begetting of an emperor was equally a by-product? and of which the existence of Felix Kennaston was a manifestation past conceiving in its unimportance? Toward what did life aspire?—that force which moved in Felix Kennaston, and thus made Felix Kennaston also an intruder, a temporary visitor, in the big moving soulless mechanism of earth and water and planets and suns and interlocking solar systems?
“To answer that question must be my modest attempt,” he decided. “In fine—why is a Kennaston? The query has a humorous ring undoubtedly, in so far as it is no little suggestive of the spinning mouse that is the higher the fewer—but, after all, it voices the sole question in which I personally am interested....”
“Why is a Kennaston?” he asked himself—thus whimsically voicing the inquiry as to whether human beings were intended for any especial purpose. Most of us find it more comfortable, upon the whole, to stave off such queries—with a jest, a shrug, or a Scriptural quotation, as best suits personal taste; but Kennaston was “queer” enough to face the situation quite gravely. Here was he, the individual, very possibly placed on—at all events, infesting—a particular planet for a considerable number of years; the planet was so elaborately constructed, so richly clothed with trees and valleys and uplands and running waters and multitudinary grass-blades, and the body that housed Felix Kennaston was so intricately wrought with tiny bones and veins and sinews, with sockets and valves and levers, and little hairs which grew upon the body like grass-blades about the earth, that it seemed unreasonable to suppose this much cunning mechanism had been set agoing aimlessly: and so, he often wondered if he was not perhaps expected to devote these years of human living to some intelligible purpose?
Religion, of course, assured him that the answer to his query was written explicitly, in various books, in very dissimilar forms. But Kennaston could find little to attract him in any theory of the universe based upon direct revelations from heaven. Conceding that
divinity had actually stated so-and-so, from Sinai or Delphi or Mecca, and had been reported without miscomprehension or error, there was no particular reason for presuming that divinity had spoken veraciously: and, indeed, all available analogues went to show that nothing in nature dealt with its inferiors candidly. To liken the relationship to the intercourse of a father with his children, as did all revealed religions with queer uniformity, was at best a two-edged simile, in that it suggested a possible amiability of intention combined with inevitable duplicity. The range of an earthly father’s habitual deceptions, embracing the source of life and Christmas presents on one side and his own fallibility on the other, was wide enough to make the comparison suspicious. When fathers were at their worst they punished; and when in their kindliest and most expansive moods, why, then it was—precisely—that they told their children fairy-stories. It seemed to Kennaston, for a while, that all religions ended in this blind-alley.
To exercise for an allotted period divinely-recommended qualities known as virtues, and to be rewarded therefor, by an immortal score-keeper, appeared a rather childish performance all around. Yet every religion agreed in asserting that such was the course of human life at its noblest; and to believe matters were thus arranged indisputably satisfied an innate craving of men’s natures, as Kennaston was privileged to see for himself.
Under all theocracies the run of men proved much the same: as has been said, it was for the most part with quite ordinary people that Horvendile dealt in dreams. The Roman citizenry, for instance, he found did not devote existence, either under the Republic or the Empire, to shouting in unanimous response to metrical declamations, and worrying over their own bare legs, or in other ways conform to the best traditions of literature and the stage; nor did the Athenians corroborate their dramatists by talking perpetually of the might of Zeus or Aphrodite, any more than motormen and stockbrokers conversed continually of the Holy Ghost. Substantial people everywhere worshiped at their accustomed temple at accustomed intervals, and then put the matter out of mind, in precisely the
fashion of any reputable twentieth-century church-goer. Meanwhile they had their business-affairs, their sober chats on weather probabilities, their staid diversions (which everywhere bored them frightfully), their family jokes, their best and second-best clothes, their flirtations, their petty snobbishnesses, and their perfectly irrational faith in Omnipotence and in the general kindliness of Omnipotence—all these they had, and made play with, to round out living. Ritualistic worship everywhere seemed to be of the nature of a conscious outing, of a conscious departure from everyday life; it was generally felt that well-balanced people would not permit such jaunts to interfere with their business-matters or home-ties; but there was no doubt men did not like to live without religion and religion’s promise of a less trivial and more ordered and symmetrical existence—to-morrow.
Meanwhile, men were to worry, somehow, through to-day—doing as infrequent evil as they conveniently could, exercising as much bravery and honesty and benevolence as they happened to possess, through a life made up of unimportant tasks and tedious useless little habits. Men felt the routine to be niggardly: but to-morrow—as their priests and bonzes, their flamens and imauns, their medicine men and popes and rectors, were unanimous—would be quite different.
To-day alone was real. Never was man brought into contact with reality save through the evanescent emotions and sensations of that single moment, that infinitesimal fraction of a second, which was passing now and it was this, precisely, that you were to disregard. Such was the burden of all dead and lingering faiths alike. Here was, perhaps, only another instance of man-kind’s abhorrence of actualities; and man’s quaint dislike of facing reality was here disguised as a high moral principle. That was why all art, which strove to make the sensations of a moment soul-satisfying, was dimly felt to be irreligious. For art performed what religion only promised.
VEvolutionofaVestryman
BUT, much as man’s religion looked to a more ordered and symmetrical existence to-morrow, just so, upon another scale, man’s daily life seemed a continuous looking-forward to a terrestrial to-morrow. Kennaston could find in the past—even he, who was privileged to view the past in its actuality, rather than through the distorting media of books and national pride—no suggestion as to what, if anything, he was expected to do while his physical life lasted, or to what, if anything, this life was a prelude. Yet that to-day was only a dull overture to to-morrow seemed in mankind an instinctive belief. All life everywhere, as all people spent it, was in preparation for something that was to happen to-morrow. This was as true of Antioch as Lichfield, as much the case with Charlemagne and Sardanapalus, with Agamemnon and TiglathPileser, as with Felix Kennaston.
Kennaston considered his own life.... In childhood you had looked forward to being a man—a trapper of the plains or a railway engineer or a pirate, for choice, but pending that, to get through the necessity of going to school five times a week. In vacations, of course, you looked forward to school’s beginning again, because
next term was to be quite different from the last, and moreover because last session, in retrospection, did not appear to have been half bad. And of course you were always wishing it would hurry up and be your birthday, or Christmas, or even Easter.... Later, with puberty, had come the desire to be a devil with the women, like the fellows in Wycherley’s plays (a cherished volume, which your schoolmates, unaccountably, did not find sufficiently “spicy”); and to become a great author, like Shakespeare; and to have plenty of money, like the Count of Monte-Cristo; and to be thrown with, and into the intimate confidence of, famous people, like the hero of a Scott novel.... Kennaston reflected that his touchstones seemed universally to have come from the library.... And Felix Kennaston had achieved his desire, to every intent, however unready posterity stood to bracket him with Casanova or Don Juan, and however many tourists still went with reverence to Stratford. For the rest, he had sufficient money; and quite certainly he had met more celebrities than any other person living. Felix Kennaston reflected that, through accident’s signal favor, he had done all he had at any time very earnestly wanted to do; and that the result was always disappointing, and not as it was depicted in story-books.... He wondered why he should again be harking back to literary standards.
Then it occurred to him that, in reality, he had always been shuffling through to-day—somehow and anyhow—in the belief that to-morrow the life of Felix Kennaston would be converted into a romance like those in story-books.
The transfiguring touch was to come, it seemed, from a girl’s lips; but it had not; he kissed, and life remained uncharmed. It was to come from marriage, after which everything would be quite different; but the main innovation was that he missed the long delightful talks he used to have with Kathleen (mostly about Felix Kennaston), since as married people they appeared only to speak to each other, in passing, as it were, between the discharge of various domestic and social duties, and speaking then of having seen Soand-so, and of So-and-so’s having said this-or-that. The transfiguring
touch was to come from wealth; and it had not, for all that his address was in the Social Register, and was neatly typed in at the beginning of one copy of pretty much every appeal sent broadcast by charitable organizations. It was to come from fame; and it had not, even with the nine-day wonder over Men Who Loved Alison, and with Felix Kennaston’s pictorial misrepresentation figuring in public journals, almost as prodigally as if he had murdered his wife with peculiar brutality or headed a company to sell inexpensive shoes. And, at the bottom of his heart, he was still expecting the transfiguring touch to come, some day, from something he was to obtain or do, perhaps to-morrow.... Then he had by accident found out the sigil’s power....
Men everywhere were living as he had lived. People got their notions of life, if only at second- or third-hand, from books, precisely as he had done. Even Amrou had derived his notions as to the value of literature from a book. Men pretended laboriously that their own lives were like the purposeful and clearly motived life of book-land. In secret, the more perspicacious cherished the reflection that, any how, their lives would begin to be like that to-morrow. The purblind majority quite honestly believed that literature was meant to mimic human life, and that it did so. And in consequences, their loveaffairs, their maxims, their passions, their ethics, their conversations, their so-called natural ties and instincts, and above all, their wickednesses, became just so many bungling plagiarisms from something they had read, in a novel or a Bible or a poem or a newspaper. People progressed from the kindergarten to the cemetery assuming that their emotion at every crisis was what books taught them was the appropriate emotion, and without noticing that it was in reality something quite different. Human life was a distorting tarnished mirror held up to literature: this much at least of Wilde’s old paradox—that life mimicked art was indisputable. Human life, very clumsily, tried to reproduce the printed word. Human life was prompted by, and was based upon, printed words—“in the beginning was the Word,” precisely as Gospel asserted. Kennaston had it now. Living might become symmetrical,
well-plotted, coherent, and rational as living was in books. This was the hope which guided human beings through to-day with anticipation of to-morrow.
Then he perceived that there was no such thing as symmetry anywhere in inanimate nature....
It was Ettarre who first pointed out to him the fact, so tremendously apparent when once observed, that there was to be found nowhere in inanimate nature any approach to symmetry. It needed only a glance toward the sky the first clear night to show there was no pattern-work in the arrangement of the stars. Nor were the planets moving about the sun at speeds or distances which bore any conceivable relation to one another. It was all at loose ends. He wondered how he could possibly have been misled by pulpit platitudes into likening this circumambient anarchy to mechanism. To his finicky love of neatness the universe showed on a sudden as a vast disheveled horror. There seemed so little harmony, so faint a sense of order, back of all this infinite torrent of gyrations. Interstellar space seemed just a jumble of frozen or flaming spheres that, moving ceaselessly, appeared to avoid one another’s orbits, or to collide, by pure chance. This spate of stars, as in three monstrous freshets, might roughly serve some purpose; but there was to be found no more formal order therein than in the flow of water-drops over a mill-wheel.
And on earth there was no balancing in the distribution of land and water. Continents approached no regular shape. Mountains stood out like pimples or lay like broken welts across the habitable ground, with no symmetry of arrangement. Rivers ran anywhither, just as the haphazard slope of earth’s crevices directed; upon the map you saw quite clearly that their streams neither balanced one another nor watered the land with any pretense of equity. There was no symmetry anywhere in inanimate nature, no harmony, no equipoise of parts, no sense of form, not even a straight line. It was all at loose ends.
But living things aimed toward symmetry. In plants the notion seemed rudimentary, yet the goal was recognizable. The branches of a tree did not put out at ordered distance, nor could you discern any definite plan in their shaping: but in the leaves, at least, you detected an effort toward true balance: the two halves of a leaf, in a rough fashion, were equal. In every leaf and flower and grass-blade you saw this never entirely successful effort.
And in insects and reptiles and fish and birds and animals you saw again this effort, more creditably performed. All life seemed about the rather childish employment of producing a creature which consisted of two equal and exactly corresponding parts. It was true that in most cases this effort was foiled by an uneven distribution of color in plumage or scales or hide; but in insects and in mankind the goal, so far as went the eye, was reached. Men and insects, to the eye at least, could be divided into two equal halves....
But even so, there was no real symmetry in man’s body save in externals. The heart was not in the center; there was no order in the jumbled viscera; the two divisions of the brain did not correspond; there was nothing on the left side to balance the troublesome vermiform appendix on the right; even the lines in the palm of one hand were unlike those which marked the other: and everywhere, in fine, there was some irrational discrepancy. Man, the highest form as yet of life, had attained at most only a teasing semblance of that crude symmetry toward which all life seemed to aim, and which inanimate nature appeared to ignore. Nowhere in the universe could Kennaston discover any instance of quite equal balance, of anything which, as vision went, could be divided into two similar halves—save only in man’s handiwork. Here, again, insects approached man’s efforts more closely than the rest of creation; for many of them builded almost as truly. But man, alone in the universe, could produce exact visual symmetry, in a cathedral or a dinner-table or a pair of scissors, just as man so curiously mimicked symmetry in his outward appearance. The circumstance was droll, and no less quaint for the fact that it was perhaps without significance....
But Kennaston bemused himself with following out the notion that life was trying to evolve symmetry—order, proportion and true balance. Living creatures represented life’s gropings toward that goal. You saw, no doubt, a dim perception of this in the dream which sustained all human beings—that to-morrow living would begin to be symmetrical, well-plotted and coherent, like the progress of a novel.... And that was precisely what religion promised, only in more explicit terms, and with the story’s milieu fixed in romantic, rather than realistic, settings. Kennaston had here the sensation of fitting in the last bit of a puzzle. Life, yearning for symmetry, stood revealed as artist. Life strove toward the creation of art. That was all life cared about. Living things were more or less successful works of art, and were to be judged according to art’s canons alone. The universe was life’s big barren studio, which the Artist certainly had neither planned nor builded, but had, somehow, occupied, to make the best of its limitations. For Kennaston insisted that living things and inanimate nature had none of the earmarks of being by the same author. They were not in similar style, he said; thus, presupposing a sentient creator of the stars and planets, it would seem to have been in contradiction of his code to make both a man’s eyes of the same color.
It was this course of speculation which converted Kennaston to an abiding faith in Christianity, such as, our rector informs me, is deplorably rare in these lax pleasure-loving days of materialism. To believe this inconsiderable planet the peculiar center of a God’s efforts and attention had for a long while strained Kennaston’s credulity: the thing was so woefully out of proportion when you considered earth’s relative value in the universe. But now Felix Kennaston comprehended that in the insensate universe there was no proportion. The idea was unknown to the astral architect, or at best no part of his plan, if indeed there had been any pre-meditation or contriver concerned. Singly on our small earth—not even in the solar system of which earth made a part—was any sense of proportion evinced; and there it was apparent only in living things. Kennaston seemed to glimpse an Artist-God, with a commendable
sense of form—Kennaston’s fellow craftsman—the earth as that corner of the studio wherein the God was working just now, and all life as a romance the God was inditing....
That the plot of this romance began with Eden and reached its climax at Calvary, Kennaston was persuaded, solely and ardently, because of the surpassing beauty of the Christ-legend. No other myth compared with it from an æsthetic standpoint. He could imagine no theme more adequate to sustain a great romance than this of an Author suffering willingly for His puppets’ welfare; and mingling with His puppets in the similitude of one of them; and able to wring only contempt and pity from His puppets—since He had not endowed them with any faculties wherewith to comprehend their Creator’s nature and intent. Indeed, it was pretty much the plight which Kennaston had invented for his own puppets at Storisende, as Kennaston complacently reflected. It was the most tremendous situation imaginable; and quite certainly no Author could ever have failed to perceive, and to avail Himself of, its dramatic possibilities. To conceive that the world-romance did not center upon Calvary was to presume an intelligent and skilled Romancer blind to the basic principles of His art. His sense of pathos and of beauty and of irony could have led Him to select no other legend. And in the inconsistencies and unsolved problems, or even the apparent contradictions, of Christianity, Felix Kennaston could see only a possible error or omission on the Author’s part, such as was common to all romances. A few errata did not hamper the tale’s worth and splendor, or render it a whit less meritorious of admiration....
And, indeed, Felix Kennaston found that his theory of the Atonement was in harmony with quite orthodox teachings. The library at Alcluid revealed bewildered and perturbed generations at guess-work. How could a God have been placated, and turned from wrath to benevolence, by witnessing the torment of His own son? What pleasure, whereby He was propitiated, could the God have derived from watching the scene on Calvary? Or was the God, as priests had taught so long (within the same moment that they proclaimed the God’s omnipotence) not wholly a free agent, because
bound by laws whereby He was compelled to punish some one for humanity’s disobedience, with the staggering option of substituting an innocent victim? For if you granted that, you conceded to be higher than the God, and overruling Him, a power which made for flat injustice. Since Schleiermacher’s time, at least, as Kennaston discovered, there had been reasoning creatures to contest the possibility of such discrepant assumptions, and a dynasty of teachers who adhered to the “subjective” theory of propitiation. For these considered that Christ came, not primarily to be crucified, but by his life to reveal to men the nature of their God. The crucifixion was an incidental, almost inevitable, result of human obtuseness; and was pregnant with value only in that thereby the full extent of divine love was perfectly evinced. The personality, rather than the sufferings, of the Nazarene had thus satisfied, not any demand or attribute of the God by acting upon it from without, “but God’s total nature by revealing it and realizing it in humanity.” The God, in short, had satisfied Himself “by revealing and expressing His nature” in the material universe, precisely as lesser artists got relief from the worries of existence by depicting themselves in their books. Just as poets express themselves communicatively in words, so here the Author had expressed Himself in flesh. Such, in effect, had been the teaching of Karl Immanuel Nitzsch, of Richard Rothe, and of von Hofman, in Germany; of Auguste Bouvier in Geneva; of Alexandre Vinet, and of Auguste Sabatier, in France; of Frederick Denison Maurice, and John Caird, and Benjamin Jowett, in England; and in America of Horace Bushnell, and Elisha Mulford, and William Newton Clarke. The list was imposing: and Kennaston rejoiced to find himself at one with so many reputable theologians. For all these scholars had dimly divined, with whatever variousness they worded the belief, that the God’s satisfaction sprang, in reality, from the consciousness of having at last done a fine piece of artistic work, in creating the character of Christ....
So, as nearly as one can phrase the matter, it was really as a proof of confidence in his Author’s literary abilities that Felix Kennaston was presently confirmed at our little country church, to the delight of
his wife and the approbation of his neighbors. It was felt to be eminently suitable: that such a quiet well-to-do man of his years and station should not be a communicant was generally, indeed, adjudged unnatural. And when William T. Vartrey (of the Lichfield Iron Works) was gathered to his grandfathers, in the following autumn, Mr. Kennaston was rather as a matter of course elected to succeed him in the vestry. And Kennaston was unfeignedly pleased and flattered.
To the discerning it is easy enough to detect in all this fantastic theorizing the man’s obsessing love of ordered beauty and his abhorrence of slovenliness—of shapelessness—which make his writings so admirable, here alluring him to believe that such ideals must also be cherished by Omnipotence. This poet loved his formal art to the extent of coming to assume it was the purpose and the origin of terrestrial life. Life seemed to him, in short, a God’s chosen form of artistic self-expression; and as a confrère, Kennaston found the result praiseworthy. Even inanimate nature, he sometimes thought, might be a divine experiment in vers libre.... But neither the justice of Kennaston’s airdrawn surmises, nor their wildness, matters; the point is that they made of him a vestryman who in appearance and speech and actions, and in essential beliefs, differed not at all from his associates in office, who had comfortably acquired their standards by hearsay. So that the moral of his theorizing should be no less obvious than salutary.
Thus, he too entered at last into that belief which is man’s noble heritage....
“Or I would put it, rather, that belief is man’s métier,” Kennaston once corrected me—“for the sufficient reason that man has nothing to do with certainties. He cannot ever get in direct touch with reality. Such is the immutable law, the true cream of the jest. Felix Kennaston, so long as he wears the fleshly body of Felix Kennaston, is conscious only of various tiny disturbances in his brain-cells, which
entertain and interest him, but cannot pretend to probe to the roots of reality about anything. By the nature of my mental organs, it is the sensation the thing arouses in my brain of which I am aware, and never of the thing itself. I am conscious only of appearances. They may all be illusory. I cannot ever tell. But it is my human privilege to believe whatever I may elect.”
“And, my dear sir,” as I pointed out, “is not this hair-splitting, really, a reduction of human life to the very shallowest sort of mysticism, that gets you nowhere?”
“Now again, Harrowby, you are falling into the inveterate racedelusion that man is intended to get somewhere. I do not see that the notion rests on any readily apparent basis. It is at any rate a working hypothesis that in the world-romance man, being cast for the part of fool, quite obviously best furthers the dénouement’s success by wearing his motley bravely.... There was a fool in my own romance, a character of no great importance; yet it was an essential incident in the story that he should irresponsibly mislay the King’s letter, and Sir Guiron thus be forced to seek service under Duke Florestan. Perhaps, in similar fashion, it is here necessary to the Author’s scheme that man must simply go on striving to gain a little money, food, and sleep, a trinket or two, some moments of laughter, and at the last a decent bed to die in. For it may well be that man’s allotted part calls for just these actions, to round out the drama artistically. Yes; it is quite conceivable that, much as I shaped events at Storisende, so here the Author aims toward making an æsthetic masterpiece of His puppet-play as a whole, rather than at ending everything with a transformation scene such as, when we were younger, used so satisfactorily to close The Black Crook and The Devil’s Auction. For it may well be that the Author has, after all, more in common with Æschylus, say, than with Mr. Charles H. Yale.... So I must train my mind to be contented with appearances, whether they be true or not—and reserving always a permissible preference for pleasant delusions. Being mortal, I am able to contrive no thriftier bargain.”
“Being mortal,” I amended, “we pick our recreations to suit our tastes. Now I, for instance—as is, indeed, a matter of some notoriety and derision here in Lichfield—am interested in what people loosely speak of as ‘the occult.’ I don’t endeavor to persuade defunct poetesses to dictate via the Ouija board effusions which give little encouragement as to the present state of culture in Paradise, or to induce Napoleon to leave wherever he is and devote his energies to tipping a table for me, you understand.... But I quite fixedly believe the Wardens of Earth sometimes unbar strange windows, that face on other worlds than ours. And some of us, I think, once in a while get a peep through these windows. But we are not permitted to get a long peep, or an unobstructed peep, nor, very certainly, are we permitted to see all there is—out yonder. The fatal fault, sir, of your theorizing is that it is too complete. It aims to throw light upon the universe, and therefore is self-evidently moonshine. The Wardens of Earth do not desire that we should understand the universe, Mr. Kennaston; it is part of Their appointed task to insure that we never do; and because of Their efficiency every notion that any man, dead, living, or unborn, might form as to the universe will necessarily prove wrong. So, if for no other reason, I must decline to think of you and me as characters in a romance.”
BookFifth
“This was the measure of my soul’s delight; It had no power of joy to fly by day, Nor part in the large lordship of the light; But in a secret moon-beholden way Had all its will of dreams and pleasant night, And all the love and life that sleepers may.
“But such life’s triumph as men waking may It might not have to feed its faint delight.”
I
OfPoeticLove:Treatedwith PoeticInefficiency
SO much for what Kennaston termed his “serious reading” in chance-opened pages of the past. There were other dreams quite different in nature, which seemed, rather, to fulfil the function of romantic art, in satisfying his human craving for a full-fed emotional existence—dreams which Kennaston jestingly described as “belleslettres.” For now by turn—as murderer, saint, herdsman, serf, fop, pickpurse, troubadour, monk, bravo, lordling, monarch, and in countless other estates—Kennaston tasted those fruitless emotions which it is the privilege of art to arouse—joys without any inevitable purchase-price, regrets that were not bitter, and miseries which left him not a penny the worse.
But it was as a lover that his rôle most engrossed him, in many dreams wherein he bore for Ettarre such adoration as he had always wistfully hoped he might entertain toward some woman some day, and had not ever known in his waking hours. It was sober truth he had spoken at Storisende: “There is no woman like you in my country, Ettarre. I can find no woman anywhere resembling you
whom dreams alone may win to.” But now at last, even though it were only in dreams, he loved as he had always dimly felt he was capable of loving.... Even the old lost faculty of verse-making seemed to come back to him with this change, and he began again to fashion rhymes, elaborating bright odd vignettes of foiled love in out-of-the-way epochs and surroundings. These were the verses included, later, under the general title of “Dramatis Personæ,” in his ChimesatMidnight.
He wrote of foiled love necessarily, since not even as a lover might he win to success. It was the cream of some supernal jest that he might not touch Ettarre; that done, though but by accident, the dream ended, and the universe seemed to fold about him, just as a hand closes. He came to understand the reason of this. “Love must look toward something not quite accessible, something not quite understood,” he had said at Storisende: and this phrase, so lightly despatched, came home to him now as pregnant truth. For it was this fact which enabled him to love Ettarre, and had always prevented his loving any other woman.
All mortal women either loved some other man, and went with him somewhither beyond the area of your daily life, and so, in time were forgotten; or, else, they loved you, and laid bare to you their minds and bodies—and neither of these possessions ever proved so remarkable, when calmly viewed, as to justify continued infatuation therewith. Such at least Felix Kennaston had always found to be the case: love did not live, as lovers do, by feeding; but, paradoxically, got strength by hungering. It should be remembered, however, that Felix Kennaston was a poet....
He would sometimes think of the women who had loved him; and would speculate, with some wistfulness, if it was invariably true, as with his own amorous traffic, that love both kept and left its victims strangers to each other? He knew so little of these soft-lipped girls and women, when everything was said....
Yet there had been—he counted—yes, time had known eight chaste and comely gentlewomen, in all, who had “given themselves to him,” as the hackneyed phrase was. These eight affairs, at any event, had conformed to every tradition, and had been as thoroughgoing as might romantically be expected: but nothing much seemed to have come of them; and he did not feel in the upshot very well acquainted with their heroines. His sole emotion toward them nowadays was that of mild dislike. But six of them—again to utilize a venerable conjunction of words—had “deceived their husbands” for the caresses of an impecunious Kennaston; and the other two had anticipatorily “deceived” the husbands they took later: so that they must, he reflected, have loved Felix Kennaston sincerely. He was quite certain, though, that he had never loved any one of them as he had always wanted to love. No one of these women had given him what he sought in vain. Kennaston had felt this lack of success dispiritedly when, with soft arms about him, it was necessary to think of what he would say next. He had always in such circumstances managed to feign high rapture, to his temporary companion’s entire satisfaction, as he believed; but each adventure left him disappointed. It had not roused in him the overwhelming emotions lovers had in books, nor anything resembling these emotions; and that was what he had wanted, and had not ever realized, until the coming of Ettarre....
He had made love, as a prevalent rule, to married women— allured, again, by bookish standards, which advanced the commerce of Lancelot with Guinevere, or of Paolo Malatesta with his brother’s wife, as the supreme type of romantic passion. On more practical grounds, Kennaston preferred married women, partly because they were less stupid to converse with in general, and in particular did not bring up the question of marrying you; and in part because the husband in the background helped the situation pictorially—this notion also now seemed to be of literary origin—besides furnishing an unfailing topic of conversation. For unfaithful or wavering wives, to Kennaston’s finding, peculiarly delighted in talking about their husbands; and in such prattle failed either to exhibit the
conventional remorse toward, or any very grave complaint against, the discussed better-half. The inconsistency would have worried Kennaston’s sense of justice, had not these husbands always been so transparently certain of Kennaston’s insignificance.... Although judging of necessity only from his own experience, Kennaston was unable conscientiously to approve of adulterous love-affairs: they tended too soon toward tediousness; and married women seemed horribly quick to become matter-of-fact in the details of a liaison, and ready almost to confuse you with the husband.
The giggle and chatter of young girls Kennaston had always esteemed unalluring, even in his own youth. He had admired a number of them extravagantly, but only as ornamental objects upon which very ill-advisedly had been conferred the gift of speech. Today he looked back wistfully at times, as we must all do, to that girl who first had asked him if he was sure that he respected her as much as ever: but it was with the mental annotation that she had seven children now, and, as Kathleen put it, not a ray of good looks left. And he would meditate that he had certainly been fond of Margaret Hugonin, even though in the beginning it was her money which attracted him; and that Marian Winwood, despite her underhanded vengeance in publishing his letters, had been the most delectable of company all that ancient summer when it had rained so persistently. Then there had been tall Agnés Faroy, like a statue of gold and ivory; Kitty Provis, with those wonderful huge green eyes of hers; and Celia Reindan, she who wore that curious silver band across her forehead; and Helen Strong; and Blanche Druro; and Muriel.... In memory they arose like colorful and gracious phantoms, far more adorable than they had ever been on earth, when each of these had loaned, for a season, the touch of irresolute soft hands and friendly lips to a half-forgotten Felix Kennaston. All these, and others, had been, a long while since, the loveliest creatures that wore tender human flesh: and so, they had kissed, and they had talked time-hallowed nonsense, and they had shed the orthodox tears; and—also a long while since—they had died or they had married the conventional some one-else: and it did not matter the
beard of an onion to the pudgy pasty man that Felix Kennaston had come to be. He had possessed, or else of his own volition he had refrained from possessing, all these brightly-colored moth-brained girls: but he had loved none of them as he had always known he was capable of loving: and at best, these girls were dead now, or at worst, they had been converted into unaccountable people....
Kathleen was returning from the South that day, and Kennaston had gone into Lichfield to meet her train. The Florida Express was late by a full hour; so he sat in their motor-car, waiting, turning over some verses in his torpid mind, and just half-noticing persons who were gathering on the station platform to take the noon train going west. He was reflecting how ugly and trivial people’s faces appear when a crowd is viewed collectively—and wondering if the Author, looking down into a hot thronged street, was never tempted to obliterate the race as an unsuccessful experiment when Kennaston recognized Muriel Allardyce.
“I simply will not see her,” he decided. He turned his back that way, picked up the morning paper on the seat beside him, and began to read an editorial on immigration. What the deuce was she doing in Lichfield, any way? She lived in St. Louis now. She was probably visiting Avis Blagden. Evidently, she was going west on the noon train. If Kathleen’s train arrived before midday he would have to get out of the car to meet her, and all three would come together on the platform. If Muriel spied him there, in the open car, it would be not uncharacteristic of her to join him. And he could not go away, because Kathleen’s train was apt to arrive any minute. It was perfectly damnable. Why could the woman not stay in St. Louis, where she belonged, instead of gadding about the country? Thus Kennaston, as he re-read the statistics as to Poles and Magyars.
“I think there’s two ladies trying to speak to you, sir,” the chauffeur hazarded.
“Eh?—oh, yes!” said Kennaston. He looked, perforce, and saw that across the railway track both Muriel Allardyce and Avis Blagden were
regarding him with idiotic grins and wavings. He lifted his hat, smiled, waved his own hand, and retired between the pages of the LichfieldCourier-Herald. Muriel was wearing a light traveling veil, he reflected; he could pretend not to know who she was. With recognition, of course, he would be expected to come over and speak to her. He must remember to ask Avis, the very next time he saw her, who had been that familiar-looking person with her, and to express regret for his short-sightedness....
He decided to step out of the car, by way of the farther door, and buy a package of cigarettes on the other side of the street. He could loaf there and pray that Muriel’s train left before Kathleen’s arrived....
“I don’t believed you recognized us,” said Avis Blagden, at his elbow. “Or else you are trying to cut your old playmates.” The two women had brazenly pursued him. They were within a yard of him. It was indelicate. It was so perfectly unnecessary. He cordially wished some friendly engine had run them both down when they were crossing the tracks....
“Why, bless my soul!” he was saying, “this is indeed a delightful surprise. I had no idea you were in town, Mrs. Allardyce. I didn’t recognize you, with that veil on—”
“There’s Peter, at last,” said Avis. “I really must speak to him a moment.” And she promptly left them. Kennaston reflected that the whole transaction was self-evidently pre-arranged. And Muriel was, as if abstractedly, but deliberately, walking beyond earshot of the chauffeur. And there was nothing for it save to accompany her.
“It’s awfully jolly to see you again,” he observed, with fervor.
“Is it? Honestly, Felix, it looked almost as if you were trying to avoid me.” Kennaston wondered how he could ever have loved a woman of so little penetration.
“No, I didn’t recognize you, with that veil on,” he repeated. “And I had no idea you were in Lichfield. I do hope you are going to pay us all a nice long visit—”
“But, no, I am leaving on this train—”
“Oh, I say, but that’s too bad! And I never knew you were here!” he lamented.
“I only stopped overnight with Avis. I am on my way home—”
“To Leonard?” And Kennaston smiled. “How do you get on with him nowadays?”
“We are—contented, I suppose. He has his business—and politics. He is doing perfectly splendidly now, you know. And I have my memories.” Her voice changed. “I have my memories, Felix! Nothing —nothing can take that from me!”
“Good God, Muriel, there are a dozen people watching us—”
“What does that matter!”
“Well, it matters a lot to me. I live here, you know.”
She was silent for a moment. “You look your latest rôle in life so well, too, Felix. You are the respectable married gentleman to the last detail. Why, you are an old man now, Felix,” she said wistfully. “Your hair is gray about the ears, and you are fat, and there are wrinkles under your eyes—But are you happy, dear?” she asked, with the grave tender speech that he remembered. And momentarily the man forgot the people about them, and the fact that his wife’s train was due any minute.
“Happier than I deserve to be, Muriel.” His voice had quavered— not ineffectively, it appeared to him.
“That’s true, at least,” the woman said, as in reflection. “You treated me rather abominably, you know—like an old shoe.”
“I am not altogether sorry you take that view of it. For I wouldn’t want you to regret anything—not even that which, to me at least, is very sacred. But there was really nothing else to do save just to let things end. It was as hard,” he said, with a continuous flight of imagination, “it was as hard on me as you.”
“Sometimes I think it was simply because you were afraid of Leonard. I put that out of my mind, though, always. You see, I like to keep my memories. I have nothing else now, Felix—” She opened the small leather bag she carried, took out a handkerchief, and brushed her lips. “I am a fool, of course. Oh, it is funny to see your ugly little snub nose again! And I couldn’t help wanting to speak to you, once more—”
“It has been delightful. And some day I certainly do hope—But there’s your train, I think. The gates are going down.”
“And here is Avis coming. So good-by, Felix. It is really forever this time, I think—”
It seemed to him that she held in her left hand the sigil of Scoteia.... He stared at the gleaming thing, then raised his eyes to hers. She was smiling. Her eyes were the eyes of Ettarre. All the beauty of the world seemed gathered in this woman’s face....
“Don’t let it be forever! Come with me, Felix! There is only you— even now, there is only you. It is not yet too late—” Astounding as were the words, they came quite clearly, in a pleading frightened whisper.
The man was young for just that one wonderful moment of inexplicable yearning and self-loathing. Then, “I—I am afraid my wife would hardly like it,” he said, equably. “So good-by, Muriel. It has been very delightful to see you again.”
“I was mistaken, though, of course. It was the top of a vanity-box, or of a toilet water flask, or of something else, that she took out of the bag, when she was looking for her handkerchief. It was just a silly coincidence. I was mistaken, of course.... And here is Kathleen’s train. Thank goodness, it was late enough....”
Thus Kennaston, as he went to receive his wife’s cool kiss. And— having carefully mentioned as a matter of no earthly importance that he had just seen Muriel Allardyce, and that she had gone off terribly in looks, and that none of them seem to hold their own like you,
dear—he disbarred from mind that awkward moment’s delusion, and tried not to think of it any more.
Cross-PurposesinSpaciousTimes
SO Kennaston seemed to have got only disappointment and vexation and gainless vague regret from his love-affairs in the flesh; and all fleshly passion seemed to flicker out inevitably, however splendid the brief blaze. For you loved and lost; or else you loved and won: there was quick ending either way. And afterward unaccountable women haunted you, and worried you into unreasonable contrition, in defiance of commonsense....
But for Ettarre, who embodied all Kennaston was ever able to conceive of beauty and fearlessness and strange purity, all perfections, all the attributes of divinity, in a word, such as his slender human faculties were competent to understand, he must hunger always in vain. Whatever happened, Ettarre stayed inaccessible, even in dreams: her beauty was his to look on only; and always when he came too near that radiant loveliness which was Ettarre’s—that perfect beauty which was so full of troubling reticences, and so, was touched with something sinister—the dream would end, and the universe would seem to fold about him, just as a hand closes. Such was the law, the kindly law, as Kennaston now
believed, through which love might thrive even in the arid heart of a poet.
Sometimes, however, this law would lead to odd results, and left the dream an enigma. For instance, he had a quaint experience upon the night of that day during which he had talked with Muriel Allardyce....
“You are in all things a fortunate man, Master—ah—whatever your true name may be,” said the boy, pettishly flinging down the cards.
“Ods life, and have we done?” says Kennaston....
The two sat in a comfortable paneled room. There was a big open fire behind Kennaston; he could see its reflections flicker about the wood-work. The boy facing him was glowingly attired in green and gold, an ardent comely urchin, who (as Kennaston estimated) might perhaps be a page to Queen Elizabeth, or possibly was one of King James’s spoilt striplings. Between them was a rough deal table, littered with playing-cards; and upon it sat a tallish blue pitcher halffull of wine, four lighted candles stuck like corks in as many emptied bottles, and two coarse yellow mugs....
“Yes, we have done,” the boy answered; and, rising, smiled cherubically. “May I ask what the object may be that you conceal with such care in your left hand?” says he.
“To be candid,” Kennaston returned, “it is the King of Diamonds, that swarthy bearded Spaniard. I had intended it should serve as a corrective and encourager of Lady Fortune, when I turned it, my next deal, as the trump card. I’ faith, I thank God I have found the jade is to be influenced by such feats of manual activity. Oh, ay, sir, I may say it without conceit that my fingers have in these matters tolerable compass and variety.”
“A card-sharp!” sneers the boy. “La, half of us suspected it already; but it will be rare news to the town that Master Lionel Branch—as I must continue to call you—stands detected in such Greek knaveries.”
“Nay, but you will hardly live to moralize of it, sir. Oh, no, sir, indeed my poor arts must not be made public: for I would not seem to boast of my accomplishments. Harkee, sir, I abhor vain-glory. I name no man, sir; but I know very well there are snotty-nosed people who regard expedients toward amending the quirks of fate with puritan disfavor. Hah, but, signior, what is that to us knights of the moon, to us gallants of generous spirit?—Oh, Lord, sir, I protest I look upon such talents much as I do upon my breeches. I do consider them as possessions, not certainly to be vaunted, but indispensable to any gentleman who hopes to make a pleasing figure in the world.”
“All this bluster is wordy foolery, Master Branch. What I have seen, I have seen; and you will readily guess how I mean to use my knowledge.”
“I would give a great deal to find out what he is talking about,” was Kennaston’s reflection. “I have discovered, at least, that my present alias is Branch, but that I am in reality somebody else.” Aloud he said: “’Fore God, your eyesight is of the best, Master Skirlaw—(How the deucedid I knowhisname, now?)—Hah, I trust forthwith to prove if your sword be equally keen.”
“I will fight with no cheats—”
“I’ faith, sir, but I have heard that wine is a famed provoker of courage. Let us try the byword.” So saying, Kennaston picked up one mug, and flung its contents full in the boy’s face. It was white wine, Kennaston noted, for it did not stain Master Skirlaw’s handsome countenance at all.
“The insult is sufficient. Draw, and have done!” the lad said quietly. His sword gleamed in the restive reflections of that unseen fire behind Kennaston.
“Na, na! but, my most expeditious cockerel, surely this place is a thought too public? Now yonder is a noble courtyard. Oh, ay, favored by to-night’s moon, we may settle our matter without any hindrance or intolerable scandal. So, I will call my host, that we may have the
