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Title: The Cream of the Jest
A comedy of evasions
Author: James Branch Cabell
Release Date: August 26, 2021 [eBook #66146]
Language: English
Produced by: Charlene Taylor, Barry Abrahamsen, and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CREAM OF THE JEST ***
THE
CREAM
OF THE
JEST
------------------------------------------------------------------------
=BOOKS BY MR. CABELL=
NOVELS:
THE CREAM OF THE JEST
THE SOUL OF MELICENT
THE RIVET IN GRANDFATHER’S NECK
THE CORDS OF VANITY
THE EAGLE’S SHADOW
TALES:
THE CERTAIN HOUR
CHIVALRY
THE LINE OF LOVE
GALLANTRY
VERSES:
FROM THE HIDDEN WAY
GENEALOGIES:
BRANCH OF ABINGDON
BRANCHIANA
THE MAJORS AND THEIR MARRIAGES
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE
CREAM
OF THE
JEST
═══════════════
A Comedy of Evasions
═══════════════
BY
JAMES BRANCH CABELL
“_Le pays où je voulais aller, tu m’y as mené en songe, cette nuit, et
tu étais belle ... ah! que tu étais belle!... Mais, comme je n’ai aimé
que ton ombre, tu me dispenseras, chère tête, de remercier ta réalité._”
NEW YORK
ROBERT M. McBRIDE & COMPANY
1917
------------------------------------------------------------------------
+Copyright, 1917, by+
ROBERT M. MCBRIDE & CO.
─────────
─────────
Published September, 1917
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TO
LOUISA NELSON
“_At me ab amore tuo diducet
nulla senectus._”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Contents
BOOK FIRST
I INTRODUCES THE AGELESS WOMAN 3
II WHEREIN A CLERK APPRAISES A 11
FAIR COUNTRY
III OF THE DOUBLE-DEALER’S TRAFFIC 15
WITH A KNAVE
IV HOW THE DOUBLE-DEALER WAS OF 19
TWO MINDS
V TREATS OF MAUGIS D’AIGREMONT’S 23
POTTAGE
VI JOURNEYS END: WITH THE 26
CUSTOMARY UNMASKING
BOOK SECOND
I OF A TRIFLE FOUND IN TWILIGHT 37
II BEYOND USE AND WONT FARES THE 40
ROAD TO STORISENDE
III OF IDLE SPECULATIONS IN A 49
LIBRARY
IV HOW THERE WAS A LIGHT IN THE 55
FOG
V OF PUBLISHING: WITH AN 61
UNLIKELY APPENDIX
VI SUGGESTING THEMES OF UNIVERSAL 72
APPEAL
VII PECULIAR CONDUCT OF A 80
PERSONAGE
VIII OF VAIN REGRET AND WONDER IN 93
THE DARK
BOOK THIRD
I THEY COME TO A HIGH PLACE 103
II OF THE SIGIL AND ONE USE OF IT 107
III TREATS OF A PRELATE AND, IN 110
PART, OF PIGEONS
IV LOCAL LAWS OF NEPHELOCOCCYGIA 118
V OF DIVERS FLESHLY RIDDLES 125
VI IN PURSUIT OF A WHISPER 130
VII OF TRUISMS: TREATED REASONABLY 136
BOOK FOURTH
I ECONOMIC CONSIDERATIONS OF 143
PIETY
II DEALS WITH PEN SCRATCHES 150
III BY-PRODUCTS OF RATIONAL 156
ENDEAVOR
IV “EPPER SI MUOVE” 163
V EVOLUTION OF A VESTRYMAN 172
BOOK FIFTH
I OF POETIC LOVE: TREATED WITH 195
POETIC INEFFICIENCY
II CROSS-PURPOSES IN SPACIOUS 210
TIMES
III HORVENDILE TO ETTARRE: AT 217
WHITEHALL
IV HORVENDILE TO ETTARRE: AT 222
VAUX-LE-VICOMTE
V HORVENDILE TO ETTARRE: IN THE 226
CONCIERGERIE
VI OF ONE ENIGMA THAT THREATENED 232
TO PROVE ALLEGORICAL
VII TREATS OF WITCHES, MIXED 239
DRINKS, AND THE WEATHER
BOOK SIXTH
I SUNDRY DISCLOSURES OF THE 249
PRESS
II CONSIDERATIONS TOWARD SUNSET 254
III ONE WAY OF ELUSION 258
IV PAST STORISENDE FARES THE ROAD 262
OF USE AND WONT
V WHICH MR. FLAHERTY DOES NOT 269
QUITE EXPLAIN
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Preface
MUCH has been written critically about Felix Kennaston since the
disappearance of his singular personality from the field of contemporary
writers; and Mr. Froser’s _Biography_ contains all it is necessary to
know as to the facts of Kennaston’s life. Yet most readers of the
_Biography_, I think, must have felt that the great change in Kennaston
no long while after he “came to forty year”—this sudden, almost
unparalleled, conversion of a talent for tolerable verse into the
full-fledged genius of _Men Who Loved Alison_—stays, after all,
unexplained....
Hereinafter you have Kennaston’s own explanation. I do not know but that
in hunting down one enigma it raises a bevy; but it, at worst, tells
from his standpoint honestly how this change came about.
You are to remember that the tale is pieced together, in part from
social knowledge of the man, and in part from the notes I made as to
what Felix Kennaston in person told me, bit by bit, a year or two after
events the tale commemorates. I had known the Kennastons for some while,
with that continual shallow intimacy into which chance forces most
country people with their near neighbors, before Kennaston ever spoke
of—as he called the thing—the sigil. And, even then, it was as if with
negligence he spoke, telling of what happened—or had appeared to
happen—and answering my questions, with simply dumbfounding personal
unconcern. It all seemed indescribably indecent: and I marveled no
little, I can remember, as I took my notes....
Now I can understand it was just that his standard of values was no
longer ours nor really human. You see—it hardly matters through how
dependable an agency—Kennaston no longer thought of himself as a man of
flesh-and-blood moving about a world of his compeers. Or, at least, that
especial aspect of his existence was to him no longer a phase of any
particular importance.
But to tell of his thoughts, is to anticipate. Hereinafter you have them
full measure and, such as it is, his story. You must permit that I begin
it in my own way, with what may to you at first seem dream-stuff. For I
commence at Storisende, in the world’s youth, when the fourth Count
Emmerick reigned in Poictesme, having not yet blundered into the
disfavor of his papal cousin Adrian VII.... With such roundabout gambits
alone can some of us approach—as one fancy begets another, if you
will—to proud assurance that life is not a blind and aimless business;
not all a hopeless waste and confusion; and that we ourselves may
(by-and-by) be strong and excellent and wise.
Such, in any event, is the road that Kennaston took, and such the goal
to which he was conducted. So, with that goal in view, I also begin
where he began, and follow whither the dream led him. Meanwhile, I can
but entreat you to remember it is only by preserving faith in human
dreams that we may, after all, perhaps some day make them come true.
RICHARD FENTNOR HARROWBY.
_Montevideo 14 April 1917._
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_Book First_
══════════════════════
“Give place, fair ladies, and begone,
Ere pride hath had a fall!
For here at hand approacheth one
Whose grace doth stain you all.
“Ettarre is well compared
Unto the Phœnix kind,
Whose like was never seen or heard,
That any man can find.”
══════════════════════
------------------------------------------------------------------------
I
Introduces the Ageless Woman
THE tale tells how Count Emmerick planned a notable marriage-feast for
his sister La Beale Ettarre and Sir Guiron des Rocques. The tale relates
that, in honor of this wedding, came from Nacumera, far oversea, Count
Emmerick’s elder sister Dame Melicent and her husband the Comte de la
Forêt, with an outlandish retinue of pagan slaves that caused great
wonder. All Poictesme took holiday. The tale narrates how from Naimes to
Lisuarte, and in the wild hill-country back of Perdigon, knights made
ready for the tournament, traveling toward Storisende in gay silken
garments such as were suited to these new times of peace. The highways
in those parts shone with warriors, riding in companies of six or eight,
wearing mantles worked in gold, and mounted upon valuable horses that
glittered with new bits and housings. And the tale tells, also, how they
came with horns sounding before them.
Ettarre watched from the turrets of Storisende, pensively. Yet she was
happy in these days. “Indeed, there is now very little left this side of
heaven for you to desire, madame,” said Horvendile the clerk, who stood
beside her at his service.
“No, there is nothing now which troubles me, Horvendile, save the
thought of Maugis d’Aigremont. I cannot ever be sure of happiness so
long as that man lives.”
“So, so!” says Horvendile—“ah, yes, a master-villain, that! He is foiled
for the present, and in hiding, nobody knows where; but I, too, would
not wonder should he be contriving some new knavery. Say what you may,
madame, I cannot but commend his persistency, however base be his
motives; and in the forest of Bovion, where I rescued you from his
clutches, the miscreant spoke with a hellish gusto that I could have
found it in my heart to admire.”
Ettarre had never any liking for this half-scoffing kind of talk, to
which the clerk was deplorably prone. “You speak very strangely at
times, Horvendile. Wickedness cannot ever be admirable; and to praise
it, even in jest, cannot but be displeasing to the Author of us all.”
“Eh, madame, I am not so sure of that. Certainly, the Author of those
folk who have figured thus far in your history has not devoted His
talents to creating perfect people.”
She wondered at him, and showed as much in the big blue eyes which had
troubled so many men’s sleep. “Since time began, there has lived no
nobler person or more constant lover than my lord Guiron.”
“Oh, yes, Sir Guiron, I grant you, is very nearly immaculate,” said
Horvendile; and he yawned.
“My friend, you have always served him faithfully. We two cannot ever
forget how much we have owed in the past to your quick wits and shrewd
devices. Yet now your manner troubles me.”
Dame Ettarre spoke the truth, for, knowing the man to be unhappy—and
suspecting the reason of his unhappiness, too—she would have comforted
him; but Horvendile was not in a confiding mood. Whimsically he says:
“Rather, it is I who am troubled, madame. For envy possesses me, and a
faint teasing weariness also possesses me, because I am not as Sir
Guiron, and never can be. Look you, they prepare your wedding-feast now,
your former sorrows are stingless; and to me, who have served you
through hard seasons of adversity, it is as if I had been reading some
romance, and had come now to the last page. Already you two grow
shadowy; and already I incline to rank Sir Guiron and you, madame, with
Arnaud and Fregonde, with Palmerin and Polinarda, with Gui and
Floripas—with that fair throng of noted lovers whose innocuous mishaps
we follow with pleasant agitation, and whom we dismiss to eternal
happiness, with smiling incredulity, as we turn back to a workaday
world. For it is necessary now that I return to my own country, and
there I shall not ever see you any more.”
Ettarre, in common with the countryside, knew the man hopelessly loved
her; and she pitied him to-day beyond wording. Happiness is a famed
breeder of magnanimity. “My poor friend, we must get you a wife. Are
there no women in your country?”
“Ah, but there is never any woman in one’s own country whom one can
love, madame,” replies Horvendile shrewdly. “For love, I take it, must
look toward something not quite accessible, something not quite
understood. Now, I have been so unfortunate as to find the women of my
country lacking in reticence. I know their opinions concerning
everything—touching God and God’s private intentions, and touching me,
and the people across the road—and how these women’s clothes are
adjusted, and what they eat for breakfast, and what men have kissed
them: there is no room for illusion anywhere. Nay, more: I am familiar
with the mothers of these women, and in them I see quite plainly what
these women will be some twenty years from this morning; there is not
even room for hope. Ah, no, madame; the women of my country are the
pleasantest of comrades, and the helpfullest of wives: but I cannot
conceal it from myself that, after all, they are only human beings; and
therefore it has never been possible for me to love any one of them.”
“And am I not, then, a human being, poor Horvendile?”
There was a tinge of mischief in the query; but beauty very often makes
for lightheadedness, both in her that has and in him that views it; nor
between Ind and Thule was there any lovelier maid than Ettarre. Smiling
she awaited his answer; the sunlight glorified each delicate clarity of
color in her fair face, and upon her breast gleamed the broken sigil of
Scoteia, that famed talisman which never left her person. “And am I not,
then, a human being?” says she.
Gravely Horvendile answered: “Not in my eyes, madame. For you embody all
that I was ever able to conceive of beauty and fearlessness and strange
purity. Therefore it is evident I do not see in you merely Count
Emmerick’s third sister, but, instead, that ageless lovable and loving
woman long worshiped and sought everywhere in vain by all poets.”
Horvendile meditated for a while. “Assuredly, it was you of whom blind
Homer dreamed, comforting endless night with visions of your beauty, as
you sat in a bright fragrant vaulted chamber weaving at a mighty loom,
and embroidering on tapestry the battles men were waging about Troy
because of your beauty; and very certainly it was to you that Hermes
came over fields of violets and parsley, where you sang magic rhymes,
sheltered by an island cavern, in which cedar and citron-wood were
burning—and, calling you Calypso, bade you release Odysseus from the
spell of your beauty. Sophocles, too, saw you bearing an ewer of bronze,
and treading gingerly among gashed lamentable corpses, lest your loved
dead be dishonored; and Sophocles called you Antigonê, praising your
valor and your beauty. And when men named you Bombyca, Theocritus also
sang of your grave drowsy voice and your feet carven of ivory, and of
your tender heart and all your honey-pale sweet beauty.”
“I do not remember any of these troubadours you speak of, my poor
Horvendile; but I am very certain that if they were poets they, also,
must in their time have talked a great deal of nonsense.”
“And as Mark’s Queen,” says Horvendile, intent on his conceit, “you
strayed with Tristran in the sunlit glades of Morois, that high forest,
where many birds sang full-throated in the new light of spring; as
Medeia you fled from Colchis; and as Esclairmonde you delivered Huon
from the sardonic close wiles of heathenry, which to you seemed
childish. All poets have had these fitful glimpses of you, Ettarre, and
of that perfect beauty which is full of troubling reticences, and so, is
somehow touched with something sinister. Now all these things I likewise
see in you, Ettarre; and therefore, for my own sanity’s sake, I dare not
concede that you are a human being.”
The clerk was very much in earnest. Ettarre granted that, insane as his
talk seemed to her; and the patient yearning in his eyes was not
displeasing to Ettarre. Her hand touched his cheek, quickly and lightly,
like the brush of a bird’s wing.
“My poor Horvendile, you are in love with fantasies. There was never any
lady such as you dream of.” Then she left him.
But Horvendile remained at the parapet, peering out over broad rolling
uplands.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
II
Wherein a Clerk Appraises a Fair Country
HORVENDILE peered out over broad rolling uplands.... He viewed a noble
country, good to live in, rich with grain and metal, embowered with tall
forests, and watered by pleasant streams. Walled cities it had, and
castles crowned its eminencies. Very far beneath Horvendile the leaded
roofs of these fortresses glittered in sunlight, for Storisende guards
the loftiest part of the province.
And the people of this land—from its lords of the high, the low, and the
middle justice, to the sturdy whining beggars at its cathedral
doors—were not all unworthy of this fair realm. Undoubtedly, it was a
land, as Horvendile whimsically reflected, wherein human nature kept its
first dignity and strength; and wherein human passions were never in a
poor way to find expression with adequate speech and action.
Now, from the field below, a lark rose singing joyously. Straight into
the air it rose, and was lost in the sun’s growing brilliance; but you
could hear its singing; and then, as suddenly, the bird dropped to
earth. No poet could resist embroidery on such a text.
Began Horvendile straightway: “_Quan vey la laudeta mover_”—or in other
wording:
“When I behold the skylark move in perfect joy toward its love the sun,
and, growing drunk with joy, forget the use of wings, so that it topples
from the height of heaven, I envy the bird’s fate. I, too, would taste
that ruinous mad moment of communion, there in heaven, and my heart
dissolves in longing.
“Ailas! how little do I know of love!—I, who was once deluded by the
conceit that I was all-wise in love. For I am unable to put aside desire
for a woman whom I must always love in vain. She has bereft me of hope.
She has robbed me of my heart, of herself, and of all joy in the world,
and she has left me nothing save dreams and regrets.
“Never have I been able to recover my full senses since that moment when
she first permitted me to see myself mirrored in her bright eyes. Hey,
fatal mirrors! which flattered me too much! for I have sighed ever since
I beheld my image in you. I have lost myself in you, like Narcissus in
his fountain.”
Thus he lamented, standing alone among the turrets of Storisende. Now a
troop of jongleurs was approaching the castle—gay dolls, jerked by
invisible wires, the vagabonds seemed to be, from this height.
“More merry-makers for the marriage-feast. We must spare no appropriate
ceremony. And yonder Count Emmerick is ordering the major-domo to
prepare peacocks stuffed with beccaficoes, and a pastry builded like a
palace. Hah, my beautiful fantastic little people, that I love and play
with, and dispose of just as I please, it is time your master shift
another puppet.”
So Horvendile descended, still poetizing: “_Pus ab mi dons no m pot
valer_”—or in other wording:
“Since nothing will avail to move my lady—not prayers or righteous
claims or mercy—and she desires my homage now no longer, I shall have
nothing more to say of love. I must renounce love, and abjure it
utterly. I must regard her whom I love as one no longer living. I must,
in fine, do that which I prepare to do; and afterward I must depart into
eternal exile.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
III
Of the Double-Dealer’s Traffic With a Knave
HORVENDILE left the fortress, and came presently to Maugis d’Aigremont.
Horvendile got speech with this brigand where he waited encamped in the
hill-country of Perdigon, loth to leave Storisende since it held Ettarre
whom he so much desired, but with too few adherents to venture an
attack.
Maugis sprawled listless in his chair, wrapped in a mantle of soiled and
faded green stuff, as though he were cold. In his hand was a naked
sword, with which moodily he was prodding the torn papers scattered
about him. He did not move at all, but his somber eyes lifted.
“What do you plan now, Horvendile?”
“Treachery, messire.”
“It is the only weapon of you scribblers. How will it serve me?”
Then Horvendile spoke. Maugis sat listening. Above the swordhilt the
thumb of one hand was stroking the knuckles of the other carefully. His
lean and sallow face stayed changeless.
Says Maugis: “It is a bold stroke—yes. But how do I know it is not some
trap for me?”
Horvendile shrugged, and asked: “Have I not served you constantly in the
past, messire?”
“You have suggested makeshifts very certainly. And to a pretty pass they
have brought me! Here I roost like a starved buzzard, with no recreation
save to watch the turrets of Storisende on clear afternoons.”
“Where Ettarre prepares to marry Sir Guiron,” Horvendile prompted.
“I think of that.... She is very beautiful, is she not, Horvendile? And
she loves this stately kindly fool who carries his fair head so high and
has no reason to hide anything from her. Yes, she is very beautiful,
being created perfect by divine malice that she might be the ruin of
men. So I loved her: and she did not love me, because I was not worthy
of her love. And Guiron is in all things worthy of her. I cannot ever
pardon him that, Horvendile.”
“And I am pointing out a way, messire, by which you may reasonably hope
to deal with Sir Guiron—ho, and with the Counts Emmerick and Perion, and
with Ettarre also—precisely as you elect.”
Then Maugis spoke wearily. “I must trust you, I suppose. But I have no
lively faith in my judgments nowadays. I have played fast and loose with
too many men, and the stench of their blood is in my nostrils, drugging
me. I move in a half-sleep, and people’s talking seems remote and
foolish. I can think clearly only when I think of how tender is the
flesh of Ettarre. Heh, a lovely flashing peril allures me, through these
days of fog, and I must trust you. Death is ugly, I know; but life is
ugly too, and all my deeds are strange to me.”
The clerk was oddly moved. “Do you not know I love you as I never loved
Guiron?”
“How can I tell? You are an outlander. Your ways are not our ways,” says
the brigand moodily. “And what have I to do with love?”
“You will talk otherwise when you drink in the count’s seat, with
Ettarre upon your knee,” Horvendile considered. “Observe, I do not
promise you success! Yet I would have you remember it was by very much
this same device that Count Perion won the sister of Ettarre.”
“Heh, if we fail,” replies Maugis, “I shall at least have done with
remembering....” Then they settled details of the business in hand.
Thus Horvendile returned to Storisende before twilight had thickened
into nightfall. He came thus to a place different in all things from the
haggard outlaw’s camp, for Count Emmerick held that night a noble revel.
There was gay talk and jest and dancing, with all other mirth men could
devise.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
IV
How the Double-Dealer Was of Two Minds
IT was deep silent night when Horvendile came into the room where
Ettarre slept. “Out, out!” cried Horvendile. “Let us have more light
here, so that men may see the beauty men die for!” He went with a torch
from lamp to lamp, kindling them all.
Ettarre stood between the bed-curtains, which were green hangings worked
with birds and beasts of the field, each in his proper colors. The girl
was robed in white; and upon her breast gleamed the broken sigil of
Scoteia, that famed talisman which never left her person. She wore a
scarlet girdle about her middle, and her loosened yellow hair fell heavy
about her. Her fine proud face questioned the clerk in silence, without
any trace of fear.
“We must wait now,” says Horvendile, “wait patiently for that which is
to follow. For while the folk of Storisende slept—while your fair,
favored lover slept, Ettarre, and your stout brothers Emmerick and
Perion slept, and all persons who are your servitors and well-wishers
slept—I, I, the puppet-shifter, have admitted Maugis d’Aigremont and his
men into this castle. They are at work now, hammer-and-tongs, to decide
who shall be master of Storisende and you.”
Her first speech you would have found odd at such a time. “But, oh, it
was not you who betrayed us, Horvendile—not you whom Guiron loved!”
“You forget,” he returned, “that I, who am without any hope to win you,
must attempt to view the squabbling of your other lovers without bias.
It is the custom of omnipotence to do that, Ettarre. I have given Maugis
d’Aigremont an equal chance with Sir Guiron. It is the custom of
omnipotence to do that also, Ettarre. You will remember the tale was
trite even in Job’s far time that the sweetmeats of life do not
invariably fall to immaculate people.”
Then, as if on a sudden, Dame Ettarre seemed to understand that the
clerk’s brain had been turned through his hopeless love for her. She
wondered, dizzily, how she could have stayed blind to his insanity this
long, recollecting the inconsequence of his acts and speeches in the
past; but matters of heavier urgency were at hand. Here, with this
apparent madman, she was on perilous ground; but now had arisen a
hideous contention without; and the shrieks there, and the clash of
metal there, spoke with rude eloquence of a harborage even less
desirable.
“Heaven will defend the right!” Ettarre said bravely.
“I am not so sure that heaven has any finger in this pie. An arras hides
all. It will lift presently, and either Good or Evil, either Guiron or
Maugis, will come through that arras as your master. I am not certain as
yet which one I shall permit to enter; and the matter rests with me,
Ettarre.”
“Heaven will defend the right!” Ettarre said bravely.
And at that the arras quivered and heaved, so that its heavy
embroideries were converted into a welter of shimmering gold, bright in
the glare of many lamps, sparkling like the ocean’s waters at sunset;
and Horvendile and Ettarre saw nothing else there for a breathless
moment, which seemed to last for a great while. Then, parting, the arras
yielded up Maugis d’Aigremont.
Horvendile chuckled.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
V
Treats of Maugis D’Aigremont’s Pottage
MAUGIS came forward, his eyes fixed hungrily upon Ettarre. “So a long
struggle ends,” he said, very quiet. “There is no virtue left, Ettarre,
save patience.”
“While life remains I shall not cease to shriek out your villainy. O
God, men have let Guiron die!” she wailed.
“I will cause you to forget that death is dreadful, Ettarre!”
“I need no teacher now.... And so, Guiron is dead and I yet live! I had
not thought that would be possible.” She whispered this. “Give me your
sword, Maugis, for just a little while, and then I will not hate you any
longer.”
The man said, with dreary patience: “Yes, you would die rather than
endure my touch. And through my desire of you I have been stripped of
wealth and joy and honor, and even of hope; through my desire of you I
have held much filthy traffic, with treachery and theft and murder,
traffic such as my soul loathed: and to no avail! Yes, I have been
guilty of many wickednesses, as men estimate these matters; and yet, I
swear to you, I seem to myself to be still that boy with whom you used
to play, when you too were a child, Ettarre, and did not hate me. Heh,
it is very strange how affairs fall out in this world of ours, so that a
man may discern no aim or purpose anywhere!”
“Yet it is all foreplanned, Maugis.” Horvendile spoke thus.
“And to what end have you ensnared me, Horvendile?” says Maugis, turning
wearily. “For the attack on Storisende has failed, and I am dying of
many wounds, Horvendile. See how I bleed! Guiron and Perion and Emmerick
and all their men are hunting me everywhere beyond that arras, and I am
frightened, Horvendile—even I, who was Maugis, am frightened!—lest any
of them find me here. For I desire now only to die untroubled. Oh,
Horvendile, in an ill hour I trusted you!”
As knave and madman, Ettarre saw the double-dealer and his dupe confront
each other. In the haggard face of Maugis, no longer evil, showed only
puzzled lassitude. In the hand of Horvendile a dagger glittered; and his
face was pensive.
“My poor Maugis, it is not yet time I make my dealings plain to you. It
suffices that you have served my turn, Maugis, and that of you I have no
need any longer. You must die now, Maugis.”
Ettarre feared this frozen madman, she who was by ordinary fearless.
Ettarre turned away her face, so that she might not see the two men
grapple. Without, the uproar continued—for a long while, it seemed. When
she looked again it was, by some great wonder-working, to meet Guiron’s
eyes and Guiron’s lips.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
VI
Journeys End: With the Customary Unmasking
“MY love, Ettarre, they have not harmed you?”
“None has harmed me, Guiron. Oh, and you?”
“Maugis is dead,” he answered joyously.
“See, here he lies, slain by brave Horvendile. And the rogues who
followed Maugis are all killed or fled. Our woes are at an end, dear
love.”
Then Ettarre saw that Horvendile indeed waited beside the dead body of
Maugis d’Aigremont. And the clerk stayed motionless while she told
Guiron of Horvendile’s baleful work.
Sir Guiron then said: “Is this true speech, Horvendile?”
“It is quite true I have done all these things, messire,” Horvendile
answered quietly.
“And with what purpose?” said Sir Guiron, very sadly; for to him too it
seemed certain that such senseless treachery could not spring from
anything but madness, and he had loved Horvendile.
“I will tell you,” Horvendile replied, “though I much fear you will not
understand—” He meditated, shook his head, smiling. “Indeed, how is it
possible for me to make you understand? Well, I blurt out the truth.
There was once in a land very far away from this land—in my country—a
writer of romances. And once he constructed a romance which, after a
hackneyed custom of my country, purported to be translated from an old
manuscript written by an ancient clerk—called Horvendile. It told of
Horvendile’s part in the love-business between Sir Guiron des Rocques
and La Beale Ettarre. I am that writer of romance. This room, this
castle, all the broad rolling countryside without, is but a portion of
my dream, and these places have no existence save in my fancies. And
you, messire—and you also, madame—and dead Maugis here, and all the
others who seemed so real to me, are but the puppets I fashioned and
shifted, for a tale’s sake, in that romance which now draws to a close.”
He paused; and Sir Guiron sighed. “My poor Horvendile!” was all he said.
“It is not possible for you to believe me, of course. And it may be that
I, too, am only a figment of some greater dream, in just such case as
yours, and that I, too, cannot understand. It may be the very cream of
the jest that my country is no more real than Storisende. How could I
judge if I, too, were a puppet? It is a thought which often troubles
me....”
Horvendile deliberated, then spoke more briskly. “At all events, I must
return now to my own country, which I do not love as I love this bright
fantastic tiny land that I created—or seemed to create—and wherein I
was—or seemed to be—omnipotent.”
Horvendile drew a deep breath; and he looked downward at the corpse he
had bereft of pride and daring and agility. “Farewell, Maugis! It would
be indecorous, above all in omnipotence, to express anything save
abhorrence toward you: yet I delighted in you as you lived and moved;
and it was not because of displeasure with you that I brought you to
disaster. Hence, also, one might evolve a heady analogue....”
Guiron was wondering what he might do in accord with honor and with
clemency. He did not stir as Horvendile came nearer. The clerk showed
very pitiful and mean beside this stately champion in full armor, all
shining metal, save for a surcoat of rose-colored stuff irregularly
worked with crescents of silver.
“Farewell, Sir Guiron!” Horvendile then said. “There are no men like you
in my country. I have found you difficult to manage; and I may confess
now that I kept you so long imprisoned at Caer Idryn, and caused you to
spend so many chapters oversea in heathendom, mainly in order that I
might weave out my romance here untroubled by your disconcerting and
rather wooden perfection. But you are not the person to suspect ill of
your creator. You are all that I once meant to be, Guiron, all that I
have forgotten how to be; and for a dead boy’s sake I love you.”
“Listen, poor wretch!” Sir Guiron answered, sternly; “you have this
night done horrible mischief, you have caused the death of many
estimable persons. Yet I have loved you, Horvendile, and I know that
heaven, through heaven’s inscrutable wisdom, has smitten you with
madness. That stair leads to the postern on the east side of the castle.
Go forth from Storisende as quickly as you may, whilst none save us
knows of your double-dealings. It may be that I am doing great wrong;
but I cannot forget I have twice owed my life to you. If I must err at
all hazards, I prefer to err upon the side of gratitude and mercy.”
“That is said very like you,” Horvendile replied. “Eh, it was not for
nothing I endowed you with sky-towering magnanimity. Assuredly, I go,
messire. And so, farewell, Ettarre!” Long and long Horvendile gazed upon
the maiden. “There is no woman like you in my country, Ettarre. I can
find no woman anywhere resembling you whom dreams alone may win to. It
is a little thing to say that I have loved you; it is a bitter thing to
know that I must live among, and pursue, and win, those other women.”
“My poor Horvendile,” she answered, very lovely in her compassion, “you
are in love with fantasies.”
He held her hand, touching her for the last time; and he trembled. “Yes,
I am in love with my fantasies, Ettarre; and, none the less, I must
return into my own country and abide there always....”
As he considered the future, in the man’s face showed only puzzled
lassitude; and you saw therein a quaint resemblance to Maugis
d’Aigremont. “I find my country an inadequate place in which to live,”
says Horvendile. “Oh, many persons live there happily enough! or, at
worst, they seem to find the prizes and the applause of my country worth
striving for whole-heartedly. But there is that in some of us which gets
no exercise there; and we struggle blindly, with impotent yearning, to
gain outlet for great powers which we know that we possess, even though
we do not know their names. And so, we dreamers wander at adventure to
Storisende—oh, and into more perilous realms sometimes!—in search of a
life that will find employment for every faculty we have. For life in my
country does not engross us utterly. We dreamers waste there at loose
ends, waste futilely. All which we can ever see and hear and touch
there, we dreamers dimly know, is at best but a portion of the truth,
and is possibly not true at all. Oh, yes! it may be that we are not
sane; could we be sure of that, it would be a comfort. But, as it is, we
dreamers only know that life in my country does not content us, and
never can content us. So we struggle, for a tiny dear-bought while, into
other and fairer-seeming lands in search of—we know not what! And, after
a little”—he relinquished the maiden’s hands, spread out his own hands,
shrugging—“after a little, we must go back into my country and live
there as best we may.”
A whimsical wise smile now visited Ettarre’s lips. Her hands went to her
breast, and presently one half the broken sigil of Scoteia lay in
Horvendile’s hand. “You will not always abide in your own country,
Horvendile. Some day you will return to us at Storisende. The sign of
the Dark Goddess will prove your safe-conduct then if Guiron and I be
yet alive.”
Horvendile raised to his mouth the talisman warmed by contact with her
sweet flesh. “It may be you will not live for a great while,” he says;
“but that will befall through no lack of loving pains on your creator’s
part.”
Then Horvendile left them. In the dark passage-way he paused, looking
back at Guiron and Ettarre for a heart-beat. Guiron and Ettarre had
already forgotten his existence. Hand-in-hand they stood in the bright
room, young, beautiful and glad. Silently their lips met.
Horvendile closed the door, and so left Storisende forever. Without he
came into a lonely quiet-colored world already expectant of dawn’s
occupancy. Already the tree-trunks eastward showed like the black bars
of a grate. Thus he walked in twilight, carrying half the sigil of
Scoteia....
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_Book Second_
══════════════════════
“Whate’er she be—
That inaccessible She
That doth command my heart and me:
“Till that divine
Idea take a shrine
Of crystal flesh, through which to shine:
“Let her full glory,
My fancies, fly before ye;
Be ye my fictions—but her story.”
══════════════════════
------------------------------------------------------------------------
I
Of a Trifle Found in Twilight
THUS he walked in twilight, regretful that he must return to his own
country, and live another life, and bear another name than that of
Horvendile.... It was droll that in his own country folk should call him
Felix, since Felix meant “happy”; and assuredly he was not pre-eminently
happy there.
At least he had ended the love-business of Ettarre and Guiron happily,
however droll the necessitated makeshifts might have been.... He had
very certainly introduced the god in the car, against Horatian
admonition, had wound up affairs with a sort of transformation scene....
It was, perhaps, at once too hackneyed and too odd an ending to be
æsthetically satisfactory, after all.... Why, beyond doubt it was. He
shrugged his impatience.
“Yet—what a true ending it would be!” he reflected. He was still walking
in twilight—for the time was approaching sunset—in the gardens of
Alcluid. He must devise another ending for this high-hearted story of
Guiron and Ettarre.
Felix Kennaston smiled a little over the thought of ending the romance
with such topsy-turvy anti-climaxes as his woolgathering wits had
blundered into; and, stooping, picked up a shining bit of metal that lay
beside the pathway. He was conscious of a vague notion he had just
dropped this bit of metal.
“It is droll how all great geniuses instinctively plagiarize,” he
reflected. “I must have seen this a half-hour ago, when I was walking up
and down planning my final chapters. And so, I wove it into the tale as
a breast-ornament for Ettarre, without ever consciously seeing the thing
at all. Then, presto! I awake and find it growing dark, with me
lackadaisically roaming in twilight clasping this bauble, just as I
imagined Horvendile walking out of the castle of Storisende carrying
much such a bauble. Oh, yes, the processes of inspiration are as
irrational as if all poets took after their mothers.”
This bit of metal, Kennaston afterward ascertained, was almost an exact
half of a disk, not quite three inches in diameter, which somehow had
been broken or cut in two. It was of burnished metal—lead, he
thought—about a sixteenth of an inch in thickness; and its single
notable feature was the tiny characters with which one surface was
inscribed.
Later Felix Kennaston was destined to puzzle over his inability to
recollect what motive prompted him to slip this glittering trifle into
his pocket. A trifle was all that it seemed then. He always remembered
quite clearly how it sparkled in the abating glare of that day’s
portentous sunset; and how the tree-trunks westward showed like the
black bars of a grate, as he walked slowly through the gardens of
Alcluid. Alcluid, be it explained, was the queer name with which Felix
Kennaston’s progenitors had seen fit to christen their fine country home
near Lichfield.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
II
Beyond Use and Wont Fares the Road to Storisende
KENNASTON was to recall, also, that on this evening he dined alone with
his wife, sharing a taciturn meal. He and Kathleen talked of very
little, now, save the existent day’s small happenings, such as having
seen So-and-so, and of So-and-so’s having said this-or-that, as
Kennaston reflected in the solitude of the library. But soon he was
contentedly laboring upon the book he had always intended to write some
day.
Off and on, in common with most high-school graduates, Felix Kennaston
had been an “intending contributor” to various magazines,
spasmodically bartering his postage-stamps for courteously-worded
rejection-slips. Then, too, in the old days before his marriage, when
Kennaston had come so near to capturing Margaret Hugonin and her big
fortune, the heiress had paid for the printing of _The King’s Quest_
and its companion enterprises in rhyme, as well as the prose _Defence
of Ignorance_—wide-margined specimens of the far-fetched decadence
then in vogue, and the idol of Kennaston’s youth, when he had
seriously essayed the parlor-tricks of “stylists.”
And it was once a familiar story how Marian Winwood got revenge on Felix
Kennaston, when he married Kathleen Saumarez, by publishing, in a
transparent guise of fiction, all the love-letters he had written Miss
Winwood; so that Kennaston might also have claimed to be generally
recognized as the actual author of her _Epistles of Ananias_, which
years ago created some literary stir.
* * * * *
But this book was to be different from any of his previous compositions.
To paraphrase Felix Kennaston’s own words (as recorded in the “Colophon”
to _Men Who Loved Alison_), he had determined in this story lovingly to
deal with an epoch and a society, and even a geography, whose comeliness
had escaped the wear-and-tear of ever actually existing. He had
attempted a jaunt into that “happy, harmless Fable-land” which is
bounded by Avalon and Phæacia and Sea-coast Bohemia, and the contiguous
forests of Arden and Broceliande, and on the west of course by the
Hesperides, because he believed this country to be the one possible
setting for a really satisfactory novel, even though its byways can
boast of little traffic nowadays. He was completing, in fine, _The Audit
at Storisende_—or, rather, _Men Who Loved Alison_, as the book came
afterward to be called.
Competent critics in plenty have shrugged over Kennaston’s pretense
therein that the romance is translated from an ancient manuscript. But
to Kennaston the clerk Horvendile, the fictitious first writer of the
chronicle and eye-witness of its events, was necessary. No doubt it
handicapped the story’s progress, so to contrive matters that one
subsidiary character should invariably be at hand when important doings
were in execution, and should be taken more or less into everyone’s
confidence—but then, somehow, it made the tale seem real.
For in the writing it all seemed perfectly real to Felix Kennaston. His
life was rather barren of motive now. In remoter times, when he had
wandered impecuniously from one adventure to another, sponging without
hesitancy upon such wealthy people as his chatter amused, there had
always been exquisite girls to make love to—such girls as the younger
generation did not produce—and the ever-present problem of whence was to
come the fares for to-morrow’s hansoms, in which the younger generation
did not ride. For now hansom cabs were wellnigh as extinct as
velocipedes or sedan-chairs, he owned two motors, and, by the drollest
turn, had money in four banks. As recreation went, he and Kathleen had
in Lichfield their round of decorous social duties; and there was
nothing else to potter with save the writing. And a little by a little
the life he wrote of came to seem to Felix Kennaston more real, and far
more vital, than the life his body was shuffling through aimlessly.
For as Horvendile he lived among such gallant circumstances as he had
always vaguely hoped his real life might provide to-morrow. This
Horvendile, coming unintelligibly to Storisende, and witnessing there
the long combat between Sir Guiron des Rocques and Maugis d’Aigremont
for possession of La Beale Alison—as Kennaston’s heroine is called of
course in the printed book—seems to us in reading the tale no very
striking figure; as in _Rob Roy_ and _Esmond_, it is not to the
narrator, but to the people and events he tells of, that attention is
riveted. But Felix Kennaston, writing the book, lived the life of
Horvendile in the long happy hours of writing, which became longer and
longer; and insensibly his existence blended and was absorbed into the
more colorful life of Horvendile. It was as Horvendile he wrote, seeming
actually at times to remember what he recorded, rather than to
invent....
And he called it inspiration....
So the tale flowed on, telling how Count Emmerick planned a notable
marriage-feast for his sister La Beale Ettarre and Sir Guiron des
Rocques, with vastly different results from those already recorded—with
the results, in fine, which figure in the printed _Men Who Loved
Alison_, where Horvendile keeps his proper place as a more or less
convenient device for getting the tale told.
But to Kennaston that first irrational winding-up of affairs, wherein a
world’s creator was able to wring only contempt and pity from his
puppets—since he had not endowed them with any faculties wherewith to
comprehend their creator’s nature and intent—was always the tale’s real
ending....
* * * * *
So it was that the lonely man lived with his dreams, and toiled for the
vision’s sake contentedly; and we of Lichfield who were most familiar
with Felix Kennaston in the flesh knew nothing then of his mental
diversions; and, with knowledge, would probably have liked him not a bit
the better. For ordinary human beings, as all other normal forms of
life, turn naturally toward the sun, and are at their best thereunder;
but it is the misfortune of dreamers that their peculiar talents find no
exercise in daylight. So we regarded Kennaston with the distrust
universally accorded people who need to be meddling with ideas in a
world which sustains its mental credit comfortably enough with a current
coinage of phrases.
And therefore it may well be that I am setting down his story not all in
sympathy, for in perfect candor I never, quite, liked Felix Kennaston.
His high-pitched voice in talking, to begin with, was irritating: you
knew it was not his natural voice, and found it so entirely senseless
for him to speak thus. Then, too, the nervous and trivial grin with
which he prefaced almost all his infrequent remarks—and the odd little
noise, that was nearly a snigger and just missed being a cough, with
which he ended them—was peculiarly uningratiating in a fat and
middle-aged person; his weak eyes very rarely met yours full-gaze; and
he was continually handling his face or fidgeting with a cigarette or
twisting in his chair. When listening to you he usually nibbled at his
fingernails, and when he talked he had a secretive way of looking at
them.
Such habits are not wholly incompatible with wisdom or generosity, and
the devil’s advocate would not advance them against their possessor’s
canonization; none the less, in everyday life they make against your
enjoying a chat with their possessor: and as for Kennaston’s undeniable
mental gifts, there is no escaping, at times, the gloomy suspicion that
fiddling with pens and ink is, after all, no fit employment for a grown
man.
Felix Kennaston, to fix the word, was inadequate. His books apart, he
was as a human being a failure. Indeed, in some inexpressible fashion,
he impressed you as uneasily shirking life. Certainly he seemed since
his marriage to have relinquished all conversational obligations to his
wife. She had a curious trick of explaining him, before his face—in a
manner which was not unreminiscent of the lecturer in “side-shows”
pointing out the peculiarities of the living skeleton or the
glass-eater; but it was done with such ill-concealed pride in him that I
found it touching, even when she was boring me about the varieties of
food he could not be induced to touch or his finicky passion for saving
every bit of string he came across.
That suggests a minor mystery: many women had been fond of Felix
Kennaston; and I have yet to find a man who liked him even moderately,
to offset the host who marveled, with unseemly epithets, as to what
these women saw in him. My wife explains it, rather enigmatically, that
he was “just a twoser”; and that, in addition, he expected women to look
after him, so that naturally they did. To her superior knowledge of the
feminine mind I can but bow: with the addition (quoting the same
authority) that a “twoser” is a trousered individual addicted to
dumbness in company and the very thrilliest sort of play-acting in
_tête-à-têtes_.
At all events, I never quite liked Felix Kennaston—not even after I came
to understand that the man I knew in the flesh was but a very ill-drawn
likeness of Felix Kennaston. After all, that is the whole sardonic point
of his story—and, indeed, of every human story—that the person you or I
find in the mirror is condemned eternally to misrepresent us in the eyes
of our fellows. But even with comprehension, I never cordially liked the
man; and so, it may well be that his story is set down not all in
sympathy.
With which Gargantuan parenthesis, in equitable warning, I return again
to his story.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
III
Of Idle Speculations in a Library
FELIX KENNASTON did not write very long that night. He fell idly to the
droll familiar wondering how this dull fellow seated here in this
luxurious room could actually be Felix Kennaston....
He was glad this spacious and subduedly-glowing place, and all the
comfortable appointments of Alcluid, belonged to him. He had seen enough
of the scrambling hand-to-mouth makeshifts of poverty, in poverty’s
heart-depressing habitations, during the thirty-eight years he weathered
before the simultaneous deaths, through a motor accident, of a
semi-mythical personage known since childhood as “your Uncle Henry in
Lichfield,” and of Uncle Henry’s only son as well, had raised Felix
Kennaston beyond monetary frets. As yet Kennaston did not very
profoundly believe in this unlooked-for turn; and in the library of his
fine house in particular he had still a sense of treading alien
territory under sufferance.
Yet it was a territory which tempted exploration with alluring vistas.
Kennaston had always been, when there was time for it, “very fond of
reading,” as his wife was used to state in tones of blended patronage
and apology. Kathleen Kennaston, in the old days of poverty, had
declaimed too many pilfered dicta concerning literary matters to retain
any liking for them.
As possibly you may recall, for some years after the death of her first
husband, Kathleen Eppes Saumarez had earned precarious bread and butter
as a lecturer before women’s clubs, and was more or less engaged in
journalism, chiefly as a reviewer of current literature. For all books
she had thus acquired an abiding dislike. In particular, I think, she
loathed the two volumes of “woodland tales” collected in those
necessitous years, from her Woman’s Page in the _Lichfield
Courier-Herald_, for the fickle general reading public, which then used
to follow the life-histories of Bazoo the Bear and Mooshwa the Mink, and
other “citizens of the wild,” with that incalculable unanimity which
to-day may be reserved for the biographies of optimistic orphans, and
to-morrow veers to _vies intimes_ of high-minded courtesans with hearts
of gold.... In fine, through a variety of reasons, Mrs. Kennaston quite
frankly cared even less for books, as manifestations of art, than does
the average tolerably honest woman to whom books do not represent a
source of income.
And you may or may not remember, likewise, what Kennaston wrote, about
this time, in the “Colophon” to _Men Who Loved Alison_. With increased
knowledge of the author, some sentences therein, to me at least, took on
larger significance:
“No one, I take it, can afford to do without books unless he be
quite sure that his own day and personality are the best
imaginable; and for this class of persons the most crying need
is not, of course, seclusion in a library, but in a sanatorium.
“It was, instead, for the great generality, who combine a taste
for travel with a dislike for leaving home, that books were by
the luckiest hit invented, to confound the restrictions of
geography and the almanac. In consequence, from the Ptolemies to
the Capets, from the twilight of a spring dawn in Sicily to the
uglier shadow of Montfaucon’s gibbet, there intervenes but the
turning of a page, a choice between Theocritus and Villon. From
the Athens of Herodotus to the Versailles of St.-Simon, from
Naishapur to Cranford, it is equally quick traveling. All times
and lands that ever took the sun, indeed, lie open, equally, to
the explorer by the grace of Gutenberg; and transportation into
Greece or Rome or Persia or Chicago, equally, is the affair of a
moment. Then, too, the islands of Avalon and Ogygia and Theleme
stay always accessible, and magic casements open readily upon
the surf of Sea-coast Bohemia. For the armchair traveler alone
enjoys enfranchisement of a chronology, and of a geography, that
has escaped the wear-and-tear of ever actually existing.
“Peregrination in the realms of gold possesses also the quite
inestimable advantage that therein one’s personality is
contraband. As when Dante makes us free of Hell and Heaven, it
is on the fixed condition of our actual love and hate of divers
Renaissance Italians, whose exploits in the flesh require to-day
the curt elucidation of a footnote, just so, admission to those
high delights whereunto Shelley conducts is purchased by
accrediting to clouds and skylarks—let us sanely admit—a
temporary importance which we would never accord them unbiased.
The traveler has for the half-hour exchanged his personality for
that of his guide: such is the rule in literary highways, a very
necessary traffic ordinance: and so long as many of us are, upon
the whole, inferior to Dante or Shelley—or Sophocles, or
Thackeray, or even Shakespeare—the change need not make entirely
for loss....”
Yes, it is lightly phrased; but, after all, it is only another way of
confessing that his books afforded Kennaston an avenue to forgetfulness
of that fat pasty fellow whom Kennaston was heartily tired of being. For
one, I find the admission significant of much, in view of what befell
him afterward.
And besides—so Kennaston’s thoughts strayed at times—these massed books,
which his predecessor at Alcluid had acquired piecemeal through the term
of a long life, were a part of that predecessor’s personality. No other
man would have gathered and have preserved precisely the same books, and
each book, with varying forcefulness, had entered into his predecessor’s
mind and had tinged it. These parti-colored books, could one but
reconstruct the mosaic correctly, would give a candid portrait of “your
Uncle Henry in Lichfield,” which would perhaps surprise all those who
knew him daily in the flesh. Of the fact that these were unusual books
their present owner and tentative explorer had no doubt whatever. They
were perturbing books.
Now these books by their pleasant display of gold-leaf, soberly aglow in
lamplight, recalled an obscure association of other tiny brilliancies;
and Felix Kennaston recollected the bit of metal he had found that
evening.
Laid by the lamp, it shone agreeably as Kennaston puckered his
protruding brows over the characters with which it was inscribed. So far
as touched his chances of deciphering them, he knew all foreign
languages were to him of almost equal inscrutability. French he could
puzzle out, or even Latin, if you gave him plenty of time and a
dictionary; but this inscription was not in Roman lettering. He wished,
with time-dulled yearning, that he had been accorded a college
education....
------------------------------------------------------------------------
IV
How There Was a Light in the Fog
AS she came toward him through the fog, “How annoying it is,” she was
saying plaintively, “that these moors are never properly lighted.”
“Ah, but you must not blame Ole-Luk-Oie,” he protested. “It is all the
fault of Beatricê Cenci....”
Then Kennaston knew he had unwittingly spoken magic words, for at once,
just as he had seen it done in theaters, the girl’s face was shown him
clearly in a patch of roseate light. It was the face of Ettarre.
“Things happen so in dreams,” he observed. “I know perfectly well I am
dreaming, as I have very often known before this that I was dreaming.
But it was always against some law to tell the people in my nightmares I
quite understood they were not real people. To-day in my daydream, and
here again to-night, there is no such restriction; and lovely as you
are, I know that you are just a daughter of sub-consciousness or of
memory or of jumpy nerves or, perhaps, of an improperly digested
entrée.”
“No, I am real, Horvendile—but it is I who am dreaming you.”
“I had not thought to be a part of any woman’s dream nowadays.... Why do
you call me Horvendile?”
She who bore the face of Ettarre pondered momentarily; and his heart
moved with glad adoration.
“Now, by the beard of the prophet! I do not know,” the girl said, at
last.
“The name means nothing to you?”
“I never heard it before. But it seemed natural, somehow—just as it did
when you spoke of Ole-Luk-Oie and Beatricê Cenci.”
“But Ole-Luk-Oie is the lord and master of all dreams, of course. And
that furtive long-dead Roman girl has often troubled my dreams. When I
was a boy, you conceive, there was in my room at the first
boarding-house in which I can remember dieting, a copy of the Guido
portrait of Beatricê Cenci—a copy done in oils, a worthless daub, I
suppose. But there was evil in the picture—a lurking devilishness, which
waited patiently and alertly until I should do what that silent watcher
knew I was predestined to do, and, being malevolent, wanted me to do. I
knew nothing then of Beatricê Cenci, mark you, but when I came to learn
her history I thought the world was all wrong about her. That woman was
evil, whatever verse-makers may have fabled, I thought for a long
while.... To-day I believe the evil emanated from the person who painted
that particular copy. I do not know who that person was, I never shall
know. But the black magic of that person’s work was very potent.”
And Kennaston looked about him now, to find fog everywhere—impenetrable
vapors which vaguely showed pearl-colored radiancies here and there, but
no determinable forms of trees or of houses, or of anything save the
face of Ettarre, so clearly discerned and so lovely in that strange
separate cloud of roseate light.
“Ah, yes, those little magics”—it was the girl who spoke—“those futile
troubling necromancies that are wrought by portraits and unfamiliar
rooms and mirrors and all time-worn glittering objects—by running waters
and the wind’s persistency, and by lonely summer noons in forests—how
inconsequently they fret upon men’s heart-strings!”
“As if some very feeble force—say, a maimed elf—were trying to attract
your attention? Yes, I think I understand. It is droll.”
“And how droll, too, it is how quickly we communicate our thoughts—even
though, if you notice, you are not really speaking, because your lips
are not moving at all.”
“No, they never do in dreams. One never seems, in fact, to use one’s
mouth—you never actually eat anything, you may also notice, in dreams,
even though food is very often at hand. I suppose it is because all
dream food is akin to the pomegranates of Persephone, so that if you
taste it you cannot ever return again to the workaday world.... But why,
I wonder, are we having the same dream?—it rather savors of Morphean
parsimony, don’t you think, thus to make one nightmare serve for two
people? Or perhaps it is the bit of metal I found this afternoon—”
And the girl nodded. “Yes, it is on account of the sigil of Scoteia. I
have the other half, you know.”
“What does this mean, Ettarre—?” he began; and reaching forward, was
about to touch her, when the universe seemed to fold about him, just as
a hand closes....
* * * * *
And Felix Kennaston was sitting at the writing-table in the library,
with a gleaming scrap of metal before him; and, as the clock showed, it
was bedtime.
“Well, it is undoubtedly quaint how dreams draw sustenance from
half-forgotten happenings,” he reflected; “to think of my recollecting
that weird daub which used to deface my room in Fairhaven! I had
forgotten Beatricê entirely. And I certainly never spoke of her to any
human being, except of course to Muriel Allardyce.... But I would not be
at all surprised if I had involuntarily hypnotized myself, sitting here
staring at this shiny piece of lead—you read of such cases. I believe I
will put it away, to play with again sometime.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
V
Of Publishing: With an Unlikely Appendix
SO Kennaston preserved this bit of metal. “No fool like an old fool,”
his commonsense testily assured him. But Felix Kennaston’s life was
rather barren of interests nowadays....
He thought no more of his queer dream, for a long while. Life had gone
on decorously. He had completed _The Audit at Storisende_, with leisured
joy in the task, striving to write perfectly of beautiful happenings
such as life did not afford. There is no denying that the typed
manuscript seemed to Felix Kennaston—as he added the last touches,
before expressing it to Dapley & Pildriff—to inaugurate a new era in
literature.
Kennaston was yet to learn that publishers in their business capacity
have no especial concern with literature. To his bewilderment he
discovered that publishers seemed sure the merits of a book had nothing
to do with the advisability of printing it. Herewith is appended a
specimen or two from Felix Kennaston’s correspondence.
DAPLEY & PILDRIFF—“We have carefully read your story, ‘The Audit
at Storisende,’ which you kindly submitted to us. It is needless
for us to speak of the literary quality of the story: it is in
fact exquisitely done, and would delight a very limited circle
of readers trained to appreciate such delicate productions. But
that class of readers is necessarily small, and the general
reader would, we fear, fail to recognize the book’s merit and be
attracted to it. For this reason we do not feel—and we regret to
confess it—that the publication of this book would be a wise
business enterprise for us to undertake. We wish that we could,
in justice to you and ourselves, see the matter in another
light. We are returning the manuscript to you, and we remain,
with appreciation of your courtesy, etc.”
PAIGE TICKNOR’S SONS—“We have given very careful consideration
to your story, ‘The Audit at Storisende,’ which you kindly
submitted to us. We were much interested in this romance, for it
goes without saying that it is marked with high literary
quality. But we feel that it would not appeal with force and
success to the general reader. Its appeal, we think, would be to
the small class of cultured readers, and therefore its
publication would not be attended with commercial success.
Therefore in your interest, as well as our own, we feel that we
must give an unfavorable decision upon the question of
publication. Naturally we regret to be forced to that
conclusion, for the work is one which would be creditable to any
publisher’s list. We return the manuscript by express, with our
appreciation of your courtesy in giving us the opportunity of
considering it, and are, etc.”
And so it was with The Gayvery Company, and with Leeds, McKibble & Todd,
and with Stuyvesant & Brothers. Unanimously they united to praise and to
return the manuscript. And Kennaston began reluctantly to suspect that,
for all their polite phrases about literary excellence, his romance
must, somehow, be not quite in consonance with the standards of that
person who is, after all, the final arbiter of literature, and to whom
these publishers very properly deferred, as “the general reader.” And
Kennaston wondered if it would not be well for him, also, to study the
all-important and exigent requirements of “the general reader.”
Kennaston turned to the publishers’ advertisements. Dapley & Pildriff at
that time were urging every one to read _White Sepulchers_, the author
of which had made public the momentous discovery that all churchgoers
were not immaculate persons. Paige Ticknor’s Sons were announcing a new
edition of _The Apostates_, a scathing arraignment of plutocratic
iniquities, which was heralded as certain to sear the soul to its core,
more than rival Thackeray, and turn our highest social circles inside
out. Then the Gayvery Company offered _Through the Transom_, a daring
study of “feminism,” compiled to all appearance under rather novel
conditions, inasmuch as the brilliant young author had, according to the
advertisements, written every sentence with his jaws set and his soul on
fire. The majority of Leeds, McKibble & Todd’s adjectives were devoted
to _Sarah’s Secret_, the prize-winner in the firm’s $15,000 contest—a
“sprightly romance of the greenwood,” whose undoubted aim, Kennaston
deduced from tentative dips into its meandering balderdash, was to
become the most sought-after book, in all institutes devoted to care of
the feeble-minded. And Stuyvesant & Brothers were superlatively
acclaiming _The Silent Brotherhood_, the latest masterpiece of a
pornographically gifted genius, who had edifyingly shown that he ranked
religion above literature, by retiring from the ministry to write
novels.
Kennaston laughed—upon which side of the mouth, it were too curious to
inquire. Momentarily he thought of printing the book at his own expense.
But here the years of poverty had left indelible traces. Kennaston had
too often walked because he had not carfare, for a dollar ever again to
seem to him an inconsiderable matter. Comfortably reassured as to
pecuniary needs for the future, he had not the least desire to control
more money than actually showed in his bank-balances: but, even so, he
often smiled to note how unwillingly he spent money. So now he shrugged,
and sent out his loved romance again.
* * * * *
An unlikely thing happened: the book was accepted for publication. The
Baxon-Muir Company had no prodigious faith in _The Audit at Storisende_,
as a commercial venture; but their “readers,” in common with most of the
“readers” for the firms who had rejected it, were not lacking in
discernment of its merits as an admirable piece of writing. And the more
optimistic among them protested even to foresee a possibility of the
book’s selling. The vast public that reads for pastime, they contended,
was beginning to grow a little tired of being told how bad was
this-or-that economic condition: and pretty much everything had been
“daringly exposed,” to the point of weariness, from the inconsistencies
of our clergy to the uncleanliness of our sausage. In addition, they
considered the surprising success of Mr. Marmaduke Fennel’s
eighteenth-century story, _For Love of a Lady_, as compared with the
more moderate sales of Miss Elspeth Lancaster’s _In Scarlet Sidon_, that
candid romance of the brothel; deducing therefrom that the “gadzooks”
and “by’r lady” type of reading-matter was ready to revive in vogue. At
all events, the Baxon-Muir Company, after holding a rather unusual
number of conferences, declared their willingness to publish this book;
and in due course they did publish it.
There were before this, however, for Kennaston many glad hours of
dabbling with proofsheets: the tale seemed so different, and so
infernally good, in print. Kennaston never in his life found any other
playthings comparable to those first wide-margined “galley proofs” of
_The Audit at Storisende_. Here was the word, vexatiously repeated
within three lines, which must be replaced by a synonym; and the clause
which, when transposed, made the whole sentence gain in force and
comeliness; and the curt sentence whose addition gave clarity to the
paragraph, much as a pinch of alum clears turbid water; and the vaguely
unsatisfactory adjective, for which a jet of inspiration suggested a
substitute, of vastly different meaning, in the light of whose
inevitable aptness you marveled over your preliminary obtuseness:—all
these slight triumphs, one by one, first gladdened Kennaston’s labor and
tickled his self-complacency. He could see no fault in the book.
His publishers had clearer eyes. His Preface, for one matter, they
insisted on transposing to the rear of the volume, where it now figures
as the book’s tolerably famous Colophon—that curious exposition of
Kennaston’s creed as artist. Then, for a title, _The Audit at
Storisende_ was editorially adjudged abominable: people would not know
how to pronounce Storisende, and in consequence would hold back from
discussing the romance or even asking for it at bookdealers. _Men Who
Loved Ettarre_ was Kennaston’s ensuing suggestion; but the Baxon-Muir
Company showed no fixed confidence in their patrons’ ability to
pronounce Ettarre, either. Would it not be possible, they inquired, to
change the heroine’s name?—and Kennaston assented. Thus it was that in
the end his book came to be called _Men Who Loved Alison_.
But to Kennaston her name stayed always Ettarre....
The book was delivered to the world, which received the gift without
excitement. The book was delivered to reviewers, who found in it a
well-intentioned echo of Mr. Maurice Hewlett’s earlier mediæval tales.
And there for a month or some six weeks, the matter rested.
Then one propitious morning an indignant gentlewoman in Brooklyn wrote
to _The New York Sphere_ a letter which was duly printed in that
journal’s widely circulated Sunday supplement, _The Literary
Masterpieces of This Week_, to denounce the loathsome and depraved
indecency of the nineteenth and twentieth chapters, in which—while
treating of Sir Guiron’s imprisonment in the Sacred Grove of Caer Idryn,
and the worship accorded there to the sigil of Scoteia—Kennaston had
touched upon some of the perverse refinements of antique sexual
relations. The following week brought forth a full page of letters. Two
of these, as Kennaston afterward learned, were contributed by the
“publicity man” of the Baxon-Muir Company, and all arraigned obscenities
which Kennaston could neither remember or on re-reading his book
discover. Later in this journal, as in other newspapers, appeared still
more denunciations. An up-to-the-minute bishop expostulated from the
pulpit against the story’s vicious tendencies, demanding that it be
suppressed. Thereafter it was no longer on sale in the large
department-stores alone, but was equally procurable at all the
bookstands in hotels and railway stations. Even the author’s
acquaintances began to read it. And the Delaunays (then at the height of
their vogue as exponents of the “new” dances) introduced “the Alison
amble”; and from Tampa to Seattle, in certain syndicated cartoons of
generally appealing idiocy, newspaper readers were privileged to see one
hero of the series knock the other heels over head with a copy of
Kennaston’s romance. And women wore the “Alison aigrette” for a whole
season; and a new brand of cheap tobacco christened in her honor had
presently made her name at least familiar in saloons. _Men Who Loved
Alison_ became, in fine, the novel of the hour. It was one of those rare
miracles such as sometimes palm off a well-written book upon the vast
public that reads for pastime.
And shortly afterward Mr. Booth Tarkington published another of his
delightful romances: one forgets at this distance of time just which it
was: but, like all the others, it was exquisitely done, and sold neck
and neck with _Men Who Loved Alison_; so that for a while it looked
almost as if the American reading public was coming to condone adroit
and careful composition.
But presently the advertising columns of magazines and newspapers were
heralding the year’s vernal output of enduring masterworks in the field
of fiction: and readers were again assured that the great American novel
had just been published at last, by any number of persons: and so, the
autumnal predecessors of these new _chefs d’œuvre_ passed swiftly into
oblivion, via the brief respite of a “popular” edition. And naturally,
Kennaston’s romance was forgotten, by all save a few pensive people.
Some of them had found in this volume food for curious speculation.
That, however, is a matter to be taken up later.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
VI
Suggesting Themes of Universal Appeal
SO Felix Kennaston saw his dream vulgarized, made a low byword; and he
contemplated this travestying, as the cream of a sardonic jest, with
urbanity. Indeed, that hour of notoriety seemed not without its pleasant
features to Felix Kennaston, who had all a poet’s ordinary appetite for
flattery. Besides, it was droll to read the “literary notes” which the
Baxon-Muir people were industriously disseminating, by means of the
daily journals, concerning Felix Kennaston’s personality, ancestry,
accomplishments, recreations and preferences in diet. And then, in
common with the old woman famed in nursery rhyme, he was very often wont
to observe, “But, lawk a mercy on me! this is none of I!”
It was droll, too, to be asked for autographs, lectures, and for
donations of “your wonderful novel.” It was droll to receive letters
from remote mysterious persons, who had read his book, and had liked it,
or else had disliked it to the point of being goaded into epistolary
remonstrance, sarcasm, abuse, and (as a rule) erratic spelling. It
troubled Kennaston that only riffraff seemed to have read his book, so
far as he could judge from these unsolicited communications; and that
such people of culture and education as might have been thrilled by
it—all people whose opinions he might conceivably value—seemed never to
write to authors....
And finally, it was droll to watch his wife’s reception of the book. To
Kennaston his wife stayed always a not unfriendly mystery. She now could
not but be a little taken aback by this revelation of his abilities, he
reflected—with which she had lived so long without, he felt,
appreciation of them—but certainly she would never admit to either fact.
He doubted very much if Kathleen would ever actually read _Men Who Loved
Alison_; on various pretexts she had deferred the pleasure, and seemed,
with perverted notions of humor, to esteem it a joke that she alone had
not read the book of which everybody was talking. Such was not
Kennaston’s idea of humor, or of wifely interest. But Kathleen dipped
into the volume here and there; and she assuredly read all the
newspaper-notices sent in by the clipping-bureau. These she considered
with profound seriousness.
“I have been thinking—you ought to make a great deal out of your next
novel,” she said, one morning, over her grapefruit; and the former poet
wondered why, in heaven’s name, it should matter to her whether or not
the marketing of his dreams earned money, when they had already a
competence. But women were thus fashioned....
“You ought to do something more up-to-date, though, Felix, something
that deals with real life—”
“Ah, but I don’t particularly care to write about a subject of which I
am so totally ignorant, dear. Besides, it isn’t for you to fleer and
gibe at a masterpiece which you never read,” he airily informed her.
“I am saving it up for next summer, Felix, when I will have a chance to
give every word of it the reverence it deserves. I really don’t have any
time for reading nowadays. There is always something more important that
has to be attended to—For instance, the gasoline engine isn’t working
again, and I had to ’phone in town for Slaytor to send a man out to-day,
to see what is the matter this time.”
“And it is messy things like that you want me to write about!” he
exclaimed. “About the gasoline engine going on another strike, and
Drake’s forgetting to tell you we were all out of sugar until late
Saturday night! Never mind, Mrs. Kennaston! you will be sorry for this,
and you will weep the bitter tears of unavailing repentance, some day,
when you ride in the front automobile with the Governor to the unveiling
of my various monuments, and have fallen into the anecdotage of a great
man’s widow.” He spoke lightly, but he was reflecting that in reality
Kathleen did not read his book because she did not regard any of his
doings very seriously. “Isn’t this the third time this week we have had
herring for breakfast?” he inquired, pleasantly. “I think I will wait
and let them scramble me a couple of eggs. It is evidently a trifle that
has escaped your attention, my darling, during our long years of happy
married life, that I don’t eat herring. But of course, just as you say,
you have a number of much more important things than husbands to think
about. I dislike having to put any one to any extra trouble on my
account; but as it happens, I have a lot of work to do this morning, and
I cannot very well get through it on an empty stomach.”
“We haven’t had it since Saturday, Felix.” Then wearily, to the
serving-girl, “Cora, see if Mr. Kennaston can have some eggs.... I wish
you wouldn’t upset things so, Felix. Your coffee will get stone-cold;
and it is hard enough to keep servants as it is. Besides, you know
perfectly well to-day is Thursday, and the library has to be
thorough-cleaned.”
“That means of course I am to be turned out-of-doors and forced to waste
a whole day somewhere in town. It is quite touching how my creature
comforts are catered to in this house!”
And Kathleen began to laugh, ruefully. “You are just a great big baby,
Felix. You are sulking and swelling up like a frog, because you think I
don’t appreciate what a wonderful husband I have and what a wonderful
book he has written.”
Then Kennaston began to laugh also. He knew that what she said was
tolerably true, even to the batrachian simile. “When you insisted on
adopting me, dear, you ought to have realized what you were letting
yourself in for.”
“—And I do think,” Kathleen went on, evincing that conviction with which
she as a rule repeated other people’s remarks—“that you ought to make
your next book something that deals with real life. _Men Who Loved
Alison_ is beautifully written and all that, but, exactly as the _Tucson
Pioneer_ said, it is really just colorful soapbubbly nonsense.”
“Ah, but is it unadulterated nonsense, Kathleen, that somewhere living
may be a uniformly noble transaction?” he debated—“and human passions
never be in a poor way to find expression with adequate speech and
action?” Pleased with the phrase, and feeling in a better temper, he
began to butter a roll.
“I don’t know about that; but, in any event, people prefer to read about
the life they are familiar with.”
“You touch on a disheartening truth. People never want to be told
anything they do not believe already. Yet I quite fail to see why, in
books or elsewhere, any one should wish to be reminded of what human
life is actually like. For living is the one art in which mankind has
never achieved distinction. It is perhaps an obscure sense of this that
makes us think the begetting of mankind an undiscussable subject, and
death a sublime and edifying topic.”
“Yes—? I dare say,” Kathleen assented vaguely. “This herring is really
very good, Felix. I think you would like it, if you just had not made up
your mind to be stubborn about it—” Then she spoke with new animation:
“Felix, Margaret Woods was in Louvet’s yesterday morning, having her
hair done for a dinner they gave the railroad crowd last night, and of
all the faded washed-out looking people I ever saw—! And I can remember
her having that hideous brown dress long before she was married. Of
course, it doesn’t make any difference to me that she didn’t see fit to
invite us. She was one of your friends, not mine. I was only thinking
that, since she always pretended to be so fond of you, it does seem
curious the way we are invariably left out.”
So Kennaston did not embroider verbally his theme—of Living
Adequately—as he had felt himself in vein to do could he have found a
listener.
“Some day,” he ruefully reflected, “I shall certainly write a paper upon
The Lost Art of Conversing with One’s Wife. Its appeal, I think, would
be universal.”
Then his eggs came....
------------------------------------------------------------------------
VII
Peculiar Conduct of a Personage
SHORTLY afterward befell a queer incident. Kennaston, passing through a
famed city, lunched with a personage who had been pleased to admire _Men
Who Loved Alison_, and whose remunerative admiration had been skilfully
trumpeted in the public press by Kennaston’s publishers.
There were some ten others in the party, and Kennaston found it droll
enough to be sitting at table with them. The lean pensive man—with hair
falling over his forehead in a neatly-clipped “bang,” such as custom
restricts to children—had probably written that morning, in his official
capacity, to innumerable potentates. That handsome bluff old
navy-officer was a national hero: he would rank in history with Perry
and John Paul Jones; yet here he sat, within arms’-reach, prosaically
complaining of unseasonable weather. That bearded man, rubicund and
monstrous as to nose, was perhaps the most powerful, as he was certainly
the most wealthy, person inhabiting flesh; and it was rumored, in those
Arcadian days, that kingdoms did not presume to go to war without
securing the consent of this financier.
And that exquisitely neat fellow, looking like a lad unconvincingly
made-up for an octogenarian in amateur theatricals, was the premier of
the largest province in the world: his thin-featured neighbor was an
aeronaut—at this period really a _rara avis_—and went above the clouds
to get his livelihood, just as ordinary people went to banks and
offices. And chief of all, their multifarious host—the personage, as one
may discreetly call him—had left unattempted scarcely any rôle in the
field of human activities: as ranchman, statesman, warrior, historian,
editor, explorer, athlete, coiner of phrases, and re-discoverer of the
Decalogue, impartially, he had labored to make the world a livelier
place of residence; and already he was the pivot of as many legends as
Charlemagne or Arthur.
The famous navy-officer, as has been said, was complaining of the
weather. “The seasons have changed so, since I can remember. We seem to
go straight from winter into summer nowadays.”
“It has been rather unseasonable,” assented the financier; “but then you
always feel the heat so much more during the first few hot days.”
“Besides,” came the judicious comment, “it has not been the heat which
was so oppressive this morning, I think, as the great amount of humidity
in the air.”
“Yes, it is most unpleasant—makes your clothes stick to you so.”
“Ah, but don’t you find, now,” asked the premier gaily, “that looking at
the thermometer tends to make you feel, really, much more uncomfortable
than if you stayed uninformed as to precisely how hot it was?”
“Well! where ignorance is bliss it is folly to be wise, as I remember to
have seen stated somewhere.”
“By George, though, it is wonderful how true are many of those old
sayings!” observed the personage. “We assume we are much wiser than our
fathers: but I doubt if we really are, in the big things that count.”
“In fact, I have often wondered what George Washington, for example,
would think of the republic he helped to found, if he could see it
nowadays.”
“He would probably find it very different from what he imagined it would
be.”
“Why, he would probably turn in his grave, at some of our newfangled
notions—such as prohibition and equal suffrage.”
“Oh, well, all sensible people know, of course, that the trouble with
prohibition is that it does not prohibit, and that woman’s place is the
home, not in the mire of politics.”
“That is admirably put, sir, if you will permit me to say so. Still,
there is a great deal to be said on both sides.”
“And after all, is there not a greater menace to the ideals of
Washington and Jefferson in the way our present laws tend uniformly to
favor rich people?”
“There you have it, sir—to-day we punish the poor man for doing what the
rich man does with entire impunity, only on a larger scale.”
“By George, there are many of our so-called captains of industry who, if
the truth were told, and a shorter and uglier word were not
unpermissible, are little better than malefactors of great wealth.”
This epigram, however heartily admired, was felt by many of the company
to be a bit daring in the presence of the magnate: and the lean
secretary spoke hastily, or at any rate, in less leisurely tones than
usual:
“After all, money is not everything. The richest people are not always
the happiest, in spite of their luxury.”
“You gentlemen can take it from me,” asserted the aeronaut, “that many
poor people get a lot of pleasure out of life.”
“Now, really though, that reminds me—children are very close observers,
and, as you may have noticed, they ask the most remarkable questions. My
little boy asked me, only last Tuesday, why poor people are always so
polite and kind—”
“Well, little pitchers have big ears—”
“What you might call a chip of the old block, eh?—so that mighty little
misses him?”
“I may be prejudiced, but I thought it pretty good, coming from a kid of
six—”
“And it is perfectly true, gentlemen—the poor are kind to each other.
Now, I believe just being kind makes you happier—”
“And I often think that is a better sort of religion than just dressing
up in your best clothes and going to church regularly on Sundays—”
“That is a very true thought,” another chimed in.
“And expressed, upon my word, with admirable clarity—”
“Oh, whatever pretended pessimists in search of notoriety may say, most
people are naturally kind, at heart—”
“I would put it that Christianity, in spite of the carping sneers of
science so-called, has led us once for all to recognize the vast
brotherhood of man—”
“So that, really, the world gets better every day—”
“We have quite abolished war, for instance—”
“My dear sir, were there nothing else, and even putting aside the
outraged sentiments of civilized humanity, another great or prolonged
war between any two of the leading nations is unthinkable—”
“For the simple reason, gentlemen, that we have perfected our fighting
machines to such an extent that the destruction involved would be too
frightful—”
“Then, too, we are improving the automobile to such an extent—”
“Oh, in the end it will inevitably supplant the horse—”
“It seems almost impossible to realize how we ever got along without the
automobile—”
“Do you know, I would not be surprised if some day horses were exhibited
in museums—”
“As rare and nearly extinct animals? Come, now, that is pretty good—”
“And electricity is, as one might say, just in its infancy—”
“The telephone, for instance—our ancestors would not have believed in
the possibilities of such a thing—”
“And, by George, they talk of giving an entire play with those
moving-picture machines—acting the whole thing out, you know.”
“Oh, yes, we live in the biggest, brainiest age the world has ever
known—”
“And America is going to be the greatest nation in it, before very long,
commercially and in every way....”
So the talk flowed on, with Felix Kennaston contributing very little
thereto. Indeed, Felix Kennaston, the dreamer, was rather ill-at-ease
among these men of action, and listened to their observations with
perturbed attention. He sat among the great ones of earth—not all of
them the very greatest, of course, but each a person of quite
respectable importance. It was the sort of gathering that in boyhood—and
in later life also, for that matter—he had foreplanned to thrill and
dazzle, as he perfectly recollected. But now, with the opportunity, he
somehow could not think of anything quite suitable to say—of anything
which would at once do him justice and be admiringly received.
Therefore he attempted to even matters by assuring himself that the talk
of these efficient people was lacking in brilliance and real depth, and
expressed sentiments which, microscopically viewed, did not appear to be
astoundingly original. If these had been less remarkable persons he
would have thought their conversation almost platitudinous. And not one
of these much-talked-about men, whatever else he might have done, could
have written _Men Who Loved Alison_! Kennaston cherished that reflection
as he sedately partook of a dish he recollected to have seen described,
on menu cards, as “Hungarian goulash” and sipped sherry of no very
extraordinary flavor....
He was to remember how plain the fare was, and more than once, was to
refer to this meal—quite casually—beginning “That reminds me of what
Such-an-one said once, when I was lunching with him,” or perhaps, “The
last time I lunched with So-and-so, I remember—” With such gambits he
was able, later on, to introduce to us of Lichfield several anecdotes
which, if rather pointless, were at least garnished with widely-known
names.
There was a Cabinet meeting that afternoon, and luncheon ended, the
personage wasted scant time in dismissing his guests.
“It has been a very great pleasure to meet you, Mr. Kennaston,” quoth
the personage, wringing Kennaston’s hand.
Kennaston suitably gave him to understand that they shared ecstasy in
common.
“Those portions of your book relating to the sigil of Scoteia struck me
as being too explicit,” the personage continued, bluffly, but in lowered
tones. The two stood now, beneath a great stuffed elk’s head, a little
apart from the others. “Do you think it was quite wise? I seem to recall
a phrase—about birds—”
But Kennaston’s thoughts were vaguely dental. And there is no denying
Kennaston was astounded. Nor was he less puzzled when, as if in answer
to Kennaston’s bewildered look, the personage produced from his
waistcoat pocket a small square mirror, which he half-exhibited, but
retained secretively in the palm of his hand. “Yes, the hurt may well be
two-fold—I am presupposing that, as a country-gentleman, you have raised
white pigeons, Mr. Kennaston?” he said, meaningly.
“Why, no, they keep up such a maddening cooing and purring on warm days,
and drum so on tin roofs”—Kennaston stammered—“that I long ago lost
patience with the birds of Venus, whatever the tincture of their
plumage. There used to be any number of them on our place, though—”
“Ah, well,” the personage said, with a wise nod, and a bright gleam of
teeth, “you exercise the privilege common to all of us—and my intended
analogy falls through. In any event, it has been a great pleasure to
meet you. Come and see me again, Mr. Kennaston—and meanwhile, think over
what I have said.”
* * * * *
And that was all. Kennaston returned to Alcluid in a whirl of formless
speculations. The mirror and the insane query as to white pigeons could
not, he considered, but constitute some password to which Kennaston had
failed to give the proper response.
The mystery had some connection with what he had written in his book as
to the sigil of Scoteia.... And he could not find he had written
anything very definite. The broken disk was spoken of as a talisman in
the vague terms best suited to a discussion of talismans by a person who
knew nothing much about them. True, the book told what the talisman
looked like; it looked like that bit of metal he had picked up in the
garden.... He wondered if he had thrown away that bit of metal; and,
searching, discovered it in the desk drawer, where it had lain for
several months.
Laid by the lamp, it shone agreeably as Kennaston puckered his
protruding heavy brows over the characters with which it was inscribed.
That was what the sigil looked like—or, rather, what half the sigil
looked like, because Ettarre still had the other half. How could the
personage have known anything about it? unless there were, indeed,
really some secret and some password through which men won to place and
the world’s prizes?... Blurred memories of Eugène Sue’s nefarious
Jesuits and of Balzac’s redoubtable Thirteen arose in the background of
his mental picturings....
No, the personage had probably been tasting beverages more potent than
sherry; there were wild legends, since disproved, such as seemed then to
excuse that supposition: or perhaps he was insane, and nobody but Felix
Kennaston knew it.... What could a little mirror, much less pigeons,
have to do with this bit of metal?—except that this bit of metal, too,
reflected light so that the strain tired your eyes, thus steadily to
look down upon the thing....
------------------------------------------------------------------------
VIII
Of Vain Regret and Wonder in the Dark
“MADAM,” he was insanely stating, “I would not for the world set up as a
fit exponent for the mottoes of a copybook; but I am not all base.”
“You are,” flashed she, “a notorious rogue.”
It was quite dark. Kennaston could not see the woman with whom he was
talking. But they were in an open paved place, like a courtyard, and he
was facing the great shut door against which she stood, vaguely
discernible. He knew they were waiting for some one to open this door.
It seemed to him, for no reason at all, that they were at Tunbridge
Wells. But there was no light anywhere. Complete darkness submerged
them; the skies showed not one glimmer overhead.
“That I am of smirched repute, madam, I lack both grounds and
inclination to deny. Yet I am not so through choice. Believe me, I am
innately of wellnigh ducal disposition; and by preference, an ill name
is as obnoxious to me as—shall we say?—soiled linen or a coat of last
year’s cut. But then, _que voulez-vous?_ as our lively neighbors
observe. Squeamishness was never yet bred in an empty pocket; and I am
thus compelled to the commission of divers profitable peccadilloes, once
in a blue moon, by the dictates of that same haphazard chance which
to-night has pressed me into the service of innocence and virtue.”
She kept silence; and he went on in lightheaded wonder as to what this
dream, so plainly recognized as such, was all about, and as to whence
came the words which sprang so nimbly to his lips, and as to what was
the cause of his great wistful sorrow. Perhaps if he listened very
attentively to what he was saying, he might find out.
“You do not answer, madam. Yet think a little. I am a notorious rogue:
the circumstance is conceded. But do you think I have selfishly become
so in quest of amusement? Nay, I can assure you that Newgate, the wigged
judge, the jolting cart, the gallows, is no pleasant dream o’ nights.
But what choice had I? Cast forth to the gutter’s miring in the
susceptible years of infancy, a girl of the town’s byblow, what choice
had I, in heaven’s name? If I may not live as I would, I must live as I
may; in emperors and parsons and sewer-diggers and cheese-mites that
claim is equally allowed.”
“You are a thief?” she asked, pensively.
“Let us put it, rather, that I have proved in life’s hard school an
indifferent Latinist, by occasionally confounding _meum_ with _tuum_.”
“A murderer?”
“Something of the sort might be my description in puritanic mouths. You
know at least what happened at The Cat and Hautbois.”
(“_But what in the world had happened there?_” Kennaston wondered.)
“And yet—” The sweet voice marveled.
“And yet I have saved you from Lord Umfraville? Ah, madam, Providence
labors with quaint instruments, dilapidating Troy by means of a wood
rocking-horse, and loosing sin into the universe through a half-eaten
apple. Nay, I repeat, I am not all base; and I have read somewhere that
those who are in honor wholly shipwrecked will yet very often cling
desperately to one stray spar of virtue.”
He could tell her hand had raised to the knocker on the closed door.
“Mr. Vanringham, will you answer me a question?”
“A thousand. (_So I am Vanringham._”)
“I have not knocked. I possess, as you know, a considerable fortune in
my own right. It would be easy for a strong man—and, sure, your
shoulders are prodigiously broad, Mr. Cut-throat!—very easy for him to
stifle my cries and carry me away, even now. And then, to preserve my
honor, I would have no choice save to marry that broad-shouldered man.
Is this not truth?”
“It is the goddess herself, newly stolen from her well. _O dea certé!_”
“I am not absolutely hideous, either?” she queried, absent-mindedly.
“Dame Venus,” Kennaston observed, “may have made a similar demand of the
waves at Cythera when she first rose among their billows: and I doubt
not that the white foaming waters, amorously clutching at her far whiter
feet, laughed and murmured the answer I would give did I not know your
question was put in a spirit of mockery.”
“And yet—” she re-began.
“And yet, I resist all these temptations? Frankly, had you been in my
eyes less desirable, madam, you would not have reached home thus
uneventfully; for a rich marriage is the only chance adapted to repair
my tattered fortunes; and the devil is cunning to avail himself of our
flesh’s frailty. Had you been the fat widow of some City knight, I would
have played my lord of Umfraville’s part, upon my pettier scale. Or, had
I esteemed it possible for me to have done with my old life, I would
have essayed to devote a cleaner existence to your service and worship.
Indeed, indeed, I speak the truth, however jestingly!” he said, with
sudden wildness. “But what would you have? I would not entrust your fan,
much less your happiness, to the keeping of a creature so untrustworthy
as I know myself to be. In fine, I look upon you, madam, in such a
rapture of veneration and tenderness and joy and heartbreaking yearning,
that it is necessary I get very tipsy to-night, and strive to forget
that I, too, might have lived cleanlily.”
And Kennaston, as he spoke thus, engulfed in darkness, knew it was a
noble sorrow which possessed him—a stingless wistful sorrow such as is
aroused by the unfolding of a well-acted tragedy or the progress of a
lofty music. This ruffian longing, quite hopelessly, to be made clean
again, so worshipful of his loved lady’s purity and loveliness, and
knowing loveliness and purity to be forever unattainable in his mean
life, was Felix Kennaston, somehow.... What was it Maugis d’Aigremont
had said?—“I have been guilty of many wickednesses, I have held much
filthy traffic such as my soul loathed; and yet, I swear to you, I seem
to myself to be still the boy who once was I.” Kennaston understood now,
for the first time with deep reality, what his puppet had meant; and how
a man’s deeds in the flesh may travesty the man himself.
But the door opened. Confusedly Kennaston was aware of
brilliantly-lighted rooms beyond, of the chatter of gay people, of thin
tinkling music, and, more immediately, of two lackeys, much be-powdered
as to their heads, and stately in new liveries of blue-and-silver.
Confusedly he noted these things, for the woman had paused in the bright
doorway, and all the loveliness of Ettarre was visible now to him, and
she had given a delighted cry of recognition.
“La, it is Horvendile! and we are having the same dream again!”
This much he heard and saw as her hand went out gladly toward him. Then
as she touched him the universe seemed to fold about Felix Kennaston,
just as a hand closes, and he was sitting at the writing-table in the
library, with a gleaming scrap of metal before him.
* * * * *
He sat thus for a long while.
“I can make nothing of all this. I remember of course that I saw Muriel
Allardyce stand very much like that, in the doorway of the Royal Hotel,
at the Green Chalybeate—and how many years ago, good Lord!... And
equally of course the most plausible explanation is that I am losing my
wits. Or, else, it may be that I am playing blindfold with perilous
matters. Felix Kennaston, my friend, the safest plan—the one assuredly
safe plan for you—would be to throw away this devil’s toy, and forget it
completely.... And, I will, too—the very first thing to-morrow
morning—or after I have had a few days to think it over, any way....”
But even as he made this compact it was without much lively faith in his
promises.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_Book Third_
══════════════════════
“Come to me in my dreams, and then
By day I shall be well again!
For then the night will more than pay
The hopeless longing of long day.
“Come, as thou cam’st a thousand times,
A messenger from lovelier climes,
To smile on our drear world, and be
As kind to others as to me!”
══════════════════════
------------------------------------------------------------------------
I
They Come to a High Place
HE was looking down at the most repulsive old woman he had ever seen.
Hers was the abhorrent fatness of a spider; her flesh appeared to have
the coloring and consistency of dough. She sat upon the stone pavement,
knitting; her eyes, which raised to his unblinkingly, were black,
secretive, and impersonally malevolent; and her jaws stirred without
ceasing, in a loose chewing motion, so that the white hairs, rooted in
the big mole on her chin, twitched and glittered in the sunlight.
“But one does not pay on entering,” she was saying. “One pays as one
goes out. It is the rule.”
“And what do you knit, mother?” Kennaston asked her.
“Eh, I shall never know until God’s funeral is preached,” the old woman
said. “I only know it is forbidden me to stop.”
So he went past her, aware that through some nameless grace the girl
whom he had twice seen in dreams awaited him there, and that the girl’s
face was the face of Ettarre. She stood by a stone balustrade, upon
which squatted tall stone monsters—weird and haphazard collocations, as
touched anatomy, of bird and brute and fiend—and she in common with
these hobgoblins looked down upon a widespread comely city. The time was
a bright and windy morning in spring; and the sky, unclouded, was like
an inverted cup which did not merely roof Ettarre and the man who had
come back to her, but inclosed them in incommunicable isolation. To the
left, beyond shimmering tree-tops, so far beneath them that it made
Felix Kennaston dizzy to look, the ruffling surface of a river
gleamed.... It was in much this fashion, he recalled, that Ettarre and
Horvendile had stood alone together among the turrets of Storisende.
“But now I wonder where on the face of—or, rather, so far above the face
of what especial planet we may happen to be?” Kennaston marveled
happily—“or east of the sun or west of the moon? At all events, it
hardly matters. Suffice it that we are in love’s land to-day. Why worry
over one particular inexplicable detail, where everything is
incomprehensible?”
“I was never here before, Horvendile; and I have waited for you so
long.”
He looked at her; and again his heart moved with glad adoration. It was
not merely that Ettarre was so pleasing to the eye, and distinguished by
so many delicate clarities of color—so young, so quick of movement, so
slender, so shapely, so inexpressibly virginal—but the heady knowledge
that here on dizzying heights he, Felix Kennaston, was somehow playing
with superhuman matters, and that no power could induce him to desist
from his delicious and perilous frolic, stirred, in deep recesses of his
being, nameless springs. Nameless they must remain; for it was as though
he had discovered himself to possess a sixth sense; and he found that
the contrivers of language, being less prodigally gifted, had never been
at need to invent any terms wherewith to express this sense’s
gratification. But he knew that he was strong and admirable; that men
and men’s affairs lay far beneath him; that Ettarre belonged to him;
and, most vividly of all, that the exultance which possessed him was a
by-product of an unstable dream.
“Yet it is not any city of to-day,” he was saying. “Look, how yonder
little rascal glitters—he is wearing a helmet of some sort and a gorget.
Why, all those pigmies, if you look closely, go in far braver scarlets
and purples than we elect to skulk about in nowadays; and there is not
an office-building or an electric-light advertisement of chewing-gum in
sight. No, that hotchpotch of huddled gables and parapets and towers
shaped like lanterns was stolen straight out of some Doré illustration
for Rabelais or _Les Contes Drolatiques_. But it does not matter at all,
and it will never matter, where we may chance to be, Ettarre. What
really and greatly matters, is that when I try to touch you everything
vanishes.”
The girl was frankly puzzled. “Yes, that seems a part of the sigil’s
magic....”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
II
Of the Sigil and One Use of It
IT proved that this was indeed a part of the sigil’s wonder-working:
Kennaston learned by experience that whenever, even by accident, he was
about to touch Ettarre his dream would end like a burst bubble. He would
find himself alone and staring at the gleaming fragment of metal.
Before long he also learned something concerning the sigil of Scoteia,
of which this piece of metal once formed a part; for it was permitted
him to see the sigil in its entirety, many centuries before it was
shattered: it was then one of the treasures of the Didascalion, a
peculiar sort of girls’ school in King Ptolemy Physcon’s city of
Alexandria, where women were tutored to honor fittingly the power which
this sigil served. But it is not expedient to speak clearly concerning
this; and the real name of the sigil was, of course, quite different
from that which Kennaston had given it in his romance.
So began an odd divided life for Felix Kennaston. At first he put his
half of the sigil in an envelope, which he hid in a desk in the library,
under a pile of his dead uncle’s unused bookplates; whence, when
occasion served, it was taken out in order that when held so as to
reflect the lamplight—for this was always necessary—it might induce the
desired dream of Ettarre.
Later Kennaston thought of an expedient by which to prolong his dreams.
Nightly he lighted and set by his bedside a stump of candle. Its tiny
flame, after he had utilized its reflection, would harmlessly burn out
while his body slept with a bit of metal in one hand; and he would be
freed of Felix Kennaston for eight hours uninterruptedly. To have left
an electric-light turned on until he awakened, would in the end have
exposed him to detection and the not-impossible appointment of a
commission in lunacy; and he recognized the potentialities of such
mischance with frank distaste. As affairs sped, however, he could
without great difficulty buy his candles in secret. He was glad now he
was well-to-do, if only because, as an incidental result of materially
bettered fortunes, he and his wife had separate bedrooms.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
III
Treats of a Prelate and, in Part, of Pigeons
THE diurnal part of Kennaston’s life was largely devoted to writing _The
Tinctured Veil_—that amazing performance which he subsequently gave to a
bewildered world. And for the rest, his waking life went on in the old
round.
But this is not—save by way of an occasional parenthesis—a chronicle of
Felix Kennaston’s doings in the flesh. You may find all that in Mr.
Froser’s _Biography_. Flippant, inefficient and moody, Felix Kennaston
was not in the flesh particularly engaging; and in writing this record
it is necessary to keep his fat corporeal personality in the background
as much as may be possible, lest it should cause you, as it so often
induced us of Lichfield, to find the man repellent, and nothing more.
Now it befell that this spring died Bishop Arkwright—of the Cathedral of
the Bleeding Heart—and many dignitaries of his faith journeyed to
Lichfield to attend the funeral. Chief among these was a prelate who
very long ago had lived in Lichfield, when he was merely a bishop.
Kennaston was no little surprised to receive a note informing him that
this eminent churchman would be pleased to see Mr. Felix Kennaston that
evening at the Bishop’s House.
The prelate sat alone in a sparsely furnished, rather dark, and
noticeably dusty room. He was like a lean effigy carved in time-yellowed
ivory, and his voice was curiously ingratiating. Kennaston recognized
with joy that this old man talked like a person in a book, in completed
sentences and picked phrases, instead of employing the fragmentary
verbal shorthand of ordinary Lichfieldian conversation: and Kennaston,
to whom the slovenliness of fairly cultured people’s daily talk was
always a mystery and an irritant, fell with promptitude into the same
tone.
The prelate, it developed, had when he lived in Lichfield known
Kennaston’s dead uncle—“for whom I had the highest esteem, and whose
friendship I valued most dearly.” He hoped that Kennaston would pardon
the foibles of old age and overlook this trespass upon Kennaston’s time.
For the prelate had, he said, really a personal interest in the only
surviving relative of his dead friend.
“There is a portrait of you, sir, in my library—very gorgeous, in full
canonicals—just as my uncle left the room,” said Kennaston, all at sea.
But the prelate had begun to talk—amiably, and in the most commonplace
fashion conceivable—of his former life in Lichfield, and of the folk who
had lived there then, and to ask questions about their descendants,
which Kennaston answered as he best could. The whole affair was puzzling
Kennaston, for he could think of no reason why this frail ancient
gentleman should have sent for a stranger, even though that stranger
were the nephew of a dead friend, just that they might discuss
trivialities.
So their talking veered, as it seemed, at random....
“Yes, I was often a guest at Alcluid—a very beautiful home it was in
those days, famed, as I remember, for the many breeds of pigeons which
your uncle amused himself by maintaining. I suppose that you also raise
white pigeons, my son?”
Kennaston saw that the prelate now held a small square mirror in his
left hand. “No, sir,” Kennaston answered evenly; “there were a great
many about the place when it came into our possession; but we have never
gone in very seriously for farming.”
“The pigeon has so many literary associations that I should have thought
it would appeal to a man of letters,” the prelate continued. “I ought to
have said earlier perhaps that I read _Men Who Loved Alison_ with great
interest and enjoyment. It is a notable book. Yet in dealing with the
sigil of Scoteia—or so at least it seemed to me—you touched upon
subjects which had better be left undisturbed. There are drugs, my son,
which work much good in the hands of the skilled physician, but cannot
be intrusted without danger to the vulgar.”
He spoke gently; yet it appeared to Kennaston a threat was voiced.
“Sir,” Kennaston began, “I must tell you that in writing of the sigil—as
I called it—I designed to employ only such general terms as romance
ordinarily accords to talismans. All I wrote—I thought—was sheer
invention. It is true I found by accident a bit of metal, from which I
derived the idea of my so-called sigil’s appearance. That bit of metal
was to me then just a bit of metal; nor have I any notion, even to-day,
as to how it came to be lying in one of my own garden-paths.”
He paused. The prelate nodded. “It is always interesting to hear whence
makers of creative literature draw their material,” he stated.
“Since then, sir, by the drollest of coincidences, a famous personage
has spoken to me in almost the identical words you employed this
evening, as to the sigil of Scoteia. The coincidence, sir, lay less in
what was said than in the apparently irrelevant allusion to white
pigeons which the personage too made, and the little mirror which he too
held as he spoke. Can you not see, sir,” Kennaston asked gaily, “to what
wild imaginings the coincidence tempts a weaver of romance? I could find
it in my heart to believe it the cream of an ironic jest that you great
ones of the earth have tested me with a password, mistakenly supposing
that I, also, was initiate. I am tempted to imagine some secret
understanding, some hidden co-operancy, by which you strengthen or,
possibly, have attained your power. Confess, sir, is not the coincidence
a droll one?”
He spoke lightly, but his heart was beating fast.
“It is remarkable enough,” the prelate conceded, smiling. He asked the
name of the personage whom coincidence linked with him, and being told
it, chuckled. “I do not think it very odd he carried a mirror,” the
prelate considered. “He lives before a mirror, and behind a megaphone. I
confess—_mea culpa!_—I often find my little looking-glass a convenience,
in making sure all is right before I go into the pulpit. Not a few men
in public life, I believe, carry such mirrors,” he said, slowly. “But
you, I take it, have no taste for public life?”
“I can assure you—” Kennaston began.
“Think well, my son! Suppose, for one mad instant, that your wild
imaginings were not wholly insane? suppose that you had accidentally
stumbled upon enough of a certain secret to make it simpler to tell you
the whole mystery? Cannot a trained romancer conceive what you might
hope for then?”
Very still it was in the dark room....
Kennaston was horribly frightened. “I can assure you, sir, that even
then I would prefer my peaceful lazy life and my dreams. I have not any
aptitude for action.”
“Ah, well,” the prelate estimated; “it is scarcely a churchman’s part to
play _advocatus mundi_. Believe me, I would not tempt you from your
books. And for our dreams, I have always held heretically, we are more
responsible than for our actions, since it is what we are, uninfluenced,
that determines our dreams.” He seemed to meditate. “I will not tempt
you, therefore, to tell me the whole truth concerning that bit of metal.
I suspect, quite candidly, you are keeping something back, my son. But
you exercise a privilege common to all of us.”
“At least,” said Kennaston, “we will hope my poor wits may not be shaken
by any more—coincidences.”
“I am tolerably certain,” quoth the prelate, with an indulgent smile,
“that there will be no more coincidences.”
Then he gave Kennaston his stately blessing; and Kennaston went back to
his life of dreams.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
IV
Local Laws of Nephelococcygia
THERE was no continuity in these dreams save that Ettarre was in each of
them. A dream would usually begin with some lightheaded topsyturviness,
as when Kennaston found himself gazing forlornly down at his remote
feet—having grown so tall that they were yards away from him and he was
afraid to stand up—or lean strangers carefully and gruesomely explained
the importance of the task, set him by quoting fragments of the
multiplication tables, or a mad bull who happened to be the King of
Spain was pursuing him through a city of blind people. But presently, as
dregs settle a little by a little in a glass of water and leave it
clear, his dream-world would become rational and compliant with familiar
natural laws, and Ettarre would be there—desirable above all other
contents of the universe, and not to be touched under penalty of ending
all.
Sometimes they would be alone in places which he did not recognize,
sometimes they would be living, under the Stuarts or the Valois or the
Cæsars, or other dynasties long since unkingdomed, human lives whose
obligations and imbroglios affected Horvendile and Ettarre to much that
half-serious concern with which one follows the action of a romance or a
well-acted play; for it was perfectly understood between Horvendile and
Ettarre that they were involved in the affairs of a dream.
Ettarre seemed to remember nothing of the happenings Kennaston had
invented in his book. And Guiron and Maugis d’Aigremont and Count
Emmerick and the other people in _The Audit at Storisende_—once more to
give _Men Who Loved Alison_ its original title—were names that rang
familiar to her somehow, she confessed, but without her knowing why. And
so, Kennaston came at last to comprehend that perhaps the Ettarre he
loved was not the heroine of his book inexplicably vivified; but,
rather, that in the book he had, just as inexplicably, drawn a blurred
portrait of the Ettarre he loved, that ageless lovable and loving woman
of whom all poets had been granted fitful broken glimpses—dimly
prefiguring her advent into his life too, with pallid and feeble
visionings. But of this he was not ever sure; nor did he greatly care,
now that he had his dreams.
There was, be it repeated, no continuity in these dreams save that
Ettarre was in each of them; that alone they had in common: but each
dream conformed to certain general laws. For instance, there was never
any confusion of time—that is, a dream extended over precisely the
amount of time he actually slept, so that each dream-life was limited to
some eight hours or thereabouts. No dream was ever iterated, nor did he
ever twice find himself in the same surroundings as touched chronology;
thus, he was often in Paris and Constantinople and Alexandria and Rome
and London, revisiting even the exact spot, the very street-corner,
which had figured in some former dream; but as terrestrial time went,
the events of his first dream would either have happened years ago or
else not be due to happen until a great while later.
He never dreamed of absolutely barbaric or orderless epochs, nor of
happenings (so far as he could ascertain) elsewhere than in Europe and
about the Mediterranean coasts; even within these confines his dreams
were as a rule restricted to urban matters, rarely straying beyond city
walls: his hypothesis in explanation of these facts was curious, but too
fine-spun to be here repeated profitably.
For a while Kennaston thought these dreams to be bits of lives he had
lived in previous incarnations; later he was inclined to discard this
view. He never to his knowledge lived through precisely the same moment
in two different capacities and places; but more than once he came
within a few years of doing this, so that even had he died immediately
after the earlier-timed dream, it would have been impossible for him to
have been reborn and reach the age he had attained in that dream whose
period was only a trifle later. In his dreams Kennaston’s age varied
slightly, but was almost always in pleasant proximity to twenty-five.
Thus, he was in Jerusalem on the day of the Crucifixion and was aged
about twenty-three; yet in another dream he was at Capreæ when Tiberius
died there, seven years afterward, and Kennaston was then still in the
early twenties: and, again, he was in London, at Whitehall, in 1649, and
at Vaux-le-Vicomte near Fontainebleau in 1661, being on each occasion
twenty-three or -four. Kennaston could suggest no explanation of this.
He often regretted that he was never in any dream anybody of historical
prominence, so that he could have found out what became of him after the
dream ended. But though he sometimes talked with notable
persons—inwardly gloating meanwhile over his knowledge of what would be
the outcome of their warfaring or statecraft, and of the manner and even
the hour of their deaths—he himself seemed fated, as a rule, never to be
any one of importance in the world’s estimation. Indeed, as Kennaston
cheerfully recognized, his was not a temperament likely to succeed, as
touched material matters, in any imaginable state of society; there was
not, and never had been, any workaday world in which—as he had said at
Storisende—he and his like would not, in so far as temporal prizes were
concerned, appear to waste at loose ends and live futilely. Then,
moreover, in each dream he was woefully hampered by inability to recall
preceding events in the life he was then leading, which handicap doomed
him to redoubled inefficiencies. But that did not matter now, in view of
his prodigal recompenses....
It was some while before the man made the quaint discovery that in these
dreams he did not in any way resemble Felix Kennaston physically. They
were astray in an autumn forest, resting beside a small fire which he
had kindled in the shelter of a boulder, when Ettarre chanced to speak
of his brown eyes, and thereby to perplex him. But there was in this
dream nothing which would reflect his countenance; and it was later, in
Troy Town (Laomedon ruled the city then, and Priam they saw as a lad
playing at marbles in a paved courtyard, where tethered oxen watched him
over curiously painted mangers) that Kennaston looked into a steel
mirror, framed with intertwined ivory serpents that had emeralds for
eyes, and found there a puzzled stranger.
Thus it was he discovered that in these dreams he was a tall lean
youngster, with ruddy cheeks, wide-set brown eyes, and a smallish head
covered with crisp tight-curling dark-red hair; nor did his appearance
ever alter, to his knowledge, in any subsequent dream. What he saw was
so different from the pudgy pasty man of forty-odd who, he knew, lay at
this moment in Felix Kennaston’s bed, breathing heavily and clasping a
bit of metal in his pudgy hand, that the stranger in the mirror laughed
appreciatively.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
V
Of Divers Fleshly Riddles
A LITTLE by a little he was beginning to lose interest in that pudgy
pasty man of forty-odd who was called Felix Kennaston, and to handle his
affairs more slackly. Once or twice Kennaston caught his wife regarding
him furtively, with a sort of anxious distrust....
Let there be no mistake here: Felix Kennaston had married a woman
admirably suited to him, and he had never regretted that act. Nor with
the advent of Ettarre, did he regret it: and never at any time would he
have considered separating his diurnal existence from that of his thin
beady-eyed capable wife, with graver seriousness than he would have
accorded, say, to a rambling notion of some day being gripped in a trap
and having no way to escape save by cutting off one of his feet. His
affection for Kathleen was well-founded, proved, and understood; but, as
it happens, this narrative does not chance to deal with that affection.
And besides, what there was to tell concerning Kennaston’s fondness for
his wife was duly set forth years ago.
Meanwhile, it began vaguely to be rumored among Kennaston’s associates
that he drank more than was good for him; and toward “drugs” also sped
the irresponsible arrows of surmise. He himself noticed, without much
interest, that daily he, who had once been garrulous, was growing more
chary of speech; and that his attention was apt to wander when the man’s
or woman’s face before him spoke at any length. These shifting faces
talked of wars and tariffs and investments and the weather and
committee-meetings, and of having seen So-and-so and of So-and-so’s
having said this-or-that, and it all seemed of importance to the wearers
of these faces; so that he made pretense to listen, patiently. What did
it matter?
It did not matter a farthing, he considered, for he had cheated life of
its main oppression, which is loneliness. Now at last Felix Kennaston
could unconcernedly acknowledge that human beings develop graveward in
continuous solitude.
His life until this had been in the main normal, with its due share of
normal intimacies with parents, kinsmen, friends, a poet’s ordinary
allotment of sweethearts, and, chief of all, with his wife. No one of
these people, as he reflected in a comminglement of yearning and
complacency, had ever comprehended the real Felix Kennaston as he
existed, in all his hampered strugglings and meannesses, his
inadequacies and his divine unexercised potentialities.
And he, upon the other hand, knew nothing of these people with any
certainty. Pettifoggeries were too easily practiced in speech or
gesture, emotions were too often feigned or overcolored in expression,
and unpopular thoughts were too instinctively dissembled, as he
forlornly knew by his own conduct of daily life, for him to put very
zealous faith in any information gained through his slender fallible
five senses; and it was the cream of the jest that through these five
senses lay his only means of getting any information whatever.
All that happened to him, he considered, happened inside his skull.
Nothing which happened in the big universe affected him in the least
except as it roused certain forces lodged in his skull. His life
consisted of one chemical change after another, haphazardly provoked in
some three pounds of fibrous matter tucked inside his skull. And so,
people’s heads took on a new interest; how was one to guess what was
going on in those queer round boxes, inset with eyes, as people so
glibly called certain restive and glinting things that moved in partial
independence of their setting, and seemed to have an individual
vitality—those queer round boxes whence vegetation sprouted as from the
soil of a planet?
Perhaps—he mused—perhaps in reality all heads were like isolated
planets, with impassable space between each and its nearest neighbor.
You read in the newspapers every once in a while that, because of one or
another inexplicable phenomenon, Mars was supposed to be attempting to
communicate with the earth; and perhaps it was in just such blurred and
unsatisfactory fashion that what happened in one human head was signaled
to another, on those rare occasions when the signal was despatched in
entire good faith. Yes, a perpetual isolation, for all the fretful and
vain strivings of humanity against such loneliness, was probably a
perdurable law in all other men’s lives, precisely as it had been in his
own life until the coming of Ettarre.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
VI
In Pursuit of a Whisper
NIGHTLY he went adventuring with Ettarre: and they saw the cities and
manners of many men, to an extent undreamed-of by Ithaca’s mundivigant
king; and among them even those three persons who had most potently
influenced human life.
For once, in an elongated room with buff-colored walls—having scarlet
hangings over its windows, and seeming larger than it was in reality,
because of its many mirrors—they foregathered with Napoleon, on the
evening of his coronation: the emperor of half-Europe was fretting over
an awkward hitch in the day’s ceremony, caused by his sisters’ attempt
to avoid carrying the Empress Josephine’s train; and he was grumbling
because the old French families continued to ignore him, as a parvenu.
In a neglected orchard, sunsteeped and made drowsy by the murmur of
bees, they talked with Shakespeare; the playwright, his nerves the worse
for the preceding night’s potations, was peevishly complaining of the
meager success of his later comedies, worrying over Lord Pembroke’s
neglect of him, and trying to concoct a masque in the style of fat Ben
Jonson, since that was evidently what the theater-patronizing public
wanted. And they were with Pontius Pilate in Jerusalem, on the evening
of a day when the sky had been black and the earth had trembled; and
Pilate, benevolent and replete with supper, was explaining the latest
theories concerning eclipses and earthquakes to his little boy, and
chuckling with fond pride in the youngster’s intelligent questions.
These three were a few among the prominent worthies of remoter days whom
Kennaston was enabled to view as they appeared in the flesh; but, as a
rule, chance thrust him into the company of mediocre people living
ordinary lives amid surroundings which seemed outlandish to him, but to
them a matter of course. And everywhere, in every age, it seemed to him,
men stumbled amiable and shatter-pated through a jungle of miracles,
blind to its wonderfulness, and intent to gain a little money, food and
sleep, a trinket or two, some rare snatched fleeting moments of
rantipole laughter, and at the last a decent bed to die in. He, and he
only, it seemed to Felix Kennaston, could see the jungle and all its
awe-inspiring beauty, wherethrough men scurried like feeble-minded ants.
He often wondered whether any other man had been so licensed as himself;
and prowling, as he presently did, in odd byways of printed matter—for
he found the library of his predecessor at Alcluid a mine rich-veined
with strangeness—Kennaston lighted on much that appeared to him
significant. Even such apparently unrelated matters as the doctrine of
metempsychosis, all the grotesque literature of witches, sorcerers and
familiar spirits, and of muses who actually prompted artistic
composition with audible voices, were beginning to fall into
cloudily-discerned interlocking. Kennaston read much nowadays in his
dead uncle’s books; and he often wished that, even at the expense of
Felix Kennaston’s being reduced again to poverty, it were possible to
revivify the man who had amassed and read these books. Kennaston wanted
to talk with him.
Meanwhile, Kennaston read of Endymion and Numa, of Iason and Anchises,
of Tannhäuser, and Foulques Plantagenet, and Raymondin de la Forêt, and
Olger Danske, and other mortal men to whom old legend-weavers, as if
wistfully, accredited the love of immortal mistresses—and of less
fortunate nympholepts, frail babbling planet-stricken folk, who had
spied by accident upon an inhuman loveliness, and so, must pine away
consumed by foiled desire of a beauty which the homes and cities and the
tilled places of men did not afford, and life did not bring forth
sufficingly. He read Talmudic tales of Sulieman-ben-Daoud—even in name
transfigured out of any resemblance to an amasser of reliable
axioms—that proud luxurious despot “who went daily to the comeliest of
the spirits for wisdom”; and of Arthur and the Lady Nimuë; and of Thomas
of Ercildoune, whom the Queen of Faëry drew from the merchants’
market-place with ambiguous kindnesses; and of John Faustus, who
“through fantasies and deep cogitations” was enabled to woo successfully
a woman that died long before his birth, and so won to his love, as the
book recorded, “this stately pearl of Greece, fair Helena, the wife to
King Menelaus.”
And, as has been said, the old idea of muses who actually prompted
artistic composition, with audible voices, took on another aspect. He
came to suspect that other creative writers had shared such a divided
life as his was now, for of this he seemed to find traces here and
there. Coleridge offered at once an arresting parallel. Yes, Kennaston
reflected; and Coleridge had no doubt spoken out in the first glow of
wonder, astounded into a sort of treason, when he revealed how he wrote
_Kubla Khan_; so that thus perhaps Coleridge had told far more
concerning the origin of this particular poem than he ever did as to his
later compositions. Then, also, I have a volume of Herrick from
Kennaston’s library with curious comments penciled therein, relative to
_Lovers How They Come and Part_ and _His Mistress Calling Him to
Elysium_; a copy of Marlowe’s _Tragical History of Doctor Faustus_ is
similarly annotated; and on a fly-leaf in Forster’s _Life of Charles
Dickens_, apropos of passages in the first chapter of the ninth book,
Kennaston has inscribed strange speculations very ill suited to general
reading. All that Kennaston cared to print, however, concerning the
hypothesis he eventually evolved, you will find in _The Tinctured Veil_,
where he has nicely refrained from too-explicit writing, and—of
course—does not anywhere pointblank refer to his personal experiences.
Then Kennaston ran afoul of the Rosicrucians, and their quaint dogmas,
which appeared so preposterous at first, took on vital meanings
presently; and here too he seemed to surprise the cautious whispering of
men who neither cared nor dared to speak with candor of all they knew.
It seemed to him he understood that whispering which was everywhere
apparent in human history; for he too was initiate.
He wondered very often about his uncle....
------------------------------------------------------------------------
VII
Of Truisms: Treated Reasonably
HE seemed, indeed, to find food for wonder everywhere. It was as if he
had awakened from a dragging nightmare of life made up of unimportant
tasks and tedious useless little habits, to see life as it really was,
and to rejoice in its exquisite wonderfulness.
How poignantly strange it was that life could afford him nothing save
consciousness of the moment immediately at hand! Memory and
anticipation, whatever else they might do—and they had important uses,
of course, in rousing emotion—yet did not deal directly with reality.
What you regretted, or were proud of, having done yesterday was no more
real now than the deeds of Cæsar Borgia or St. Paul; and what you looked
forward to within the half-hour was as non-existent as the senility of
your unborn great-grandchildren. Never was man brought into contact with
reality save through the evanescent emotions and sensations of that
single moment, that infinitesimal fraction of a second, which was
passing now. This commonplace, so simple and so old, bewildered
Kennaston when he came unreservedly to recognize its truth....
To live was to be through his senses conscious, one by one, of a
restricted number of these fractions of a second. Success in life, then,
had nothing to do with bank-accounts or public office, or any step
toward increasing the length of one’s obituary notices, but meant to be
engrossed utterly by as many as possible of these instants. And complete
success required a finding, in these absorbing instants, of employment
for every faculty he possessed. It was for this that Kennaston had
always vaguely longed; and to this, if only in dreams, he now attained.
If only in dreams he debated: why, and was he not conscious, now, in his
dreams, of every moment as it fled? And corporal life in banks and
ballrooms and legislative halls and palaces, nowhere had anything more
than that to offer mortal men.
It is not necessary to defend his course of reasoning; to the contrary,
its fallacy is no less apparent than its conduciveness to unbusinesslike
conclusions. But it is highly necessary to tell you that, according to
Felix Kennaston’s account, now, turn by turn, he was in Horvendile’s
person rapt by nearly every passion, every emotion, the human race has
ever known. True, throughout these dramas into which chance plunged him,
in that he knew always he was dreaming, he was at once performer and
spectator; but he played with the born actor’s zest—feeling his part, as
people say—and permitting the passion he portrayed to possess him almost
completely.
Almost completely, be it repeated; for there was invariably a sufficient
sense of knowing he was only dreaming to prevent entire abandonment to
the raw emotion. Kennaston preferred it thus. He preferred in this more
comely way to play with human passions, rather than, as seemed the
vulgar use, to consent to become their battered play-thing.
It pleased him, too, to be able to have done with such sensations and
emotions as did not interest him; for he had merely to touch Ettarre,
and the dream ended. In this fashion he would very often terminate an
existence which was becoming distasteful—resorting debonairly to this
sort of suicide, and thus dismissing an era’s social orderings and its
great people as toys that, played with, had failed to amuse Felix
Kennaston.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_Book Fourth_
══════════════════════
“_But there were dreams to sell
Ill didst thou buy:
Life is a dream, they tell,
Waking to die.
Dreaming a dream to prize,
Is wishing ghosts to rise;
And, if I had the spell
To call the buried—well,
Which one would I?_”
══════════════════════
------------------------------------------------------------------------
I
Economic Considerations of Piety
AS has been said, Kennaston read much curious matter in his dead uncle’s
library....
But most books—even Felix Kennaston’s own little books—did not seem now
to be affairs of heavy moment. Once abed, clasping his gleaming broken
bit of metal, and the truthful history of all that had ever happened
was, instead, Kennaston’s library. It was not his to choose from what
volume or on which page thereof he would read; accident, as it seemed,
decided that; but the chance-opened page lay unblurred before him, and
he saw it with a clarity denied to other men of his generation.
* * * * *
Kennaston stood by the couch of Tiberius Cæsar as he lay ill at Capreæ.
Beside him hung a memorable painting, by Parrhasius, which represented
the virgin Atalanta in the act of according very curious assuagements to
her lover’s ardor. Charicles, a Greek physician, was telling the Emperor
of a new religious sect that had arisen in Judea, and of the
persecutions these disciples of Christus were enduring. Old Cæsar
listened, made grave clucking noises of disapproval.
“It is, instead, a religion that should be fostered. The man preached
peace. It is what my father before me strove for, what I have striven
for, what my successors must strive for. Peace alone may preserve Rome:
the empire is too large, a bubble blown so big and tenuous that the
first shock will disrupt it in suds. Pilate did well to crucify the man,
else we could not have made a God of him; but the persecution of these
followers of Christus must cease. This Nazarene preached the same
doctrine that I have always preached. I shall build him a temple. The
rumors concerning him lack novelty, it is true: this God born of a
mortal woman is the old legend of Dionysos and Mithra and Hercules, a
little pulled about; Gautama also was tempted in a wilderness;
Prometheus served long ago as man’s scapegoat under divine anger; and
the cult of Pollux and Castor, and of Adonis, has made these
resurrection stories hackneyed. In fine, Charicles, you have brought me
a woefully inartistic jumble of old tales; but the populace prefers old
tales, they delight to be told what they have heard already. I shall
certainly build Christus a temple.”
So he ran on, devising the reception of Christ into the Roman pantheon,
as a minor deity at first, and thence, if the receipts at his temple
justified it, to be raised to greater eminence. Tiberius saw large
possibilities in the worship of this new God, both from a doctrinal and
a money-making standpoint. Then Cæsar yawned, and ordered that a company
of his Spintriæ be summoned to his chamber, to amuse him with their
unnatural diversions.
But Charicles had listened in horror, for he was secretly a Christian,
and knew that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. He
foresaw that, without salutary discouragement, the worship of Christus
would never amount to more than the social fad of a particular season,
just as that of Cybele and that of Heliogabalus had been modish in
different years; and would afterward dwindle, precisely as these cults
had done, into shrugged-at old-fashionedness. Then, was it not written
that they only were assuredly blessed who were persecuted for
righteousness’ sake?—Why, martyrdom was the one certain road to Heaven;
and a religion which is patronized by potentates, obviously, breeds no
martyrs.
So Charicles mingled poison in Cæsar’s drink, that Cæsar might die, and
crazed Caligula succeed him, to put all Christians to the sword. And
Charicles young Caius Cæsar Caligula—Child of the Camp, Father of
Armies, Beloved of the Gods—killed first of all.
* * * * *
Then a lean man, white-robed, and clean-shaven as to his head, was
arranging a complicated toy. He labored in a gray-walled room, lit only
by one large circular window opening upon the sea. There was an alcove
in this room, and in the alcove stood a large painted statue.
This prefigured a crowned woman, in bright parti-colored garments of
white and red and yellow, under a black mantle embroidered with small
sparkling stars. Upon the woman’s forehead was a disk, like a round
glittering mirror; seen closer, it was engraved with tiny characters,
and Kennaston viewed it with a thrill of recognition. To the woman’s
right were vipers rising from the earth, and to the left were stalks of
ripe corn, all in their proper colors. In one hand she carried a golden
boat, from which a coiled asp raised its head threateningly. From the
other hand dangled three or four slender metal rods, which were not a
part of the statue, but were loosely attached to it, so that the least
wind caused them to move and jangle. There was nothing whatever in the
gray-walled room save this curious gleaming statue and the lean man and
the mechanical toy on which he labored.
He explained its workings, willingly enough. See now! you kindled a fire
in this little cube-shaped box. The air inside expanded through this
pipe into the first jar of water, and forced the water out, through this
other pipe, into this tiny bucket. The bucket thus became heavier and
heavier, till its weight at last pulled down the string by which the
bucket was swung over a pulley, and so, moved this lever.
Oh, yes, the notion was an old one; the priest admitted he had copied
the toy from one made by Hero of Alexandria, who died years ago. Still,
it was an ingenious trifle: moreover—and here was the point—enlarge the
scale, change the cube-shaped box into the temple altar, fasten the
lever to the temple doors, and you had the mechanism for a miracle.
People had only to offer burnt sacrifices to the Goddess, and before
their eyes the All-Mother, the holy and perpetual preserver of the human
race, would stoop to material thaumaturgy, and would condescend to
animate her sacred portals.
“We very decidedly need some striking miracle to advertise our temple,”
he told Kennaston. “Folk are flocking like sheep after these barbarous
new Galilean heresies. But the All-Mother is compassionate to human
frailty; and this device will win back many erring feet to the true
way.”
And Kennaston saw there were tears in this man’s dark, sad eyes. The
trickster was striving to uphold the faith of his fathers; and in the
attempt he had constructed a practicable steam-engine.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
II
Deals With Pen Scratches
THEN Kennaston was in Alexandria when John the Grammarian pleaded with
the victorious Arabian general Amrou to spare the royal library, the
sole repository at this period of many of the masterworks of Greek and
Roman literature.
But Amrou only laughed, with a practical man’s contempt for such
matters. “The Koran contains all that is necessary to salvation: if
these books teach as the Koran teaches they are superfluous; if they
contain anything contrary to the Koran they ought to be destroyed. Let
them be used as fuel for the public baths.”
And this was done. Curious, very curious, it was to Kennaston, to
witness this utilitarian employment of a nation’s literature; and it
moved him strangely. He had come at this season to believe that
individual acts can count for nothing, in the outcome of things.
Whatever might happen upon earth, during the existence of that midge
among the planets, affected infinitesimally, if at all, the universe of
which earth was a part so inconceivably tiny. To figure out the
importance in this universe of the deeds of one or another nation
temporarily clustering on earth’s surface, when you considered that
neither the doings of Assyria or of Rome, or of any kingdom, had ever
extended a thousand feet from earth’s surface, was a task too delicate
for human reason. For human faculties to attempt to estimate the
individuals of this nation, in the light of the relative importance of
their physical antics while living, was purely and simply ridiculous. To
assume, as did so many well-meaning persons, that Omniscience devoted
eternity to puzzling out just these minutiæ, seemed at the mildest to
postulate in Omniscience a queer mania for trivialities. With the
passage of time, whatever a man had done, whether for good or evil, with
the man’s bodily organs, left the man’s parish unaffected: only man’s
thoughts and dreams could outlive him, in any serious sense, and these
might survive with perhaps augmenting influence: so that Kennaston had
come to think artistic creation in words—since marble and canvas
inevitably perished—was the one, possibly, worth-while employment of
human life. But here was a crude corporal deed which bluntly destroyed
thoughts, and annihilated dreams by wholesale. To Kennaston this seemed
the one real tragedy that could be staged on earth....
Curious, very curious, it was to Kennaston, to see the burning of
sixty-three plays written by Æschylus, of a hundred and six by
Sophocles, and of fifty-five by Euripides—masterworks eternally lost,
which, as Kennaston knew, the world would affect to deplore eternally,
whatever might be the world’s real opinion in the matter.
But of these verbal artificers something at least was to endure. They
would fare better than Agathon and Ion and Achæus, their admitted equals
in splendor, whose whole life-work was passing, at the feet of
Horvendile, into complete oblivion. There, too, were perishing all the
writings of the Pleiad—the noble tragedies of Homerus, and Sositheus,
and Lycophron, and Alexander, and Philiscus, and Sosiphanes, and
Dionysides. All the great comic poets, too, were burned pellmell with
these—Telecleides, Hermippus, Eupolis, Antiphanes, Ameipsas, Lysippus,
and Menander—“whom nature mimicked,” as the phrase was. And here,
posting to obliteration, went likewise Thespis, and Pratinas, and
Phrynichus—and Choerilus, whom cultured persons had long ranked with
Homer. Nothing was to remain of any of these save the bare name, and
even this would be known only to pedants. All these, spurred by the
poet’s ageless monomania, had toiled toward, and had attained, the
poet’s ageless goal—to write perfectly of beautiful happenings: and of
this action’s normal by-product, which is immortality in the mouths and
minds of succeeding generations, all these were being robbed, by the
circumstance that parchment is inflammable.
Here was beauty, and wit, and learning, and genius, being wasted—quite
wantonly—never to be recaptured, never to be equaled again (despite the
innumerable painstaking penmen destined to fret the hearts of unborn
wives), and never, in the outcome, to be thought of as a very serious
loss to anybody, after all....
These book-rolls burned with great rapidity, crackling cheerily as the
garnered wisdom of Cato’s octogenarian life dissolved in puffs of smoke,
and the wit of Sosipater blazed for the last time in heating a pint of
water.... But then in Parma long afterward Kennaston observed a monk
erasing a song of Sappho’s from a parchment on which the monk meant to
inscribe a feeble little Latin hymn of his own composition; in an
obscure village near Alexandria Kennaston saw the only existent copy of
the _Mimes_ of Herondas crumpled up and used as packing for a
mummy-case; and at Prior Park Kennaston watched Mrs. Elizabeth Barnes,
then acting as cook for Dr. William Warburton, destroy in making
piecrust the unique manuscript copies of three of Shakespeare’s dramas,
which had never been printed.
And—conceding Heaven to be an actual place, and attainment of its
felicities to be the object of human life—Kennaston could not, after
all, detect any fault in Amrou’s logic. Æsthetic considerations could,
in that event, but lead to profitless time-wasting where every moment
was precious.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
III
By-Products of Rational Endeavor
THEN again Kennaston stood in a stone-walled apartment, like a cell,
wherein there was a furnace and much wreckage. A contemplative friar was
regarding the disorder about him with disapproval, the while he sucked
at two hurt fingers.
“There can be no doubt that Old Legion conspires to hinder the great
work,” he considered.
“And what is the great work, father?” Kennaston asked him.
“To find the secret of eternal life, my son. What else is lacking? Man
approaches to God in all things save this, _Imaginis imago_, created
after God’s image. But as yet, by reason of his mortality, man shudders
in a world that is arrayed against him. Thus, the heavens threaten with
winds and lightnings, with plague-breeding meteors and the unfriendly
aspect of planets; the big seas molest with waves and inundations,
stealthily drowning cities overnight, and sucking down tall navies as a
child gulps sugarplums; whereas how many plants and gums and seeds bear
man’s destruction in their tiny hearts! what soulless beasts of the
field and of the wood are everywhere enleagued in endless feud against
him, with tusks and teeth, with nails and claws and venomous stings,
made sharp for man’s demolishment! Thus all struggle miserably, like
hunted persons under a sentence of death that may at best be avoided for
a little while. And manifestly, this is not as it should be.”
“Yet I much fear it is so ordered, father.”
The old man said testily: “I repeat, for your better comfort, there can
be no doubt that Satan alone conspires to hinder the great work. No; it
would be abuse of superstition to conceive, as would be possible for
folk of slender courage, that the finger of heaven has to-day unloosed
this destruction, to my bodily hurt and spiritual admonition.” Kennaston
could see, though, that the speaker half believed this might be exactly
what had happened. “For I am about no vaunting transgression of man’s
estate; I do but seek to recover his lost heritage. You will say to me,
it is written that never shall any man be one day old in the sight of
God?—Yet it is likewise written that unto God a thousand years are but
one day. For this period of time, then, may each man righteously demand
that death delay to enact the midwife to his second birth. It advantages
not to contend that even in the heyday of patriarchs few approached to
such longevity; for Moses, relinquishing to silence all save the progeny
of Seth, nowhere directly tells us that some of the seed of Cain did not
outlive Methuselah. Yea, and our common parent, Adam, was created in the
perfect age of man, which then fell not short of one hundred years,
since at less antiquity did none of the antediluvian fathers beget
issue, as did Adam in the same year breath was given him; and the years
of Adam’s life were nine hundred and thirty; whereby it is a reasonable
conceit of learned persons to compute him to have exceeded a thousand
years in age, if not in duration of existence. Now, it is written that
we shall all die as Adam died; and caution should not scruple to affirm
this is an excellent dark saying, prophetic of that day when no man need
outdo Adam in celerity to put by his flesh.”
Then Kennaston found the alchemist had been compounding nitrum of
Memphis with sulphur, mixing in a little willow charcoal to make the
whole more friable, and that the powder had exploded. The old man was
now interested, less in the breakage, than in the horrible noise this
accident had occasioned.
“The mixture might be used in court-pageants and miracle-plays,” he
estimated, “to indicate the entrance of Satan, or the fall of Sodom, or
Herod’s descent into the Pit, and so on. Yes, I shall thriftily sell
this secret, and so get money to go on with the great work.”
Seeking to find the means of making life perpetual, he had accidentally
discovered gunpowder.
* * * * *
Then at Valladolid an age-stricken seaman, wracked with gout, tossed in
a mean bed and grumbled to bare walls. He, “the Admiral,” was neglected
by King Philip, the broth was unfit for a dog’s supper, his son Diego
was a laggard fool. Thus the old fellow mumbled.
Ingratitude everywhere! and had not he, “the Admiral”—“the Admiral of
Mosquito Land,” as damnable street-songs miscalled him, he whimpered, in
a petulant gust of self-pity—had not he found out at last a way by sea
to the provinces of the Great Khan and the treasures of Cipango? Give
him another fleet, and he would demonstrate what malignant fools were
his enemies. He would convert the Khan from Greek heresies; or else let
the Holy Inquisition be established in Cipango, the thumbscrew and the
stake be fittingly utilized there _ad majorem Dei gloriam_—all should
redound to the credit of King Philip, both temporal and celestial. And
what wealth, too, a capable emissary would bring back to his
Majesty—what cargoes of raw silks, of gold and precious gems, ravished
from Kanbalu and Taidu, those famed marvelous cities!... But there was
only ingratitude and folly everywhere, and the broth was cold....
Thus the broken adventurer, Cristoforo Colombo, mumbled. He had doubled
the world’s size and resources, in his attempts to find some defenseless
nation which could be plundered with impunity; and he was dying in
ignorance of what his endeavors had achieved.
* * * * *
And Kennaston was at Blickling Hall when King Henry read the Pope’s
letter which threatened excommunication. “Nan, Nan,” the King said,
“this is a sorry business.”
“Sire,” says Mistress Boleyn, saucily, “and am I not worth a little
abuse?”
“You deserve some quite certainly,” he agrees; and his bright lecherous
pig’s eyes twinkled, and he guffawed.
“Defy the Pope, then, sire, and marry your true love. Let us snap
fingers at Giulio de Medici—”
“Faith, and not every lass can bring eleven fingers to the task,” the
King put in.
She tweaked his fine gold beard, and Kennaston saw that upon her left
hand there was really an extra finger.
“My own sweetheart,” says she, “if you would have my person as much at
your disposal as my heart is, we must part company with Rome. Then, too,
at the cost of a few Latin phrases, some foolish candle-snuffing and a
little bell-ringing, you may take for your own all the fat abbey-lands
in these islands, and sell them for a great deal of money,” she pointed
out.
So, between lust and greed, the King was persuaded. In the upshot,
“because”—as was duly set forth to his lieges—“a virtuous monarch ought
to surround his throne with many peers of the worthiest of both sexes,”
Mistress Anne Boleyn was created Marchioness of Pembroke, in her own
right, with a reversion of the title and estates to her offspring,
whether such might happen to be legitimate or not. A pension of £1,000
per annum, with gold, silver and parcel-gilt plate to the value of
£1,188, was likewise awarded her: and the King, by thus piously defying
Romish error, earned the abbey-lands, as well as the key of a certain
bed-chamber, and the eternal approbation of zealous Protestants, for
thus inaugurating religious liberty.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
IV
“Epper Si Muove”
THESE ironies Kennaston witnessed among many others, as he read in this
or that chance-opened page from the past. Everywhere, it seemed to him,
men had labored blindly, at flat odds with rationality, and had achieved
everything of note by accident. Everywhere he saw reason to echo the cry
of Maugis d’Aigremont—“It is very strange how affairs fall out in this
world of ours, so that a man may discern no plan or purpose anywhere.”
Here was the astounding fact: the race did go forward; the race did
achieve; and in every way the race grew better. Progress through
irrational and astounding blunders, whose outrageousness bedwarfed the
wildest _clichés_ of romance, was what Kennaston found everywhere. All
this, then, also was foreplanned, just as all happenings at Storisende
had been, in his puny romance; and the puppets here, too, moved as they
thought of their own volition, but really in order to serve a denouement
in which many of them had not any personal part or interest....
And always the puppets moved toward greater efficiency and comeliness.
The puppet-shifter appeared to seek at once utility and artistic
self-expression. So the protoplasm—that first imperceptible pinhead of
living matter—had become a fish; the fish had become a batrachian, the
batrachian a reptile, the reptile a mammal; thus had the puppets
continuously been reshaped, into more elaborate forms more captivating
to the eye, until amiable and shatter-pated man stood erect in the
world. And man, in turn, had climbed a long way from gorillaship,
however far he was as yet from godhead—blindly moving always, like fish
and reptile, toward unapprehended loftier goals.
But, just as men’s lives came to seem to Kennaston like many
infinitesimal threads woven into the pattern of human destiny, so
Kennaston grew to suspect that the existence of mankind upon earth was
but an incident in the unending struggle of life to find a home in the
universe. Human inhabitancy was not even a very important phase in the
world’s history, perhaps; a scant score or so of centuries ago there had
been no life on earth, and presently the planet would be a silent naked
frozen clod. Would this sphere then have served its real purpose of
being, by having afforded foothold to life for a few æons?
He could not tell. But Kennaston contemplated sidereal space full of
such frozen worlds, where life seemed to have flourished for a while and
to have been dispossessed—and full, too, of glowing suns, with their
huge satellites, all slowly cooling and congealing into fitness for
life’s occupancy. Life would tarry there also, he reflected; and thence
also life would be evicted. For life was not a part of the universe, not
a product of the universe at all perhaps, but, rather, an intruder into
the cosmic machinery, which moved without any consideration of life’s
needs. Like a bird striving to nest in a limitless engine, insanely
building among moving wheels and cogs and pistons and pulley-bands,
whose moving toward their proper and intended purposes inevitably swept
away each nest before completion—so it might be that life passed from
moving world to world, found transitory foothold, began to build, and
was driven out.
What was it that life sought to rear?—what was the purpose of this
endless endeavor, of which the hatching of an ant or the begetting of an
emperor was equally a by-product? and of which the existence of Felix
Kennaston was a manifestation past conceiving in its unimportance?
Toward what did life aspire?—that force which moved in Felix Kennaston,
and thus made Felix Kennaston also an intruder, a temporary visitor, in
the big moving soulless mechanism of earth and water and planets and
suns and interlocking solar systems?
“To answer that question must be my modest attempt,” he decided. “In
fine—why is a Kennaston? The query has a humorous ring undoubtedly, in
so far as it is no little suggestive of the spinning mouse that is the
higher the fewer—but, after all, it voices the sole question in which I
personally am interested....”
* * * * *
“Why is a Kennaston?” he asked himself—thus whimsically voicing the
inquiry as to whether human beings were intended for any especial
purpose. Most of us find it more comfortable, upon the whole, to stave
off such queries—with a jest, a shrug, or a Scriptural quotation, as
best suits personal taste; but Kennaston was “queer” enough to face the
situation quite gravely. Here was he, the individual, very possibly
placed on—at all events, infesting—a particular planet for a
considerable number of years; the planet was so elaborately constructed,
so richly clothed with trees and valleys and uplands and running waters
and multitudinary grass-blades, and the body that housed Felix Kennaston
was so intricately wrought with tiny bones and veins and sinews, with
sockets and valves and levers, and little hairs which grew upon the body
like grass-blades about the earth, that it seemed unreasonable to
suppose this much cunning mechanism had been set agoing aimlessly: and
so, he often wondered if he was not perhaps expected to devote these
years of human living to some intelligible purpose?
Religion, of course, assured him that the answer to his query was
written explicitly, in various books, in very dissimilar forms. But
Kennaston could find little to attract him in any theory of the universe
based upon direct revelations from heaven. Conceding that divinity had
actually stated so-and-so, from Sinai or Delphi or Mecca, and had been
reported without miscomprehension or error, there was no particular
reason for presuming that divinity had spoken veraciously: and, indeed,
all available analogues went to show that nothing in nature dealt with
its inferiors candidly. To liken the relationship to the intercourse of
a father with his children, as did all revealed religions with queer
uniformity, was at best a two-edged simile, in that it suggested a
possible amiability of intention combined with inevitable duplicity. The
range of an earthly father’s habitual deceptions, embracing the source
of life and Christmas presents on one side and his own fallibility on
the other, was wide enough to make the comparison suspicious. When
fathers were at their worst they punished; and when in their kindliest
and most expansive moods, why, then it was—precisely—that they told
their children fairy-stories. It seemed to Kennaston, for a while, that
all religions ended in this blind-alley.
To exercise for an allotted period divinely-recommended qualities known
as virtues, and to be rewarded therefor, by an immortal score-keeper,
appeared a rather childish performance all around. Yet every religion
agreed in asserting that such was the course of human life at its
noblest; and to believe matters were thus arranged indisputably
satisfied an innate craving of men’s natures, as Kennaston was
privileged to see for himself.
Under all theocracies the run of men proved much the same: as has been
said, it was for the most part with quite ordinary people that
Horvendile dealt in dreams. The Roman citizenry, for instance, he found
did not devote existence, either under the Republic or the Empire, to
shouting in unanimous response to metrical declamations, and worrying
over their own bare legs, or in other ways conform to the best
traditions of literature and the stage; nor did the Athenians
corroborate their dramatists by talking perpetually of the might of Zeus
or Aphrodite, any more than motormen and stockbrokers conversed
continually of the Holy Ghost. Substantial people everywhere worshiped
at their accustomed temple at accustomed intervals, and then put the
matter out of mind, in precisely the fashion of any reputable
twentieth-century church-goer. Meanwhile they had their
business-affairs, their sober chats on weather probabilities, their
staid diversions (which everywhere bored them frightfully), their family
jokes, their best and second-best clothes, their flirtations, their
petty snobbishnesses, and their perfectly irrational faith in
Omnipotence and in the general kindliness of Omnipotence—all these they
had, and made play with, to round out living. Ritualistic worship
everywhere seemed to be of the nature of a conscious outing, of a
conscious departure from everyday life; it was generally felt that
well-balanced people would not permit such jaunts to interfere with
their business-matters or home-ties; but there was no doubt men did not
like to live without religion and religion’s promise of a less trivial
and more ordered and symmetrical existence—to-morrow.
Meanwhile, men were to worry, somehow, through to-day—doing as
infrequent evil as they conveniently could, exercising as much bravery
and honesty and benevolence as they happened to possess, through a life
made up of unimportant tasks and tedious useless little habits. Men felt
the routine to be niggardly: but to-morrow—as their priests and bonzes,
their flamens and imauns, their medicine men and popes and rectors, were
unanimous—would be quite different.
To-day alone was real. Never was man brought into contact with reality
save through the evanescent emotions and sensations of that single
moment, that infinitesimal fraction of a second, which was passing
now—and it was this, precisely, that you were to disregard. Such was the
burden of all dead and lingering faiths alike. Here was, perhaps, only
another instance of man-kind’s abhorrence of actualities; and man’s
quaint dislike of facing reality was here disguised as a high moral
principle. That was why all art, which strove to make the sensations of
a moment soul-satisfying, was dimly felt to be irreligious. For art
performed what religion only promised.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
V
Evolution of a Vestryman
BUT, much as man’s religion looked to a more ordered and symmetrical
existence to-morrow, just so, upon another scale, man’s daily life
seemed a continuous looking-forward to a terrestrial to-morrow.
Kennaston could find in the past—even he, who was privileged to view the
past in its actuality, rather than through the distorting media of books
and national pride—no suggestion as to what, if anything, he was
expected to do while his physical life lasted, or to what, if anything,
this life was a prelude. Yet that to-day was only a dull overture to
to-morrow seemed in mankind an instinctive belief. All life everywhere,
as all people spent it, was in preparation for something that was to
happen to-morrow. This was as true of Antioch as Lichfield, as much the
case with Charlemagne and Sardanapalus, with Agamemnon and
Tiglath-Pileser, as with Felix Kennaston.
Kennaston considered his own life.... In childhood you had looked
forward to being a man—a trapper of the plains or a railway engineer or
a pirate, for choice, but pending that, to get through the necessity of
going to school five times a week. In vacations, of course, you looked
forward to school’s beginning again, because next term was to be quite
different from the last, and moreover because last session, in
retrospection, did not appear to have been half bad. And of course you
were always wishing it would hurry up and be your birthday, or
Christmas, or even Easter.... Later, with puberty, had come the desire
to be a devil with the women, like the fellows in Wycherley’s plays (a
cherished volume, which your schoolmates, unaccountably, did not find
sufficiently “spicy”); and to become a great author, like Shakespeare;
and to have plenty of money, like the Count of Monte-Cristo; and to be
thrown with, and into the intimate confidence of, famous people, like
the hero of a Scott novel.... Kennaston reflected that his touchstones
seemed universally to have come from the library.... And Felix Kennaston
had achieved his desire, to every intent, however unready posterity
stood to bracket him with Casanova or Don Juan, and however many
tourists still went with reverence to Stratford. For the rest, he had
sufficient money; and quite certainly he had met more celebrities than
any other person living. Felix Kennaston reflected that, through
accident’s signal favor, he had done all he had at any time very
earnestly wanted to do; and that the result was always disappointing,
and not as it was depicted in story-books.... He wondered why he should
again be harking back to literary standards.
Then it occurred to him that, in reality, he had always been shuffling
through to-day—somehow and anyhow—in the belief that to-morrow the life
of Felix Kennaston would be converted into a romance like those in
story-books.
The transfiguring touch was to come, it seemed, from a girl’s lips; but
it had not; he kissed, and life remained uncharmed. It was to come from
marriage, after which everything would be quite different; but the main
innovation was that he missed the long delightful talks he used to have
with Kathleen (mostly about Felix Kennaston), since as married people
they appeared only to speak to each other, in passing, as it were,
between the discharge of various domestic and social duties, and
speaking then of having seen So-and-so, and of So-and-so’s having said
this-or-that. The transfiguring touch was to come from wealth; and it
had not, for all that his address was in the _Social Register_, and was
neatly typed in at the beginning of one copy of pretty much every appeal
sent broadcast by charitable organizations. It was to come from fame;
and it had not, even with the nine-day wonder over _Men Who Loved
Alison_, and with Felix Kennaston’s pictorial misrepresentation figuring
in public journals, almost as prodigally as if he had murdered his wife
with peculiar brutality or headed a company to sell inexpensive shoes.
And, at the bottom of his heart, he was still expecting the
transfiguring touch to come, some day, from something he was to obtain
or do, perhaps to-morrow.... Then he had by accident found out the
sigil’s power....
Men everywhere were living as he had lived. People got their notions of
life, if only at second- or third-hand, from books, precisely as he had
done. Even Amrou had derived his notions as to the value of literature
from a book. Men pretended laboriously that their own lives were like
the purposeful and clearly motived life of book-land. In secret, the
more perspicacious cherished the reflection that, any how, their lives
would begin to be like that to-morrow. The purblind majority quite
honestly believed that literature was meant to mimic human life, and
that it did so. And in consequences, their love-affairs, their maxims,
their passions, their ethics, their conversations, their so-called
natural ties and instincts, and above all, their wickednesses, became
just so many bungling plagiarisms from something they had read, in a
novel or a Bible or a poem or a newspaper. People progressed from the
kindergarten to the cemetery assuming that their emotion at every crisis
was what books taught them was the appropriate emotion, and without
noticing that it was in reality something quite different. Human life
was a distorting tarnished mirror held up to literature: this much at
least of Wilde’s old paradox—that life mimicked art—was indisputable.
Human life, very clumsily, tried to reproduce the printed word. Human
life was prompted by, and was based upon, printed words—“in the
beginning was the Word,” precisely as Gospel asserted. Kennaston had it
now. Living might become symmetrical, well-plotted, coherent, and
rational as living was in books. This was the hope which guided human
beings through to-day with anticipation of to-morrow.
Then he perceived that there was no such thing as symmetry anywhere in
inanimate nature....
It was Ettarre who first pointed out to him the fact, so tremendously
apparent when once observed, that there was to be found nowhere in
inanimate nature any approach to symmetry. It needed only a glance
toward the sky the first clear night to show there was no pattern-work
in the arrangement of the stars. Nor were the planets moving about the
sun at speeds or distances which bore any conceivable relation to one
another. It was all at loose ends. He wondered how he could possibly
have been misled by pulpit platitudes into likening this circumambient
anarchy to mechanism. To his finicky love of neatness the universe
showed on a sudden as a vast disheveled horror. There seemed so little
harmony, so faint a sense of order, back of all this infinite torrent of
gyrations. Interstellar space seemed just a jumble of frozen or flaming
spheres that, moving ceaselessly, appeared to avoid one another’s
orbits, or to collide, by pure chance. This spate of stars, as in three
monstrous freshets, might roughly serve some purpose; but there was to
be found no more formal order therein than in the flow of water-drops
over a mill-wheel.
And on earth there was no balancing in the distribution of land and
water. Continents approached no regular shape. Mountains stood out like
pimples or lay like broken welts across the habitable ground, with no
symmetry of arrangement. Rivers ran anywhither, just as the haphazard
slope of earth’s crevices directed; upon the map you saw quite clearly
that their streams neither balanced one another nor watered the land
with any pretense of equity. There was no symmetry anywhere in inanimate
nature, no harmony, no equipoise of parts, no sense of form, not even a
straight line. It was all at loose ends.
But living things aimed toward symmetry. In plants the notion seemed
rudimentary, yet the goal was recognizable. The branches of a tree did
not put out at ordered distance, nor could you discern any definite plan
in their shaping: but in the leaves, at least, you detected an effort
toward true balance: the two halves of a leaf, in a rough fashion, were
equal. In every leaf and flower and grass-blade you saw this never
entirely successful effort.
And in insects and reptiles and fish and birds and animals you saw again
this effort, more creditably performed. All life seemed about the rather
childish employment of producing a creature which consisted of two equal
and exactly corresponding parts. It was true that in most cases this
effort was foiled by an uneven distribution of color in plumage or
scales or hide; but in insects and in mankind the goal, so far as went
the eye, was reached. Men and insects, to the eye at least, could be
divided into two equal halves....
But even so, there was no real symmetry in man’s body save in externals.
The heart was not in the center; there was no order in the jumbled
viscera; the two divisions of the brain did not correspond; there was
nothing on the left side to balance the troublesome vermiform appendix
on the right; even the lines in the palm of one hand were unlike those
which marked the other: and everywhere, in fine, there was some
irrational discrepancy. Man, the highest form as yet of life, had
attained at most only a teasing semblance of that crude symmetry toward
which all life seemed to aim, and which inanimate nature appeared to
ignore. Nowhere in the universe could Kennaston discover any instance of
quite equal balance, of anything which, as vision went, could be divided
into two similar halves—save only in man’s handiwork. Here, again,
insects approached man’s efforts more closely than the rest of creation;
for many of them builded almost as truly. But man, alone in the
universe, could produce exact visual symmetry, in a cathedral or a
dinner-table or a pair of scissors, just as man so curiously mimicked
symmetry in his outward appearance. The circumstance was droll, and no
less quaint for the fact that it was perhaps without significance....
But Kennaston bemused himself with following out the notion that life
was trying to evolve symmetry—order, proportion and true balance. Living
creatures represented life’s gropings toward that goal. You saw, no
doubt, a dim perception of this in the dream which sustained all human
beings—that to-morrow living would begin to be symmetrical, well-plotted
and coherent, like the progress of a novel.... And that was precisely
what religion promised, only in more explicit terms, and with the
story’s _milieu_ fixed in romantic, rather than realistic, settings.
Kennaston had here the sensation of fitting in the last bit of a puzzle.
Life, yearning for symmetry, stood revealed as artist. Life strove
toward the creation of art. That was all life cared about. Living things
were more or less successful works of art, and were to be judged
according to art’s canons alone. The universe was life’s big barren
studio, which the Artist certainly had neither planned nor builded, but
had, somehow, occupied, to make the best of its limitations. For
Kennaston insisted that living things and inanimate nature had none of
the earmarks of being by the same author. They were not in similar
style, he said; thus, presupposing a sentient creator of the stars and
planets, it would seem to have been in contradiction of his code to make
both a man’s eyes of the same color.
It was this course of speculation which converted Kennaston to an
abiding faith in Christianity, such as, our rector informs me, is
deplorably rare in these lax pleasure-loving days of materialism. To
believe this inconsiderable planet the peculiar center of a God’s
efforts and attention had for a long while strained Kennaston’s
credulity: the thing was so woefully out of proportion when you
considered earth’s relative value in the universe. But now Felix
Kennaston comprehended that in the insensate universe there was no
proportion. The idea was unknown to the astral architect, or at best no
part of his plan, if indeed there had been any pre-meditation or
contriver concerned. Singly on our small earth—not even in the solar
system of which earth made a part—was any sense of proportion evinced;
and there it was apparent only in living things. Kennaston seemed to
glimpse an Artist-God, with a commendable sense of form—Kennaston’s
fellow craftsman—the earth as that corner of the studio wherein the God
was working just now, and all life as a romance the God was inditing....
That the plot of this romance began with Eden and reached its climax at
Calvary, Kennaston was persuaded, solely and ardently, because of the
surpassing beauty of the Christ-legend. No other myth compared with it
from an æsthetic standpoint. He could imagine no theme more adequate to
sustain a great romance than this of an Author suffering willingly for
His puppets’ welfare; and mingling with His puppets in the similitude of
one of them; and able to wring only contempt and pity from His
puppets—since He had not endowed them with any faculties wherewith to
comprehend their Creator’s nature and intent. Indeed, it was pretty much
the plight which Kennaston had invented for his own puppets at
Storisende, as Kennaston complacently reflected. It was the most
tremendous situation imaginable; and quite certainly no Author could
ever have failed to perceive, and to avail Himself of, its dramatic
possibilities. To conceive that the world-romance did not center upon
Calvary was to presume an intelligent and skilled Romancer blind to the
basic principles of His art. His sense of pathos and of beauty and of
irony could have led Him to select no other legend. And in the
inconsistencies and unsolved problems, or even the apparent
contradictions, of Christianity, Felix Kennaston could see only a
possible error or omission on the Author’s part, such as was common to
all romances. A few errata did not hamper the tale’s worth and splendor,
or render it a whit less meritorious of admiration....
And, indeed, Felix Kennaston found that his theory of the Atonement was
in harmony with quite orthodox teachings. The library at Alcluid
revealed bewildered and perturbed generations at guess-work. How could a
God have been placated, and turned from wrath to benevolence, by
witnessing the torment of His own son? What pleasure, whereby He was
propitiated, could the God have derived from watching the scene on
Calvary? Or was the God, as priests had taught so long (within the same
moment that they proclaimed the God’s omnipotence) not wholly a free
agent, because bound by laws whereby He was compelled to punish some one
for humanity’s disobedience, with the staggering option of substituting
an innocent victim? For if you granted that, you conceded to be higher
than the God, and overruling Him, a power which made for flat injustice.
Since Schleiermacher’s time, at least, as Kennaston discovered, there
had been reasoning creatures to contest the possibility of such
discrepant assumptions, and a dynasty of teachers who adhered to the
“subjective” theory of propitiation. For these considered that Christ
came, not primarily to be crucified, but by his life to reveal to men
the nature of their God. The crucifixion was an incidental, almost
inevitable, result of human obtuseness; and was pregnant with value only
in that thereby the full extent of divine love was perfectly evinced.
The personality, rather than the sufferings, of the Nazarene had thus
satisfied, not any demand or attribute of the God by acting upon it from
without, “but God’s total nature by revealing it and realizing it in
humanity.” The God, in short, had satisfied Himself “by revealing and
expressing His nature” in the material universe, precisely as lesser
artists got relief from the worries of existence by depicting themselves
in their books. Just as poets express themselves communicatively in
words, so here the Author had expressed Himself in flesh. Such, in
effect, had been the teaching of Karl Immanuel Nitzsch, of Richard
Rothe, and of von Hofman, in Germany; of Auguste Bouvier in Geneva; of
Alexandre Vinet, and of Auguste Sabatier, in France; of Frederick
Denison Maurice, and John Caird, and Benjamin Jowett, in England; and in
America of Horace Bushnell, and Elisha Mulford, and William Newton
Clarke. The list was imposing: and Kennaston rejoiced to find himself at
one with so many reputable theologians. For all these scholars had dimly
divined, with whatever variousness they worded the belief, that the
God’s satisfaction sprang, in reality, from the consciousness of having
at last done a fine piece of artistic work, in creating the character of
Christ....
So, as nearly as one can phrase the matter, it was really as a proof of
confidence in his Author’s literary abilities that Felix Kennaston was
presently confirmed at our little country church, to the delight of his
wife and the approbation of his neighbors. It was felt to be eminently
suitable: that such a quiet well-to-do man of his years and station
should not be a communicant was generally, indeed, adjudged unnatural.
And when William T. Vartrey (of the Lichfield Iron Works) was gathered
to his grandfathers, in the following autumn, Mr. Kennaston was rather
as a matter of course elected to succeed him in the vestry. And
Kennaston was unfeignedly pleased and flattered.
* * * * *
To the discerning it is easy enough to detect in all this fantastic
theorizing the man’s obsessing love of ordered beauty and his abhorrence
of slovenliness—of shapelessness—which make his writings so admirable,
here alluring him to believe that such ideals must also be cherished by
Omnipotence. This poet loved his formal art to the extent of coming to
assume it was the purpose and the origin of terrestrial life. Life
seemed to him, in short, a God’s chosen form of artistic
self-expression; and as a confrère, Kennaston found the result
praiseworthy. Even inanimate nature, he sometimes thought, might be a
divine experiment in _vers libre_.... But neither the justice of
Kennaston’s airdrawn surmises, nor their wildness, matters; the point is
that they made of him a vestryman who in appearance and speech and
actions, and in essential beliefs, differed not at all from his
associates in office, who had comfortably acquired their standards by
hearsay. So that the moral of his theorizing should be no less obvious
than salutary.
* * * * *
Thus, he too entered at last into that belief which is man’s noble
heritage....
“Or I would put it, rather, that belief is man’s _métier_,” Kennaston
once corrected me—“for the sufficient reason that man has nothing to do
with certainties. He cannot ever get in direct touch with reality. Such
is the immutable law, the true cream of the jest. Felix Kennaston, so
long as he wears the fleshly body of Felix Kennaston, is conscious only
of various tiny disturbances in his brain-cells, which entertain and
interest him, but cannot pretend to probe to the roots of reality about
anything. By the nature of my mental organs, it is the sensation the
thing arouses in my brain of which I am aware, and never of the thing
itself. I am conscious only of appearances. They may all be illusory. I
cannot ever tell. But it is my human privilege to believe whatever I may
elect.”
“And, my dear sir,” as I pointed out, “is not this hair-splitting,
really, a reduction of human life to the very shallowest sort of
mysticism, that gets you nowhere?”
“Now again, Harrowby, you are falling into the inveterate race-delusion
that man is intended to get somewhere. I do not see that the notion
rests on any readily apparent basis. It is at any rate a working
hypothesis that in the world-romance man, being cast for the part of
fool, quite obviously best furthers the dénouement’s success by wearing
his motley bravely.... There was a fool in my own romance, a character
of no great importance; yet it was an essential incident in the story
that he should irresponsibly mislay the King’s letter, and Sir Guiron
thus be forced to seek service under Duke Florestan. Perhaps, in similar
fashion, it is here necessary to the Author’s scheme that man must
simply go on striving to gain a little money, food, and sleep, a trinket
or two, some moments of laughter, and at the last a decent bed to die
in. For it may well be that man’s allotted part calls for just these
actions, to round out the drama artistically. Yes; it is quite
conceivable that, much as I shaped events at Storisende, so here the
Author aims toward making an æsthetic masterpiece of His puppet-play as
a whole, rather than at ending everything with a transformation scene
such as, when we were younger, used so satisfactorily to close _The
Black Crook_ and _The Devil’s Auction_. For it may well be that the
Author has, after all, more in common with Æschylus, say, than with Mr.
Charles H. Yale.... So I must train my mind to be contented with
appearances, whether they be true or not—and reserving always a
permissible preference for pleasant delusions. Being mortal, I am able
to contrive no thriftier bargain.”
“Being mortal,” I amended, “we pick our recreations to suit our tastes.
Now I, for instance—as is, indeed, a matter of some notoriety and
derision here in Lichfield—am interested in what people loosely speak of
as ‘the occult.’ I don’t endeavor to persuade defunct poetesses to
dictate via the Ouija board effusions which give little encouragement as
to the present state of culture in Paradise, or to induce Napoleon to
leave wherever he is and devote his energies to tipping a table for me,
you understand.... But I quite fixedly believe the Wardens of Earth
sometimes unbar strange windows, that face on other worlds than ours.
And some of us, I think, once in a while get a peep through these
windows. But we are not permitted to get a long peep, or an unobstructed
peep, nor, very certainly, are we permitted to see all there is—out
yonder. The fatal fault, sir, of your theorizing is that it is too
complete. It aims to throw light upon the universe, and therefore is
self-evidently moonshine. The Wardens of Earth do not desire that we
should understand the universe, Mr. Kennaston; it is part of Their
appointed task to insure that we never do; and because of Their
efficiency every notion that any man, dead, living, or unborn, might
form as to the universe will necessarily prove wrong. So, if for no
other reason, I must decline to think of you and me as characters in a
romance.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_Book Fifth_
“This was the measure of my soul’s delight;
It had no power of joy to fly by day,
Nor part in the large lordship of the light;
But in a secret moon-beholden way
Had all its will of dreams and pleasant night,
And all the love and life that sleepers may.
“But such life’s triumph as men waking may
It might not have to feed its faint delight.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
I
Of Poetic Love: Treated with Poetic Inefficiency
SO much for what Kennaston termed his “serious reading” in chance-opened
pages of the past. There were other dreams quite different in nature,
which seemed, rather, to fulfil the function of romantic art, in
satisfying his human craving for a full-fed emotional existence—dreams
which Kennaston jestingly described as “_belles lettres_.” For now by
turn—as murderer, saint, herdsman, serf, fop, pickpurse, troubadour,
monk, bravo, lordling, monarch, and in countless other estates—Kennaston
tasted those fruitless emotions which it is the privilege of art to
arouse—joys without any inevitable purchase-price, regrets that were not
bitter, and miseries which left him not a penny the worse.
But it was as a lover that his rôle most engrossed him, in many dreams
wherein he bore for Ettarre such adoration as he had always wistfully
hoped he might entertain toward some woman some day, and had not ever
known in his waking hours. It was sober truth he had spoken at
Storisende: “There is no woman like you in my country, Ettarre. I can
find no woman anywhere resembling you whom dreams alone may win to.” But
now at last, even though it were only in dreams, he loved as he had
always dimly felt he was capable of loving.... Even the old lost faculty
of verse-making seemed to come back to him with this change, and he
began again to fashion rhymes, elaborating bright odd vignettes of
foiled love in out-of-the-way epochs and surroundings. These were the
verses included, later, under the general title of “Dramatis Personæ,”
in his _Chimes at Midnight_.
He wrote of foiled love necessarily, since not even as a lover might he
win to success. It was the cream of some supernal jest that he might not
touch Ettarre; that done, though but by accident, the dream ended, and
the universe seemed to fold about him, just as a hand closes. He came to
understand the reason of this. “Love must look toward something not
quite accessible, something not quite understood,” he had said at
Storisende: and this phrase, so lightly despatched, came home to him now
as pregnant truth. For it was this fact which enabled him to love
Ettarre, and had always prevented his loving any other woman.
All mortal women either loved some other man, and went with him
somewhither beyond the area of your daily life, and so, in time were
forgotten; or, else, they loved you, and laid bare to you their minds
and bodies—and neither of these possessions ever proved so remarkable,
when calmly viewed, as to justify continued infatuation therewith. Such
at least Felix Kennaston had always found to be the case: love did not
live, as lovers do, by feeding; but, paradoxically, got strength by
hungering. It should be remembered, however, that Felix Kennaston was a
poet....
* * * * *
He would sometimes think of the women who had loved him; and would
speculate, with some wistfulness, if it was invariably true, as with his
own amorous traffic, that love both kept and left its victims strangers
to each other? He knew so little of these soft-lipped girls and women,
when everything was said....
Yet there had been—he counted—yes, time had known eight chaste and
comely gentlewomen, in all, who had “given themselves to him,” as the
hackneyed phrase was. These eight affairs, at any event, had conformed
to every tradition, and had been as thorough-going as might romantically
be expected: but nothing much seemed to have come of them; and he did
not feel in the upshot very well acquainted with their heroines. His
sole emotion toward them nowadays was that of mild dislike. But six of
them—again to utilize a venerable conjunction of words—had “deceived
their husbands” for the caresses of an impecunious Kennaston; and the
other two had anticipatorily “deceived” the husbands they took later: so
that they must, he reflected, have loved Felix Kennaston sincerely. He
was quite certain, though, that he had never loved any one of them as he
had always wanted to love. No one of these women had given him what he
sought in vain. Kennaston had felt this lack of success dispiritedly
when, with soft arms about him, it was necessary to think of what he
would say next. He had always in such circumstances managed to feign
high rapture, to his temporary companion’s entire satisfaction, as he
believed; but each adventure left him disappointed. It had not roused in
him the overwhelming emotions lovers had in books, nor anything
resembling these emotions; and that was what he had wanted, and had not
ever realized, until the coming of Ettarre....
He had made love, as a prevalent rule, to married women—allured, again,
by bookish standards, which advanced the commerce of Lancelot with
Guinevere, or of Paolo Malatesta with his brother’s wife, as the supreme
type of romantic passion. On more practical grounds, Kennaston preferred
married women, partly because they were less stupid to converse with in
general, and in particular did not bring up the question of marrying
you; and in part because the husband in the background helped the
situation pictorially—this notion also now seemed to be of literary
origin—besides furnishing an unfailing topic of conversation. For
unfaithful or wavering wives, to Kennaston’s finding, peculiarly
delighted in talking about their husbands; and in such prattle failed
either to exhibit the conventional remorse toward, or any very grave
complaint against, the discussed better-half. The inconsistency would
have worried Kennaston’s sense of justice, had not these husbands always
been so transparently certain of Kennaston’s insignificance.... Although
judging of necessity only from his own experience, Kennaston was unable
conscientiously to approve of adulterous love-affairs: they tended too
soon toward tediousness; and married women seemed horribly quick to
become matter-of-fact in the details of a liaison, and ready almost to
confuse you with the husband.
The giggle and chatter of young girls Kennaston had always esteemed
unalluring, even in his own youth. He had admired a number of them
extravagantly, but only as ornamental objects upon which very
ill-advisedly had been conferred the gift of speech. To-day he looked
back wistfully at times, as we must all do, to that girl who first had
asked him if he was sure that he respected her as much as ever: but it
was with the mental annotation that she had seven children now, and, as
Kathleen put it, not a ray of good looks left. And he would meditate
that he had certainly been fond of Margaret Hugonin, even though in the
beginning it was her money which attracted him; and that Marian Winwood,
despite her underhanded vengeance in publishing his letters, had been
the most delectable of company all that ancient summer when it had
rained so persistently. Then there had been tall Agnés Faroy, like a
statue of gold and ivory; Kitty Provis, with those wonderful huge green
eyes of hers; and Celia Reindan, she who wore that curious silver band
across her forehead; and Helen Strong; and Blanche Druro; and Muriel....
In memory they arose like colorful and gracious phantoms, far more
adorable than they had ever been on earth, when each of these had
loaned, for a season, the touch of irresolute soft hands and friendly
lips to a half-forgotten Felix Kennaston. All these, and others, had
been, a long while since, the loveliest creatures that wore tender human
flesh: and so, they had kissed, and they had talked time-hallowed
nonsense, and they had shed the orthodox tears; and—also a long while
since—they had died or they had married the conventional some one-else:
and it did not matter the beard of an onion to the pudgy pasty man that
Felix Kennaston had come to be. He had possessed, or else of his own
volition he had refrained from possessing, all these brightly-colored
moth-brained girls: but he had loved none of them as he had always known
he was capable of loving: and at best, these girls were dead now, or at
worst, they had been converted into unaccountable people....
* * * * *
Kathleen was returning from the South that day, and Kennaston had gone
into Lichfield to meet her train. The Florida Express was late by a full
hour; so he sat in their motor-car, waiting, turning over some verses in
his torpid mind, and just half-noticing persons who were gathering on
the station platform to take the noon train going west. He was
reflecting how ugly and trivial people’s faces appear when a crowd is
viewed collectively—and wondering if the Author, looking down into a hot
thronged street, was never tempted to obliterate the race as an
unsuccessful experiment—when Kennaston recognized Muriel Allardyce.
“I simply will not see her,” he decided. He turned his back that way,
picked up the morning paper on the seat beside him, and began to read an
editorial on immigration. What the deuce was she doing in Lichfield, any
way? She lived in St. Louis now. She was probably visiting Avis Blagden.
Evidently, she was going west on the noon train. If Kathleen’s train
arrived before midday he would have to get out of the car to meet her,
and all three would come together on the platform. If Muriel spied him
there, in the open car, it would be not uncharacteristic of her to join
him. And he could not go away, because Kathleen’s train was apt to
arrive any minute. It was perfectly damnable. Why could the woman not
stay in St. Louis, where she belonged, instead of gadding about the
country? Thus Kennaston, as he re-read the statistics as to Poles and
Magyars.
“I think there’s two ladies trying to speak to you, sir,” the chauffeur
hazarded.
“Eh?—oh, yes!” said Kennaston. He looked, perforce, and saw that across
the railway track both Muriel Allardyce and Avis Blagden were regarding
him with idiotic grins and wavings. He lifted his hat, smiled, waved his
own hand, and retired between the pages of the _Lichfield
Courier-Herald_. Muriel was wearing a light traveling veil, he
reflected; he could pretend not to know who she was. With recognition,
of course, he would be expected to come over and speak to her. He must
remember to ask Avis, the very next time he saw her, who had been that
familiar-looking person with her, and to express regret for his
short-sightedness....
He decided to step out of the car, by way of the farther door, and buy a
package of cigarettes on the other side of the street. He could loaf
there and pray that Muriel’s train left before Kathleen’s arrived....
“I don’t believed you recognized us,” said Avis Blagden, at his elbow.
“Or else you are trying to cut your old playmates.” The two women had
brazenly pursued him. They were within a yard of him. It was indelicate.
It was so perfectly unnecessary. He cordially wished some friendly
engine had run them both down when they were crossing the tracks....
“Why, bless my soul!” he was saying, “this is indeed a delightful
surprise. I had no idea you were in town, Mrs. Allardyce. I didn’t
recognize you, with that veil on—”
“There’s Peter, at last,” said Avis. “I really must speak to him a
moment.” And she promptly left them. Kennaston reflected that the whole
transaction was self-evidently pre-arranged. And Muriel was, as if
abstractedly, but deliberately, walking beyond earshot of the chauffeur.
And there was nothing for it save to accompany her.
“It’s awfully jolly to see you again,” he observed, with fervor.
“Is it? Honestly, Felix, it looked almost as if you were trying to avoid
me.” Kennaston wondered how he could ever have loved a woman of so
little penetration.
“No, I didn’t recognize you, with that veil on,” he repeated. “And I had
no idea you were in Lichfield. I do hope you are going to pay us all a
nice long visit—”
“But, no, I am leaving on this train—”
“Oh, I say, but that’s too bad! And I never knew you were here!” he
lamented.
“I only stopped overnight with Avis. I am on my way home—”
“To Leonard?” And Kennaston smiled. “How do you get on with him
nowadays?”
“We are—contented, I suppose. He has his business—and politics. He is
doing perfectly splendidly now, you know. And I have my memories.” Her
voice changed. “I have my memories, Felix! Nothing—nothing can take that
from me!”
“Good God, Muriel, there are a dozen people watching us—”
“What does that matter!”
“Well, it matters a lot to me. I live here, you know.”
She was silent for a moment. “You look your latest rôle in life so well,
too, Felix. You are the respectable married gentleman to the last
detail. Why, you are an old man now, Felix,” she said wistfully. “Your
hair is gray about the ears, and you are fat, and there are wrinkles
under your eyes—But are you happy, dear?” she asked, with the grave
tender speech that he remembered. And momentarily the man forgot the
people about them, and the fact that his wife’s train was due any
minute.
“Happier than I deserve to be, Muriel.” His voice had quavered—not
ineffectively, it appeared to him.
“That’s true, at least,” the woman said, as in reflection. “You treated
me rather abominably, you know—like an old shoe.”
“I am not altogether sorry you take that view of it. For I wouldn’t want
you to regret—anything—not even that which, to me at least, is very
sacred. But there was really nothing else to do save just to let things
end. It was as hard,” he said, with a continuous flight of imagination,
“it was as hard on me as you.”
“Sometimes I think it was simply because you were afraid of Leonard. I
put that out of my mind, though, always. You see, I like to keep my
memories. I have nothing else now, Felix—” She opened the small leather
bag she carried, took out a handkerchief, and brushed her lips. “I am a
fool, of course. Oh, it is funny to see your ugly little snub nose
again! And I couldn’t help wanting to speak to you, once more—”
“It has been delightful. And some day I certainly do hope—But there’s
your train, I think. The gates are going down.”
“And here is Avis coming. So good-by, Felix. It is really forever this
time, I think—”
It seemed to him that she held in her left hand the sigil of Scoteia....
He stared at the gleaming thing, then raised his eyes to hers. She was
smiling. Her eyes were the eyes of Ettarre. All the beauty of the world
seemed gathered in this woman’s face....
“Don’t let it be forever! Come with me, Felix! There is only you—even
now, there is only you. It is not yet too late—” Astounding as were the
words, they came quite clearly, in a pleading frightened whisper.
The man was young for just that one wonderful moment of inexplicable
yearning and self-loathing. Then, “I—I am afraid my wife would hardly
like it,” he said, equably. “So good-by, Muriel. It has been very
delightful to see you again.”
* * * * *
“I was mistaken, though, of course. It was the top of a vanity-box, or
of a toilet water flask, or of something else, that she took out of the
bag, when she was looking for her handkerchief. It was just a silly
coincidence. I was mistaken, of course.... And here is Kathleen’s train.
Thank goodness, it was late enough....”
Thus Kennaston, as he went to receive his wife’s cool kiss. And—having
carefully mentioned as a matter of no earthly importance that he had
just seen Muriel Allardyce, and that she had gone off terribly in looks,
and that none of them seem to hold their own like you, dear—he disbarred
from mind that awkward moment’s delusion, and tried not to think of it
any more.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
II
Cross-Purposes in Spacious Times
SO Kennaston seemed to have got only disappointment and vexation and
gainless vague regret from his love-affairs in the flesh; and all
fleshly passion seemed to flicker out inevitably, however splendid the
brief blaze. For you loved and lost; or else you loved and won: there
was quick ending either way. And afterward unaccountable women haunted
you, and worried you into unreasonable contrition, in defiance of
commonsense....
But for Ettarre, who embodied all Kennaston was ever able to conceive of
beauty and fearlessness and strange purity, all perfections, all the
attributes of divinity, in a word, such as his slender human faculties
were competent to understand, he must hunger always in vain. Whatever
happened, Ettarre stayed inaccessible, even in dreams: her beauty was
his to look on only; and always when he came too near that radiant
loveliness which was Ettarre’s—that perfect beauty which was so full of
troubling reticences, and so, was touched with something sinister—the
dream would end, and the universe would seem to fold about him, just as
a hand closes. Such was the law, the kindly law, as Kennaston now
believed, through which love might thrive even in the arid heart of a
poet.
Sometimes, however, this law would lead to odd results, and left the
dream an enigma. For instance, he had a quaint experience upon the night
of that day during which he had talked with Muriel Allardyce....
* * * * *
“You are in all things a fortunate man, Master—ah—whatever your true
name may be,” said the boy, pettishly flinging down the cards.
“Ods life, and have we done?” says Kennaston....
The two sat in a comfortable paneled room. There was a big open fire
behind Kennaston; he could see its reflections flicker about the
wood-work. The boy facing him was glowingly attired in green and gold,
an ardent comely urchin, who (as Kennaston estimated) might perhaps be a
page to Queen Elizabeth, or possibly was one of King James’s spoilt
striplings. Between them was a rough deal table, littered with
playing-cards; and upon it sat a tallish blue pitcher half-full of wine,
four lighted candles stuck like corks in as many emptied bottles, and
two coarse yellow mugs....
“Yes, we have done,” the boy answered; and, rising, smiled cherubically.
“May I ask what the object may be that you conceal with such care in
your left hand?” says he.
“To be candid,” Kennaston returned, “it is the King of Diamonds, that
swarthy bearded Spaniard. I had intended it should serve as a corrective
and encourager of Lady Fortune, when I turned it, my next deal, as the
trump card. I’ faith, I thank God I have found the jade is to be
influenced by such feats of manual activity. Oh, ay, sir, I may say it
without conceit that my fingers have in these matters tolerable compass
and variety.”
“A card-sharp!” sneers the boy. “La, half of us suspected it already;
but it will be rare news to the town that Master Lionel Branch—as I must
continue to call you—stands detected in such Greek knaveries.”
“Nay, but you will hardly live to moralize of it, sir. Oh, no, sir,
indeed my poor arts must not be made public: for I would not seem to
boast of my accomplishments. Harkee, sir, I abhor vain-glory. I name no
man, sir; but I know very well there are snotty-nosed people who regard
expedients toward amending the quirks of fate with puritan disfavor.
Hah, but, signior, what is that to us knights of the moon, to us
gallants of generous spirit?—Oh, Lord, sir, I protest I look upon such
talents much as I do upon my breeches. I do consider them as
possessions, not certainly to be vaunted, but indispensable to any
gentleman who hopes to make a pleasing figure in the world.”
“All this bluster is wordy foolery, Master Branch. What I have seen, I
have seen; and you will readily guess how I mean to use my knowledge.”
“I would give a great deal to find out what he is talking about,” was
Kennaston’s reflection. “I have discovered, at least, that my present
alias is Branch, but that I am in reality somebody else.” Aloud he said:
“’Fore God, your eyesight is of the best, Master Skirlaw—(_How the deuce
did I know his name, now?_)—Hah, I trust forthwith to prove if your
sword be equally keen.”
“I will fight with no cheats—”
“I’ faith, sir, but I have heard that wine is a famed provoker of
courage. Let us try the byword.” So saying, Kennaston picked up one mug,
and flung its contents full in the boy’s face. It was white wine,
Kennaston noted, for it did not stain Master Skirlaw’s handsome
countenance at all.
“The insult is sufficient. Draw, and have done!” the lad said quietly.
His sword gleamed in the restive reflections of that unseen fire behind
Kennaston.
“Na, na! but, my most expeditious cockerel, surely this place is a
thought too public? Now yonder is a noble courtyard. Oh, ay, favored by
to-night’s moon, we may settle our matter without any hindrance or
intolerable scandal. So, I will call my host, that we may have the key.
Yet, upon my gentility, Master Skirlaw, I greatly fear I shall be forced
to kill you. Therefore I cry you mercy, sir, but is there no business on
your mind which you would not willingly leave undischarged? Save you,
friend, but we are all mortal. Hah, to a lady whom I need not name, it
is an affair of considerable import what disposition a bold man might
make of this ring—”
Leering, Kennaston touched the great signet-ring on the lad’s thumb; and
forthwith the universe seemed to fold about him, just as a hand closes.
In this brief moment of inexplicable yearning and self-loathing he
comprehended that the boy’s face was the face of Ettarre.
And Kennaston, awake, was pleading, with meaningless words: “Valentia!
forgive me, Valentia!...”
* * * * *
And that was all. This dream remained an enigma. Kennaston could never
know what events had preceded this equivocal instant, or how Ettarre
came to be disguised as a man, or what were their relations in this
dream, nor, above all, why he should have awakened crying upon the name
of Valentia. It was simply a law that always when he was about to touch
Ettarre—even unconsciously—everything must vanish; and through the
workings of that law this dream, with many others, came to be just a
treasured moment of unexplainable but poignant emotion.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
III
Horvendile to Ettarre: At Whitehall
TO Kennaston the Lord Protector was saying, with grave unction: “You
will, I doubt not, fittingly express to our friends in Virginia, Master
Major, those hearty sentiments which I have in the way of gratefulness,
in that I have received the honor and safeguard of their approbation;
for all which I humbly thank them. To our unfriends in that colony we
will let action speak when I shall have completed God’s work in
Ireland.”
“Yet the Burgesses, sir, are mostly ill-affected; and Berkeley, to grant
him justice, does not lack bravery—”
“With Heaven’s help, Master Major, I have of late dealt with a king who
did not lack bravery. Nay, depend upon it, I shall some day grant
William Berkeley utter justice—such justice as I gave his master, that
proud curled man, Charles Stuart.” Then the Lord Protector’s face was
changed, and his harsh countenance became a little troubled. “Yes, I
shall do all this, with Heaven’s help, I think. But in good faith, I
grow old, Master Major. I move in a mist, and my deeds are strange to
me....”
Cromwell closed and unclosed his hands, regarding them; and he sighed.
Then it was to Ettarre he spoke:
“I leave you in Master Major’s charge. It may be I shall not return
alive into England; indeed, I grow an old man and feel infirmities of
age stealing upon me. And so, farewell, my lass. Truly if I love you not
too well, I err not on the other hand much. Thou hast been dearer to me
than any other creature: let that suffice.” And with this leave-taking
he was gone.
As the door closed upon Cromwell’s burly figure, “No, be very careful
not to touch me,” Kennaston implored. “The dream must last till I have
found out how through your aid, Ettarre, this bull-necked country squire
has come to rule England. It is precisely as I expected. You explain
Cromwell, you explain Mohammed—Richelieu and Tamburlaine and Julius
Cæsar, I suspect, and, as I know, Napoleon—all these men who have
inexplicably risen from nothing to earthly supremacy. How is it done,
Ettarre?”
“It is not I who contrive it, Horvendile. I am but an incident in such
men’s lives. They have known me—yes: and knowing me, they were bent
enough on their own ends to forget that I seemed not unlovely. It is not
the sigil and the power the sigil gives which they love and serve—”
“And that small square mirror, such as Cromwell also carried—?”
Kennaston began. “Or is this forbidden talk?”
“Yes, that mirror aids them. In that mirror they can see only
themselves. So the mirror aids toward the ends they chose, with open
eyes.... But you cannot ever penetrate these mysteries now, Horvendile.
The secret of the mirror was offered you once, and you would not
bargain. The secret of the mirror is offered to no man twice.”
And he laughed merrily. “What does it matter? I am perfectly content.
That is more than can be said for yonder sanctimonious fat old rascal,
who has just told me he is going into Ireland ‘for the propagating of
the gospel of Christ, the establishing of truth and peace, and the
restoring of that bleeding nation to its former happiness and
tranquillity.’ Why is it that people of executive ability seem always to
be more or less mentally deficient? Now, you and I know that, in point
of fact, he is going into Ireland to burn villages, massacre women, hang
bishops, and generally qualify his name for all time as a Hibernian
synonym for infamy. Oh, no, the purchase-price of grandeur is too great;
and men that crown themselves in this world inevitably perform the
action with soiled hands. Still, I wish I had known I was going visiting
to-night in seventeenth-century England,” said Kennaston, reflectively;
“then I could have read up a bit. I don’t even know whether Virginia
ever submitted to him. It simply shows what idleness may lead to! If I
had studied history more faithfully I would have been able to-night to
prophesy to Oliver Cromwell about the results of his Irish campaigns and
so on, and could have impressed him vastly with my abilities. As it is,
I have missed an opportunity which will probably never occur again to
any man of my generation....”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
IV
Horvendile to Ettarre: At Vaux-le-Vicomte
“WHAT fun!” says Kennaston; “we are at Vaux-le-Vicomte, where Fouquet is
entertaining young Louis Quatorze. Yonder is La Vallière—the thin
tow-headed girl, with the big mouth. People are just beginning to
whisper scandal about her. And that tall jade is Athenaïs de
Tonnay-Charente—the woman who is going to be Madame de Montespan and
control everything in the kingdom later on, you remember. The King is
not yet aware of her existence, nor has Monsieur de Montespan been
introduced....
“The Troupe of Monsieur is about to present an open-air comedy. It is
called _Les Facheux_—The Bores. It is rumored to take off very cleverly
the trivial tedious fashion in which perfectly well-meaning people
chatter their way through life. But that more fittingly would be the
theme of a tragedy, Ettarre. Men are condemned eternally to bore one
another. Two hundred years and more from to-day—perhaps forever—man will
lack means, or courage, to voice his actual thoughts adequately. He must
still talk of weather probabilities and of having seen So-and-so and of
such trifles, that mean absolutely nothing to him—and must babble of
these things even to the persons who are most dear and familiar to him.
Yes, every reputable man must desperately make small-talk, and echo and
re-echo senseless phrases, until the crack of doom. He will always be
afraid to bare his actual thoughts and interests to his fellows’
possible disapproval: or perhaps it is just a pitiable mania with the
race. At all events, one should not laugh at this ageless aspersion and
burlesque of man’s intelligence as performed by man himself....
“The comedy is quite new. A marquis, with wonderful canions and a
scented wig like an edifice, told me it is by an upholsterer named
Coquelin, a barnstormer who ran away from home and has been knocking
about the provinces unsuccessfully for nearly twenty years: and my
little marquis wondered what in the world we are coming to, when
Monsieur le Surintendent takes up with that class of people. Is not my
little marquis droll?—for he meant Poquelin, soon to be Poquelin de
Molière, of course. Molière, also, is a name which is not famous as yet.
But in a month or so it will be famous for all time; and Monsieur le
Surintendent will be in jail and forgotten....
“You smile, Ettarre? Ah, yes, I understand. Molière too adores you. All
poets have had fitful glimpses of you, Ettarre, and of that perfect
beauty which is full of troubling reticences, and so, is touched with
something sinister. I have written as to the price they pay, these
hapless poets, in a little book I am inditing through that fat pudgy
body I wear in the flesh.... Do not frown: I know it is forbidden to
talk with you concerning my life in the flesh....
“Ah, the King comes—evidently in no very amiable frame of mind—and all
rise, like a flurry of great butterflies. It is the beginning of the
play. See, a woman is coming out of the big shell in the fountain....
“I wish my old friend Jonas d’Artagnan were here. It is a real pity he
is only a character in fiction—just as I once thought you were, Ettarre.
Eh, what a fool I was to imagine I had created you! and that I
controlled your speech and doings! I know much better now....
“Ettarre, your unattainable beauty tears my heart. Is that black-browed
Molière your lover too? What favors have you granted him? You perceive I
am jealous. How can I be otherwise, when there is nothing, nothing in me
that does not cry out for love of you? And I am forbidden ever to win
quite to you, ever to touch you, ever to see you even save in my
dreams!”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
V
Horvendile to Ettarre: In the Conciergerie
THEY waited in a big dark room of the Conciergerie, with many other
condemned émigrants, until the tumbrils should come to fetch them to the
Place de la Révolution. They stood beneath a narrow barred window, set
high in the wall, so that thin winter sunlight made the girl’s face
visible. Misery was about them, death waited without: and it did not
matter a pennyworth.
“Ettarre, I know to-day that all my life I have been seeking you. Very
long ago when I was a child it was made clear that you awaited me
somewhere; and, I recollect now, I used to hunger for your coming with a
longing which has not any name. And when I went about the dusty world I
still believed you waited somewhere—till I should find you, as I
inevitably must, or soon or late. Did I go upon a journey to some
unfamiliar place?—it might be that unwittingly I traveled toward your
home. I could never pass a walled garden where green tree-tops showed
without suspecting, even while I shrugged to think how wild was the
imagining, that there was only the wall between us. I did not know the
color of your eyes, but I knew what I would read there. And for a
fevered season I appeared to encounter many women of earth who resembled
you—”
“All women resemble me, Horvendile. Whatever flesh they may wear as a
garment, and however time-frayed or dull-hued or stained by horrible
misuse that garment may seem to be, the wearer of that garment is no
less fair than I, could any man see her quite clearly. Horvendile, were
that not true, could our great Author find anywhere a woman’s body which
wickedness and ugliness controlled unchecked, all the big stars which
light the universe, and even the tiny sun that our earth spins about,
would be blown out like unneeded candles, for the Author’s labor would
have been frustrated and misspent.”
“Yes; I know now that this is true.... See, Ettarre! Yonder woman is
furtively coloring her cheeks with a little wet red rag. She does not
wish to seem pale—or is it that she wishes to look her best?—in the
moment of death.... Ettarre, my love for you whom I could not ever find,
was not of earth, and I could not transfer it to an earthly woman. The
lively hues, the lovely curvings and the fragrant tender flesh of
earth’s women were deft to cast their spells; but presently I knew this
magic was only of the body. It might be I was honoring divinity; but it
was certain that even in such case I was doing so by posturing before my
divinity’s effigy in tinted clay. Besides, it is not possible to know
with any certainty what is going on in the round glossy little heads of
women. ‘I hide no secrets from you, because I love you,’ say they?—eh,
and their love may be anything from a mild preference to a flat lie. And
so, I came finally to concede that all women are creatures of like
frailties and limitations and reserves as myself, and I was most
poignantly lonely when I was luckiest in love. Once only, in my life in
the flesh, it seemed to me that a woman, whom I had abandoned, held in
her hand the sigil visibly. That memory has often troubled me, Ettarre.
It may be that this woman could have given me what I sought everywhere
in vain. But I did not know this until it was too late, until the chance
and the woman’s life alike were wasted.... And so, I grew apathetic,
senseless and without any spurring aspiration, seeing that all human
beings are so securely locked in the prison of their flesh.”
“When immortals visit earth it is necessary they assume the appearance
of some animal. Very long ago, as we have seen, Horvendile, that secret
was discovered, which so many myths veil thinly: and have we not
learned, too, that the animal’s fleshly body is a disguise which it is
possible to put aside?”
“That knowledge, so fearfully purchased at the Sabbat, still troubles
me, Ettarre.... Monsieur le Prince, I regret the circumstance, but—as
you see—my snuff-box is quite empty. Ah, but yes, as you very justly
observe, rappee, repose and rationality are equally hard to come by in
these mad days.... Is that not droll, Ettarre? This unvenerable old
Prince de Gâtinais—once Grand Duke of Noumaria, you remember—has been
guilty in his career of every iniquity and meanness and cowardice: now,
facing instant death, he finds time to think of snuff and
phrase-making.... But—to go back a little—I had thought the Sabbat would
be so different! One imagined there would be cauldrons, and hags upon
prancing broomsticks, and a black goat, of course—”
“How much more terrible it is—and how beautiful!”
“Yet—even now I may not touch you, Ettarre.”
“My friend, all men have striven to do that; and I have evaded each one
of them at the last, and innumerable are the ways of my elusion. There
is no man but has loved me, no man that has forgotten me, and none but
has attempted to express that which he saw and understood when I was
visible.”
“Do I not know? There is no beauty in the world save those stray hints
of you, Ettarre. Canvas and stone and verse speak brokenly of you
sometimes; all music yearns toward you, Ettarre, all sunsets whisper of
you, and it is because they waken memories of you that the eyes of all
children so obscurely trouble and delight us. Ettarre, your unattainable
beauty tears my heart. There is nothing, nothing in me that does not cry
out for love of you. And it is the cream of a vile jest that I am
forbidden ever to win quite to you, ever to touch you, ever to see you
even save in my dreams!”
“Already this dream draws toward an end, my poor Horvendile.”
And he saw that the great doors—which led to death—were unclosing: and
beyond them he saw confusedly a mob of red-capped men, of malignant
frenzied women, of wide-eyed little children, and the staid officials,
chatting pleasantly among themselves, who came to fetch that day’s tale
of those condemned to the guillotine. But more vividly Kennaston saw
Ettarre and how tenderly she smiled, in thin wintry sunlight, as she
touched Kennaston upon the breast, so that the dream might end and he
might escape the guillotine.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
VI
Of One Enigma that Threatened to Prove Allegorical
THEN again Kennaston stood alone before a tall window, made up of many
lozenge-shaped panes of clear glass set in lead framework. He had put
aside one of the two great curtains—of a very fine stuff like gauze,
stitched over with transparent glittering beetle-wings, and embroidered
with tiny seed pearls—which hung before this window.
Snow covered the expanse of house-tops without, and the sky without was
glorious with chill stars. That white city belonged to him, he knew,
with a host of other cities. He was the strongest of kings. People
dreaded him, he knew; and he wondered why any one should esteem a frail
weakling such as he to be formidable. The hand of this great king—his
own hand, that held aside the curtain before him—was shriveled and
colorless as lambs’ wools. It was like a horrible bird-claw.
(“_But then I have the advantage of remembering the twentieth century,”
he thought, fleetingly, “and all my contemporaries are superstitious
ignorant folk. It is strange, but in this dream I appear to be an old
man. That never happened before._”)
A remote music resounded in his ears, and cloying perfumes were about
him....
“I want to be happy. And that is impossible, because there is no
happiness anywhere in the world. I, a great king, say this—I, who am
known in unmapped lands, and before whom nations tremble. For there are
but three desirable things in life—love and power and wisdom: and I, the
king, have sounded the depths of these, and in none is happiness.”
Despairing words came to him now, and welled to his lips, in a sort of
chaunt:
“I am sad to-night, for I remember that I once loved a woman. She was
white as the moon; her hair was a gold cloud; she had untroubled eyes.
She was so fair that I longed for her until my heart was as the heart of
a God. But she sickened and died: worms had their will of her, not I. So
I took other women, and my bed was never lonely. Bright poisonous women
were brought to me, from beyond the sunset, from the Fortunate Islands,
from Invallis and Planasia even; and these showed me nameless
endearments and many curious perverse pleasures. But I was not able to
forget that woman who was denied me because death had taken her: and I
grew a-weary of love, for I perceived that all which has known life must
suffer death.
“There was no people anywhere who could withstand my armies. We traveled
far in search of such a people. My armies rode into a country of great
heat and endless sands, and contended with the Presbyter’s brown
horsemen, who fought with arrows and brightly painted bows; and we slew
them. My armies entered into a land where men make their homes in the
shells of huge snails, and feed upon white worms which have black heads;
and we slew them. My armies passed into a land where a people that have
no language dwell in dark caves under the earth, and worship a stone
that has sixty colors; and we slew them, teaching ruthlessly that all
which has known life must suffer death.
“Many stiff-necked kings, still clad in purple and scarlet and wearing
gold crowns—monarchs whose proud faces, for all that these men were my
slaves, kept their old fashion and stayed changeless as the faces of
statues—such were my lackeys: and I burned walled cities. Empires were
my playthings, but I had no son to inherit after me. I had no son—only
that dead horrible mangled worm, born dead, that I remember seeing very
long ago where the woman I loved lay dead. That would have been my son
had the thing lived—a greater and a nobler king than I. But death willed
otherwise: the life that moved in me was not to be perpetuated: and so,
the heart in my body grew dried and little and shriveled, like a parched
pea: for I perceived that all which has known life must suffer death.
“Then I turned from warfare, and sought for wisdom. I learned all that
it is permitted any man to know—oh, I learned more than is permissible.
Have I not summoned demons from the depths of the sea, and at the Sabbat
have I not smitten haggard Gods upon the cheek? Yea, at Phigalia did I
not pass beneath the earth and strive with a terrible Black Woman, who
had the head of a horse, and wrest from her what I desired to know? Have
I not talked with Morskoi, that evil formless ruler of the Sea-Folk, and
made a compact with him? And has not even Phobetor, whose real name may
not be spoken, revealed to me his secrets, at a paid price of which I do
not care to think, now I perceive that all which has known life must
suffer death?
“Yea, by the Hoofs of the Goat! it seems to me that I have done these
things; yet how may I be sure? For I have learned, too, that all man’s
senses lie to him, that nothing we see or hear or touch is truthfully
reported, and that the visible world at best stands like an island in an
uncharted ocean which is a highway, none the less, for much alien
traffic. Yet, it seems to me that I found means whereby the universe I
live in was stripped of many veils. It seems to me that I do not regret
having done this.... But presently I shall be dead, and all my
dearly-purchased, wearily-earned wisdom must lie quiet in a big stone
box, and all which has known life must suffer death.
“For death is mighty, and against it naught can avail: it is terrible
and strong and cruel, and a lover of bitter jests. And presently,
whatever I have done or learned or dreamed, I must lie helpless where
worms will have their will of me, and neither the worms nor I will think
it odd. For all which has known life must suffer death.”
A remote music resounded in his ears, and cloying perfumes were about
him. Turning, he saw that the walls of this strange room were of
iridescent lacquer, worked with bulls and apes and parrots in raised
gold: black curtains screened the doors: and the bare floor was of
smooth sea-green onyx. A woman stood there, who did not speak, but only
waited. At length he knew what terror was, for terror possessed him
utterly; and yet he was elated.
“You have come, then, at last....”
“To you at last I have come as I come to all men,” she answered, “in my
good hour.” And Ettarre’s hands, gleaming and half-hidden with jewels,
reached toward his hands, so gladly raised to hers; and the universe
seemed to fold about him, just as a hand closes.
* * * * *
Was it as death she came to him in this dream?—as death made manifest as
man’s liberation from much vain toil? Kennaston, at least, preferred to
think his dreams were not degenerating into such hackneyed crude
misleading allegories. Or perhaps it was as ghost of the dead woman he
had loved she came, now that he was age-stricken and nearing death, for
in this one dream alone he had seemed to be an old man.
Kennaston could not ever be sure; the broken dream remained an enigma;
but he got sweet terror and happiness of the dream, for all that,
tasting his moment of inexplicable poignant emotion: and therewith he
was content.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
VII
Treats of Witches, Mixed Drinks, and the Weather
MEANWHILE, I used to see Kennaston nearly every day.... Looking back, I
recollect one afternoon when the Kennastons were calling on us. It was
the usual sort of late-afternoon call customarily exchanged by country
neighbors....
“We have been intending to come over for ever so long,” Mrs. Kennaston
explained. “But we have been in such a rush, getting ready for the
summer—”
“We only got the carpets up yesterday,” my wife assented. “Riggs just
kept promising and promising, but he did finally get a man out—”
“Well, the roads are in pretty bad shape,” I suggested, “and those vans
are fearfully heavy—”
“Still, if they would just be honest about it,” Mrs. Kennaston
bewailed—“and not keep putting you off—No, I really don’t think I ever
saw the Loop road in worse condition—”
“It’s the long rainy spell we ought to have had in May,” I informed her.
“The seasons are changing so, though, nowadays that nobody can keep up
with them.”
“Yes, Felix was saying only to-day that we seem no longer to have any
real spring. We simply go straight from winter into summer.”
“I was endeavoring to persuade her,” Kennaston amended, “that it was
foolish to go away as long as it stays cool as it is.”
“Oh, yes, _now_!” my wife conceded. “But the paper says we are in for a
long heat period about the fifteenth. For my part, I think July is
always our worst month.”
“It is just that you feel the heat so much more during the first warm
days,” I suggested.
“Oh, no!” my wife said, earnestly; “the nights are cool in August, and
you can stand the days. Of course, there are apt to be a few mosquitoes
in September, but not many if you are careful about standing water—”
“The drain-pipe to the gutter around our porch got stopped somehow, last
year”—this Kennaston contributed, morosely—“and we had a terrible time.”
“—Then there is always so much to do, getting the children started at
school,” my wife continued—“everything under the sun needed at the last
moment, of course! And the way they change all the school-books every
year is simply ridiculous. So, if I had my way, we would always go away
early, and be back again in good time to get things in shape—”
“Oh, yes, if we could have our way!”—Mrs. Kennaston could not deny
that—“but don’t your servants always want August off, to go home? I know
ours do: and, my dear, you simply don’t dare say a word.”
“That is the great trouble in the country,” I philosophized—“in fact, we
suburbanites are pretty well hag-ridden by our dusky familiars. The
old-time darkies are dying out, and the younger generation is simply
worthless. And with no more sense of gratitude—Why, Moira hired a new
girl last week, to help out upstairs, and—”
“Oh, yes, hag-ridden! like the unfortunate magicians in old stories!”
Kennaston broke in, on a sudden. “We were speaking about such things the
other day, you remember? I have been thinking—You see, every one tells
me that, apart from being a master soapboiler, Mr. Harrowby, you are by
way of being an authority on witchcraft and similar murky
accomplishments?” And he ended with that irritating little noise, that
was nearly a snigger, and just missed being a cough.
“It so often comes over me,” says Moira—which happens to be my wife’s
name—“that Dick, all by himself, is really Harrowby & Sons, Inc.”—she
spoke as if I were some sort of writing-fluid—“and has his products on
sale all over the world. I look on him in a new light, so to speak, when
I realize that daily he is gladdening Calcutta with his soaps,
delighting London with his dentifrice, and comforting Nova Zembla with
his talcum powder.”
“Well, but I inherited all that. It isn’t fair to fling ancestral
soap-vats in my face,” I reminded her. “And yes, I have dabbled a bit in
forces that aren’t as yet thoroughly understood, Mr. Kennaston. I
wouldn’t go so far as to admit to witchcraft, though. Very certainly I
never attended a Sabbat.”
I recollect now how his face changed. “And what in heaven’s name was a
Sabbat?” Then he fidgeted, and crossed his legs the other way.
“Well! it was scarcely heaven’s name that was invoked there, if old
tales are to be trusted. Traditionally, the Sabbat was a meeting
attended by all witches in satisfactory diabolical standing, lightly
attired in smears of various magical ointments; and their vehicle of
transportation to this outing was, of course, the traditional
broomstick. Good Friday,” I continued, seeing they all seemed willing
enough to listen, “was the favorite date for these gatherings, which
were likewise sometimes held on St. John’s Eve, on Walburga’s Eve, and
on Hallowe’en Night. The diversions were numerous: there was feasting,
music, and dancing, with the devil performing obligatos on the pipes or
a cittern, and not infrequently preaching a burlesque sermon. He usually
attended in the form of a monstrous goat; and when—when not amorously
inclined, often thrashed the witches with their own broomsticks. The
more practical pursuits of the evening included the opening of graves,
to despoil dead bodies of finger- and toe-joints, and certain portions
of the winding-sheet, with which to prepare a powder that had strange
uses.... But the less said of that, the better. Here, also, the devil
taught his disciples how to make and christen statues of wax, so that by
roasting these effigies the persons whose names they bore would be
wasted away by sickness.”
“I see,” says Kennaston, intently regarding his fingernails: “they must
have been highly enjoyable social outings, all around.”
“They must have been worse than family reunions,” put in Mrs. Kennaston,
and affected to shudder.
“Indeed, there are certain points of resemblance,” I conceded, “in the
general atmosphere of jealous hostility and the ruthless digging-up of
what were better left buried.”
Then Kennaston asked carelessly, “But how could such absurd
superstitions ever get any hold on people, do you suppose?”
“That would require rather a lengthy explanation—Why, no,” I protested,
in answer to his shrug; “the Sabbat is not inexplicable. Hahn-Kraftner’s
book, or Herbert Perlin’s either, will give you a very fair notion of
what the Sabbat really was—something not in the least grotesque, but
infinitely more awe-inspiring than is hinted by any traditions in
popular use. And Le Bret, whom bookdealers rightly list as ‘curious’—”
“Yes. I have read those books, it happens. My uncle had them, you know.
But”—Kennaston was plainly not quite at ease—“but, after all, is it not
more wholesome to dismiss such theories as fantastic nonsense, even if
they are perfectly true?”
“Why, not of necessity,” said I. “As touches what we call the ‘occult,’
delusion after delusion has been dissipated, of course, and much
jubilant pother made over the advance in knowledge. But the last of his
delusions, which man has yet to relinquish, is that he invented them.
This too must be surrendered with time; and already we are beginning to
learn that many of these wild errors are the illegitimate children of
grave truths. Science now looks with new respect on folk-lore—”
“Mr. Kennaston,” says Moira, laughing, “I warn you, if you start Dick on
his hobbies, he will talk us all to death. So, come into the house, and
I will mix you two men a drink.”
And we obeyed her, and—somehow—got to talking of the recent
thunderstorms, and getting in our hay, and kindred topics.
* * * * *
Yes, it was much the usual sort of late-afternoon call customarily
exchanged by country neighbors. I remember Moira’s yawning as she closed
the cellarette, and her wondering how Mrs. Kennaston could keep on
rouging and powdering at her age, and why Kennaston never had anything
in particular to say for himself?
“Do you suppose it is because he has a swelled head over his little old
book, or is he just naturally stupid?” she wanted to know.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_Book Sixth_
══════════════════════
“Alas! the sprite that haunts us
Deceives our rash desire;
It whispers of the glorious gods,
And leaves us in the mire:
We cannot learn the cipher
Inscribed upon our cell;
Stars taunt us with a mystery
Which we lack lore to spell.”
══════════════════════
------------------------------------------------------------------------
I
Sundry Disclosures of the Press
SUCH as has been described was now Felix Kennaston’s manner of living,
which, as touches utilitarian ends, it might be wiser forthwith to
dismiss as bred by the sickly fancies of an idle man bemused with
unprofitable reading. By day his half of the sigil lay hidden in the
library, under a pile of unused bookplates. But nightly this bit of
metal was taken with him to bed, in order that, when held so as to
reflect the candlelight—for this was always necessary—it might induce
the desired dream of Ettarre; and that, so, Horvendile would be freed of
Felix Kennaston for eight hours uninterruptedly.
In our social ordering Felix Kennaston stayed worthy of consideration in
Lichfield, both as a celebrity of sorts and as the owner of four
bank-accounts; and colloquially, as likewise has been recorded, he was
by ordinary dismissed from our patronizing discussion as having long
been “queer,” and in all probability “a dope-fiend.” In Lichfield, as
elsewhere, a man’s difference from his fellows cannot comfortably be
conceded except by assuming the difference to be to his discredit.
Meanwhile, the Felix Kennaston who owned two motors and had money in
four banks, went with his wife about their round of decorous social
duties; and the same Felix Kennaston, with leisured joy in the task, had
completed _The Tinctured Veil_—which, as you now know, was woven from
the dreamstuff Horvendile had fetched out of that fair country—very far
from Lichfield—which is bounded by Avalon and Phæacia and Sea-coast
Bohemia, and the contiguous forests of Arden and Broceliande, and on the
west of course by the Hesperides.
Then, just before _The Tinctured Veil_ was published, an accident
happened.
Fate, as always frugal of display, used simple tools. Kennaston, midway
in dressing, found he had no more mouthwash. He went into his wife’s
bathroom, in search of a fresh bottle. Kathleen was in Lichfield for the
afternoon, at a card party; and thus it was brought about that Kennaston
found, lying in the corner of her bathroom press, and hidden by a bottle
of Harrowby’s No. 7 Dental Delight, the missing half of the sigil of
Scoteia—the half which Ettarre had retained. There was no doubt about
it. He held it in his hand.
“Now, that,” said Felix Kennaston, aloud, “is rather curious.”
He went into the library, and lifted the little pile of unused
bookplates; and presently the two pieces of metal lay united upon his
wife’s dressing-table, between the manicure-set and the pincushion,
forming a circle not quite three inches in diameter, just such as he had
seen once upon the brow of Mother Isis, and again in the Didascalion
when Ptolemy of the Fat Paunch was master of Egypt.
“So, Kathleen somehow found the other half. She has had it from the
first.... But naturally I never spoke of Felix Kennaston; it was
forbidden, and besides, the sigil’s crowning grace was that it enabled
me to forget his existence. And the girl’s name in the printed book is
Alison. And Horvendile is such an unimportant character that Kathleen,
reading the tale hastily—I thought she simply skimmed it!—did not
remember that name either; and so, did not associate the dream names in
any way with my book, nor with me.... She too, then, does not know—as
yet.... And, for all that, Kathleen, the real Kathleen, is
Ettarre—‘whatever flesh she may wear as a garment!’.... Or, rather,
Ettarre is to Kathleen as Horvendile—but am I truly that high-hearted
ageless being? Eh, I do not know, for we touch mystery everywhere. I
only know it is the cream of the jest that day by day, while that lean,
busy sharp-eyed stranger, whose hands and lips my own hands and lips
meet daily, because this contact has become a part of the day’s
routine—”
But he was standing before his wife’s dressing-table, and the mirror
showed him a squat insignificant burgess in shirtsleeves, with grizzled
untidied hair, and mild accommodating pale eyes, and an inadequate nose,
with huge nostrils, and a spacious naked-looking upper-lip. That was
Felix Kennaston, so far as all other people were concerned save
Kathleen. He smiled; and in the act he noted that the visual result was
to make Felix Kennaston appear particularly inane and sheepish. But he
knew now that did not matter. Nor did it greatly matter—his thoughts
ran—that it was never permitted any man, not even in his dreams, ever to
touch the hands and lips of Ettarre.
So he left there the two pieces of metal, united at last upon his wife’s
dressing-table, between the manicure-set and the pincushion, where on
her return she might find them, and, finding, understand all that which
he lacked words to tell.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
II
Considerations Toward Sunset
THEN Kennaston went for a meditative walk in the abating glare of that
day’s portentous sunset, wherein the tree-trunks westward showed like
the black bars of a grate. It was in just such a twilight that
Horvendile had left Storisende....
And presently he came to a field which had been mowed that week. The
piled hay stood in rounded heaps, suggestive to Kennaston of shaggy
giant heads bursting through the soil, as in the old myth of Cadmus and
the dragon’s teeth; beyond were glittering cornfields, whose tremulous
green was shot with brown and sickly yellow now, and which displayed a
host of tassels like ruined plumes. Autumn was at hand. And as Kennaston
approached, a lark—as though shot vehemently from the ground—rose
singing. Straight into the air it rose, and was lost in the sun’s
abating brilliance; but still you could hear its singing; and then, as
suddenly, the bird dropped earthward.
Kennaston snapped his fingers. “Aha, my old acquaintance!” he said, “but
now I envy you no longer!” Then he walked onward, thinking....
* * * * *
“What did I think of?” he said, long afterward—“oh, of nothing with any
real clarity. You see—I touched mystery everywhere....
“But I thought of Kathleen’s first kiss, and of the first time I came to
her alone after we were married, and of our baby that was born dead....
I was happier than I had ever been in any dream.... I saw that the ties
of our ordinary life here in the flesh have their own mystic strength
and sanctity. I comprehended why in our highest sacrament we pre-figure
with holy awe, not things of the mind and spirit, but flesh and
blood.... A man and his wife, barring stark severance, grow with time to
be one person, you see; and it is not so much the sort of person as the
indivisibility that matters with them....
“And I thought of how in evoking that poor shadow of Ettarre which
figures in my book, I had consciously written of my dear wife as I
remembered her when we were young together. My vocabulary and my ink
went to the making of the book’s Ettarre: but with them went Kathleen’s
youth and purity and tenderness and serenity and loving-kindness toward
all created things save the women I had flirted with—so that she
contributed more than I....
“And I saw that the good-smelling earth about my pudgy pasty body, and
my familiar home—as I turned back my pudgy pasty face toward Alcluid,
bathed now in the sun’s gold—were lovely kindly places. Outside were
kings and wars and thunderous zealots, and groaning, rattling thunderous
printing-presses, too, that were turning off a book called _The
Tinctured Veil_, whereinto had been distilled and bottled up the very
best that was in Felix Kennaston; but here was just ‘a citadel of peace
in the heart of the trouble.’ And—well, I was satisfied. People do not
think much when they are satisfied.”
But he did not walk long; for it was growing chilly, as steadily dusk
deepened, in this twilight so like that in which Horvendile had left
Storisende forever.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
III
One Way of Elusion
KATHLEEN was seated at the dressing-table, arranging her hair, when
Kennaston came again into her rooms. He went forward, and without
speaking, laid one hand upon each shoulder.
Now for an instant their eyes met in the mirror; and the woman’s face he
saw there, or seemed to see there, yearned toward him, and was
unutterably loving, and compassionate, and yet was resolute in its
denial. For it denied him, no matter with what wistful tenderness, or
with what wonder at his folly. Just for a moment he seemed to see that;
and then he doubted, for Kathleen’s lips lifted complaisantly to his,
and Kathleen’s matter-of-fact face was just as he was used to seeing it.
And thus, with no word uttered, Felix Kennaston understood that his wife
must disclaim any knowledge of the sigil of Scoteia, should he be bold
enough to speak of it. He knew he would never dare to speak of it in
that constricted hide-bound kindly life which he and Kathleen shared in
the flesh. To speak of it would mean to become forthwith what people
glibly called insane. So Horvendile and Ettarre were parted for all
time. And Kathleen willed this, no matter with what wistful tenderness,
and because of motives which he would never know—for how could one tell
what was going on inside that small round head his hand was caressing?
Still, he could guess at her reasons; and he comprehended now that
Ettarre had spoken a very terrible truth—“_All men I must evade at the
last, and innumerable are the ways of my elusion._”
“Well, dear,” he said aloud; “and was it a pleasant party?”
“Oh, so-so,” Kathleen conceded; “but it was rather a mixed crowd. Hadn’t
you better hurry and change your clothes, Felix? It is almost
dinner-time, and, you know, we have seats for the theater to-night.”
Quite as if he, too, were thinking of trifles, Felix Kennaston took up
the two bits of metal. “I have often wondered what this design meant,”
he said, idly—not looking at her, and hopeful that this much allusion at
least was permitted to what they dared not speak of openly.
“Perhaps Mr. Harrowby could tell you.” Kathleen also spoke as with
indifference—not looking at him, but into the mirror, and giving deft
final touches to her hair.
“Eh—?” Kennaston smiled. “Oh, yes, Dick Harrowby, I grant you, has
dabbled a bit in occult matters, but hardly deep enough, I fancy, to
explain—this.”
“At all events,” Kathleen considered, “it is a quarter to seven already,
and we have seats for the theater to-night.”
He cleared his throat. “Shall I keep this, or you?”
“Why, for heaven’s sake—! The thing is of no value now, Felix. Give it
to me.” She dropped the two pieces of metal into the wastebasket by the
dressing-table, and rose impatiently. “Of course if you don’t _mean_ to
change for dinner—”
He shrugged and gave it up.
* * * * *
So they dined alone together, sharing a taciturn meal, and duly
witnessed the drolleries of _The Gutta-Percha Girl_. Kennaston’s sleep
afterward was sound and dreamless.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
IV
Past Storisende Fares the Road of Use and Wont
HE read _The Tinctured Veil_ in print, with curious wistful wonder. “How
did I come to write it?” was his thought.
Thereafter Felix Kennaston, as the world knows, wrote no more books,
save to collect his later verses into a volume. “I am afraid to write
against the author of _The Tinctured Veil_,” he was wont flippantly to
declare. And a few of us suspected even then that he spoke the absolute
truth.
* * * * *
Meanwhile, Mr. and Mrs. Kennaston continued their round of decorous
social duties: their dinner-parties were chronicled in the _Lichfield
Courier-Herald_; and Kennaston delivered, by request, two scholarly
addresses before the Lichfield Woman’s Club, was duly brought forward to
shake hands with all celebrities who visited the city, and served
acceptably in the vestry of his church.
Was Felix Kennaston content?—that is a question he alone could have
answered.
“But why shouldn’t I have been?” he said, a little later, in reply to
the pointblank query. “I had a handsome home, two motors, money in four
banks, and a good-looking wife who loved and coddled me. The third
prince gets no more at the end of any fairy tale. Still, the old woman
spoke the truth, of course—one pays as one goes out.... Oh, yes, one
pays!—that is an inevitable rule; but what you have to pay is not
exorbitant, all things considered.... So, be off with your crude
pessimisms, Harrowby!”
* * * * *
And indeed, when one comes to think, he was in no worse case than any
other husband of his standing. “Who wins his love must lose her,” as no
less tunefully than wisely sings one of our poets—a married bard, you
may be sure—and all experience tends to prove his warbling perfectly
veracious. Romancers, from Time’s nonage, have invented and have
manipulated a host of staple severances for their puppet
lovers—sedulously juggling, ever since Menander’s heyday, with
compromising letters and unscrupulous rivals and shipwrecks and wills
and testy parents and what not—and have contrived to show love
overriding these barriers plausibly enough. But he must truly be a
boldfaced rhapsodist who dared at outset marry his puppets, to each
other, and tell you how their love remained unchanged.
I am thus digressing, in obsolete Thackerayan fashion, to twaddle about
love-matches alone. People marry through a variety of other reasons, and
with varying results: but to marry for love is to invite inevitable
tragedy. There needs no side-glancing here at such crass bankruptcies of
affection as end in homicide or divorce proceedings, or even just in
daily squabbling: these dramas are of the body. They may be taken as the
sardonic comedies, or at their most outrageous as the blustering cheap
melodramas, of existence; and so lie beyond the tragic field. For your
true right tragedy is enacted on the stage of a man’s soul, with the
man’s reason as lone auditor.
And being happily married—but how shall I word it? Let us step into the
very darkest corner. Now, my dear Mr. Grundy, your wife is a credit to
her sex, an ornament to her circle, and the mainstay of your home; and
you, sir, are proverbially the most complacent and uxorious of spouses.
But you are not, after all, married to the girl you met at the
chancel-rail, so long and long ago, with unforgotten tremblings of the
knees. Your wife, that estimable matron, is quite another person. And
you live in the same house, and you very often see her with hair
uncombed, or even with a disheveled temper; you are familiar with her
hours of bathing, her visits to the dentist, and a host of other
physical phenomena we need not go into; she does not appreciate your
jokes; she peeps into your personal correspondence; she keeps the top
bureau-drawer in a jumble of veils and gloves and powder-rags and
hair-pins and heaven knows what; her gowns continually require to be
buttoned up the back in an insane incalculable fashion; she irrationally
orders herring for breakfast, though you never touch it:—and in fine,
your catalogue of disillusionments is endless.
Hand upon heart, my dear Mr. Grundy, is this the person to whom you
despatched those letters you wrote before you were married? Your wife
has those epistles safely put away somewhere, you may depend on it: and
for what earthly consideration would you read them aloud to her? Some
day, when one or the other of you is dead, those letters will ring true
again and rouse a noble sorrow; and the survivor will be all the better
for reading them. But now they only prove you were once free of uplands
which you do not visit nowadays: and that common knowledge is a secret
every wife must share half-guiltily with her husband—even in your
happiest matrimonial ventures—as certainly as it is the one topic they
may not ever discuss with profit.
For you are married, you and she: and you live, contentedly enough, in a
four-square world, where there is the rent and your social obligations
and the children’s underclothing to be considered, long and long before
indulgence in rattle-pate mountain-climbing. And people glibly think of
you as Mr. and Mrs. Grundy now, almost as a unit: but do you really know
very much about that woman whose gentle breathing—for we will not
crudely call it snoring—you can always hear at will o’ nights? Suppose,
by a wild flight of fancy, that she is no more honest with you than you
are with her?
* * * * *
So to Kennaston his wife remained a not unfriendly mystery. They had
been as demi-gods for a little while; and the dream had faded, to leave
it matters not what memories; and they were only Mr. and Mrs. Felix
Kennaston. Concerning all of us, my fellow failures in the great and
hopeless adventure of matrimony, this apologue is narrated.
Yet, as I look into my own wife’s face—no more the loveliest, but still
the dearest of all earthly faces, I protest—and as I wonder how much she
really knows about me or the universe at large, and have not the least
notion—why, I elect to believe that, in the ultimate, Kennaston was not
dissatisfied. For all of us the dream-haze merges into the glare of
common day; the _dea certé_, whom that fled roseate light transfigured,
stands confessed a simple loving woman, a creature of like flesh and
limitations as our own: but who are we to mate with goddesses? It is
enough that much in us which is not merely human has for once found
exercise—has had its high-pitched outing, however fleet—and that,
because of many abiding memories, we know, assuredly, the way of flesh
is not a futile scurrying through dining-rooms and offices and shops and
parlors, and thronged streets and restaurants, “and so to bed.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
V
Which Mr. Flaherty Does Not Quite Explain
WITH the preceding preachment I wish I might end the story. For what
follows—which is my own little part in the story of Felix Kennaston—is
that discomfortable sort of anticlimax wherein the key to a mystery, by
unlocking unsuspected doors, discloses only another equally perplexing
riddle.
Kathleen Kennaston died in her sleep some eleven months after her
husband discovered the missing half of the sigil....
“I have a sort of headache,” she said, toward nine o’clock in the
evening. “I believe I will go to bed, Felix.” So she kissed him
goodnight, in just that emotionless preoccupied fashion that years of
living together had made familiar; and so she left him in the
music-room, to smoke and read magazines. He never saw her living any
more.
Kathleen stopped in the hall, to wind the clock. “Don’t forget to lock
the front door when you come up, Felix.” She was out of sight, but he
could hear her, as well as the turning of the clock key. “I forgot to
tell you I saw Adèle Van Orden to-day, at Greenberg’s. They are going
down to the Beach Thursday. She told me they haven’t had a cook for
three days now, and she and old Mrs. Haggage have had to do all the
work. She looked it, too—I never saw any one let themselves go all to
pieces the way she has—”
“How—? Oh, yes,” he mumbled, intent upon his reading; “it is pretty bad.
Don’t many of them keep their looks as you do, dear—”
And that was all. He never heard his wife’s voice any more. Kennaston
read contentedly for a couple of hours, and went to bed. It was in the
morning the maid found Mrs. Kennaston dead and cold. She had died in her
sleep, quite peacefully, after taking two headache powders, while her
husband was contentedly pursuing the thread of a magazine story through
the advertising columns....
Kennaston had never spoken to her concerning the sigil. Indeed, I do not
well see how he could have dared to do so, in view of her attitude in a
world so opulent in insane asylums. But among her effects, hidden away
as before in the press in her bathroom, Kennaston found both the pieces
of metal. They were joined together now, forming a perfect circle, but
with the line of their former separation yet visible.
He showed me the sigil of Scoteia, having told this tale....
* * * * *
I had thought from the first there would prove to be supernal
double-dealing back of all this. The Wardens of Earth sometimes unbar
strange windows, I suspect—windows which face on other worlds than ours;
and They permit this-or-that man to peer out fleetingly, perhaps, just
for the joke’s sake; since always They humorously contrive matters so
this man shall never be able to convince his fellows of what he has
seen, or of the fact that he was granted any peep at all. The Wardens
without fail arrange what we call—gravely, too—“some natural
explanation.”
Kennaston showed me the sigil of Scoteia, having told this tale....
“You are interested in such things, you see—just as Kathleen said. And I
have sometimes wondered if when she said, ‘Perhaps Mr. Harrowby could
tell you,’ the words did not mean more than they seemed then to mean—?”
I was interested now, very certainly. But I knew that Kathleen Kennaston
had referred not at all to my interest in certain of the less known
sides of existence, which people loosely describe as “occult.”
And slowly, I comprehended that for the thousandth time the Wardens of
Earth were uncompromised; that here too They stayed unconvicted of
negligence in Their duty: for here was at hand the “natural
explanation.” Kennaston’s was one of those curious, but not uncommon,
cases of self-hypnosis, such as Fehlig and Alexis Bidoche have
investigated and described. Kennaston’s first dream of Ettarre had been
an ordinary normal dream, in no way particularly remarkable; and
afterward, his will to dream again of Ettarre, co-operating with his
queer reading, his temperament, his idle life, his belief in the sigil,
and co-operating too—as yet men may not say just how—with the hypnotic
effects of any trivial bright object when gazed at steadily, had been
sufficient to induce more dreams. I could understand how it had all
befallen in consonance with hackneyed laws, insane as was the outcome.
And the prelate and the personage had referred, of course, to the
then-notorious nineteenth and twentieth chapters of _Men Who Loved
Alison_, in which is described the worship of the sigil of Scoteia—and
which chapters they, in common with a great many other people,
considered unnecessarily to defile a noble book. The coincidence of the
mirrors was quaint, but in itself came to less than nothing; for as
touches the two questions as to white pigeons, the proverb alluded to by
the personage, concerning the bird that fouls its own nest, is fairly
familiar, and the prelate’s speech was the most natural of prosaic
inquiries. What these two men had said and done, in fine, amounted to
absolutely nothing until transfigured in the crucible of an ardent
imagination, by the curious literary notion that human life as people
spend it is purposeful and clearly motived.
For what Kennaston showed me was the metal top of a cold cream jar. I am
sure of this, for Harrowby’s Crême Cleopatre is one of the most popular
articles our firm manufactures. I hesitate to tell you how many thousand
husbands may find at will among their wives’ possessions just such a
talisman as Kennaston had discovered. I myself selected the design for
these covers when the stuff was first put in the market. They are sealed
on, you may remember, with gray wax, to carry out the general idea that
we are vending old Egyptian secrets of beauty. And the design upon these
covers, as I have since been at pains to make sure, is in no known
alphabet. P. N. Flaherty (the artist implicated) tells me he “just made
it up out of his head”—blending meaningless curlicues and dots and
circles with an irresponsible hand, and sketching a crack across all,
“just to make it look ancient like.” It was along this semblance of a
fracture—for there the brittle metal is thinnest—that the cover first
picked up by Kennaston had been broken. The cover he showed me was, of
course, complete.... So much for Mr. Flaherty’s part in the matter; and
of hieroglyphic lore, or any acquaintance with heathenry beyond his
gleanings from the moving pictures, I would be the last person to
suspect him.
It was natural that Mrs. Kennaston should have used Harrowby’s Crême
Cleopatre habitually; for indeed, as my wife had often pointed out, Mrs.
Kennaston used a considerable amount of toilet preparations. And that
Mrs. Allardyce should have had a jar of Harrowby’s Crême Cleopatre in
her handbag was almost inevitable: there is no better restorative and
cleanser for the complexion, after the dust and dirt of a train-journey,
as is unanimously acknowledged by Harrowby & Sons’ advertisements.
But there is the faith that moves mountains, as we glibly acknowledge
with unconcernment as to the statement’s tremendous truth; and Felix
Kennaston had believed in his talisman implicitly from the very first.
Thus, through his faith, and through we know not what soul-hunger, so
many long hours, and—here is the sardonic point—so many contented and
artistically-fruitful hours of Kennaston’s life in the flesh had been
devoted to contemplation of a mirage. It was no cause for astonishment
that he had more than once surprised compassion and wonder in his wife’s
eyes: indeed, she could hardly have failed to suspect his mind was
affected; but, loving him, she had tried to shield him, as is the way of
women.... I found the whole matter droll and rather heartbreaking. But
the Wardens of Earth were uncompromised, so far as I could prove.
Whatever windows had or had not been unbarred, there remained no
proof....
* * * * *
So I shook my head. “Why, no,” said I, with at worst a verbal adhesion
to veracity. “I, for one, do not know what the design means. Still, you
have never had this deciphered,” I added, gently. “Suppose—suppose there
had been some mistake, Mr. Kennaston—that there was nothing miraculous
about the sigil, after all—?”
I cannot tell you of his expression; but it caused me for the moment to
feel disconcertingly little and obtuse.
“Now, how can you say that, I wonder!” he marveled—and then, of course,
he fidgeted, and crossed his legs the other way—“when I have been
telling you, from alpha to omega, what is the one great thing the sigil
taught me—that everything in life is miraculous. For the sigil taught me
that it rests within the power of each of us to awaken at will from a
dragging nightmare of life made up of unimportant tasks and tedious
useless little habits, to see life as it really is, and to rejoice in
its exquisite wonderfulness. If the sigil were proved to be the top of a
tomato-can, it would not alter that big fact, nor my fixed faith. No,
Harrowby, the common names we call things by do not matter—except to
show how very dull we are,” he ended, with that irritating little noise
that was nearly a snigger, and just missed being a cough.
And I was sorely tempted.... You see, I never liked Felix Kennaston. The
man could create beauty, to outlive him; but in his own appearance he
combined grossness with insignificance, and he added thereto a variety
of ugly senseless little mannerisms. He could evolve interesting ideas,
as to Omnipotence, the universe, art, life, religion, himself, his wife,
a candlestick or a comet—anything—and very probably as to me; but his
preferences and his limitations would conform and color all these ideas
until they were precisely what he desired to believe, no more or less;
and, having them, he lacked means, or courage, to voice his ideas
adequately, so that to talk with him meant a dull interchange of
commonplaces. Again, he could aspire toward chivalric love, that passion
which sees in womankind High God made manifest in the loveliest and most
perfect of His creations; but in the quest he had succeeded merely in
utilizing womenfolk either as toys to play with and put by or as drudges
to wait on him; yet, with all this, he could retain unshaken his faith
in and his worship of that ideal woman. He could face no decision
without dodging; no temptation without compromise; and he lied, as if by
instinct, at the threatened approach of discomfort or of his fellows’
disapproval: yet devils, men and seraphim would conspire in vain in any
effort to dissuade him from his self-elected purpose. For, though he
would do no useful labor he could possibly avoid, he could grudge
nothing to the perfection of his chosen art, in striving to perpetuate
the best as he saw it.
In short, to me this man seemed an inadequate kickworthy creature, who
had muddled away the only life he was quite certain of enjoying, in
contemplation of a dream; and who had, moreover, despoiled the lives of
others, too, for the dream’s sake. To him the dream alone could
matter—his proud assurance that life was not a blind and aimless
business, not all a hopeless waste and confusion; and that he, this
gross weak animal, could be strong and excellent and wise, and his
existence a pageant of beauty and nobility. To prove this dream was
based on a delusion would be no doubt an enjoyable retaliation, for
Kennaston’s being so unengaging to the eye and so stupid to talk to; but
it would make the dream no whit less lovely or less dear to him—or to
the rest of us, either.
For it occurred to me that his history was, in essentials, the history
of our race, thus far. All I advanced for or against him, equally, was
true of all men that have ever lived.... For it is in this inadequate
flesh that each of us must serve his dream; and so, must fail in the
dream’s service, and must parody that which he holds dearest. To this we
seem condemned, being what we are. Thus, one and all, we play false to
the dream, and it evades us, and we dwindle into responsible citizens.
And yet always thereafter—because of many abiding memories—we know,
assuredly, that the way of flesh is not a futile scurrying through
dining-rooms and offices and shops and parlors, and thronged streets and
restaurants, “and so to bed.” ...
It was in appropriate silence, therefore, that I regarded Felix
Kennaston, as a parable. The man was not merely very human; he was
humanity. And I reflected that it is only by preserving faith in human
dreams that we may, after all, perhaps some day make them come true.
THE END
VAIL-BALLOU CO., BINGHAMTON AND NEW YORK
------------------------------------------------------------------------
● Transcriber’s Notes:
○ Missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected.
○ Typographical errors were silently corrected.
○ Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only
when a predominant form was found in this book.
○ Text that:
was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_);
was in bold by is enclosed by “equal” signs (=bold=)
had extra character spacing by “plus” signs (+stretched+).
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