70. All Ends Perplexedly

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JURGEN, thus left alone, forthwith ascended the side of the great tomb. He stood now at the top of it, holding to the neck of the horse upon which sat the sculptured effigy of Manuel. The stone face, above and looking beyond Jurgen, when seen at such close quarters, was blotched and grotesquely coarse, the blank eyeballs gave it a repellent air of crass idiocy. But Jurgen was there to appraise not the face but the garments of the overtowering hero, and it was at the gems with which this famous effigy was inset that Jurgen was really looking.

Then, without any deep surprise, Jurgen whistled. To his trained eye it was apparent enough that these gems with which Madame Niafer had prodigally adorned her husband’s statue were one and all, and had been from the first, bright bits of variously colored glass. The Countess Radegonde, it appeared, had been by a great many years forestalled in her economics and in her practical view of this tomb by the countess who builded it.

And somehow Jurgen was not much surprised. His only verbal outbreak was to utter one of his favorite remarks. He said, “These women!”

He climbed down to the pavement afterward, with the gingerly care befitting a person of forty-and-something. He cocked his gray head, looking upward with a remarkable blending of the quizzical and of the regretful. Now, seen at an appropriate distance, now Manuel of Poictesme appeared again resplendent and in everything majestic. He sat there, wary and confident and superb, it seemed, perpetually to guard the country which he had redeemed; and to which, men said, he was to return....

Thus Jurgen waited for some while, regarding the vast tomb which was wholly empty, and which everywhere was adorned with a worthless tinsel glitter, and which yet stayed the most holy and, precisely as Jurgen had pointed out, the actually inspiring shrine of the heroic cult of the Redeemer....

Jurgen opened his mouth. Then he shut it.

For Jurgen recalled that only last month he had become involved in a somewhat perturbing experience, on account of having spoken extempore in praise of the Devil; and so, as concerned the Redeemer, Jurgen decided not to commit himself one way or the other. It seemed the part of wisdom for an aging pawnbroker to keep out of all such extra-mundane affairs.... Even so, a carnival of thoughts now tempted him to play with them, because this was a paradoxical tomb about which, but for the promptings of discretion, one might say a number of fine things. Those tinsel fripperies were, to the eyes of a considerate person, worthy of a reverence undemanded by mere diamonds, because of the deeds which they had prompted: and this emptiness was sacred because of the faith which people had put in it. And that this glittering vacuity could, as a matter of fact, work miracles was now fully attested: for it had reduced Jurgen to silence.

No: you could never, shruggingly, dismiss this tomb as, upon the whole, a malefic fraud which emanated only folly and intolerance and a persecution of the short-sighted by the blind. That was, in fact, a relatively unimportant aspect, in that it was an aspect which need never trouble you personally, if you were careful. And, at forty-and-something, you were careful.

Meanwhile you knew the shining thing to have been, also, the begetter of so much charity, and of forbearance, and of bravery, and of self-denial,—and of its devotees’ so strange, so troublingly incomprehensible, contentment,—that it somewhat frightened Jurgen. For Jurgen, but a moment ago, had been handling—perhaps—a bit over-intimately that really dangerous fountain-head of all the aspiring and fine standards which the aging pawnbroker was used unfeignedly to admire, with a vague, ever-present underthought as to the disastrousness of acquiring them. It would, he felt, be the very deuce if in business life one were ever to find these notions on the wrong side of his counter....

Esthetically it was, of course, delightful to regard the preëminent manifesters of the Redeemer’s power and sanctity, in those splendid lords of the Silver Stallion about whom Jurgen had but now been talking. It was an ennobling and a picturesque reflection that humanity had once risen to such heights; that mere mortal men had, through their faith in and their contact with the great Redeemer, become purged of all faults and carnal weaknesses, and had lived stainlessly, and had even performed their salutary miracles whenever such a course seemed requisite. Jurgen thought it would be rather fun to work miracles. In any event, it was pleasant, and it was non-committally uplifting, just to think about the heroic saints of yesterday, and to envy their lot in life and their assured fine place in history.

Jurgen thought, for example, of gentle and great-hearted old Guivric sharing his worldly wealth in such noble irrationality with all needy persons; and of kneeling Miramon with those seven thousand horrific bees swarming about him,—screeching out infernal threats, but powerless to trouble the serene, psalm-singing and unstung saint. Jurgen thought of Kerin facing so intrepidly yet other hideous cohorts of disputatious fiends and cowing their science so-called with decisive Biblical texts; and of the noble shocked figure of virtuous Gonfal holding fast his nightgown about him with one hand, and with the other repulsing the enamored—and, they said, quite good-looking also,—Queen Morvyth of the Isles of Wonder, when she assaulted his chastity. Performances like these were well worthy to be commemorated in history: and Jurgen regarded them with a warm, gratifying thrill of purely esthetic appreciation.

For, from any practical standpoint, Jurgen obscurely felt, it would be inconvenient to be quite as perfect and superb as all that. Or, you might put it better, perhaps, that this was not a condition which a really honorable person, with a shop and a wife and other obligations, could conscientiously do anything directly to provoke for himself. Any, as one might say, defenseless householder whom the all-powerful Redeemer had explicitly and unarguably singled out to live in the heroic sanctity of an apostle would be, of course, in quite another and wholly justifiable case....

And Jurgen was wondering what it was that the child who Jurgen once had been had, actually, witnessed and heard upon Upper Morven. He could not now be certain: the fancies of a child are so unaccountable, so opulent in decorative additions.... Yet the testimony of that child appeared to have done more than anything else toward establishing Dom Manuel’s supremacy over all the men that Poictesme had ever known; indeed, when every fostering influence was allowed for, the whole cult of the returning Redeemer had begun with the testimony of that child. And perhaps it was natural enough (in this truly curious world) that Jurgen nowadays should be the only person remaining in any place who was a bit dubious as to the testimony of that child....

Anyhow, young Jurgen had brought down from Morven a most helpful and inspiring prediction which kept up people’s spirits in this truly curious world; and cheerfulness was a clear gain. The fact that nothing anywhere entitled you to it could only, he deduced, make of this cheerfulness a still clearer gain....

There might, besides, very well have been something to build upon. Modesty, indeed, here raised the point if Jurgen—at that tender age and some while before the full ripening of his powers,—could have invented out of the whole cloth anything quite so splendid and far-reaching? And that question he modestly left unanswered. Meanwhile (among so many perplexities) it was certain that Poictesme, along with the rest of Christendom, had now its wholly satisfactory faith and its beneficent legend.