“They told us in that monastery, ‘The End of the World is coming.’ The priest we met on the road said, ‘The End of the World is at hand.’ Three days ago, in that town, the church bells rang and our crowd left us, and gave their money into the bag at the door.”
“The End of the World—! I would I might give it a rope’s end! The world ends if I starve! Hark you! Soothsay that the world does NOT end—at least not in our time! Soothsay along this road so that we get money! Get money or get thy ribs broken!”
The road that they were travelling proved villainously muddy and uneven. Toward noon they found sitting by the wayside a man who led in a chain a brown bear. “This road is most fearful—plain bog and mountain! But never will it be mended, because presently comes the End of the World!”
Black Martin shook his bull shoulders and scraped the mud from a torn shoe. “We have been south. I heard a little talk of that, but nothing in a month to what is heard now in a day! Is it coming to an end in France before it comes in Aquitaine?”
“Only the learned knew much about it,” said the bearward. “Then, all of a sudden, comes a word from the bishops that has to be read in all the churches. And it begins, ‘As the End of the World is at hand—’ So it began to run from mouth to mouth.—The road is muddy and it is raining? Well, the earth sweats with terror!”
It was yet raining when the troop of Entertainers came into the town between Orléans and Paris. They came through a narrow street that turned and wound upon itself to the market-place, and all the way Jouel and Baudwin beat drum and played viol, and Black Martin at the head cried in a bull’s voice. “Choice Entertainment! My masters! My masters! Choice Entertainment!” They brought into the market-place a queue of followers and attracted certain folk already there. But the rain came down hard, and the Entertainers were dead tired and downhearted and all went spiritlessly. Even fear of Black Martin could not keep it up. The crowd felt the chill rain and dissolved. The individuals that stayed, having no better place to go, were not the kind that scattered gain.
There was a black, tangled knot of lanes and alleys like frozen serpents. Mean houses cowered on either side. The Entertainers bargained for night’s lodging in certain of these, and fire to cook food by. Dusk shut in, with a great monastery bell booming overhead. Pastourel the wrestler and his wife Jeanne and their three children and Gersonde the soothsayer had a hut-like place with a hearth in the middle and the smoke going out through a hole overhead. Pastourel was Black Martin’s son, Gersonde’s uncle. If he had not had a black temper he would have been by no means a bad giant. Jeanne was younger than he, not much older than Gersonde. Gersonde loved Jeanne and the children.
Outside poured the rain. The smoke within the hut circled acrid and heavy. Jeanne, bringing Pastourel his supper, let fall the wooden bowl and spilled the stew of little-meat and fragments of vegetables. Pastourel had a stick which he used in vaulting. He took it now and beat Jeanne, beat her much worse than he usually did, since the rain and ill-luck were in his temper. Jeanne began to cry out loudly; his hand was twisted in her long hair, and he flung her to the floor and still beat her. The children cried, huddled in the corner. Gersonde dragged at Pastourel’s arm, caught at the stick. He was strong as a bull, he flung her to the other side of the hut and kept on beating Jeanne. The hut stood in a populous alley; now came folk striking at the door to know if there was murder.
Pastourel flung the door open. “I am beating my wife who spoiled my supper! Cannot a man beat his wife in peace and quietness?”
The people left the door. “It is nothing! There is nothing unlawful. He is beating his wife.”