“You have a soul in you,” he said.
The man stood on the strand under the black cliffs and watched the boat climb the waves. He saw the galley hoisted up, the sails flapping in the wind as the ship sheered out and ran for the open sea. Her sails gleamed white against the tumultuous west, and the ridged waters hid her hull. Overhead, the gulls screamed and circled. Mark, shouldering his spear, turned back and climbed the cliff, with his face towards the towers of Tintagel.
IV
A galley came up the Usk towards dawn, towards dawn when the woods were hung with mist, and a vast quiet brooded over the world. The river made a moist murmur through reeds and sedge, seeming to chant of golden meads as it ran to wed the sea. All the eastern casements of Caerleon glimmered gold as the dawn struck over wood and hill; the city’s walls smiled out of the night; her vanes and towers were noosed as with fire. The galley drew to the great quay, and poled to the steps as the city awoke.
A lad, with his russet mantle turned up over his girdle, passed up from the galley and the quay towards the southern gate of the city of Caerleon. His step was sanguine, his face deep with dreams. He seemed to personate “Youth” entering that city of woeful magic that poets and painters name “Romance.”
Within the walls the stir of life had been sounded in by the clarions of the dawn. Seafaring men went down to the river and their ships. At the gate arms rang, tumbrils rumbled. Slim girls passed out into the orchards and the fields, under the trees all heavily grained, russet and green and gold. Women drew water at the wells. The merchant folk in the market square spread their stalls for the day—fruit, flesh, fish, cloth, and the fabrics of the East, armour and brazen jars, vases of strange device.
The city pleased the lad as he passed through its stirring streets, and took the vigour of it, the human symbolism, into his soul. His idealism shed a glamour over the place; how red and white were its maidens; how fair its stately houses; how splendid the clashing armour of its guards. In the market square he asked a wizened apple-seller concerning the palace, and was pointed to the wooded hill where white walls rose above the green. Jehan solaced himself with a couple of ruddy apples from the stall. It was early yet for the palace, so the seller said, and Jehan sat down by a fountain where doves flew, and thought of his errand as he watched the folk go by.
The sun was high before he came to the great gate leading to the gardens of the King. It chanced to be a great day at Caerleon, a day of public appeal, when Uther played patriarch to his people, and sat to hear the prayers of the wronged or the oppressed. Hence it followed that Jehan, pressing in at the gate, found himself one among many, one of a herd, a boy among his elders. In the antechamber of the palace he was edged into a corner, elbowed and kept there by stouter clients who, as a mere matter of course, shouldered a boy to the wall. Argument availed nothing. Men were used to plausible tales for winning precedence, and each considered his especial matter the most pressing in the eyes of justice. The crowd overawed him. The doorkeepers thrust him back with their staves when he waxed importunate and attempted to parley. Often he bethought him of the ring, but, being quick to suspect theft in such a mob, he kept the talisman tight in his tunic, and trusted to time and the powers of patience.
What with giving way to women whose sex commended them, and men whose strength and egotism seemed vested in their elbows, Jehan was fended far from the door all day. A squabbling, querulous crowd filled the place; women with grievances, merchants who had been plundered on the road; peasants, priests, soldiers; beggars and adventurers; a Jew banker whom some Christian had taken by the beard; a farmer whose wife had taken a fancy to a gentleman’s bed. It was a stew of envy, discontent, and misfortune. Jehan, whose none too sumptuous clothing did him little service, was shouldered casually into the background. “Take second place to a brat of a boy! God forbid such an indignity!” The vexed folk believed vigorously in the premiership of years.