Chapter V: Part 5

“The Troupe of Monsieur is about to present an open-air comedy. It is called _Les Facheux_—The Bores. It is rumored to take off very cleverly the trivial tedious fashion in which perfectly well-meaning people chatter their way through life. But that more fittingly would be the theme of a tragedy, Ettarre. Men are condemned eternally to bore one another. Two hundred years and more from to-day—perhaps forever—man will lack means, or courage, to voice his actual thoughts adequately. He must still talk of weather probabilities and of having seen So-and-so and of such trifles, that mean absolutely nothing to him—and must babble of these things even to the persons who are most dear and familiar to him. Yes, every reputable man must desperately make small-talk, and echo and re-echo senseless phrases, until the crack of doom. He will always be afraid to bare his actual thoughts and interests to his fellows’ possible disapproval: or perhaps it is just a pitiable mania with the race. At all events, one should not laugh at this ageless aspersion and burlesque of man’s intelligence as performed by man himself....

“The comedy is quite new. A marquis, with wonderful canions and a scented wig like an edifice, told me it is by an upholsterer named Coquelin, a barnstormer who ran away from home and has been knocking about the provinces unsuccessfully for nearly twenty years: and my little marquis wondered what in the world we are coming to, when Monsieur le Surintendent takes up with that class of people. Is not my little marquis droll?—for he meant Poquelin, soon to be Poquelin de Molière, of course. Molière, also, is a name which is not famous as yet. But in a month or so it will be famous for all time; and Monsieur le Surintendent will be in jail and forgotten....

“You smile, Ettarre? Ah, yes, I understand. Molière too adores you. All poets have had fitful glimpses of you, Ettarre, and of that perfect beauty which is full of troubling reticences, and so, is touched with something sinister. I have written as to the price they pay, these hapless poets, in a little book I am inditing through that fat pudgy body I wear in the flesh.... Do not frown: I know it is forbidden to talk with you concerning my life in the flesh....

“Ah, the King comes—evidently in no very amiable frame of mind—and all rise, like a flurry of great butterflies. It is the beginning of the play. See, a woman is coming out of the big shell in the fountain....

“I wish my old friend Jonas d’Artagnan were here. It is a real pity he is only a character in fiction—just as I once thought you were, Ettarre. Eh, what a fool I was to imagine I had created you! and that I controlled your speech and doings! I know much better now....

“Ettarre, your unattainable beauty tears my heart. Is that black-browed Molière your lover too? What favors have you granted him? You perceive I am jealous. How can I be otherwise, when there is nothing, nothing in me that does not cry out for love of you? And I am forbidden ever to win quite to you, ever to touch you, ever to see you even save in my dreams!”

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V

Horvendile to Ettarre: In the Conciergerie

THEY waited in a big dark room of the Conciergerie, with many other condemned émigrants, until the tumbrils should come to fetch them to the Place de la Révolution. They stood beneath a narrow barred window, set high in the wall, so that thin winter sunlight made the girl’s face visible. Misery was about them, death waited without: and it did not matter a pennyworth.

“Ettarre, I know to-day that all my life I have been seeking you. Very long ago when I was a child it was made clear that you awaited me somewhere; and, I recollect now, I used to hunger for your coming with a longing which has not any name. And when I went about the dusty world I still believed you waited somewhere—till I should find you, as I inevitably must, or soon or late. Did I go upon a journey to some unfamiliar place?—it might be that unwittingly I traveled toward your home. I could never pass a walled garden where green tree-tops showed without suspecting, even while I shrugged to think how wild was the imagining, that there was only the wall between us. I did not know the color of your eyes, but I knew what I would read there. And for a fevered season I appeared to encounter many women of earth who resembled you—”

“All women resemble me, Horvendile. Whatever flesh they may wear as a garment, and however time-frayed or dull-hued or stained by horrible misuse that garment may seem to be, the wearer of that garment is no less fair than I, could any man see her quite clearly. Horvendile, were that not true, could our great Author find anywhere a woman’s body which wickedness and ugliness controlled unchecked, all the big stars which light the universe, and even the tiny sun that our earth spins about, would be blown out like unneeded candles, for the Author’s labor would have been frustrated and misspent.”

“Yes; I know now that this is true.... See, Ettarre! Yonder woman is furtively coloring her cheeks with a little wet red rag. She does not wish to seem pale—or is it that she wishes to look her best?—in the moment of death.... Ettarre, my love for you whom I could not ever find, was not of earth, and I could not transfer it to an earthly woman. The lively hues, the lovely curvings and the fragrant tender flesh of earth’s women were deft to cast their spells; but presently I knew this magic was only of the body. It might be I was honoring divinity; but it was certain that even in such case I was doing so by posturing before my divinity’s effigy in tinted clay. Besides, it is not possible to know with any certainty what is going on in the round glossy little heads of women. ‘I hide no secrets from you, because I love you,’ say they?—eh, and their love may be anything from a mild preference to a flat lie. And so, I came finally to concede that all women are creatures of like frailties and limitations and reserves as myself, and I was most poignantly lonely when I was luckiest in love. Once only, in my life in the flesh, it seemed to me that a woman, whom I had abandoned, held in her hand the sigil visibly. That memory has often troubled me, Ettarre. It may be that this woman could have given me what I sought everywhere in vain. But I did not know this until it was too late, until the chance and the woman’s life alike were wasted.... And so, I grew apathetic, senseless and without any spurring aspiration, seeing that all human beings are so securely locked in the prison of their flesh.”

“When immortals visit earth it is necessary they assume the appearance of some animal. Very long ago, as we have seen, Horvendile, that secret was discovered, which so many myths veil thinly: and have we not learned, too, that the animal’s fleshly body is a disguise which it is possible to put aside?”

“That knowledge, so fearfully purchased at the Sabbat, still troubles me, Ettarre.... Monsieur le Prince, I regret the circumstance, but—as you see—my snuff-box is quite empty. Ah, but yes, as you very justly observe, rappee, repose and rationality are equally hard to come by in these mad days.... Is that not droll, Ettarre? This unvenerable old Prince de Gâtinais—once Grand Duke of Noumaria, you remember—has been guilty in his career of every iniquity and meanness and cowardice: now, facing instant death, he finds time to think of snuff and phrase-making.... But—to go back a little—I had thought the Sabbat would be so different! One imagined there would be cauldrons, and hags upon prancing broomsticks, and a black goat, of course—”

“How much more terrible it is—and how beautiful!”

“Yet—even now I may not touch you, Ettarre.”

“My friend, all men have striven to do that; and I have evaded each one of them at the last, and innumerable are the ways of my elusion. There is no man but has loved me, no man that has forgotten me, and none but has attempted to express that which he saw and understood when I was visible.”

“Do I not know? There is no beauty in the world save those stray hints of you, Ettarre. Canvas and stone and verse speak brokenly of you sometimes; all music yearns toward you, Ettarre, all sunsets whisper of you, and it is because they waken memories of you that the eyes of all children so obscurely trouble and delight us. Ettarre, your unattainable beauty tears my heart. There is nothing, nothing in me that does not cry out for love of you. And it is the cream of a vile jest that I am forbidden ever to win quite to you, ever to touch you, ever to see you even save in my dreams!”

“Already this dream draws toward an end, my poor Horvendile.”

And he saw that the great doors—which led to death—were unclosing: and beyond them he saw confusedly a mob of red-capped men, of malignant frenzied women, of wide-eyed little children, and the staid officials, chatting pleasantly among themselves, who came to fetch that day’s tale of those condemned to the guillotine. But more vividly Kennaston saw Ettarre and how tenderly she smiled, in thin wintry sunlight, as she touched Kennaston upon the breast, so that the dream might end and he might escape the guillotine.

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VI

Of One Enigma that Threatened to Prove Allegorical

THEN again Kennaston stood alone before a tall window, made up of many lozenge-shaped panes of clear glass set in lead framework. He had put aside one of the two great curtains—of a very fine stuff like gauze, stitched over with transparent glittering beetle-wings, and embroidered with tiny seed pearls—which hung before this window.

Snow covered the expanse of house-tops without, and the sky without was glorious with chill stars. That white city belonged to him, he knew, with a host of other cities. He was the strongest of kings. People dreaded him, he knew; and he wondered why any one should esteem a frail weakling such as he to be formidable. The hand of this great king—his own hand, that held aside the curtain before him—was shriveled and colorless as lambs’ wools. It was like a horrible bird-claw.

(“_But then I have the advantage of remembering the twentieth century,” he thought, fleetingly, “and all my contemporaries are superstitious ignorant folk. It is strange, but in this dream I appear to be an old man. That never happened before._”)

A remote music resounded in his ears, and cloying perfumes were about him....

“I want to be happy. And that is impossible, because there is no happiness anywhere in the world. I, a great king, say this—I, who am known in unmapped lands, and before whom nations tremble. For there are but three desirable things in life—love and power and wisdom: and I, the king, have sounded the depths of these, and in none is happiness.”

Despairing words came to him now, and welled to his lips, in a sort of chaunt:

“I am sad to-night, for I remember that I once loved a woman. She was white as the moon; her hair was a gold cloud; she had untroubled eyes. She was so fair that I longed for her until my heart was as the heart of a God. But she sickened and died: worms had their will of her, not I. So I took other women, and my bed was never lonely. Bright poisonous women were brought to me, from beyond the sunset, from the Fortunate Islands, from Invallis and Planasia even; and these showed me nameless endearments and many curious perverse pleasures. But I was not able to forget that woman who was denied me because death had taken her: and I grew a-weary of love, for I perceived that all which has known life must suffer death.

“There was no people anywhere who could withstand my armies. We traveled far in search of such a people. My armies rode into a country of great heat and endless sands, and contended with the Presbyter’s brown horsemen, who fought with arrows and brightly painted bows; and we slew them. My armies entered into a land where men make their homes in the shells of huge snails, and feed upon white worms which have black heads; and we slew them. My armies passed into a land where a people that have no language dwell in dark caves under the earth, and worship a stone that has sixty colors; and we slew them, teaching ruthlessly that all which has known life must suffer death.

“Many stiff-necked kings, still clad in purple and scarlet and wearing gold crowns—monarchs whose proud faces, for all that these men were my slaves, kept their old fashion and stayed changeless as the faces of statues—such were my lackeys: and I burned walled cities. Empires were my playthings, but I had no son to inherit after me. I had no son—only that dead horrible mangled worm, born dead, that I remember seeing very long ago where the woman I loved lay dead. That would have been my son had the thing lived—a greater and a nobler king than I. But death willed otherwise: the life that moved in me was not to be perpetuated: and so, the heart in my body grew dried and little and shriveled, like a parched pea: for I perceived that all which has known life must suffer death.

“Then I turned from warfare, and sought for wisdom. I learned all that it is permitted any man to know—oh, I learned more than is permissible. Have I not summoned demons from the depths of the sea, and at the Sabbat have I not smitten haggard Gods upon the cheek? Yea, at Phigalia did I not pass beneath the earth and strive with a terrible Black Woman, who had the head of a horse, and wrest from her what I desired to know? Have I not talked with Morskoi, that evil formless ruler of the Sea-Folk, and made a compact with him? And has not even Phobetor, whose real name may not be spoken, revealed to me his secrets, at a paid price of which I do not care to think, now I perceive that all which has known life must suffer death?

“Yea, by the Hoofs of the Goat! it seems to me that I have done these things; yet how may I be sure? For I have learned, too, that all man’s senses lie to him, that nothing we see or hear or touch is truthfully reported, and that the visible world at best stands like an island in an uncharted ocean which is a highway, none the less, for much alien traffic. Yet, it seems to me that I found means whereby the universe I live in was stripped of many veils. It seems to me that I do not regret having done this.... But presently I shall be dead, and all my dearly-purchased, wearily-earned wisdom must lie quiet in a big stone box, and all which has known life must suffer death.

“For death is mighty, and against it naught can avail: it is terrible and strong and cruel, and a lover of bitter jests. And presently, whatever I have done or learned or dreamed, I must lie helpless where worms will have their will of me, and neither the worms nor I will think it odd. For all which has known life must suffer death.”

A remote music resounded in his ears, and cloying perfumes were about him. Turning, he saw that the walls of this strange room were of iridescent lacquer, worked with bulls and apes and parrots in raised gold: black curtains screened the doors: and the bare floor was of smooth sea-green onyx. A woman stood there, who did not speak, but only waited. At length he knew what terror was, for terror possessed him utterly; and yet he was elated.

“You have come, then, at last....”

“To you at last I have come as I come to all men,” she answered, “in my good hour.” And Ettarre’s hands, gleaming and half-hidden with jewels, reached toward his hands, so gladly raised to hers; and the universe seemed to fold about him, just as a hand closes.

* * * * *

Was it as death she came to him in this dream?—as death made manifest as man’s liberation from much vain toil? Kennaston, at least, preferred to think his dreams were not degenerating into such hackneyed crude misleading allegories. Or perhaps it was as ghost of the dead woman he had loved she came, now that he was age-stricken and nearing death, for in this one dream alone he had seemed to be an old man.

Kennaston could not ever be sure; the broken dream remained an enigma; but he got sweet terror and happiness of the dream, for all that, tasting his moment of inexplicable poignant emotion: and therewith he was content.

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VII

Treats of Witches, Mixed Drinks, and the Weather

MEANWHILE, I used to see Kennaston nearly every day.... Looking back, I recollect one afternoon when the Kennastons were calling on us. It was the usual sort of late-afternoon call customarily exchanged by country neighbors....

“We have been intending to come over for ever so long,” Mrs. Kennaston explained. “But we have been in such a rush, getting ready for the summer—”

“We only got the carpets up yesterday,” my wife assented. “Riggs just kept promising and promising, but he did finally get a man out—”

“Well, the roads are in pretty bad shape,” I suggested, “and those vans are fearfully heavy—”

“Still, if they would just be honest about it,” Mrs. Kennaston bewailed—“and not keep putting you off—No, I really don’t think I ever saw the Loop road in worse condition—”

“It’s the long rainy spell we ought to have had in May,” I informed her. “The seasons are changing so, though, nowadays that nobody can keep up with them.”

“Yes, Felix was saying only to-day that we seem no longer to have any real spring. We simply go straight from winter into summer.”

“I was endeavoring to persuade her,” Kennaston amended, “that it was foolish to go away as long as it stays cool as it is.”

“Oh, yes, _now_!” my wife conceded. “But the paper says we are in for a long heat period about the fifteenth. For my part, I think July is always our worst month.”

“It is just that you feel the heat so much more during the first warm days,” I suggested.

“Oh, no!” my wife said, earnestly; “the nights are cool in August, and you can stand the days. Of course, there are apt to be a few mosquitoes in September, but not many if you are careful about standing water—”

“The drain-pipe to the gutter around our porch got stopped somehow, last year”—this Kennaston contributed, morosely—“and we had a terrible time.”

“—Then there is always so much to do, getting the children started at school,” my wife continued—“everything under the sun needed at the last moment, of course! And the way they change all the school-books every year is simply ridiculous. So, if I had my way, we would always go away early, and be back again in good time to get things in shape—”

“Oh, yes, if we could have our way!”—Mrs. Kennaston could not deny that—“but don’t your servants always want August off, to go home? I know ours do: and, my dear, you simply don’t dare say a word.”

“That is the great trouble in the country,” I philosophized—“in fact, we suburbanites are pretty well hag-ridden by our dusky familiars. The old-time darkies are dying out, and the younger generation is simply worthless. And with no more sense of gratitude—Why, Moira hired a new girl last week, to help out upstairs, and—”

“Oh, yes, hag-ridden! like the unfortunate magicians in old stories!” Kennaston broke in, on a sudden. “We were speaking about such things the other day, you remember? I have been thinking—You see, every one tells me that, apart from being a master soapboiler, Mr. Harrowby, you are by way of being an authority on witchcraft and similar murky accomplishments?” And he ended with that irritating little noise, that was nearly a snigger, and just missed being a cough.

“It so often comes over me,” says Moira—which happens to be my wife’s name—“that Dick, all by himself, is really Harrowby & Sons, Inc.”—she spoke as if I were some sort of writing-fluid—“and has his products on sale all over the world. I look on him in a new light, so to speak, when I realize that daily he is gladdening Calcutta with his soaps, delighting London with his dentifrice, and comforting Nova Zembla with his talcum powder.”

“Well, but I inherited all that. It isn’t fair to fling ancestral soap-vats in my face,” I reminded her. “And yes, I have dabbled a bit in forces that aren’t as yet thoroughly understood, Mr. Kennaston. I wouldn’t go so far as to admit to witchcraft, though. Very certainly I never attended a Sabbat.”

I recollect now how his face changed. “And what in heaven’s name was a Sabbat?” Then he fidgeted, and crossed his legs the other way.

“Well! it was scarcely heaven’s name that was invoked there, if old tales are to be trusted. Traditionally, the Sabbat was a meeting attended by all witches in satisfactory diabolical standing, lightly attired in smears of various magical ointments; and their vehicle of transportation to this outing was, of course, the traditional broomstick. Good Friday,” I continued, seeing they all seemed willing enough to listen, “was the favorite date for these gatherings, which were likewise sometimes held on St. John’s Eve, on Walburga’s Eve, and on Hallowe’en Night. The diversions were numerous: there was feasting, music, and dancing, with the devil performing obligatos on the pipes or a cittern, and not infrequently preaching a burlesque sermon. He usually attended in the form of a monstrous goat; and when—when not amorously inclined, often thrashed the witches with their own broomsticks. The more practical pursuits of the evening included the opening of graves, to despoil dead bodies of finger- and toe-joints, and certain portions of the winding-sheet, with which to prepare a powder that had strange uses.... But the less said of that, the better. Here, also, the devil taught his disciples how to make and christen statues of wax, so that by roasting these effigies the persons whose names they bore would be wasted away by sickness.”

“I see,” says Kennaston, intently regarding his fingernails: “they must have been highly enjoyable social outings, all around.”

“They must have been worse than family reunions,” put in Mrs. Kennaston, and affected to shudder.

“Indeed, there are certain points of resemblance,” I conceded, “in the general atmosphere of jealous hostility and the ruthless digging-up of what were better left buried.”

Then Kennaston asked carelessly, “But how could such absurd superstitions ever get any hold on people, do you suppose?”

“That would require rather a lengthy explanation—Why, no,” I protested, in answer to his shrug; “the Sabbat is not inexplicable. Hahn-Kraftner’s book, or Herbert Perlin’s either, will give you a very fair notion of what the Sabbat really was—something not in the least grotesque, but infinitely more awe-inspiring than is hinted by any traditions in popular use. And Le Bret, whom bookdealers rightly list as ‘curious’—”

“Yes. I have read those books, it happens. My uncle had them, you know. But”—Kennaston was plainly not quite at ease—“but, after all, is it not more wholesome to dismiss such theories as fantastic nonsense, even if they are perfectly true?”

“Why, not of necessity,” said I. “As touches what we call the ‘occult,’ delusion after delusion has been dissipated, of course, and much jubilant pother made over the advance in knowledge. But the last of his delusions, which man has yet to relinquish, is that he invented them. This too must be surrendered with time; and already we are beginning to learn that many of these wild errors are the illegitimate children of grave truths. Science now looks with new respect on folk-lore—”

“Mr. Kennaston,” says Moira, laughing, “I warn you, if you start Dick on his hobbies, he will talk us all to death. So, come into the house, and I will mix you two men a drink.”

And we obeyed her, and—somehow—got to talking of the recent thunderstorms, and getting in our hay, and kindred topics.

* * * * *

Yes, it was much the usual sort of late-afternoon call customarily exchanged by country neighbors. I remember Moira’s yawning as she closed the cellarette, and her wondering how Mrs. Kennaston could keep on rouging and powdering at her age, and why Kennaston never had anything in particular to say for himself?

“Do you suppose it is because he has a swelled head over his little old book, or is he just naturally stupid?” she wanted to know.

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_Book Sixth_

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“Alas! the sprite that haunts us
Deceives our rash desire;
It whispers of the glorious gods,
And leaves us in the mire:
We cannot learn the cipher
Inscribed upon our cell;
Stars taunt us with a mystery
Which we lack lore to spell.”

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I

Sundry Disclosures of the Press

SUCH as has been described was now Felix Kennaston’s manner of living, which, as touches utilitarian ends, it might be wiser forthwith to dismiss as bred by the sickly fancies of an idle man bemused with unprofitable reading. By day his half of the sigil lay hidden in the library, under a pile of unused bookplates. But nightly this bit of metal was taken with him to bed, in order that, when held so as to reflect the candlelight—for this was always necessary—it might induce the desired dream of Ettarre; and that, so, Horvendile would be freed of Felix Kennaston for eight hours uninterruptedly.

In our social ordering Felix Kennaston stayed worthy of consideration in Lichfield, both as a celebrity of sorts and as the owner of four bank-accounts; and colloquially, as likewise has been recorded, he was by ordinary dismissed from our patronizing discussion as having long been “queer,” and in all probability “a dope-fiend.” In Lichfield, as elsewhere, a man’s difference from his fellows cannot comfortably be conceded except by assuming the difference to be to his discredit.

Meanwhile, the Felix Kennaston who owned two motors and had money in four banks, went with his wife about their round of decorous social duties; and the same Felix Kennaston, with leisured joy in the task, had completed _The Tinctured Veil_—which, as you now know, was woven from the dreamstuff Horvendile had fetched out of that fair country—very far from Lichfield—which is bounded by Avalon and Phæacia and Sea-coast Bohemia, and the contiguous forests of Arden and Broceliande, and on the west of course by the Hesperides.

Then, just before _The Tinctured Veil_ was published, an accident happened.

Fate, as always frugal of display, used simple tools. Kennaston, midway in dressing, found he had no more mouthwash. He went into his wife’s bathroom, in search of a fresh bottle. Kathleen was in Lichfield for the afternoon, at a card party; and thus it was brought about that Kennaston found, lying in the corner of her bathroom press, and hidden by a bottle of Harrowby’s No. 7 Dental Delight, the missing half of the sigil of Scoteia—the half which Ettarre had retained. There was no doubt about it. He held it in his hand.

“Now, that,” said Felix Kennaston, aloud, “is rather curious.”

He went into the library, and lifted the little pile of unused bookplates; and presently the two pieces of metal lay united upon his wife’s dressing-table, between the manicure-set and the pincushion, forming a circle not quite three inches in diameter, just such as he had seen once upon the brow of Mother Isis, and again in the Didascalion when Ptolemy of the Fat Paunch was master of Egypt.

“So, Kathleen somehow found the other half. She has had it from the first.... But naturally I never spoke of Felix Kennaston; it was forbidden, and besides, the sigil’s crowning grace was that it enabled me to forget his existence. And the girl’s name in the printed book is Alison. And Horvendile is such an unimportant character that Kathleen, reading the tale hastily—I thought she simply skimmed it!—did not remember that name either; and so, did not associate the dream names in any way with my book, nor with me.... She too, then, does not know—as yet.... And, for all that, Kathleen, the real Kathleen, is Ettarre—‘whatever flesh she may wear as a garment!’.... Or, rather, Ettarre is to Kathleen as Horvendile—but am I truly that high-hearted ageless being? Eh, I do not know, for we touch mystery everywhere. I only know it is the cream of the jest that day by day, while that lean, busy sharp-eyed stranger, whose hands and lips my own hands and lips meet daily, because this contact has become a part of the day’s routine—”

But he was standing before his wife’s dressing-table, and the mirror showed him a squat insignificant burgess in shirtsleeves, with grizzled untidied hair, and mild accommodating pale eyes, and an inadequate nose, with huge nostrils, and a spacious naked-looking upper-lip. That was Felix Kennaston, so far as all other people were concerned save Kathleen. He smiled; and in the act he noted that the visual result was to make Felix Kennaston appear particularly inane and sheepish. But he knew now that did not matter. Nor did it greatly matter—his thoughts ran—that it was never permitted any man, not even in his dreams, ever to touch the hands and lips of Ettarre.

So he left there the two pieces of metal, united at last upon his wife’s dressing-table, between the manicure-set and the pincushion, where on her return she might find them, and, finding, understand all that which he lacked words to tell.

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II

Considerations Toward Sunset

THEN Kennaston went for a meditative walk in the abating glare of that day’s portentous sunset, wherein the tree-trunks westward showed like the black bars of a grate. It was in just such a twilight that Horvendile had left Storisende....

And presently he came to a field which had been mowed that week. The piled hay stood in rounded heaps, suggestive to Kennaston of shaggy giant heads bursting through the soil, as in the old myth of Cadmus and the dragon’s teeth; beyond were glittering cornfields, whose tremulous green was shot with brown and sickly yellow now, and which displayed a host of tassels like ruined plumes. Autumn was at hand. And as Kennaston approached, a lark—as though shot vehemently from the ground—rose singing. Straight into the air it rose, and was lost in the sun’s abating brilliance; but still you could hear its singing; and then, as suddenly, the bird dropped earthward.

Kennaston snapped his fingers. “Aha, my old acquaintance!” he said, “but now I envy you no longer!” Then he walked onward, thinking....

* * * * *

“What did I think of?” he said, long afterward—“oh, of nothing with any real clarity. You see—I touched mystery everywhere....

“But I thought of Kathleen’s first kiss, and of the first time I came to her alone after we were married, and of our baby that was born dead.... I was happier than I had ever been in any dream.... I saw that the ties of our ordinary life here in the flesh have their own mystic strength and sanctity. I comprehended why in our highest sacrament we pre-figure with holy awe, not things of the mind and spirit, but flesh and blood.... A man and his wife, barring stark severance, grow with time to be one person, you see; and it is not so much the sort of person as the indivisibility that matters with them....

“And I thought of how in evoking that poor shadow of Ettarre which figures in my book, I had consciously written of my dear wife as I remembered her when we were young together. My vocabulary and my ink went to the making of the book’s Ettarre: but with them went Kathleen’s youth and purity and tenderness and serenity and loving-kindness toward all created things save the women I had flirted with—so that she contributed more than I....

“And I saw that the good-smelling earth about my pudgy pasty body, and my familiar home—as I turned back my pudgy pasty face toward Alcluid, bathed now in the sun’s gold—were lovely kindly places. Outside were kings and wars and thunderous zealots, and groaning, rattling thunderous printing-presses, too, that were turning off a book called _The Tinctured Veil_, whereinto had been distilled and bottled up the very best that was in Felix Kennaston; but here was just ‘a citadel of peace in the heart of the trouble.’ And—well, I was satisfied. People do not think much when they are satisfied.”

But he did not walk long; for it was growing chilly, as steadily dusk deepened, in this twilight so like that in which Horvendile had left Storisende forever.

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III

One Way of Elusion

KATHLEEN was seated at the dressing-table, arranging her hair, when Kennaston came again into her rooms. He went forward, and without speaking, laid one hand upon each shoulder.

Now for an instant their eyes met in the mirror; and the woman’s face he saw there, or seemed to see there, yearned toward him, and was unutterably loving, and compassionate, and yet was resolute in its denial. For it denied him, no matter with what wistful tenderness, or with what wonder at his folly. Just for a moment he seemed to see that; and then he doubted, for Kathleen’s lips lifted complaisantly to his, and Kathleen’s matter-of-fact face was just as he was used to seeing it.

And thus, with no word uttered, Felix Kennaston understood that his wife must disclaim any knowledge of the sigil of Scoteia, should he be bold enough to speak of it. He knew he would never dare to speak of it in that constricted hide-bound kindly life which he and Kathleen shared in the flesh. To speak of it would mean to become forthwith what people glibly called insane. So Horvendile and Ettarre were parted for all time. And Kathleen willed this, no matter with what wistful tenderness, and because of motives which he would never know—for how could one tell what was going on inside that small round head his hand was caressing? Still, he could guess at her reasons; and he comprehended now that Ettarre had spoken a very terrible truth—“_All men I must evade at the last, and innumerable are the ways of my elusion._”

“Well, dear,” he said aloud; “and was it a pleasant party?”

“Oh, so-so,” Kathleen conceded; “but it was rather a mixed crowd. Hadn’t you better hurry and change your clothes, Felix? It is almost dinner-time, and, you know, we have seats for the theater to-night.”

Quite as if he, too, were thinking of trifles, Felix Kennaston took up the two bits of metal. “I have often wondered what this design meant,” he said, idly—not looking at her, and hopeful that this much allusion at least was permitted to what they dared not speak of openly.

“Perhaps Mr. Harrowby could tell you.” Kathleen also spoke as with indifference—not looking at him, but into the mirror, and giving deft final touches to her hair.

“Eh—?” Kennaston smiled. “Oh, yes, Dick Harrowby, I grant you, has dabbled a bit in occult matters, but hardly deep enough, I fancy, to explain—this.”

“At all events,” Kathleen considered, “it is a quarter to seven already, and we have seats for the theater to-night.”

He cleared his throat. “Shall I keep this, or you?”

“Why, for heaven’s sake—! The thing is of no value now, Felix. Give it to me.” She dropped the two pieces of metal into the wastebasket by the dressing-table, and rose impatiently. “Of course if you don’t _mean_ to change for dinner—”

He shrugged and gave it up.

* * * * *

So they dined alone together, sharing a taciturn meal, and duly witnessed the drolleries of _The Gutta-Percha Girl_. Kennaston’s sleep afterward was sound and dreamless.

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IV

Past Storisende Fares the Road of Use and Wont

HE read _The Tinctured Veil_ in print, with curious wistful wonder. “How did I come to write it?” was his thought.

Thereafter Felix Kennaston, as the world knows, wrote no more books, save to collect his later verses into a volume. “I am afraid to write against the author of _The Tinctured Veil_,” he was wont flippantly to declare. And a few of us suspected even then that he spoke the absolute truth.

* * * * *

Meanwhile, Mr. and Mrs. Kennaston continued their round of decorous social duties: their dinner-parties were chronicled in the _Lichfield Courier-Herald_; and Kennaston delivered, by request, two scholarly addresses before the Lichfield Woman’s Club, was duly brought forward to shake hands with all celebrities who visited the city, and served acceptably in the vestry of his church.

Was Felix Kennaston content?—that is a question he alone could have answered.

“But why shouldn’t I have been?” he said, a little later, in reply to the pointblank query. “I had a handsome home, two motors, money in four banks, and a good-looking wife who loved and coddled me. The third prince gets no more at the end of any fairy tale. Still, the old woman spoke the truth, of course—one pays as one goes out.... Oh, yes, one pays!—that is an inevitable rule; but what you have to pay is not exorbitant, all things considered.... So, be off with your crude pessimisms, Harrowby!”

* * * * *

And indeed, when one comes to think, he was in no worse case than any other husband of his standing. “Who wins his love must lose her,” as no less tunefully than wisely sings one of our poets—a married bard, you may be sure—and all experience tends to prove his warbling perfectly veracious. Romancers, from Time’s nonage, have invented and have manipulated a host of staple severances for their puppet lovers—sedulously juggling, ever since Menander’s heyday, with compromising letters and unscrupulous rivals and shipwrecks and wills and testy parents and what not—and have contrived to show love overriding these barriers plausibly enough. But he must truly be a boldfaced rhapsodist who dared at outset marry his puppets, to each other, and tell you how their love remained unchanged.

I am thus digressing, in obsolete Thackerayan fashion, to twaddle about love-matches alone. People marry through a variety of other reasons, and with varying results: but to marry for love is to invite inevitable tragedy. There needs no side-glancing here at such crass bankruptcies of affection as end in homicide or divorce proceedings, or even just in daily squabbling: these dramas are of the body. They may be taken as the sardonic comedies, or at their most outrageous as the blustering cheap melodramas, of existence; and so lie beyond the tragic field. For your true right tragedy is enacted on the stage of a man’s soul, with the man’s reason as lone auditor.

And being happily married—but how shall I word it? Let us step into the very darkest corner. Now, my dear Mr. Grundy, your wife is a credit to her sex, an ornament to her circle, and the mainstay of your home; and you, sir, are proverbially the most complacent and uxorious of spouses. But you are not, after all, married to the girl you met at the chancel-rail, so long and long ago, with unforgotten tremblings of the knees. Your wife, that estimable matron, is quite another person. And you live in the same house, and you very often see her with hair uncombed, or even with a disheveled temper; you are familiar with her hours of bathing, her visits to the dentist, and a host of other physical phenomena we need not go into; she does not appreciate your jokes; she peeps into your personal correspondence; she keeps the top bureau-drawer in a jumble of veils and gloves and powder-rags and hair-pins and heaven knows what; her gowns continually require to be buttoned up the back in an insane incalculable fashion; she irrationally orders herring for breakfast, though you never touch it:—and in fine, your catalogue of disillusionments is endless.

Hand upon heart, my dear Mr. Grundy, is this the person to whom you despatched those letters you wrote before you were married? Your wife has those epistles safely put away somewhere, you may depend on it: and for what earthly consideration would you read them aloud to her? Some day, when one or the other of you is dead, those letters will ring true again and rouse a noble sorrow; and the survivor will be all the better for reading them. But now they only prove you were once free of uplands which you do not visit nowadays: and that common knowledge is a secret every wife must share half-guiltily with her husband—even in your happiest matrimonial ventures—as certainly as it is the one topic they may not ever discuss with profit.

For you are married, you and she: and you live, contentedly enough, in a four-square world, where there is the rent and your social obligations and the children’s underclothing to be considered, long and long before indulgence in rattle-pate mountain-climbing. And people glibly think of you as Mr. and Mrs. Grundy now, almost as a unit: but do you really know very much about that woman whose gentle breathing—for we will not crudely call it snoring—you can always hear at will o’ nights? Suppose, by a wild flight of fancy, that she is no more honest with you than you are with her?

* * * * *

So to Kennaston his wife remained a not unfriendly mystery. They had been as demi-gods for a little while; and the dream had faded, to leave it matters not what memories; and they were only Mr. and Mrs. Felix Kennaston. Concerning all of us, my fellow failures in the great and hopeless adventure of matrimony, this apologue is narrated.

Yet, as I look into my own wife’s face—no more the loveliest, but still the dearest of all earthly faces, I protest—and as I wonder how much she really knows about me or the universe at large, and have not the least notion—why, I elect to believe that, in the ultimate, Kennaston was not dissatisfied. For all of us the dream-haze merges into the glare of common day; the _dea certé_, whom that fled roseate light transfigured, stands confessed a simple loving woman, a creature of like flesh and limitations as our own: but who are we to mate with goddesses? It is enough that much in us which is not merely human has for once found exercise—has had its high-pitched outing, however fleet—and that, because of many abiding memories, we know, assuredly, the way of flesh is not a futile scurrying through dining-rooms and offices and shops and parlors, and thronged streets and restaurants, “and so to bed.”

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V

Which Mr. Flaherty Does Not Quite Explain

WITH the preceding preachment I wish I might end the story. For what follows—which is my own little part in the story of Felix Kennaston—is that discomfortable sort of anticlimax wherein the key to a mystery, by unlocking unsuspected doors, discloses only another equally perplexing riddle.

Kathleen Kennaston died in her sleep some eleven months after her husband discovered the missing half of the sigil....

“I have a sort of headache,” she said, toward nine o’clock in the evening. “I believe I will go to bed, Felix.” So she kissed him goodnight, in just that emotionless preoccupied fashion that years of living together had made familiar; and so she left him in the music-room, to smoke and read magazines. He never saw her living any more.

Kathleen stopped in the hall, to wind the clock. “Don’t forget to lock the front door when you come up, Felix.” She was out of sight, but he could hear her, as well as the turning of the clock key. “I forgot to tell you I saw Adèle Van Orden to-day, at Greenberg’s. They are going down to the Beach Thursday. She told me they haven’t had a cook for three days now, and she and old Mrs. Haggage have had to do all the work. She looked it, too—I never saw any one let themselves go all to pieces the way she has—”

“How—? Oh, yes,” he mumbled, intent upon his reading; “it is pretty bad. Don’t many of them keep their looks as you do, dear—”

And that was all. He never heard his wife’s voice any more. Kennaston read contentedly for a couple of hours, and went to bed. It was in the morning the maid found Mrs. Kennaston dead and cold. She had died in her sleep, quite peacefully, after taking two headache powders, while her husband was contentedly pursuing the thread of a magazine story through the advertising columns....

Kennaston had never spoken to her concerning the sigil. Indeed, I do not well see how he could have dared to do so, in view of her attitude in a world so opulent in insane asylums. But among her effects, hidden away as before in the press in her bathroom, Kennaston found both the pieces of metal. They were joined together now, forming a perfect circle, but with the line of their former separation yet visible.

He showed me the sigil of Scoteia, having told this tale....

* * * * *

I had thought from the first there would prove to be supernal double-dealing back of all this. The Wardens of Earth sometimes unbar strange windows, I suspect—windows which face on other worlds than ours; and They permit this-or-that man to peer out fleetingly, perhaps, just for the joke’s sake; since always They humorously contrive matters so this man shall never be able to convince his fellows of what he has seen, or of the fact that he was granted any peep at all. The Wardens without fail arrange what we call—gravely, too—“some natural explanation.”

Kennaston showed me the sigil of Scoteia, having told this tale....

“You are interested in such things, you see—just as Kathleen said. And I have sometimes wondered if when she said, ‘Perhaps Mr. Harrowby could tell you,’ the words did not mean more than they seemed then to mean—?”

I was interested now, very certainly. But I knew that Kathleen Kennaston had referred not at all to my interest in certain of the less known sides of existence, which people loosely describe as “occult.”

And slowly, I comprehended that for the thousandth time the Wardens of Earth were uncompromised; that here too They stayed unconvicted of negligence in Their duty: for here was at hand the “natural explanation.” Kennaston’s was one of those curious, but not uncommon, cases of self-hypnosis, such as Fehlig and Alexis Bidoche have investigated and described. Kennaston’s first dream of Ettarre had been an ordinary normal dream, in no way particularly remarkable; and afterward, his will to dream again of Ettarre, co-operating with his queer reading, his temperament, his idle life, his belief in the sigil, and co-operating too—as yet men may not say just how—with the hypnotic effects of any trivial bright object when gazed at steadily, had been sufficient to induce more dreams. I could understand how it had all befallen in consonance with hackneyed laws, insane as was the outcome.

And the prelate and the personage had referred, of course, to the then-notorious nineteenth and twentieth chapters of _Men Who Loved Alison_, in which is described the worship of the sigil of Scoteia—and which chapters they, in common with a great many other people, considered unnecessarily to defile a noble book. The coincidence of the mirrors was quaint, but in itself came to less than nothing; for as touches the two questions as to white pigeons, the proverb alluded to by the personage, concerning the bird that fouls its own nest, is fairly familiar, and the prelate’s speech was the most natural of prosaic inquiries. What these two men had said and done, in fine, amounted to absolutely nothing until transfigured in the crucible of an ardent imagination, by the curious literary notion that human life as people spend it is purposeful and clearly motived.

For what Kennaston showed me was the metal top of a cold cream jar. I am sure of this, for Harrowby’s Crême Cleopatre is one of the most popular articles our firm manufactures. I hesitate to tell you how many thousand husbands may find at will among their wives’ possessions just such a talisman as Kennaston had discovered. I myself selected the design for these covers when the stuff was first put in the market. They are sealed on, you may remember, with gray wax, to carry out the general idea that we are vending old Egyptian secrets of beauty. And the design upon these covers, as I have since been at pains to make sure, is in no known alphabet. P. N. Flaherty (the artist implicated) tells me he “just made it up out of his head”—blending meaningless curlicues and dots and circles with an irresponsible hand, and sketching a crack across all, “just to make it look ancient like.” It was along this semblance of a fracture—for there the brittle metal is thinnest—that the cover first picked up by Kennaston had been broken. The cover he showed me was, of course, complete.... So much for Mr. Flaherty’s part in the matter; and of hieroglyphic lore, or any acquaintance with heathenry beyond his gleanings from the moving pictures, I would be the last person to suspect him.

It was natural that Mrs. Kennaston should have used Harrowby’s Crême Cleopatre habitually; for indeed, as my wife had often pointed out, Mrs. Kennaston used a considerable amount of toilet preparations. And that Mrs. Allardyce should have had a jar of Harrowby’s Crême Cleopatre in her handbag was almost inevitable: there is no better restorative and cleanser for the complexion, after the dust and dirt of a train-journey, as is unanimously acknowledged by Harrowby & Sons’ advertisements.

But there is the faith that moves mountains, as we glibly acknowledge with unconcernment as to the statement’s tremendous truth; and Felix Kennaston had believed in his talisman implicitly from the very first. Thus, through his faith, and through we know not what soul-hunger, so many long hours, and—here is the sardonic point—so many contented and artistically-fruitful hours of Kennaston’s life in the flesh had been devoted to contemplation of a mirage. It was no cause for astonishment that he had more than once surprised compassion and wonder in his wife’s eyes: indeed, she could hardly have failed to suspect his mind was affected; but, loving him, she had tried to shield him, as is the way of women.... I found the whole matter droll and rather heartbreaking. But the Wardens of Earth were uncompromised, so far as I could prove. Whatever windows had or had not been unbarred, there remained no proof....

* * * * *

So I shook my head. “Why, no,” said I, with at worst a verbal adhesion to veracity. “I, for one, do not know what the design means. Still, you have never had this deciphered,” I added, gently. “Suppose—suppose there had been some mistake, Mr. Kennaston—that there was nothing miraculous about the sigil, after all—?”

I cannot tell you of his expression; but it caused me for the moment to feel disconcertingly little and obtuse.

“Now, how can you say that, I wonder!” he marveled—and then, of course, he fidgeted, and crossed his legs the other way—“when I have been telling you, from alpha to omega, what is the one great thing the sigil taught me—that everything in life is miraculous. For the sigil taught me that it rests within the power of each of us to awaken at will from a dragging nightmare of life made up of unimportant tasks and tedious useless little habits, to see life as it really is, and to rejoice in its exquisite wonderfulness. If the sigil were proved to be the top of a tomato-can, it would not alter that big fact, nor my fixed faith. No, Harrowby, the common names we call things by do not matter—except to show how very dull we are,” he ended, with that irritating little noise that was nearly a snigger, and just missed being a cough.