“Do not disturb me,” said this bird, at once, “for I have had quite enough to upset me already.”
Florian for an instant stayed silent and somewhat confused. For this evidently was not the saint’s hermitage, and a talking gander seemed not wholly natural. Then Florian recollected that Morven had always been the home of sorcery. So Florian replied, with great civility, that he had not meant to intrude, but merely happened to be passing. And Florian then talked with this gander, who told of the quite disgusting scene he had witnessed when a woman, riding upon a magic staff, had come into the hut, and had there been delivered of a child.
“Children are not usually acquired so,” said the gander, “for as a rule, a stork brings them, and that is a much nicer method.”
“But where,” said Florian, “is now this honorarium ?”
“I do not know what that means,” the bird replied, “but I do know that if it means anything objectionable it has almost certainly been in here today to annoy me.”
And the bird told of how a dove had come and had carried off in its beak the ring the woman had given it. He told how presently had come a fine looking man with a shining about his head, not flying but luxuriously riding through the air upon a gold cloud, with cherubs’ heads floating about him; and how the woman and the child had gone away upon this same cloud, surrounded by, the gander thought, extremely fretful looking cherubs.
“The whole affair has upset me very much,” said the gander, “for I was composing, and I can never bear to be interrupted.”
And the gander sang to Florian of the proper way in which children should be born and should live thereafter. About the glory of love and the felicities of marriage, about patriotism and success in business and about the high assurances of religion, the gander sang, and about optimism and philanthropy and about the steady advancing of every kind of social improvement. And of man that is the child and heir of God, and of the splendor of man’s works, and of the magnanimity of human nature, and of the wonder of man’s living upon earth, the gander sang also.
“Parbleu, but let us be logical about this!” said Florian. “Your art is very pleasing; but it embellishes a lazar-house with pastels. For human living is not at all like the song you have made concerning it.”
“So much the worse for human living,” the gander answered. “It does not bother me here in my cage. Besides, the purpose and the effect of my singing, like that of all great singing, is to fill my fellows with a sentiment of their importance as moral beings and of the greatness of their destinies. So I do not mimic. I create.”
Florian looked at the gander for some while, and Florian sighed. This creature too had in it nothing of the realist, Florian reflected, and it preferred to live by its own code; but its aesthetic theories coincided with Hoprig’s. And the hermitage of that—somehow—ambiguous Hoprig was still to seek.
Florian left the imprisoned gander singing very gloriously, and Florian went now across Morven, that place of abominable fame. These uplands were thickly overgrown with a queer vine that had large oval leaves, the green of which was mottled with red, somewhat like the skin of snakes. Here also grew strawberry vines. As he walked this undergrowth was continually catching in the buckles of Florian’s shoes. Everywhere were inexplicable soft noises, and about his face danced a small cloud of midges.
There was no other sign of life except that once five large black and white birds rose from the ground immediately before him, seeming to rise from between his feet as the grasshoppers had done. This did not frighten Florian, exactly, but the suddenness of it, in this lonely place, gave him a shock not wholly delightful. These birds, he saw, had been feeding there upon the berries of a small bush, upon purple berries which were about the size of a wren’s egg, and whose outer sides had been pecked away by the birds, leaving the seeds exposed. All this was natural enough until you reflected that in these latitudes no bush produced berries as early as April.
Now toward twilight Florian came to clumps of big and vividly yellow toad-stools, which seemed fat and poisonous and very evil. He passed among these, breaking many of them with his feet, and reflecting that the tiny screams which appeared to be uttered by these broken, loathsomely soft things must be the cry of some other sort of queer bird hidden somewhere near at hand. And he presently saw the appearance of a man coming toward him, and about the head of this man was a shining, as Florian perceived from afar, and was so assured that this was Hoprig.
Florian went forward intrepidly, once he had loosened Flamberge in the scabbard. But this was not Hoprig. It was, instead, an incredibly old man in faded blue, who carried upon his arm an open basket filled with small roots. At his heel came a blue and white dog. The old man looked once at Florian, with peculiarly bright eyes, like the eyes of those who had watched the Feast of the Wheel, and he passed without speaking. The dog paused, and without making any noise, sniffed about Florian’s legs once or twice, as if this inspection were a matter of duty, and then followed this old man who had about his head a shining. It was odd, but the dog made no noise when he sniffed thus close to you; and neither the man in blue nor the blue and white dog made any least noise as they passed through the thick and tangled vines underfoot; nor did their passing at all move these vines which caught at the buckles of Florian’s shoes so that he was continually tripping. These things rendered it difficult to believe that the man and the dog could be wholly natural.
And still those pertinacious midges danced before Florian’s eyes: and he was tired of slapping at them without ever driving them away. Morven did not appear a merry place, upon this the last day of April, as Florian toiled through Morven’s thickening twilight, in search of Holy Hoprig’s hermitage, wherein was now the child that Florian had need of.
26. Husband and Wife
TOWARD evening Florian came into the saint’s hermitage. Inside, it proved a most comfortable hermitage, having walls builded of logs with the interstices filled with plaster. It seemed rather luxuriously furnished, to Florian’s glance, which took exact note of nothing more specific than the skull upon the lectern and the three silver-gilt candelabra. These twelve candles, as you came in from the twilight, made the room quite cosy. Florian did not, however, look at the room’s equipment with the interest he reserved for his wife.
Melior sat there, alone except for the newborn child in her lap. At the sound of Florian’s entrance she had drawn the child closer, raising her blue mantle about it in an involuntary movement of protection: and as she faced him thus, Florian could see, without any especial interest, that with motherhood all her lost beauty had returned. It seemed inexplicable, but Melior was, if anything, more lovely than she had ever been: it was probably one of Hoprig’s miracles: and Florian found time to wonder why he should be, so unquestionably and so actively, irritated by the sight of a person in everything so pleasing.
Neither spoke for a while.
“I thought that you would be here before long: and all I have to say is that I wonder how you can look me in the face,” observed Melior, at last. “Still, that you should be so bent upon your own destruction that you have followed us even here, does, I confess, astonish me. Why, Florian, have you no sense at all!”
“My dearest, you underestimate the power of paternal affection.” Florian came to her, and gently uncovered the child’s face. The baby, having supped, was asleep. Florian looked at it for a moment and for yet another moment. He shrugged. “No: I am aware of none of the appropriate emotions. The creature merely seems to me unfinished. Its head, in particular, has been affixed most unsatisfactorily; and I lament the general appearance of having been recently boiled. No, I sacrifice little.”