The Cream of the Jest .........................................................................................................................................1

In one of the charming essays wherein Anatole France narrates the adventures of his soul I find these words:

"It is good to be reasonable and to love only the true; yet there are hours when common reality no longer

satisfies and one yearns to escape from nature. We know well that this is impossible, but we so not desire it

the less for that. Are not our most i rrealizable desires the most ardent? Doubtlessand this is our great

miserydoubtless we cannot escape from ourselves. We are condemned, irrevocably, to see all things

reflected in us with a mournful and desolating monotony. For this very reason we t hirst after the unknown

and aspire to what is beyond us. We must have the unusual. We are asked, 'What do you wish?' And we

reply, 'I wish something else.' What we touch, what we see, is nothing: we are drawn toward the intangible

It is a philosophy of disillusion, the graceful sigh of an Epicurean who has concurred in the wisdom of

Heraclitus: an Epicurean, however, in whose wisdom is the fragrance of compassion and understanding, and

who has achieved to the dignity that is incap able alike of enthusiasm and despair.

James Branch Cabell agress with M. Anatole France. He has observed life very closelytoo closely,

perhaps, ever to surprise its deepest secretsand, in a dozen volumes he has intimated, with exquisite

urbanity, that it leaves much to be desired. He ha s even ventured to supply a few of the ommissions, troubled

always by the suspicion that he must inevitably fail, yet consoled by the sublime faith that "to write perfectly

From the beginnings of these labors Mr. Cabell has ranked himself with the skeptics. In itself this is no

distinction, for skepticism nowadays is almost as easy to aquire as faith, indeed, for most of its devotees, it

is the expression of a faitha re bours. But Mr. Cabell, being essentially an aristocrat of sensibilities, and

averse from indulgence in the obvious, has always insisted upon distinction. He has found it by introducing

into his skepticism two qualities: good taste and irony. That is to say, every doubt which issues from his

fertile intelligence must be arrayed in the brilliant garb of a courtier, whose flattery of the

monarchLifeis a veiled sarcasm, so delicately worded only upon reflection does one perceive the sting.

Yet even the flattery is sincere, and the mockery, however mordant, conceals a poignant wistfulness.

Nowhere in his books can a shrewd reader charge him with lesemajeste towards life. It is true that

superficially Mr. Cabell is an advocate for ennui, s eeming to relish with soft melodious laughter every

imperfection discoverable in the features of "reality." And unquestionably the author of Domnei,of Gallantry,

of The Cream of the Jest, Jurgen and Figures of Earth com municates always a profound discontent with

thingsastheyare, seeks always a country modeled upon dreams wherein is neither amiguity nor

frustration, nor any hint of sorrow or regret. But this is the prerogative of huckster and genius alike.

Mr.Cabell has fished in deep waters, and so, not content with "desiderating"the word is peculiarly his

owna "life beyond life," he terminates all his valiant errantry into Cocaigne and Storisende and Poictesme

with the invariable conclusion that one should make the best of this world, since all others are conjectural,

This attitude, mingling an adroit, uncanny and disconcerting insight with a suave good humor entitles Mr.

Cabell to be called a philosopher. The pedantic will add "a pessimist." Oddly enough, the word fits like a

glove; what pessimism deeper than to hav e perceived, with equal clarity, and in one glance, the inadequacy

of life and the fatal impotence of the dreams whereby living was to become an enfranchisement of all things

noble and lovely and gracious? And having perceived this, to say, smilingly, al most casually: "Live your life,

acquiesce in life, as becomes a gentleman; dream your dreams, love your dreams as becomes a child. In

neither case will you be assured of happiness, yet it may be that you will find content. It is enough."

Hereafter one is to follow the adventures of Felix Kennaston, alias Horvendile, in quest of the elixir of

"something else." And in the man's pathetic fumbling at locked doors, in his patient deciphering of the Sigil

of Scoteia, one may divine an allegory , composite of this world and all the worlds that never were or shall

be. The riddle stays insoluble, yet in the words of Jean Dolent the riddle find explicitness:

We turn now to the last of the books by Richard Fentor Harrowby, which is The Cream of The Jest.

Meanwhile, continuing directly with the matter of The Eagle's Shadow, I must tell yousince Harrowby has

omitted this information,that Kathleen Saumarez and Felix Kennaston were married in June 1904, to

confront, as it seemed, a future of genteel poverty. But, within four months, the death of old strange Henry

Kennaston, the squire of Alcuid, had changed all that gray prospect materially. I avoid, though, any further

entrance into affairs with which the Biography of Manuel's life has no close concern, and which in any case

are more properly set forth in J. V. A. Froser's Biography of Felix Kennaston. You may read therein how the

elopement of Kennaston's parents, in 1867, had begun the feud between their two families,a feud which

had resulted in Kennaston's being reared by the Bulmers, without any contacts with his father's kindred,so

that, when Henry Kennaston was killed, in October 1904, his only surviving nephew acquired a competence

from a person whom Felix Kennaston had not ever known or talked with, nor even seen from a distance....

The point here is that Felix Kennaston in his middle thirties became economically independent and was made

free to devote the rest of his days to whatsoever amusements he might prefer; and that he gave over his life to

Whereby, of course, American literature was enriched with Men Who Loved Allison.... Of the actual and

eventual worth of this romance I cannot pretend to be an unprejudiced judge. The tale seems to me one of

those many books which have profited, very dubiously indeed, by having obtained, in one way of another, the

repute of being indecent. Such books tend to endure, but their tenure of survival is upon depressingly twilit

terms. And they make for a most dolorous deal of dreary timewasting. It is quite dreadful to consider with

what sad and futile perseverance the sloppy and soporific catalogues of Rabelais, the pale inanities of the

Heptameron, and the unendurably dull botcheries of Boccaccioor, for that matter, of Fielding and of

Smollett,have been toiled through by misguided millions in quest of these authors' rumored obscenity....

But it is even more dreadful, for the ears of the fairly honest, to hear any one of these readers protest, as they

all do invariably, that he reads not for the story's sake, but because of the delicate art and the sparkling wit

with which the tale is told. Besides, he does get, in the way of indecency, so very little for his trouble.

Well, and just so I doubt if Men Who Loved Alison, in common with a great many other modern

masterpieces, does not continue to be read today upon somewhat similar grounds. As books go, it has had a

long life: indeed, the tale has survived its publication now by some twentyone years; and it is handsomely

written of course, in its own overornate and selfconscious and clogged fashion. But I fancy that the most of

this book's readers are, here again, those immatureminded persons who are content to put up with the

diction and the stylistic devices for the sake of the atoning talk about unnatural amors which, howsoever

sparsely, here and there adorns and cheers the pornoscopic reader's laborious way.

It is though, now that I think of it, with another book that this Author's Note should be concerned. And my

appropriate point is, rather, that with the volume now in your hand the Biography completes the portrayal,

begun in "The Eagle's Shadow," of Felix Bulmer Kennaston and of his adoption of the poetic attitude toward

life, in the very same Lichfield which Robert Etheridge Townsend and Colonel Rudolph Musgrave

coetaneously inhabited, and of Kennaston's ultimate success as an Economist. Hereinafter, then, as I have

written in another place, the story of the Biography is rounded off by presenting the poetthe poietes, the

"maker,"in modern conditions; and by presenting, too, the manner of this Felix Kennaston's return into

Poictesmeinto that all accommodating country wherein almost anything is rather more than likely to

happen,so that, through this return, the prepetuated life of Manuel ends its seven hundred years of

journeying at the exact point of its outset. The circle is thus made complete, as my last poet annihilates,

through quite other means than were employed by my first poet, Madoc, the intervening twenty generations.

That is the main point. Madoc triumphed, you may remember, through the amenities of judicious

punctuation. Felix Kennaston made use of wholly different methods to gain very much the same end. But

Kennaston also triumphed. And the protagonist of the Biographythat protagonist being, as I have perhaps

already said, the perpetuated life of Manuel,was thus enabled, once more, to do that which seemed

expected.... I mean, that the life of Manual, as that life is throughout The Cream of the Jest embodied in Felix

Bulmer Kennaston, returned into its longlost Poictesme, I mean, that the life of Manuel thus did, in a

fashion told of hereinafter, conform to those ancient prophecies which had been begotten, in some part by

Jurgen's essays in the imaginative, but mainly by the fond pride and faith of Dame Niafer. I mean, in brief,

that this volume also narrates how "Manuel, as was his custom, did what Niafer thought best," and that it

records how she had her way with him, as became a competent wife, a great long while after both of them

were reputedly dead.... For I doubt if, in any important sense, either one of this primal pair of married lovers

was truly dead, or ever will be dead. We know that the life of Manuel informed the body of Felix Kennaston:

and I quite strongly suspect that Niafer survived in Kathleen Kennaston, and that Niafer continues to survive,

wheresoever homelife flourishes, in the aging body of every really competent wife.

You may, likewise, hereinafter attempt in van to read The Lineage of Lichfield, an anomalous production

which none the less appears to me not unaptly to wind up and to illustrate the long story of the wanderings of

the life of Manuel, in a shape some where between an index and a map of that journeying. The notion of this

Lineage was not mine, but was suggested to me by Lewis Galantiere, as you may observe that I have honestly

recorded in this brief comedy's rather long dedication. It is a dedication which comprises in itself a complete

Author's Note to The Lineage of Lichfield; and so to this Epistle Dedicatory I now refer you, for any

information which you may desire as to the latter section of the present volume.

I add merely that the Lineage was written in the summer of 1921, especially for what I imagine to have been

the most easily indescribable of all American magazines, the Reviewer. The Reviewer, as published at

RichmondinVirginia,from a side alley in immediate antagonism to a cathedral,was at this season in

theory a fortnightly periodical, which in point of fact appeared whensoever the editors thought it might

perhaps be amusing to get out another issue. In any case, the Reviewer was scheduled to become a monthly

magazine in the autumn of 1921, and I had agreed to edit the first three issues in this new avatar. I did edit

them, to such an extent as the vagaries of the printer permitted: and the Lineage thus made its first tripartite

appearance, in the October, November and December numbers, for 1921, of the Reviewer. It was largely due

to this fact, my conscience now and then tell me, that the Reviewer was not long afterward forced to become

To return to The Cream of the Jest, this tale was some while in the making. In January 1911, I think, was

begun the dizain which under stars more favorable would have told about ten of Richard Harrowby's

adventurings, for the most part, in the occult: but Saturn very plainly stood in the ascendant at the scheme's

birth; for as these stories came into being, no one of them, save only Concerning David Jorgram, met with the

then present needs of any discoverable magazine. The dizain was therefore abandoned; and of the eight

stories finished, some were destroyed, and others were utilized here and there quite variously. Two of these

tales, as they had been written in the spring of 1911, were in 1913 combined and rewritten, with the addition

of considerable new matter, so that before 1914 had well begun to make the world safe for hypocrisy, these

stories had blended into one continuous and fairly long Comedy of Evasion, called then In the Flesh, but a

little later rechristened The Cream of The Jest.... Thus did it come about that with the opening on 1915 this

The first of all its rejectorsacting on behalf of the George H. Doran Company, in January 1915,was a

romanticminded and obviously young male who wrote me as to this book a wholly charming, if wholly

disapproving, long letter. His objections I find to have been severally, that my theme lacked sufficient weight

to ballast more than a short story; that the portions relative to the publishing of Kennaston's novel (which

turned out five years later to be uncommonly neat soothsaying) could interest no one unconnected with the

world of book making; that "In the Flesh" was not verily "in the flesh" but smelt over strongly of midnight

oil; and that, above all, my book failed to present in its characters a group, or even any one person, who

evoked the reader's sympathy and admiration. For, as this hypercritical romanticist went on the

explainprior to subscribing himself Sincerely yours, Sinclair Lewis,the general reading public simply

cannot be induced to buy novels about unattractive and ignoble people, although the future author of Main

Street and Elmer Gantry did go so far as to admit that disagreeable characters might be permissible "as

The typescript of In the Flesh was soon after that, but far less colorfully, rejected by the J. B. Lippincott

Company, in the month of February. For some now inexplicable reason or another it seems to have been

declined by no publishing firm during March. Then, in April 1915, I paid my first visit to the offices of

Robert M. McBride Company, where yet another unheardof young person, who signed himself Guy Holt,

had been interested by the typescript of In the Flesh to the highly noncommittal extent of wishing to see

something else by its writer. I who had four unpublished books was willing enough to oblige him. So the visit

took place in due form; and thus began, upon my thirtysixth birthday, the most staunch and the most

beneficent of all my literary friendships. Moreover, McBride's, in the upshot, accepted The Rivet in

Grandfather's Neck for publication in the autumn of that year, and The Certain Hour and From the Hidden

Way for publication in 1916; but McBride's also quite wholeheartedly, declined to sponsor any printing of In

This comedy was then put by, for some months, to make way for the publishing and the instant failure of The

Rivet in Grandfather's Neck. But in 1916 my typescript set forth once more atraveling; and I find the

itinerary to be succinct:"Rejected by John Lane Company, in January 1961; by E. P. Dutton and Company,

in March 1916; by Houghton Mifflin Company, in April 1916; by Charles Scribner's Sons, in June 1916;"

The record finishes just thus, with a semicolon, which one now finds rather pathetically defiant, through its

implication that this is by no means to be the end. Nevertheless I seem thereafter, for almost an entire year, to

have squandered no more currency in express charges upon this unsalable typescript.... The particularly

disheartening part, you see, was that even at McBride's where others of my books had met at last with

editorial though not with financial favor, even there the opinion appeared unanimous with the opinion of all

What happened next, I simply cannot say. I do not recall whether McBride's asked for another sight of this

book or whether I again submitted it without waiting for any such invitation. Nor do I know for what reason

the editorial staff of McBride's then altered its opinion as to the book now before you, beyond the fact that

this changing can hardly have been caused by the firm's having meanwhile published as many as three books

by me, of which all had failed forthwith and utterly. But I do know that McBride's in April 1917, accepted

The Cream of The Jest, as the story was by this time called, just two years after they had rejected it; and I find

also that the John Lane Company brought out this book in England, in 1923, some seven and a half years

after the John Lane Company had rejected it.... The ways of all publishers, however, I discovered some while

ago to be incalcuable: and I do not think that any deduction can ever be drawn, through the channels of mere

rationality, from any of their actions. It is perhaps the one trait which they share congenially with their

The book was published, then, under its final title. "The Cream of the Jest," in September 1917, and as a

Yet its publication had results. H. L. Mencken, that unusual and indeed unique youngster who, as you may

recall, had praised The Cords of Vanity some eight or more years earlier, now came forth, in the Smart Set,

with a longish article in which The Cream of the Jest was favorably appraised in combination with yet

another novel, quaintly entitled The Three Black Pennys, then lately published by yet another unknown

author,a youngish Pennsylvanian, who not long after this time came to Dumbarton as a direct result of this

article, so that I then met Joseph Hergesheimer, just as I a bit later met Mencken also, through virtue of

And moreover an even younger Burton Rascoe, who, as yet in his early twenties, had very very recently been

made literary editor of the Chicago Tribune, chanced to be pleased by The Cream of the Jest; and he

forthwith decided that it was a book which should not die unnoticed, at least, not in Chicago. What I take to

have been the most remarkable, as it was certainly the most rambunctious, of all campaigns in the history of

polite letters then opened, upon 29 December 1917, with the appearance, in the Chicago Tribune, of an article

by Burton Rascoe headed Here's a Chance to Own Another First Edition. Thereafter, very much as the

hapless Romans were formerly assured by the elder Cato, in his every public address upon whatsoever

nominal theme, that Carthage must be destroyed, so now, upon each Saturday, week after week, all literate

The assertion did not pass unchallenged. For at once Ben Hecht and Rupert Hughes, who, it may be

remembered, ranked as wellknown writers in those remote times, were moved to comment upon my various

books with fervor, and with such taste as each of these then prominent litterateurs possessed, in one or

another of the Chicago papers. Through the pages of the HeraldExaminers, Vincent Starrett joined in, to

commend The Cream of the Jest: B. L. T.'s Lineo'Type column took up the matter of my literary demerits,

in another section of the Tribune, and in a rather more ribald vein: whereas Keith Preston and Richard

Atwater waxed equally frank and derogatory in the Chicago News. And then,as when upon some field of

glory the cold draft laws have fetched face the intrepid patriots of two nations, and the loud machinegun

then answers to the ruthless speaking of its fellows ruthlessly,so now did they who shared in this debate

It all quite learned, too, at the price of some lessening in coherence and in any exact meaning. Perhaps no one

could ever have told you what all the printed rioting, and the tumultuary paragraphs, and the ungentle

namecalling, were precisely about. But Moliere, and Menander, and Novalis, and Agathon, and

Shakespeare, and Praxiteles, and Robert W. Chambers, were all dragged somehow into the affair during the

following months on insane dispute; and to each of these notabilities was accorded almost as much

prominence in the various critical dicta as was being granted to me, now that Chicago had taken up polite

letters in a really serious way. For some six months, did the literati of Chicago thus debate whether I was an

unjustly neglected author or a posturing imbecile; and the city at large must have known, vaguely, that

somebody of my name existed, and had published a book called The Cream of the Jest.

But the rest of America, so far as my publishers or I could perceive, remained deplorably oblivious of both

facts: The Cream of the Jest had very soon appeared upon the Marked Down counters in all book stores: and

yet two more years were to pass before a book by me was to become a more or less salable commodity, under

Meanwhile I had heard again from that stripling Sinclair Lewis who had been the first of this book's so many

rejectors; and, since it developed that during the intervening three years his taste had so altered that he now

quite approved of The Cream of the Jest, therefore we met before long, and we got on together excellently. I

found that, for my part, it was not possible to help liking and admiring this Sinclair Lewis, even after the droll

and deferential boy whom I first knew had turned out to be a worldfamous genius, of a especial sort which

And so it is that, when I reflect that through The Cream of the Jest I first met Lewis, and Hergesheimer, and

Mencken, and Rascoe, and Guy Holt, I can see that in the end this book became, in some sense, the most

potent of all my books in its influence upon my career as a writer. This book did not get for me any general

recognition. It got for me, instead, something in every was more valuable. For it was The Cream of the Jest

which first made for me in the seventeenth year of my writing, a few warm friends who but a little later were

to fight in my behalf very nobly, and with wholly heroic tenacity.... That, though, is not my present theme. I

have not any need here to rehearse those now ancient battlings, which indeed had not anything in particular to

do with The Cream of the Jest, and were not joined until 1920: but I have a strong need, and a neverdying

urge, to record here, and to record upon every available occasion, my gratitude to all these and to yet other

If few writers have met with more smug, more prurient, or more disingenuous opponents, no writer whatever,

I think has found more faithful allies. I now and then think also that, but for these allies, an almost

allimportant personageI mean, that "general reader" who hereinafter becomes of a sudden aware of Felix

Kennaston in very much the same fashion wherein "the author of `Jurgen'" also was discovered,would

perhaps have heard but little more of my later writings than in prior times this "general reader" had ever

heard, during the gray and hopedeferring years before 1929, of my earlier books. And I deduce, at such

seasons, that, inasmuch as it was The Cream of the Jest which got for me the most of these friends and valiant

benefactors, I may very well be grateful to The Cream of the Jest likewise, upon grounds which are hardly, if

Much has been written critically about Felix Kennaston since the disappearance of his singular personality

from the field of comtemporary writers; and Mr. Froser's Biography contains all it is necessary to know as to

the facts of Kenneston's life. Yet most readers of the Biography, I think, must have felt that the great change

in Kenneston no long while after he "came to forty year" this sudden, almost unparalleled, conversion of a

talent for tolerable verse into the fullfledged genius of Men Who Loved Alison stays, after all,

Hereinafter you have Kennaston's own explanation. I do not know but that in hunting down one enigma it

raises abevy; 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 notes I made as to what Felix Kennaston 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 indescibably indescent: 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 or really human. You see it

hardly matters through how dependable an agency Kenneston no longer thought of himself as a man of

fleshandblood moving about a world of his compeers. Or, at least, that especial aspect of his existence was

But to tell you 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 dreamstuff. 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 blind and

aimless business; not all a hopeless waste and confusion; and that we ourselves may (by and by) be strong

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 wither 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

The tale tells how Count Emmerick planned a notable marriagefeast for his sister La Beale Ettare and Sir

Guiron des Rocques. The tale relates that, in honor of this wedding, came from Nacumera, far overseas,

Count Emmerick's elder sister Dame Melicent and her husband the Comte de la Foret, with an outlandish

retinue of pagan slaves that caused great wonder. All Poictesme took holiday. The tale narrates how from

Naimes to Lisuarte, and in the wild hillcountry back of Perdigon, knights made ready for the tournament,

travelling toward Storisend in gay silken garments such as were suited to these new times of peace. The

highways in these parts shone with warriors, riding in companies of six or eight, wearing mantles worked in

gold, and mounted upon horses that glittered with new bits and housings. And the tale tells, also, how they

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

"No, there is nothing now which troubles me, Horvendile, save the thought of Maugris d'Aigremont. I cannot

"So, so!" says Horvendile "ah, yes, a mastervillain, 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 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

Ettare had never any liking for this halfscoffing 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,

Eh, madame, I am not so sure of that. Certainly, the Author of those folks who have figured thus far in your

She wondered at such foolish speaking, and she showed him 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

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

To that Ettarre replied: "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.

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 weddingfeast now, your

former sorrows are stingless; and to me, who has served you through hard seasons of adversity, it is as if I

had been reading some romance, and had come 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 trun back to a wrokaday

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 today

beyond wording. Happiness is a famed breeder of magnanimity. "My poor friend, we must get you a wife.

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 there 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 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 ben possible for me to love them any one of them."

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 lovlier 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.

Gravely Horvendile answered: "Not in my eyes, madame. For you embody all that I was ever able to

concieve 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 worshipped and

But I had thought poets were famous for their inconstancy. It is remarkable hearing that, to the contrary, they

have loved steadfastly the same woman; and, in any case, I question how, without suspecting it, I could have

Horvendile meditated for a while. "Assuredly, it was you of whom blind Homer dreamed, comforting endless

nights with visions of your beauty, as you sat in a bright fragrant vaulted chamber weaving at a mighty loom,

and embroidering on a tapestry the battles men were waging about Troy because of your beauty; and very

certainly it was you that Hermes came over fields of violets and parsley, where you sang magic rhymes,

sheltered by an island cavern, in which cedar and citronwood were burning and, calling you Calypso,

bade you to 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 one be dishonored; and

Sophocles called you Antigone, praising your valor and your beauty. And when men named you Bombyca,

Theocritus also sang of your grave drowsy voice and your feet carven of ivory, and of your tender heart and

I do not remember any of these troubadours you speak of, my poor Horvendile; but I am very certain that if

they were great 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 Tristan in the sunlit glades

of Morois, that high forest, where many birds sang fullthroated 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 glances 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

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

My poor Horvendile, you are in love with fantasies. There was never any lady such as you dream of."

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 eminences. Very far beneath Horvendile the leaded roofs of these fortresses glittered in

And the people of this land from its lords of the high, the low, and the middle justice, to the sturdy whining

beggers at its cathedral doors were not unworthy of this fair realm. Undoubtedly, it was a land, as

Horvendile whimsically reflected, wherein human nature kept its first dignity and strenght; 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

"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 allwise 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

"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 to 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 merrymakers for the marriagefeast. We must spare no appropriate cermony. And yonder Count

Emmerick is ordering the majordomo 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

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 rightweous 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, in fine, do that which I prepare to do; and afterward I must depart into eternal exile."

Horvendile left the fortress, and came presently to Maugis d'Aigremont. Horvendile got speech with this

brigand where he waited encamped in the hillcountry of Perdigon, loth to leave Storisende since it held

Ettarre who he so much desired, but with too few a adherents to venture an attack.

Maugis sprawled listles 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 he was prodding the torn papers scattered about him. He did

Then Horvendile spoke. Maugis sat listening. Above the swordhilt the thumb of one hand was stroking the

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 except upon clear forenoons to look at the towers of Storisende."

"Meanwhile at Storisende," said Horvendile, " Ettarre prepares to marry Sir Guiron."

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

"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 Heitman Michael, 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 judgements

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 halfsleep, 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 daus

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

"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 rememeber it was by very much

"Heh, if we fail," replies Maugis, "I shall at least have done with rememebering..." Then they settled details

Thus Horvendile returned to Storisende before twilight had thickened into nightfall. He came thus to a place

different in all things from the haggared outlaw's camp, for Count Emmerick held that night a noble revel.

The barons of Poictesme had wellnigh lost the knack of dancing during the twelve years of neverending

warfare which had been stirred up by the lust and greed of Maugis d'Aigremont: but tonight all trouble

seemed to have departed fron Storisende; and these warriors merrily returned to the sports of their youth.

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

Ettarre stood between the bedcurtains, 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 questioneed the clerk in silence, without any

"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 wellwishers slept I, I, the puppetshifter, have admitted

Maugis d'Aigrenont and his men into this castle. They are at work now, hammerandtongs, to decide who

Her first speech you would have found odd at such a time. "But, oh, it was not you who betrayed us,

"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 ominpotence to so that, Ettarre. I have given Maugis

d'Aigremont an equal chance with Sir Guiron. It is the custom of omnipotence to so 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

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 hidous contention

without; and the shrieks there, and the clash of metal there, spoke with rude eloquence of company even less

Horvendile replied: "I am not 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."

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

Maugis came forward, his eyes fixed hungrily upon Ettarre. "So a long struggle ends," he said, very quiet.

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

"I need no teacher now.... And so, Gruiron is dead and I yet live! I had not thought that would be possable."

She whispered this. "Give me your sword, Maugis, for just a little while, and then I will not hate you any

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

"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 Michael and

Perion and all thier 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 too soon I desire now only to die

As knave and madman, Ettarre saw the doubledealer 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

"My poor Maugis, it is not yet time I make my dealings plain to you. It suffices that you have served my turn,

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 wonderworking, to meet Guiron's eyes and Guiron's lips.

"My love, Ettare, they have not harmed you?" Sir Guiron cried to her, in the while that the maid answered:

"Maugis is dead," he answered joyously. "See here he lies, slain by brave Horvendile. And the rouges who

Then Ettarre saw that that Horvendile indeed waited becide the dead body of Maugis d'Aigremont. And the

"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, he pretended to translate from an old

manuscript written by an ancieny clerk called Horvendile. It told of Horvendile's part in the lovebusiness

between Sit 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 dreams, and fancies. And you , messire and you also, madame and dead Maugiss 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

"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

Horvendile deliberated, then spoke more briskly. "at all events, I most return now to my own country, which I

do not live a I live this bright fantastis Poictesme that I created or seemed to create and wherein I was

Horvendile drew a deep breath; and he looked downward at the corpse he had bereft of pride and dareing 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 and moved; and it was not because of

displeasure with uou that I brought you to disaster. Hence, also, one might evolve a heady analogue...."

Guiron was wondering what he might do in accord and with clemency. He did not stir as Horvendile came

nearer. The clerk showed very pitiful and mean becide 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

difficuly to manage; and I may confess now that I kept you so long imprisioned at Caer Idryn, and caused you

to spennd so many chapters oversea in heathendom, mainly in order that I might here weave out my romance

untroubled by your disconcerting and rather wooden perfection. But you are not the person to suspect ill of

your creator. You ate all that I once ment to be, Guiron, all that I have forgotten her to be; and for a dead

"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

doubledealings. 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

skytowering 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 things to say that I have loved you; it is a bitter

"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,

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 wholeheartedly. 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

Storisendeoh, 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 al 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 dearbought while, into other and

fairerseeming lands in search ofwe know not what! And, after a litle"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

A whimisical 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

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 passageway he paused, looking back at Guiron and Ettarre for a

heartbeat. Guiron and Ettarre had already forgotten his existence. Hand in hand they stood in the bright

Horvendile closed the door, and so left Storisende forever. Without he came into a lonely quietcolored

world already expectant of dawn's occupancy. Already the treetrunks eastward showed like the black bars of

Which deals with, among other unsatisfying matters, Lichfield ''"Whate'er she be

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 call him Felix, since Felix

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 and ending to be aethetically satisfactory, after all.... Why, beyond doubt it was. He

He was still walking in twilight for the time was approaching sunset in the gardens of Alcluid. He must

Felix Kennaston smiled a little over the thought of ending the romance with such topsyturvy anticlimaxes 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 we great geniuses instinctively plagiarize," he reflected. "I must have seen this a halfhour

ago, when I was walking up and down planning my final chapters. And so, I wove it into the tale as a

breastornament for Ettare, without ever consciously seeing the thing at all. Then, presto! I awake and find it

growing dark, with me lackadaisically astray in the twilight with this picked up piece of trash, just as I

imagened Horvendile walking out of the castle of Storisende carryinh such a jigumicrank. 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

Later Felix Kennaston was destined to puzzle over his inability to recollect what motive prompted him to slip

this glittering trifle into his pocket. He always remembered quite clearly how it sparkled in the abating glare

of that day's protentous sunset; and how the treetrunks 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.

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

Soandso, and of Soandso's having said thisorthat, 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 highschool graduates, Felix Kennaston had been an "intending

contributor" to various magazines, spasmodically bartering his postagestamps for courteouslyworded

rejectionslips. Then, too, in the old days before his marriage, when Kennaston had come close 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 of Defence of Ignorance widemargined specimens

of the farfetched decadence then in vogue, and the idol of Kennaston's youth, when he had seriously essayed

And it was once a familiar story how Marian Winwood got revenge on Felix Kennaston, when he married

Kathleen Saumarez, by publishing, in the transparent guise of fiction, all the loveletters he had written Miss

Winwood; so that Kennaston might actually have claimed to be generally recognized as the actual author of

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

wearandtear of ever actually existing. He had attempted a jaunt into the "happy, harmless Fableland"

which is bounded by Avalon and Phaeacia and Seacoast 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. Kennaston was completing, in fine, The Audit at

Storisendor, rather, Men Who Loved Alison, as the book came afterward to be called.

Competent critics in plenty have shrugged over Kennaston's cliche of pretending that the romance is

"retold" from an ancient manuscript. But to Kennaston the clerk Horvendile, the fictitious first writer of the

chronical and eyewitness 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 confidencebut then, somehow, it made the tale

For in the writing it all seemed perfectly real to Felix ennaston. His life was rather barren of motive now.. In

remoter, when he had wandered impecuniously from one adventture to another, sponging without hesitancy

upon such wealthy people as his chatter amused, there had always been exquisite girls to make love tosuch

girls as the younger generation did not produceand the everpresent problem of whence was to come the

fares for tomorrows hamsoms, in which the younger generation did not ride. For now hansom cabs were

wellnigh as uncommon as bicycles or sedanchairs, 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

This was not the first time that Kennastion had written of Ettarre and Horvendile: for The King's Quest, of

course, tells all about that ruining which this evasive pair contrived for King Alfgar, in somewhat stodgy

Spenserian verse. But Kennaston now understood this Horvendile more comlletely.... And so, as Horvendile

he lived among such gallant circumstances as he had always vaguely hoped his real life might provide by and

This Horvendile, coming unintelligibly to Storisende, and wittnessing there the long combat between Sir

Guiron des Rocques and Maugis d'Aigremont for possession of La Beale Alisonas Kennaston's heroine is

called of course in the printed book,this Horvendile now seems tto us 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 Kennnaston, writing the book, lived the life of Horvendile in the long happy hours of writing, in stints

which steadily became longer and more pleasurable; and insensiibly his existence blended and was absorbed

into the more colorful life of Horvendile. It was as Horvendile he wrote, seeming actually at times to

So the tale flowed on, telling how Count Emmerick planned a nottable marriagefeast for his sister La Beale

Ettarre and Sir Guiron des Rocques, with vastly different results from those already recordedwith the

results, in fine, which figure in the printed Men Who Loved Allison, wherin Horvendile keeps his proper

But to Kennaston that first irrational windingup of affairs, wherin a world's creator was able to wring only

contempt and pity from his puppetssince he had not endowed them with any faculties wherwith to

comprehend thier creator's nature and intentwas always the tale's real ending....

So it was that the lonely man lived with his dreams, and toiled for the vision's sake conttentedly: 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 better. For ordinary human beings,

with other normal forms of life, turn naturally toward the sun, and are at thier best thereunder; but it is the

misfortune of dreamers that thier peculiar talents find no exercise in daylight. So we regared Kennaston with

the distrust universally accorded people who need to be meddling with ideas in a world which sustains its

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 highpitched voice in talking, to begin with, was irritating: you new

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 remarksand the odd little noise, that was

nearly a snigger and just missed being a cough, with which he ended themwas peculiarly uningratiating in

a fat and middleaged person; his weak eyes very rarely met yours fullgaze; 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 fiddleing 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 shriking life. Certainly he seemed since his

marriage to have relinquished all conversationaal obligements to his wife. She had a curious trick of

explaining him, before his facein a manner which was not unreminiscent of the lecturer in "sideshows"

pointing out the peculiarities of the living skeleton or the glasseater; but it was done with such illconcealed

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

addittion, he expcted 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 coompany and the very thrilliest sort of playacting in teteatetes.

At all events, I never quite liked Felix Kennastonnot even after I came to understand that the man I knew

in the flesh was but a very illdrawn likeness of Felix Kennaston. After all, that is the whole sardonic point of

his storyand, indeed, of every human storythat 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

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

Felix Kennaston did not write very long that night. He fell idly to the droll familiar wondering how this dull

He was glad this spacious and subduedlyglowing place, and all the comfortable appointments of Acluid,

belonged to him. He had seen enough of the scrambling handtomouth makeshifts of poverty, in poverty's

heartdepressing habitations, during the thirtyeight years he weathered before the simultaneous deaths,

through a motor accident, of a semimythical 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 unlookedfor turn; and in the library of his fine house in

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 declained too many pilfered dicta concerning

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 reveiwer 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 CourierHerald, for the fickle general readingpublic, which then

used to follow the lifehistories of Bazoo the Bear and Mooshwa the Mink, and other "citizens of the wild,"

with that incalculable unanimity which today may be reserved for the biographies of optimistic orphans, and

tomorrow veers to vies intimes of highminded 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 ttherin, to me at least, took

"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,

"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 daen in Sicily to the uglier

shadow of Montfaucon's gibbet, there intervenes but the turning of a page, a choice betweeen Theocritus and

Villon. From the Athens of Herodotus to the Versailles of St.Simon, from Naishappur to Cranford, it is

equally quick traveling. All times and lands that ever took the sun, indeed, lie open, equally, to the explorer

by grace of Gutenberg; and transportation into Greece or Rome or Persia or Chicago, equally, in the affair of

a moment. Then, too, the islands of Avalon and Ogygia and Theleme stay always accessible, and magic

casements open readiily upon the surf of Seacoast Bohemia. For the armchair traveler alone enjoys

enfranchisement of a chronology, and of a geography, that has escaped the wearandtear of ever actually

"Peregrination in the realms of gold possesses also the quite inestimable advanttage that therin one's

personality is contraband. As when Dante maeks 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 today the curt

elucidation of a footnote, just so, admission to those high delights whereunto Shelley conducts is purchased

by accrediting to clouds and sylarkslet us sanely admita temporary importance which we would never

accord them unbiased. The traveler has for the halfhour 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 of Shellyor Sophocles, or Thackeray, or even Shakespearethe change need not

Yes, it is lightly phrased; but, after all, it is only another way of confessing that his books afford Kennaston

an avenue to forgetfullness of that fat pasty fellow whom Kennaston was heartily tired of being. For one, I

And becides,so Kennaston's thoughts strayed at times,these massed books, which his predecessor at

Alcluid had acquired piecemeal through the term of a long life, were a part of that predecessor's personality.

No other man would have gathered and have preserved precisely the same books, and each book, with

varying forcefulness, had entered into his predecessor's mind and had tinged it. These particolored books,

could one but reconstrust the mosaic correctly, would give a candid portrait of "your Uncle Henry in

Lichfield," which would perhaps surprise all those who knew him daily in the flesh. Of the fact that these

were unusual books their present owner and tentative explorer had no doubt whatever. They were perturbing

Now these books by their pleasant display of goldleaf, soberly aglow in lamplight, recalled an obscure

association of other tiny brilliances; and Felix Kennaston recollected the bit of metal he had found that

Laid by the lamp, it shone agreeably as Kennaston puckered his protruding brows over the characters with

which it was inscribed. So far as touched his chances of deciphering them, he knew all foreign languages

were to him of almost equal inscrutability. French he could puzzle out, or even Latin, if you gave him plenty

of time and a dictionartry; but this inscription was not in Roman lettering. He wished, with timedulled

As she come toward him through the fog, "How annoying it is," she was saying plaintively, "that these moors

"Ah, but you must not blame OleLukOie," he protested. "It is not all the fault of Beatrice Cenci..."

Then Kennaston knew he had unwittingly spoken magic words, for at once, just as he had seen it done in

theaters, the girl's face was shown him clearly in a patch of roseate light. It was the face of Ettarre.

"Things happen so in dreams, "he observed. "I know perfectly well I am dreaming, as I have very often

known before this that I was dreaming. But it was always against some law to tell the people in my nightmare

I quite understood they were not real people. "today in my daydream, and here again tonight, there is no

such restriction; and lovely as you are, I know that you are just a daughter of subconsciouness or of memory

"I had not thought to be part of any woman's dream nowadays.... Why do you call me Horvendile?"

She who bore the face of Ettarre pondered momentarily; and his heart moved with glad adoration.

"I never heard it before. But it seemed natural, somehowjust as it did when you spoke of OleLukOie

"But OleLukOie is the lord and master of all dreams, of course. And that furtive longdead Roman girl has

often troubled my dreams. When I was a boy, you concive, There was in my room at the first boardinghouse

in which I can remember dieting, a copy of the Guido portrait of Beatrice Cencia copy done in oils, a

worthless daub, I suppose. But there was evil in the picturea lurking devilishness, which waited patiently

and alertly until I should do what that silent whatever knew I was predestined to do, and, being malevolent,

wanted me to do. I knew nothing then of Beatrice Cenci, mark you, but when I`came to learn about her. That

woman was evil, whatever versemakers may have fabled, I thought for a long while.... Today I believe the

evil emanated from the person who painted that particular copy. I`do not know who that person was, I never

And Kennaston looked about him now, to find fog everywhereimpenetrable vapors which vaguely showed

pearlcolored radiancies here and there, but no determinable forms of trees or of houses, or of anything save

the face of Ettarre, so clearly discerned and so lovely in that strange separate cloud of roseate light.

"Ah, yes, those little magics"it was the girl who spoke"those futile troubling necromancies that are

wrought by portraits and unfamiliar rooms and mirrors and all timeworn glittering objectsby running

waters and the wind's persistency, and by lonely summer noons in the forests.... These are the little magics,

that have no large power, but how inconsequently do they fret upon men's heartstrings!"

"As if some very feeble forcesay, a maimed elfwere trying to attract attention? Yes, I think I

"And how droll, too, it is how quickly we communicate our thoughtseven though, if you notice, you are

"No, they never do in dreams. One never seems in fact, to use one's mouthyou never actually eat anything,

you may also notice, in dreams even though food is very often at hand. I suppose it is because all dream food

is akin to the pomegranates of Persephone, so that if you taste it you cannot ever return again the the

workaday world.... But why, I wonder, are we having the same dream?it rather savors of Morphean

parsimony, don't you think, thus to make one nightmare serve for two people? Or perhaps it is the bit of metal

And the girl nodded. "Yes, it is on account of the sigel of Scoteia. I have the other half, you know."

"What does this mean, Ettarre?" he began; and reaching forward, was about to touch her, when the

And Felix Kennaston was sitting at the writingtable in the library, with a gleaming scrap of metal before

"Well, it is undoubtedly quaint how dreams draw sustenance from halfforgotten happinings," he reflected;

"to think of my recollecting that weird daub which used to deface my room in Fairhaven! I had forgotten

Beatrice entirely. And I certainly never spoke of her to any human being, except of course Muriel

Allardyce.... But I would not be at all suprised if I had involuntarily hypnotized myself, sitting here staring at

this shiny piece of leadyou read of such cases. I believe I will put it away, to play with again sometime."

So Kennaston preserved this bit of metal. "No fool like an old fool," his commonsense testily assured him.

He thought no more of his queer dream, for a long while. Life had gone on decorously. He had completed

The Audit at Storisende, with leisured joy in the task, striving to write perfectly of beautiful happenings such

as life did not afford. There is no denying that the typed manuscript seemed to Felix Kennastonas he added

the last touches, before expressing it to Dapley Pildriffto inaugrate a new era in literature.

Kennaston was yet to learn that publishers in their business capacity have no especial concern with literature.

To his bewilderment he discovered that publishers seemed sure the merits a book had nothing to do with the

advisability of printing it. Herewith is appended a specimen or two from Felix Kennaston's correspondence

Dapley Pildreff"We have carefully read your story, 'The Audit at Storisende,' which you kindly submitted

to us. It is needless for us to speak of the literary quality of the story: it is in fact exquisitly done, and would

delight a very limited circle of readers trained to appreciate such delicate productions. But that class of

readers is necessarily small, and the general reader would, we fear, fail to recognize the book's merit and be

attracted to it. For this reason we do not feeland we regret to confess itthat the publication of this book

would be a wise business enterprise for us to undertake. We wish we could, in justice to you and ourselves,

see the matter in another light. We are returning the manuscript to you, and we remain, with appreciation of

Paige Ticknor's Sons"We have given very careful concideration to your story, 'The Audit at Storisende,'

which you kindly submitted to us. We were much interested in this romance, for it goes without saying that it

is marked with high literary quality. But we feel that it would not appeal with force and success to the general

reader. Its appeal, we think, would be to the small class of cultured readers, and therfore its publication would

not be attended with commercial success. Therefore in your interest, as well as our own, we feel that we must

give an unfavorable decision upon the question of publication. Naturally we regret to be forced to that

conclusion, for the work is one which would be creditable to any publiser's list. We return the manuscript by

express, with our apprecation of your courtesy in giving us the opportunity of consiidering it, and are, ect."

And so it was with The Gayvery Company, and with Leeds, McKibble Todd, and with Stuyvesant Brothers.

Unanimously they united to praise and to return the manuscript. And Kennaston began reluctantly to suspect

that, for all thier polite phrases about literay excellence, his romance must, somehow, be not quite in

consonance with the standards of that person who is, after all, the final arbiter of literature, and to whom

these publishers very properly deferred, as "the general reader." And Kennaston wondered if it would not be

well for him, also, to study the allimportant and exigent requirements of "the general reader."

Kennaston turned to the publishers' advertisements. Dapley Pildriff at that time were urging every one to read

White Sepulchers, the auther of which had made public the momentous discovery that all chorchgoers were

not immaculate persons. Paige Ticknor's Sons were announcing a "revised version" of The Apostates,by

Kennaston's own loathed firstcousin,which was guaranteed to sear the soul to its core, more than rival

Thackeray, and turn our highest social circles inside out. Then the Gayvery Company offered Through the

Transom, a daring study of "feminism," compiled to all appearanc under rather novel conditions, inasmuch as

the brilliant aother had, according to the advertisements, written every sentence with his jaws set and his soul

on fire. The majority of Leeds, McKibble Todds adjectives were devoted to Sarah's Secret, the prizewinner

in the firm's $15,000 contesta "sprightly romance of the greenwood," whose undoubted aim, Kennaston

deduced from tentative dips into its meandering balderdash, was to become the most soughtafter book in all

institutes devoted to care of the feebleminded. And Stuyvesant brothers were superlatively acclaiming The

Silent Brotherhood, the latest masterpiece of a pornographically gifted genius, who had edifyingly shown that

he ranked religion above literature by retiring from the ministry to write novels.

Kennaston laughedupon which side of the mouth it were too curious to inquire . Momentarily he thought

of printing the book at his own expense. But here the years of poverty had left indelible traces. Kennaston had

too often walked because he had not carfare, for a dollar ever again to seem to him an inconsiderable matter.

Comfortably reassured as to pecuniary needs for the future, he had not the least desire to control more money

than actually showed in his bankbalances: but, even so, he often smiled to note how unwillingly he spent

An unlikly thing happened: the book was accepted for publication. The BaxonMuir Company had no

proigious faith in The Audit at Storiende, as a commercial venture; but their "readers," in common with most

of the "readers" for the firms who had rejected it, were not lacking in discernment of its merits as an

admirable piece of writing. And the more optimistic among them protested even to forsee a posibility of the

book's selling. The vast public that reads for pastime, they contended, was begining to grow a litle tired of

being told how bad was thisorthat economic condition: and pretty much everything had been "daringly

exposed," to the point of weariness, from the inconsistencies of our clergy to the uncleanliness of our

sausage. In addition, they considered the supprising success of Mr. Marmaduke Fennel's eighteenthcentury

story, For Love of a Lady, as compared with the more moderate sales of Miss Elspeth Lancaster's In Scarlet

Sidon, that candid romamce of the brothel; deducing therefrom that the "gadzooks" and "by'r lady" type of

readingmatter was ready to revive in vogue. At all events, the BaxonMuir Company, after holding a rather

unusual number of conferences, declared their willingness to publish this book; and in due course they did

There were before this, however, for Kennaston manny glad hours of dabbling with proofsheets: the tale

seemed so different, and so infernally good, in print. Kennaston never in his life found any other plaything

comparable to those first widemargined "galley proofs" of The Audit at Strorisende. Here was the word,

vexatiously repeated within three lines, which must be replaced by a synonym; and the clause which, when

transposed, made the whole sentence gain in force and comeliness; and the curt sentence whose addition gave

clarity to the paragraph, much as a pinch of alum clears turbid water; and the vaguely unsatisfactory

adjective, for which a jet on inspiration suggested a substitute, of vastly different meaning, in the light of

whose inevitable aptness you marveled over your preliminary obtuseness:all these slight triumphs, one by

one, first gladdened Kennaston's labor and tickled his selfcomplacency. He could see no fault on the book.

His publishers had clearer eyes. His Preface, for one matter, they insisted on transposing to the rear of the

volume, where it now figures as the book's tolerably famous Colophonthat curious exposition of

Kennaston's creed as artist. Then, for a title, The Audit at Storisende was editorially adjudged abominable:

people would not know how to pronounce Storisende, and in consequence would hold back from discussing

the romance or even asking for it at bookdealers. Men Who Loved Ettarre was Kennaston's ensueing

suggesttion; but the BaxonMuir Company showed no fixed confidence in their patron's ability to pronounce

Ettarre either. Would it not be possible, they inquired, to change the heroine's name?and Kennaston

assented. Thus it was that in the end his book come to be called Men Who Loved Alison.

The book was delivered to the world, which received the gift without excitement. The book was delivered to

reviewers, who found in it a wellintentioned echo of Mr. Maurice Hewlett's earlier mediaeval tales. And

Then one propitous morning an indignant gentlewoman in Brooklyn wrote to The New York Sphere a letter

which was duly printed in that journal's widely circulated Sunday Supplement, The Literary Masterpieces of

This Week, to denounce the loathsome and depreved indecency of the nineteenth and twentieth chapters, in

whichwhile treating of Sir Guirons imprisonment in the Sacred Grove of Caer Idryn, and the worship

accorded there to the sigil of ScoteiaKennaston had touched upon some of the preverse refinements of

antique sexual relations. The following week brought forth a full page of letters. Two of these, as Kennaston

afterwards learned, were contributed by the "publicity man" of the BaxonMuir Company, and all arraigned

obscenities which Kennaston could neither remember nor on rereading his book diiscover. Later in this

journal, as in other newspapers, appeared still more denunciations. An uptotheminute bishop

expostulated from the pulpit against the story's vicious tendencies, demanding that it be suppressed, Therafter

it was no longer on sale in the large departmentstores alone, but was equally procurable at all the

bookstands in hotels and railway stations. Even the author's acquaintances began to read it. And the

Delaunays (then at the height of thier vogue as exponents of the "new" dances) introduced "the Alison

amble"; and from Tampa to Seattle, in certain syndicated cartoons of generally appealing idiocy, newspaper

readers were privileged to see one hero of the series knock the other heels over head with a copy of

Kennaston's romance. And women wore the "Alison aigrette" for a whole season; and a new brand of cheap

tobacco christened in her honor had presently made her name at least familiar in saloons. Men Who Loved

Alison became, in fine, the novel of the hour. It was one of those rare miracles such as sometimes palm off a

And shortly afterwards Mr. Booth Tarkington published another of his delightful romances: one forgets at

this distance of time just which it was: but, like all the others, it was exquisitely done, and sold neck and neck

with Men Who Loved Alison; so that for a while it looked almost as if the American reading public was

But presentyl the advertising columns of magazines and newspapers were heralding the year's vernal output

of enduring masterworks in the field of fiction: and readers were again assured that the great American novel

had just been published at last, by any number of persons: and so, the autumnal predecessors of these new

chefs d'oeuvre passed swiftly into oblivion, via the brief respite of a "popular" edition. And naturally,

Kennaston's romance was forgoten, by all save a few pensive people. Some of them had found in this volume

So Felix Kennaston saw his dream vulgarized, made a low byward; and he contemplated this travestying, as

the cream of a sardonic jest, with urbanity. Indeed, that hour of notoriety seemed not without its pleasant

features to Felix Kennaston, who had all a poet's ordinary appetite for flattery. Becides, it was droll to read

the "literary notes" which the BaxonMuir people were industriously disseminating, by means of the daily

journals, as to this Felix Kennaston's personality, ancestry, accomplishments, recreations and preferances in

And then, in common with the old woman famed in nursery rhyme, he was very often wont to observe, "But,

It was droll too, to be asked for autographs, lestures, and for donations of "your wonderful novel." It was

droll to receive letters from remote mysterious persons, who had read his book, and had liked it, or else had

disliked it to the point of being goaded into epistolary remonstrance, sarcasm, abuse, and (as a rule) erratic

spelling. It troubled Kennaston that only riffraff seemed to have read his book, so far as he could judge from

these unsolicited communications; and that such people of culture and education as might have been thrilled

And finally, it was droll to watch his wife's reception of the book. To Kennaston his wife stayed always a not

unfriendly mystery. She now could not but be a little taken aback by this revelation of his abilities, he

reflectedwith which she had lived so long without, he felt appreciation of thembut certainly she would

never admit to either fact. He doubted very much if Kathleen would ever actually read Men Who Loved

Allison; on various pretexts she had deferred the pleasure, and seemed, with perverted notions of humor, to

esteem it a joke that she alone had not read the book of which everybody was talking. Such was not

Kennaston's idea of humor, or of wifely interest. But Kathleen dipped into the volume here and there; and she

assuredly read all the newspapernotices sent in by the clippingbureau. These she considered with profound

"I have been thinkingyou ought to make a great deal out of your next novel," she said, one morning, over

her grapefruit; and the former poet wondered why, in heavens name, it should matter to her whether or not

the marketing of his dreams earned money, when they had already a competence. But women were thus

"You ought to do something more uptodate, though, Felix, something that deals with real life"

"Ah, but I don't particularly care to write about a subject of which I am so totally ignorant, dear. Becides, it

isn't for you to fleer and gibe at a masterpiece which you never read," he airily informed her.

"I am saving it up for next summer, Felix, when I will have a chance to give every word of it the reverence it

deserves. I really don't have any time for reading nowadays. There is always something more important that

has to be attended toFor insance, the gasoline engine isn't working again, and I had to 'phone in town for

"And it is messy things like that you want me to write about!" he exclaimed. "About the gasoline engine

going on another strike, and Drake's forgetting to tell you we were all out of sugar until late Saturday night!

Never mind, Mrs. Kennaston you will be sorry for this, and you will weep the bitter tears of unavailing

repentance, some day, when you ride in the front automobile with the Governor to the unveiling of my

various monuments, and have fallen into the anecdotage of a great man's widow." He spoke lightly, but he

was reflecting that in reality Kathleen did not read his book because she did not regard any of his doings very

seriously. "Isn't this the third time this week we have had herring for breakfast?" he inquired, pleasantly. "I

think I will wait and let them scramble me a couple of eggs. It is evidently a trifle that has escaped your

attention, my darling, during our long years of happy married life, that I don't eat herring. But of course, just

as you say, you have a number of much more important things than husbands to think about. I dislike having

to put any one to any extra trouble on my account; but as it happens, I have a lot of work to do this morning,

"We haven't had it since Saturday, Felix." Then wearly, to the servinggirl, "Cora, see if Mr. Kennaston can

have some eggs.... I wish you wouldn't upset things so, Felix. Your coffee will get stonecold; and it is hard

enough to keep servents as it is. Becides, you know perfectly well today is Thursday, and the librery has to

"That means of course I am to be turned outofdoors and forced to waste a whole day somewhere in town.

And kathleen began to laugh, ruefully. "You are just a great big baby, Felix. You are sulking aand swelling

up like a frog, because you think I don't appreciate what a wonderful husband I have and what a wonderful

Then Kennaston began to laugh also. He knew that what she had said was tolerably true, even to the

batrachian simile. "When you insisted on adopting me, dear, you ought to have realized what you were letting

"And I do think," Kathleen went on, evincing that conviction with which she as a rule repeated other

peoples remarks"that you ought to make your next book something that deals with real life. Men Who

Loved Alison is beautifully written and all that, but, exactly as the Tucson Pioneer said, it is really just

"Ah, but is it unadulterated nonsense, Kathleen, that somewhere living may be a uniformly noble

transaction?" he debated"and human passions never be in a poor way to find expression with adequate

speech and action" Pleased with the phrase, and feeling in a better temper, he began to butter a roll.

"I don't know about that; but, in any event, people prefer to read about the life they are familiar with."

"You touch on a disheartening truth. People never want to be told anything they do not believe already. Yet I

quite fail to see why, in books or elsewhere, any one should wish to be reminded of what human life is

actually like. For living is the one art in which mankind has never achieved distinction. It is perhaps an

obscure sense of this that makes us think the begetting of mankind an undiscussable subject, and death a

"Yes? I dare say," Kathleen assented vaguely. "This herring is really very good, Felix. I think you would

like it, if you just had not made up your mind to be stubborn about it" Then she spoke with new animation:

"Felix, Margaret Woods was in Louvet's yesterday morning, having her hair done for a dinner they gave the

railroad crowd last night, and of all the faded washedout looking people I ever saw! And I can remember

her having that hideous brown dress long before she was married. Of course it doesn't make any difference to

me that she didn't see fit to invite us. She was one of your friends, not mine. I was only thinking that, since

she always pretended to be so fond of you, it does seem curious the way we are invariably left out." "So

Kennaston did not embroider verbally his themeof Living Adequatelyas he had felt himself in vein to

"Some day," he ruefully reflected, in the while that Kathleen spoke of the sort of people that were getting into

the Women's Club nowadays, "I shall certainly write a paper upon The Lost Art of Conversing with One's

Shortly afterward befell a queer incident. Kennaston, passing through a famed city, lunched with a personage

who had been pleased to admire Men Who Loved Alison, and whose remunerative admiration had been

There were some ten others in the party, and Kennaston found it droll enough to be sitting at table with them.

The lean pensive manwith hair falling over his forehead in a neatlyclipped "bang," such as custom

restricts to childrenhad probably written that morning, in his official capacity, to innumerable potentates.

That handsome bluff old navyofficer was a national hero: he would rank in history with Perry and John Paul

Jones; yet here he sat, within arms'reach, prosaically complaining of unseasonable weather. That bearded

man, rubicund and monstrous as to nose, was perhaps the most powerful, as he was certainly the most

wealthy, person inhabiting flesh; and it was rumored, in those Arcadian days, that kingdoms nowhere might

And that exquisitely neat fellow, looking like a lad unconvincingly madeup for an octogenarian in amateur

theatricals, was the premier of the largest province in the world: his thinfeatured neighbor was an

aeronautat this period really a rara avisand went above the clouds to get his livelihood, just as ordinary

people went to banks and offices. And chief of all, their multifarious hostthe personage, as one may

discreetly call himhad left unattempted scarcely any role in the field of human activities: as ranchman,

statesman, warrior, historian, editor, explorer, athlete, coiner of phrases, and rediscoverer of the Decalogue,

impartially, he had labored to make the world a livelier place of residence; and already he was the pivot of as

The famous navyofficer, as has been said, was complaining of the weather. "The seasons have changed so,

"It has been rather unseasonable," assented the financier; "but then you always feel the heat so much more

"Becides," came the judicious comment, "it has not been the heat which was so oppressive his morning, I

"Ah, but don't you find now," asked the premier gaily, "that looking at the thermometer tends to make you

feel, really, much more uncomfortable than if you stayed uninformed as to precisely how hot it was?"

"Well! where ignorance is bliss it is folly to be wise, as I remember to have seen stated somewhere."

"By George, though, it is wonderful how true are many of those old sayings!" observed the personage. "We

assume we are much wiser than our fathers: but I doubt if we really are, in the big things that count."

"In fact, I have often wondered what George Washington, for example, would think of the republic he helped

"Why, he would probably turn in his grave, at some of our newfangled notionssuch as prohibition and

"Oh, well, all sensible people know, of course, that the trouble with prohibition is that it does not prohibit,

"That is admirably put, sir, if you will permit me to say so. Still, there is a great deal to be said on both sides."

"And after all, is there not a greater menace to the ideas of Washington and Jefferson in the way our present

"There you have it, sirtoday we punish the poor man for doing what the rich man does with entire

"By George, there are many of our socalled captains on industry who, if the truth were told, and a shorter

and uglier word were not unpermissible, are little better than malefactors of great wealth."

This epigram, however heartily admired, was felt by many of the company to be a bit daring in the presence

of the magnate: and the lean secretary spoke hastily, or at any rate, in less leisurely tones than usual:

"After all, money is not everything. The richest people are not always he happiest, in spite of their luxury."

"You gentlemen can take it from me," asserted the aeronaut, "that many poor people get a lot of pleasure out

"Now really though, that reminds mechildren are very close observers, and, as you may have noticed, they

ask the most remarkable questions. My little boy asked me, only last Tuesday, why poor people are always so

"What you might call a chip of the old block, eh?so that mighty little misses him?"

"And perfectly true, gentlementhe poor are kind to each other. Now, I believe just being kind makes you

"And I often think that is a better sort of religion than just dressing up in your best clothes and going to

"Oh, whatever pretended pessimists in search of notoriety may say, most people are naturally kind, at

"I would put it that Christianity, in spite of the carpinng sneers of science socalled, has led us once for all to

"My dear sir, were there nothing else, and even putting aside the outraged sentiments of civilized humanity,

another great or prolonged war between any two of the leading nations is unthinkable"

"For the simple reason, gentlemen, that we have perfected our fighting machines to such an extent that the

"Oh, it seems impossible to realize how we ever got along without the automoblie"

"Do you know, I would not be surpised if some day horses were exhibited in museums"

"The telephone, for instanceour ancestors would not have believed in the possibilities of such a thing"

"And, by George, they talk of giving an entire play with those movingpicture machinesacting the whole

"And America is going to be the greatest nation in it, before very long, commercially and in every way....

So the talk flowed on, with Felix Kennaston contributting very little thereto. Indeed, Felix Kennaston, the

dreamer, was rather illatease among these men of action, and listened to their observations with perturbed

attention. He sat among the great ones of earthnot all of them the very greatest, of course, but each a

person of quite respectable importance. It was the sort of gathering that in boyhoodand in later life also, for

that matterhe had foreplanned to thrill and dazzle, as he perfectly recollected. But now, with the

opportunity, he somehow could not think of anything quite suitable to sayof anything which would at once

Therefore he attempted to even matters by assuring himself that the talk of these efficient people was lacking

in brilliance and real depth, and expressed sentiments which, microscopocally viewed, did not appear to be

astoundingly original. If these had been less remarkablee persons he would have thought their conversation

almost platitudinous. And not one of them, however distinguished, or whatever else he might have done,

could have written Men Who Loved Alison! Kennaston cherished that reflection as he sedately partook of a

dish he resollectted to have seen described, on menu cards, as "Hungarian goulash" and sipped sherry of no

He was to remember how plain the fare was, and more than once, was to refer to this mealquite

casuallythrough a "That reminds me of what Suchanone said once, when I was lunching with him," or

perhaps, "The last time I lunched with Soandso, I remember" With such gambits he was to begin, later,

to introduce to us of Lichfield divers anecdotes which, if rather pointless, were at least garnished with

There was a Cabinet meeting that afternoon, and luncheon ended, the personage wasted scant time dismissing

"It has been a very great pleasure to meet you Mr. Kennaston;" quoth the personage, wringing Kennaston's

Kennaston suitably gave him to understand that they shared ecstasy in common. But all the while Kennaston

was, really thinking that here before him, halfrevealed, shone the worldfamous teeth portrayed by

cartoonists in the morningpaper every day, everywhere. Yes, they were remarkable teethimmaculate,

marmoreal and massive,and they were so closeset that Kennaston was now smitten with an idiotic desire

"Those portions of your book relating to the sigil of Scoteia struck me as being too explicit," the personage

continued, bluffly, but in lowered tones. The two stood now, beneath a great stuffed elk's head, a little apart

from the others. "Do you think it was quite wise? I seem to recall a phraseabout birds"

Kennaston's thoughts remained, as yet, dental. But there is no denying Kennaston was perturbed. Nor was he

less puzzled when, as if in answer to Kennaston's bewildered look, the personage produced from his

waistcoat pocket a small square mirror, which he halfexhibited, but retained secretively in the palm of his

hand. "Yes, the hurt may be twofoldI am presupposing that, as a countrygentleman, you have raised

"Why, no, they keep up such a maddening cooing and purring on warm days, and drum so on tin

roofs"Kennaston stammered"that I long ago lost patience with the birds of Venus, whatever the tincture

"Ah, well," the personage said, with a wise nod, and with more teeth than ever, "you exercise a privilege

common to all of usand my intended analogy falls through. In any event, it has been a great pleasure to

meet you. Come and see me again, Mr. Kennastonand meanwhile, think over what I have said."

And that was all. Kennaston returned to Alcluid in a whirl of formless speculations. The mirror and the

insane query as to white pigions could not, he concidered, but constitute some password to which Kennaston

The mystery had some connection with what he had written in his book as to the sigil of Scoteia.

... And he could not find he had written anything very definite. The broken disk was spoken of as a talisman

in the vague terms best suited to a discussion of talismans by a person who knew nothing much a about them.

True, the book told what the talisman looked like; it looked like that bit of metal he had picked up in the

garden.... He wondered if he had thrown away that bit of metal; and, searching, discovered it in the desk

Laid by the lamp, it shone agreeably as Kennaston puckered his protruding heavy brows over the characters

with which it was inscribed. That was what the sigil looked likeor rather, what half the sigil looked like,

because Ettarre still had the other half. How could the personage have known anything about it? unless there

were, indeed, really some secret and some password through which men won to place and the world's

prized?... Blurred memories of Eugene Sue's nefarious Jesuits and of Balzac's redoubtable Thirteen arose in

No, the personage had probably been tasting beverages more potent than sherry; there were wild legends,

since disproved, such as seemed then to excuse that supposition: or perhaps he was insane, and nobody but

Filix Kennaston knew it.... What could a little mirror, much less pigions, have to do with this bit of

metal?except that this bit of metal, too, reflected light so that the strain tired your eyes, thus steadily to

"Madam," he was insanely stating, "I would not for the world set up as a fit exponent for the mottoes of a

It was quite dark. Kennaston could not see the woman with whom he was talking. But they were in an open

paved place, like a courtyard, and he was facing the great shut door against which she stood, vaguely

discernible. He knew they were waiting for some one to open this door. It seemed to him for no reason at all,

that they were at Tunbridge Wells. But there was no light anywhere. Complete darkness submerged them; the

"That I am of smirched repute, madam, I lack both grounds and inclination to deny. Yet I am not so through

choice. Believe me, I am innately a lover of all bodily comforts: so, by preference, an ill name is as

obnoxious to me asshall we say?soiled linen or a coat of last year's cut. But then, que voulezvous? as

our lively neighbors observe. Squeamishness was never yet bred in an empty pocket; and I am thus

compelled to the commission of divers profitable peccadilloes, once in a blue moon, by the dictates of that

same haphazard chance which tonight has pressed me into the service of innocence and virtue."

She kept silence; and he went on in lightheaded wonder as to what this dream, so plainly recognized as such,

was all about, and as to whence came the words which sprang so nimbly to his lips, and as to what was the

cause of his great wistfull sorrow. Perhaps if he listened very attentively to what he was saying, he might find

"You do not answer madam. Yet think a little. I am a notorious rogue: the circumstance is conceded. But do

you think I have selfishly become so in quest of amusement? Nay, I can assure you that Newgate, the wigged

judge, the jolting cart, the gallows, blend in no pleasant dreams.... But what choice had I? Cast forth to the

gutter's miring in the susceptible years of infancy, a girl of the town's byblow, what choice had I, in heaven's

name? If I may not live as I would, I must live as I may; in emperors and parsons and sewerdiggers and

"Let us put it, rather, that I have proved in life's hard school an indifferent Latinist, by occasionally

"Something of the sort might be my description in puritanic mouths. You know at least what happened at The

"And yet I have saved you from Lord Umfraville? Ah, madam, Providence labors with quaint instruments,

dilapidating Troy by means of a wood rockinghorse, and loosing sin into the universe through a halfeaten

apple. Nay, I repeat, I am not all base; and I have read somewhere that those who are in honor wholly

He could tell her hand had raised to the knocker on the closed door. "Mr. Vanringham, will you answer me a

The girl continued "I have not knocked. I possess, as you know a considerable fortune in my own right. It

would be easy for a strong manand, sure, your shoulders are prodigiously broad, Mr. Cutthroat!very

easy for him to stifle my cries and carry me away, even now. And then, to preserve my honor, I would have

"Dame Venus," Kennaston observed, "may have made a similar demand of the waves at Cythera when she

first rose among their billows: and I doubt not that the white foaming waters, amorously clutching a her far

whiter feet, laughed and murmured the answer I would give did I not know your question was put in a spirit

"And yet," the man echoed, "I resist all these temptations? Frankly, had you been in my eyes less desirable,

madam, you would not have reached home thus eneventfully; for a rich marriage is the only chance adapted

to repair my tattered fortunes; and the devil is cunning to avail himself of our flesh's frailty. Had you been the

fat widow of some City knight, I would have played my lord of Umfraville's part, upon my pettier scale. Or,

had I esteemed it possible for me to have done with my old life, I would have essayed to devote a cleaner

existence to your service and worship. Indeed, indeed, I speak the truth, however jestingly!" he said, with

sudden wildness. "But what would you have? I would not entrust your fan, much less your happiness, to the

keeping of a creature so untrustworthy as I know myself to be. In fine, I look upon you, madam, in such a

rapture of veneration and tenderness and joy and heartbreaking yearning, that it is necessary I get very tipsy

And Kennaston, as he spoke thus, engulfed in darkness, knew it was a noble sorrow which possessed hima

stingless wistfull sorrow such as is aroused by the unfolding of a wellacted tragedy or the progress of a lofty

music. This ruffian longing, quite hopelessly, to be made clean again, so worshipful of his loved lady's purity

to be forever unattainable in his mean life, was Felix Kennaston somehow.... What was it Maugiss

d'Aigremont had said?"I have been guilty of many wickednesses, I have held much filthy traffic such as

my soul loathed; and yet, I swear to you, I seem to myself to be still the boy who once was I." Kennaston

understood now, for the first time with deep reality, what his puppet had meant; and how a man's deeds in the

But the door opened. Confusedly Kennaston was aware of brilliantlylighted rooms beyond, of the chatter of

gay people, of the thin tinkling music, and more immediately, of two lackeys, much bepowdered as to their

heads, and stately in new liveries of blueandsilver. Confusedly he noted these things, for the woman had

paused in the bright doorway, and all the loveliness of Etarre was visible now, and she had given a delighted

This much he heard and saw as her hand went out toward him gladly. Then as she touched him the universe

seemed to fold about Feliix Kennaston, just as a hand closes, and he was siting at the writingtable in the

"I can make nothing of all this. I remember of course that I saw Muriel Allardyce stand very much like that,

in the doorway of the Royal Hotel, at the Green Chalybeateand how many years ago, good Lord!... And

equally of course the most plausible explanation is that I am losing my wits. Or, else it may be that I am

playing blindfold with perilous matters. Felix Kennaston, my friend, the safest planthe one assuredly safe

plan for youwould be to throw away this devil's toy, and forget it completely.... And, I will, toothe very

first thing tomorrow morningor after I have had a few days to think it over, any way...."

But even as he made this compact it was without much lively faith in his promises.

He was looking down at the most repulsive old woman he had ever seen. Hers was the abhorrent fatness of a

spider; the flesh appeared to have the coloring and consistency of dough. She sat upon the stone pavement,

kniting; her eyes, which raised to his unblinkingly, were black, secretive, and impersonally malevolent; and

her jaws stirred without ceasing, in a loose chewing motion, so that the white hairs, rooted in the big mole on

"But one does not pay on entering," she was saying. "One pays as one goes out. It is the rule."

"Eh, I shall never know until God's funeral is preached," the old woman said. "I only know it is forbidden me

So he went past her, aware that through some nameless grace the girl whom he had twice seen in dreams

awaited him there, and that the girl's face was the face of Ettarre. She stood be a stone balustrade, upon which

squatted tall stone monstersweird and haphazard collocations, as touched anatomy, of bird and brute and

fiendand she in common with these hobgolins looked down upon a widespread comely city. The time was

a bright and windy morning in spring; and the sky, unclouded was like an inverted cup which did not merely

roof Ettarre and the man who had come back to her, but inclosed them in incommunicable isolation. To the

left, beyond shimmering treetops, so far beneath them that it made Felix Kennaston dizzy to look, the

ruffling surface of a river gleamed.... It was in much this fashion, he recalled, that Ettarre and Horvendile had

"But now I wonder where on the face ofor, rather, so far above the face of what especial planet we may

happen to be? "Kennastton marveled happily"or east of the sun or west of the moon? At all events, it

hardly matters. Suffice it that we are in love's land today. What need is there to worry over any one

"He lookeed at her; and again his heart moved with glad adoration. It was not merely that Ettarre was so

pleasing to the eye, and distinguished by so many delicate clarities of colorso young, so quick of

movement, so slender, so shapely, so inexpressibly virginalbut the heady knowledge that here on dizzying

heights he, Felix Kennaston, was somehow playing with superhuman matters, and that no power could induce

him to desist from his delicious and perilous frolic, stirred in deep recesses of his being, nameless springs.

Nameless they must remain; for it was as though he had discovered himself to possess a sixth sense; and he

found that the contrivers of language, being less prodigally gifted, had never been at need to invent any terms

wherewith to express this sense's gratification. But he knew that he was strong and admirable; that men and

men's affairs lay far beneath him; that Ettarre belonged to him; and, most vividly of all, that the exulatance

"Yet it is not an city of today," he was saing. "Look, how yonder little rascal glittershe is wearing a

helmet of some sort and a gorget. Why, all those pigmies, if you look closely, go in far braver scarlets and

purples than we elect to skulk about in nowadays; and nowhere in sight is an officebuilding or an

electriclight advertisement of chewinggum. No, that hotchpotch of hubbled gables and parapets and towers

shaped like lanterns was stolen straight out of some Dore Illuustration for Rabelais or Les Contes

Drolatiques. But it does not matter at all, and it will never matter, where we may chance to be, Ettarre. What

really and greatly matters, is that when I try to touch you everything vanishes."

It proved that this was indeed a part of the sigil's wonderworking: Kennaston learned by experience that

whenever, even by accident, he was about to touch Ettarre his dream would end like a burst bubble. He would

Before long he also learned something concerning the sigil of Scoteia, of which his piece of metal once

formed a part; for it was permitted him to see the sigil in its entirety, many centuries before it was shattered:

it was then one of he treasures of the Didascalion, a peculiar sort of girls' school in King Ptolemy Physcon's

ciity of Alexandria, where women were tutored to honor fittingly the power which this sigil served. But it is

not expedient to speak clearly concerning this; and the real name of the sigil was, of course, quite different

So began an odd divided life for Felix Kennaston. At first he put his half of the sigil in an envelope, which he

hid in a desk in the library, under a pile of his dead uncle's unused bookplates; whence, when occasion

served, it was taken out in order that when held so as to reflect the lamplightfor this was always

Later Kennaston thought of an expedient by which to prolong his dreams. Nightly he lighted and set by his

bedside a stump of candle. The tiny flame, after he had utilized its reflection, would harmlessly burn out

while his body slept with a bit of metal in one hand; and he would be freed of Felix Kennaston for eight hours

uninterruptedly. To have left an electriclight turned on until he awakened, would in the end have exposed

him to detection and the notimpossible appointment of a commission in lunacy; and he recognized the

potentialities of such mischance with frank distaste. As affairs sped, however, he could without great

difficulty buy his candles in secret. He was glad now he was welltodo, if only because, as an incidental

The diurnal part of Kennaston's life was largely devoted to writing The Tinctured Veilthat amazing

performance which he subsequently gave to a bewildered world. And for the rest, his waking life went on in

But this is notsave by way of an occasional parenthesisa chronicle of Felix Kennaston's doing in the

flesh. You may find all that in Mr. Froser's Biography. Flippant, inefficient and moody, Felix Kennaston was

not in the flesh particularly engaging; and in writing this record it is necessary to keep his fat corporeal

personality in the background as much as may be possible, lest this workaday mask, of unamiable flesh and

mannerisms, should cause you, as it so often induced us of Lichfield, to find the man repellent, and nothing

Now it befell that this spring died Bishop Arkwrightof the Cathedral of the Bleeding Heartand many

dignitaries of his faith journeyed to Lichfield to attend the funeral. Chief among these was a prelate who very

long ago had lived in Lichfield, when he was merely a bishop. Kennaston was no little surprised to receive a

note informing him that this eminent churchman would be pleased to see Mr. Felix Kennaston that evening at

The prelate sat alone in a sparsely furnished, rather dark, and noticeably dusty room. He was like a lean

effigy carved in timeyellowed ivory, and his voice was curiously ingratiating. Kennaston recognized with

joy that this old man talked like a person in a book, instead of employing the fragmentary verbal shorthand of

ordinary Lichfieldiam conversation; and Kennaston, to whom the slovenliness of fairly cultured people's

daily talk was always a mystery and an irritant, fell with promptitude into the same tone.

The prelate, it developed, had when he lived in Lichfield known Kennaston's dead uncle"for whom I had

the highest esteem, and whose friendship I valued most dearly." He hoped that Kennaston would pardon the

foibles of old age and overlook this trespass upon Kennaston's time. For the prelate had, he said, really a

"There is a portrait of you, sir, in my libraryvery gorgeous, in full canonicalsjust as my uncle left the

room," said Kennaston, all at sea. But the prelate had begun to talkamiably, and in the most commonplace

fashion conceivableof his former life in Lichfield, and, of the folk who had lived there then, and to ask

questions about their descendants, which Kennaston answered as he best could. The whole affair was

puzzling Kennaston, for he could think of no reason why this frail ancient gentleman should have sent for a

stranger, even though that stranger were the nephew of a dead friend, just that they might discuss trivialities.

"Yes, I was often a guest at Alcluida very beautiful home it was in those days, famed, as I remember, for

the many breeds of pigions which your uncle amused himself by maintaining. I suppose that you also raise

Kennaston saw that the prelate now held a small square mirror in his left hand. "No, sir," Kennaston

answered evenly; "there were a great many about the place when it came into our possession; but we have

"The pigion has so many literary associations that I should have thought it would appeal to a man of letters,"

the prelate continued. "I ought to have said eariler perhaps that I read Men Who Loved Alison with great

interest and enjoyment. It is a notable book. Yet in dealing with the sigil of Scoteiaor so at least it seemed

to meyou touched upon subjects which had better be lift undisturbed, There are drugs, my son, which work

much good in the hands of the skilled physician, but cannot without danger be entrusted to the vulger." "Sir,

Kennaston began, "I must tell you that in writing of the sigilas I called itI designed to employ only such

general terms as romance ordinarily accords to talismans. All I wroteI thoughtwas sheer invention. It is

true I found by accident a bit of metal, from which I derived the idea of my socalled sigil's appearance. That

bit of metal was to me then just a bit of metal; nor have I any notion, even today, as to how it came to be

He paused. The prelate nodded. "It is always interesting to hear whence makers of creative literature draw

"Since then, sir, by the drollest of concidences, a famous personage has spoken to me in almost the identical

words you employed this evening, as to the sigil of Scoteia. The coincidence, sir, lay less in what was said

than in the apparenttly irrelevant allusiion to white pigeons which the personage too made, and the litle

mirror which he too held as he spoke. Can you not see, sir," Kennaston asked gaily, "to what wild imaginings

the coincidence tempts a weaver of romance? I could find it in my heart to believe it the cream of an ironic

jest that you great ones of the earth have tested me with a password mistakenly supposing that I, also, was

initiate. I am tempted to imagine some secret understanding, some hidden sooperancy, by which you

strengthen or, possibly, have attained your power. Confess, sir, is not the coincidence a droll one?"

"It is remarkable enough," the prelate conceded, smiling. He asked the name of the personage whom

coincidence linked with him, and being told it, chuckled. "I do not think it very odd he carried a mirror," the

prelate considered. "He lives before a mirror, and behiind a megaphone. I confessmea culpa!I often find

my little lookingglass a convenience, in making sure all is right before I go into the pulpit. Not a few men in

public life, I believe, carry such mirrors," he said, slowly. "But you, I take it, have no taste for public life?"

"Think well, my son! Suppose, for one mad instant, that your wild imaginings were not wholly insane?

suppose that you had accidentally stumbled upon enough of a certain secret to make it simpler to tell you the

whole mystery? Cannot a trained romancer conceive what you might hope for then?"

Kennaston was horribly frightened. "I can assure you, sir that even then I would prefer my peaceful lazy life

"Ah, well," the prelate estimated; "it is scarcely a churchman's part to play advocatus mundi. Believe me, I

would not tempt you from your books. And for our dreams, I have always held heretically, we are more

responsible than for our actions, since it is what we are, uninfluenced, that determines our dreams." He

seemed to meditate. "I will not tempt you, therefore, to tell me the whole truth concerning that bitt of metal. I

suspect, quite candidly, you are keeping something back, my son. But you exercise a privilege common to all

"At least," said Kennaston, "we will hope my poor wits may not be shaken by any morecoincidences."

"I am tolerably certain," quoth the prelate, with an indulgent smile, "that there will be no more coincidences."

Then he gave Kennaston his stately blessing; and Kennaston went back to his life of dreams.

There was no continuity in these dreams save that Etarre was in each of them. A dream would usually begin

with some lightheaded topsyturviness, as when Kennaston found himself gazing forlornly down at his remote

feethaving grown so tall that they were yards away from him and he was afraid to stand upor when thin

men in black hoods carefully explained the importance of the task set him by quoting fragmentgs of the

multiplication tables, or when a bull who happened to be the King of Spain was pursuing him through a city

of blind people. But presently, as dregs settle a little by a little in a glass of water and leave it clear, his

dreamworld would become rational and compliant with familiar natural laws, and Ettarre would be

theredesirable above all other contents of the universe, and not to be touched under penalty of ending all.

Sometimes they would be alone in places which he did not recognize, sometimes they would be living under

the Stuarts or the Valois or the Caesars, or other dynasties long since unkingdomed, human lives whose

obligations and imbroglios affected Horvendile and Ettarre to much that halfserious concern with which one

follows the action of a romance or a wellacted play; for it was perfectly understood between Horvendile and

Ettare seemed to remember nothing of the happenings Kennaston had invented in his book. And Guiron and

Maugis d'Aigremontt and Count Emmerick and the other people in The Audit at Storisendeonce more to

give Men Who Loved Alison its original titlewere names that rang familiar to her somehow, she

confessed, but without her knowing why. And so, Kennaston came at last to comprehend that peerhaps the

Etarre he loved was not the heroine of his book inexplicably vivified; but, rather, that in the book he had, just

as inexplicably, drawn a blurred portrait of the Ettarre he loved, that ageless lovable and loving woman of

whom all poets had been granted fitful broken glimpsesdimly prefiguring her advent into his life too, with

pallid and feeble visionings. But of this he was not ever sure; nor did he greatly care, now that he had his

There was, be it repeated, no continuity in these save that Ettarre was in each of them; that alone they had in

common: but each dream conformed to certain general laws. For instance, there was never any confusion of

timethat is, a dream extended over precisely the amount of time he actually slept, so that each dreamlife

was limited to some eight hours or therabouts. No dream was ever iterated, nor did he ever twice find himself

in the same surroundings as touched chronology; thus, he was often in Paris and Constantinople and

Alexandria and Rome and London, revisiting even the exact spot, the very streetcorner, which had figgured

in some former dream; but as terrestrial time went, the events of his first dream would either have happened

He never dreamed of absolutely barbaric orderless epochs, nor of happenings (so far as he could ascertain)

elsewhere than in Europe and about the mediterranean coasts; even within these confines his dreams were as

a rule restricted to urban matters, rarely straying beyond city walls: his hypothesis in explanation of these

For a while Kennaston thought these dreams to be bits of lives he had lived in previous incarnations; later he

was inclined to discard this view. He never to his knowledge lived through precisely the same moment in two

different capacitiies and places; but more than once he came within a few years of doing this, so that even had

he died immediately after the earliertimed dream, it would have been impossible for him to have been

reborn and reach the age he had attained in that dream whose period was only a trifle later. In his dreams

Kennaston's age varied slightly, but was almost always in plesant proximity to twentyfive. Thus, he was in

Jerusalem on the day of the Cruxifixion and was aged about twentythree; yet in another dream he was at

Capreae when Tiberius died there, seven year afterward, and Kennaston was then still in the early twenties:

and again, he was in London, at Whitehall, in 1649, and at VauxleVicomte near Fontainebleau in 1661,

being on each occasion twentythree or four. Kennaston could suggest no explanation of this.

He often regretted that he was never in any dream anybody of historical prominence, so that he could have

found out what became of him after the dream ended. But though he sometimes talked with notable

personsinwardly gloating meanwhile over his knowledge of what would be the outcome of their warfaring

or statecraft, and of the manner and even the hour of their deathshe himself seemed fated, as a rule, never

to be any one of importance in the world's estimation. Indeed, as Kennaston cheerfully recognized, his was

not a temperament likely to succeed, as touched material matters, in any imaginable state of society; there

was not, and never had been, any workaday world in whichas he had said at Storisendehe and his like

would not, in so far as temporal prizes were concerned, appear to waste at loose ends and live futilely. Then,

moreover, in each dream he was woefully hampered by inability to recall preceding events in the life he was

then leading, which handicap doomed him to redoubled inefficiencies. But that did not matter now, in view of

It was some while before the man made the quaint disovery that in these dreams he did not in any way

resemble Feliix kennaston physically. They were astray in an autumn forest, resting beside a small fire which

he had kindled in the shelter of a boulder, when Ettarre chanced to speak of his brown eyes, and thereby

perplex him. But there was in this dream nothing which would reflect his countenance; and it was later, in

Troy Town (Laomedon ruled the city then, and Priam they saw as a lad playing at marbles in a paved

courtyard, where tethered oxen watched him over curiously painted mangers) that Kennaston looked into a

steel mirror, framed with intertwined ivory serpents that had emeralds for eyes, and found there a puzzled

Thus it was he discovered that in these dreams he was a tall lean youngster, with ruddy cheeks, wideset

brown eyes, and a smallish head covered with crisp tightcurling darkred hair; nor did his appearance ever

change, save only once, in any subsequent dream. What he saw was so different from the pudgy pasty man of

fortyodd who, he knew, lay at this moment in Felix Kennaston's bed, breathing heavily and clasping a bit of

A little by a little he was beginning to lose interest in that pudgy pasty man of fortyodd who was called

Felix Kennaston, and to handle his affairs more slackly. Once or twice Kennaston caught his wife regrading

Let there be no mistake here: Felix Kennaston had married a woman admirably suited to him, and he had

never regretted that act. Nor with the advent of Ettarre did he regret it: and never at any time would he have

concidered separating his diurnal existence from that of his thin beadyeyed capable wife, with graver

seriousness than he would have accorded, say, to a rambling notion of one day being gripped in a trap and

having no way to escape save by cutting off one of his feet. His affection for Kathleen was wellfounded,

proved, and understood; but, as it happens, this narrative does not chance to deal with that affection. And

becides, what there was to tell concerning Kennaston's fondness for his wife was duly set forth years ago.

Meanwhile, it began vaguely to be rumored among Kennaston's associates that he drank more than was good

for him; and toward "drugs" also sped the irresponsible arrows of surmise. He himself noticed, without much

interest, that daily he, who had once been garrulous, ws growing more chary of speech; and that his attention

was apt to wander when the man's or woman's face before him spoke at any length. These shifting faces

talked of wars and tariffs and investents and the weather and committeemeetings, and of having seen

Soandso and of Soandso's having said thisorthat, and it all seemed of importance to the wearers of

It did not matter a farthing, he considered, for he had cheated life of its main oppression, which is loneliness.

Now at last Felix Kennaston could unconcernedly acknowledge that human beings develop graveward in

His life until this had been in the main normal, with its due share of normal intimacies with parents, kinsmen,

friends, a poet's ordinary allotment of sweethearts, and, chief of all, with his wife. No one of these people, as

he reflected in a comminglement of yearning and complacency, had ever comprehended the real Felix

Kennaston as he existed, in all his hampered strugglings and meannesses, his inadequacies and his divine

And he, upon the other hand, knew nothing of these people with any certainty. Pettifoggeries were too easily

practiced in speech or gesture, emotions were too often feigned or overcolored in expression, and unpopular

thoughts were too instinctively dissembled, as he forlornly knew by his own conduct of daily life, for him to

put very zealous faith in any information gained through his slender fallible five senses; and it was the cream

of the jest that through these five senses lay his only means of getting any information whatever.

All that happened to him, he considered, happened inside his skull. Nothing which happened in the big

universe affected him in the least except as it roused certain forces lodged in his skull. His life consisted of

one chemical change after another, haphazardly provoked in some three pounds of fibrous matter tucked

inside his skull. And so, people's heads took on a new interest; how was one to guess what was going on in

those queer round boxes, inset with eyes, as people so glibly called certain restive and glinting things that

moved in partial independence of their setting, and seemed to have an individual vitalityin those queer

round boxes out of which an uncanny vegetation, that people, here again, so glibly and unwonderingly called

Perhapshe musedperhaps in reality all heads were like isolated planets, with impassable space between

each and its nearest neighbor. You read in the newspapers every once in a while that, because of

oneoranother inexplicable phenomenon, Mars was supposed to be attempting to communicate with the

earth; and perhaps it was in just such blurred and unsatisfactory fashion that what happened in one human

head was signaled to another, on those rare occasions when the signal was despatched in entire good faith.

Yes a perpetual isolation, for all the fretful and vain strivings of humanity against such lonelines, was

probably a perdurable law in all other men's lives, precisely as it had been in his own life until the coming of

Nightly he went adventuring with Ettarre: and they saw the cities and manners of many men, to an extent

undreamedof by Ithaca's mundivagant king; and among them even those three persons who had most

For once, in an elongated room with buffcolored wallshaving scarlet hangings over its windows, and

seeming larger than it was in reality, because of its many mirrorsthey foregathered with Napoleon, on the

evening of his coronation: the emperor of halfEurope was fretting over an awkward hitch in the day's

ceremony, caused by his sisters' attempt to avoid carrying the Empress Josephine's train; and he was

grumbling because the old French families continued to ignore him, as a parvenu. All in all, the Emperor had

In a neglected orchard, sunsteeped and made drowsy by the murmer of bees, they talked with Shakespeare:

the playwright, his nerves the worse for the preceding night's potations, was peevishly complaining of the

meager success of his later comedies, he was worrying over Lord Pembroke's neglect of him, and he was

trying to concoct a masque in the style of fat Ben Jonson, since that was evidently what the

theaterpatronizing public wanted; and, working thus against the grain, Shakespeare had got not any pleasyre

Then they were with Pontius Pilate in Jersusalem on the evening of a day when the sky had been black and

the earth had trembled; and Pilate, benevolent and replete with supper, was explaining the latest theories

concerning eclipses and earthquakes to his little boy, and he was chuckling with fond pride in the youngsters

intelligent questions, because Pontius Pilate was exceedingly well pleased with his day's work.

These three were a few among the prominent worthies of remoter days whom Kennaston was enabled to view

as they appeared in the flesh; but, as a rule, chance thrust him into the company of mediocre people living

ordinary lives amid surroundings which seemed outlandish to him, but to them a matter of course. And

everywhere, in every age, it seemed to him, men stumbld amiable and shatterpated through a jungle of

miracles, blind to its wonderfulness, and intent to gain a little money, food and sleep, a trinket or two, some

rare snatched fleeting moments of rantipole laughter, and at the last a decent bed to die in. He, and he only, it

seemed to Felix Kennaston, could see the jungle and all its aweinspiring beauty, wherethrough men scurried

He often wondered whether any other man had been so licensed as himself; and prowling, as he presently did,

in odd byways of printed matterfor he found the library of his predecessor at Alcluid a mine richveined

with strangnessKennaston lighted on much that appeared to him significant. Even such apparently

unrelated matters as the doctrine of metempsychosis, all the grotesque literature of witches, sorcerers and

familiar spirits, and of muses who actually prompted artistic composition with audible voices, were beginning

to fall into cloudilydiscerned interlocking. Kennaston read much nowadays in his dead uncle's books; and he

often wished that, even at the expense of Felix Kennaston's being reduced again to poverty, it were possible

to revivify the man who had amassed and read these books. Kennaston wanted to talk with him.

Meanwhile, Kennaston read of Endymion and Numa, of Iason and Anchises, of Tannhauser, and Foulques

Plantagent, and Raymondin de la Foret, and Olger Danske, and other mortal men to whom old

legendweavers, as if wistfully, accreditd the love of immortal mistressesand of less fortunatte

nympholepts, frail babbling planetstricken folk, who had spied by accident upon an inhuman loveliness, and

so, must pine away consumed by foiled desire of a beauty which the homes and cities and the tilled places of

men did not afford, and life did not bring forth sufficingly. He read Talmundic tales of

SuliemanbenDaoudeven in name transfigured out of any resemblance to an amasser of reliable

axiomsthat proud luxurious despot "who went daily to the comliest of the spirits for wisdom"; and of

Arthur and the Lady Nimue; and of Thomas of Ercildoune, whom the Queen of Faery drew from the

merchants' marketplace with ambiguous kindnesses; and of John Faustus, who "through fantasies and deep

cogitations" was enabled to woo successfully a woman that died long before his birth, and so won to his love,

as the book recorded, "this stately pearl of Greece, fair Helena, the wife to King Menelaus."

And, as has been said, the old idea of muses who actually prompted artistic composition, with audible voices,

took on another aspect. He came to suspect that other creative writers had shared such a divided life as his

was now, for of this he seemed to find traces here and there. Colerdige offered at once an arresting parallel.

Yes, Kennaston reflected; and Coleridge had no doubt spoken out in the first glow of wonder, astounded into

a sort of treason, when he revealed how he wrote Kubla Khan; so that thus perhaps Coleridge had told far

more concerning the origin of this particular poem than he ever did as to his later compositions. Then, also, I

have a volume of Herrick from Keennaston's library with curious comments penciled therein, relative to

Lovers How They Come and Part and His Mistress Calling Him to Elysium; a copy of Marlowe's Tragical

History of Doctor Faustus is similarly annotated; and on a flyleaf in Forster's Life of Charles Dickens,

apropos of passages in the first chapter of the ninth book, Kennaston has inscribed strange speculations very

ill suited to general reading. All that Kennaston cared to print, however, concerning the hypothesis he

eventually evolved, you can find in The Tinctured Veil, where he has nicely refrained from tooexplicit

writing, andof coursedoes not anywhere pointblank refer to his personal experiences.

Then Kennaston ran afoul on the Rosicrucians, and their quaint dogmas, which appeared so preposterous at

first, took on vital meanings presently; and here too he seemed to surprise the cautious whispering of men

who neither cared nor dared to speak with candor of all they knew. It seemed to him he understood that

whispering which was everywhere apparent in human history; for he too was initiate.

He seemed, indeed, to find food for wonder everywhere. It was as if he had awakened from a dragging

nightmare of life made up of unimportant tasks and tedious useless little habits, to see life as it really was,

and to rejoice in its exquisite wonderfulness. How poignantly strange it was that life could afford him nothing

save consciousness of the moment immediately at hand! Memory and anticipatioon, whatever else they might

doand they had important uses, of course, in rousing emotionyet did not deal dirctly with reality. What

you regretted, or were proud of, having done yesterday was no more real now than the deeds of Caeser

Borgia or St. Paul; and what you looked forward to within the halfhour was as nonexistent as the senility

of your unborn greatgrandchildren. Never was man brought into contact with reality save through the

evanescent emotions and sensations of that single moment, that infinitesimal fraction of a second, which was

passing now. This commonplace, so simple and so old, bewildered Kennaston when he came unreservedle to

To live was to be through his senses conscious, one by one, of a restricted number of these fractions of a

second. Success in life, then, had nothing to do with bankaccounts or public office, or any step toward

increasing the length of one's obituary notices, but meant to be engrossed utterly by as many as possible of

these instants. And complete success required a finding, in these absorbing instants, of employment for every

facultu he possessed. It was for this that Kennaston had always vaguely longed; and to this, if only in dreams,

If only in dreams! he debated: why, and was he not conscious, now, in his dreams, of every moment as it

fled? And corporal life in banks and ballrooms and legislative halls and palaces, nowhere had anything more

It is not necessary to defend his course of reasoning; to the contrary, its fallacy is no less apparent than its

conduciveness to unbusinesslike conclusions. But it is highly necessary to tell you that, according to Felix

Kennaston's account, now, turn by turn, he was in Horvendile's person rapt by nearly every passion, every

emotion, the human race has ever known. True, throughout these dramas into which chance plunged him, in

that he knew always he was dreaming, he was at once performer and spectator; but he played with the born

actor's zestfeeling his part, as people sayand permitting the passion he portrayed to possess him almost

Almost completely, be it repeated; for there was invariably a sufficient sense of knowing he was only

dreaming to prevent entire abandonment to the raw emotion. Kennaston preferred it thus. He preferred in this

more comely way to play with human passions, rather than, as seemed the vulgar use, to consent to become

It pleased him, too, to be able to have done with such sensations and emotions as did not interest him; for he

had merely to touch Ettarre, and the dream ended. In this fashion he would very often terminate an existence

which was becoming distastefulresorting debonairly to this sort of sucide, and thus dismissing an era's

social ordering and its great people as toys that, played with, had failed to amuse Felix Kennaston.

Which Travels, roundabout, to edifying and safe conclusions "But there were dreams to sell

As has been said, Kennaston read much curious matter in his dead uncle's library....

But most bookseven Felix Kennaston's own little booksdid not seem now to be affairs of heavy

moment. Once abed, clasping his gleaming broken bit of metal, and the truthful history of all that had ever

happened was, instead, Kennaston's library. It was not his to choose from what volume or on which page

thereof he would read; accident, as it seemed, decided that; but the chanceopened page lay unblurred before

Kennaston stood by the couch of Tiberius Caesar as he lay ill at Capreae. Becide him hung a memorable

painting, by Parrhasius, which represented the virgin Atalanta in the act of according very curious

assuagements to her lover's ardor. Charicles, a Greek physician, was telling the Emperor of a new religious

sect that had arisen in Judea, and of the persecutions these disciples of Christus were enduring. Old Caesar

"It is, instead, a religion that should be fostered. The man preached peace. It is what my father before me

strove for, what I have striven for, what my successors must strive for. Peace alone may preserve Rome: the

empire is too large, a bubble blown so big and tenuous that the first shock will disrupt it in suds. Pilate did

well to crucify the man, else we could not have made a God of him; but the persecution of these followers of

Christus must cease. This Nazarene preached the same doctrine that I have always preached. I shall build him

a temple. The rumors concerning him lack novelty, it is true: this God born of a mortal woman is the old

legend of Dionysos and Mithra and Hercules, a little pulled about; Gautama also was tempted in a wilderness;

Prometheus served long ago as man's scapegoat under divine anger; and the cult of Pollux and Castor, and of

Adonis, has made these resurrection stories hackneyed. In fine, Charicles, you have broyght me a woefully

inartistic jumble of old tales; but the populace prefers old tales, they delight to be told what they have heard

So he ran on, devising the reception of Christ into the Roman pantheon, as a minor diety at first and thence, if

the receipts at his temple justified it, to be raised to greater eminence. Tiberius saw large possibilities in the

worship of this new God, both from a doctrinal and a moneymaking standpoint. Then Caeser yawned, and

ordered that a company of his Spintriae be summoned to his chamber, to amuse him with their unnatural

But Charicles had listened in horror, for he was secretly a Christian, and knew that the blood of the martyrs is

the seed of the church. He foresaw that, without salutary discouragement, the worship of Christus would

never amount to more than the social fad of a particular season, just as that of Cybele and that of ElaGabal

had been modish in different years; and would afterward dwindle, precisely as these cults had done, into

shruggedat oldfashionedness. Then, was it not written that they only were assurdly blessed who were

persecuted for righteousness' sake?Why, martyrdom was the one certain road to Heaven; and a religion

So Charicles mingled poison in Caesar's drink, that Caesar might die, and crazed Caligula succeed him, to put

all Christains to the sword. And Charicles young Caius Caeser CaligulaChild of the Camp, Father of

Then a lean man, whiterobed, and cleanshaven as to his head, was arranging a complicated toy. He labored

in a graywalled room, lit only by one large circular window opening upon the sea. There was an alcove in

This prefigured a crowned woman, in bright particolored garments of white and red and yellow, under a black

mantle embroidered with small sparkling stars. Upon the woman's forehead was a disk, like a round glittering

mirror; seen closer, it was engraved with tiny characters, and Kennaston viewed it with a thrill of recognition.

To the woman's right were vipers rising from the earth, and to the left were stalks of ripe corn, all in their

proper colors. In one hand she carried a golden boat, from which a coiled asp raised its head threateningly.

From the other hand dangled a cluster of slender metal rods, which were not a part of the statue, but were

loosely attached to it, so that the last wind caused them to move and jangle. There was nothing whatever in

the graywalled room save this curious gleaming statue and the lean man and the mechanical toy on which he

He explained its workings, willingly enough. See now! you kindled a fire in this little cubeshaped box. The

air inside expanded through this pipe into the first jar of water, and forced the water out, through this other

pipe, into this tiny bucket. The bucket thus became heavier and heavier, till its weight at last pulled down the

Oh, yes, the notion was an old one; the priest admited he had copied the toy from one made by Heron of

Alexandria who died years ago. Still, it was an ingenious trifle: moreoverand here was the pointenlarge

the scale, change the cubeshaped box into the temple alter, fasten the lever to the temple doors, and you had

the mechanism for a miracle. People had only to offer burnt sacrifices to the Goddess, and before their eyes

the AllMother, the holy and perpetual preserver of the human race, would stoop to material thaumaturgy,

"We very decidedly need some striking miracle to advertise our temple," he told Kennaston. "Folk are

flocking like sheep after these barbarous new Galilean heresies. But the AllMother is compassionate to

And Kennaston saw there were tears in this man's dark sad eyes. The trickster was striving to uphold the faith

of his fathers; and in the attempt he had constructed a practicable steamengine.

Then Kennaston was in Alexandria when John the Grammarian pleaded with the victorious Arabian general

Amrou to spare the royal library, the sole repository at this period of many of the masterworks of Greek and

But Amrou only laughed, with a practical man's contempt for such matters. "The Koran contains all that is

necessary to salvation: if these books teach as the Koran teaches they are superfluous; if they contain

anything contrary to the Koran they ought to be destroyed. Let them be used as fuel for the public baths."

And this was done. Curious, very curious, it was to Kennaston, to witness this utilitarian employment of a

nation's literature; and it moved him strangely. He had come at this season to believe that individual acts can

count for nothing, in the outcome of things. Whatever might happen upon earth, during the existence of that

midge among the planets, affected infinitesimally, if at all the universe of which earth was a part so

inconceivably tiny. To figure out the importance in this universe of the deeds of one or another nation

temporarily clustering on earth's surface, when you concidered that neither the doings of Assyris or of Rome,

or of any kingdom, had ever extended a thousand feet from earth's surface, was a task too delicate for human

reason. For human faculties to attempt to estimate the individuals of this nation, in the light of the relative

importance of their physical antics while living, was purely and simply ridiculous. To assume, as did so many

wellmeaning persons, that Omniscience devoted eternity to puzzling out just these minutiae, seemed at the

mildest to postulate in Omniscience a queer mania for trivialities. With the passsage of time, whatever a man

had done, whether for good or evil, with the man's bodily organs, left the man's parish unaffected: only a

man's thoughts and dreams could outlive him, in any serious sense, and these might survive with perhaps

augmenting influnce: so that Kennaston had come to think artistic creation in wordssince marble and

canvas inevitably perishedwas he one, possibly, worthwhile employment of human life. But here was a

crude corporal deed which bluntly destroyed thoughts, and annihilated dreams by wholesale. To Kennaston

Curious, very curious, it was to Kennaston, to see the burning of sixtythree plays written by AEschylus, of a

hundred and six by Sophocles, and of fiftyfive by Euripidesmasterworks eternally lost, which, as

Kennaston knew, the world would affect to deplore eternally, whataver might be the world's real opinion in

But of these verbal artificers something a least was to endure. They would fare better than Agathon and Ion

and Achaeus, their admitted equals in splendor, whose whole lifework was passing, at the feet of

Horvendile, into complete oblivion. There, too, were perishing all the writings of the Pleiadthe noble

tragedies of Homerus, and Sositheus, and Lycophron, and Alexander, and Philiscuc, and Sosiphanes, and

Dionysides. All the great comic poets, too, were burned pellmell with theseTelecleides, Hermippus,

Eupolis, Antiphanes, Ameipsas, Lysippus, and Menander"whom nature mimicked," as the phrase was.

And here, posting to obliteration went likewise Thespis, and Pratinas, and Phrynichusand Choerilus, whom

cultured persons had long ranked with Homer. Nothing was to remain of any of these save the bare name, and

even this would be known only to pedants. All these, spurred by the poet's ageless monomania, had toiled

toward, and had attained, the poets ageless goalto write perfectly of beautiful happenings: and of this

action's normal byproduct, which is immortality in the mouths and minds of succeeding generations, all

Here was beauty, and wit, and learning, and genius, being wastedquite wantonlynever to be recaptured,

never to be equaled again (despite the innumerable painstaking penmen destined to fret the hearts of unborn

wives), and never, in the outcome, to be thought of as a very serious loss to anybody, after all....

These bookrolls burned with great rapidity, crackling cheerily as the garnered wisdom of Cato's

octogenarian life dissolved in puffs of smoke, and the wit of Sosipater blazed for the last time in heating a

pint of water.... But then in Parma long afterward Kennaston observed a monk erasing a song of Sappho's

from a parchment on which the monk meant to inscribe a feeble little Latin hymn of his own compostition; in

an obscure village near Alexandria Kennaston saw the only existent copy of the Mimes of Herondas

crumpled up and used as packing for a mummycase; in the tidiest of old English Kennaston watched thrifty

Betty Baker, then acting as cook for Warburton the antiquary, destroy in making piecrust the unique

manuscript copies of some fifty plays, among which were neverprinted tragedies by Marlowe and Cyril

Tourneur and George Chapmen, and comedies by Middleton and Greene and Dekker, andrather

drollythose very three dramas which Shakespeare, when he talked with Horvendile in the orchard, had

asserted to perpetuate, upon the whole, the most excellent fruit of Shakespeare's ripened craftsmanship.

Yetconceding Heaven to be an actual place and atainment of its felicities to be the object of human

lifeKennaston could not, after all, detect and fault in Amrou's logic. AEsthetic considerations could, in that

Then again Kennaston stood in a stonewalled apartment, like a cell, wherein there was a furnace and much

wreckage. A contemplative frair was regarding the disorder about him with disapproval, the while he sucked

"There can be no doubt that Old Legion conspires to hinder the great work," he considered.

"To find the secret of eternal life, my son. What else is lacking? Man approaches to God in all things save

this, Imaginis imago, created after God's image. But as yet, by reason of his mortality, man shudders in a

world that is arrayed against him. Thus, the heavens threaten with winds and lightnings, with

plaguebreeding metors and the unfriendly aspect of planets; the big seas molest with waves and inundations,

stealthily drowning cities overnight, and sucking down tall navies as a child gulps sugarplums; whereas how

many plants and gums and seeds bear man's destruction in their tiny hearts! what soulless beasts of the field

and of the wood are everywhere enleagued in endless feud against him, with tusks and teeth, with nails and

claws and venomous stings, made sharp for man's demolishment! Thus all struggle miserably, like hunted

persons under a sentence of death that may at best be avoided for a little while. And manifestly, this is not as

"Yet I much fear it is so ordered, father." The old man said testily: "I repeat, for your better comfort, there can

be no doubt that Satan alone conspires to hinder the great work. No; it would be abuse of superstition to

conceive, as would be possible for folk of slender courage, that the finger of heaven has today unloosed this

destruction, to my bodily hurt and spiritual admonition." Kennaston could see, though, that the speaker half

believed this might be exactly what had happened. "For I am about no vaunting trangression of man's estate; I

do but seek to recover his lost heritage. You will say to me, it is written that never shall any man be one day

old in the sight of God?yet it is likewise written that unto God a thousand years are but one day. For one

thousand years, then, may each man righteously hope to have death delay to enact the midwife to his second

birth. It advantages not to contend that even in the heyday of patriarchs few approached to such longevity; for

Moses, relinquishing to silence all save the progeny of Seth, nowhere directly tells us that some of the seed of

Cain did not outlive Methuselah. Yea, and our common parent, Adam, was created in the perfect age of man,

which then fell not short of the antediluvian fathers beget issue, as did Adam in the same year breath was

given him; whereby it is a reasonable conceit of learned persons to compute him to have exceded a thousand

years in age, if not in duration of existence. Now, it is written that we shall all die as Adam died; and caution

should not scruple to affirm this is an excellent dark saying, prophetic of that day when no man need outdo

Then Kennaston found the alchemist had been compounding nitrum of Memphis with sulpher, mixing in a

little willow charcoal to make the whole more friable, and that the powder had exploded. The old man was

now interested, less in the breakage, than in the horrible noise this accident had occasioned.

"The mixture might be used in courtpagents and miracleplays, "he estimated, "to indicate the entrance of

Satan or the fall of Sodom, or Herod's descent into the Pit, and so on. Yes, I shall thriftily sell this secert, and

Seeking to find the means of making life perpetual, he had accidently discovered gunpowder.

Then at Valladolid an agestriken seaman, wracked with gout, tossed in a mean bed and grumbled to bare

walls. He, "the Admiral," was neglected by King Phillip, the broth was unfit for a dog's supper, his son Diego

Ingratitude everywhere! and had not he, "the Admiral""the Admiral of Mosquito Land," as damnable

streetsongs miscalled him, he whimpered, in a petulant gust of selfpityhad not he found out at last a way

by sea to the provinces of the Great Khan and the treasures of Cipango? Give him another fleet, and he would

demonstrate what milignant fools were his enemies. He would convert the Khan from Greek heresies; or else

let the Holy Inquisition be established in Cipango, the thumbscrew and the stake be fittingly utilized there ad

majorem Dei gloriamall should redound to the credit of King Philip, both temporal and celestial. And what

wealth, too, a capable emissary would bring back to his Majestywhat cargoes of raw silks, of gold and

precious gems, ravished from Kanbalu and Taidu, those famed marvelous cities!... But there was only

Thus mumbled the broken adventuurer, Cristoforo Colombo. He had doubled the world's size and resouurces,

in his attempts to find some defenseless nation which could be plundered with impunity; and he was dying in

br> And Kennaston was at Blickling Hall when King Henry read the Pope's letter which threatened

"You deserve some quite certainly," he agrees; and his bright lecherous pig's eyes twinkled, and he guffawed.

"Defy the Pope, then, sire, and marry your true love. Let us snap fingers at Giulio de Medici"

"Faith, and not every lass can bring eleven fingers to the task," the King put in.

She tweaked his fine gold beard, and Kennaston saw that upon her left hand there was really an extra finger.

"My own sweetheart," says she, "if you would have my person as much at your disposal as my heart is, we

must part company with Rome. Then, too, at the cost of a few Latin phrases, some foolish candlesnuffing

and a little bellringing, you may take for your own all the fat abbeylands in these islands, and sell them for

So, between lust and greed, the King was persuaded. In the upshot, "because"as was duly set forth to his

lieges"a virtuous monarch ought to surround his throne with many peers of the worthiest of both sexes,"

Mistress Anne Boleyn was created Marchioness of Pembroke, in her own right, with a reversion of the title

and estates to her offspring, whether such might happen to be legitimate or not. A pension of 1,000 per

annum, with gold, silver and parcelgilt plate to the value of 1,188, was likewise awarded her: and the King,

by thus piously defying Romish error, earned the abbeylands as well as the key of a certain bedchamber,

and the eternal approbation of zealous Protestants, for thus inaugurating religious liberty.

These ironies Kennaston witnessed among many others, as he read in this or that chanceopened page from

the past. Everywhere, it seemed to him, men labored blindly, at flat odds with rationality, and had achieved

everything of note by accident. Everywhere he saw reason to echo the cry of Maugis d'Aigremont"It is

very strange how affairs fall out in this world of ours, so that a man may discern no plan or purpose

Here was the astounding fact: the race did go forward; the race did achieve; and in every way the race grew

better. Progress through irational and astounding blunders, whose outrageousness bedwarfed the wildest

cliches of ramance, was what Kennaston found everywhere. All this, then, also was foreplanned, just as all

happenings at Storisende had been, in his puny romance; and the puppets, here to, moved as they thought of

their own volition, but really in order to serve a denouement in which many of them had not any personal part

And always the puppets moved toward greater efficiency and comeliness. The puppetshifter appeared to

seek at once uttility and artistic selfexpression. So the protoplasmthat first imperceptible pinhead of

living matterhad become a fish; the fish had become a batrachian, the batrachian a reptile, the reptile a

mammal; thus had the puppets continuously been reshaped, into more elaborate forms more captivating to the

eye, until amiable and shatterpated man stood erect in the world. And man, in turn, had climbed a long way

from gorillaship, however far he was as yet from godheadblindly moving always, like fish and reptile,

But, just as men's lives came to seem to Kennaston like many infinitesimal threads woven into the pattern of

human destiny, so Kennaston grew to suspect that the existence of mankind upon earth was but an incident in

the unending struggle of life to find a home in the universe. Human inhabitancy was not even a very

important phase in the world's history, perhaps; a scant score or so of centuries ago there had been no life on

earth, and by and by the planet would be a silent naked frozen clod. Would this sphere then have served its

He could not tell. But Kennaston contemplated sidereal space full of such frozen worlds, where life seemed to

have flourished for a while and to have been disposessedand full, too, of glowing suns, with their huge

satellites, all slowly cooling and congealing into fitness for life's occupansy. Life would tarry there also, he

reflected; and thence also life would be evicted. For life was not a part of the universe, not a product of the

universe at all perhaps, but rather, an intruder into the cosmic machinery, which moved without any

consideratioin of life's needs. Like a bird striving to nest in a limitless engine, insanely building among

moving wheels and cogs and pistons and pulleybands, whose moving toward their proper and intended

purposes inevitably swept away each nest before completionso it might be that life passed from moving

What was it that life sought to rear?what was the purpose of this endless endeavor, of which the hatching

of an ant or the begetting of an emperor was equally a byproduct? and of which the existence of Felix

Kennaston was a manifestation past conceiving in its umimportance? Toward what did life aspire?that

force which moved in Felix Kennaston, and thus made Felix Kennaston also an intruder, a temporary visitor,

in the big moving soulless mechanism of earth and water and planets and suns and interlocking solar

"To answer that question must be my modest attempt," he decided. "In finewhy is a Kennaston? The query

has a humorous ring undoubtedly, in so far as it is no little suggestive of the spinning mouse that is the higher

the fewerbut, after all, it voices the sole question in which I personally am interested...."

"Why is a Kennaston?" he asked himselfthus whimisically voicing a real desire to know if human beings

were intended for any especial purpose. Most of us find it more comfortable, upon the whole, to stave off

such querieswith a jest, a shrug, or a Scriptural quotation, as best suits personal taste; but Kennaston was

"queer" enough to face the situation quite gravely. Here was he, the individual, very possibly placed onat

all events, infestinga particular planet for a considerable number of years; the planet was so elaborately

constructed, so richly clothed with trees and valleys and uplands and running waters and multitudinary

grassblades, and the body that housed Felix Kennaston was so intricately wrought with tiny bones and veins

and sinews, with sockets and valves and levers, and little hairs which grew upon the body like grassblades

about the earth, that it seemed unreasonable to suppose this much cunning mechanism had been set agoing

aimlessly: and so, he often wondered if he was not perhaps expected to devote these years of human living to

Religion, of course, assured him that the answer to his query was, in various books, explicitly written, in very

dissimilar forms. But Kennaston could find little to attract him in any theory of the universe based upon

direct revelations from heaven. Conceding that divinity had actually stated soandso, from Sinai or Delphi

or Mecca, and had been reported without miscomprehension or error, there was no particular reason for

presuming that divinity had spoken veraciously: and, indeed all a available analogues went to show that

nothing in nature dealt with its inferiors candidly. To liken the relationship to the intercourse of a father with

his children, as did all revealed religions with queer uniformity, was at best a twoedged simile, in that it

suggested a possible amiability of intention combined with inevitable duplicity. The range of an earthly

father's habitual deceptions. embracing the sourse of life and Christmas presents on one side and his own

fallibility on the other was wide enough to make the comperison suspicious. When fathers were at their worst

they punished; and when in their kindliest and most expansive moods, why, then it waspreciselythat

they told their children fairystories. It seemed to Kennaston, for a while, that all religions ended in this

To exercise for an allotted period divinelyrecommended qualities known as virtues, and to be rewarded

therefor, by an immortal scorekeeper, appeared a rather childish performance all around. Yet every religion

agreed in asserting that such was the course of human life at its noblest; and to believe matters were thus

arranged indisputably satisfied an innate craving of men's natures, as Kennaston was, perhaps uniquely,

Under all theocracies the run of men proved much the same: as has been said, it was for the most part with

quite ordinary people that Horvendile dealt in dreams. The Roman citizenry, for instance, he found did not

devote existence, either under the Republic or the Empire, to shouting in unanimous response to metrical

declamations, and worrying over their own bare legs, or in other ways conform to the best traditions of

literature and the stage; nor did the Athenians corroborate their dramatists by talking perpetually of the might

of Zeus or Aphrodite, any more than motormen and stockbrokers conversed continually of the Holy Ghost.

Substantial people everywhere worshiped at their accustomed temple at accustomed intervals, and then put

the matter out of mind, in precisely the fashion of any reputable twentiethcentury churchgoer. Meanwhile

they had their businessaffairs, their sober chats on weather probabilities, their staid diversions (which

everywhere bored them frightfully), their family jokes, their best and secondbest clothes, their flirtations,

their petty snobbishnesses, and their perfectly irrational faith in Omnipotence and in the general kindliness of

Omnipotenceall these they had, and made play with, to round out living. Ritualistic worship everywhere

seemed to be of the nature of a conscious outing, of a conscious departure from everyday life; it was

generally felt that wellbalanced people would not permit such jaunts to interfere with their businessmatters

or hometies; but there was no doubt men did not like to live without religion and religion's promise of a less

Meanwhile, men were to worry, somehow, through todaydoing as infrequent evil as they conveniently

could, exercising as much bravery and honesty and benevolence as they happened to possess, through a life

made up of unimportant tasks and tedious useless little habits. Men felt the routine to be niggardly: but

tomorrowas their priests and bonzes, their flamens and imauns, their medicine men and popes and

Today alone was real. Never was man brought into contact with reality save through the evanescent

emotions and sensations of that single moment, that infinitesimal fraction of a second, which was passing

nowand it was in the insignificance of this moment, precisely, that religious persons must believe. So ran

the teachings of all dead and lingering faiths alike. Here was, perhaps, only another instance of mankind's

abhorrence of actualities; and man's quaint dislike of facing reality was here disguised as a high moral

principle. That was why all art, which strove to make the sensations of a moment soulsatisfying, was dimly

But, much as man's religion looked to a more ordered and symmetrical existence tomorrow, just so, upon

another scale, man's daily life seemed a continous lookingforward to a terrestrial tomorrow. Kennaston

could find in the pasteven he, who was privileged to view the past in its actuality, rather than through the

distorting media of books and national prideno suggestion as to what, if anything, he was expected to do

while his physical life lasted, or to what, if anything, this life was a prelude. Yet that today was only a dull

overture to tomorrow seemed in mankind an instinctive belief. All life everywhere, as all people spent it,

was in preparation for something that was to happen tomorrow. This was true of Antioch as Lichfield, as

much the case with Charlemagne and Sardanapalus, with Agamemnon and TiglathPileser, as with Felix

Kennaston considered his own life.... In childhood you had looked forward to being a mana trapper of the

plains or a railway engineer or a pirate, for choice, but pending that, to get through the necessity of going to

school five times a week. In vacations, of coure, you looked forward to school's begining again, because last

session, in retrospection, did not appear to have been half bad. And of course you were always wishing it

would hurry up and be your birthday, or Christmas, or even Easter.... Later, with puberty, had come the desire

to be a devil with the women, like the fellows in Wycherley's plays (a cherished volume, which your

schoolmates, unaccountably, did not find sufficiently "spicy"); and to become a great author, like

Shakespeare; and to have plenty of money, like the Count of MonteCristo; and to be thrown with, and into

the intimate confidence of, famous people, like the hero of a Scott novel.... Kennaston reflected that his

touchstones seemed universally to have come from the library.... And Felix Kennaston had achieved his

desire, to every intent, however unapt might be posterity to bracket him with Casanova or Don Juan, and

however many tourists still went with reverence to Stratford rather than Alcluid. He had money; and quite

certainly he had met more celebrities than any other person living. Felix Kennsaton reflected that, through

accident's signal favor, he had done all he had at any time very ernestly wanted to do; and that the result was

always disappointing, and not as it was depicted in storybooks.... He wondered why he should again be

Then it occurred to him that, in reality, he had always been shuffling through todaysomehow and

anyhowin the belief that tomorrow the life of Felix Kennaston would be converted into a romance like

The transfiguring touch was to come,it seemed from a girl's lips; but it had not; he kissed, and life remained

uncharmed. It was to come from marriage, after which everything would be quite differrent; but the main

innovation was that he missed the long delightful talks he used to have with Kathleen (mostly about Felix

Kennaston), since as married people they appeared only to speak to each other, in passing, as it were,

between the discharge of various domestic and social duties, and to speak then of having seen Soandso,

and of Soand so's having said thisorthat. The transfiguring touch was to come from wealth; and it had

not, for all that his address was in the Social Register, and was neatly typed in at the begining of one copy of

pretty much every appeal sent broadcast by charitable organizations. It was to come from fame; and it had

not, even with the nineday wonder over Men Who Loved Alison, and with Felix Kennaston's pictorial

misrepresentation figuring in public journals almost as prodigally as if he had murdered his wife with

peculiar brutality or headed a company to sell inexpensive shoes. And, at the bottom of his heart, he was still

expecting the transfiguring touch to come, some day, from something he was to obtain or do, perhaps

Men everywhere were living as he had lived. People got their notions of life, if only at secondor thirdhand,

from books, precisely as he had done. Even Amrou had derived his notiions as to the value of literature from

a book. Men pretended laboriously that their own lives were like the purposeful and clearly motived life of

bookland. In secret, and more perspicacious cherished the reflection that, anyhow, their lives would begin to

be like that tomorrow. The purblind majority quite honestly believed that literature was meant to mimic

human life, and that it did so. And in consequence, their loveaffairs, their maxims, their socalled natural

ties and instincts, and above all, their wickedness, became just so many bungling plagiarisms from something

they had read, in a novelor a Bible or a poem or a newspaper. People progressed from the kindergarten to the

cemetery assuming that their emotion at every crisis was what books taught them was the appropriate

emotion, and without noticing that it was in reality something quite different. Human life was a distorting

tarnished mirror held up to literature: this much at least of Wilde's old paradoxthat life mimicked artwas

indisputable. Human life, very clumsily, tried to reproduce the printed word. Human life was prompted by,

and was based upon, printed words"in the beginning was the Word," precisely as Gospel asserted.

Kennaston had it now. Living might become symmetrical, wellplotted, coherent, and as rational as living

was in books. This was the hope which guided human beings through today with anticipation of tomorrow.

Then he preceived that there was no such thing as symmetry anywhere in inanimate nature....

It was Ettarre who first pointed out to him the fact, so tremendously apparent when once observed, that there

was to be found nowhere in inamimate nature any approach to symmetry. It needed only a glance toward the

sky the first clear night to show there was no patternwork in the arrangement of the stars. Nor were the

planets moving about the sun at speeds or distances which bore any conceivable relation to one another. It

was all at loose ends. He wondered how he could possibly have been misled by pulpit platitudes into likening

this circumambient anarchy to mechanism. To his finicky love of neatness the universe showed on a sudden

as a vast disheveled horror. There seemed so little harmony, so faint a sense of order, back of all this infinite

torrent of gyrations. Interstellar space seemed just a jumble of frozen or flaming spheres that, moving

ceaselessly, appeared to avoid one another's orbits, or to collide, by pure chance. This spate of stars, as in

three monstrous freshets, might roughly serve some purpose; but there was to be found no more formal order

And on earth there was no balancing in the distribution of land and water. Continents approached no regular

shape. Mountains stood out like pimples or lay like broken welts across the habitable ground, with no

symmetery of arrangement. Rivers ran anywither, just as the haphazard slope of earth's crevices directed;

upon the map you saw quite clearly that these streams neither balanced one another nor watered the land with

any pretence of equity. There was no symmetery anywhere in inanimate nature, no harmony, no equipoise of

parts, no sense of form, not even a straight line. It was all at loose ends, exceptbewilderinglywhen water

froze. For then, as the microsccope showed you, the icecrystals were arranged in perfect and very elaborate

patterns. And these stellular patterns, to the mused judgment of Kennaston, appeared to have been shaped by

the last lovetap of unreasonwhen, in completing all, unreason made sure that even here the universe

should run askew to any conceivable "design" and lose even the coherency of being everywhere irregular.

But living things aimed toward symmetry. In plants the notion seemed rudimentary, yet the goal was

recongnizable. The branches of a tree did not put out at ordered distance, nor could you discern any definite

plan in their shaping: but in the leaves, at least, you detected an effort toward true balance: the two halves of a

leaf, in a rough fashion, were equal. In every leaf and flower and grassblade you saw this never entirely

And in insects and reptiles and fish and birds and animals you saw again this effort, more creditably

performed. All life seemed about the rather childish employment of producing a creature which consisted of

two equal and exactly corresponding parts. It was true that in most cases this effort was foiled by an uneven

distribution of color in plumage or scales or hide; but in insects and in mankind the goal, so far as went the

eye, was reached. Men and insects, to the eye at least, could be divided into two equal halves....

But even so, there was no real symmetry in man's body save in externals. The heart was not in the center;

there was no order in the jumbled viscera; the two divisions of the brain did not correspond; there was

nothing on the left side to balance the troublesome vermiform appendix on the right; even the lines in the

palm of one hand were unlike those which marked the other: and everywhere, in fine, there was some

irrational discrepansy. Man, the highest form as yet of life, had attained at most only a teasing semblance of

that crude symmetry toward which all life seemed to aim, and which inanimate nature appeared to ignore.

Nowhere in the universe could Kennaston discover any instance of quite equal balance, of anything which, as

vision went, could be divided into two similar halvessave only in man's handiwork. Here again, insects

approached man's effort more closely than the rest of creation; for many of them builded almost as truly. But

man, alone in the universe, could produce exact visual symmetry, in a cathedral or a dinnertable or a pair of

scissors, just as man so curiously mimicked symmetry in his outward appearance. The circumstance was

droll, and no less quaint for the fact that it was perhaps without significance....

But Kennaston bemused himself with following out the notion that life was trying to evolve

symmetryorder, proportion and true balance. Living creatures represented life's gropings toward that goal.

You saw, no doubt, a dim perception of this in the dream which sustained all human beingsthat tomorrow

living would begin to be symmetrical, wellplotted and coherent, like the progress of a novel.... And that was

precisely what religion promised, only in more explicit terms, and with the story's milieu fixed in romantic,

rather than realistic, settings. Kennaston had here the sensation of fitting in the last bit of a puzzle. Life,

yearning for symmetry, stood revealed as artist. Life strove towards the creation of art, and were to be

judged according to art's canons alone. The universe was life's big barren studio, which the Artist certainly

had neither planned nor builded, but had, somehow, occupied, to make the best of its limitations. For

Kennaston insisted that living things and inanimate nature had none of the earmarks of being by the same

author. They were not in similar style, he said; thus, presupposing a sentient creator of the stars and planets, it

would seem to have been in contradiction of his code to make both of a man's eyes the same color.

It was this course of speculation which converted Kennaston to an abiding faith in Christianity, such as, our

rector informs me, is deplorably rare in these lax pleasureloving days of materialism. To believe this

inconsiderable planet the peculiar center of a God's efforts and attention had for a long while strained

Kennaston's credulity: the thing was so woefully out of proportion when you considered earth's relative value

in the universe. But now Felix Kennaston comprehended that in the insensate universe there was no

proportion. The idea was unknown to the astral architect, or at best no part of his plan, if indeed there had

been any premeditation or contriver concerned. singly on our small earthnot even in the solar syatem of

which earth made a partwas any sense of proportion evinced; and there it was apparent only in living

things. Kennaston seemed to glimpse an ArtistGod, with a commendable sense of formKennaston's

fellow craftsmanthe earth as that corner of the studio wherein the God was working just now, and all life

That the plot of this romance began with Eden and reached its climax at Calvary, Kennaston was persuaded,

solely and ardently, bacause of the surpassing of the Christlegend. No other myth compared with it from an

aesthetic standpoint. He could imagine no theme more adequate to sustain a great romance than this of an

Author suffering willingly for His puppets' welfare; and mingling with His puppets in the similitude of one of

them; and able to wring only contempt and pity from His puppetssince He had not endowed them with any

faculties wherewith to comprehend their Creator's nature and intent. Indeed, it was pretty much the plight

which Kennaston had invented for his own puppets at Storisende, as Kennaston complacently reflected. It

was the most tremendous "situation" imaginable; and quite certainly no Author could ever have failed to

perceive, and to avail Himself of its dramatic possibilities. To conceive that the worldromance did not

center upon Calvary was to presume an intelligent and skilled Romancer blind to the basic principles of His

art. His sense of pathos and of beauty and of irony could have led Him to select no other legend. And in the

inconsistencies and unsolved problems, or even the apparent contradictions, of Christianity, Felix Kennaston

could see only possible error or omission on the Author's part, such as was common to all romances. A few

errata did not hamper the tale's worth and splendor, or render it a whit less meritorious of admiration....

And, indeed, Felix Kennaston found that his theory of the Atonement was in harmony with quite orthodox

teachings. The library at Alcluid revealed bewildered and perturbed generations at guesswork. How could a

God have been placated, and turned from wrath to benevolence, by witnessing the torment of His own son?

What pleasure, whereby He was propitiated, could the God have derived from watching the scene on

Calvary? Or was the god, as priests had taught so long (within the same moment that they proclaimed the

God's omnipotence) not wholly a free agent, because bound by laws whereby He was compelled to punish

some one for humanity's disobedience, with the staggering option of substituting an innocent victim? For if

you granted that, you conceded to be higher than the God, and overruling Him, a power which made for flat

injustice. Since Schleiermacher's time, at least as Kennaston discovered, there had been reasoning creatures

to contest the possibility of such discrepant assumptions, and a dynasty of teachers who adhered to the

"subjective" theory of propitiation. For these considered that Christ came, not primarily to be crucified, but

by his life to reveal to men the nature of their God. The crucifixion was an incidental, almost inevitable,

result of human obtuseness; and was pregent with value only in that thereby the full extent of divine love was

perfectly evinced. The personality, rather than the sufferings, of the Nazarene had thus satisfied, not any

demand or attribute of the God by acting upon it from without, "but God's total nature by revealing it and

realizing it in humanity." The God, in short, had satisfied Himself "by revealing and expressing His nature" in

the material universe, precisely as lesser artists got relief from the worries of existence by depecting

themselves in their books. Just as poets express themselves communicatively in words, so here the Author

had expressed Himself in flesh. Such, in effect, had been the teaching of Karl Immanuel Nitzsch, of Richard

Rothe, and of von`Hofman, in Germany; of Auguste Bouvier in Geneva; of Alexandre Vinet, and of course

Auguste Sabatier, in France; of Frederick Denison Maurice, and John Caird, and Benjamin Jowet, in

England; and in America of Horace Bushnell, and Elisha Mulford, and William Newton Clarke. The list was

imposing: and Kennaston rejoiced to find himself at one with so many reputable theologians. For all these

scholars had dimly divined, with whatever variousness they worded the belief, that the God's satisfaction

sprang, in reality, from the consciousness of having at last done a fine piece of artistic work, in creating the

So, as nearly as one can phrase the matter, it was really as a proof of confidence in his Author's literary

abilities that Felix Kennaston was presently confirmed at our little country church, to the delight of his wife

and the approbation of his neighbors. It was felt to be eminently suitable: that such a quiet welltodo man of

his years and station should not be a communicant was generally, indeed, adjudged unnatural. And when

William T. Vartrey (of the Liichfield Iron Works) was gathered to his grandfathers, in the following autumn,

Mr. Kennaston was rather as a matter of course elected to succeed him in the vestry. And Kennaston was

To the discerning it is easy enough to detect in all this fantastic theorizing the man's obsessing love of

ordered beauty and his abhorrence of slovenliness and shapelessnessvery easy to see just what makes the

writings of Felix Kennaston most admirablehere alluring him to believe that such ideals must also be

cherished by Omnipotence. This poet loved his formal art to the extent of coming to assume it was the

purpose and the origin of terrestrial life. Life seemed to him, in short, a God's chosen form of artistic

selfexpression; and as a confrere, Kennaston found the result praiseworthy. Even inanimate nature, he

sometimes thought, might be a divine experiment in vers libre.... But neither the justice of Kennaston's

airdrawn surmises, nor their wildness, matters; the point is that they made of him a vestryman who in

appearance and speech and actions, and in essential beliefs, differed not at all from his associates in office,

who had comfortably acquired their standards by hearsay. So that the moral of his theorizing should be no

Through such airdrawn surmises, then, as I have just recorded did Felix Kennaston enter at last into that

belief which is man's noblest heritage.... "Or I would put it, rather, that belief is man's metier," Kennaston

once corrected me"for the sufficient reason that man has nothing to do with certainties. He cannot ever get

in direct touch with reality. Such is the immutable law, the true cream of the jest. Felix Kennaston, so long as

he wears the fleshly body of Felix Kennaston, is conscious only of various tiny disturbances in his

braincells, which entertain and interest him, but cannot pretend to probe to the roots of reality about

anything. By the nature of my mental organs, it is the sensation the the thing arouses in my brain of which I

am aware, and never of the thing itself. I am conscious only of appearances. They may all be illusory. I

cannot ever tell. But it is my human privilege to believe whatever I may elect."

"Yet, my dear sir," as I pointed out, "is not this hairsplitting, really, a reduction of human life to the very

"Now again, Harrowby, you are falling into the inveterate racedelusion that man is is intended to get

somewhere. I do not see that the notion rests on any readily apparent basis. It is at any rate a working

hypothesis that in the worldromance man, being cast for the part of fool, quite obviously best furthers the

denouement's success by wearing his motley bravely.... There was a fool in my own romance, a character of

no great importance; yet it was an essential incident in the story that he should irresponsibly mislay the King's

letter, and Sir Guiron thus be forced to seek service under Duke Florestan. Perhaps, in similar fashion, it is

here necessary to the Author's scheme that man must simply go on striving to gain a little money, food, and

sleep, a trinket or two, some moments of laughter, and at the last a decent bed to die in. For it may well be

that man's allotted part calls for just these actions, to round out the drama artistically. Yes; it is quite

conceivable that, much as I shaped events at Storisende, so here the Author aims toward making an aesthetic

masterpiece of His puppetplay as a whole, rather than at ending everything with a transformation scene such

as, when we were younger, used so satisfactorily to close The Black Crook and The Devil's Auction. For it

may well be that the Author has, after all, more in common with AEschylus, say, than with the Charles H.

Yale who catered to our boyhood with those spectacular diversions.... So I must train my mind to be

contented with appearances, whether they be preference for the illusion which seems the more pleasent.

"Being mortal," I amended, "we pick our recreations to suit our tastes. Now I, for instanceas is, indeed, a

matter of some notoriety and derision here in Lichfieldam interested in what people loosely speak of as

"the occult." I don't endeavor to persuade defunct poetesses to dictate via the Ouija board effusions which

gave little encouragement as to the present state of culture in Paradise, or to induce Napoleon to leave

wherever he is and devote his energies to tipping a table for me, you understand.... But I quite fixedly believe

the Wardens of Earth sometimes unbar strange windows, that face on other worlds than ours. And some of us,

I think, once in a while get a peep through these windows. But we are not permitted to get a long peep, on an

unobstructed peep, nor very certainly, are we permitted to see all there isout yonder. The fatal fault, sir, of

your theorizing is that it is too complete. It aims to throw light upon the universe, and therefore is

selfevidently moonshine. The Wardens of Earth do not desire that we should understand the universe, Mr.

Kennaston; it is part of Their appointed task to insure that we never do; and because of Their efficiency every

notion that any man, dead, living, or unborn, might form as to the universe will necessarily prove wrong. So,

if for no other reason, I must decline to think of you and me as characters in a romance.

So much for what Kennaston termed his "serious reading" in chanceopened pages of the past. There were

other dreams quite different in nature, which seemed, rather, to fulfil the function of romantic art, in

satisfying his human craving for a fullfed emotional existencedreams which Kennaston jestingly

described as "belles lettres." For now by turnas murderer, saint, herdsman, serf, fop, pickpurse, troubadour,

monk, bravo, lordling, monarch, and in countless other estatesKennaston tasted those fruitless emotions

which it is the privilege of art to arousejoys without any inevitable purchaseprice, regrets that were not

But it was as a lover that his role most engrossed him, in many dreams wherein he bore for Ettarre such

adoration as he had always wistfully hoped he might entertain toward some woman some day, and had not

ever known in his waking hours. It was sober truth he had spoken at Storisende: "There is no woman like you

in my country, Ettarre. I can find no woman anywhere resembling you whom dreams alone may win to." But

now at last, even though it were only in dreams, he loved as he had always dimly felt he was capable of

loving.... Even the old lost faculty of versemaking seemed to come back to him with this change, and he

began again to fashion rhymes, elaborating bright odd vignettes of foiled love in outoftheway epochs and

surroundings. These were the verses included, later, under the general title of "Dramatis personae," in his

He wrote of foiled love necessarily, since not even as a lover might he win to success. It was the cream of

some supernal jest that he might not touch Ettarre; that done, though but by accident, the dream ended, and

the universe seemed to fold about him, just as a hand closes. He came to understand the reason of this. "Love

must look toward something not quite accessible, something not quite understood," he had said at Storisende:

and this phrase, so lightly despatched, came home to him now as pregnant truth. For it was this fact which

enabled him to love Ettarre, and had always prevented his loving any other woman.

All mortal women either loved some other man, and went with him somewhither beyond the area of your

daily life, and so, in time were forgotten; or, else, they loved you, and laid bare to you their minds and

bodiesneither of these possessions ever proved so remarkable, when calmly viewed, as to justify continued

infatuation therewith. Such at least Felix Kennaston had always found to be the case: love did not live, as

lovers do, by feeding; but, paradoxically, got strength by hungering. It should be remembered however, that

He would sometimes think of the women who had loved him; and would specualate, with some wistfulness,

if it was invariably true, as with his own amorous traffic, that love both kept and left its victims strangers to

each other? He knew so little of these softlipped girls and women, when everything was said....

Yet there had beenhe countedyes, time had known eight chaste and comely gentlewoman, in all, who

had "given themselves to him." as the hackneyed phrase was. These eight affairs, at any event, had

conformed to every tradition, and had been as throughgoing as might romantically be expected: but nothing

much seemed to have come of them; and he did not feel in the upshot very well acquainted with their

heroines. His sole emotion toward them nowadays was that of mild dislike. But six of themhad "deceived

their husbands" for the caresses of impecunious Kennaston; and the other two had anticipatorily "decieved"

the husbands they took later: so that they must, he reflected, have loved Felix Kennaston sincerely. He was

quite certain, though, that he had never loved any one of them as he had always wanted to love. No one of

these women had given him what he sought in vain. Kennaston had felt this lack of success dispiritedly when,

with soft arms about him, it was necessary to think of what he would say next. He had always in such

circumstances managed to feign high rapture, to his temporary companion's entire satisfaction, as he had

believed; but each adventure left him disappointed. It had not roused in him the overwhelming emotions

lovers had in books, nor anything resembling these emotions; and that was what he had wanted, and had not

He had made love, as a prevalent rule, to married womenallured, again, by bookish standards, which

advanced the commerce of Lancelot with Guinevere, or of Paolo Malatesta with his brothers wife, as the

supreme type of romantic passion. On more practical grounds, Kennaston preferred married women, partly

because they were less stupid to converse with in general, and in particular did not bring up the question of

marrying you; and in part because the husband in the background helped the situation pictoriallythis notion

also now seemed to be of literary orginbecides furnishing an unfailing topic of conversation. For unfaithful

or wavering wives, to Kennaston's finding, peculiarly delighted in talking about their husbands; an in such

prattle failed either to exhibit the conventional remorse toward, or any very grave complaint against, the

discussed betterhalf. The inconsistency would have worried Kennaston's sense of justice, had not these

husbands always been so transparently certain of Kennaston's insignificance.... Although judgeing of

necessity only from his own experience Kennaston was unable conscientiously to approve of adulterous

loveaffairs: they tended too soon toward tediousness; and married women seemed horribly quick to become

matteroffact in the details of a liaison, and ready almost to confuse you with the husband.

The giggle and chatter of young girls Kennaston had always esteemed unalluring, even in his own youth. He

had admired a number of them extravagantly, but only as ornamental objects upon which very illadvisedly

had been conferred the gift of speech. Today he looked back wistfully at times, as we must all do, to that

girl who first had asked him if he was sure that he respected her as much as ever: but it was with the mental

annotation that she had seven children now, and, as Kathleen put it, not a ray of good looks left. And he

would meditate that he had certainly been fond of Margaret Hugonin, even though in the beginning it was her

money which attracted him; and that Marian Winwood, despite her underhanded vengeance in publishing his

letters, had been the most delectable of company all that ancient summer when it had rained so persistently.

Then there had been tall Agnes Faroy, like a statue of gold and ivory; Kitty Provis, with those wonderful

huge green eyes of hers; and Celia Reindan, she who wore that curious silver band across her forhead; and

Helen Strong; and Blanche Druro; and Muriel.... In memory they arose like colorful and gracious phantoms,

far more adorable then they had ever been on earth, when each of these had loaned, for a season, the touch of

irresolute soft hands and friendly lips to a halfforgotten Felix Kennaston. All these, and others had been, a

long while since, the loveliest creatures that wore tender human flesh: and so, they had kissed, and they had

talked timehallowed nonsence, and they had shed the orthodox tears; andalso a long while sincethey

had died or they had married the conventional some one else: and it did not matter the beard of an onion to

the pudgy pasty man that Felix Kennaston had come to be. He had possessed, or else of his own violation he

had refrained from possessing, all these brightlycolored mothbrained girls: but he had loved none of them

as he had always known he was capable of loving: and at best, these girls were dead now, or at worst, they

Kathleen was returning from the South that day, and Kennaston had gone into Lichfield to meet her train. The

Florida Express was late by a full hour; so he sat in their motorcar, waiting, turning over some verses in his

torpid mind, and just halfnoticing persons who were gathering on the station platform to take the noon train

going west. He was reflecting how ugly and trivial people's faces appear when a crowd is viewed

collectivelyand wondering if the Author, looking down into a hot thronged street, was never tempted to

obliterate the race as an unsuccessful experimentwhen Kennaston recognized Muriel Allardyne.

"I simply will not see her," he decided. He turned his back that way, picked up the morning paper on the seat

beside him, and began to read an editorial on immigration. What the deuce was she doing in Lichfield any

way? She lived in St. Louis now. She was probably visiting Avis Blagden. Evidently, she was going west on

the noon train. If Kathleen's train arrived before midday he would have to get out of the car to meet her, and

all three would come together on the platform. If Muriel spied him there, in the open car, it would not be

uncharacteristic of her to join him. And he could not go away, because Kathleen's train was apt to arrive any

minute. It was perfectly damnable. Why could the woman not stay in St. Louis where she belonged, instead

of gadding about the country? Thus Kennaston, as he reread the statistics as to Poles and Magyers.

"I think there's two ladies trying to speak to you, sir," the chauffeur hazarded.

"Eh?oh, yes!" said Kennaston. he looked, perforce, and saw that across the railway track both Muriel

Allardyce and Avis Blagden were regarding him with idiotic grins and waving. He lifted his hat, smiled,

waved his own hand, and retired between the pages of the Lichfield CourierHerald. Muriel was wearing a

light traveling veil, he reflected; he could pretend not to know who she was. With recognition, of course, he

would be expected to come over and speak to her. He must remember to ask Avis, the very next time he saw

her, who had been that familiarlooking person with her, and to express regret for his shortsightedness....

He decided to step out of the car, by way of the farther door, and buy a package of cigarettes on the other side

of the street. He could loaf there and pray the Murial's train left before Kathleen's arrived....

"I don't believe you recognized us," said Avis Blagden, at his elbow. "Or else you are trying to cut your old

playmates." The two women had brazenly pursued him. They were within a yard of him. It was indelicate. It

was so perfectly unnecessary. He cordially wished some friendly engine had run them both down when they

"Why, bless my soul!" he was saying, "this is indeed a delightful suprise. I had no idea you were in town,

"There's Peter, at last," said Avis. "I really must speak to him a moment." And she promptly left them.

Kennaston reflected that the whole transaction was selfevidently prearranged. And Muriel was, as if

abstractedly, but deliberately, walking beyond earshot of the chauffeur. And there was nothing for it save to

"Is it? Honestly, Felix, it looked almost as if you were trying to avoid me." Kennaston wondered how he

"No, I didn't recognize you, with that veil on," he repeated. "And I had no idea you were in Lichfield. I do

"We arecontented, I suppose. He has his businessand politics. He is doing perfectly splendidly now, you

know. And I have my memories." Her voice changed. "I have my memories, Felix! Nothingnothing can

She was silent for a moment. "You look you latest role in life so well, too, Felix. You are the respectable

married gentleman to the last detail. Why, you are an old man now, Felix," she said wistfully. "Your hair is

grey about the ears, and you are fat, and there are wrinkles under you eyesBut are you happy, dear?" she

asked, with the grave tender speech that he remembered. And momentarily the man forgot the people about

"Happier than I deserve to be, Muriel." His voice had quaveredhad quavered in fact very nicely, it

"That's true, at least," the woman said, as in reflection. "You treated me rather abominably, you knowlike

"I am not altogether sorry you take that view of it. For I wouldn't want you to regretanythingnot even

that which, to me at least, is very sacred. But there was really nothing else to do save just let things end. It

was as hard," he said, with a continuous flight of imagination, "it was as hard on me as you."

"Sometimes I think it was simply because you were afraid of Leonard. I put that out of my mind, though,

always. You see I like to keep my memories. I have nothing else now, Felix" She opened the small leather

bag she carried, took out a handkerchief, and brushed her lips. "I am a fool of course. Oh, it is funny to see

your ugly little snub nose again! And I couldn't help wanting to speak to you, once more"

"It has been delightful. And some day I certainly do hopeBut there's your train, I think. The gates are going

"And here is Avis coming. So goodby, Felix, it is really forever this time, I think"

It seemed to him that she held in her left hand the sigil of Scoteia.... He stared at the gleaming thing, then

raised his eyes to hers. She was smiling. Her eyes were the eyes of Ettarre. All the beauty of the world

"Don't let it be forever! Come with me, Felix! There is only youeven now, there is only you. It is not yet

too late" Astounding as were the words, they came quite clearly, in a pleading frightened whisper.

The man was young for just that one wonderful moment of inexplicable yearning and selfloathing. Then, "I

am afraid my wife would hardly like it," he said equably. "So goodby, Muriel. It has been very delightful to

"I was mistaken, though, of course. It was the top of a vanitybox, or of a toiletwater flask, or of something

else, that she took out of the bag, when she was looking for her handkerchief. It was just a silly concidence. I

was mistaken, of course.... And here is Kathleen's train. Thank goodness, it was late enough...."

Thus Kennaston, as he went to receive his wife's cool kiss. Andhaving carefully mentioned as a matter of

no earthly importance that he had just seen Muriel Allardyce, and that she had gone off terribly in looks, and

that none of them seem to hold their own like you, dearhe debarred from mind that awkward moment's

So Kennaston seemed to have got only disappointment and vexation and gainless vague regret from his

loveaffairs in the flesh; and all fleshly passion seemed to flicker out inevitably, however splendid the brief

blaze. For you loved and lost; or else you loved and won: there was quick ending either way. And afterward

unaccountable women haunted you, and worried you into unreasonable contrition, in defiance of

But for Ettarre, who embodied all Kennaston was ever able to conceive of beauty and fearlessness and

strange purity, all perfections, all the attributes of divinity, in a word, such as his slender human faculties

were competent to understand, he must hunger always in vain. Whatever happened, Ettarre stayed

inaccessible, even in dreams: her beauty was his to look on only; and always when he came too near that

radiant loveliness which was Ettarre'sthat perfect beauty which was so full of troubling reticences, and so,

was touched with something sinisterthe dream would end, and the universe would seem to fold about him,

just as a hand closes. Such was the law, the kindly law, as Kennaston now believed, through which love

Sometimes, however, this law would lead to odd results, and left the dream an enigma. For instance, he had a

quaint experience upon the night of that day during which he had talked with Muriel Allardyce....

"You are in all things a fortunate man, Masterahwhatever your true name may be," said the boy,

The two sat in a comfortable paneled room. There was a big open fire behind Kennaston; he could see its

reflections flicker about the woodwork. The boy facing him was glowingly attired in green and gold, an

ardent comely urchin, who (as Kennaston estimated) might perhaps be a page to Queen Elizabeth, or possibly

was one of King James's spoilt striplings. Between them was a rough deal table, littered with playingcards;

and upon it sat a tallish blue pitcher halffull of wine, four lighted candles stuck like corks in as many

"Yes, we have done," the boy answered; and, rising, smiled cherubically. "May I ask what is the object that

"To be candid," Kennaston returned, "it is the King of Diamonds, that swarthy bearded Spaniard. I had

intended it should serve as a corrective and encourager of Lady Fortune, when I turned it, my next deal, as the

trump card. I'faith, I thank God I have found the jade is to be influenced by such feats of manual activity. Oh,

ay, sir, I may say it without conceit that my fingers have in these matters tolerable compass and variety."

"A cardsharp!" sneers the boy. "La, half of us suspected it already; but it will be rare news to the town that

Master Lionel Branchas I must continue to call youstands detected in such Greek Knaveries."

"Nay, but you will hardly live to moralize of it, sir. Oh, no, sir, indeed my poor arts must not be made public:

for I would not seem to boast of my accomplishments. Harkee, sir, I abhor vainglory. I name no man sir; but

I know very well there are snottynosed people who accord these expedients to amend the quirks of fate their

puritan disfavor. Hah, but, signior, what is that to us knights of the moon, to us gallants of generous

spirit?Oh, Lord, sir, I protest I look upon such talents much as I do upon my breeches. I do consider them

as possessions, not certainly to be vaunted, but indispensable to any gentleman who hopes to make a pleasing

"All this bluster is wordy foolery, Master Branch. What I have seen, I have seen; and you will readily guess

"I would give a great deal to find out what he is talking about," was Kennaston's reflection. "I have

discovered, at least, that my present alias is Branch, but that I am in reality somebody else." Aloud he said:

"Fore God, your eyesight is of the best Master Skirlaw(How the deuce did I know his name, now?)Hah,

"I'faith, sir, but I have heard that wine is a famed provoker of courage. Let us try the byword." So saying

Kennaston picked up one mug, and flung its contents full in the boy's face. It was white wine, Kennaston

"The insuly is sufficient. Draw, and have done!" the lad said quietly. His sword gleamed in the restive

"Na, na! but, my most expeditious cockerel, surely this place is a thought too public? Now yonder is a noble

courtyard. Oh, ay, favored by tonight's moon, we may settle our matter without any hindrance of intolerable

scandle. So, I will call my host, that we may have the key. Yet, upon my gentility, Master Skirlaw, I greatly

fear I shall be forced to kill you. Therefore I cry you mercy, sir, but is there on your mind no business which

you would not willingly leave undischarged? Save you, friend, but we are all mortal. Hah, to a lady whom I

need not name, it is an affair of considerable import what dispositon a bold man might make of this ring"

Leering, Kennaston touched the great signetring on the lad's thumb; and forthwith the universe seemed to

fold about him, just as a hand colses. In this brief moment of inexplicable yearning and selfloathing he

And Kennaston, awake, was pleading, with meaningless words: "Valentia! forgive me, Valentia!...."

And that was all. This dream remained an enigma. Kennaston could never know what events had preceded

this equivocal instant, or how Ettarre came to be disguised as a man, or what were their relations in this

dream, nor, above all, why he should have awakened crying upon the name of Valentia. It was simply a law

that always when he was about to touch Ettarreeven unconsciouslyeverything must vanish; and through

the workings of that law this dream, with many others, came to be just a treasured moment of unexplainable

To Kennaston the Lord Protector was saying, with grave unction: "You will, I doubt not, fittingly express to

our friends in Virginia, Master Major, those hearty sentiments which I have in the way of gratefulness, in that

I have received the honor and safe guard of their approbatiion; for al which I humbly thank them. To our

unfriends in that colony we will let action speak when I shal have completed God's work in Ireland."

"Yet the Burgesses, sir, are mostly illaffected; and Berkeley, to grant him justice, does not lack bravery"

"With Heaven's help, Master Major, I have of late dealt with a king who did not lack bravery. Nay, depend

upon it, I shall some day grant William Berkeley utter justicesuch justice as I gave his master, that proud

curled man, Charles Stuart." Then the Lord Protector's face was changed, and his harsh countenance became

a little troubled. "Yes, I shall do all this, with Heaven's help, I think. But in good faith, I grow old, Master

Cromwell closed and unclosed his hands, regarding them; amd he sighed. Then it was to Ettarre he spoke:

"I leave you in Master Major's charge. It may be I shall not return alive into England; indeed, I grow an old

man and feel infirmities of age stealing upon me. And so, farewell, my lass. Truly if I love you not too well, I

err not on the other hand much. Thou hast been dearer to me than any other creature: let that suffice." And

As the door closed upon Cromwell's burly figure, "No, be very careful not to touch me," Kennsaton implored.

"The dream must last till I have found out how through your aid, Ettarre, this bullnecked country squire has

come to rule England. It is precisely as I expected. You explain Cromwell, you explain

MohammedRichelieu and Tamburlaine and Julius Caeser, I suspect, and, as I know, Napoleonall these

men who have inexplicably risen from nothing to earthly supremacy. How is it done Ettarre?"

"It is not I who contrive it, Horvendile. I am but an incident in such men's lives. They have known meyes:

and knowing me, they were bent enough on their own ends to forget that I seemed not unlovely. It is not the

"And that small square mirror, such as Cromwell also carried?" Kennaston began. "Or is this forbidden

"Yes, that mirror aids them. In that mirror they can see only themselves. So the mirror aids toward the ends

they chose, with open eyes.... But you cannot ever penetrate these mysteries now, Horvendile. The secret of

the mirror was offered you once, and you would not bargain. The secret of the mirror is offered to no man

And he laughed merrily. "What does it matter? I am perfectly content. That is more than can be said for

yonder sanctimonious fat old rascal, who has just told me he is going into Ireland 'for the propagating of the

gospel of Christ, the establishing of truth and peace, and the restoring to it's former happiness and

tranquillity.' Why is it that people of executive ability seem always to be more or less mentally deficient?

Now, you and I know that, in point of fact, he is going into Ireland to burn Villages, massacre women, hang

bishops, and generally qualify his name for all time as a Hibernian synonym for infamy. Oh, no, the

purchaseprice of grandeur is too great; and men that crown themselves in this world inevitably perform the

action with soiled hands. Still, I wish I had known I was going visiting tonight in seventeenthcentury

England," said Kennaston, reflectively; "then I could have read up a bit. I don't even know whether Virginia

ever submitted to him. It simply shows what idleness may lead to! If I had studied history more faithfully I

would have been able tonight to prophesy to Oliver Cromwell about the results of his Irish campaigns and

so on, and could have impressed him vastly with my abilities. As it is, I have missed an opportunity which

"What fun!" says Kennaston; "we are at VauxleVicomte, where Fouquet is enteraining young Louis

Quatorze. Yonder is La Vallierethe thin towheaded girl, with the big mouth. People are just begining to

whisper scandal about her. And that tall jade is Athenais de TonnayCharentethe woman who is going to

be Madame de Montespan and control everything in the kingdom later on, you remember. The King is not yet

"The Troupe of Monsieur is about to present an openair comedy. It is called Les FacheuxThe Bores. It is

rumored to take off very cleverly the trivial tedious fashion in which perfectly wellmeaning 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 todayperhaps foreverman will lack

means, or courage, to voice his actual thoughts adequately. He must still talk of weather probilities and of

having seen Soandso and of such trifles, that mean absolutely nothing to himand must babble of these

things even to the persons who are most dear and familiar to him. Yes, every reputable man must desperately

make smalltalk, and echo and reecho 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

"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 surintendent

droll?for he ment Poquelin, soon to be Poquelin de Moliere, of course. Moliere, also, is a name which is

not yet famous as yet. But in a month or so it will be famous for all time; and Monsieur le Surintendent will

"You smile, Ettarre? Ah, yes, I understand. Moliere 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

"Ah, the King comesevidently in no very amiable frame of mindand all rise, like a flurry of great

butterflies. It is the begining of the play. See, a woman is coming out of the big shell in the fountain....

"I wish my old dear friend Jonas d'Artagnan were here. It is a real pity he is only a character in fictionjust

as I once thought you to be, Ettarre. Eh, what a fool I was to imagine I had created you! and that I controlled

"Ettarre, your unattainable beauty tears my heart. Is that blackbrowed Moliere 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

They waited in a big dark room of the Conciergerie, with many other condemned emigrants, until the

tumbrils should come to fetch them to the Place de la Revolution. 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,

"Ettarre, I know today 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 had not any name. And when I went about the dusty world I still believed you waited

somewheretill 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 treetops 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 woman of earth who resembled

"All women resemble me, Horveendile. Whatever flesh they may wear as a garment, and however

timefrayed or dullhued 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 paleof is it that she wishes to look her best?in the moment of

death.... Ettare, my love for you whom I could not ever find, was not of earth, and I could not transfer it to

any of our women. The lively hues, the lovely curvings and the fragrant tender flesh of earth's women were

deft to cast spells; but presently I knew this magic was only of the body. It might be I was honoring divinity's

effigy in tinted clay. Becides, it is not possible to know with any certainly what is going on in the round

glossy little heads of women. 'I hide no secerts 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 too 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, was discovered that secert, 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. Yes, it is perturbing to be

assured I am only a garment which is sometimes worn by that Horvendile who is of the Leshy, and who shifts

other puppets than I can imagine. For I am an overweening garment, Ettarre,or rather, let us say, I

flauntingly esteem myself a fine feather in the cap of this eternal Horvendile. So does it sometimes seem to

my vainglorious selfconceit that even this demiurgic Horvendile and his Poictesme, and, for that matter, all

the living anywhere in this world, are only the notions of a certain fat and flabby dreamer"

"Indeed, I am not likely to forget the Sabbat.... Monsieur le Prince, I regret the circumstances, butas you

seemy snuffbox 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

Gatinaisonce Grande Duke of Noumaria, you rememberhas in his career been guilty of every iniquity

and meanness and cowardice: now, facing instant death, he finds time to think of snuff and phrasemaking....

Butto go back a littleI had thought the Sabbat would be so different! One imagined there would be

"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

"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 awaken 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 forbidded ever to win quite to you, ever to touch you, ever

And he saw that the great doorswhich led to deathwere unclosing: and beyond them he saw confusedly

a mob of redcapped men, of malignant frenzied women, of wideeyed 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 excape the guillotine.

Then again Kennaston stood alone before a tall window, made up of many lozengeshaped panes of clear

glass set in lead framework. He had put aside one of the two great curtainsof a very fine stuff like gauze,

stitched over with transparent glittering beetlewings, and embroidered with tiny seed pearlswhich hung

Snow covered the expanse of housetops 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 kinghis own hand, that held aside the curtain before himwas

("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

"I want to be happy. And that is impossible, because there is no happiness anywhere in the world. I, a great

king, say thisI, who am known in unmapped lands, and before whom nations tremble. For there are but

three desirable things in lifelove and power and wisdom: and I, the king, have sounded the depths of these,

"I am sad tonight, 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 aweary 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

"Many stiffnecked kings, still clad in purple and scarlet and wearing gold crownsmonarchs whose proud

faces, for all that these men were my slaves, kept their old fashion and stayed changeless as the faces of

statuessuch were my lackeys: and I burned walled cities. Empires were my playthings, but I had no son to

inherit after me. I had no sononly 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 liveda

greater and a nobler king than I. But death willed otherwise: the life that moved in me was not to be

perpetuated: aad so, the heart in my body grew dried and little and shrivled, like a parched pea: for I

"Then I turned from warfare, and sought for wisdom. I learned all that is permitted any man to knowoh, 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 SeaFolk, 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

dearlypurchased, wearilyearned wisdom must lie quiet in a big stone box, and all which has known life

"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 studied or dreamed, I must lie helpless where worms will have

their will of me, and neither the worms nor I will think it odd, because we have both learnedby how

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 seagreen onyx. A woman stood there, who did

not speak, but only waited. So did he perceive what terror was, for terror possessed him utterly; and yet he

"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 halfhidden with jewels, reached toward his hands, so gladly raised to hers; and the universe

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

agestriken 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 and enigma; but he got sweet terror and

happiness of the dream, for all that, tasting his moment of inexplicable poignant emotion: and therewith he

Meanwhile, I used to see Kennaston nearly every day.... Looking back, I recollected one afternoon when the

Kennastons were calling on us. It was the usual sort of lateafternoon call customarily exchanged by country

"We have been intending to come over for ever so long," Mrs. Kennaston explained. "But we have been in

"We only got the carpets up yesterday," my wife assented. "Riggs just kept promising and promising, but he

"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 offNo,

"It's the long rainy spell we ought to have had in May," I informed her. "The seasons are changing so, though,

"Yes, Felix was saying only today that we seem no longer to have any realy spring. We simply go straight

"I was endeavoring to persuade her," Kennaston emended, "that it was foolish to go away as long as it stays

"Oh, yes, now!" my wife conceded. "But the paper says we are in for a long heat period about the fifteenth.

"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 drainpipe to the gutter around our poch got stopped somehow, last year"this Kennaston contributed,

"Then there is always so much to do, getting the children started at school," my wife

continued"everything undr the sun needed at the last moment, of course! And the way they change all the

schoolbooks every year is simply ridiculous. So, if I had my way, we would always go away early, and be

"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

hagridden by our dusky familiars. The oldtime darkies are dying out, and the younger generation is simply

worthless. And with no more sense of gratitudeWhy, Moira hired a new girl last week, to help out upstairs,

"No, dear, it was in the morning," my wife corrected me, "and everybody that the upstairsgirl everywhere

"Of course they did," Mrs. Kennaston remarked, with unconcealed indignation. "But now, even with the

politest of them you simply never know where you are. For what with the way they leave you, without one

minute's notice, hagridden, Mr. Harrowby, is really not any name for it. They just go!

"Oh, yes, hagridden! 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 thinkingYou 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

"It so often comes over me," says Moriawhich 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 writingfluid"and has his preducts on

sale all over the world. I look on him in a new light, so to speak, when I relaze that daily he is gladdening

Calcutta with his soaps, delighting London with his dentifrice, and comforting Nova Zembla with his talcum

"Well but I inherited all that. It isn't fair to fling ancestral soapvats 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

I recollected now how his face changed. "And what in heaven's name was a Sabbat?" Then he fidgeted, and

I replied : "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 held after dusk on St. John's Eve, on

Malburga'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 whenwhen 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 toejoints, and certain portions of the

windingsheet, with which ti 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

"I see," says Kennaston, intently regarding his fingernails: "they must have been highly enjoyable social

"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

Then Kennaston asked carelessly, "But how could such absurd superstitions ever get any hold on people, do

"That would require rather a lenghty explanationWhy, no," I protested, in answer to his shrug; "the Sabbat

is not inexplicable. HahnKraftner's book, or Herbert Perlin's either, will give you a very fair notion of what

the Sabbat really wassomething not in the least grotesque, but infinitely more aweinspiring 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

"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 od 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 vhildren of grave

"Mr. Kennaston," says Moira, laughing, "I warn you, if you start Dick on his hobbies, he will taalk us all to

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

Yes, it was much the usual sort of lateafternoon 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?"

Which indicates that Lichfield may stand not far from Poictesme "Alas! the sprite that haunts us

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 candlelightfor this was

always necessaryit might induce the desired dream of Ettarre; and that, so, Horvendile would be freed of

In our social ordering Felix Kennaston stayed worthy of consideration in Lichfield, both as a celebrity of

sorts and as the owner of four bankaccounts; and colloquially, as likewise has been recorded, he was by

ordinary dismisseed from our patronizing discussion as having long been "queer," and in all pprobability "a

dope fiend." In Lichfield, as elsewhere, a man's difference from his fellows cannot comfortably be conceded

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 Veilwhich, as you now know, was woven from the dreamstuff Horvendile had

fetched out of that fair countryvery far from Lichfieldwhich is bounded by Avalon and Phaecia and

Seacoast Bohemia, and the contiguous forests of Arden and Broceliande, and on the west of course by the

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.

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 manicureset 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

"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 hastilyI 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 knowas 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 Horvendilebut am I truly that highhearted

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, busyeyed stranger, whose hands and lips my own hands and lips meet

But he was standing before his wife's dressingtable, 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 nakedlooking upperlip. That was Felix Kennaston, so far as were concerned

all other people 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

matterhis thoughts ranthat it was never permitted any man, not even in his dreams, ever to touch the

So he left there the two pieces of metal, united at last upon his wife's dressingtable, between the

manicureset and the pincushion, where on her return she might find them, and, finding, understand all that

Then Kennaston went for a meditative walk in the abating glare of that day's portentous sunset, wherein the

treetrunks westward showed like the black bars of a grate. It was in just such a twilight that Horvendile had

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 larkas though shot vehemently from the groundrose 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

Kennaston snapped his fingers. "Aha, my old acquaintance!" he said, "but now I envy you no longer!" Then

"What did I think of?" he said, long afterward"oh, of nothing with any real clarity. You seeI touched

"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 have 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 comprehend why in our highest

sacrament we prefigure 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

"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 remember 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 lovingkindness toward all created things save the women I had flirted withso that she contributed

"And I saw that the goodsmelling earth about my pudgy pasty body, and my familiar homeas I turned

back my pudgy pasty face toward Alcluid, bathed now in the sun's goldwere lovely kindly places. Outside

were kings and wars and thunderous zealots, and groaning, rattling thunderous printingpresses, 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.' Andwell, I

But he did not walk long; for it was growing chilly, as steadily dusk deepened, in this twilight so like that in

Kathleen was seated at the dressingtable, arranging her hair, when Kennaston came again into her rooms.

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

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 speak of it in that

constricted hidebound 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 becasue of motives which he would never

knowfor 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

"Oh, soso," Kathleen conceded; "but it was rather a mixed crowd. Hadn't you better hurry and change your

clothes, Felix? It is almost dinnertime, and, you know, we have seats for the theater tonight."

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, idlynot looking at her, and hopeful that they were at least

"Perhaps Mr. Harrowby could tell you." Kathleen also spoke as if with indifferencenot looking at him, but

"Eh?" Kennaston smiled. "Oh, yes, Dick Harrowby, I grant you, has dabbled a bit in occult matters, but

"At all events," Kathleen considered, "it is a quarter to seven already, and we have seats for the theater

"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 dressingtable, and rose impatiently. "Of course if you don't mean to

So they dined alone together, sharing a taciturn meal, and duly witnessed the drolleries of The GuttaPercha

He read The Tinctured Veil in print, with curious wistful wonder. "How did I come to write it?" was his

Thereafter Felix Kennaston wrote no more books. He revised painstakingly, for the uniform edition of his

works, the "privately printed" volumes of his remote youth; he collected a body of miscellaneous verse in the

curiously unequal Chimes at Midnight: but after The Tinctured Veil he wrote nothing more save only those

occasional papers which later were assembled in How Many Angels. "I am afraid to write against the author

of Men Who Loved Alison," he was wont to flippantly declare. And a few of us suspected even then that he

For this Kennaston to us seemed like an instrument that had been used to accomplish a needed bit of work,

and, when the work was done, had been put by. And he did not matter: what only mattered was the fact that

we possessed Men Who Loved Alison. A quota of youngsters here and there, I know, begin to assert that we

have in The Tinctured Veil an affair of even more grave importance, and they may be right. It is a question

Meanwhile, Mr. and Mrs. Kennaston continued their round of decorous social duties: their dinnerparties

were chronicled in the Lichfield CourierHerald; and Kennaston delivered, by request, two scholarly

addresses before the Lichfield Woman's Club, was duly brought forward to shake hands with all celebrities

"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 goodlooking 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 courseone pays as

one goes out.... Oh, yes, one pays!that is an inevitable rule; but what you have to pay is not exorbitant, all

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 poetsa married bard, you

may be sureand 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 loverssedulously

juggling, ever since Menander's heyday, with compromising letters and unscrupulous rivals and shipwrecks

and wills and testy parents and what notand 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

I am thus digressing, in obsolete Thackerayan fashion, to twaddle about lovematches 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 sideglancing 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

And being happily marriedbut 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, sire, are proverbially the most complacent and uxorious of spouses. But you are not, after all, mariied to

the girl you met at the chancelrail, so long and long ago, with unforgotten tremblings of the 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 her 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 bureaudrawer in a jumble of veils and

gloves and powderrags and hairpins 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

Hand upon heart, my dear Mr. Grundy, is this the person to whom you dispatched those letters you wrote

before you were married? Your wife has these 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 this common knowledge is a secret every wife must share halfguiltily with her husbandeven in your

happiest matrimonial venturesas 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 foursquare world, where there is

the rent and your social obligations and the children's underclothing to be considered, long and long before

indulgence in rattlepate mountainclimbing. 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 breathingfor we will

not crudely call it snoringyou are privleged, now, to hear every night until the one or the other of you is

done with breathing? Suppose, by a wild flight of fancy, that she is no more honest with you than you are

So to Kennaston his wife remained a not unfriendly mystery. They had been demigods for a little while; and

the dream had faded, to leave it matters not what memories; and they were only Mr. and Mrs. Felix Bulmer

Kennaston. Of all of us, my fellow failures in the great and hopeless adventure of matrimony, this apologue is

Yet, as I look into my own wife's faceno more the loveliest, but still the dearest of all earthly faces, I

protestand as I`wonder how much she really knows about me or the universe at large, and have not the

least notionwhy, I elect to believe that, in the ultimate, Kennaston was not dissatisfied. For all of us the

dreamhaze merges into the glare of common day: the dea certe, 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

exercisehas had its highpitched outing, however fleetand that, because of many abiding memories, we

know, assuredly, the way of flesh is not a futile scurrying through diningrooms and offices and shops and

With the preceding preachment I wish I might end the story. For what followswhich is my own little part

in the story of Felix Kennastonis that discomfortable sort of anticlimax wherein the key to a mystery, by

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

"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 musicroom, to smoke and read magazines. He never saw her living any

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

Adele Van Orden today, 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

"How? Oh, yes," he mumbled, intent upon his reading; "it is pretty bad. Don't many of them keep their

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

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.

I thought from the first there would prove to be supernal doubledealing back of all this. The Wardens of

Earth sometimes unbar strange windows, I suspectwindows which face on other worlds than ours: and

They permit thisorthat 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 callgravely,

"You are interested in such things, you seejust 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

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 selfhypnosis, 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, cooperating

with his queer reading, his temperament, his idle life, his belief in the sigil, and cooperating tooas yet

men may not say just howwith the hypnotic effect of any small bright object when gazed at steadily, had

been sufficient to induce more dreams. I could understand how it had all befallen in consonance with

And the prelate and the personage had referred, of course, to the thennotorious ninteenth and twentieth

chapters of Men Who Loved Alison,in which is described the worship of the sigil of Scoteiaand 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

For what Kennaston showed me was the metal top of a cold cream jar. I am sure of this, for Harrowby's

Creme Cleopatre is one of the most popular articles our firm manufactures. I hesitate to tell you how many

thousand husbands may find at will among their wives' possessions just such a talisman as Kennaston had

discovered. I myself selected the design for these covers when the stuff was first put in the market. They are

sealed on, you may remember, with gray wax, to carry out the general idea that we are vending old Egyptian

secrets of beauty. And the design upon these covers, as I have since been at pains to make sure, is in no

known alphabet. P. N. Flaherty (the artist implicated) tells me he "just made it up out of his head"blending

meaningless curlicues and dots and circles with an irresponsible hand, and sketching a crack accross all, "just

to make it look ancient like. "It was along this semblance of a fracturefor there the brittle metal is

thinnestthat 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

It was natural that Mrs. Kennaston should have used Harrowby's Creme Cleopatre habitually; for indeed, as

my wife had often pointed out, Mrs. Kennaston used a considerable amount of toilet preparations. And that

Mrs. Allardyce should have had a jar of Harrowby's Creme Cleopatre in her handbag was almost inevitable:

there is no better restorative and cleanser for the complexion, after the dust and dirt of a train journey, as is

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 soulhunger, so many long hours, andhere is the

sardonic pointso many contented and artisticallyfruitful 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.

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. "Supposesuppose there

had been some mistake, Mr. Kennastonthat 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 marvelledand 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 methat 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

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 tomatocan, it would not alter that big fact, nor my fixed faith. No, Harrowby, the common names

we call things do not matterexcept to show how very dull we are," he ended, with that irritating noise that

And I was sorely tempted.... You see, I never liked Felix Kennaston. The man could create beauty, to outlive

him; but in his own appearance he combined grossness with insignificance, and he added thereto a variety of

ugly senseless little mannerisms. He could evolve interesting ideas, as to Omnipotence, the universe, art, life,

religion, himself, his wife, a candlestick or a cometanythingand very probably as to me; but his

preferences and his limitations would conform and color all these ideas until they were precicely what he

desired to belive, no more or less; and, having them, he lacked means, or courage, to voice his ideas

adequately, so that to talk with him meant a dull interchange of commonplaces. Again, he could aspire

toward chivalric love, that passion which sees in womankind High God made manifest in the loveliest and

most perfect of his creations; but in the quest he had succeeded merely in utilizing womenfolk either as toys

to play with and put by or as drudges to wait on him; yet, with all this, he could retain unshaken his faith in

and his worship of that ideal woman. He could face no decision without dodging; no temptation without

compromise; and he lied, as if by instinct, at the threatened approach of discomfort or of his fellows'

dissaproval: yet devils, men and seraphim would conspire in vain in any effort to dissuade him from his

selfelected purpose. For, though he would do no useful labor he could possibly avoid, he could grudge

nothing to the perfection of his chosen art, in striving to perpetuate the best as he saw it.

In short, to me this man seemed an inadequate kickworthy creature, who had muddled away the only life he

was quite sure of enjoying, in contemplation of a dream; and who had, moreover, despoiled the lives of

others, too, for the dream's sake. To him that dream alone could matterhis proud assurance that life was not

a blind and aimless business, not all a hopeless waste and confusion; and that he, this gross and weak animal,

could be strong and excellent and wise, and his existence a pageant of beauty and nobility. To prove this

dream was based on a delusion would be no doubt an enjoyable retaliation, for Kennaston's being so

unengaging to the eye and so stupid to talk to; but it would make the dream no whit less lovely or dear to

For it occurred to me that his history was, in essentials, the history of our race, thus far. All I advanced for or

against him, equally, was true of all men that have ever lived.... For it is in this inadequate flesh that each of

us must serve his dream; and so, must fail in the dream's service, and must parody that which he holds

dearest. To this we seem condemned, being what we are. Thus, one and all, we play false to the dream, and it

evades us, and we dwindle into responsible citizens. And yet always thereafterbecause of many abiding

memorieswe know, assuredly, that the way of flesh is not a futile scurrying through diningrooms and

offices and shops and parlors, and thronged streets and restaurants, "and so to bed."...

It was in appropriate silence, therefore, that I regarded Felix Kennaston, as a parable. The man was not

merely very human; he was humanity. And I reflected that it is only by preserving faith in human dreams that

Which is the proper ending of all comedies; and heralds, it may be, an afterpiece.

"Still we say as we go, 'Strange to think by the way, Whatever there is to know, That shall we know one

The Epilogue "And yet, sir," I have said, by and by, "yet it is only by preserving faith in human dreams that

we may, after all, perhaps some day make them come true." And Kennaston, without bothering to look

"In fact," he remarked, "that sums up everything nicely enough. So here , upon this note of temperate

optimismhowsoever cauitously conditioned and behedged and qualified,here let us end the long

journying of the life of Manuel. For logic now demands that of me, here and in no other place."

I was, you may depend upon it, startled.... I saw then that the old fellow was still looking, not at me, but into

the fireplace where the red glowing seemed to detain his gaze. And I felt that this was not quite Felix

Kennaston, but, rather, through the virtue of that small steady glowing, in some part Horvendile who was

"Meanwhile," he said, "that life has journeyed a far way, from the body of the Redeemer of Poictesme to the

body of Felix Kennaston, and from the high turrents of Storisende to the pennedin, quiet library of Alcuid.

There has been adventuring in the journey, much of it pleasant enough: the codes of chivalrous and gallant

persons, and of little poets also, have been fairly tested in many lands and times: yet the comedy has not, after

"I deduce that the thing said to Florian de Puysange by the redheaded guide of all, holds true. The conedy of

the life of Manuel does not vary. The first act is the imagining of the place where contentment exists and may

be cone to; and the second act reveals the striving toward, and the third act the falling short of, that shining

goal,or else, the attaining of it, to discover that happiness, after all, abides a thought farther down the

"But, even so,and even then,the wise will yet reflect that it is only be preserving faith in human dreams

that we may, after all, perhaps some day make them come true,and that we may thus add to the comedy of

"You may be right," a strangely tired and shrunk looking Kennaston answered me, "and certainly I can not go

so far as to say that you are wrong. But, still, at the same time! Yes, that is how I feel about it, even now....

In any case, the journeying must by every rule of logic end here. For the life of Manual, housed, after

twentytwo removes in the fat body of Felix Kennaston, has, after all, regained the road to Storisende"

At that I remarked: "I, in my turn, deduce, sir, that, now you possessas you call the thing,the complete

sigil, you must have used it yet again, in some manner which you have never told me about?"

He said: "I have not ever employed the complete sigil. And it is true I have not told you everything. Why

should I? No Author ever does.... So, as yet, this Kennaston waits, in the quiet library at Alcluid, mildly

bored and a bit puzzled by the Lichfield in whose affairs he has somehow become involved. But an assured

way out of all these drab annoyances is known to him, and the way back is known, also to the Poictesme from

which the life of Manuel a great long while ago set forth. With Felix Kennastonor, if you prefer it so, with

Horvendile,rests safe this secret and peculiar knowledge as to how the life of Manuel may yet repair to it's

first home after some seven centuries of exile. Thus will the traveller returnby and byto the place of his

starting; the legend of the second coming of the Redeemer will be justified, in, at all events, my lesser world;

and the tale to Manuel's life will have come again, as it did once becide the pool of Haranton, full circle."

"Alas, my friend," I observed, "if you spoke Greek or Coptic now it might be I would understand you rather

But I was at large pains to talk unemphatically, and to keep my voice well lowered. For it was plain enough

that this pudgy, old, meurotic wreckage o a man, once more, was partly hypnotized, by gazing thus steadly

into the small bright fire; and I was finding his queer borderland condition o be of some interest.

He said then: "Felix Kennaston, alone of all the Manuelides, hes returned to Storisende. He too has acquired

that sigil and that secretforever unknown to you, my poor Harrowby,through which this elderly and this

rather famous person has glimpsed, howsoever brokenly, the loves and the desires and the adventures he had

when he wore another body than the gray body which he now wears. And to this Felix Kennaston also has

been showna bit tantalizinglythe face of an unforgotten boy who has been free, through seven whole

centuries, to follow after his own thinking and his own desires.... For the comedy of the life of Manuel, I

"Yet by and by," I prompted him, "you, Horvendille, will employ the complete sigil?"

"Yes, by and by," the droning, very tired voice went on. And then a lean and snubnosed stranger will come

to me also. 'and what is that thing? this stranger will perforce be asking, as he asks of everyone at long last.

Nor can the answer ever vary, whether it be you or I or any other man who speaks at the end of his living here

"It is the figure of a man which I have modeled and modeled and cannot get exactly to my liking."... For thus

it has been in the old days and in every day. And this is the end of every comedy. YetI agree with you, my

Harrowby,yet, if the Author will it, there may be appended to any comedy an afterpiece. Meanwhile, so far

Thereafter he sat gazing rather moodily into the fire. And I too summed up in brief my entire knowledge as to