GARIN SEEKS HIS FORTUNE

One day, from sunrise to sunset, Garin kept company with the train of the Abbot of Saint Pamphilius. As the day dropped toward eve the road touched a stream that, reflecting the western sky, blushed like a piece of coral. It was the monks’ home stream. The ford passed, their abbey would ere long rise before them. Some were tired of travel and had been homesick for garden and refectory, cell and chapel—homesick as a dog for its master, a child for its mother, a plant for its sunshine. Some were not tired of travel and were not homesick. So there were both glad and sorry in the fellowship that, midway of the ford, checked the fat abbey mules and horses to let them drink. The beasts stooped their necks to the pink water; monks and lay brothers and abbey knaves looked at the opposite slope. When they reached its crest they would see before them Saint Pamphilius, grey and rich. The abbot’s mule drank first as was proper, raised its head first, and with a breath of satisfaction splashed forward. The two monks immediately attendant upon the Reverend Father must pull up their horses’ heads before they had half drunken and follow their superior.

The abbot, mounting the gently shelving bank, looked at his sons in God, yet dotting the small bright river. He just checked his mule. “That limping youth is no longer in our company.”

The monk nearest him spoke. “Reverend Father, as we came through the wood a mile back, he gave Brother Anselm thanks, then slipped from behind him. Brother Bartholomew called to him, but he went away among the trees.”

“Ah!” said the abbot; “in which direction?”

“Reverend Father, southwardly.”

Abbot Arnaut sat silent a moment, then shook the reins and his mule climbed on toward the hill-top. “Ah,” he said to himself, and he said it piously. “He is young, and when you are young perils do not imperil! When you are young, you are an eel to slip through—I have done what I could! Doubtless he will escape.”

That night there rose a great round moon. It lighted Garin through the wood until he was ready to sleep,—it showed him where he could find the thickest bed and covering of leaves,—and when he waked in the night he saw it like a shield overhead. All day, riding behind Brother Anselm, the monks about him, black as crows, he had felt dull and dead. Waking now in the night, forest around him and moon above, sheer unfamiliarity and wonder at his plight made him shiver and start like a lost child. All that he had lost passed before him. Foulque passed, transfigured in his eyes, he was so lonely and sick for home. Raimbaut the Six-fingered passed, transfigured. The rude hall in Raimbaut’s keep, the smoky fire and the lounging men—they were desirable to him; he felt a cold pang when it crossed him that he would never win back. He strove to plunge, head to heel, into the rich depths of the feeling before this feeling, to recall the glow out of which he had spoken at Castel-Noir, to go back to the nightingale’s singing. It was there, that feeling; he knew that it had been born and was living. But to-night half a chill and empty world was between him and it. There in the forest, beneath the round moon, he had a bewildered brain and an aching heart. Then at last he crossed the half-world to some faint sweetness, and so slept.

With the dawn he was afoot. He had a piece of bread in his pouch, and as he walked he ate this, and a streamlet gave him drink. The wood thinned. In the first brightness of the day he came upon a road of so fair a width and goodness that he saw it must be a highway and beaded with towns. Apparently it ran northeast and southwest, though so broken was the country that at short range it rounded almost any corner you might choose. Where he was going he did not know, but he took the trend that led him south by west. Dimly he thought of making his way into Spain. Barcelona—there was a great town—and King Alfonso of Aragon was known for a gallant king, rich, liberal and courtly. Garin looked down at his serf’s tunic and torn shoon—but then he felt within his breast. Foulque’s purse was there.

When he waked, it had been first to bewilderment and then to mere relief in warmth and sunlight. Now as he walked courage returned, the new energy and glow. Early as it was, the road had its travel which increased with the strengthening day. It was a country rich in beauty. He had never been so far from home. The people upon the road were like people he had seen before. Yet there existed small, regional differences, and his eye was quick at noting these. They pleased him; imagination played. The morning was fair without and within.

A driver of mules—twenty with twenty loads of sawn wood and sacks of salt and other matters—caught up with him. Garin and he walked side by side and the former learned whence the road came and where it went. As for the world hereabouts, it belonged to Count Raymond of Toulouse. Garin, walking, began to sing.

“You sing well, brother,” said the muleteer. “If you dwelt with animals as I do, your voice would crack! They do not understand me when I sing. They think that I mean that they may stand still and admire.—Ha! May God forget and the devil remember you there! Get up!”

They travelled with pauses, jerks, and starts, so at last Garin said, “Farewell, brother!” and swung on alone. Half an hour later he, in turn, came up with a pedlar, a great pack wrapt in cloth on his back, sitting resting by the wayside. “Who’ll buy?” called the pedlar. “Here’s your fine pennyworths!”

Garin stopped beside him and considered the pack. Travelling merchants of a different grade, going with laden horses from fair to fair, might have with them, cut, fashioned and sewed, a dress that would do for an esquire. But not a poor pack-aback like this. He shook his head.

“No money?” asked the pedlar. “Thumb of Lazarus! how this sickness spreads!”

Other wayfarers came in sight. “Who’ll buy?” called the pedlar. “Here’s your fine pennyworths!”

Garin left him chaffering with a rich villein, and went his own way along the sunny road.

Toward noon, rounding a hill, he came upon a little village. He bought from the nearest house bread and cheese and a cup of goat’s milk, and sat down under a mulberry tree to eat and drink. As he made an end of the feast, two girls came and stood in the house door. They studied his appearance, and it seemed to find favour. He smiled back at them.

“Where do you live?” asked one.

“In the moon.”

“Ha!” said the girl. “It was as round as an egg last night. You must have dropped out. And where are you going?”

“To the sun.”

“HÈ! You will be sunburned. Whose man are you?”

“Lord Love’s.”

The girls laughed for joy in him. “HÈ! We see his collar around your neck! What does he make you do?”

“He makes me to serve a lady.”

“‘Ladies!’ We do not like ‘ladies’! They are as proud as they were made of sugar!”

“In the court of Lord Love,” said Garin, “every woman mounts into a lady.”

One of the girls laughed more silently than the other. “Oh, the pleasant fool!” she said. “You go on a long pilgrimage when you go to Compostella. But to that court would be the longest I have ever heard tell of!”

The other dug her bare foot into the ground. “If you are in no hurry, the house can give you work to do, and for it supper and lodging.”

“I have to reach the sun. And who would do that,” said Garin, “must be travelling.”

He stood up, left the mulberry tree, and because they were young and not unfair, and there was to be seen in it no harm or displeasure, he kissed them both. They laughed and pushed him away, then, their hands on his shoulders, each kissed back.

Leaving them and the hamlet behind, he came again into fair country where the blue sky touched the hill-tops. Morning had slipped into afternoon. Not far away would be a town he had heard of. He meant to get there a different dress. It was necessary to do that. Wandering so, in this serf’s wear, he might at any hour be taken up, called to account, made to name his master. “Lord Love” would not answer far. Say that, without fathomless trouble, he got the dress, what was going to follow upon the getting? He did not know.

Ahead of him walked a thin figure wrapped in a black mantle and wearing a wide hat somewhat like a palmer’s. Garin lessened the distance between them. The black-clad one was talking, or more correctly, chanting to himself as he walked, and that with such abstraction from the surrounding world that he did not hear the other moving close behind him. Garin listened before speaking.

“In Ethiopia is found basilisk, cockatrice, and phoenix; in certain parts of Greece the centaur, and in the surrounding seas mermaiden. The dolphin is of all beasts the tenderest-hearted. Elephants worship the sun.... Pliny tells us that there are eleven kinds of lightning. Clap your hands when it lightens.... The elements are four—earth, air, fire and water. To each of these pertaineth a spirit—gnome, sylph, salamander, ondine. By long and great study a scholar at last may perceive sylph or salamander. Such an one rises to strange wisdom.... The earth is not a plain as we were taught. Impossible for our human mind to conceive how it may be round, and yet the most learned hold that it is so. Holy Church denieth, in toto, the Antipodes, and one must walk warily. Yet, if it is fancied a square, there are difficulties. Aristotle—”

Garin came even with him. “God save you, sir!”

The black mantle started violently, returned the salutation, but looked around him nervously. Then, seeing in a neighbouring field half a dozen peasants, men and women, he recovered his equanimity. Moreover, when he looked at him closely, the youth had not the face of a robber. He addressed Garin in a slightly sing-song voice. “Do you know this road? How far is it to the town?”

“I do not know the road. It is not much further, I think.”

The man in the black mantle was a thin, pale, ascetic-looking person. He had a hungry look, or what, at first, Garin thought was such. The esquire had seen hungry men, peasants starved and wolfish, prisoners with a like aspect, fasting penitents. But it was the man’s eyes, Garin decided, that gave him the look, and it was not one of hunger for bread. They were large and clear, and they seemed to seek something afar.

Their owner at first looked askance and with a somewhat peevish pride at the peasant keeping beside him. Garin had forgotten his garb and the station it assigned him. But the feeling, such as it was, seemed to drift out of the black-clad’s mind. “I grow weary,” he said, “and shall be glad to beg a night’s shelter.”

“Have you travelled far?”

“From Bologna.”

“Bologna! That is in Italy.”

“Yes. The University there. I am going to Paris. It may be that I shall go to Oxford.”

“Ah,” said Garin, with respect. “I understand now why you were talking to yourself. You are a student.”

“That am I. One day I may be Magister or Doctor.” He walked with a lifted gaze. “I serve toward that—and toward the gaining of Knowledge.”

Garin was silent; then he said with some wistfulness, “I, too, would have learning and knowledge.”

The other walked with a rapt gaze. “It is the true goddess,” he said, “it is the Great Love.”

But Garin dissented from that with a shake of the head and a short laugh of rapture.

The student turned his large eyes upon him. “You love a woman.—What is her name?”

“I do not know,” said Garin. “Nor the features of her face, nor where she lives.” Suddenly as he moved, he made a name. “The Fair Goal,” he said, “I have named her now.”

The interest of the man in black had been but momentary. “Study is a harsh mistress,” he said; “fair, but terrible! It would irk any pitying saint to see how we students fare! Hunger and cold and nakedness. Books, without warmth or cheer or light where we can con them. And we often want books and nowhere can procure them. We live in booths or in corners of other men’s dwellings, and none care to give us livelihood while we master knowledge. There were several thousand of us in Bologna, and in Paris there are more, and at Oxford they say there are many thousands. I have seen us go blind, and I have seen us die of hunger, and I have seen us unwitted—”

“But you go on,” said Garin.

“It is the only life,” answered the black mantle.

They walked in silence. After a few moments a thought seemed to occur to the journeyer from Bologna. He looked more closely at his companion. “By your dress you are out of the fields. But your tongue speaks castle-wise.”

Garin had his vanity of revealment. “My tongue is my own, but this dress is not,” he said; then, repenting his rashness, “Do not betray me! I am fleeing from trouble.”

“No, I will not,” answered the student with simplicity. “I know trouble, and he is hard to escape. You are, perchance, a young knight?”

“I was my lord’s esquire. But it is my meaning to become a knight.—I would make poems, too.”

“Ah!” said the student, “a troubadour.”

Garin made no answer, but the word sank in. He had a singing heart to-day. You could be knight and troubadour both. He wished now to write a beautiful song for the Fair Goal.

They came in sight of the town. It was fairly large, massed, like most towns, about a castle. As in all towns, you saw churches and churches rising above the huddled houses.

“I will find,” said the student, “some house of monks. I will give them all the news I know, and they will give me food and a pallet. Best come with me.”

But Garin would not try the monastery.

The afternoon was waning. They entered the town not more than an hour before the gates would shut, and parted in the shadow of the wall. When Garin had gone twenty paces, he looked back. The student was standing where he had left him, in a brown study, but now he spoke across the uneven, unpaved way. “Choose knowledge!” he said.

Garin, going on through a narrow, dark, and tortuous lane, found in his mind the jongleur to whom he had talked on the road from Roche-de-FrÊne. “Choose love!” had said the jongleur. Garin laughed. “I choose what I must!” The dark way seemed to blossom with roses; jewels and perfumes were in his hands.

He found, after an hour of wandering and enquiry, lodging in a high, old, ruinous house above a black alley. Here he got a Spartan supper, and went to bed, tired but hopeful. Morning seemed to come at once. He rose in a high, clear dawn, ate what they gave him, sallied forth, and in the first sunshine came to a shop where was standing a Jew merchant in a high cap. Garin bought shirt, hose and breeches, tunic and mantle, shoes and cap. The Jew looked questions out of his small, twinkling black eyes, but asked none with his tongue.

Back to his lodging went Garin, his purchases under his arm, shifted from serf’s garb into these, and stood forth in russet and blue—a squire again to the eye, though not the squire of any knight or lord of wealth. He counted over the moneys yet in his purse, and then, having paid to a half-blind old woman the price of his lodging, went forth again, and at a place for weapons bought a dagger with sheath and belt. Near the weapon shop was a church porch. Garin wished to think things out a little, so he went across to this and took his seat upon the steps in the sunshine, his back to a pillar.