ill JAME' ;C LIBRARY UN. .. ... , OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ THE CREAM OF THE JEST BOOKS BY MR. CABELL NOVELS: THE CREAM OF THE JEST THE SOUL OF ME LI CENT 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 THE CREAM OF THE JEST A Comedy of Evasions BY JAMES BRANCH CABELL ? I" " Le pays em je voulais oiler, tu m'y as menS en songe, cette nuit, et tu etais beUe . . . ah! que tu etais belle! . . . Mais, comme je n'ai aime que ton ombre, tu me dispen- seras, chere tete, de remercier ta realite." NEW YORK ROBERT M. McBRIDE & COMPANY 1917 Copyright, 1917, by ROBERT M. MCBRIDE & Co. Published September, 1917 C7 TO LOUISA NELSON 1 At me ab amort tuo diducet nulla senectus." Contents BOOK FIRST I INTRODUCES THE AGELESS WOMAN . . 3 II WHEREIN A CLERK APPRAISES A FAIR COUNTRY n III OF THE DOUBLE-DEALER'S TRAFFIC WITH A KNAVE 15 IV How THE DOUBLE-DEALER WAS OF Two MINDS 19 V TREATS OF MAUGIS D'AIGREMONT'S POT- TAGE 23 VI JOURNEYS END: WITH THE CUSTOMARY UNMASKING 26 BOOK SECOND I OF A TRIFLE FOUND IN TWILIGHT . . 37 II BEYOND USE AND WONT FARES THE ROAD TO STORISENDE 40 III OF IDLE SPECULATIONS IN A LIBRARY . . 49 IV How THERE WAS A LIGHT IN THE FOG . 55 V OF PUBLISHING: WITH AN UNLIKELY AP- PENDIX 61 VI SUGGESTING THEMES OF UNIVERSAL AP- PEAL 72 ix CONTENTS VII PECULIAR CONDUCT OF A PERSONAGE . . 80 VIII OF VAIN REGRET AND WONDER IN THE DARK 93 BOOK THIRD I THEY COME TO A HIGH PLACE . . . .103 II OF THE SlGIL AND ONE USE OF IT . . . IO7 III TREATS OF A PRELATE AND, IN PART, OF PIGEONS no 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 PIETY . .143 II DEALS WITH PEN SCRATCHES . . . .150 III BY-PRODUCTS OF RATIONAL ENDEAVOR . 156 IV "EPPER Si MUOVE" 163 V EVOLUTION OF A VESTRYMAN . . . .172 BOOK FIFTH I OF POETIC LOVE: TREATED WITH POETIC INEFFICIENCY 195 II CROSS-PURPOSES IN SPACIOUS TIMES . .210 III HORVENDILE TO ElTARRE : AT WHITEHALL 217 IV HORVENDILE TO ETTARRE: AT VAUX-LE- VlCOMTE 222 CONTENTS V HORVENDILE TO ElTARRE : IN THE CON- CIERGERIE . v 226 VI OF ONE ENIGMA THAT THREATENED TO PROVE ALLEGORICAL 232 VII TREATS OF WITCHES, MIXED DRINKS, AND THE WEATHER 239 BOOK SIXTH I SUNDRY DISCLOSURES OF THE PRESS . . 249 II CONSIDERATIONS TOWARD SUNSET . . . 254 III ONE WAY OF ELUSION 258 IV PAST STORISENDE FARES THE ROAD OF USE AND WONT 262 V WHICH MR. FLAHERTY DOES NOT QUITE EXPLAIN 269 XI 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 un- paralleled, 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 explan- ation. 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 to- gether, in part from social knowledge of the man, and in part from the notes I made as to what Felix xiii PREFACE 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 neigh- bors, 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 dumbfound- ing personal unconcern. It all seemed indescrib- ably indecent: and I marveled no little, I can re- member, as I took my notes. . . . Now I can understand it was just that his stand- ard of values was no longer ours nor really hu- man. 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 im- portance. But to tell of his thoughts, is to anticipate. Hereinafter you have them full measure and, such xiv PREFACE 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 Em- merick reigned in Poictesme, having not yet blun- dered 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 hope- less 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. xv 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 Phoenix kind, Whose like was never seen or heard, That any man can find." 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 Foret, with an outlandish retinue of pagan slaves that caused great wonder. All Poictesme took holi- day. 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 gar- ments 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, wear- ing mantles worked in gold, and mounted upon valuable horses that glittered with new bits and 3 THE CREAM OF THE JEST 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 Horven- dile the clerk, who stood beside her at his serv- ice. " No, there is nothing now which 'troubles me, Horvendile, save the thought of Maugis d'Aigre- mont I cannot ever be sure of happiness so long as that man lives." " So, so ! " says Horvendile " ah, yes, a mas- ter-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 can- not 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-scof- fing kind of talk, to which the clerk was deplorably 4 INTRODUCES THE AGELESS WOMAN prone. " You speak very strangely at times, Horvendile. Wickedness cannot ever be admir- able; 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. Cer- tainly, the Author of those folk who have figured thus far in your history has not devoted His tal- ents 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 faith- fully. 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 rea- son of his unhappiness, too she would have 5 THE CREAM OF THE JEST comforted him ; but Horvendile was not in a con- fiding mood. Whimsically he says: " Rather, it is I who am troubled, madame. For envy possesses me, and a faint teasing weari- ness also possesses me, because I am not as Sir Guiron, and never can be. Look you, they pre- pare your wedding-feast now, your former sor- rows 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 Flori- pas with that fair throng of noted lovers whose innocuous mishaps we follow with pleasant agita- tion, 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 6 INTRODUCES THE AGELESS WOMAN 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," re- plies 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 opin- ions 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 morn- ing; there is not even room for hope. Ah, no, madame ; the women of my country are the pleas- antest 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 7 THE CREAM OF THE JEST 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 be- tween 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. " Assur- edly, it was you of whom blind Homer dreamed, 8 INTRODUCES THE AGELESS WOMAN comforting endless night with visions of your beauty, as you sat in a bright fragrant vaulted chamber weaving at a mighty loom, and em- broidering on tapestry the battles men were wag- ing 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, call- ing 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 Antigone, 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 non- sense." THE CREAM OF THE JEST " And as Mark's Queen/' says Horvendile, in- tent 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 per- fect beauty which is full of troubling reticences, and so, is somehow touched with something sin- ister. 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 displeas- ing 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, peer- ing out over broad rolling uplands. 10 Wherein a Clerk Appraises a Fair Country HORVENDILE peered out over broad rolling uplands. . . . He viewed a no- ble 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. Un- doubtedly, it was a land, as Horvendile whimsic- ally 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. II THE CREAM OF THE JEST 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 em- broidery 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 top- ples from the height of heaven, I envy the bird's fate. I, too, would taste that ruinous mad mo- ment 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 12 A CLERK APPRAISES A COUNTRY 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 13 THE CREAM OF THE JEST 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." 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 listen- 15 THE CREAM OF THE JEST ing. 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 cer- tainly. 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 Storis- ende 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 Gui- ron is in all things worthy of her. I cannot ever pardon him that, Horvendile." 16 TRAFFIC WITH A KNAVE " 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," Hor- THE CREAM OF THE JEST vendile 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. 18 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 yel- low hair fell heavy about her. Her fine proud face questioned the clerk in silence, without any trace of fear. 4 We must wait now," says Horvendile, " wait patiently for that which is to follow. For while 19 THE CREAM OF THE JEST the folk of Storisende slept while your fair, favored lover slept, Ettarre, and your stout brothers Emmerick and Perion slept, and all per- sons 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 be- trayed us, Horvendile not you whom Guiron loved I" " 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, Et- tarre. 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 in- variably fall to immaculate people." Then, as if on a sudden, Dame Ettarre seemed to understand that the clerk's brain had been 20 THE DOUBLE-DEALER OF TWO MINDS turned through his hopeless love for her. She wondered, dizzily, how she could have stayed blind to his insanity this long, recollecting the in- consequence 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 pres- ently, 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 21 THE CREAM OF THE JEST of many lamps, sparkling like the ocean's waters at sunset; and Horvendile and Ettarre saw noth- ing 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. 22 Treats of Maugis D'Aigre- mont's Pottage MAUGIS came forward, his eyes fixed hun- grily upon Ettarre. " So a long strug- gle 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 dread- ful, 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; 23 THE CREAM OF THE JEST through my desire of you I have held much filthy traffic, with treachery and theft and murder, traf- fic 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." Horven- dile spoke thus. " And to what end have you ensnared me, Hor- vendile?" says Maugis, turning wearily. " For the attack on Storisende has failed, and I am dy- ing 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- 24 MAUGIS D'AIGREMONT'S POTTAGE dealer and his dupe confront each other. In the haggard face of Maugis, no longer evil, showed only puzzled lassitude. In the hand of Horven- dile 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 M 44 TV Jf Y 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'Aigre- mont. 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. 26 JOURNEYS END "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 Hor- vendile. " 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 coun- try a writer of romances. And once he con- structed a romance which, after a hackneyed cus- tom 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 pup- 27 THE CREAM OF THE JEST pets 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; 28 JOURNEYS END 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 coun- try. I have found you difficult to manage; and I may confess now that I kept you so long im- prisoned 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 for- gotten how to be ; and for a dead boy's sake I love you." " Listen, poor wretch! " Sir Guiron answered, 29 THE CREAM OF THE JEST sternly; " you have this night done horrible mis- chief, you have caused the death of many estim- able persons. Yet I have loved you, Horvendile, and I know that heaven, through heaven's in- scrutable 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." :t That is said very like you," Horvendile re- plied. " 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, Et- tarre. I can find no woman anywhere resembling you whom dreams alone may win to. It is a lit- tle 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 30 JOURNEYS END 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 al- ways. . . ." As he considered the future, in the man's face showed only puzzled lassitude; and you saw therein a quaint resemblance to Maugis d'Aigre- mont. " 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 im- potent 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 Ji THE CREAM OF THE JEST 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, shrug- ging " 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 Hor- vendile'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 32 JOURNEYS END warmed by contact with her sweet flesh. " It may be you will not live for a great while," he says; u but that will befall through no lack of lov- ing pains on your creator's part." Then Horvendile left them. In the dark pas- sage-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, beau- tiful and glad. Silently their lips met. Horvendile closed the door, and so left Storis- ende 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. 33 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." 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 u happy " ; and assuredly he was not pre-eminently happy there. At least he had ended the love-business of Et- tarre and Guiron happily, however droll the neces- sitated makeshifts might have been. . . . He had very certainly introduced the god in the car, against Horatian admonition, had wound up af- fairs with a sort of transformation scene. . . . It was, perhaps, at once too hackneyed and too odd an ending to be aesthetically satisfactory, after all. . . . Why, beyond doubt it was. He shrugged his impatience. " Yet what a true ending it would be! " he 37 THE CREAM OF THE JEST 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 con- scious 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 clasp- ing this bauble, just as I imagined Horvendile walking out of the castle of Storisende carrying much such a bauble. Oh, yes, the processes of in- spiration are as irrational as if all poets took after their mothers." 38 A TRIFLE FOUND IN TWILIGHT This bit of metal, Kennaston afterward ascer- tained, 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 sun- set; 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. 39 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 Kath- leen 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 li- brary. 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 " intend- ing contributor " to various magazines, spasmod- ically bartering his postage-stamps for courteously- worded rejection-slips. Then, too, in the old days before his marriage, when Kennaston had 40 THE ROAD TO STORISENDE come so near to capturing Margaret Hugonin and her big fortune, the heiress had paid for the print- ing of The King's Quest and its companion enter- prises 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 es- sayed 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 recog- nized as the actual author of her Epistles of An- anias, 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 " Col- ophon " to Men Who Loved Alison), he had de- termined 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 THE CREAM OF THE JEST actually existing. He had attempted a jaunt into that " happy, harmless Fable-land " which is bounded by Avalon and Phaeacia 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. 42 THE ROAD TO STORISENDE 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 wan- dered impecuniously from one adventure to an- other, 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 veloci- pedes 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 Lich- field 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 Hor- 43 THE CREAM OF THE JEST vendile, 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 Em- merick planned a notable marriage-feast for his sister La Beale Ettarre and Sir Guiron des Roc- ques, with vastly different results from those al- ready recorded with the results, in fine, which figure in the printed Men Who Loved Alison, where Horvendile keeps his proper place as a 44 THE ROAD TO STORISENDE 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 fac- ulties 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 content- edly; and we of Lichfield who were most familiar with Felix Kennaston in the flesh knew nothing then of his mental diversions; and, with knowl- edge, 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 re- garded Kennaston with the distrust universally ac- corded people who need to be meddling with ideas in a world which sustains its mental credit com- 45 THE CREAM OF THE JEST fortably 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 infre- quent remarks and the odd little noise, that was nearly a snigger and just missed being a cough, with which he ended them was peculiarly unin- gratiating 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 listen- ing to you he usually nibbled at his finger-nails, and when he talked he had a secretive way of look- ing 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 pos- 46 THE ROAD TO STORISENDE sessor: 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 inade- quate. His books apart, he was as a human being a failure. Indeed, in some inexpressible fashion, he impressed you as uneasily shirking life. Cer- tainly he seemed since his marriage to have re- linquished all conversational obligations to his wife. She had a curious trick of explaining him, before his face in a manner which was not un- reminiscent of the lecturer in " side-shows " point- ing out the peculiarities of the living skeleton or the glass-eater; but it was done with such ill-con- cealed 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 epi- 47 THE CREAM OF THE JEST thets, 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 ex- pected women to look after him, so that naturally they did. To her superior knowledge of the fem- inine mind I can but bow : with the addition (quot- ing the same authority) that a u twoser " is a trousered individual addicted to dumbness in com- pany and the very thrilliest sort of play-acting in tete-a-tetes. At all events, I never quite liked Felix Kennas- ton 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 per- son you or I find in the mirror is condemned eter- nally 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 equit- able warning, I return again to his story. Of Idle Speculations in a Library FLIX 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-glow- ing place, and all the comfortable appointments of Alcluid, belonged to him. He had seen enough of the scrambling hand-to-mouth make- shifts 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 per- sonage 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 49 THE CREAM OF THE JEST 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 explora- tion 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 de- claimed too many pilfered dicta concerning liter- ary 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 re- viewer of current literature. For all books she had thus acquired an abiding dislike. In particu- lar, 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 50 OF IDLE SPECULATIONS IN A LIBRARY other " citizens of the wild," with that incalcul- able unanimity which to-day may be reserved for the biographies of optimistic orphans, and to-mor- row veers to vies in times of high-minded courte- sans 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 in- come. 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 leav- ing home, that books were by the luckiest hit in- vented, to confound the restrictions of geography and the almanac. In consequence, from the 51 THE CREAM OF THE JEST 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 Guten- berg; and transportation into Greece or Rome or Persia or Chicago, equally, is the affair of a mo- ment. 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 foot- note, just so, admission to those high delights whereunto Shelley conducts is purchased by ac- crediting to clouds and skylarks let us sanely 52 OF IDLE SPECULATIONS IN A LIBRARY 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 high- ways, a very necessary traffic ordinance : and so long as many of us are, upon the whole, inferior to Dante or Shelley or Sophocles, or Thack- eray, 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 af- forded Kennaston an avenue to forgetfulness of that fat pasty fellow whom Kennaston was heartily tired of being. For one, I find the ad- mission significant of much, in view of what befell him afterward. And besides so Kennaston' s thoughts strayed at times these massed books, which his prede- cessor at Alcluid had acquired piecemeal through the term of a long life, were a part of that pre- decessor's personality. No other man would have gathered and have preserved precisely the same books, and each book, with varying force- fulness, had entered into his predecessor's mind 53 THE CREAM OF THE JEST 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 sur- prise 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 Ken- naston 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 educa- tion. . . . 54 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 Beatrice 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. 1 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, 55 THE CREAM OF THE JEST and here again to-night, there is no such restric- tion; and lovely as you are, I know that you are just a daughter of sub-consciousness or of mem- ory or of jumpy nerves or, perhaps, of an im- properly digested entree." " 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 Hor- vendile?" She who bore the face of Ettarre pondered mo- mentarily; and his heart moved with glad adora- tion. " 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 nat- ural, somehow just as it did when you spoke of Ole-Luk-Oie and Beatrice 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 56 HOW THERE WAS A LIGHT IN THE FOG remember dieting, a copy of the Guido portrait of Beatrice Cenci a copy done in oils, a worth- less daub, I suppose. But there was evil in the picture a lurking devilishness, which waited pa- tiently 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 noth- ing then of Beatrice 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 par- ticular 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 57 THE CREAM OF THE JEST who spoke " those futile troubling necromancies that are wrought by portraits and unfamiliar rooms and mirrors and all time-worn glittering ob- jects by running waters and the wind's per- sistency, 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 ac- tually eat anything, you may also notice, in dreams, even though food is very often at hand. I sup- pose 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 58 HOW THERE WAS A LIGHT IN THE FOG parsimony, dorft 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 be- gan; 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 bed- time. " 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 Fair- haven! I had forgotten Beatrice 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 involun- 59 THE CREAM OF THE JEST tarily hypnotized myself, sitting here staring at this shiny piece of lead you read of such cases. J believe I will put it away, to play with again sometime." 60 Of Publishing: With an Unlikely Appendix SO Kennaston preserved this bit of metal. " No fool like an old fool," his common- sense 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 leis- ured 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 discov- ered that publishers seemed sure the merits of a 61 THE CREAM OF THE JEST 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, c 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 an- other 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 62 OF PUBLISHING 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 commer- cial success. Therefore in your interest, as well as our own, we feel that we must give an unfavor- able decision upon the question of publication. Naturally we regret to be forced to that conclu- sion, for the work is one which would be credit- able to any publisher's list. We return the manu- script by express, with our appreciation of your courtesy in giving us the opportunity of consider- ing it, and are, etc." And so it was with The Gayvery Company, and with Leeds, McKibble & Todd, and with Stuy- vesant & Brothers. Unanimously they united to praise and to return the manuscript. And Ken- naston began reluctantly to suspect that, for all their polite phrases about literary excellence, his romance must, somehow, be not quite in conso- nance 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 63 THE CREAM OF THE JEST all-important and exigent requirements of " the general reader." Kennaston turned to the publishers' advertise- ments. Dapley & Pildriff at that time were urg- ing every one to read White Sepulchers, the au- thor of which had made public the momentous discovery that all churchgoers were not immacu- late persons. Paige Ticknor's Sons were an- nouncing 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 Gay- very Company offered Through the Transom, a daring study of " feminism," compiled to all ap- pearance 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 de- voted to Sarah's Secret, the prize-winner in the firm's $15,000 contest a "sprightly romance of the greenwood," whose undoubted aim, Ken- naston deduced from tentative dips into its mean- 64 OF PUBLISHING dering 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. Momen- tarily 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 ac- cepted for publication. The Baxon-Muir Com- 65 THE CREAM OF THE JEST pany had no prodigious faith in The Audit at Storlsende, as a commercial venture; but their " readers," in common with most of the " read- ers " for the firms who had rejected it, were not lacking in discernment of its merits as an admir- able piece of writing. And the more optimistic among them protested even to foresee a possibil- ity 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 ad- dition, 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 un- usual number of conferences, declared their will- 66 OF PUBLISHING ingness to publish this book; and in due course they did publish it. There were before this, however, for Kennas- ton many glad hours of dabbling with proof- sheets: the tale seemed so different, and so infer- nally good, in print. Kennaston never in his life found any other playthings comparable to those first wide-margined " galley proofs " of The Audit at Storlsende. Here was the word, vexa- tiously 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 ob- tuseness: 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, THE CREAM OF THE JEST 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 curi- ous 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 book-dealers. Men Who Loved Ettarre was Kennaston's ensu- ing suggestion; but the Baxon-Muir Company showed no fixed confidence in their patrons' abil- ity 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 Et- tarre. . . . The book was delivered to the world, which re- ceived the gift without excitement. The book was delivered to reviewers, who found in it a well-intentioned echo of Mr. Maurice Hewlett's 68 OF PUBLISHING earlier mediaeval tales. And there for a month or some six weeks, the matter rested. Then one propitious morning an indignant gen- tlewoman in Brooklyn wrote to The New York Sphere a letter which was duly printed in that jour- nal's widely circulated Sunday supplement, The Literary Masterpieces of This Week, to denounce the loathsome and depraved indecency of the nine- teenth and twentieth chapters, in which while treating of Sir Guiron's imprisonment in the Sa- cred Grove of Caer Idryn, and the worship ac- corded there to the sigil of Scoteia Kennaston had touched upon some of the perverse refine- ments 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 jour- nal, as in other newspapers, appeared still more denunciations. An up-to-the-minute bishop ex- postulated from the pulpit against the story's vi- THE CREAM OF THE JEST cious tendencies, demanding that it be suppressed. Thereafter it was no longer on sale in the large department-stores alone, but was equally procur- able 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 u the Alison amble"; and from Tampa to Seattle, in certain syndicated car- toons of generally appealing idiocy, newspaper readers were privileged to see one hero of the se- ries 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: 70 OF PUBLISHING but, like all the others, it was exquisitely done, and sold neck and neck with Men Who Loved Ali- son; 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 maga- zines 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 au- tumnal predecessors of these new chefs d'ceuvre passed swiftly into oblivion, via the brief respite of a " popular " edition. And naturally, Ken- naston'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 vulgar- ized, made a low byword; and he con- templated 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 dissemi- nating, by means of the daily journals, concern- ing Felix Kennaston's personality, ancestry, ac- complishments, 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 72 THEMES OF UNIVERSAL APPEAL novel." It was droll to receive letters from re- mote 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, sar- casm, 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 re- ception 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, ap- preciation 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 per- verted notions of humor, to esteem it a joke that 73 THE CREAM OF THE JEST she alone had not read the book of which every- body was talking. Such was not Kennaston's idea of humor, or of wifely interest. But Kath- leen 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 fash- ioned. . . . " 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, 74 THEMES OF UNIVERSAL APPEAL 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 re- pentance, 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 Kath- leen did not read his book because she did not re- gard any of his doings very seriously. " Isn't this the third time this weelc we have had herring for breakfast? " he inquired, pleasantly. " I think 75 THE CREAM OF THE JEST 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 num- ber 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 hap- pens, 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 per- fectly 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 some- where in town. It is quite touching how my crea- ture comforts are catered to in this house! " And Kathleen began to laugh, ruefully. " You THEMES OF UNIVERSAL APPEAL 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, evinc- ing that conviction with which she as a rule re- peated 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, Kath- leen, 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. 77 THE CREAM OF THE JEST " I don't know about that; but, in any event, people prefer to read about the life they are fa- miliar 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 78 THEMES OP UNIVERSAL APPEAL 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 lis- tener. " Some day," he ruefully reflected, " I shall cer- tainly write a paper upon The Lost Art of Con- versing with One's Wife. Its appeal, I think, would be universal." Then his eggs came. . . . 79 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 pub- lishers. 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 hand- some 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, prosai- cally complaining of unseasonable weather. That 80 PECULIAR CONDUCT OF A PERSONAGE bearded man, rubicund and monstrous as to nose, was perhaps the most powerful, as he was cer- tainly 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 multi- farious host the personage, as one may dis- creetly call him had left unattempted scarcely any role in the field of human activities : as ranch- man, statesman, warrior, historian, editor, ex- plorer, athlete, coiner of phrases, and re-discov- erer 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 81 THE CREAM OF THE JEST 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 pre- mier gaily, " that looking at the thermometer tends to make you feel, really, much more uncom- fortable than if you stayed uninformed as to pre- cisely how hot it was? " " Well ! where ignorance is bliss it is folly to be wise, as I remember to have seen stated some- where." " By George, though, it is wonderful how true are many of those old sayings ! " observed the per- sonage. ;< We assume we are much wiser than 82 PECULIAR CONDUCT OF A PERSONAGE 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 re- public he helped to found, if he could see it nowa- days." " 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 pro- hibition 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 83 THE CREAM OF THE JEST 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 unper- missible, 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 secre- tary 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 chil- dren are very close observers, and, as you may have noticed, they ask the most remarkable ques- tions. My little boy asked me, only last Tuesday, why poor people are always so polite and kind " " Well, little pitchers have big ears " 84 PECULIAR CONDUCT OF A PERSONAGE " 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 be- ing kind makes you happier " " And I often think that is a better sort of re- ligion 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 admir- able 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 " 85 THE CREAM OF THE JEST " 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 un- thinkable " "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 " 86 PECULIAR CONDUCT OF A PERSONAGE " 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 na- tion in it, before very long, commercially and in every way . . ." So the talk flowed on, with Felix Kennaston con- tributing very little thereto. Indeed, Felix Ken- naston, the dreamer, was rather ill-at-ease among these men of action, and listened to their observa- tions 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 re- spectable importance. It was the sort of gather- ing 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 admir- ingly received. Therefore he attempted to even matters by as- 87 THE CREAM OF THE JEST suring himself that the talk of these efficient peo- ple was lacking in brilliance and real depth, and expressed sentiments which, microscopically viewed, did not appear to be astoundingly orig- inal. If these had been less remarkable persons he would have thought their conversation almost platitudinous. And not one o 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 de- scribed, 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 point- less, were at least garnished with widely-known names. 88 PECULIAR CONDUCT OF A PERSONAGE 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 re- call 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 pro- duced 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 pre-supposing that, as a country-gentleman, you have raised 8'9 THE CREAM OF THE JEST white pigeons, Mr. Kennaston?" he said, mean- ingly. " 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 in- tended analogy falls through. In any event, it has been a great pleasure to meet you. Come and see me again, Mr. Kennaston and mean- while, think over what I have said." And that was all. Kennaston returned to Al- cluid in a whirl of formless speculations. The mirror and the insane query as to white pigeons could not, he considered, but constitute some pass- word to which Kennaston had failed to give the proper response. The mystery had some connection with what he 90 PECULIAR CONDUCT OF A PERSONAGE 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 dis- cussion of talismans by a person who knew noth- ing 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 Ken- naston 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, in- deed, really some secret and some password through which men won to place and the world's prizes? . . . Blurred memories of Eugene Sue's nefarious Jesuits and of Balzac's redoubtable Thirteen arose in the background of his mental picturings. . . . THE CREAM OF THE JEST 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 in- sane, and nobody but Felix Kennaston knew it. ... What could a little mirror, much less pigeons, have to do with this bit of metal ? ex- cept that this bit of metal, too, reflected light so that the strain tired your eyes, thus steadily to look down upon the thing. . . . 92 Of Fain Regret and Wonder in the Dark "JL M" ADAM," he was insanely stating, " I %/| would not for the world set up as a -L T A fit exponent for the mottoes of a copy- book; 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 over- head. " That I am of smirched repute, madam, I lack both grounds and inclination to deny. Yet I am 93 THE CREAM OF THE JEST not so through choice. Believe me, I am in- nately of wellnigh ducal disposition; and by prefer- ence, 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 com- mission of divers profitable peccadilloes, once in a blue moon, by the dictates of that same hap- hazard 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 recog- nized 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 be- come so in quest of amusement? Nay, I can as- sure you that Newgate, the wigged judge, the jolt- ing cart, the gallows, is no pleasant dream o' 94 VAIN REGRET AND WONDER nights. But what choice had I? Cast forth to the gutter's miring in the susceptible years of in- fancy, 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 par- sons 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 occa- sionally confounding meum with tuum." " A murderer?" " Something of the sort might be my descrip- tion 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 Umfra- ville ? Ah, madam, Providence labors with quaint instruments, dilapidating Troy by means of a wood rocking-horse, and loosing sin into the uni- verse through a half-eaten apple. Nay, I repeat, I am not all base; and I have read somewhere 95 THE CREAM OF THE JEST 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 Fanringham") " 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 shoul- ders 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 eerie! " "I am not absolutely hideous, either?" she queried, absent-mindedly. " Dame Venus," Kennaston observed, " may have made a similar demand of the waves at Cy- thera when she first rose among their billows : and I doubt not that the white foaming waters, amor- VAIN REGRET AND WONDER ously 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 Um- fraville'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 heartbreak- 97 THE CREAM OF THE JEST ing 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 pos- sessed 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 love- liness, and knowing loveliness and purity to be for- ever unattainable in his mean life, was Felix Ken- naston, 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, VAIN REGRET AND WONDER 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 de- lighted 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 Kennas- ton, 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 99 THE CREAM OF THE JEST blindfold with perilous matters. Felix Kennas- ton, my friend, the safest plan the one as- suredly 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 with- out much lively faith in his promises. 100 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 ! " 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 con- sistency of dough. She sat upon the stone pave- ment, knitting; her eyes, which raised to his un- blinkingly, were black, secretive, and imperson- ally 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." 103 THE CREAM OF THE JEST 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 incommuni- cable 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 Storis- ende. " 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 104 THEY COME TO A HIGH PLACE 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 Et- tarre 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 knowl- edge that here on dizzying heights he, Felix Ken- naston, 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 ex- press this sense's gratification. But he knew that he was strong and admirable; that men and men's 105 THE CREAM OF THE JEST 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 un- stable dream. " Yet it is not any city of to-day," he was say- ing. " 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 of- fice-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 Dore illustration for Rabelais or Les Conies Drola- tiques. 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. . . ." 106 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 concern- ing 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 107 THE CREAM OF THE JEST different from that which Kennaston had given it in his romance. So began an odd divided life for Felix Kennas- ton. 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 in- duce 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 unin- terruptedly. To have left an electric-light turned on until he awakened, would in the end have ex- posed him to detection and the not-impossible ap- pointment of a commission in lunacy; and he recog- nized the potentialities of such mischance with frank distaste. As affairs sped, however, he could without great difficulty buy his candles in 1 08 OF THE SIGIL AND ONE USE OF IT 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. 109 Treats of a Prelate and, in Part, of Pigeons THE diurnal part of Kennaston's life was largely devoted to writing The Tinc- tured 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 Ark- no TREATS OF A PRELATE AND OF PIGEONS wright 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. Ken- naston was no little surprised to receive a note in- forming him that this eminent churchman would be pleased to see Mr. Felix Kennaston that eve- ning 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. Ken- naston recognized with joy that this old man talked like a person in a book, in completed sen- tences 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 friend- iii THE CREAM OF THE JEST ship I valued most dearly." He hoped that Ken- naston 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 dis- cuss trivialities. So their talking veered, as it seemed, at ran- dom. . . . 1 Yes, I was often a guest at Alcluid a very beautiful home it was in those days, famed, as I 112 TREATS OF A PRELATE AND OF PIGEONS remember, for the many breeds of pigeons which your uncle amused himself by maintaining. I sup- pose 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/' Ken- naston answered evenly; "there were a great many about the place when it came into our pos- session; 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 un- disturbed. There are drugs, my son, which work much good in the hands of the skilled physician, but cannot be intrusted without danger to the vul- gar." He spoke gently; yet it appeared to Kennas- ton a threat was voiced. " Sir," Kennaston began, " I must tell you that THE CREAM OF THE JEST in writing of the sigil as I called it I de- signed to employ only such general terms as ro- mance 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 sigiPs appear- ance. 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 al- ways interesting to hear whence makers of cre- ative 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 irrele- vant 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," Ken- naston 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 114 TREATS OF A PRELATE AND OF PIGEONS 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 im- agine 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 con- ceded, smiling. He asked the name of the per- sonage 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 mega- phone. 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 mir- rors," 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 THE CREAM OF THE JEST 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 sieemed 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 privi- lege common to all of us." " At least," said Kennaston, " we will hope my poor wits may not be shaken by any more coin- cidences." 116 TREATS OF A PRELATE AND OF PIGEONS " 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. 117 IV Local Laws of Nephe- lococcygia 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 re- mote 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 famil- iar 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. 118 LOCAL LAWS OF NEPHELOCOCCYGIA Sometimes they would be alone in places which he did not recognize, sometimes they would be liv- ing, under the Stuarts or the Valois or the Caesars, 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 with- out 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 119 THE CREAM OF THE JEST 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 con- formed 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 chron- ology; thus, he was often in Paris and Constanti- nople 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 120 LOCAL LAWS OF NEPHELOCOCCYGIA 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 profit- ably. For a while Kennaston thought these dreams to be bits of lives he had lived in previous incarna- tions; 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 im- mediately 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 Cruci- fixion and was aged about twenty-three ; yet in an- other dream he was at Capreae when Tiberius died there, seven years afterward, and Kennaston was then still in the early twenties : and, again, he was 121 THE CREAM OF THE JEST in London, at Whitehall, in 1649, an ^ 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, more- over, in each dream he was woefully hampered by inability to recall preceding events in the life he 122 LOCAL LAWS OF NEPHELOCOCCYGIA 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 123 THE CREAM OF THE JEST 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. 124 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 Kennas- ton, 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 affec- 125 THE CREAM OF THE JEST tion. And besides, what there was to tell con- cerning 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 be- fore 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 pre- tense 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 de- velop graveward in continuous solitude. His life until this had been in the main normal, 126 OF DIVERS FLESHLY RIDDLES with its due share of normal intimacies with par- ents, 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 com- minglement of yearning and complacency, had ever comprehended the real Felix Kennaston as he existed, in all his hampered stragglings and mean- nesses, 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, emo- tions were too often feigned or overcolored in ex- pression, and unpopular thoughts were too in- stinctively dissembled, as he forlornly knew by his own conduct of daily life, for him to put very zeal- ous 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, hap- pened 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. 127 THE CREAM OF THE JEST 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 C7ery once in a while that, because of one-or-another inexplicable phe- nomenon, 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 sig- naled to another, on those rare occasions when the signal was despatched in entire good faith. Yes, a perpetual isolation, for all the fretful and 128 OF DIVERS FLESHLY RIDDLES 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. 129 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 un- dreamed-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 130 IN PURSUIT OF A WHISPER nerves the worse for the preceding night's pota- tions, 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 ex- plaining 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 sur- roundings 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, THE CREAM OF THE JEST 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 mat- ters as the doctrine of metempsychosis, all the gro- tesque literature of witches, sorcerers and familiar spirits, and of muses who actually prompted artistic composition with audible voices, were be- ginning to fall into cloudily-discerned interlock- ing. 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. IN PURSUIT OF A WHISPER Meanwhile, Kennaston read of Endymion and Numa, of lason and Anchises, of Tannhauser, and Foulques Plantagenet, and Raymondin de la Foret, and Olger Danske, and other mortal men to whom old legend-weavers, as if wistfully, ac- credited 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 con- sumed 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 resem- blance to an amasser of reliable axioms that proud luxurious despot " who went daily to the comeliest of the spirits for wisdom "; and of Ar- thur and the Lady Nimue; and of Thomas of Ercildoune, whom the Queen of Faery 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 re- 133 THE CREAM OF THE JEST corded, " 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, Ken- naston 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 Call- ing 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 Dick- ens, apropos of passages in the first chapter of the ninth book, Kennaston has inscribed strange specu- 134 IN PURSUIT OF A WHISPER lations very ill suited to general reading. All that Kennaston cared to print, however, concern- ing the hypothesis he eventually evolved, you will find in The Tinctured Veil, where he has nicely re- frained from too-explicit writing, and of course does not anywhere pointblank refer to his per- sonal experiences. Then Kennaston ran afoul of the Rosicrucians, and their quaint dogmas, which appeared so pre- posterous at first, took on vital meanings pres- ently; 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. . . , 135 F/7 Of Truisms: Treated Reasonably HE seemed, indeed, to find food for won- der everywhere. It was as if he had awakened from a dragging nightmare of life made up of unimportant tasks and tedious use- less 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 mo- ment immediately at hand! Memory and antici- pation, 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 yes- terday was no more real now than the deeds of Caesar Borgia or St. Paul; and what you looked forward to within the half-hour was as non-exist- ent as the senility of your unborn great-grand- children. Never was man brought into contact 136 TRUISMS: TREATED REASONABLY with reality save through the evanescent emotions and sensations of that single moment, that infin- itesimal 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 frac- tions of a second. Success in life, then, had noth- ing 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 ut- terly 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 Ken- naston 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 mo- ment as it fled? And corporal life in banks and ballrooms and legislative halls and palaces, no- where had anything more than that to offer mortal men. THE CREAM OF THE JEST 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 pos- sess 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 vul- gar 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 in- 138 TRUISMS: TREATED REASONABLY terest him; for he had merely to touch Ettarre, and the dream ended. In this fashion he would very often terminate an existence which was be- coming 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. 139 Book Fourth " But there were dreams to sell 111 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 ? " Economic Considerations of Piety AS has been said, Kennaston read much curious matter in his dead uncle's li- brary. . . . But most books even Felix Kennaston's own little books did not seem now to be affairs of heavy moment. Once abed, clasping his gleam- ing broken bit of metal, and the truthful history of all that had ever happened was, instead, Kennas- ton'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 gener- ation. Kennaston stood by the couch of Tiberius Caesar as he lay ill at Capreae. Beside him hung a memorable painting, by Parrhasius, which repre- 143 THE CREAM OF THE JEST sented the virgin Atalanta in the act of according very curious assuagements to her lover's ardor. Charicles, a Greek physician, was telling the Em- peror of a new religious sect that had arisen in Judea, and of the persecutions these disciples of Christus were enduring. Old Caesar listened, made grave clucking noises of disapproval. " It is, instead, a religion that should be fos- tered. 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 fol- lowers 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 144 ECONOMIC CONSIDERATIONS OF PIETY scapegoat under divine anger; and the cult of Pollux and Castor, and of Adonis, has made these resurrection stories hackneyed. In fine, Char- icles, 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 stand- point. Then Caesar yawned, and ordered that a company of his Spintriae be summoned to his chamber, to amuse him with their unnatural diver- sions. 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 fore- saw that, without salutary discouragement, the worship of Christus would never amount to more than the social fad of a particular season, just as 145 THE CREAM OF THE JEST 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 Caesar's drink, that Caesar might die, and crazed Caligula suc- ceed him, to put all Christians to the sword. And Charicles young Caius Caesar 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 yel- 146 ECONOMIC CONSIDERATIONS OF PIETY low, 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 what- ever in the gray-walled room save this curious gleaming statue and the lean man and the me- chanical 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 147 THE CREAM OF THE JEST 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 thau- maturgy, and would condescend to animate her sacred portals. " We very decidedly need some striking mira- cle to advertise our temple," he told Kennaston. u Folk are flocking like sheep after these bar- barous 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 148 ECONOMIC CONSIDERATIONS OF PIETY man's dark sad eyes. The trickster was striving to uphold the faith of his fathers; and in the at- tempt he had constructed a practicable steam- engine. 149 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 con- tains all that is necessary to salvation: if these books teach as the Koran teaches they are super- fluous; 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 em- ployment of a nation's literature; and it moved him strangely. He had come at this season to believe that individual acts can count for noth- ing, in the outcome of things. Whatever might 150 DEALS WITH PEN SCRATCHES happen upon earth, during the existence of that midge among the planets, affected infmitesimally, if at all, the universe of which earth was a part so inconceivably tiny. To figure out the impor- tance in this universe of the deeds of one or an- other nation temporarily clustering on earth's sur- face, 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 sur- face, 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 rela- tive importance of their physical antics while liv- ing, was purely and simply ridiculous. To as- sume, as did so many well-meaning persons, that Omniscience devoted eternity to puzzling out just these minutiae, 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 sur- vive with perhaps augmenting influence: so that THE CREAM OF THE JEST Kennaston had come to think artistic creation in words since marble and canvas inevitably per- ished was the one, possibly, worth-while em- ployment of human life. But here was a crude corporal deed which bluntly destroyed thoughts, and annihilated dreams by wholesale. To Ken- naston 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 .^Eschylus, of a hundred and six by Sophocles, and of fifty-five by Euripides masterworks eter- nally 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 Achasus, 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 writ- ings of the Pleiad the noble tragedies of Ho- merus, and Sositheus, and Lycophron, and Alex- 152 DEALS WITH PEN SCRATCHES ander, and Philiscus, and Sosiphanes, and Di- onysides. All the great comic poets, too, were burned pellmell with these Telecleides, Her- mippus, Eupolis, Antiphanes, Ameipsas, Lysippus, and Menander " whom nature mimicked," as the phrase was. And here, posting to oblitera- tion, went likewise Thespis, and Pratinas, and Phrynichus and Choerilus, whom cultured per- sons 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 hap- penings : 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 in- flammable. Here was beauty, and wit, and learning, and genius, being wasted quite wantonly never ' to be recaptured, never to be equaled again (de- spite the innumerable painstaking penmen destined 153 THE CREAM OF THE JEST 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 ob- served 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 Her- ondas 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 mak- ing 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, de- 154 DEALS WITH PEN SCRATCHES tect any fault in Amrou's logic. ./Esthetic con- siderations could, in that event, but lead to profit- less time-wasting where every moment was pre- cious. 155 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 con- spires to hinder the great work," he considered. " And what is the great work, father?" Ken- naston 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 ar- rayed against him. Thus, the heavens threaten with winds and lightnings, with plague-breeding meteors and the unfriendly aspect of planets; the BY-PRODUCTS OF RATIONAL ENDEAVOR 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 de- molishment ! 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 ad- monition." Kennaston could see, though, that the speaker half believed this might be exactly what had happened. " For I am about no vaunt- 157 THE CREAM OF THE JEST ing 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 advan- tages not to contend that even in the heyday of patriarchs few approached to such longevity; for Moses, relinquishing to silence all save the prog- eny of Seth, nowhere directly tells us that some of the seed of Cain did not outlive Methuselah. Yea, and our common parent, Adam, was cre- ated in the perfect age of man, which then fell not short of one hundred years, since at less an- tiquity 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 BY-PRODUCTS OF RATIONAL ENDEAVOR not scruple to affirm this is an excellent dark say- ing, 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 ex- ploded. The old man was now interested, less in the breakage, than in the horrible noise this accident had occasioned. 4 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 Her- od'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 per- petual, 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 159 THE CREAM OF THE JEST 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 whim- pered, 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 fit- tingly 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 Co- lombo, mumbled. He had doubled the world's 1 60 BY-PRODUCTS OF RATIONAL ENDEAVOR 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 threat- ened 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 Gulio de Me- dici " " Faith, and not every lass can bring eleven fingers to the task," the King put in. She tweaked his fine gold beard, and Kennas- ton 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 161 THE CREAM OF THE JEST 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-ring- ing, 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 per- suaded. 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 es- tates 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 er- ror, earned the abbey-lands, as well as the key of a certain bed-chamber, and the eternal appro- bation of zealous Protestants, for thus inaugurat- ing religious liberty. 162 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. Every- where 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 ir- rational and astounding blunders, whose outrag- eousness bedwarfed the wildest cliches of ro- mance, 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 163 THE CREAM OF THE JEST 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 im- perceptible pinhead of living matter had be- come 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 mov- ing always, like fish and reptile, toward unap- prehended loftier goals. But, just as men's lives came to seem to Ken- naston 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 164 < < E P P E R SI MUOVE 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 af- forded foothold to life for a few aeons? He could not tell. But Kennaston contem- plated 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 oc- cupancy. Life would tarry there also, he re- flected; 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 to- ward their proper and intended purposes inevita- bly swept away each nest before completion THE CREAM OF THE JEST 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 Ken- naston? The query has a humorous ring un- doubtedly, 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. . * .*' 166 < < E P P E R SI MUOVE "Why is a Kennaston?" he asked himself thus whimsically voicing the inquiry as to whether human beings were intended for any especial pur- pose. 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 sock- ets 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 aim- lessly: and so, he often wondered if he was not perhaps expected to devote these years of human living to some intelligible purpose? THE CREAM OF THE JEST Religion, of course, assured him that the an- swer to his query was written explicitly, in vari- ous books, in very dissimilar forms. But Kennas- ton 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 pre- suming 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 reli- gions with queer uniformity, was at best a two- edged simile, in that it suggested a possible amia- bility of intention combined with inevitable du- plicity. The range of an earthly father's habit- ual deceptions, embracing the source of life and Christmas presents on one side and his own falli- bility 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 1 68 <. " 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 na- tions 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 un- troubled eyes. She was so fair that I longed for 233 THE CREAM OF THE JEST 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 coun- try of great heat and endless sands, and con- tended 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 234 OF ONE ENIGMA 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 hor- rible 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 per- missible. Have I not summoned demons from 235 THE CREAM OF THE JEST 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 de- sired to know? Have I not talked with Mors- koi, 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 re- gret having done this. . . . But presently I shall be dead, and all my dearly-purchased, wearily- 236 OF ONE ENIGMA 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 237 THE CREAM OF THE JEST 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, pre- ferred 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 emo- tion: and therewith he was content. 238 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 Ken- nastons 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 put- 239 THE CREAM OF THE JEST ting 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," Ken- naston 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 mos- quitoes in September, but not many if you are careful about standing water " " The drain-pipe to the gutter around our 240 WITCHES, MIXED DRINKS, AND WEATHER porch got stopped somehow, last year " this Kennaston contributed, morosely u and we had a terrible time." " Then there is always so much to do, get- ting the children started at school," my wife con- tinued " 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 al- ways 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 arc 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" 241 THE CREAM OF THE JEST " Oh, yes, hag-ridden ! like the unfortunate magicians in old stories I " Kennaston broke in, on a sudden. " We were speaking about such things the other day, you remember? I have been think- ing You see, every one tells me that, apart from being a master soapboiler, Mr. Harrowby, you are by way of being an authority on witch- craft 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 writ- ing-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 242 WITCHES, MIXED DRINKS, AND WEATHER 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 at- tended 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. Tra- ditionally, the Sabbat was a meeting attended by all witches in satisfactory diabolical standing, lightly attired in smears of various magical oint- ments; 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, u was the favorite date for these gatherings, which were likewise some- times held on St. John's Eve, on Walburga's Eve, and on Hallowe'en Night. The diversions were numerous: there was feasting, music, and danc- ing, with the devil performing obligates 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 243 THE CREAM OF THE JEST 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 enjoy- able social outings, all around." " They must have been worse than family re- unions," put in Mrs, Kennaston, and affected to shudder. " Indeed, there are certain points of resem- blance," 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? " 244 WITCHES, MIXED DRINKS, AND WEATHER " That would require rather a lengthy explana- tion 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 " Ken- naston was plainly not quite at ease " but, after all, is it not more wholesome to dismiss such theo- ries as fantastic nonsense, even if they are per- fectly 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 245 THE CREAM OF THE JEST 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-after- noon call customarily exchanged by country neigh- bors. I remember Moira's yawning as she closed the cellarette, and her wondering how Mrs. Ken- naston 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 nat- urally stupid? " she wanted to know. 246 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." 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 249 THE CREAM OF THE JEST 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 ex- cept by assuming the difference to be to his dis- credit. Meanwhile, the Felix Kennaston who owned two motors and had money in four banks, went with his wife about their round of decorous so- cial duties; and the same Felix Kennaston, with leisured joy in the task, had completed The Tinc- tured Fell 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 Phaeacia and Sea-coast Bohemia, and the contigu- ous forests of Arden and Broceliande, and on the west of course by the Hesperides. Then, just before The Tinctured Veil was pub- lished, 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. 250 SUNDRY DISCLOSURES OF THE PRESS 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 bath- room 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 dress- ing-table, between the manicure-set and the pin- cushion, 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 Didas- calion when Ptolemy of the Fat Paunch was mas- ter 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 for- bidden, and besides, the sigil's crowning grace was that it enabled me to forget his existence. 251 THE CREAM OF THE JEST 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 remem- ber 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 insig- nificant burgess in shirtsleeves, with grizzled un- tidied hair, and mild accommodating pale eyes, and an inadequate nose, with huge nostrils, and a spacious naked-looking upper-lip. That was 252 SUNDRY DISCLOSURES OF THE PRESS 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, under- stand all that which he lacked words to tell. 253 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 Hor- vendile 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 sing- ing. Straight into the air it rose, and was lost 254 CONSIDERATIONS TOWARD SUNSET 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, think- ing. . . . 'What did I think of?" he said, long after- ward " 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. . . . 255 THE CREAM OF THE JEST " 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 re- membered 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 thun- derous 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." 256 CONSIDERATIONS TOWARD SUNSET 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 Storis- ende forever. 257 One Way of Elusion KATHLEEN was seated at the dressing- table, arranging her hair, when Kennas- ton 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 mir- ror; 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 Kennas- ton understood that his wife must disclaim any knowledge of the sigil of Scoteia, should he be 258 ONE WAY OF ELUSION 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 be- come 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 innumera- ble 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 din- ner-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. 259 THE CREAM OF THE JEST " 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 waste- basket by the dressing-table, and rose impatiently. " Of course if you don't mean to change for dinner " 260 ONE WAY OF ELUSION 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. 261 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 sus- pected 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. 262 THE ROAD OF USE AND WONT Was Felix Kennaston content? that is a ques- tion 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 inevit- able rule; but what you have to pay is not ex- orbitant, 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 sedu- lously juggling, ever since Menander's heyday, 263 THE CREAM OF THE JEST with compromising letters and unscrupulous rivals and shipwrecks and wills and testy parents and what not and have contrived to show love over- riding 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 affec- tion 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 blus- tering 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 264 THE ROAD OF USE AND WONT to her sex, an ornament to her circle, and the main- stay 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 di- sheveled 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 265 THE CREAM OF THE JEST has those epistles safely put away somewhere, you may depend on it: and for what earthly considera- tion 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 now- adays: and that common knowledge is a secret every wife must share half-guiltily with her hus- band even in your happiest matrimonial ven- tures 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? 266 THE ROAD OF USE AND WONT 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 un- friendly 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. Concern- ing 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 certe, whom that fled roseate light transfigured, stands con- fessed 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 267 THE CREAM OF THE JEST in us which is not merely human has for once found exercise has had its high-pitched outing, how- ever 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." 268 Which Mr. Flaherty Does Not Quite Explain WITH the preceding preachment I wish I might end the story. For what fol- lows which is my own little part in the story of Felix Kennaston is that discom- fortable sort of anticlimax wherein the key to a mystery, by unlocking unsuspected doors, dis- closes 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. 269 THE CREAM OF THE JEST " 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 Adele 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 peace- fully, 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 270 MR. FLAHERTY DOES NOT EXPLAIN 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, hav- ing told this tale. . . . 271 THE CREAM OF THE JEST * You are interested in such things, you see just as Kathleen said. And I have sometimes wondered if when she said, * Perhaps Mr. Har- rowby 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 u occult." And slowly, I comprehended that for the thou- sandth time the Wardens of Earth were uncom- promised; 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 aft- erward, his will to dream again of Ettarre, co- operating with his queer reading, his tempera- ment, his idle life, his belief in the sigil, and co- operating too as yet men may not say just how 272 MR. FLAHERTY DOES NOT EXPLAIN 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 unnec- essarily 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 273 THE CREAM OF THE JEST top of a cold cream jar. I am sure of this, for Harrowby's Creme 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 thin- nest 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 274 MR. FLAHERTY DOES NOT EXPLAIN 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 Creme 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 Creme 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 Ken- naston 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 275 THE CREAM OF THE JEST 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 heart-breaking. 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 276 MR. FLAHERTY DOES NOT EXPLAIN one great thing the sigil taught me that every- thing 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 use- less 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 cre- ate beauty, to outlive him ; but in his own appear- ance 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 any- thing and very probably as to me ; but his preferences and his limitations would conform and 277 THE CREAM OF THE JEST 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 mani- fest in the loveliest and most perfect of His crea- tions; 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 fel- lows' 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 278 MR. FLAHERTY DOES NOT EXPLAIN kickworthy creature, who had muddled away the only life he was quite certain of enjoying, in con- templation 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 con- fusion; 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 279 THE CREAM OF THE JEST it evades us, and we dwindle into responsible citi- zens. 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 280 THE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA CRUZ This book is due on the last DATE stamped below. NOV8 IS67 NOV 5. 1S69 DDT 2 9 RED MAY I APR71990REC'0 lOOm-8,'65 (F6282s8)2373 TORED AT NRLF PS3505.A153C7 3 2106 00209 3935