The Wanderers

by Mary Johnston

Here she dwelled in Tanneguy’s town. With her were steward and chamberlain and tirewomen from the ruined castle, and she had the two children Alard and Yolande. Tanneguy, all the world knew, was her knight, and with poesy and tourney did her honour. He visited her in her garden and hall, and often was she in his castle.

Tanneguy hod a stone room with groined roof upheld by pillars. Outside its windows, cut in the thick, thick wall, quivered ivy and myrtle, sang the birds, hummed the bees, fell the gold light or the pleasant rain. By this room was a smaller room, and in this was built a furnace, and here tables held alembics and crucibles with a many other curiously shaped vessels, large and small, of glass or metal. Vials were there, and chests great and small, balances, and instruments with which to measure, manage, and design, earths and ores in heaps, and water falling from a stone lion’s head into a basin curved around by a stone gryphon. He had two men in brown who fed coals to his furnace, and for a helper an old, skilled man in green, a notable alchemist, but a lesser alchemist than Tanneguy himself. All this room held in a red-brown glow. With a magic hand and eye, it fascinated the children of Beatrix, often let to come and look from the great room or the deep, green garden. In the greater room of the stone pillars were Tanneguy’s books. His time considered, he had many.

He did not love books nor study more than did Beatrix whom he called his lady and who was now his guest. Together they loved knowledge, enquiry into the source and background and flow of things.

He was prince and she was lady. Abide within the four corners of sundry conventions, acknowledge various unfreedoms, and for the rest, so long as jealousy, envy, and hatred did not look their way, they might bend, in this great room, over one book. They did so; they loved, but their age found no occasion to blame their love.

These were their personal relations. They were beginning—after far wandering in lands and times—to find that one was reality, but two illusion. They were most happy in each other’s company. To be alone together in bower or garden, or in this room of knowledge and thought, had an ancient root of sweetness, a fulness of rest and home. But now that old bliss was rising into wider space. They were together even when, to eye or touch, they failed of physical nearness. They began in all things each to feel, to perceive, the other. Far and near, then and now, began to fade, divisions and limitations to grow of less account. Once these had seemed unclimbable walls, unleapable gulfs. Now they began to perceive that the gulfs were filling, the walls crumbling.... It came with a far-away perception that all walls and gulfs were arbitrary, temporary.... In the meantime it was sweet to work together in this old stone room.

Often and often she brought the two children with her and they played in the little garden without. Sometimes Tanneguy watched her playing with the children; sometimes the four of them played. She taught the children well, and especially did she teach the girl Yolande. She would have her leap and run, toss and catch again, ride and swim and draw a bow. She would have her look and know and think, perceive, divine. Came to Tanneguy’s castle a wise and famed Discoverer, a man who dreamed and then went forth to find how the dream and the truth tallied, who fitted ships and made little known shores better known, and unknown places known, who dreamed of outer ocean and how to reach east from west and north from south. He talked in hall for all to hear, and he talked in the stone-lined room when there were fewer by. Tanneguy and Beatrix sat with him here, listening and questioning. Beatrix kept by her the child Yolande, willing enough to stay, her hand in her mother’s, her head against her mother’s knee.

Said the old Discoverer: “Lady, bring your son to listen, who, when he is grown, may do more than listen! Your daughter must listen to that which will content her with women’s world.”

But Beatrix said: “Worlds melt into one another. I would have her listen to that which will discontent her!”

Whereat the old Discoverer laughed, and said that he had himself found discontent valuable.

Time passed. On a certain day Tanneguy and Beatrix watched the furnace glow, and in the crucibles metals soften. The men in brown, the old man in green, moved about; there were red and amber lights, and shadows formless and shadows forked. There were the sound of fire and the sound of water, and the show of strange shapes of glass and copper vessels. And, a presence of power, there dwelled with the rest the philosophical notions behind these experiments, these endeavours—transmutation, transformation, prima materia and the shapes it took, and why it took the shapes—law, law, and what or who abode in law, yet could and did make slow change in its body and its ways....