Allegories; Fantasy fiction; Historical fiction; Middle Ages -- Fiction
"O woman dear," says Jurgen, "but I have loved you, and my heart is
water now that you are taken from me: and to remember your ways and
the joy I had in them will be a big and grinding sorrow in the long
time to come. Oh, not with any heroic love have I loved you, nor
with any madness and high dreams, nor with much talking either; but
with a love befitting my condition, with a quiet and cordial love."
"And must you be trying, while I die, to get your grieving for me
into the right words?" she asks him, smiling very sadly. "No matter:
you are Jurgen, and I have loved you. And I am glad that I shall
know nothing about it when in the long time, to come you will be
telling so many other women about what was said by Zorobasius and
Ptolemopiter, and when you will be posturing and romancing for their
delight. For presently I shall have tasted Lethê: and presently I
shall have forgotten you, King Jurgen, and all the joy I had in you,
and all the pride, and all the love I had for you, King Jurgen, who
loved me as much as you were able."
"Why, and will there be any love-making, do you think, in Hell?" he
asks her, with a doleful smile.
"There will be love-making," she replied, "wherever you go, King
Jurgen. And there will be women to listen. And at the last there
will be a bean-pole of a woman, in a wig."
"I am sorry--" he said. "And yet I have loved you, Chloris."
"That is my comfort now. And presently there will be Lethê. I put
the greater faith in Lethê. And still, I cannot help but love you,
Jurgen, in whom I have no faith at all."
He said, again: "I am not worthy."
They kissed. Then each of them was conveyed to an appropriate doom.
And tears were in the eyes of Jurgen, who was not used to weep: and
he thought not at all of what was to befall him, but only of this
and that small trivial thing which would have pleased his Chloris
had Jurgen done it, and which for one reason or another Jurgen had
left undone.
"I was not ever unkind to her, says she! ah, but I might have been
so much kinder. And now I shall not ever see her any more, nor ever
any more may I awaken delight and admiration in those bright tender
eyes which saw no fault in me! Well, but it is a comfort surely that
she does not know how I devoted the last night she was to live to
teaching mathematics."
And then Jurgen wondered how he would be despatched into the Hell of
his fathers? And when the Philistines showed him in what manner they
proposed to inflict their sentence he wondered at his own
obtuseness.
"For I might have surmised this would be the way of it," said
Jurgen. "And yet as always there is a simplicity in the methods of
the Philistines which is unimaginable by really clever fellows. And
as always, too, these methods are unfair to us clever fellows. Well,
I am willing to taste any drink once: but this is a very horrible
device, none the less; and I wonder if I have the pluck to endure
it?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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