Kerin now for a while regarded his fellow prisoner with a trace of mild disapproval. And Kerin said:
“Yet I catalogue verities which are well proven and assured. But you, who live in a brown cage that is buried deep in this gray and lonely corridor, you can have no first-hand information as to beauty and mystery and holiness and heroism and immortality, you encourage people in a business of which you are ignorant, and you sing about ardors and raptures and, above all, about a future of which you can know nothing.
“That may very well be just why I sing of these things so movingly. And in any event, I do not seek to copy nature. I, on the contrary, create to divert me such faith and dreams as living among men would tend to destroy. But as it is, my worshipers depart from me drunk with my very potent music; they tread high-heartedly, in this gray corridor, and they are devoid of fear and parvanimity; for the effect of my singing, like that of all great singing, is to fill my hearers with a sentiment of their importance as moral beings and of the greatness of their destinies.”
“Oh, but,” said Kerin, “but I finished long ago with the various schools of morals, and I am now, as I told you, well forward in petrology. Nor shall I desist from learning until I have come by all knowledge and all truth which can content my Saraïde. And she, Messire Gander, is a remarkably clear-sighted young woman, to whom the romantic illusions which you provide could be of no least importance.”
“Nothing,” returned the gander, “nothing in the universe, is of importance, or is authentic to any serious sense, except the illusions of romance. For man alone of animals plays the ape to his dreams. These axioms—poor, deaf and blinded spendthrift!—are none the less valuable for being quoted.”
“Nor are they, I suspect,” replied Kerin, “any the less generally quoted for being bosh.”
With that he returned to his books; and the gander resumed its singing.
And many more years thus passed: overhead, the legend of Manuel had come into being and was flourishing, and before its increase the brawling bleak rough joyous times which Kerin had known, were, howsoever slowly, passing away from Poictesme, not ever to return. Overhead, Count Emmerick was ruling—inefficiently enough, but at least with a marked bent toward the justice and mercy and kindliness imposed upon him by the legend,—where Dom Manuel had ruled according to his own will alone. Overhead, Dame Niafer and Holmendis were building everywhere their shrines and convents and hospitals; and were now beginning, a little by a little, to persecute, with the saint’s rather ruthless miracle-working, the fairies and the demons and all other unorthodox spirits aboriginal to this land; and were beginning, too, to extirpate the human heretics who here and there had showed such a lack of patriotism and of religious faith as to question the legend of Manuel and the transcending future of Poictesme.
The need of doing this was a grief to Niafer and Holmendis, as well as a troubling tax upon their hours of leisure: but, nevertheless, as clear-headed philanthropists, they here faced honestly the requirements of honest faith in any as yet revealed religion,—by which all unbelievers must be regarded as lost in any event, and cannot be permitted to continue in life except as a source of yet other immortal souls’ pollution and ruin.
Meanwhile the gander also exalted the illusions of romance: and Kerin read. His eyes journeyed over millions upon millions of pages in the while that Kerin sat snug: and except for the gander’s perilously sweet and most distracting singing, Kerin had no worries in any manner to interrupt him, and no bothers whatever, save only the increasing infirmities of his age.