“What do you call your turnpike corner?” enquired Peter of this couple of age-stricken ones, as they sat side by side on a wooden bench, filling a big wooden bucket with a mess of sour milk and mouldy bread and bad potatoes, while a big bristling sow of a yellowish colour uplifted her snout from a hollow place scooped out of the ground before them.
“What does the lord on his feet say?” enquired the antiquity who wore male clothes, addressing the antiquity who wore female clothes.
The woman made no reply to this question. But she rose to her feet and held out a long skinny arm with a regular birds’ claw at the end of it.
“Give silver, great lord of the highway,” she murmured huskily in a queer French patois: “and me yes! even me, will give you the magic word for your long travel.”
The enormous head of Peter of Maricourt moved a little, or perhaps we ought to say drooped a little forward, while from the white expanse of his face, like the sting of a creature that might have stung itself to death in the days of the father of Abraham, protruded the sharp tip of a presumably human tongue.
His black eyes seemed to the companion of the female antiquity, who still kept opening and closing her extended fingers, to flow into each other till they ceased to be two bottomless blacknesses and became one. But whether they were one or two, they evidently read in the Cretan Maze of feminine wrinkles upon which they were now concentrated that that seemingly dried up fountain of wisdom had a tap that was well worth tapping.
“Yes, by Satan,” the traveller must have thought, “I’ll get something out of you!” for he was not only nodding with his head now, but he was also searching in the lining of his jerkin.
At last he brought out a couple of silver coins, a big one and a little one. These he turned over in his fingers many times, so as to make sure the woman saw just what they were and the difference between them. Having satisfied himself that both these things had been observed, he negligently flipped the edges of the two pieces of silver together and permitted his own raptorial orbs to relapse into their respective hollows, while they took in the geographical position of this most pitiful of all possible turnpikes.
He soon became aware that the narrow road he had come by, and the three radiating roads now offering themselves as rivals for his next move, were all sloping upwards. And the queer thing was that, while there were occasional trees, some big, some small, some deciduous, some coniferous, along the edges of all these roads, the ridge or rim of the shallow grassy basin out of which they all led and over which they all vanished into the void or into the clouds, was entirely bare, bare of gorse or bracken or black-thorn, so nakedly bare that it was possible even to note the varying height of particular patches of ordinary meadow grass.
“Why is it,” the man asked himself, “that to stand at the bottom of a shallow bowl like this and look up at its grassy rim, about half a mile, I suppose, from this hut, gives me such complete acceptance of my fate as I feel at this moment? If my fate had been totally different from what it is, I mean different from the fate of being the Antichrist, who has been prophesied of as long as the Christ has been prophesied of, should I, I wonder, feel this same acceptance of it simply from staring up at this rim of grass?
“If, for instance I’d been a Jewish youth like Moses and had come here straight from a vision of the burning bush, with the voice of Jehovah issuing from it and the revelation that it was my fate to lead Israel out of Egypt, should I be feeling this same calm acceptance of such a fate as I feel now when I fall into my role as the self-appointed antagonist of Jesus? Is there perhaps a revelation of some planetary Anangkee, or sublime Necessity, in the mere presence of a naked rondure of earth and grass like this against the whole of empty Space?”
With this thought and with this spectacle in his mind, Petrus Peregrinus returned the larger of the two silver coins to the folds of his jerkin and handed the smaller one to the woman, who clutched it, and proceeded to bite it with what were obviously the only teeth in her head that were opposite each other.
Clearly satisfied with the sensation in her mouth caused by this action, she opened with a metallic snap a small receptacle fastened to a leather belt round her waist and slipped the coin inside.
“And now,” cried Petrus Peregrinus, fumbling with a bag in the lining of his jerkin adjoining the abode of his special treasure the loadstone. Presently he produced from this receptacle a small live slow-worm, at the sight of which the woman in front of him was seized with panic, and leaving her seat crouched down behind her mate, who groaned and shut his eyes.
All Petrus did however was to fling the slow-worm into the uplifted jaws of the great sow, who promptly bit off its head. Nobody but Petrus saw the pitiful flap which the tail of the slow-worm made to avoid following its head down the sow’s throat. These are the things that, if they can only be seen by the right person, lead to some very curious conclusions as to the mystery of life. For as the sow lay down to digest what it had swallowed, the decapitated tail, without wriggling at all and with a final motion of infinite relaxation, as if it were thankfully joining the vast army of exhausted organisms whose reckless, desperate, and aggressive “heads” have flung them aside, stretched out to welcome eternal rest.
“And now,” murmured Petrus Peregrinus, “I shall leave you, and take the road to the nearest port for the Isle of Britain where I have a greater conquest to achieve than you — or he—” and he nodded at the old man with closed eyes—“or you either, old lady—” and with the handle of his sheathed sword-dagger he prodded the sow’s back—“could possibly understand. And that”—and he pointed to the continuation, over the rim of the valley, of the road by which he had come, “that will be the way I shall go.”
With this he turned his back upon them all, upon the old man, whose whole conscious personality seemed devoted to the task of allowing nothing to make him open his eyes, upon the sow who was clearly finding the digestion of a small saurian head an occupation both peaceful and soothing, upon the absolutely motionless body of the decapitated slow-worm, against which, as against the side of a Leviathan, two small insects were already tentatively extending their minute feelers, and finally upon the old lady, who, as she watched that small dark figure — for his soldier’s cap was black, his jerkin was black, a heavy velvet cloak he carried on his arm was black, his stockings and wooden shoes were black, while the blackest of all was his one single weapon, that half-sword, half-dagger, which he left in its sheath and used as a short staff to support his steps on any uphill road — uttered from the depths of her whole being the oldest of all European curses.
It wasn’t till he was just not quite out of hearing that the old woman stretched out both her arms to give full expression to this malediction. With the fingers of both her hands tightly closed she repeated the word Erre!
“Erre! Erre!” she cried over and over again, pronouncing each syllable of the word with peculiar emphasis.
Petrus of Maricourt turned quickly enough when he caught those two syllables upon the air. In Picardy, as well as in Savoy, and of course everywhere along the shore of the Mediterranean, that phrase was used to express loathing and bitter contempt. So there was the magic word that he had stopped so long at that turn-pike hovel to extract from its witch-wife! Erre! And the word was the very same curse that had been heard in all the harbours of all the coasts and islands of the Mediterranean and Aegean since the days of Homer.