Sclaug went out and came back intermittently, bringing food for Kerin. Sclaug returned as a rule with blood upon his lips and chin. When Sclaug was away, Kerin had to make the best—a poor best,—of the company of the garrulous large gander which lived in the brown cage.
Then, also, unusual creatures, many of them not unlike men and women, would come sometimes, during these absences of Sclaug,—whom, for some reason or another, they seemed to dislike,—and they invoked the gander, and paid his price, and ceremonies would ensue. Ever-busy Kerin could not, of course, spare from his reading much time to notice these ornithomantic and probably pagan rites. Yet he endured such interruptions philosophically; because, at least, he reflected, they put an end for that while to the gander’s perilously sweet and most distracting singing.
And several years thus passed; and Kerin had no worries in any manner to interrupt him except the gander. That inconsiderate bird insisted upon singing, with a foolish, damnable sort of charm: and so, was continually checking Kerin’s pursuit of knowledge, with anserine rhapsodies about beauty and mystery and holiness and heroism and immortality, and about a variety of other unscientific matters.
“For life is very marvelous,” this gander was prone to remark, “and to the wonders of earth there is no end appointed.”
“Well, I would not say that, precisely,” Kerin would reply, good-temperedly looking up for the while from his book, “because geology has made great progress of late. And so, Messire Gander, I would not say quite that. Rather, I would say that Earth is a planet infested with the fauna best suited to survive in this particular stage of the planet’s existence. In any case, I finished long ago with earth, and with all ordinary terrestrial phenomena, such as earthquakes, and the formation of continents, and elevation of islands, and with stars and meteorics and with cosmography in general.”
“—And of all creatures man is the most miraculous—”
“The study of anthropology is of course important. So I have learned too about man, his birth and organization, his invention and practice of the arts, his polities at large, and about the sidereal influences which control the horoscope and actions of each person as an individual.”
“—A child of god, a brother to the beasts—!”
“Well, now, I question too the scientific value of zoomorphism: yet the facts about beasts, I admit, are interesting. For example, there are two kinds of camels; the age of the stag can be told by inspection of his horns; the period of gestation among sheep is one hundred and fifty days; and in the tail of the wolf is a small lock of hair which is a supreme love charm.”
“You catalogue, poor Kerin,” said the gander; “you collect your bits of knowledge as a magpie gathers shining pebbles; you toil through one book to another book as methodically as a worm gnaws out the same advance: but you learn nothing, in the wasted while that your youth goes.”
“To the contrary, I am at this very moment learning,” replied Kerin. “I am learning about the different kinds of stone and marble, including lime and sand and gypsum. I am learning that the artists who excelled in sculpture were Phidias, Scopas and Praxiteles. The last-named, I have just learned also, left a son called Cephisodotos, who inherited much of his father’s talent, and made a notably fine Group of Wrestlers.”
“You and your wrestlers,” said the gander, “are profoundly absurd! But time is the king of wrestlers; and he already prepares to try a fall with you.”
“Now, indeed, those Wrestlers were not absurd,” replied Kerin. “And the proof of it is that they were for a long while the particular glory of Pergamos.”
At that the gander seemed to give him up, saying, after a little hissing: “Very well, then, do you catalogue your facts about Pergamos and staghorns and planets! But I shall sing.”
Kerin now for a while regarded his fellow prisoner with a trace of mild disapproval. And Kerin said:
“Yet I catalogue verities which are well proven and assured. But you, who live in a brown cage that is buried deep in this gray and lonely corridor, you can have no first-hand information as to beauty and mystery and holiness and heroism and immortality, you encourage people in a business of which you are ignorant, and you sing about ardors and raptures and, above all, about a future of which you can know nothing.”
“That may very well be just why I sing of these things so movingly. And in any event, I do not seek to copy nature. I, on the contrary, create to divert me such faith and dreams as living among men would tend to destroy. But as it is, my worshipers depart from me drunk with my very potent music; they tread high-heartedly, in this gray corridor, and they are devoid of fear and parvanimity; for the effect of my singing, like that of all great singing, is to fill my hearers with a sentiment of their importance as moral beings and of the greatness of their destinies.”
“Oh, but,” said Kerin, “but I finished long ago with the various schools of morals, and I am now, as I told you, well forward in petrology. Nor shall I desist from learning until I have come by all knowledge and all truth which can content my Saraide. And she, Messire Gander, is a remarkably clear-sighted young woman, to whom the romantic illusions which you provide could be of no least importance.”
“Nothing,” returned the gander, “nothing in the universe, is of importance, or is authentic to any serious sense, except the illusions of romance. For man alone of animals plays the ape to his dreams. These axioms—poor, deaf and blinded spendthrift!—are none the less valuable for being quoted.”
“Nor are they, I suspect,” replied Kerin, “any the less generally quoted for being bosh.”
With that he returned to his books; and the gander resumed its singing.
And many more years thus passed: overhead, the legend of Manuel had come into being and was flourishing, and before its increase the brawling bleak rough joyous times which Kerin had known, were, howsoever slowly, passing away from Poictesme, not ever to return. Overhead, Count Emmerick was ruling—inefficiently enough, but at least with a marked bent toward the justice and mercy and kindliness imposed upon him by the legend,—where Dom Manuel had ruled according to his own will alone. Overhead, Dame Niafer and Holmendis were building everywhere their shrines and convents and hospitals; and were now beginning, a little by a little, to persecute, with the saint’s rather ruthless miracle-working, the fairies and the demons and all other unorthodox spirits aboriginal to this land; and were beginning, too, to extirpate the human heretics who here and there had showed such a lack of patriotism and of religious faith as to question the legend of Manuel and the transcending future of Poictesme.
The need of doing this was a grief to Niafer and Holmendis, as well as a troubling tax upon their hours of leisure: but, nevertheless, as clear-headed philanthropists, they here faced honestly the requirements of honest faith in any as yet revealed religion,—by which all unbelievers must be regarded as lost in any event, and cannot be permitted to continue in life except as a source of yet other immortal souls’ pollution and ruin.
Meanwhile the gander also exalted the illusions of romance: and Kerin read. His eyes journeyed over millions upon millions of pages in the while that Kerin sat snug: and except for the gander’s perilously sweet and most distracting singing, Kerin had no worries in any manner to interrupt him, and no bothers whatever, save only the increasing infirmities of his age.