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.
28. THE RESPECTABLE GESTURE
Then his wife died. She died sedately, with the best medical and churchly aid, and after an appropriate leave-taking of her numerous family. There was a loneliness upon Madoc when he saw her white and shriveled old body,—so troublingly made strange by the forlorn aloofness of the dead,—lying upon the neat bed among four torches of pine wood. His loneliness closed over him like a cold flood.
He thought confusedly of the fierce loving which had been between them in their youth; and of their high adventuring because of a music which was not wholly of this earth; and of the ensuing so many years through which a sensible, unmoonstruck married couple had shared in all and in howsoever trivial matters loyally; and of how those fallen pale lips would not ever find fault with him any more. It was then that he fetched the black pen with which Madoc had written his world-famous songs; and he laid his pen in the cold hand of Ettarre.
“I call you all to witness,” said Madoc, “that this day has robbed my living of its purpose and of every joy. I call you all to witness that I shall make no more songs now that I have lost my heart’s arbiter and my art’s arbitrary and most candid critic. Let my fame end with my happiness! Let the provokers of each perish in the one burning!”
29. “THIS TRULY DOES NOT DIE”
Thereafter Madoc stood beside the funeral pyre. About him were his children and his grandchildren. A company of white-robed boys, from the temple of the local goddess of fertility, were singing what many persons held to be the very noblest of Madoc’s many superb songs, the poet’s great hymn about human immortality and about the glorious heritage of man that is the ever-living and beloved heir of Heaven.
Four bondwomen were killed, and their bodies were arranged gracefully about the pyre, along with the furnishings of Ettarre’s toilet table and her cooking utensils and her sewing implements. Then fire was laid to all. Ettarre’s frail aged body was burned so, with the black pen that was in her hand.
The white-robed boys sang very movingly; and they enumerated sweetly and comfortably, and exultantly, the joys into which this noble and most virtuous lady had entered yesterday afternoon. But old Madoc heard another music, unheard through all the years in which he had held Ettarre away from her lunar witcheries to be his bedfellow upon Earth: and the bereaved widower shocked everybody by laughing aloud, now that he heard once more the skirling music from behind the moon which, whether it stayed heard or unheard, was decreed to be the vexing of him who had cheated the Norns.
30. LEADS TO CONTENTMENT
Such was the end of his prosperity and honor, and such was the beginning of his happiness. Old Madoc went now as a vagabond, a trifle crazed, a trifle ragged, but utterly satisfied to follow after that music which none other heard.
Its maker fled always a little before him, inaccessibly: she held before her that with which she made her music, upon no cumbersome bronze harp but upon her heartstrings: her averted face he could not see, nor did he any longer wonder if it were Ettarre or some other who guided him. It was enough that Madoc followed after the music woven out of all doubtfulness and discontent which rang more true than any other music.
He followed its sweet skirling down the lanes and streets in which home-keeping persons chanted the famous songs of Madoc. Everywhere the smiling old wanderer could see his fellows living more happily and more worthily because of the contentedness and the exultant faith which was in these songs.
He was glad that he had made these songs, to be a cordial to guiltless men who had not cheated the Norns. Meanwhile—for him who had outwitted the Gray Three,—there stayed always yonder, always just ahead, another music, which was not wholly of this earth, and which a vagabond alone might be following after always, as was his allotted doom.
31. THE BEST POSSIBLE POSTSCRIPT
This the story of Madoc: but of the story of Ettarre this is only a very little part. For her story is not lightly to be ended (so do the learned declare) by the death of any woman’s body which for a while Ettarre has been wearing: nor is her music-making ended either (the young say), no matter to what ears time and conformity may have brought deafness.
I think we oldsters hardly need to debate the affair, with so many other matters to be discussed and put in order, now that all evenings draw in. If there be any music coming from behind the moon it echoes faintlier than does the crackling of the hearth-fire; it is drowned by the piping voices of our children. We—being human—may pause to listen now and then, half wistfully, it may be, for an unrememberable cadence which only the young hear: yet we whom time has made deaf to this music are not really discontent; and common decency forbids one to disturb the home circle (as that blundering Lamech did, you may remember) by crying out, “I have slain a young man to my hurt!”