Читать книгу The Holy Sinner - Thomas Mann - Страница 10

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The spirit of story-telling, which I embody, is a shrewd and waggish soul who knows his business and does not straightway gratify every curiosity; on the other hand he rouses many more, satisfies one and meanwhile puts the others so to speak on ice so they will keep, and perhaps even grow stronger. If anybody feels he must know forthwith what became of the child on God’s wild sea, his mind is diverted and occupied with other tale, which to know is just as needful to him, let it even go to his heart with grief. But that it is so sad may strengthen his hope that out there on the ondes it may go more happily, for the spirit of story-telling is not so unshrewd as to tell only sad tales.

The next news is of the sinful mother and how ill it continued to go with her. The woman had grief to bear, alsus much indeed that I know not whether my mouth be skilled to report it and do it justice in words. I feel indeed it lacks me of experience. Neither true joy nor true sorrow was ever my lot. I live as it were midway, by my monkdom cut off from one as from the other. It may be that which makes me call allegory to my aid to depict the suffering of my lady, and to say that five swords pierced her, not less than so many. And I will straightway explain my metaphor and call each of the five swords by name.

The first was the spiritual anguish which beset her for the sin she had committed with her brother, when she felt bliss in her very flesh and blood at the thought of it, and for the way she clung to the hope of her mate’s return.—The second was her childbed sickness and weakness, for the recovery from the birth was slow and hard, despite the midwife’s faithful care. Her milk struck in and gave her fever and after six weeks, which as they tell me is the right time for women to rise from childbed and go first to church, she was still so weak that she could hardly stand on her feet.—Did that come only from the milk fever? Ah, no, for now I name the third sword: that was anxiety, dread, and heartache for the small skipper out there in the wild wind, so utterly given into God’s hand; who drank her milk no more, and of whom she knew not whether he had been rescued or swallowed up by the sea. How it wounded her, this sword!—But the fourth was a two-edged one, thrust into her heart by so cruel a hand that I wonder how she survived and added to her days—though not to her salvation, or only quite at the last, which I reserve to myself to tell. Twice indeed she sank in a swound from this sword: once when she felt it in her heart, and again straightway when she realized it was still there. Yet she lived with and bore it—how? That you must ask of her tender woman-nature, tender, yet so strong—I cannot tell you.

Just three days, that is, before the day when, still pale, she should go to church, it befell that Anaclet, the squire, appeared at the castle with shield reversed in sign of ill tidings. What could they be? Scarcely needed he to give them words, yes, hardly needed to come with shield reversed, to be understood. That he came back alone was enough. His sweet lord was dead.

Oh, I am quite inconsolable over this loss! The mere writing of it causes me such a pang as is in truth as little granted to my monkhood as is actual joy. Very likely I am writing only to take for myself something of both human joy and human sorrow. Scarcely can I contain my tears at the sight of Anaclet’s reversed shield; were it not that out on the ondes there lived some hope of compensation and of life renewed, I could not persuade my heart to slay poor Wiligis. For as it is the spirit of story-telling which rings the bells when they ring themselves, so it is he too who slays those who, in the song, die.

Dead, young Wiligis, so slender and fine! It is true he had thought nobody good enough for him, save his sister, twinn-born and just as fine as he, and had sinned with her beyond pardon. Only hardly, again, do I forgive him the murder of Hanegiff, so good a hound. But for penance he had been knightly ready, when it turned out he was not able for it. I do not know, this youth, although gifted for sin and swiftly roused to it, had probably never in the depths of his heart been very firm. All too quickly he went pale, trembled easily, and was gallant but frail. The parting from his sweet sister, his mate, had seized harshly and consumingly on his life, and for the hard crusade he was probably in his soul not well armed. Of robbers, monsters, swamps, forests, rocks, and waters he had with Anaclet surmounted much, but he had not got so far as the port of Massilia; before he came there he clutched his breast, turned his drawn face to heaven, and sank into the marshy ground, where his steed snuffled at him in sympathy. How swiftly then sprang Anaclet from the saddle! In his arms he bore him to a castle not far thence, whose lord received him hospitably and put the way-weary one to bed with all care. But his heart was broken, the second day he gave up the ghost, and when they drew the shroud over his head, however old it got this earth would never again see this quite special brother-sister countenance, these lips arched over a mouth of gravity, these eyes blue in their blackness, this quivering nose, the forehead with the sign in the black hair, the fine-fine brows.

At the thought I suppress a tear, and I applaud the good lord of the castle for ordering that the corpse of the princely pilgrim be brought back with honour to his home. Anaclet rode a day ahead of the train and came before Sibylla with drooping head and shield reversed. She had already been near to swound when his name, his alone, was named to her. When she saw him she lost herself and sank against his arm. I am ashamed of my own tears, for they fall only out of a gentle melancholy, whereas hers was a pang that no tears soften, and when she revived a second time her eye was dry and her bearing rigid. She had herself informed by the squire what had happened to her lord and then said: ‘Good.’ This ‘good’ was not good at all. Such a ‘good’ is by no means submission to God’s will, rather it is a world of recalcitrance and perpetual denial of God’s counsel and it means: ‘As you choose, Lord God, I draw my own conclusions from your dispensation, to me unacceptable. You had in me a female, a sinful one, certainly. Now you will have in me no female at all but for ever a rigid bride of affliction, closed and defiant, to amaze you.’ God keep me from such a sword and such frozenness. True, I afford it no opening. But glad am I even so, that the tale lets me taste it and I do know in a sense how it feels.

The Sieur Eisengrein said to her:

‘The bier of your brother is come and stands in the castle chapel. He has given to God his body for his soul, and you are now our liege lady. Accept my bended knee. At the same time let the warning be spoken, for your honour and mine, that when we bring him to his grave you shall show a grief such as one pays a brother and no other. Any grief warmer than is fit and proper for a sister must be sternly concealed.’

She answered him back in this wise:

‘For advice and subtle suggestion, Sir Knight, my thanks. I think my bearing is not such as would expose my protector’s honour with expressions of too extreme a pain. You are indeed inexperienced in grief if you think the deepest would be loud. I intend now to pray three hours over the bier of my sacred brother. That should not overpass the bounds of decency. Then with measured mourning you may bring him to his place. Mine is no longer here on your waterburg, and not from this place will I rule the land. I hope further to have a loyal servant in you, Cons du Châtel, yet I like you not, and though you made me your liege lady, you stand not close to me in favour, of this at this hour be assured by me. You took from me my sweet brother-sister child, shipped it on the savage seas and its father, my dearest-loved brother, sent to his death—that had, I suppose, all to be, for honour and statesmanship, but yet I bear you a grudge for it and am weary to death of your iron-hearted good nature. I will have you neither to seneschal nor steward, nor will I have you anywheres about me when I take residence in my chief city in the high castle at Bruges on the deep sea-bight. You might, were you about me, forge shrewd plans of policy, on account of the direct succession, and want to marry me off with some prince of Christendom, equal in birth to mine; whereas only one was equal with me, for whom I everlastingly mourn. Of marriage I will not hear, for celui je tiendrai ad espous qui nos redemst de son sanc précieu. Alms and fasts, watching and praying on the bare stone, with all that is harsh and repulsive to the flesh, so shall my life be as lady of this land, that God may see he has in me no longer a sinful woman but no woman at all, instead a princess-nun whose heart is dead. Such my resolve.’

It was, and remained, and was, Christ knows, not the right one. For oh, it brought the fifth sword above the woman’s head and the land’s, of which straightway. Sibylla returned not to Beaurepaire, the place of her youth and her sin; it lay forsaken, guarded only by a castellan and a small troop of serjents. The princess held court in the castle at Bruges, on the ocean bay, a strict court where no laughing was, save when the mistress absented herself, lying alone or in prayer on the bare stones, between two monks. In white robe she descended, accompanied only by two women with baskets, and dispensed to the poor, who called her blessed. Joy and ease she had not for her portion, only night masses, castigation, and short commons, and this above all not for love of God but to defy Him that it might pierce through and through Him and He be shaken.

So she lived some years; her beauty was not punished by her punishment though she would willingly have yielded it. Often blue rings from watching lay round her eyes, yet she ripened from year to year, preserving on earth the traits of her dead brother, into the loveliest of women; and that I feel was also according to her will, that God might be vexed because she granted so lovely a body to no husband, but remained her brother’s penitent widow. And yet, as already in her childhood, many a Christian prince sought her out and offered his hand, by missives and messagers and sometimes even in person. But each was turned away. It saddened court and country, even God whom it was meant to sadden, though against so much penitential abstinence He on His side could have nothing to say. The dilemma she did not begrudge him.

In the sixth year a most noble prince, Roger-Philippus, King of Arelat, began to importune her for his marriageable son, Roger by name without the Philipp. He was a prince such as for my life I cannot bear, a shameless fellow. Even at fifteen years he had a black pointed beard, eyes like burning coals, eyebrows arched like his moustache, and was tall, hairy, quarrelsome, gallant, a cockerel, a heart-breaker, a dueller, a devil of a fellow, to me quite unspeakable. That his father wished him well I can understand, also that he thought good to settle him as soon as possible in wedlock. The Lord Grimald’s high-born and pious daughter seemed the right choice, and political considerations played a part as well, for not only did the King covet the lovely woman for his heir, but also on top of that to join Artoys and Flaundres to Arelat and Upper Burgundy, that he wanted for him above all.

So then messagers and missives, tender proposals and wooing gifts went from land to land, and King Roger-Philippus himself (with his son and stately retinue of Burgundian knights) visited the court of Bruges, where Roger straightway seduced three maids of honour but was looked upon coldly by the liege lady. She had a way of measuring his most knightly figure up and down with mocking eyes, which embittered the cockerel to his very marrow and enflamed him for ever against her so that he felt his honour lost if he were not to possess her. The whole court too, including the three ladies who had fallen the first few days, were in favour of the suit, for they all wanted Sibylla to give the realm a duke and that there should be at length a bourne set to her chastity. But she courteously avoided the King’s advances, said not Nay but by no means Yea, and made condition of an indefinite period for consideration after the Burgundians had gone home again. Thence they renewed their messages, reminders, and pleas but were put off and on with fair words and then denials which soon sounded more like No, only veering more to a Yes for the sake of politeness, and always leaving everything in the balance, to the end that father and son might finally tire of the business.

Four years passed like this; then King Roger-Philippus gave his hand to death and must needs go with him; so Roger of the pointed beard became King of Arelat. By this time he had laid under obligation all the court ladies of less than fifty and a host of burghers’ daughters to boot; yet he had never forgotten his lust after the coy dame in the white robe who had looked at him so offensively; and after he reached the throne the desire to possess her chimed with a craving to increase his realm by adding hers, as had been his father’s political design. So then barefaced threats mingled with sweet wooing when he wrote to her and sent missives post to the effect that sooner would he strive against her in arms than resign her peerless self and wed another. Hers was the fault that his realm remained without a queen as it was hers as well that her own lacked a lord; and against so much evil God Himself would in the end bid him take the sword. So or in such like words the cock and stallion. But Sibylla, to keep him in check, let her Nay veer to the side of Yea and thus passed three more years, until his patience wore out. But at last it did: and with two thousand knights and ten thousand foot-soldiers he fell upon Sibylla’s land and overran it with fire and sword.

‘À moi, Baron Eisengrein! Forget that in our distraction we banished you from our court. Be mindful of the services which you paid our lord and father now in glory with God. Call up my knights, assemble my foot-soldiers, open the arsenals, stout Fieldmarshal, and hurl yourself on the impudent robber who would snatch us with bloody hand into his bed! Protect your Duchess, ordained of God!’

Thus began the ‘wooing war’ between Burgundy and Flaundres-Artoys, so called in the mouths of the troubadours, which with varying fortunes, and stubbornly resumed again and again, was waged with great destruction for five long years.

‘Give peace, lady, after so much travail to this land and offer him your hand who ever yearns for you, the suitor bold, so true and tireless ever!’ But she said: ‘Never!’