Читать книгу Hamlet had an Uncle - James Branch Cabell - Страница 10
ОглавлениеNOW CORAMBUS BEGINS A BLOOD-FEUD
'Poor Hamlet talked his usual sort of wild nonsense,' Geruth told the King of Jutland. 'He continued to behave like a barnyard; and I humoured him as I best might. It does not matter, one way or the other, whether he mooed or bleated. He crows rather well, though. Did you have a nice hunt? All boys are more or less flighty; but they get over it by and by.'
Fengon regarded the dear fluttered woman tenderly; and he said:
'My darling, I respect your position. You prefer neither to betray him to me nor me to him. That is as it should be, Geruth; and I honour this reticence, which befits equally the fond mother of Hamlet and the true-hearted wife of Fengon.'
'But now, Fengon, now you quite misunderstand me----'
'To the contrary, so great is my affection for my adored wife and for my dear son that I understand, and applaud, both of you. For the boy has intelligence,' says Fengon, with paternal pride, 'and because of it he has set about deluding and killing me in a wholly rational manner. Hamlet intends, at all costs, to get vengeance for his father's death.'
'Fengon, you are talking nonsense. Horvendile was only Hamlet's uncle at utmost, although in a manner of speaking, of course, he was his stepfather, too. But at any rate, you are his father----'
'Yes, my dearest; and I make bold to think it is that fact which accounts for his intelligence; but Hamlet does not know it. He reasons only that by pretending to be insane he can preserve his own life until he has found a good opportunity of taking mine. It is not easy for a mere boy to kill unaided a king in the publicity of court life; poor Hamlet must bide his time; and I think he has contrived the best possible device.'
'Now, Fengon, if you would but let me explain----'
Fengon answered with a tolerant smiling: 'You must permit me to quote; and if I appear somewhat highflown, that is, in the speech of youth, a fault not unfamiliar. "My mother, I put my trust in you. I beseech you, as you value your own flesh and blood, not to betray me to the bland betrayer of your body and of your good name. Though he have never so many flattering courtiers to defend him, yet will I bring dark-hearted Fengon to his death. I am bound in honour to requite his wicked killing of my father, brave Horvendile."'
Geruth said blankly, 'So you were listening!' She added, with large dignity--
'I do not think it was at all honourable of you, Fengon, to be spying upon your own wife in that way, quite as if I did not intend to tell you everything at the first possible moment.'
'My conduct,' the King agreed, 'in view of your unfailing candour, was most reprehensible. I apologize for it. Nevertheless, I did leave the hunt. I did return unobserved while our poor boy was disposing of our poor Corambus. I did take the place of Corambus, behind the tapestry. So there is really not any need for you to repeat any of Hamlet's heroic denunciations. I was honestly touched by them, Geruth. Our son has an excellent heart; and to a degree truly astounding, his vocabulary defies my credulity. Neither you nor Ingrid has he addressed in the normal voice of Hamlet. He has found, it is evident, some widely-read grey counsellor to prepare for him these noble speeches which display, so exactly, that untutored eloquence of the human heart which one encounters only in the more elaborately polished forms of literature. He evinces, in brief, intelligence as well as firm moral principles, such as reflect credit upon both his parents.'
'That, Fengon, sounds very well, the way you put it. But you had no right to be eavesdropping. And never did I hear of a right-thinking Viking, who was taught, by his own dear mother, how to worship Odin properly, and how to take plunder from heathen people in the correct way, doing anything of the sort.'
'Come now, my darling,' the King pleaded, 'but everything is quite as it should be! There is no least need for you thus to excite yourself, inasmuch as now we both understand the boy intends to make an end of me upon the first available chance, I can take proper care of myself. It should be to our parental fondness, I submit, a great consolation to find him only a murderer instead of a maniac; for the latter condition cannot always be remedied. So do you smile at me, my precious! and let us plan to get Hamlet out of these parts as quickly as may be managed.'
'In fact,' said the perturbed Queen, 'a change of climate, or perhaps a sea-trip, some time this summer----'
'That is it,' says Fengon. 'A sea-trip! but not this summer.'
Before the man's masculine unreason, Geruth remained patient, upon the most flagrant possible scale, but without for one moment pretending to condone any such nonsense. Instead, she explained aloofly:
'I do not at all see, Fengon, how you can say not this summer. It might be just the proper cure for his nervous condition. Indeed, now I think of it, I am sure it is. I know that my own father, whenever he took cold or felt run down, has always made it a fixed rule to invade Norway or Sweden, quite informally, of course, with not more than two or three long-ships, so that you can attack villages up the smaller rivers without running aground. Or once and in a while, Russia. He led a five-day cattle raid in the island of Bornholm, only last August, on account of a touch of sciatica. Very certainly, August comes in the summer. Nor do I mean that Hamlet has sciatica. I mean the principle of the thing. Because, Fengon, it cured him completely; and the fact that, at his age, my father still has two salt herrings and a half-gallon of beer for breakfast every day in the year does show you, I think, that he knows how to look after his health.'
Fengon said: 'Yes, my dearest: your father is wholly wonderful; he is almost worthy of his daughter. But Hamlet cannot wait until summer; for the situation is not so simple as you think. I must tell you Hamlet has not merely killed Corambus. He has hacked the corpse into fragments. In addition, he has boiled these fragments, in your man Grettir's soap pot, until the meat fell away from the bones; and the distressing results Hamlet has thrust at random into the various privies of the castle. It was quite a shock to me, just now, in my own apartments, to find the head of Corambus glaring up at me in frank disapproval of an intention from which I at once refrained.'
So utterly aghast was Queen Geruth that, for the moment, she approached concision, through saying:
'Why, but, Fengon! I never heard of such a thing! and I really do think Hamlet is going too far, with such a nice, clean, tidy old gentleman!'
Fengon put aside his wife's shrillness with the aplomb of a well-seasoned husband; and soothingly pointed out:
'Still, you and I, Geruth, can understand that in improvising new funeral customs Hamlet has been trying to foster a name for eccentricity. Between ourselves, I dare grant that his methods are rather nicely adapted to serve his ends. So I do not blame him; to the contrary! I applaud his intelligence. But the family of the deceased are certain to be less broad-minded. There is no one of the five stalwart sons of Corambus but will consider this unconventional and dispersed sort of burial to be open to invidious comment. They are bound in honour, as his nearest of male kin, to declare a blood-feud. Yet, by good luck, before the beginning of a blood-feud, the law allows to any murderer, whether a man or a woman, five days in which to leave the kingdom----'
'But in winter time a murderer is allowed two weeks,' says Geruth discontentedly.
'You are quite right, my dear, as always,' was the reply of fond Fengon. 'Only, I do not gather, at the middle of May, exactly what--well! whatever you may be talking about, my adored one--has to do with anything else.'
'It is only that in winter there would have been more time to see about his underwear, Fengon, and his shirts too. So I really do think it would have been far more convenient if only he had waited until, say, just the first of November, before killing Corambus. Corambus would not have objected at all, I am certain, because he was always so very considerate----'
'Yes, my darling: I meant merely that Hamlet would have to fight each one of the sons of Corambus, from Leif to Asmund, in the order of their age, should Hamlet remain in Jutland for six days longer. I shall therefore take your advice----'
'And I must say, Fengon, it is high time you did take my advice. It would have been better for everybody if only my advice had been listened to a little more often in this house, because, Heaven knows, I was always frank in speaking for your own good, although there is no need to go into that now, with six suits of underwear at the very least to be got ready.'
'You are quite right, my dear,' says Fengon; 'and at all times I have found your advice to be invaluable. I shall accordingly send Hamlet into Britain, to live there in safety, with my good foster-brother Edric, until the sons of poor Corambus have agreed to accept, in place of a series of duels with our poor son, a proper payment of weregild.'
'Just what is the weregild for Corambus?' Geruth inquired provisionally; for she knew of course that weregild (as people called the indemnity which it was optional for the kin of a murdered person to accept from the murderer instead of starting a blood-feud) was fixed by the social ranking of the deceased; and thus varied to almost any degree.
Fengon pulled a long face.
'The rate of a privy counsellor,' he admitted, 'is twelve gold marks, or ninety-six aurar of silver. That the sum is large I cannot deny: yet the fond heart of a father is still larger; and paternal devotion does not haggle in the talons of the law, or even in the teeth of extortion.'
Geruth answered this aphorism with a formula which was only too familiar to Fengon's hearing, inasmuch as at all times this vague but generous-natured lady employed this same formula before the prospect of spending some more money. In brief, Geruth answered--with a vast and a most noble air of altruism and of abstruse thinking, flavoured never so slightly with reproof--that, even so, it would be a saving in the long run.
Fengon often wondered when this long run would begin, but he had been taught, by experience, how far wiser it was not to ask questions about the matter.
--And nobody (Geruth continued) could deny that; nor could anybody have been more sincerely fond of Corambus; she quite disapproved of any such conduct; but when Hamlet was your own child, it did make a difference. You could not argue about it; it was simply a fact all parents had to face; nor would any proper set of parent--she added, with a frank gleam of proffered battle--so much as dream of taking any other attitude, at this special time of all others; and that much she felt it her plain duty to say.
Fengon replied, 'Yes, my darling; you are wholly right.'
So was it that, after three unhurried dissertations, concerning shirts, and what Corambus had said only last Thursday, and the comparative inexpensiveness of killing people of rather less preeminence, the Queen of Jutland agreed--by-and-by--to the wisdom of sending Hamlet into Britain; and of committing his safety to the King of Deira.
