Chapter I: Part 1

THE
CREAM
OF THE
JEST

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=BOOKS BY MR. CABELL=

NOVELS:
THE CREAM OF THE JEST
THE SOUL OF MELICENT
THE RIVET IN GRANDFATHER’S NECK
THE CORDS OF VANITY
THE EAGLE’S SHADOW

TALES:
THE CERTAIN HOUR
CHIVALRY
THE LINE OF LOVE
GALLANTRY

VERSES:
FROM THE HIDDEN WAY

GENEALOGIES:
BRANCH OF ABINGDON
BRANCHIANA
THE MAJORS AND THEIR MARRIAGES

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THE
CREAM
OF THE
JEST
═══════════════
A Comedy of Evasions
═══════════════
BY

JAMES BRANCH CABELL

“_Le pays où je voulais aller, tu m’y as mené en songe, cette nuit, et tu étais belle ... ah! que tu étais belle!... Mais, comme je n’ai aimé que ton ombre, tu me dispenseras, chère tête, de remercier ta réalité._”

NEW YORK
ROBERT M. McBRIDE & COMPANY
1917

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+Copyright, 1917, by+
ROBERT M. MCBRIDE & CO.
─────────

─────────
Published September, 1917

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TO

LOUISA NELSON

“_At me ab amore tuo diducet
nulla senectus._”

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Contents

BOOK FIRST

I INTRODUCES THE AGELESS WOMAN 3

II WHEREIN A CLERK APPRAISES A 11
FAIR COUNTRY

III OF THE DOUBLE-DEALER’S TRAFFIC 15
WITH A KNAVE

IV HOW THE DOUBLE-DEALER WAS OF 19
TWO MINDS

V TREATS OF MAUGIS D’AIGREMONT’S 23
POTTAGE

VI JOURNEYS END: WITH THE 26
CUSTOMARY UNMASKING

BOOK SECOND

I OF A TRIFLE FOUND IN TWILIGHT 37

II BEYOND USE AND WONT FARES THE 40
ROAD TO STORISENDE

III OF IDLE SPECULATIONS IN A 49
LIBRARY

IV HOW THERE WAS A LIGHT IN THE 55
FOG

V OF PUBLISHING: WITH AN 61
UNLIKELY APPENDIX

VI SUGGESTING THEMES OF UNIVERSAL 72
APPEAL

VII PECULIAR CONDUCT OF A 80
PERSONAGE

VIII OF VAIN REGRET AND WONDER IN 93
THE DARK

BOOK THIRD

I THEY COME TO A HIGH PLACE 103

II OF THE SIGIL AND ONE USE OF IT 107

III TREATS OF A PRELATE AND, IN 110
PART, OF PIGEONS

IV LOCAL LAWS OF NEPHELOCOCCYGIA 118

V OF DIVERS FLESHLY RIDDLES 125

VI IN PURSUIT OF A WHISPER 130

VII OF TRUISMS: TREATED REASONABLY 136

BOOK FOURTH

I ECONOMIC CONSIDERATIONS OF 143
PIETY

II DEALS WITH PEN SCRATCHES 150

III BY-PRODUCTS OF RATIONAL 156
ENDEAVOR

IV “EPPER SI MUOVE” 163

V EVOLUTION OF A VESTRYMAN 172

BOOK FIFTH

I OF POETIC LOVE: TREATED WITH 195
POETIC INEFFICIENCY

II CROSS-PURPOSES IN SPACIOUS 210
TIMES

III HORVENDILE TO ETTARRE: AT 217
WHITEHALL

IV HORVENDILE TO ETTARRE: AT 222
VAUX-LE-VICOMTE

V HORVENDILE TO ETTARRE: IN THE 226
CONCIERGERIE

VI OF ONE ENIGMA THAT THREATENED 232
TO PROVE ALLEGORICAL

VII TREATS OF WITCHES, MIXED 239
DRINKS, AND THE WEATHER

BOOK SIXTH

I SUNDRY DISCLOSURES OF THE 249
PRESS

II CONSIDERATIONS TOWARD SUNSET 254

III ONE WAY OF ELUSION 258

IV PAST STORISENDE FARES THE ROAD 262
OF USE AND WONT

V WHICH MR. FLAHERTY DOES NOT 269
QUITE EXPLAIN

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Preface

MUCH has been written critically about Felix Kennaston since the disappearance of his singular personality from the field of contemporary writers; and Mr. Froser’s _Biography_ contains all it is necessary to know as to the facts of Kennaston’s life. Yet most readers of the _Biography_, I think, must have felt that the great change in Kennaston no long while after he “came to forty year”—this sudden, almost unparalleled, conversion of a talent for tolerable verse into the full-fledged genius of _Men Who Loved Alison_—stays, after all, unexplained....

Hereinafter you have Kennaston’s own explanation. I do not know but that in hunting down one enigma it raises a bevy; but it, at worst, tells from his standpoint honestly how this change came about.

You are to remember that the tale is pieced together, in part from social knowledge of the man, and in part from the notes I made as to what Felix Kennaston in person told me, bit by bit, a year or two after events the tale commemorates. I had known the Kennastons for some while, with that continual shallow intimacy into which chance forces most country people with their near neighbors, before Kennaston ever spoke of—as he called the thing—the sigil. And, even then, it was as if with negligence he spoke, telling of what happened—or had appeared to happen—and answering my questions, with simply dumbfounding personal unconcern. It all seemed indescribably indecent: and I marveled no little, I can remember, as I took my notes....

Now I can understand it was just that his standard of values was no longer ours nor really human. You see—it hardly matters through how dependable an agency—Kennaston no longer thought of himself as a man of flesh-and-blood moving about a world of his compeers. Or, at least, that especial aspect of his existence was to him no longer a phase of any particular importance.

But to tell of his thoughts, is to anticipate. Hereinafter you have them full measure and, such as it is, his story. You must permit that I begin it in my own way, with what may to you at first seem dream-stuff. For I commence at Storisende, in the world’s youth, when the fourth Count Emmerick reigned in Poictesme, having not yet blundered into the disfavor of his papal cousin Adrian VII.... With such roundabout gambits alone can some of us approach—as one fancy begets another, if you will—to proud assurance that life is not a blind and aimless business; not all a hopeless waste and confusion; and that we ourselves may (by-and-by) be strong and excellent and wise.

Such, in any event, is the road that Kennaston took, and such the goal to which he was conducted. So, with that goal in view, I also begin where he began, and follow whither the dream led him. Meanwhile, I can but entreat you to remember it is only by preserving faith in human dreams that we may, after all, perhaps some day make them come true.

RICHARD FENTNOR HARROWBY.

_Montevideo 14 April 1917._

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_Book First_

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“Give place, fair ladies, and begone,
Ere pride hath had a fall!
For here at hand approacheth one
Whose grace doth stain you all.

“Ettarre is well compared
Unto the Phœnix kind,
Whose like was never seen or heard,
That any man can find.”

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I

Introduces the Ageless Woman

THE tale tells how Count Emmerick planned a notable marriage-feast for his sister La Beale Ettarre and Sir Guiron des Rocques. The tale relates that, in honor of this wedding, came from Nacumera, far oversea, Count Emmerick’s elder sister Dame Melicent and her husband the Comte de la Forêt, with an outlandish retinue of pagan slaves that caused great wonder. All Poictesme took holiday. The tale narrates how from Naimes to Lisuarte, and in the wild hill-country back of Perdigon, knights made ready for the tournament, traveling toward Storisende in gay silken garments such as were suited to these new times of peace. The highways in those parts shone with warriors, riding in companies of six or eight, wearing mantles worked in gold, and mounted upon valuable horses that glittered with new bits and housings. And the tale tells, also, how they came with horns sounding before them.

Ettarre watched from the turrets of Storisende, pensively. Yet she was happy in these days. “Indeed, there is now very little left this side of heaven for you to desire, madame,” said Horvendile the clerk, who stood beside her at his service.

“No, there is nothing now which troubles me, Horvendile, save the thought of Maugis d’Aigremont. I cannot ever be sure of happiness so long as that man lives.”

“So, so!” says Horvendile—“ah, yes, a master-villain, that! He is foiled for the present, and in hiding, nobody knows where; but I, too, would not wonder should he be contriving some new knavery. Say what you may, madame, I cannot but commend his persistency, however base be his motives; and in the forest of Bovion, where I rescued you from his clutches, the miscreant spoke with a hellish gusto that I could have found it in my heart to admire.”

Ettarre had never any liking for this half-scoffing kind of talk, to which the clerk was deplorably prone. “You speak very strangely at times, Horvendile. Wickedness cannot ever be admirable; and to praise it, even in jest, cannot but be displeasing to the Author of us all.”

“Eh, madame, I am not so sure of that. Certainly, the Author of those folk who have figured thus far in your history has not devoted His talents to creating perfect people.”

She wondered at him, and showed as much in the big blue eyes which had troubled so many men’s sleep. “Since time began, there has lived no nobler person or more constant lover than my lord Guiron.”

“Oh, yes, Sir Guiron, I grant you, is very nearly immaculate,” said Horvendile; and he yawned.

“My friend, you have always served him faithfully. We two cannot ever forget how much we have owed in the past to your quick wits and shrewd devices. Yet now your manner troubles me.”

Dame Ettarre spoke the truth, for, knowing the man to be unhappy—and suspecting the reason of his unhappiness, too—she would have comforted him; but Horvendile was not in a confiding mood. Whimsically he says:

“Rather, it is I who am troubled, madame. For envy possesses me, and a faint teasing weariness also possesses me, because I am not as Sir Guiron, and never can be. Look you, they prepare your wedding-feast now, your former sorrows are stingless; and to me, who have served you through hard seasons of adversity, it is as if I had been reading some romance, and had come now to the last page. Already you two grow shadowy; and already I incline to rank Sir Guiron and you, madame, with Arnaud and Fregonde, with Palmerin and Polinarda, with Gui and Floripas—with that fair throng of noted lovers whose innocuous mishaps we follow with pleasant agitation, and whom we dismiss to eternal happiness, with smiling incredulity, as we turn back to a workaday world. For it is necessary now that I return to my own country, and there I shall not ever see you any more.”

Ettarre, in common with the countryside, knew the man hopelessly loved her; and she pitied him to-day beyond wording. Happiness is a famed breeder of magnanimity. “My poor friend, we must get you a wife. Are there no women in your country?”

“Ah, but there is never any woman in one’s own country whom one can love, madame,” replies Horvendile shrewdly. “For love, I take it, must look toward something not quite accessible, something not quite understood. Now, I have been so unfortunate as to find the women of my country lacking in reticence. I know their opinions concerning everything—touching God and God’s private intentions, and touching me, and the people across the road—and how these women’s clothes are adjusted, and what they eat for breakfast, and what men have kissed them: there is no room for illusion anywhere. Nay, more: I am familiar with the mothers of these women, and in them I see quite plainly what these women will be some twenty years from this morning; there is not even room for hope. Ah, no, madame; the women of my country are the pleasantest of comrades, and the helpfullest of wives: but I cannot conceal it from myself that, after all, they are only human beings; and therefore it has never been possible for me to love any one of them.”

“And am I not, then, a human being, poor Horvendile?”

There was a tinge of mischief in the query; but beauty very often makes for lightheadedness, both in her that has and in him that views it; nor between Ind and Thule was there any lovelier maid than Ettarre. Smiling she awaited his answer; the sunlight glorified each delicate clarity of color in her fair face, and upon her breast gleamed the broken sigil of Scoteia, that famed talisman which never left her person. “And am I not, then, a human being?” says she.

Gravely Horvendile answered: “Not in my eyes, madame. For you embody all that I was ever able to conceive of beauty and fearlessness and strange purity. Therefore it is evident I do not see in you merely Count Emmerick’s third sister, but, instead, that ageless lovable and loving woman long worshiped and sought everywhere in vain by all poets.”

Horvendile meditated for a while. “Assuredly, it was you of whom blind Homer dreamed, comforting endless night with visions of your beauty, as you sat in a bright fragrant vaulted chamber weaving at a mighty loom, and embroidering on tapestry the battles men were waging about Troy because of your beauty; and very certainly it was to you that Hermes came over fields of violets and parsley, where you sang magic rhymes, sheltered by an island cavern, in which cedar and citron-wood were burning—and, calling you Calypso, bade you release Odysseus from the spell of your beauty. Sophocles, too, saw you bearing an ewer of bronze, and treading gingerly among gashed lamentable corpses, lest your loved dead be dishonored; and Sophocles called you Antigonê, praising your valor and your beauty. And when men named you Bombyca, Theocritus also sang of your grave drowsy voice and your feet carven of ivory, and of your tender heart and all your honey-pale sweet beauty.”

“I do not remember any of these troubadours you speak of, my poor Horvendile; but I am very certain that if they were poets they, also, must in their time have talked a great deal of nonsense.”

“And as Mark’s Queen,” says Horvendile, intent on his conceit, “you strayed with Tristran in the sunlit glades of Morois, that high forest, where many birds sang full-throated in the new light of spring; as Medeia you fled from Colchis; and as Esclairmonde you delivered Huon from the sardonic close wiles of heathenry, which to you seemed childish. All poets have had these fitful glimpses of you, Ettarre, and of that perfect beauty which is full of troubling reticences, and so, is somehow touched with something sinister. Now all these things I likewise see in you, Ettarre; and therefore, for my own sanity’s sake, I dare not concede that you are a human being.”

The clerk was very much in earnest. Ettarre granted that, insane as his talk seemed to her; and the patient yearning in his eyes was not displeasing to Ettarre. Her hand touched his cheek, quickly and lightly, like the brush of a bird’s wing.

“My poor Horvendile, you are in love with fantasies. There was never any lady such as you dream of.” Then she left him.

But Horvendile remained at the parapet, peering out over broad rolling uplands.

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II

Wherein a Clerk Appraises a Fair Country

HORVENDILE peered out over broad rolling uplands.... He viewed a noble country, good to live in, rich with grain and metal, embowered with tall forests, and watered by pleasant streams. Walled cities it had, and castles crowned its eminencies. Very far beneath Horvendile the leaded roofs of these fortresses glittered in sunlight, for Storisende guards the loftiest part of the province.

And the people of this land—from its lords of the high, the low, and the middle justice, to the sturdy whining beggars at its cathedral doors—were not all unworthy of this fair realm. Undoubtedly, it was a land, as Horvendile whimsically reflected, wherein human nature kept its first dignity and strength; and wherein human passions were never in a poor way to find expression with adequate speech and action.

Now, from the field below, a lark rose singing joyously. Straight into the air it rose, and was lost in the sun’s growing brilliance; but you could hear its singing; and then, as suddenly, the bird dropped to earth. No poet could resist embroidery on such a text.

Began Horvendile straightway: “_Quan vey la laudeta mover_”—or in other wording:

“When I behold the skylark move in perfect joy toward its love the sun, and, growing drunk with joy, forget the use of wings, so that it topples from the height of heaven, I envy the bird’s fate. I, too, would taste that ruinous mad moment of communion, there in heaven, and my heart dissolves in longing.

“Ailas! how little do I know of love!—I, who was once deluded by the conceit that I was all-wise in love. For I am unable to put aside desire for a woman whom I must always love in vain. She has bereft me of hope. She has robbed me of my heart, of herself, and of all joy in the world, and she has left me nothing save dreams and regrets.

“Never have I been able to recover my full senses since that moment when she first permitted me to see myself mirrored in her bright eyes. Hey, fatal mirrors! which flattered me too much! for I have sighed ever since I beheld my image in you. I have lost myself in you, like Narcissus in his fountain.”

Thus he lamented, standing alone among the turrets of Storisende. Now a troop of jongleurs was approaching the castle—gay dolls, jerked by invisible wires, the vagabonds seemed to be, from this height.

“More merry-makers for the marriage-feast. We must spare no appropriate ceremony. And yonder Count Emmerick is ordering the major-domo to prepare peacocks stuffed with beccaficoes, and a pastry builded like a palace. Hah, my beautiful fantastic little people, that I love and play with, and dispose of just as I please, it is time your master shift another puppet.”

So Horvendile descended, still poetizing: “_Pus ab mi dons no m pot valer_”—or in other wording:

“Since nothing will avail to move my lady—not prayers or righteous claims or mercy—and she desires my homage now no longer, I shall have nothing more to say of love. I must renounce love, and abjure it utterly. I must regard her whom I love as one no longer living. I must, in fine, do that which I prepare to do; and afterward I must depart into eternal exile.”

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III

Of the Double-Dealer’s Traffic With a Knave

HORVENDILE left the fortress, and came presently to Maugis d’Aigremont. Horvendile got speech with this brigand where he waited encamped in the hill-country of Perdigon, loth to leave Storisende since it held Ettarre whom he so much desired, but with too few adherents to venture an attack.

Maugis sprawled listless in his chair, wrapped in a mantle of soiled and faded green stuff, as though he were cold. In his hand was a naked sword, with which moodily he was prodding the torn papers scattered about him. He did not move at all, but his somber eyes lifted.

“What do you plan now, Horvendile?”

“Treachery, messire.”

“It is the only weapon of you scribblers. How will it serve me?”

Then Horvendile spoke. Maugis sat listening. Above the swordhilt the thumb of one hand was stroking the knuckles of the other carefully. His lean and sallow face stayed changeless.

Says Maugis: “It is a bold stroke—yes. But how do I know it is not some trap for me?”

Horvendile shrugged, and asked: “Have I not served you constantly in the past, messire?”

“You have suggested makeshifts very certainly. And to a pretty pass they have brought me! Here I roost like a starved buzzard, with no recreation save to watch the turrets of Storisende on clear afternoons.”

“Where Ettarre prepares to marry Sir Guiron,” Horvendile prompted.

“I think of that.... She is very beautiful, is she not, Horvendile? And she loves this stately kindly fool who carries his fair head so high and has no reason to hide anything from her. Yes, she is very beautiful, being created perfect by divine malice that she might be the ruin of men. So I loved her: and she did not love me, because I was not worthy of her love. And Guiron is in all things worthy of her. I cannot ever pardon him that, Horvendile.”

“And I am pointing out a way, messire, by which you may reasonably hope to deal with Sir Guiron—ho, and with the Counts Emmerick and Perion, and with Ettarre also—precisely as you elect.”

Then Maugis spoke wearily. “I must trust you, I suppose. But I have no lively faith in my judgments nowadays. I have played fast and loose with too many men, and the stench of their blood is in my nostrils, drugging me. I move in a half-sleep, and people’s talking seems remote and foolish. I can think clearly only when I think of how tender is the flesh of Ettarre. Heh, a lovely flashing peril allures me, through these days of fog, and I must trust you. Death is ugly, I know; but life is ugly too, and all my deeds are strange to me.”

The clerk was oddly moved. “Do you not know I love you as I never loved Guiron?”

“How can I tell? You are an outlander. Your ways are not our ways,” says the brigand moodily. “And what have I to do with love?”

“You will talk otherwise when you drink in the count’s seat, with Ettarre upon your knee,” Horvendile considered. “Observe, I do not promise you success! Yet I would have you remember it was by very much this same device that Count Perion won the sister of Ettarre.”

“Heh, if we fail,” replies Maugis, “I shall at least have done with remembering....” Then they settled details of the business in hand.

Thus Horvendile returned to Storisende before twilight had thickened into nightfall. He came thus to a place different in all things from the haggard outlaw’s camp, for Count Emmerick held that night a noble revel. There was gay talk and jest and dancing, with all other mirth men could devise.

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IV

How the Double-Dealer Was of Two Minds

IT was deep silent night when Horvendile came into the room where Ettarre slept. “Out, out!” cried Horvendile. “Let us have more light here, so that men may see the beauty men die for!” He went with a torch from lamp to lamp, kindling them all.

Ettarre stood between the bed-curtains, which were green hangings worked with birds and beasts of the field, each in his proper colors. The girl was robed in white; and upon her breast gleamed the broken sigil of Scoteia, that famed talisman which never left her person. She wore a scarlet girdle about her middle, and her loosened yellow hair fell heavy about her. Her fine proud face questioned the clerk in silence, without any trace of fear.

“We must wait now,” says Horvendile, “wait patiently for that which is to follow. For while the folk of Storisende slept—while your fair, favored lover slept, Ettarre, and your stout brothers Emmerick and Perion slept, and all persons who are your servitors and well-wishers slept—I, I, the puppet-shifter, have admitted Maugis d’Aigremont and his men into this castle. They are at work now, hammer-and-tongs, to decide who shall be master of Storisende and you.”

Her first speech you would have found odd at such a time. “But, oh, it was not you who betrayed us, Horvendile—not you whom Guiron loved!”

“You forget,” he returned, “that I, who am without any hope to win you, must attempt to view the squabbling of your other lovers without bias. It is the custom of omnipotence to do that, Ettarre. I have given Maugis d’Aigremont an equal chance with Sir Guiron. It is the custom of omnipotence to do that also, Ettarre. You will remember the tale was trite even in Job’s far time that the sweetmeats of life do not invariably fall to immaculate people.”

Then, as if on a sudden, Dame Ettarre seemed to understand that the clerk’s brain had been turned through his hopeless love for her. She wondered, dizzily, how she could have stayed blind to his insanity this long, recollecting the inconsequence of his acts and speeches in the past; but matters of heavier urgency were at hand. Here, with this apparent madman, she was on perilous ground; but now had arisen a hideous contention without; and the shrieks there, and the clash of metal there, spoke with rude eloquence of a harborage even less desirable.

“Heaven will defend the right!” Ettarre said bravely.

“I am not so sure that heaven has any finger in this pie. An arras hides all. It will lift presently, and either Good or Evil, either Guiron or Maugis, will come through that arras as your master. I am not certain as yet which one I shall permit to enter; and the matter rests with me, Ettarre.”

“Heaven will defend the right!” Ettarre said bravely.

And at that the arras quivered and heaved, so that its heavy embroideries were converted into a welter of shimmering gold, bright in the glare of many lamps, sparkling like the ocean’s waters at sunset; and Horvendile and Ettarre saw nothing else there for a breathless moment, which seemed to last for a great while. Then, parting, the arras yielded up Maugis d’Aigremont.

Horvendile chuckled.

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V

Treats of Maugis D’Aigremont’s Pottage

MAUGIS came forward, his eyes fixed hungrily upon Ettarre. “So a long struggle ends,” he said, very quiet. “There is no virtue left, Ettarre, save patience.”

“While life remains I shall not cease to shriek out your villainy. O God, men have let Guiron die!” she wailed.

“I will cause you to forget that death is dreadful, Ettarre!”

“I need no teacher now.... And so, Guiron is dead and I yet live! I had not thought that would be possible.” She whispered this. “Give me your sword, Maugis, for just a little while, and then I will not hate you any longer.”

The man said, with dreary patience: “Yes, you would die rather than endure my touch. And through my desire of you I have been stripped of wealth and joy and honor, and even of hope; through my desire of you I have held much filthy traffic, with treachery and theft and murder, traffic such as my soul loathed: and to no avail! Yes, I have been guilty of many wickednesses, as men estimate these matters; and yet, I swear to you, I seem to myself to be still that boy with whom you used to play, when you too were a child, Ettarre, and did not hate me. Heh, it is very strange how affairs fall out in this world of ours, so that a man may discern no aim or purpose anywhere!”

“Yet it is all foreplanned, Maugis.” Horvendile spoke thus.

“And to what end have you ensnared me, Horvendile?” says Maugis, turning wearily. “For the attack on Storisende has failed, and I am dying of many wounds, Horvendile. See how I bleed! Guiron and Perion and Emmerick and all their men are hunting me everywhere beyond that arras, and I am frightened, Horvendile—even I, who was Maugis, am frightened!—lest any of them find me here. For I desire now only to die untroubled. Oh, Horvendile, in an ill hour I trusted you!”

As knave and madman, Ettarre saw the double-dealer and his dupe confront each other. In the haggard face of Maugis, no longer evil, showed only puzzled lassitude. In the hand of Horvendile a dagger glittered; and his face was pensive.

“My poor Maugis, it is not yet time I make my dealings plain to you. It suffices that you have served my turn, Maugis, and that of you I have no need any longer. You must die now, Maugis.”

Ettarre feared this frozen madman, she who was by ordinary fearless. Ettarre turned away her face, so that she might not see the two men grapple. Without, the uproar continued—for a long while, it seemed. When she looked again it was, by some great wonder-working, to meet Guiron’s eyes and Guiron’s lips.

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VI

Journeys End: With the Customary Unmasking

“MY love, Ettarre, they have not harmed you?”

“None has harmed me, Guiron. Oh, and you?”

“Maugis is dead,” he answered joyously.

“See, here he lies, slain by brave Horvendile. And the rogues who followed Maugis are all killed or fled. Our woes are at an end, dear love.”

Then Ettarre saw that Horvendile indeed waited beside the dead body of Maugis d’Aigremont. And the clerk stayed motionless while she told Guiron of Horvendile’s baleful work.

Sir Guiron then said: “Is this true speech, Horvendile?”

“It is quite true I have done all these things, messire,” Horvendile answered quietly.

“And with what purpose?” said Sir Guiron, very sadly; for to him too it seemed certain that such senseless treachery could not spring from anything but madness, and he had loved Horvendile.

“I will tell you,” Horvendile replied, “though I much fear you will not understand—” He meditated, shook his head, smiling. “Indeed, how is it possible for me to make you understand? Well, I blurt out the truth. There was once in a land very far away from this land—in my country—a writer of romances. And once he constructed a romance which, after a hackneyed custom of my country, purported to be translated from an old manuscript written by an ancient clerk—called Horvendile. It told of Horvendile’s part in the love-business between Sir Guiron des Rocques and La Beale Ettarre. I am that writer of romance. This room, this castle, all the broad rolling countryside without, is but a portion of my dream, and these places have no existence save in my fancies. And you, messire—and you also, madame—and dead Maugis here, and all the others who seemed so real to me, are but the puppets I fashioned and shifted, for a tale’s sake, in that romance which now draws to a close.”

He paused; and Sir Guiron sighed. “My poor Horvendile!” was all he said.

“It is not possible for you to believe me, of course. And it may be that I, too, am only a figment of some greater dream, in just such case as yours, and that I, too, cannot understand. It may be the very cream of the jest that my country is no more real than Storisende. How could I judge if I, too, were a puppet? It is a thought which often troubles me....”

Horvendile deliberated, then spoke more briskly. “At all events, I must return now to my own country, which I do not love as I love this bright fantastic tiny land that I created—or seemed to create—and wherein I was—or seemed to be—omnipotent.”

Horvendile drew a deep breath; and he looked downward at the corpse he had bereft of pride and daring and agility. “Farewell, Maugis! It would be indecorous, above all in omnipotence, to express anything save abhorrence toward you: yet I delighted in you as you lived and moved; and it was not because of displeasure with you that I brought you to disaster. Hence, also, one might evolve a heady analogue....”

Guiron was wondering what he might do in accord with honor and with clemency. He did not stir as Horvendile came nearer. The clerk showed very pitiful and mean beside this stately champion in full armor, all shining metal, save for a surcoat of rose-colored stuff irregularly worked with crescents of silver.

“Farewell, Sir Guiron!” Horvendile then said. “There are no men like you in my country. I have found you difficult to manage; and I may confess now that I kept you so long imprisoned at Caer Idryn, and caused you to spend so many chapters oversea in heathendom, mainly in order that I might weave out my romance here untroubled by your disconcerting and rather wooden perfection. But you are not the person to suspect ill of your creator. You are all that I once meant to be, Guiron, all that I have forgotten how to be; and for a dead boy’s sake I love you.”

“Listen, poor wretch!” Sir Guiron answered, sternly; “you have this night done horrible mischief, you have caused the death of many estimable persons. Yet I have loved you, Horvendile, and I know that heaven, through heaven’s inscrutable wisdom, has smitten you with madness. That stair leads to the postern on the east side of the castle. Go forth from Storisende as quickly as you may, whilst none save us knows of your double-dealings. It may be that I am doing great wrong; but I cannot forget I have twice owed my life to you. If I must err at all hazards, I prefer to err upon the side of gratitude and mercy.”

“That is said very like you,” Horvendile replied. “Eh, it was not for nothing I endowed you with sky-towering magnanimity. Assuredly, I go, messire. And so, farewell, Ettarre!” Long and long Horvendile gazed upon the maiden. “There is no woman like you in my country, Ettarre. I can find no woman anywhere resembling you whom dreams alone may win to. It is a little thing to say that I have loved you; it is a bitter thing to know that I must live among, and pursue, and win, those other women.”

“My poor Horvendile,” she answered, very lovely in her compassion, “you are in love with fantasies.”

He held her hand, touching her for the last time; and he trembled. “Yes, I am in love with my fantasies, Ettarre; and, none the less, I must return into my own country and abide there always....”

As he considered the future, in the man’s face showed only puzzled lassitude; and you saw therein a quaint resemblance to Maugis d’Aigremont. “I find my country an inadequate place in which to live,” says Horvendile. “Oh, many persons live there happily enough! or, at worst, they seem to find the prizes and the applause of my country worth striving for whole-heartedly. But there is that in some of us which gets no exercise there; and we struggle blindly, with impotent yearning, to gain outlet for great powers which we know that we possess, even though we do not know their names. And so, we dreamers wander at adventure to Storisende—oh, and into more perilous realms sometimes!—in search of a life that will find employment for every faculty we have. For life in my country does not engross us utterly. We dreamers waste there at loose ends, waste futilely. All which we can ever see and hear and touch there, we dreamers dimly know, is at best but a portion of the truth, and is possibly not true at all. Oh, yes! it may be that we are not sane; could we be sure of that, it would be a comfort. But, as it is, we dreamers only know that life in my country does not content us, and never can content us. So we struggle, for a tiny dear-bought while, into other and fairer-seeming lands in search of—we know not what! And, after a little”—he relinquished the maiden’s hands, spread out his own hands, shrugging—“after a little, we must go back into my country and live there as best we may.”

A whimsical wise smile now visited Ettarre’s lips. Her hands went to her breast, and presently one half the broken sigil of Scoteia lay in Horvendile’s hand. “You will not always abide in your own country, Horvendile. Some day you will return to us at Storisende. The sign of the Dark Goddess will prove your safe-conduct then if Guiron and I be yet alive.”

Horvendile raised to his mouth the talisman warmed by contact with her sweet flesh. “It may be you will not live for a great while,” he says; “but that will befall through no lack of loving pains on your creator’s part.”

Then Horvendile left them. In the dark passage-way he paused, looking back at Guiron and Ettarre for a heart-beat. Guiron and Ettarre had already forgotten his existence. Hand-in-hand they stood in the bright room, young, beautiful and glad. Silently their lips met.

Horvendile closed the door, and so left Storisende forever. Without he came into a lonely quiet-colored world already expectant of dawn’s occupancy. Already the tree-trunks eastward showed like the black bars of a grate. Thus he walked in twilight, carrying half the sigil of Scoteia....

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_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.”

══════════════════════

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I

Of a Trifle Found in Twilight

THUS he walked in twilight, regretful that he must return to his own country, and live another life, and bear another name than that of Horvendile.... It was droll that in his own country folk should call him Felix, since Felix meant “happy”; and assuredly he was not pre-eminently happy there.

At least he had ended the love-business of Ettarre and Guiron happily, however droll the necessitated makeshifts might have been.... He had very certainly introduced the god in the car, against Horatian admonition, had wound up affairs with a sort of transformation scene.... It was, perhaps, at once too hackneyed and too odd an ending to be æsthetically satisfactory, after all.... Why, beyond doubt it was. He shrugged his impatience.

“Yet—what a true ending it would be!” he reflected. He was still walking in twilight—for the time was approaching sunset—in the gardens of Alcluid. He must devise another ending for this high-hearted story of Guiron and Ettarre.

Felix Kennaston smiled a little over the thought of ending the romance with such topsy-turvy anti-climaxes as his woolgathering wits had blundered into; and, stooping, picked up a shining bit of metal that lay beside the pathway. He was conscious of a vague notion he had just dropped this bit of metal.

“It is droll how all great geniuses instinctively plagiarize,” he reflected. “I must have seen this a half-hour ago, when I was walking up and down planning my final chapters. And so, I wove it into the tale as a breast-ornament for Ettarre, without ever consciously seeing the thing at all. Then, presto! I awake and find it growing dark, with me lackadaisically roaming in twilight clasping this bauble, just as I imagined Horvendile walking out of the castle of Storisende carrying much such a bauble. Oh, yes, the processes of inspiration are as irrational as if all poets took after their mothers.”

This bit of metal, Kennaston afterward ascertained, was almost an exact half of a disk, not quite three inches in diameter, which somehow had been broken or cut in two. It was of burnished metal—lead, he thought—about a sixteenth of an inch in thickness; and its single notable feature was the tiny characters with which one surface was inscribed.

Later Felix Kennaston was destined to puzzle over his inability to recollect what motive prompted him to slip this glittering trifle into his pocket. A trifle was all that it seemed then. He always remembered quite clearly how it sparkled in the abating glare of that day’s portentous sunset; and how the tree-trunks westward showed like the black bars of a grate, as he walked slowly through the gardens of Alcluid. Alcluid, be it explained, was the queer name with which Felix Kennaston’s progenitors had seen fit to christen their fine country home near Lichfield.

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II

Beyond Use and Wont Fares the Road to Storisende

KENNASTON was to recall, also, that on this evening he dined alone with his wife, sharing a taciturn meal. He and Kathleen talked of very little, now, save the existent day’s small happenings, such as having seen So-and-so, and of So-and-so’s having said this-or-that, as Kennaston reflected in the solitude of the library. But soon he was contentedly laboring upon the book he had always intended to write some day.

Off and on, in common with most high-school graduates, Felix Kennaston had been an “intending contributor” to various magazines, spasmodically bartering his postage-stamps for courteously-worded rejection-slips. Then, too, in the old days before his marriage, when Kennaston had come so near to capturing Margaret Hugonin and her big fortune, the heiress had paid for the printing of _The King’s Quest_ and its companion enterprises in rhyme, as well as the prose _Defence of Ignorance_—wide-margined specimens of the far-fetched decadence then in vogue, and the idol of Kennaston’s youth, when he had seriously essayed the parlor-tricks of “stylists.”

And it was once a familiar story how Marian Winwood got revenge on Felix Kennaston, when he married Kathleen Saumarez, by publishing, in a transparent guise of fiction, all the love-letters he had written Miss Winwood; so that Kennaston might also have claimed to be generally recognized as the actual author of her _Epistles of Ananias_, which years ago created some literary stir.

* * * * *

But this book was to be different from any of his previous compositions. To paraphrase Felix Kennaston’s own words (as recorded in the “Colophon” to _Men Who Loved Alison_), he had determined in this story lovingly to deal with an epoch and a society, and even a geography, whose comeliness had escaped the wear-and-tear of ever actually existing. He had attempted a jaunt into that “happy, harmless Fable-land” which is bounded by Avalon and Phæacia and Sea-coast Bohemia, and the contiguous forests of Arden and Broceliande, and on the west of course by the Hesperides, because he believed this country to be the one possible setting for a really satisfactory novel, even though its byways can boast of little traffic nowadays. He was completing, in fine, _The Audit at Storisende_—or, rather, _Men Who Loved Alison_, as the book came afterward to be called.

Competent critics in plenty have shrugged over Kennaston’s pretense therein that the romance is translated from an ancient manuscript. But to Kennaston the clerk Horvendile, the fictitious first writer of the chronicle and eye-witness of its events, was necessary. No doubt it handicapped the story’s progress, so to contrive matters that one subsidiary character should invariably be at hand when important doings were in execution, and should be taken more or less into everyone’s confidence—but then, somehow, it made the tale seem real.

For in the writing it all seemed perfectly real to Felix Kennaston. His life was rather barren of motive now. In remoter times, when he had wandered impecuniously from one adventure to another, sponging without hesitancy upon such wealthy people as his chatter amused, there had always been exquisite girls to make love to—such girls as the younger generation did not produce—and the ever-present problem of whence was to come the fares for to-morrow’s hansoms, in which the younger generation did not ride. For now hansom cabs were wellnigh as extinct as velocipedes or sedan-chairs, he owned two motors, and, by the drollest turn, had money in four banks. As recreation went, he and Kathleen had in Lichfield their round of decorous social duties; and there was nothing else to potter with save the writing. And a little by a little the life he wrote of came to seem to Felix Kennaston more real, and far more vital, than the life his body was shuffling through aimlessly.

For as Horvendile he lived among such gallant circumstances as he had always vaguely hoped his real life might provide to-morrow. This Horvendile, coming unintelligibly to Storisende, and witnessing there the long combat between Sir Guiron des Rocques and Maugis d’Aigremont for possession of La Beale Alison—as Kennaston’s heroine is called of course in the printed book—seems to us in reading the tale no very striking figure; as in _Rob Roy_ and _Esmond_, it is not to the narrator, but to the people and events he tells of, that attention is riveted. But Felix Kennaston, writing the book, lived the life of Horvendile in the long happy hours of writing, which became longer and longer; and insensibly his existence blended and was absorbed into the more colorful life of Horvendile. It was as Horvendile he wrote, seeming actually at times to remember what he recorded, rather than to invent....

And he called it inspiration....

So the tale flowed on, telling how Count Emmerick planned a notable marriage-feast for his sister La Beale Ettarre and Sir Guiron des Rocques, with vastly different results from those already recorded—with the results, in fine, which figure in the printed _Men Who Loved Alison_, where Horvendile keeps his proper place as a more or less convenient device for getting the tale told.

But to Kennaston that first irrational winding-up of affairs, wherein a world’s creator was able to wring only contempt and pity from his puppets—since he had not endowed them with any faculties wherewith to comprehend their creator’s nature and intent—was always the tale’s real ending....

* * * * *

So it was that the lonely man lived with his dreams, and toiled for the vision’s sake contentedly; and we of Lichfield who were most familiar with Felix Kennaston in the flesh knew nothing then of his mental diversions; and, with knowledge, would probably have liked him not a bit the better. For ordinary human beings, as all other normal forms of life, turn naturally toward the sun, and are at their best thereunder; but it is the misfortune of dreamers that their peculiar talents find no exercise in daylight. So we regarded Kennaston with the distrust universally accorded people who need to be meddling with ideas in a world which sustains its mental credit comfortably enough with a current coinage of phrases.

And therefore it may well be that I am setting down his story not all in sympathy, for in perfect candor I never, quite, liked Felix Kennaston. His high-pitched voice in talking, to begin with, was irritating: you knew it was not his natural voice, and found it so entirely senseless for him to speak thus. Then, too, the nervous and trivial grin with which he prefaced almost all his infrequent remarks—and the odd little noise, that was nearly a snigger and just missed being a cough, with which he ended them—was peculiarly uningratiating in a fat and middle-aged person; his weak eyes very rarely met yours full-gaze; and he was continually handling his face or fidgeting with a cigarette or twisting in his chair. When listening to you he usually nibbled at his fingernails, and when he talked he had a secretive way of looking at them.

Such habits are not wholly incompatible with wisdom or generosity, and the devil’s advocate would not advance them against their possessor’s canonization; none the less, in everyday life they make against your enjoying a chat with their possessor: and as for Kennaston’s undeniable mental gifts, there is no escaping, at times, the gloomy suspicion that fiddling with pens and ink is, after all, no fit employment for a grown man.

Felix Kennaston, to fix the word, was inadequate. His books apart, he was as a human being a failure. Indeed, in some inexpressible fashion, he impressed you as uneasily shirking life. Certainly he seemed since his marriage to have relinquished all conversational obligations to his wife. She had a curious trick of explaining him, before his face—in a manner which was not unreminiscent of the lecturer in “side-shows” pointing out the peculiarities of the living skeleton or the glass-eater; but it was done with such ill-concealed pride in him that I found it touching, even when she was boring me about the varieties of food he could not be induced to touch or his finicky passion for saving every bit of string he came across.

That suggests a minor mystery: many women had been fond of Felix Kennaston; and I have yet to find a man who liked him even moderately, to offset the host who marveled, with unseemly epithets, as to what these women saw in him. My wife explains it, rather enigmatically, that he was “just a twoser”; and that, in addition, he expected women to look after him, so that naturally they did. To her superior knowledge of the feminine mind I can but bow: with the addition (quoting the same authority) that a “twoser” is a trousered individual addicted to dumbness in company and the very thrilliest sort of play-acting in _tête-à-têtes_.

At all events, I never quite liked Felix Kennaston—not even after I came to understand that the man I knew in the flesh was but a very ill-drawn likeness of Felix Kennaston. After all, that is the whole sardonic point of his story—and, indeed, of every human story—that the person you or I find in the mirror is condemned eternally to misrepresent us in the eyes of our fellows. But even with comprehension, I never cordially liked the man; and so, it may well be that his story is set down not all in sympathy.

With which Gargantuan parenthesis, in equitable warning, I return again to his story.

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III

Of Idle Speculations in a Library

FELIX KENNASTON did not write very long that night. He fell idly to the droll familiar wondering how this dull fellow seated here in this luxurious room could actually be Felix Kennaston....

He was glad this spacious and subduedly-glowing place, and all the comfortable appointments of Alcluid, belonged to him. He had seen enough of the scrambling hand-to-mouth makeshifts of poverty, in poverty’s heart-depressing habitations, during the thirty-eight years he weathered before the simultaneous deaths, through a motor accident, of a semi-mythical personage known since childhood as “your Uncle Henry in Lichfield,” and of Uncle Henry’s only son as well, had raised Felix Kennaston beyond monetary frets. As yet Kennaston did not very profoundly believe in this unlooked-for turn; and in the library of his fine house in particular he had still a sense of treading alien territory under sufferance.

Yet it was a territory which tempted exploration with alluring vistas. Kennaston had always been, when there was time for it, “very fond of reading,” as his wife was used to state in tones of blended patronage and apology. Kathleen Kennaston, in the old days of poverty, had declaimed too many pilfered dicta concerning literary matters to retain any liking for them.

As possibly you may recall, for some years after the death of her first husband, Kathleen Eppes Saumarez had earned precarious bread and butter as a lecturer before women’s clubs, and was more or less engaged in journalism, chiefly as a reviewer of current literature. For all books she had thus acquired an abiding dislike. In particular, I think, she loathed the two volumes of “woodland tales” collected in those necessitous years, from her Woman’s Page in the _Lichfield Courier-Herald_, for the fickle general reading public, which then used to follow the life-histories of Bazoo the Bear and Mooshwa the Mink, and other “citizens of the wild,” with that incalculable unanimity which to-day may be reserved for the biographies of optimistic orphans, and to-morrow veers to _vies intimes_ of high-minded courtesans with hearts of gold.... In fine, through a variety of reasons, Mrs. Kennaston quite frankly cared even less for books, as manifestations of art, than does the average tolerably honest woman to whom books do not represent a source of income.

And you may or may not remember, likewise, what Kennaston wrote, about this time, in the “Colophon” to _Men Who Loved Alison_. With increased knowledge of the author, some sentences therein, to me at least, took on larger significance:

“No one, I take it, can afford to do without books unless he be
quite sure that his own day and personality are the best
imaginable; and for this class of persons the most crying need
is not, of course, seclusion in a library, but in a sanatorium.

“It was, instead, for the great generality, who combine a taste
for travel with a dislike for leaving home, that books were by
the luckiest hit invented, to confound the restrictions of
geography and the almanac. In consequence, from the Ptolemies to
the Capets, from the twilight of a spring dawn in Sicily to the
uglier shadow of Montfaucon’s gibbet, there intervenes but the
turning of a page, a choice between Theocritus and Villon. From
the Athens of Herodotus to the Versailles of St.-Simon, from
Naishapur to Cranford, it is equally quick traveling. All times
and lands that ever took the sun, indeed, lie open, equally, to
the explorer by the grace of Gutenberg; and transportation into
Greece or Rome or Persia or Chicago, equally, is the affair of a
moment. Then, too, the islands of Avalon and Ogygia and Theleme
stay always accessible, and magic casements open readily upon
the surf of Sea-coast Bohemia. For the armchair traveler alone
enjoys enfranchisement of a chronology, and of a geography, that
has escaped the wear-and-tear of ever actually existing.

“Peregrination in the realms of gold possesses also the quite
inestimable advantage that therein one’s personality is
contraband. As when Dante makes us free of Hell and Heaven, it
is on the fixed condition of our actual love and hate of divers
Renaissance Italians, whose exploits in the flesh require to-day
the curt elucidation of a footnote, just so, admission to those
high delights whereunto Shelley conducts is purchased by
accrediting to clouds and skylarks—let us sanely admit—a
temporary importance which we would never accord them unbiased.
The traveler has for the half-hour exchanged his personality for
that of his guide: such is the rule in literary highways, a very
necessary traffic ordinance: and so long as many of us are, upon
the whole, inferior to Dante or Shelley—or Sophocles, or
Thackeray, or even Shakespeare—the change need not make entirely
for loss....”

Yes, it is lightly phrased; but, after all, it is only another way of confessing that his books afforded Kennaston an avenue to forgetfulness of that fat pasty fellow whom Kennaston was heartily tired of being. For one, I find the admission significant of much, in view of what befell him afterward.