Выбрать главу

James Branch Cabell

The Witch-Woman Trilogy

James Branch Cabell

[1879–1958]

The Witch-Woman Trilogy

From the Biography of Manuel

Being the three stories of Ettare, the daughter of Manuel the Redeemer,

Consisting of:

The Music Behind The Moon,

The White Robe,

and

The Way Of Ebcen

together with the original

Colophon.

  (The text conforms with the 1948 revisions by the author.)

Table of Contents

THE MUSIC FROM BEHIND THE MOON

PART ONE. OF MADOC IN HIS YOUTH

PART TWO. OF MADOC IN THIS WORLD

PART THREE. OF MADOC IN THE MOON

PART FOUR. OF MADOC IN THE OLD TIME

THE WHITE ROBE

1. OF HIS MANNER OF LIFE IN THE SECULAR

2. OF HIS ARDENT LOVE AND APPROACH TO MARTYRDOM

3. OF HIS CONFESSION AND CONVERSION

4. OF THE DIVINE CONDESCENSIONS SHOWN UNTO HIM

5. OF HIS YET FURTHER INCREASE IN GRACE

6. OF HIS CONTINUED ZEAL AND EFFICACY

7. OF THE SALUTARY POWER OF HIS PREACHING

8. OF THE KINDLY IMPULSES OF HIS PIETY

9. OF THE REWARD APPOINTED FOR HIM

10. OF HIS RIGHTEOUS ENDING

THE WAY OF ECBEN

Words for the Intending Reader

PART ONE: Of Alfgar in His kingdom

Chapter I. The Warring for Ettaine

Chapter II. Of Their Love-talk

Chapter III. A Dream Smites Him

Chapter IV. The Sending of the Swallow

Chapter V. The Way of Ulf

PART TWO: Of Alfgar in His Journeying

Chapter VI. We Come to Davan

Chapter VII. ‘The King Pays!’

Chapter VIII. We Approach Clioth

Chapter IX. The Way of Worship

Chapter X. The Last Giving

Chapter XI. How Time Passed

PART THREE: Of Alfgar in the Grayness

Chapter XII. The Way of All Women

Chapter XIII. What a Boy Thought

PART FOUR: Of Alfgar in a Garden

Chapter XIV. We Encounter Dawn

Chapter XV. How the King Triumphed

Chapter XVI. Contentment of a Chevalier

Chapter XVII. The Changing of Alfgar

Chapter XVIII. As to Another Marriage Feast

Chapter XIX. The Way It Ended

PART FIVE: Of Horvendile and Ettarre

Chapter XX. We Regard Other Wanderers

THE COLOPHON CALLED: “Hail and Farewell, Ettarre!”

Chapter I. Which Disposes of The Witch-Woman

Chapter II. Which Takes Up an Unprofitable Subject

Chapter III. Which Touches Youth and Uncrabbed Age

Chapter IV. Which Records a Strange Truism

Chapter V. Which Chronicles an Offset

Chapter VI. Which Becomes Reasonable

Chapter VII. Which Deals with the Deplorable

Chapter VIII. Which Slightly Anticipates

Chapter IX. Which Keeps a Long Standing Engagement

Chapter X. Which, at Long Last, Says All

THE MUSIC FROM BEHIND THE MOON

EPITOME OF A POET

  “Judge thou the lips of those that rose up against me,

  and their devices against me all the day.

  Behold their sitting down, and their rising up;

  I am their music.

FOR

CARL VAN VECHTEN

Whatever hereinafter he may like

PART ONE. OF MADOC IN HIS YOUTH

  —De grâce, belle dame, si je puis vous demander ce que fait a coeur de savoir, dites-moi pourquoi vous êtes assise ici toute seule?

  —Je vais te le dire, man pauvre Madoc, avec franchise.

THE TEXT FROM GENESIS

  To such as will to listen I plan here to tell the story of Madoc and some little part of the story of Ettarre.

  Now this is a regrettably familiar tale. It may possibly have begun with Lamech, in the Book of Genesis,—who was, in any event, the first well-thought-of citizen upon known record to remark, “I have slain a young man to my hurt!” And poets tell us that many poets whose bodies had survived to middle age have repeated this glum observation, although probably not ever since then, when Lamech spoke without tact, to their co-partners alike in the homicide and in married life.

  Moreover, this is a regrettably inconclusive tale, without any assured ending. Nor is there any assured prophesying, either, that the next thousand years or so will remedy that defect in this tale, because the story of Ettarre is not lightly to be ended by the death of any woman’s body which for a while Ettarre has been wearing.

  And, lastly, this is a regrettably true tale such as no correct-thinking person ought to regard seriously.

1. FOUR VIEWS OF A POET

  Lean red-haired Madoc was the youngest and the least promising of the poets about the cultured court of Netan, the High King of Marr and Kett. When it was Madoc’s turn to take out his bronze harp from its bag of otter-skin, and to play at a banquet, he assisted nobody’s digestion. And, as the art-loving King would put it, twisting half-fretfully at his long white beard, what else was the lad there for?

  The best-thought-of connoisseurs declared the songs of Madoc to be essentially hollow and deficient in, as they phrased it in their technical way, red blood: to which verdict the wives and the sweethearts of these connoisseurs were only too apt to reply that, anyhow, the boy was quite nice-looking. The unthinking women thus confirmed the connoisseurs in their disapproval.

  But the strangest matter of all, in a world where poets warm themselves mainly by self-esteem, was that not even to young Madoc did his songs appear miraculous beyond any description.

  To Madoc’s hearing his songs ran confusedly; they strained toward a melody which stayed forever uncaptured; and they seemed to him to be thin parodies of an elvish music, not wholly of this earth, some part of which he had heard very long ago and had half forgotten, but the whole of which music remained unheard by any mortal ears.

2. THE WOMAN LIKE A MIST

  Now, upon a May evening, when a plump amber-colored moon stayed as yet low behind the willows in the east, this same young Madoc bathed with an old ceremony. Thereafter he sat beside the fountain meditatively disposing of his allotted portion of thin wine and of two cheese sandwiches. A woman came to him, white-limbed and like a living mist in that twilight.

  “Hail, friend!” said Madoc.

  She replied, with hushed and very lovely laughter, “I am not your friend.”

  He said, “Well, peace be with you, in any event!”

  She answered, “There is for you, poor Madoc, no more peace, now that I have come to you all the long way from behind the moon.”

  And then that woman did a queer thing, for she laid to her young breasts her hands, and from the flesh of her body she took out her red heart, and upon her heartstrings she made a music.

  It was a strange and troubling music she made there in the twilight, and after that slender mistlike woman had ended her music-making, and had vanished as a white wave falters and is gone, then Madoc could not recall the theme or even one cadence of her music-making, nor could he put the skirling of it out of his mind. Moreover, there was upon him a loneliness and a hungering for what he could not name.