The Tale of Gold and Silence by Gustave Kahn

Author:Gustave Kahn [Kahn, Gustave]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Coat Press
Published: 2012-04-22T00:00:00+00:00

The people of the city knew almost nothing about the old man. He had arrived one day, long ago, from another capital. It was presumed, and rumored, that he was originally from the Orient, but many years ago, and his slow progress had been interrupted by sojourns, by long and patient healings. His old man’s face with its long white beard and keen eyes, offered no symptoms of age among the nuances of aging. He was stern and upright; the poor people of the low quarter always had recourse to his benevolence, the cheerful and powerful aristocrats to his science. He had often been seen entering the palace of the emperors, and within its marble-paved courtyards his footsteps marched in concert with those of a powerful bishop or a valued adviser.

Special virtues were attributed to him for calming poor madmen: those who make the attics of saddened houses resound to a slow but continuous ululation; those who scamper on all fours, swinging their haggard and drooling faces; those who hide their heads under a scrap of cloth, draping the air around then, staking a staff at the clouds and seeming to command infinity with a verbose gesture. For them he put dolors and ambitions to sleep, and brought back the poor powerful sovereign, betrayed and abandoned, to lie down in his wretched bed, and sent him back to the closure and calm of dreams. People brought the poor girls him who weep inconsolably and whose souls filter through staring eyes, and he lulled those sufferers, and resolved the excessively profound and silent dolors that weighed too heavily upon their hearts into thin, refreshing tears.

When he passed through the streets of the city, invariably clad in a long brown robe with a collar and a thick bonnet, fur in winter and velvet in summer, the townspeople in their doorways took off their hats, and the gentlefolk bowed to him, for everyone owed him some recognition. Nevertheless, in spite of his ever-steady tread, his silence broken only to reply or give care, and the simple monotony of his attire, for those people who saw him every day he remained a stranger, originally from the Orient, who might go back there, either by the road to the east, going to meet a caravan stopped at one of the great fairs, or the road to the west, on a ship chartered for the long haul.

His justice and his fair-mindedness had made him the arbiter of many disputes between individuals, and even some of a more general order, but that was also because it was felt that he had no particular interest in these litigations that were addressed to his firm clear-sightedness, being detached from overly personal impressions. He seemed to be under the jurisdiction of something more permanent, more exact and more personal than everything that surrounded him; the strictest modulations of organs were less distant than his thought, and theological discussions and disputes regarding the organization of the city appeared slightly juvenile in the regard of his aphorisms.

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