No More Learning

A half-hour
more went by, and then a young lad, with what appeared to be a number
of cock's feathers stuck round his hat, came out of the path behind
him, and began to move about among the dead thieves, cutting their
heads off. Then he laid the heads in a heap before the knight, and
said: 'O great knight, I have been bid come and ask you for the crowns
you promised for the heads: five crowns a head. They bid me tell you
that they have prayed to God and His Mother to give you a long life,
but that they are poor peasants, and that they would have the money
before you die. They told me this over and over for fear I might forget
it, and promised to beat me if I did. '

The knight raised himself upon his elbow, and opening a bag that hung
to his belt, counted out the five crowns for each head. There were
thirty heads in all.

'O great knight,' said the lad, 'they have also bid me take all care of
you, and light a fire, and put this ointment upon your wounds. ' And he
gathered sticks and leaves together, and, flashing his flint and steel
under a mass of dry leaves, had made a very good blaze. Then, drawing
off the coat of mail, he began to anoint the wounds: but he did it
clumsily, like one who does by rote what he had been told. The knight
motioned him to stop, and said: 'You seem a good lad. '

'I would ask something of you for myself. '

'There are still a few crowns,' said the knight; 'shall I give them to
you? '

'O no,' said the lad. 'They would be no good to me. There is only one
thing that I care about doing, and I have no need of money to do it.
I
go from village to village and from hill to hill, and whenever I come
across a good cock I steal him and take him into the woods, and I keep
him there under a basket, until I get another good cock, and then I set
them to fight. The people say I am an innocent, and do not do me any
harm, and never ask me to do any work but go a message now and then. It
is because I am an innocent that they send me to get the crowns: anyone
else would steal them; and they dare not come back themselves, for now
that you are not with them they are afraid of the wood-thieves. Did you
ever hear how, when the wood-thieves are christened, the wolves are
made their godfathers, and their right arms are not christened at all? '

'If you will not take these crowns, my good lad, I have nothing for
you, I fear, unless you would have that old coat of mail which I shall
soon need no more. '

'There was something I wanted: yes, I remember now,' said the lad. 'I
want you to tell me why you fought like the champions and giants in the
stories and for so little a thing. Are you indeed a man like us? Are
you not rather an old wizard who lives among these hills, and will not
a wind arise presently and crumble you into dust? '

'I will tell you of myself,' replied the knight, 'for now that I am
the last of the fellowship, I may tell all and witness for God. Look
at the Rose of Rubies on my helmet, and see the symbol of my life and
of my hope. ' And then he told the lad this story, but with always
more frequent pauses; and, while he told it, the Rose shone a deep
blood-colour in the firelight, and the lad stuck the cock's feathers in
the earth in front of him, and moved them about as though he made them
actors in the play.

'I live in a land far from this, and was one of the Knights of Saint
John,' said the old man; 'but I was one of those in the Order who
always longed for more arduous labours in the service of the Most High.
At last there came to us a knight of Palestine, to whom the truth of
truths had been revealed by God Himself. He had seen a great Rose of
Fire, and a Voice out of the Rose had told him how men would turn from
the light of their own hearts, and bow down before outer order and
outer fixity, and that then the light would cease, and none escape the
curse except the foolish good man who could not, and the passionate
wicked man who would not, think. Already, the Voice told him, the
wayward light of the heart was shining out upon the world to keep it
alive, with a less clear lustre, and that, as it paled, a strange
infection was touching the stars and the hills and the grass and the
trees with corruption, and that none of those who had seen clearly
the truth and the ancient way could enter into the Kingdom of God,
which is in the Heart of the Rose, if they stayed on willingly in the
corrupted world; and so they must prove their anger against the Powers
of Corruption by dying in the service of the Rose of God.