But Skuld looked rather pensively at each of the two other literary ladies before she said, “One almost pities them at times.”
Then Urdhr laughed outright. “My darling, you waste sympathy in this sweet fashion because we also were poets when we wrote Earth’s Epic. For myself, I grant we made a mistake to put any literary people in the book. Still, it is a mistake to which most beginners are prone: and that story, you must remember, was one of our first efforts. All inexperienced girls must necessarily write balderdash. So we put poets in that book, and death, and love, and common-sense, and I can hardly remember what other incredibilities.”
With that, they all laughed again, to think of their art’s crude beginnings.
23. THE CALL OF EARTH
A poet is bold. “There is no god in any current mythology who would have made bold to cheat the Norns,” said Sargatanet, with odd quietness.
Madoc replied, “My pen is almighty; my pen is equally good at music-making and at arithmetic.”
Sargatanet looked, for some while, with very pale blue eyes, at the two midgets down there beside his gold-sandaled feet. “Your pen makes music,” Sargatanet then said, “such as all men delight in. Yet it cannot make my music. Your pen cannot write down nor may it cancel any line of the music which I eternally devise to be an eternal vexing to every poet, no matter what may be his boldness.”
But, in the while that Sargatanet spoke such nonsense, Madoc had uplifted his Ettarre to the back of his hippogriffin. “I have done with all vexations!” Madoc cried out, as the glittering monster spread its huge white wings, and, flapping upward from behind the moon, plunged mightily toward Earth.
Thereafter the hippogriffin went as a comet goes, because its heart remembered that upon this Earth, among the dear hills of Noenhir, were its warm nest builded out of cedar trees and its loved mate brooding over her agate-colored eggs. And upon the monster’s back, exulting Madoc also passed with a high heart, toward his allotted doom.
PART FOUR. OF MADOC IN THE OLD TIME
Ils vécurent ainsi pendant quelque temps: et la plume noire lui donna de l’argent, du bien, tout ce qu’il faut pour vivre heureux dans le monde. Ensuite le chevalier Madoc partit encore pour voyager.
24. THE OLD TIME REITERATES
Thus it was that Madoc and his Ettarre returned to an Earth rejuvenated by Madoc’s pen, and lived in the old time which long and long ago had perished before the time of Madoc.
Now the Northmen ruled as lords of Noenhir, where the hippogriffin had left its riders. These Northmen were an unsophisticated and hardy people, exceedingly brave and chaste, whose favorite recreations were drunkenness and song-making and piracy.
They welcomed the singer who could make such comfortable and uplifting songs as Madoc wrote with the quill which had fallen from the wing of the Father of All Lies. Madoc sang to them about their own importance, about the excellence of their daily habits, and about the splendid and luxurious future which was in store for their noble Nordic race: he made for them that music which incites mankind toward magnanimity.
Under their winged helmets the ruddy faces of the attendant pirates were aglow with altruism and kindliness and every manner of virtue. In their thorps and homesteads they welcomed Madoc, and paid him well. So Madoc builded at Noenhir a fine wooden halclass="underline" he and his Ettarre began housekeeping: and Madoc had not anything to trouble him, and his fair wife’s embraces were now as dear to him as once had been the embraces of Ainath.
25. CONFECTIONER’S REPOSE
Madoc had not anything to trouble him. For many years he made his songs, and these songs made his hearers better and more happy. The only difference was that Madoc, now, had invested some little faith in his optimistic and uplifting songs; and much of what they said appeared to Madoc to be, quite possibly, almost true, here and there.
Madoc lived statelily, with all manner of comfort, in his broad hall, with dragons handsomely painted upon each end of it, and with a stout palisade of oak logs enclosing everything. The most prominent thieves and cutthroats in the country delighted to hear and to reward the singing of Madoc; Druids had crowned Madoc with the sacred mistletoe, as the king of skalds; the fame of Madoc was spread everywhither about the world: and the renowned poet had not anything to trouble him, and no heavier task confronted Madoc than to make praiseworthy music.
But Ettarre made no more music. “How was it that little air of yours used to run, my darling?” her illustrious husband would ask, very carelessly.
And Ettarre would reply, with the common-sense of a married woman: “How can I remember a music I never learned until centuries after this morning? And besides, what time have I for such fiddle-faddle with all these children on my hands?”
26. WHAT WAS NOT TROUBLE
Madoc knew that he had not anything to trouble him. You were not really troubled by your vagrant notion that the face of Ainath or the face of Maya, or the more terrible strange pallor of Queen Lilith’s face, seemed now and then to be regarding the well-thought-of poet that was Madoc, with a commingling—for so illogical are all day-dreams—of derision and of pity.
Nor could you call it a trouble that, now and then, in such misleading reveries as were apt to visit idle persons when upon the plains and hills of Noenhir the frail tints of spring were resting lightly, and ever so briefly, the women whom tall, red-haired young Madoc had thrust aside, because of the magic laid upon the prime of his manhood, seemed to have been more dear and more desirable than anybody could expect a mere boy to appreciate.
Nor was it a trouble—rather, was it, when properly regarded, a blessing—that the one woman whom you had ever loved was endlessly wrangling nowadays over your meals and the validity of your underclothing, and over the faithlessness of all servants, and over the doings of her somewhat tedious children; and was endowed, nowadays, with the chronic and the never wholly smothered dissatisfaction which is the mark of a competent housekeeper. Madoc very well knew that he had not anything to trouble him.
27. TOO MUCH IS NOT ENOUGH
Meanwhile love’s graduates lived with large ease and splendor. About their rheumatic knees were now the flaxen heads of grandchildren: they had broad farmlands, and thralls to do their bidding, and many cattle lowed in their barns. Life had given them all the good things which life is able to give. And Madoc had no desires save those which food and sleeping satisfied, and lean red-haired Madoc now was lean and gray and pompous, and unaccountably peevish also.
He rarely wrote new songs. But everywhere his elder songs had been made familiar, in all quarters of the world, by the best-thought-of pirates and sea rovers, as the sort of thing of which the decadent younger generation was incapable. Everybody everywhere was charmed by their resonant beguilement. Even the most callow poets admitted that with a little more frankness about sexual matters and the unfairness of social conditions the old fellow would have been passable.
Madoc, in brief, had not any care or need, nor, it was plain, any contentment. He fell more and more often to asking Ettarre if she could not recollect, just for the fun of the thing, a strain or two of the music from behind the moon with which she used to keep him without any home and miserable. And the old lady would tell him more and more pettishly that she had no patience whatever with his nonsense.