shape of a man that went from Jordan to Golgotha? Or were the Merinthians right? These are a few of the questions, Messire de Logreus, which naturally arise. And not all of them are to be settled out of hand.”

Thus speaking, the gallant prelate bowed, then raised three fingers in benediction, and so quitted Jurgen, who was still kneeling before the crucifix.

“Ah, ah!” says Jurgen, to himself, “but what a variety of interesting problems are, in point of fact, suggested by religion. And what delectable exercise would the settling of these problems, once for all, afford the mind of a monstrous clever fellow! Come now, it might be well for me to enter the priesthood. It may be that I have a call.”

But people were shouting in the street. So Jurgen rose and dusted his knees. And as Jurgen came out of the Cathedral of the Sacred Thorn the cavalcade was passing that bore away Dame Guenevere to the arms and throne of her appointed husband. Jurgen stood upon the Cathedral porch, his mind in