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

be heroic to tell you this boy’s life was ruined. But I do not think it was. Instead, he had learned all of a sudden that which at twenty-one is heady knowledge. That was the hour which taught him sorrow and rage, and sneering, too, for a redemption. Oh, it was armor that hour brought him, and a humor to use it, because no woman now could hurt him very seriously. No, never any more!”

“Ah, the poor boy!” she said, divinely tender, and smiling as a goddess smiles, not quite in mirth.

“Well, women, as he knew by experience now, were the pleasantest of playfellows. So he began to play. Rampaging through the world he went in the pride of his youth and in the armor of his hurt. And songs he made for the pleasure of kings, and swordplay he made for the pleasure of men, and a whispering he made for the pleasure of women, in places where renown was, and where he trod boldly, giving pleasure to everybody, in those fine days. But the whispering, and all that followed the whispering, was his best game, and the game he played for the longest while, with many brightly colored playmates who took the game more seriously than he did. And their faith in the game’s importance, and in him and his high-sounding nonsense, he very often found amusing: and in their other chattels too he took his natural pleasure. Then, when he had played sufficiently, he held a consultation with diverse waning appetites; and he married the handsome daughter of an estimable pawnbroker in a fair line of business. And he lived with his wife very much as two people customarily live together. So, all in all, I would not say his life was ruined.”

“Why, then, it was,” said Dorothy. She stirred uneasily, with an impatient sigh; and you saw that she was vaguely puzzled. “Oh, but somehow I think you are a very horrible old man: and you seem doubly horrible in that glittering queer garment you are wearing.”

“No woman ever praised a woman’s handiwork, and each of you is particularly severe upon her own. But you are interrupting the saga.”

“I do not see”⁠—and those large bright eyes of which the color was so indeterminable and so dear to Jurgen, seemed even larger now⁠—“but I do not see how there could well be any more.”

“Still, human hearts survive the benediction of the priest, as you may perceive any day. This man, at least, inherited his father-in-law’s business, and found it, quite as he had anticipated, the fittest of vocations for a cashiered poet. And so, I suppose, he was content. Ah, yes; but after a while Heitman Michael returned from foreign parts, along with his lackeys, and plate, and chest upon chest of merchandise, and his fine horses, and his wife. And he who had been her lover could see her now, after so many years, whenever he liked. She was a handsome stranger. That was all. She was rather stupid. She was nothing remarkable, one way or another. This respectable pawnbroker saw that quite plainly: day by day he writhed under the knowledge. Because, as I must tell you, he could not retain composure in her presence, even now. No, he was never able to do that.”

The girl somewhat condensed her brows over this information. “You mean that he still loved her. Why, but of course!”

“My child,” says Jurgen, now with a reproving forefinger, “you are an incurable romanticist. The man disliked her and despised her. At any event, he assured himself that he did. Well, even so, this handsome stupid stranger held his eyes, and muddled his thoughts, and put errors into his accounts: and when he touched her hand he did not sleep that night as he was used to sleep. Thus he saw her, day after day. And they whispered that this handsome and stupid stranger had a liking for young men who aided her artfully to deceive her husband: but she never showed any such favor to the respectable pawnbroker. For youth had gone out of him, and it seemed that nothing in particular happened. Well, that was his saga. About her I do not know. And I shall never know! But certainly she got the name of deceiving Heitman Michael with two young men, or with five young men it might be, but never with a respectable pawnbroker.”

“I think that is an exceedingly cynical and stupid story,” observed the girl. “And so I shall be off to look for Jurgen. For he makes love very amusingly,” says Dorothy, with the sweetest, loveliest meditative smile that ever was lost to heaven.

And a madness came upon Jurgen, there in the garden between dawn and sunrise, and a disbelief in such injustice as now seemed incredible.

“No, Heart’s Desire,” he cried, “I will not let you go. For you are dear and pure and faithful, and all my evil dream, wherein you were a wanton and befooled me, was not true. Surely, mine was a dream that can never be true so long as there is any justice upon earth. Why, there is no imaginable God who would permit a boy to be robbed of that which in my evil dream was taken from me!”

“And still I cannot understand your talking, about this dream of yours⁠—!”

“Why, it seemed to me I had lost the most of myself; and there was left only a brain which played with ideas, and a body that went delicately down pleasant ways. And I could not believe as my fellows believed, nor could I love them, nor could I detect anything in aught they said or did save their exceeding folly: for I had lost their cordial common faith in the importance of what use they made of half-hours and months and years; and because a jill-flirt had opened my eyes so that they saw too much, I had lost faith in the importance of my own actions, too. There was