60. In the Hall of the Chosen

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WHEN Donander of Évre awoke in the Northern paradise, he also was content enough. It was a strange and not what you could call a cozy place, this gold-roofed hall with its five hundred and forty mile-wide doors: and the monsters, in the likeness of a stag and of a she-goat, which straddled above the building perpetually feeding upon the lower leaves of the great tree called Lærath, seemed to Donander preëminently outlandish creatures, animals under whose bellies no really considerate persons would have erected a residence. Yet, like Palnatoki, Donander of Évre was an old campaigner, who could be tolerably comfortable anywhere. Nor was to discover himself among pagans a novel experience, since in his mortal life Donander had ridden at adventure in most corners of the world, and rather more than half of his finest enemies and of his opponents in many delightful encounters had been infidels.

“Excepting always their unfortunate religious heresies,” he was used to concede, “I have no fault to pick with heathen persons, whom in the daily and nocturnal affairs of life I have found quite as friendly and companionable as properly baptized ladies.”

In fine, he got on well enough with the flaxen-haired spirits of these Northern kings and skalds and jarls and vikingar. They stared, and some guffawed, when he fitted out a little shrine, in which Donander prayed decorously, every day at the correct hours, for the second coming of Manuel and for the welfare of Donander’s soul upon the holy Morrow of Judgment. Yet, after all, these boreal ghosts conceded, in paradise if anywhere a man should be permitted utterly to follow his own tastes, even in imaginative eschatology. And when they talked their really pathetic nonsense about being the guests of Sidvrar the Weaver and Constrainer, and about living forever through his bounty thus happily in the Hall of the Chosen, it was Donander’s turn to shrug. Even had there been no other discrepancies, everybody knew that heaven had, not five hundred and forty golden gates, but only twelve entrances, each carved from a single pearl and engraved with the name of a tribe of Israel.

“Besides,” Donander asked, “who is this Weaver and Constrainer? Certainly, I never heard of him before.”

“He is the King and Father of the Ænseis,” they told him. “He is overlord of that unimaginable folk who dwell in Ydalir; and who do not kill their deformed and weakling children, as we were used to do, but instead cast from the ivory ramparts of Ydalir all such degenerate offspring, to be the gods of races who are not blond and Nordic.”

Donander, as a loyal son of the Church, could only shake his head over such nonsense, and the innumerous other errors by which these heathen were being misled to everlasting ruin. Aloud, Donander repeated his final verdict as to the pretensions of this Sidvrar, by saying again, “I never heard of him.”

Nevertheless, Donander went without real discontent among the pleasures of paradise, and he joined in all the local sports. In common with the other dead, he ate the flesh of the inexhaustible boar, and with them he drank of the strong mead which sustained them in perpetual tipsiness. And he sedately rode out with the others every morning into the meadows where these blessed pagan lords fought joyously among themselves until midday. At noon a peal of thunder would sound, the slain and wounded warriors were of a sudden revivified and cured of their hurts, and were reunited to whatsoever arms and heads and legs the contestants had lost in their gaming: and the company would return fraternally to the gold-roofed hall, where they ate and drank and made their brags until they slept.

“Yet perhaps our banquets might, messieurs,” Donander had suggested, after a century or so of these rough-and-ready pleasures, “be not unadvantageously seasoned with the delights of feminine companionship, if only for dessert?”

“But it is one of our appointed blessings to have done with women and their silly ways,” cried out the vikingar, “now that we have entered paradise.”

And Donander, who had always been notable for his affectionate nature, and who had served vigorously so many ladies par amours, seemed grieved to hear a saying so unchivalrous. Still, he said nothing.

Thus much time passed; and the worlds were changed: but in the eyes of Donander of Évre, as in the eyes of all who feasted in the Hall of the Chosen, there was no knowledge nor any fear of time, because these blessed dead lived now in perpetual tipsiness. And, as befitted a loyal son of the Church, Donander, without any complaining, in the surroundings which Heaven out of Heaven’s wisdom had selected for him, awaited the second coming of Manuel and the holy Morrow of Judgment.