CHAPTER FOURTEEN

BEFORE the summer was quite withered, their life in the huts came to an end, unexpectedly. One day Goldmund cut a sling, and strayed here and there around the clearing with it, in the hope of winging a partridge, or some such game, since their store of food was getting scanty. Lene had come with him to pick berries. Sometimes he would cross her track, and could see her head between the branches, on its brown neck, rising from the linen shift, and hear her singing. Once she came to his side, and they munched some berries: then she went on, and he lost sight of her. He thought of her half-tenderly, half-angrily. She had spoken again of autumn, and the future, and then said she believed herself with child, and would never let him go from her again.

'Now I must end it,' he was thinking. 'Soon I shall be weary of all this, and then I must wander again alone, and leave Robert, too, and see that before the winter comes I get back to the Bishop's city, to Master Nicholas, and there I shall weather out this winter, and next spring buy myself some good shoes, and trudge on till I reach our cloister in Mariabronn, and greet Narziss. It must be full ten years since I saw him. I must see him again, if only for a day, or two days.'

A sudden voice broke in upon his thoughts, and he grew instantly aware how far his mind and wishes had strayed from Lene, as though he had gone from her already. He listened sharply; the same noise startled him again, and he thought he could hear Lene's voice, calling in the bitterest need. Soon he was near enough. Yes, it was Lene. He hurried on, still rather angry, though her cries had roused his dread and pity. When at last he came within sight she was kneeling, or crouching, in the grass, her gown half-torn off her body, screaming and struggling with a man. Goldmund rushed in on them, all the grief, anger, uneasiness in his mind venting itself in rage against the aggressor. He came upon him, just as he had pinned her to earth; her naked breasts streamed blood, and the man held and clasped her greedily. Goldmund threw himself onto him, and crushed his throat with lustful, angry hands, a thin, reedy throat, covered in hair. He throttled with delight, till the man hung limp. Still gripping hard, he dragged his swooning, surrendered enemy over the ground, to a place where grey ridges of stone jutted, sharp and bare, out of the earth. Here he raised him high, twice, thrice, and, heavy as he was, dashed down his head.

He flung the body away with its neck broken, his anger still unappeased; he would have liked to do him a longer injury.

Lene watched it all with delight. Her breasts streamed blood, she was trembling still from head to foot, gasping for air. But now she had stumbled to her knees, and, in ecstasy, watched her mighty lover drag her assailant over the ground, throttle him, break his neck, and fling him aside. He lay like a slaughtered snake, limp and disjointed; his grey face, with the wild beard and matted hair, hung pitifully down over his chest. Lene stumbled, with cries of triumph, to her feet; yet suddenly, now, her face went white, the fear still shook in all her limbs, she turned sick, and fell fainting into the bilberry shrubs. Soon she was recovered enough to let Goldmund lead her back to the hut, where he washed the blood from her breasts, all covered in scratches, and one with the marks of a man's teeth on it. Robert was entranced by this adventure, and eager for details of the fight.

'His neck broken, you say? Wonderful, Goldmund; all men fear you.'

Goldmund had no wish to speak further of it. His rage had cooled, and soon, as they left the huddled corpse, he had had to think of Victor, the poor, dead guzzler, and that here was the second man to die at his hands. To get clear of Robert, he answered:

'Well now, you can do something yourself. Go along, and see that he gets a burial. If you find it too hard to scrape up a hole for him, drag him as far as the pool, and throw him in among the reeds; or cover him well with earth and stones.'

Robert would hear nothing of this. He would have no truck with corpses. How could you ever be certain that a corpse had no taint of plague on him?

Lene had lain down in the hut. The bite on her breast throbbed and burned. Yet, in spite of it, she soon felt better, rose, blew up her fire, and warmed the goat's milk for their supper. She was full of mirth, yet nonetheless they sent her early to bed, where she went like a lamb, so deep was her admiration of Goldmund.

He, however, was surly, and would say nothing. Robert, knowing his mood, left him in peace. When, late that night, Goldmund joined Lene on the straw, he bent above her, listening to her breath. She slept; he lay very restless, thinking of Victor, longing to get up and go from the others, feeling that this was the end of playing at houses.

Yet one thing had set him thinking. He had caught the look in Lene's eyes, as she watched him fling aside the throttled churl. That had been a thing worth noting, and he knew he never should forget it. In those wide, horror-stricken, delighted eyes, there had been such a glint of triumphant pride, such a glow of deep and passionate lechery, as he never had seen or imagined in women's faces. But for this one look, he might not have remembered Lene's face, when he strove, years later, to recall it. It had been enough, this single look, to give her peasant's face a terror and beauty. For months his eyes had seen nothing which roused the thought, 'This should be carved.' With this, in a kind of livid terror, the wish to draw flashed back into his mind.

Since he could not sleep he stood up at last, and went outside. It was cold, a breeze sighed in the birches. He walked up and down in the dark, came to rest on a stone, lost in his thoughts, deep in sadness. He suffered for Victor's sake, for the sake of the man he had slain today, suffered for the loss of his innocence, the clear, child's beauty of his soul. Was it for this he had broken out of the cloister, left Narziss, given such pain to Master Nicholas, scorned even to marry the pretty Lisbeth – that he might live like a gipsy on a heath, chase escaped cattle through the woods, batter out a wretched life on the stones. Had it all any sense or worth in it? He sank back, and stared up at the pale night-clouds, till he had gazed so long that his thoughts all left him. He could not tell if he watched clouds or looked into the darkness of his own mind. Then, at the instant he fell asleep, there flamed, in the drifting sky, like a lightning flash, the great pale face of his Eve, her heavy eyelids drooping above him. Suddenly these eyes opened wide; deep eyes, full of longing and lust to kill. Goldmund slept, till the dew had soaked him.

Next day Lene was sick. They let her lie; there was much to do. Early that morning Robert had seen two sheep in the wood, which scampered away as he approached them. He ran back for Goldmund, they hunted the sheep half the day, and at last succeeded in trapping one of them. They were tired out when, towards evening, they reached their hut with the beast.

Lene felt sick to death. Goldmund leaned over her, feeling her body, and found plague-boils. This he kept to himself, but Robert suspected it at once, when he heard that Lene was still sick, and so refused to come inside. He must find some place to sleep in the wood, he said, and must take the goat, since it too could sicken of the plague.

'Go to the devil,' Goldmund shouted. 'Never let me set eyes on you again.'

But he seized the goat, and led it into the hut, behind the birch wall. Quietly, without his goat, Robert went off, full of dread; dread of the plague, dread of Goldmund, dread of solitude and the night. He lay down to sleep, nearby, in the woods.

Goldmund said to Lene:

'Don't be afraid. I'm with you. You'll soon be better.'

She shook her head.

'Be careful, love. Don't come too near me. And don't you weary yourself to comfort me. I must die, and I'd rather die now than see an empty place beside me, and know you'd gone from me for ever. Every morning I thought of that and feared it. No, I'd rather die.'

By morning it was already bad with her. From time to time Goldmund brought her a drink of water, and then, for an hour or two, he slept. Now as the light came creeping into the hut, he could see death plainly in her face, it looked so soft and shrivelled up. He went outside, to breathe the air and see the sky. The two gnarled fir trunks at the wood's edge were already glittering in the sunrise; the morning tasted sweet and cool, the far-off hills were hidden in a mist. He went a few steps further, stretched his tired body, took a deep breath. The world was fair on this sad morning. Now he would soon be on the roads again. This was a time for leave-taking.

Out of the wood Robert called to him. Was she any better? He would stay with them if only it weren't the plague. Goldmund must not be angry, he had kept the sheep with him all night.

'Get away to hell, and your sheep along with you,' shouted Goldmund. Lene's half-dead, and I'm infected.' This last he invented to get rid of him. This Robert might be harmless enough, but Goldmund wanted no more of his company. He was far too timid and mean, did not sort with this hour of fate and horror. Robert went off and never came back. Lene lay asleep when he entered the hut. He too dozed off for a while, and in a dream saw Bless his pony, and the lovely chestnut in the cloister. In this dream he felt that he looked across an endless desert, at a lost home that was still dear to him. Tears ran down his cheeks, and over his yellow beard as he woke.

He heard Lene speak, in a feeble voice. She had called him, and he sat upright on his straw. But she spoke to none, only muttered words to herself, little love-words and words of strife, laughing to herself and sighing heavily, till at last she sobbed, and gradually her voice died out. Goldmund stood up and bent over her tainted face, noting all its lines with bitter eagerness, traced out its forms, twisted and jumbled together, by the shrivelling breath of destruction. 'Sweet Lene,' his heart called, 'my sweet, kind, pretty one – will you leave me, too? Are you, too, weary of me, already?'

He would have liked to run off and leave her. To wander far, breathe in the air, tire himself out, see new sights, would ease his pain, might even have comforted his grief. Yet he could not leave the maid to die alone.

Lene could drink no more goat's milk, so he drank his fill, since now they had no other food. Several times he led out the goat to pasture, let it run, and get its drink of water. Then he went back to stand by Lene's side, whispering tenderness, gazing very closely into her face, watching her die, disconsolate but attentive. She was conscious still, at times asleep, but when she woke she could only half unclose her eyes, their lids were so heavy and sagging. From hour to hour this young girl aged and aged, wrinkles came round her eyes and nostrils; on her fresh young neck stood the quickly withering face of a grandmother. She said very little; only 'Goldmund' or 'Oh, my love,' striving to moisten her blue swollen lips with her tongue. Then he would set the pitcher to her mouth.

In the night she died, without a plaint, in one short sigh, and then no more breath came from her body. A shudder ran along her skin. This sight caused his heart to swell with grief, as he thought of the dying fish in the marketplace, whose death he had so often seen and pitied. That was just how they, too, had died: one spasm, then a quick, light shudder, running along their bodies from end to end, skimming off the sheen, and the life along with it. He knelt with her a little while longer, then ran out into the air, to lie in bracken. He remembered the goat, and went back for it. It strayed a while, and lay down on the grass. He lay beside it, pillowed his head on its flank, and slept till daybreak. Then he entered the hut for the last time, and there, on the hither side of the wattle, took one last look at Lene's face. He loathed to abandon the dead; went forth again to gather an armful of bracken, dried leaves and boughs, and fling them into the hut; struck fire, and set light to it all. From the hut itself he took nothing but flint and steel. Their wattle fence went up in flame in an instant.

Outside he stood to watch it burn, his face scorched by the blaze, till at last the roof stood in flames, and the first rafter crashed within. The goat leapt about him, bleating wildly. It would have been well to slaughter the little beast and roast himself a morsel of goat's flesh, to get up his strength for the roads, but he could not do it. He drove the goat into the bushes. Smoke from Lene's pyre followed him on his way through the woods. Never had he set forth so disconsolate.

But that which now awaited his sight was worse, far worse, than he had imagined. It began with the first farms and villages, and never ceased, no matter how far he strayed, more terrible and strange as he found his way into it. A thick mist of decay hung over this land, a veil of cruelty, horror, darkness of soul. The worst were not the empty houses, the farmyard dogs, famished or rotting on their chains, the dead, strewn about the earth, the begging children, the death-holes at city gates. Far worse than any dead were the living, who seemed to have their souls crushed out of them by a load of horror and panic fear of the end. Strange, gruesome tales met him on all sides. Parents had run from their children, husbands from their ailing wives, the instant they knew them to be tainted. Death-churls, hospital servitors, ruled like hangmen, looting the perished houses and, if it pleased them, leaving the dead to fall to bits; plucking the dying from their beds and casting them, alive, into the death-carts. Crazy, mumbling fugitives wandered the road, shunning every contact with other men, hunted on and on by the thought of death. Others, resolute to live, herded, while still they might, in merry bands, dancing and drabbing, with Death their fiddler. Lost waifs clustered at graveyard gates, or crept into empty, plundered houses. And, worst of all, each sought a scapegoat, to unload this horrible weight of grief; each had his tale of some cursed creature whose guilt had brought this on the land, whose malice had conjured up the pestilence. Devilish folk, they would say to Goldmund, of their hate had spread death here and there, squeezed poison from the boils of corpses, to daub it over walls and lintels, infecting wellsprings, and the cattle. Any in such suspicion were lost, unless they had been warned and could take flight, since justice and the mob soon made an end of them. The rich had brought the plague, said the poor, and the rich said it was the poor; while many said it was the Jews, and some the Italians, or the leeches. In one city, with fierce disgust in his heart, Goldmund watched the Jews roast in their Jewery, house taking fire from house, while the mob clamoured round and made a ring, to thrust back shrieking fugitives into the flames. Everywhere in this welter of hate and grief, the innocent were burned, racked, or struck down. Goldmund felt that the world was poisoned indeed, since there seemed no innocence or joy, honour or love, on earth any more. Then, since death's fiddle sounded in every place, he would join the merriest of the dancers: he had learnt to hear their notes far in the distance, could strum a lute to their caperings, or himself dance all night long under pitch-pine torches.

He did not fear. Once on a winter's night under the fir-trees, with Victor's fingers round his throat, he had tasted the deep terror of death. He had known it since, out on the moors, in the snow and dearth of many hard days' wanderings. But that had been such death as a man could grapple with; against it he could set himself on guard, and so he had fought death off with weary limbs, with shaking hands and gnawing belly. None could fight this death by pestilence; they must let it rage, and surrender to it, and Goldmund had surrendered long ago. He did not fear, since it seemed to him there was nothing left in life for him, now he had turned from Lene's shrivelling body and wandered so many days in the Kingdom of Bones. Yet a strange, sharp eagerness kept him alert. He could never tire of watching the reaper at his work, or listening to the song of passing life. Nothing could appal his sight; in every place the same quiet passion seized him, to be by, noting with careful eyes each step along the road through hell. He would eat tainted bread in perished houses, sing and share their wine with tipsters, pluck the quickly shrivelling flowers of lust, gaze into the staring eyes of women, the glazed, unanswering eyes of sots, the slowly filming eyes of the dying; loving these fevered, desperate, half-dead harlots; help for a plate of broth to carry out corpses, shovel on the earth for two farthings. The world had grown savage and full of darkness, death howled his song in Goldmund's straining ears, who marked its note with never-sated eagerness.

His aim was the city of Master Nicholas, urged thither by the longing to work again, though the way was long and full of fear, through a shrivelled world, where light had perished. He trudged sadly on, lulled by death-songs, but attentive to the wailing voices of men, sad, and yet aglow with desire, his itch to see it all never appeased.

In a cloister he saw a freshly painted wall-picture, and had to stand there long, before he could leave it. It was a dance of death across the wall: pale Bones dancing folk off the earth, a king, a bishop, an abbot, a count, a knight, a leech, a peasant, a serf – he took them all – and skeletons piped, through hollow bones, to lead them. Goldmund's curious eyes took in this picture. There, from what he had seen of murky death, some unknown fellow-craftsman drew the lesson, crying his shrill-voiced admonition that all must die, in the ears of men. It was good, a very good sermon, was this wall-painting: the fellow had seen the matter well, his savage picture seemed to moan and rattle. Yet nonetheless Goldmund had felt it otherwise. Here it was the necessity to die that stood painted up so sternly and inescapably. Goldmund would have liked another picture. In him death's wildest song had a different echo, a voice calling homewards into the earth, home to a mother; its sounds not harsh and white, but sweet and enticing. Here, where death thrust forth his hand into life, it was as an iron-tongued warrior that he came. And yet his voice had other notes in it; deep, loving sounds, gentle as sated autumn, so that near him the tiny lamp of life seemed to shine with a brighter, warmer glow. For others death might be a captain, a judge, a hangman, a stern father - `for Goldmund death was also a mother and mistress, crooning the enticements of life, touching him with a shiver of desire.

When he had left the painted death-dance, and gone his way, he longed still more for work, and Master Nicholas. Yet every place he traversed had something to hinder him, new sights of death, a fresh experience, and he sniffed their reek with eager nostrils. Face after face demanded an hour or day of this watcher's pity or curiosity. For three days he had a little whimpering peasant-boy at his side, and for hours carried him on his back; a half-famished waif of five or six, from whom he found it hard to rid himself. In the end he left him with a charcoal burner's wife in a wood, whose man was dead, and who wanted some living warmth to comfort her. For miles a stray cur limped at his heels, eating from his hand, warming his sleep; and one morning, when he woke, it had gone its ways. This grieved him, since he was used to speak to the dog, pouring out his thoughts, for hours, on the malice of men, to it; on God's existence, the carver's craft, the breasts and lips of a knight's young daughter, Julia, whom he had known long ago, in his youth. Like many other wanderers through the death Goldmund had become a little crazed. None in this plague-stricken land had all their wits, and many were mad out and out. The young Jewess, Rebecca, may have been mad, the fair, dark maid, with glittering eyes, with whom he passed some days on the roads.

He had found her in the fields, out beyond the gates of a little town, rocking and moaning, by the cinders of a burnt-out heap of logs, beating her face, and tearing at her long black hair. It was her hair first moved his heart, it looked so beautiful, and he caught her wild hands and held them fast, talked to the maid and, as he comforted, saw that her face and body were very fair. She raved with grief for her father whom the balies of the town had burnt to ashes, along with fifteen other Jews. She had escaped, but then returned in desperation, and now lay howling out her grief that she had not let them burn her along with him. Patiently he held her clawing hands, speaking soft words, muttering of pity and protection, and offering to do whatever she would. She asked his help to bury her father, and they gathered all the bones from the glowing ashes, carried them in secret into the fields, and there laid them in the earth. Then it was night, and Goldmund sought out a sleeping-place, heaped up a bed for the maid in a little oak wood, promised he would guard her sleep, and listened as she lay there sobbing, until at last sleep came and stilled her cries. He too slept for a while, and in the morning began to court her, telling her she could not stay there alone, she would be known for a Jewess and struck to death, or vagabonds would come on her, and rape her, and in the woods there were wolves and gipsies. But he, he said, would bear her company, protecting her from beasts and humans, for she moved the pity in his heart; he had eyes in his head to see what beauty was, and never would he suffer those white shoulders and shining eyes to be the food of wolves, or burnt to ashes on a scaffold. She heard him sullenly to the end, then sprang up and ran away from him. He had to chase, and hold her, before she would listen.

'Rebecca,' he said, 'you see I mean you no harm. You are sad for thinking of your father, and will hear no word of any love. But tomorrow, or next day, or later, I'll ask you again, and, till then, I'll shield you, and bring you food, and never touch you. Mourn as long as you must! You can be either sad or merry with me, but always you shall only do what pleases you.'

All this was spoken to the wind. She would do nothing, she said with stubborn rage, that could ever bring her joy again. She would do what brought her the worst agony, and the sooner the wolves had got her the greater her content would be. Let him go his ways; he should never have her. He had said too much to her already.

'Sweet,' he answered, 'can you not see that death is everywhere – that they are dying in all the houses of every town, that the whole world is full of clamour and grief? Even the rage of the fools who burned your father was nothing but their grief and need. It was all born of the same great pain. Listen – soon death will take us too, and then we shall lie out rotting in the fields, and wolves play at dice with our bones. Let us live, now while we may, and love each other. Oh, it were such pity, my love, for your white neck, and little feet. Sweetheart, come with me now, I will only watch you and protect you.'

He begged her long; till suddenly he remembered that it was useless to persuade with words, or any reasoning. Then he was silent, and stared glumly at her. Her dark, proud face was set in hate.

'So are you all,' she said at last, in a voice of utter loathing and derision. 'All you Christians are the same. First you help a daughter to bury her father, slaughtered by you and your like, whose little finger was worth all of you – and have scarce done when the maid must be yours to lie with, and go out junketing at your side. So are you all. At first I thought you might be a good man: but how can any of you be good? Oh, you are swine.'

As she said all this Goldmund watched her eyes, and saw something deeper than the hate in them; a thing which moved him to the heart. He saw death again, there in her eyes; not the death which cannot be escaped, but the freedom to die, the will, the longing for it, the quiet, soft answer of resignation to the call of our mother, the earth.

'Rebecca,' he told her very gently, 'you may be right, and I a wicked man, although I meant only good to you. Forgive me. I have only just understood.'

He took off his cap and bowed very low, as though to a princess, then left her, with an aching heart. For long his soul was full of pain, and he could not bear to speak to anyone. Little as they resembled one another, this poor, proud Jewess, in some strange fashion, put him in mind of Lydia, the knight's daughter. It brought a man sorrow to love such women, and yet, for a while, it seemed to Goldmund that these were the only two he had ever loved; the poor, anxious Lydia, and this shrinking, bitter Jewish maid.

For days he remembered this dark Jewess, and dreamt, for many nights after, of the fiery, lissom beauty of her body, fashioned, it seemed, for all desire, and yet given over to death. Oh that such lips and eyes should be formed to be the loot of 'swine', and then lie rotting in the fields. Was there no power, no magic in the world, to save such tender blossom of precious joy?

Yes, there was one such magic. This loveliness must reshape itself in his soul, his hands inform it, and preserve. With delight and fear he perceived how full his mind had grown of images, how many shapes this long, dread journey had left inscribed upon his heart. Forms thronged and jostled within him, till he longed for quiet, to see them all, and release them into living permanence. More eager, more alert, more curious, he went on, with searching eyes, and passionate senses, but restless, now, for clay and wood, for paper, charcoal, and a workshop.

The summer died. Many assured him that with the autumn, or early winter, the plague must end. It was autumn now, but with no joy in it. Goldmund came through empty, desolate country, with none to gather in its harvests, so that fruit dropped from the trees, and covered the grass. In many places it was plundered by savage bands from the town, consorting together to rob the land. Slowly he neared his destination, and would often fear, in these last days, to find himself tainted with the plague, and so be forced to die in a cow-stall. He feared death now, and shrank away from it; he must live, to taste the one delight of standing again before a woodblock, and giving himself up to the carver's craft. Now, for the first time in his life, the Empire was too broad, and the world too wide for him: no pleasant town could hold him now, no wench keep him longer than a night.

One day he came to a church, on whose front, in deep niches, borne up by columns, stood many rows of figures, cut in stone, fashioned in a very ancient time – figures of apostles, martyrs, angels, such as he had seen often before, in his own cloister-church in Mariabronn. As a boy he had taken a certain pleasure in them, although they never stirred him very deeply. They had seemed to him beautiful and worthy, yet a little too stiff, patriarchal, ceremonious. Later, at the end of his first great wandering, when he had been so moved to joy and wonder by Nicholas' sweet and sorrowful Mother of God, he had found these old solemn figures clumsy and heavy, too rigid, too remote from life, thinking with a certain disdain of them, finding this new style of Master Nicholas a far more living, deeper, and rarer art.

But as, today, after long experience, he came back to them, his soul scarred by the world, full of the urgent need for quiet and thought, their old, stern forms suddenly moved him, with a force and power he had never known. Piously he stood before their reverence, in which still beat the heart of a perished day, the fears and raptures of many dead, held in strong lines above the centuries, defying the brittleness of time. A feeling of deep awe and love of them stole into his heart as he gazed, and he shuddered at his wasted, burnt-out life. He did what he had not done these many years; accused himself, and longed for penances, sought out a confessional and a priest.

But, although the church had many shriving-stools, there was not a priest in them all: they were dead, or lying in hospices; they had run far off, fearing the taint. The nave was empty, Goldmund's steps rang in the vaultings. He knelt at an empty stool, and shut his eyes. Then he began to whisper through the lattice:

'Dear God, see what is become of me. I come back to You, an evil, useless man. I have flung away my youth, like a spendthrift, and now very little is left over. I have slain, I have stolen, I have whored. I have idled, and eaten the bread of others. God, why did You make us so? And why do You lead us by such ways? Are we not Your children? Did not Your Son go to death for us? Are there not saints and angels to watch over us? Or is it all a bundle of pretty tales, invented to keep the children quiet, at which shavelings laugh among themselves? Your works have confused me, God the Father. You have made the world very ill, and now You rule it very weakly. I have seen streets and houses full of dead men. I have seen the rich lock up their doors and fly, leaving the poor, their brothers, to rot unburied. I have seen how men feared one another, how they struck down Jews like slaughtered cattle. I have seen so many innocent suffer and die, so many evil men wallow in sloth. Have You turned away, and left us utterly? Are Your own creatures of no more worth to You? Do You want men to perish from the world?'

Sighing, he came out through the great doors: dumb rows of saints and angels towered above him, each set high in its narrow space, held in the long, stiff folds of their gowns; unchangeable, unattainable, greater than men. Stern and mute, in their narrow niches, deaf to every question and petition, yet they seemed eternally to comfort; the triumphant conquerors of death, the rigid saviours from despair. They, in their dignity and beauty, had watched the crumbling generations. Ah, that poor Rebecca had been as they, poor Lene, charred to ashes in her hut, poor gentle Lydia, Master Nicholas! One day these, too, should stand and abide: soon he would have fixed their memories, which now meant only love and grief to him, fear, and the longing to hold their shape. They, too, should comfort the living, alive with neither name nor history; the still, mute symbols of human days.