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 by
it—all people whose opinions he might conceivably value—seemed never to
write to authors....
And finally, it was droll to watch his wife’s 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
reflected—with which she had lived so long without, he felt,
appreciation of them—but certainly she would never admit to either fact.
He doubted very much if Kathleen would ever actually read _Men Who Loved
Alison_; on various pretexts she had deferred the pleasure, and seemed,
with 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
newspaper-notices sent in by the clipping-bureau. These she considered
with profound seriousness.
“I have been thinking—you ought to make a great deal out of your next
novel,” she said, one morning, over her grapefruit; and the former poet
wondered why, in heaven’s name, it should matter to her whether or not
the marketing of his dreams earned money, when they had already a
competence. But women were thus fashioned....
“You ought to do something more up-to-date, though, Felix, something
that deals with real life—”
“Ah, but I don’t particularly care to write about a subject of which I
am so totally ignorant, dear. Besides, it isn’t for you to fleer and
gibe at a masterpiece which you never read,” he airily informed her.
“I am saving it up for next summer, Felix, when I will have a chance to
give every word of it the reverence it deserves. I really don’t have any
time for reading nowadays. There is always something more important that
has to be attended to—For instance, the gasoline engine isn’t working
again, and I had to ’phone in town for Slaytor to send a man out to-day,
to see what is the matter this time.”
“And it is messy things like that you want me to write about!” he
exclaimed. “About the gasoline engine going on another strike, and
Drake’s forgetting to tell you we were all out of sugar until late
Saturday night! Never mind, Mrs. Kennaston! you will be sorry for this,
and you will weep the bitter tears of unavailing 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, and
I cannot very well get through it on an empty stomach.”
“We haven’t had it since Saturday, Felix.” Then wearily, to the
serving-girl, “Cora, see if Mr. Kennaston can have some eggs.... I wish
you wouldn’t upset things so, Felix. Your coffee will get stone-cold;
and it is hard enough to keep servants as it is. Besides, you know
perfectly well to-day is Thursday, and the library has to be
thorough-cleaned.”
“That means of course I am to be turned out-of-doors and forced to waste
a whole day somewhere in town. It is quite touching how my creature
comforts are catered to in this house!”
And Kathleen began to laugh, ruefully. “You are just a great big baby,
Felix. You are sulking and swelling up like a frog, because you think I
don’t appreciate what a wonderful husband I have and what a wonderful
book he has written.”
Then Kennaston began to laugh also. He knew that what she said was
tolerably true, even to the batrachian simile. “When you insisted on
adopting me, dear, you ought to have realized what you were letting
yourself in for.”
“—And I do think,” Kathleen went on, evincing that conviction with which
she as a rule repeated other people’s remarks—“that you ought to make
your next book something that deals with real life. _Men Who Loved
Alison_ is beautifully written and all that, but, exactly as the _Tucson
Pioneer_ said, it is really just colorful soapbubbly nonsense.”
“Ah, but is it unadulterated nonsense, 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 sublime and edifying topic.”
“Yes—? I dare say,” Kathleen assented vaguely. “This herring is really
very good, Felix. I think you would like it, if you just had not made up
your mind to be stubborn about it—” Then she spoke with new animation:
“Felix, Margaret Woods was in Louvet’s yesterday morning, having her
hair done for a dinner they gave the railroad crowd last night, and of
all the faded washed-out looking people I ever saw—! And I can remember
her having that hideous brown dress long before she was married. Of
course, it doesn’t make any difference to me that she didn’t see fit to
invite us. She was one of your friends, not mine. I was only thinking
that, since she always pretended to be so fond of you, it does seem
curious the way we are invariably left out.”
So Kennaston did not embroider verbally his theme—of Living
Adequately—as he had felt himself in vein to do could he have found a
listener.
“Some day,” he ruefully reflected, “I shall certainly write a paper upon
The Lost Art of Conversing with One’s Wife. Its appeal, I think, would
be universal.”
Then his eggs came....
------------------------------------------------------------------------
VII
Peculiar Conduct of a Personage
SHORTLY afterward befell a queer incident. Kennaston, passing through a
famed city, lunched with a personage who had been pleased to admire _Men
Who Loved Alison_, and whose remunerative admiration had been skilfully
trumpeted in the public press by Kennaston’s publishers.
There were some ten others in the party, and Kennaston found it droll
enough to be sitting at table with them. The lean pensive man—with hair
falling over his forehead in a neatly-clipped “bang,” such as custom
restricts to children—had probably written that morning, in his official
capacity, to innumerable potentates. That handsome bluff old
navy-officer was a national hero: he would rank in history with Perry
and John Paul Jones; yet here he sat, within arms’-reach, 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 did not presume to go to war without
securing the consent of this financier.
And that exquisitely neat fellow, looking like a lad unconvincingly
made-up for an octogenarian in amateur theatricals, was the premier of
the largest province in the world: his thin-featured neighbor was an
aeronaut—at this period really a _rara avis_—and went above the clouds
to get his livelihood, just as ordinary people went to banks and
offices. And chief of all, their multifarious host—the personage, as one
may discreetly call him—had left unattempted scarcely any rôle in the
field of human activities: as ranchman, statesman, warrior, historian,
editor, explorer, athlete, coiner of phrases, and re-discoverer of the
Decalogue, impartially, he had labored to make the world a livelier
place of residence; and already he was the pivot of as many legends as
Charlemagne or Arthur.
The famous navy-officer, as has been said, was complaining of the
weather. “The seasons have changed so, since I can remember. We seem to
go straight from winter into summer nowadays.”
“It has been rather unseasonable,” assented the financier; “but then you
always feel the heat so much more during the first few hot days.”
“Besides,” came the judicious comment, “it has not been the heat which
was so oppressive this morning, I think, as the great amount of humidity
in the air.”
“Yes, it is most unpleasant—makes your clothes stick to you so.”
“Ah, but don’t you find, now,” asked the 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 to found, if he could see it
nowadays.”
“He would probably find it very different from what he imagined it would
be.”
“Why, he would probably turn in his grave, at some of our newfangled
notions—such as prohibition and equal suffrage.”
“Oh, well, all sensible people know, of course, that the trouble with
prohibition is that it does not prohibit, and that woman’s place is the
home, not in the mire of politics.”
“That is admirably put, sir, if you will permit me to say so. Still,
there is a great deal to be said on both sides.”
“And after all, is there not a greater menace to the ideals of
Washington and Jefferson in the way our present laws tend uniformly to
favor rich people?”
“There you have it, sir—to-day we punish the poor man for doing what the
rich man does with entire impunity, only on a larger scale.”
“By George, there are many of our so-called captains of industry who, if
the truth were told, and a shorter and uglier word were not
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
the happiest, in spite of their luxury.”
“You gentlemen can take it from me,” asserted the aeronaut, “that many
poor people get a lot of pleasure out of life.”
“Now, really though, that reminds me—children 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
polite and kind—”
“Well, little pitchers have big ears—”
“What you might call a chip of the old block, eh?—so that mighty little
misses him?”
“I may be prejudiced, but I thought it pretty good, coming from a kid of
six—”
“And it is perfectly true, gentlemen—the poor are kind to each other.
Now, I believe just being kind makes you happier—”
“And I often think that is a better sort of religion than just dressing
up in your best clothes and going to church regularly on Sundays—”
“That is a very true thought,” another chimed in.
“And expressed, upon my word, with admirable clarity—”
“Oh, whatever pretended pessimists in search of notoriety may say, most
people are naturally kind, at heart—”
“I would put it that Christianity, in spite of the carping sneers of
science so-called, has led us once for all to recognize the vast
brotherhood of man—”
“So that, really, the world gets better every day—”
“We have quite abolished war, for instance—”
“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 destruction involved would be too
frightful—”
“Then, too, we are improving the automobile to such an extent—”
“Oh, in the end it will inevitably supplant the horse—”
“It seems almost impossible to realize how we ever got along without the
automobile—”
“Do you know, I would not be surprised if some day horses were exhibited
in museums—”
“As rare and nearly extinct animals? Come, now, that is pretty good—”
“And electricity is, as one might say, just in its infancy—”
“The telephone, for instance—our ancestors would not have believed in
the possibilities of such a thing—”
“And, by George, they talk of giving an entire play with those
moving-picture machines—acting the whole thing out, you know.”
“Oh, yes, we live in the biggest, brainiest age the world has ever
known—”
“And America is going to be the greatest nation in it, before very long,
commercially and in every way....”
So the talk flowed on, with Felix Kennaston contributing very little
thereto. Indeed, Felix Kennaston, the dreamer, was rather ill-at-ease
among these men of action, and listened to their observations with
perturbed attention. He sat among the great ones of earth—not all of
them the very greatest, of course, but each a person of quite
respectable importance. It was the sort of gathering that in boyhood—and
in later life also, for that matter—he had foreplanned to thrill and
dazzle, as he perfectly recollected. But now, with the opportunity, he
somehow could not think of anything quite suitable to say—of anything
which would at once do him justice and be admiringly received.
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, microscopically viewed, did not appear to be
astoundingly original. If these had been less remarkable persons he
would have thought their conversation almost platitudinous. And not one
of these much-talked-about men, whatever else he might have done, could
have written _Men Who Loved Alison_! Kennaston cherished that reflection
as he sedately partook of a dish he recollected to have seen described,
on menu cards, as “Hungarian goulash” and sipped sherry of no very
extraordinary flavor....
He was to remember how plain the fare was, and more than once, was to
refer to this meal—quite casually—beginning “That reminds me of what
Such-an-one said once, when I was lunching with him,” or perhaps, “The
last time I lunched with So-and-so, I remember—” With such gambits he
was able, later on, to introduce to us of Lichfield several anecdotes
which, if rather pointless, were at least garnished with widely-known
names.
There was a Cabinet meeting that afternoon, and luncheon ended, the
personage wasted scant time in dismissing his guests.
“It has been a very great pleasure to meet you, Mr. Kennaston,” quoth
the personage, wringing Kennaston’s hand.
Kennaston suitably gave him to understand that they shared ecstasy in
common.
“Those portions of your book relating to the sigil of Scoteia struck me
as being too explicit,” the personage continued, bluffly, but in lowered
tones. The two stood now, beneath a great stuffed elk’s head, a little
apart from the others. “Do you think it was quite wise? I seem to recall
a phrase—about birds—”
But Kennaston’s thoughts were vaguely dental. And there is no denying
Kennaston was astounded. Nor was he less puzzled when, as if in answer
to Kennaston’s bewildered look, the personage produced from his
waistcoat pocket a small square mirror, which he half-exhibited, but
retained secretively in the palm of his hand. “Yes, the hurt may well be
two-fold—I am presupposing that, as a country-gentleman, you have raised
white pigeons, Mr. Kennaston?” he said, meaningly.
“Why, no, they keep up such a maddening cooing and purring on warm days,
and drum so on tin roofs”—Kennaston stammered—“that I long ago lost
patience with the birds of Venus, whatever the tincture of their
plumage. There used to be any number of them on our place, though—”
“Ah, well,” the personage said, with a wise nod, and a bright gleam of
teeth, “you exercise the privilege common to all of us—and my intended
analogy falls through. In any event, it has been a great pleasure to
meet you. Come and see me again, Mr. Kennaston—and 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 pigeons could
not, he considered, but constitute some password to which Kennaston had
failed to give the proper response.
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 about them. True, the book told what the talisman
looked like; it looked like that bit of metal he had picked up in the
garden.... He wondered if he had thrown away that bit of metal; and,
searching, discovered it in the desk drawer, where it had lain for
several months.
Laid by the lamp, it shone agreeably as Kennaston puckered his
protruding heavy brows over the characters with which it was inscribed.
That was what the sigil looked like—or, rather, what half the sigil
looked like, because Ettarre still had the other half. How could the
personage have known anything about it? unless there were, indeed,
really some secret and some password through which men won to place and
the world’s prizes?... Blurred memories of Eugène Sue’s nefarious
Jesuits and of Balzac’s redoubtable Thirteen arose in the background of
his mental picturings....
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 Felix
Kennaston knew it.... What could a little mirror, much less pigeons,
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
look down upon the thing....
------------------------------------------------------------------------
VIII
Of Vain Regret and Wonder in the Dark
“MADAM,” he was insanely stating, “I would not for the world set up as a
fit exponent for the mottoes of a copybook; but I am not all base.”
“You are,” flashed she, “a notorious rogue.”
It was quite dark. Kennaston could not see the woman with whom he was
talking. But they were in an open paved place, like a courtyard, and he
was facing the great shut door against which she stood, vaguely
discernible. He knew they were waiting for some one to open this door.
It seemed to him, for no reason at all, that they were at Tunbridge
Wells. But there was no light anywhere. Complete darkness submerged
them; the skies showed not one glimmer overhead.
“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 of wellnigh ducal disposition; and by preference, an ill name
is as obnoxious to me as—shall we say?—soiled linen or a coat of last
year’s cut. But then, _que voulez-vous?_ as our lively neighbors
observe. Squeamishness was never yet bred in an empty pocket; and I am
thus compelled to the commission of divers profitable peccadilloes, once
in a blue moon, by the dictates of that same haphazard chance which
to-night has pressed me into the service of innocence and virtue.”
She kept silence; and he went on in lightheaded wonder as to what this
dream, so plainly 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 wistful sorrow. Perhaps if he listened very
attentively to what he was saying, he might find out.
“You do not answer, madam. Yet think a little. I am a notorious rogue:
the circumstance is conceded. But do you think I have selfishly become
so in quest of amusement? Nay, I can assure you that Newgate, the wigged
judge, the jolting cart, the gallows, is no pleasant dream o’ nights.
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 sewer-diggers and cheese-mites that
claim is equally allowed.”
“You are a thief?” she asked, pensively.
“Let us put it, rather, that I have proved in life’s hard school an
indifferent Latinist, by occasionally confounding _meum_ with _tuum_.”
“A murderer?”
“Something of the sort might be my description in puritanic mouths. You
know at least what happened at The Cat and Hautbois.”
(“_But what in the world had happened there?_” Kennaston wondered.)
“And yet—” The sweet voice marveled.
“And yet I have saved you from Lord Umfraville? Ah, madam, Providence
labors with quaint instruments, dilapidating Troy by means of a wood
rocking-horse, and loosing sin into the universe through a half-eaten
apple. Nay, I repeat, I am not all base; and I have read somewhere that
those who are in honor wholly shipwrecked will yet very often cling
desperately to one stray spar of virtue.”
He could tell her hand had raised to the knocker on the closed door.
“Mr. Vanringham, will you answer me a question?”
“A thousand. (_So I am Vanringham._”)
“I have not knocked. I possess, as you know, a considerable fortune in
my own right. It would be easy for a strong man—and, sure, your
shoulders are prodigiously broad, Mr. Cut-throat!—very easy for him to
stifle my cries and carry me away, even now. And then, to preserve my
honor, I would have no choice save to marry that broad-shouldered man.
Is this not truth?”
“It is the goddess herself, newly stolen from her well. _O dea certé!_”
“I am not absolutely hideous, either?” she queried, absent-mindedly.
“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 at her far whiter
feet, laughed and murmured the answer I would give did I not know your
question was put in a spirit of mockery.”
“And yet—” she re-began.