And he commenced devouring like his namesake’ ‘the gray beast of the wood,’ and forcing, in his rough hospitable way, Philammon to devour also much against his will and stomach.
‘There. I feel happier now!’ quoth Wulf, at last. ‘There is nothing to be done in this accursed place but to eat. I get no fighting, no hunting. I hate women as they hate me. I don’t know anything indeed, that I don’t hate, except eating and singing. And now, what with those girls’ vile unmanly harps and flutes, no one cares to listen to a true rattling warsong. There they are at it now, with their caterwauling, squealing all together like a set of starlings on a foggy morning! We’ll have a song too, to drown the noise.’ And he burst out with a wild rich melody, acting, in uncouth gestures and a suppressed tone of voice, the scene which the words described—
An elk looked out of the pine forest He snuffed up east, he snuffed down west, Stealthy and still.
His mane and his horns were heavy with snow; I laid my arrow across my bow, Stealthy and still.
And then quickening his voice, as his whole face blazed up into fierce excitement—
The bow it rattled’ the arrow flew, It smote his blade-bones through and through, Hurrah!
I sprang at his throat like a wolf of the wood, And I warmed my hands in the smoking blood, Hurrah!
And with a shout that echoed and rang from wall to wall, and pealed away above the roofs, he leapt to his feet with a gesture and look of savage frenzy which made Philammon recoil. But the passion was gone in an instant, and Wulf sat down again chuckling to himself—
‘There—that is something like a warrior’s song. That makes the old blood spin along again! But this debauching furnace of a climate! no man can keep his muscle, or his courage, or his money, or anything else in it. May the gods curse the day when first I saw it!’
Philammon said nothing, but sat utterly aghast at an outbreak so unlike Wulf’s usual caustic reserve and stately self-restraint, and shuddering at the thought that it might be an instance of that daemoniac possession to which these barbarians were supposed by Christians and by Neo-Platonists to be peculiarly subject. But the horror was not yet at its height; for in another minute the doors of the women’s court flew open, and, attracted by Wulf’s shout, out poured the whole Bacchanalian crew, with Orestes, crowned with flowers, and led by the Amal and Pelagia, reeling in the midst, wine-cup in hand.