Читать книгу The Holy Sinner - Thomas Mann - Страница 4

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There was once a Duke of Flaundres and Artoys, by name Grimald. His sword was called Eckesachs, the Terrible. His Castilian war-steed was named Guverjorss. Securer in God’s favour seemed no prince than he, and bold ranged his eye over lands his by death and inheritance, with fat cities and strong citadels, and rested, stern with self-respect, on his meiny and squire-shaft, with runners, cooks, kitchen-boys, drummers and trumpeters, fiddlers and flautists. He had also his body-servants, twelve boys of distinguished birth and gentle manners, among them two sons of Saracens. The Christian lads were forbidden to tease the latter about their idol Mohammed. When with his wife Baduhenna, that lofty dame, he paced to the church or the festal board, then these pages sprang by twos, handfast, in coloured stockings before them, setting their feet crosswise and becking with their heads.

His native stronghold, where Duke Grimald chiefly held court, was Chastel Beaurepaire, and lay on the heights of sheep-feeding Artoys, looking from afar as though turned on a lathe, with its roofs, terraces, outworks, and ring-walls reinforced by towers, a very refuge such as a prince well needs: against savage foes from without as well as against evil notions of his own subjects; yet indeed most habitable and pleasant to the senses too. Its kernel was a towering donjon keep, square, with inner rooms of great splendour, the like of which however were hidden not only in the dwelling-tower itself but also in the course of the walls in many a special building and inner ring as well; and from the great hall of the keep a straight stair went out into the court and garden sward, where surrounded by walls there stood a spreading linden tree. On the bench that went round it the ducal pair liked to sit of a summer afternoon on cushions of fine phelle silk from Aleppo and Damascus, while the court sat round at ease at their feet on carpets spread by squires on the well-tended sward; and they listened to many a true and many a deceiving tale of player folk who, picking their strings, related of Artus, lord of all Brittany, of good-weather King Orendel, how he suffered bitter shipwreck in late autumn and became thrall to the ice-giants; of the combats of Christian knights with strange, frightful people in such remote lands as Ethnise, Gylstram, or Rankulat: folk with heads like cranes, with eyes in their foreheads, web-footers, pygmies, and giants; of the extraordinary dangiers of the magnet-mountain and the outwitting of the griffins for their red gold; of the battle for the faith of St Silvester with a Jew before the Emperor Constantine; when the Jew murmured the name of his God in the ear of a steer and the animal fell dead to the ground. But Silvester invoked Christus, and the bull rose on his legs again and in thundering roar proclaimed the superiority of the true faith.

All this only by way of illustration. At other times they gave each other cunning riddles or carried on free conversation full of cortoisie and wit, so that much merry laughter of mixed voices, lords and ladies, filled the air.

For my part I have to laugh, because some might think in the great hall above there burned of evenings smoking torches of straw and pitch-pine for light. Oh no! Rings hung from the roof thick bestuck with flickering candles, and wall candelabra held bunches of candles with tenfold gleam into the room. There were two marble chimney-pieces where aloes and sandalwood burned, and broad carpets covered the stones; on occasion perhaps the Prince of Kanvoleis or the King of Anjou—bien sois venu, beau Sire!—being guests of the Duke, there were strewn branches and green rushes and flowers. At table the Lord Grimald and his Lady Baduhenna sat in chairs with cushions of Arabic achmardi, opposite to them their chaplain. The musicians sat at the foot of the table or else at a separate little table and the court at square tables let down from the walls, covered with white, and four squires for each table handed golden beakers and gay silk napkins and they carved kneeling. Fit was the food for court: heron and fish and lamb cutlets, and birds caught in snares in the woods, and fat carp. With each dish there was sauce, pepper, and agrass (by which I mean fruit sauce), and diligently, their faces red as fire (for they drank too, behind the doors), the pages filled the beakers with wine and mulberry wine and red Sinopel and spicy ‘clear drink’, that is to say claret, with which with the greatest pleasure and frequency the Lord Grimald wetted his gorge.

But I will not further celebrate the good life on Beaurepaire, though it were indeed untruth to conceal that the presses were bursting with linen and damask, silks and velvets of rare sort, otter-skins, and also fine sables; that the stands and cases glittered with Azagoger fine-ware, such as bowls hollowed out of precious stones and gold goblets. The drawers scarcely held the supply of spicery with which the air was scented, the carpets and couches strewed: herbs and woods, ambergris, theriac, clove, muskat, and cardamom; that in secret treasuries were bestowed many a golden mark from the Caucasus, wrested from the claws of griffins; thereto jewels and wonder-working stones unset, as carbuncle, onyx, chalcedony, coral, and whatever else they are called: agate, sardonyx, pearls, malachite, and diamonds; that the magazines and armouries were crammed with priceless weapons, shirts of chain mail, harsenières and shields from Toledo in Spain, harness for rider and steed, trappings, harness, saddles, and bell-bridles; the stables, penfolds, kennels, and cages were full to overflowing with horses and hounds, game lures, falcons, and talking birds.

But enough of such paeans! Though it were no small thing to align and keep in grammatical sequence such encomiums as these! In most courtly fashion, it is clear, did the Lord Grimald and the Lady Baduhenna pass their days, admired by all Christendom round about, richly besene with all the good things of the earth. So it goes in all the tales and then goes on to say: ‘Only one thing was lacking to their joy.’ The life of man follows well-tried patterns, but it is only in words that it is old and traditional; in and for itself it is ever new and young, though even so nothing may remain to the teller save to give it the old words. Only one thing then, says he, perforce, was lacking to make their happiness complete: that was children—and how often one saw the pair kneeling side by side on velvet cushions, wringing their hands to heaven for that which was withheld! Not only so; but in all the churches of Flaundres and Artoys each Sunday prayers rose from the chancel to God for this boon, yet He seemed ever to deny His ear to the plea; for both were already forty and still delayed the hope of posterity and direct succession, so that one day belike the dukedome would be torn insunder in strife of contending heirs.

Was it because the Archbishop of Cologne, Utrecht, Maastricht, and Liège entered the lists with solemn masses and supplicating processions? I so believe; for after long hesitation by the Almighty the ban was at last lifted and the princess looked forward to maternal joys—joys, alas, destined only to be quenched in the tortures of a childbed whose agony bore witness to the lingering misgivings of the All-Wisdom on the score of her hopes. For woe! The dame was not to recover from the twins which with inhuman shrieks she bore to the light of day. Her own light failed, and Duke Grimald was made a father only to find himself at the same time widowed.

How strangely does providence mingle for us mortal joy and sorrow in one cup! The Archbishop, unfavourably affected by the doubtful success which his pressure upon the Almighty had brought about, left it to the Bishop of Cambray to hold the exequies in the cathedral at Ypres. When now the stone slab covered the vault where the Lady Baduhenna kept her cold childbed, Duke Grimald returned to Beaurepaire to rejoice in what was given him, after in due form mourning what had been taken away. The swaddling-pair, death’s dearest scions, lad and maid, his flesh and blood, heirs of his house, they were his bliss in bane, and were the bliss of all the burgh, wherefore together they were called Joidelacourt, meaning joy of the court, for more charming infants truly the world never saw, and no painter from Cologne or Maastricht could have painted more beauteous with paint: so pure of form, flowed round by all sweet airs, with little hair like down of chicks and eyes at first all full of heaven’s light; seldom crying, ever ready with angel smiles that melted one’s heart, not only for others but also when they looked at each other on the chiffonier, clapped hands together, and said ‘Da, da!’

Joidelacourt, of course, they were called only in common and in flattering jest. In holy baptism, bestowed by the chaplain of the castle, they received the names Wiligis and Sibylla; and though younker Wiligis, who clapped so much harder while saying ‘Da, da’ than did his sister Sibylla, was the chief person and heir, yet on her too, as on her whole sex, fell a gleam from the glory of the Queen of Heaven and with tenderer eye did Duke Grimald regard his daughter than the so important and quite as handsome son. His son would be a knight like himself, doughty and bold, made for the women, when after jousting he would wash from his body the rust of his sweated armour; made for the claret too, yes, one could tell that. The sweet strangeness of tender womanhood, endowed from above, takes hold quite otherwise of the rude heart of man, even the fatherly one; and thus the Lord Grimald called his son only young sprig and monkey but the wee girl ‘ma charmante’ and kissed her while he only patted the boy and gave him his finger to hold.