eyes less desirable, madam, you would not have reached home thus
uneventfully; 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 to-night, and strive to forget
that I, too, might have lived cleanlily.”
And Kennaston, as he spoke thus, engulfed in darkness, knew it was a
noble sorrow which possessed him—a stingless wistful sorrow such as is
aroused by the unfolding of a well-acted 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 and loveliness, and
knowing loveliness and purity to be forever unattainable in his mean
life, was Felix Kennaston, somehow.... What was it Maugis 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 flesh may travesty the man himself.
But the door opened. Confusedly Kennaston was aware of
brilliantly-lighted rooms beyond, of the chatter of gay people, of thin
tinkling music, and, more immediately, of two lackeys, much be-powdered
as to their heads, and stately in new liveries of blue-and-silver.
Confusedly he noted these things, for the woman had paused in the bright
doorway, and all the loveliness of Ettarre was visible now to him, and
she had given a delighted cry of recognition.
“La, it is Horvendile! and we are having the same dream again!”
This much he heard and saw as her hand went out gladly toward him. Then
as she touched him the universe seemed to fold about Felix Kennaston,
just as a hand closes, and he was sitting at the writing-table in the
library, with a gleaming scrap of metal before him.
* * * * *
He sat thus for a long while.
“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 Chalybeate—and 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 plan—the one assuredly
safe plan for you—would be to throw away this devil’s toy, and forget it
completely.... And, I will, too—the very first thing to-morrow
morning—or 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.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_Book Third_
══════════════════════
“Come to me in my dreams, and then
By day I shall be well again!
For then the night will more than pay
The hopeless longing of long day.
“Come, as thou cam’st a thousand times,
A messenger from lovelier climes,
To smile on our drear world, and be
As kind to others as to me!”
══════════════════════
------------------------------------------------------------------------
I
They Come to a High Place
HE was looking down at the most repulsive old woman he had ever seen.
Hers was the abhorrent fatness of a spider; her flesh appeared to have
the coloring and consistency of dough. She sat upon the stone pavement,
knitting; 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 her chin, twitched and glittered in the sunlight.
“But one does not pay on entering,” she was saying. “One pays as one
goes out. It is the rule.”
“And what do you knit, mother?” Kennaston asked her.
“Eh, I shall never know until God’s funeral is preached,” the old woman
said. “I only know it is forbidden me to stop.”
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 by a stone balustrade, upon
which squatted tall stone monsters—weird and haphazard collocations, as
touched anatomy, of bird and brute and fiend—and she in common with
these hobgoblins 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 tree-tops, 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 stood alone together among the turrets of Storisende.
“But now I wonder where on the face of—or, rather, so far above the face
of what especial planet we may happen to be?” Kennaston 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 to-day. Why worry
over one particular inexplicable detail, where everything is
incomprehensible?”
“I was never here before, Horvendile; and I have waited for you so
long.”
He looked 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 color—so young, so quick of movement, so
slender, so shapely, so inexpressibly virginal—but 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 exultance which possessed him was a
by-product of an unstable dream.
“Yet it is not any city of to-day,” he was saying. “Look, how yonder
little rascal glitters—he 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 there is not
an office-building or an electric-light advertisement of chewing-gum in
sight. No, that hotchpotch of huddled gables and parapets and towers
shaped like lanterns was stolen straight out of some Doré illustration
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.”
The girl was frankly puzzled. “Yes, that seems a part of the sigil’s
magic....”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
II
Of the Sigil and One Use of It
IT proved that this was indeed a part of the sigil’s wonder-working:
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
find himself alone and staring at the gleaming fragment of metal.
Before long he also learned something concerning the sigil of Scoteia,
of which this 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 the treasures of the Didascalion, a
peculiar sort of girls’ school in King Ptolemy Physcon’s city 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
from that which Kennaston had given it in his romance.
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 lamplight—for this was always necessary—it might induce the
desired dream of Ettarre.
Later Kennaston thought of an expedient by which to prolong his dreams.
Nightly he lighted and set by his bedside a stump of candle. Its 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 electric-light turned on until he awakened, would in the end have
exposed him to detection and the not-impossible 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 well-to-do, if only because, as an incidental result of materially
bettered fortunes, he and his wife had separate bedrooms.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
III
Treats of a Prelate and, in Part, of Pigeons
THE diurnal part of Kennaston’s life was largely devoted to writing _The
Tinctured Veil_—that amazing performance which he subsequently gave to a
bewildered world. And for the rest, his waking life went on in the old
round.
But this is not—save by way of an occasional parenthesis—a chronicle of
Felix Kennaston’s doings 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 it should cause you, as it so often
induced us of Lichfield, to find the man repellent, and nothing more.
Now it befell that this spring died Bishop Arkwright—of the Cathedral of
the Bleeding Heart—and 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 Bishop’s House.
The prelate sat alone in a sparsely furnished, rather dark, and
noticeably dusty room. He was like a lean effigy carved in time-yellowed
ivory, and his voice was curiously ingratiating. Kennaston recognized
with joy that this old man talked like a person in a book, in completed
sentences and picked phrases, instead of employing the fragmentary
verbal shorthand of ordinary Lichfieldian 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 personal interest in the only
surviving relative of his dead friend.
“There is a portrait of you, sir, in my library—very gorgeous, in full
canonicals—just as my uncle left the room,” said Kennaston, all at sea.
But the prelate had begun to talk—amiably, and in the most commonplace
fashion conceivable—of 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.
So their talking veered, as it seemed, at random....
“Yes, I was often a guest at Alcluid—a very beautiful home it was in
those days, famed, as I remember, for the many breeds of pigeons which
your uncle amused himself by maintaining. I suppose that you also raise
white pigeons, my son?”
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 never
gone in very seriously for farming.”
“The pigeon 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 earlier 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 Scoteia—or so at least it seemed to me—you touched upon
subjects which had better be left undisturbed. There are drugs, my son,
which work much good in the hands of the skilled physician, but cannot
be intrusted without danger to the vulgar.”
He spoke gently; yet it appeared to Kennaston a threat was voiced.
“Sir,” Kennaston began, “I must tell you that in writing of the sigil—as
I called it—I designed to employ only such general terms as romance
ordinarily accords to talismans. All I wrote—I thought—was sheer
invention. It is true I found by accident a bit of metal, from which I
derived the idea of my so-called sigil’s appearance. That bit of metal
was to me then just a bit of metal; nor have I any notion, even to-day,
as to how it came to be lying in one of my own garden-paths.”
He paused. The prelate nodded. “It is always interesting to hear whence
makers of creative literature draw their material,” he stated.
“Since then, sir, by the drollest of coincidences, 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 apparently irrelevant allusion to white
pigeons which the personage too made, and the little 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 co-operancy, by which you strengthen or,
possibly, have attained your power. Confess, sir, is not the coincidence
a droll one?”
He spoke lightly, but his heart was beating fast.
“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 behind a megaphone. I
confess—_mea culpa!_—I often find my little looking-glass 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?”
“I can assure you—” Kennaston began.
“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?”
Very still it was in the dark room....
Kennaston was horribly frightened. “I can assure you, sir, that even
then I would prefer my peaceful lazy life and my dreams. I have not any
aptitude for action.”
“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 bit of metal.
I suspect, quite candidly, you are keeping something back, my son. But
you exercise a privilege common to all of us.”
“At least,” said Kennaston, “we will hope my poor wits may not be shaken
by any more—coincidences.”
“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.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
IV
Local Laws of Nephelococcygia
THERE was no continuity in these dreams save that Ettarre 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
feet—having grown so tall that they were yards away from him and he was
afraid to stand up—or lean strangers carefully and gruesomely explained
the importance of the task, set him by quoting fragments of the
multiplication tables, or a mad 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 dream-world would become rational and compliant with familiar
natural laws, and Ettarre would be there—desirable 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
Cæsars, or other dynasties long since unkingdomed, human lives whose
obligations and imbroglios affected Horvendile and Ettarre to much that
half-serious concern with which one follows the action of a romance or a
well-acted play; for it was perfectly understood between Horvendile and
Ettarre that they were involved in the affairs of a dream.
Ettarre seemed to remember nothing of the happenings Kennaston had
invented in his book. And Guiron and Maugis d’Aigremont and Count
Emmerick and the other people in _The Audit at Storisende_—once more to
give _Men Who Loved Alison_ its original title—were names that rang
familiar to her somehow, she confessed, but without her knowing why. And
so, Kennaston came at last to comprehend that perhaps the Ettarre 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 glimpses—dimly
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 dreams.
There was, be it repeated, no continuity in these dreams 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 time—that is, a dream extended over precisely the
amount of time he actually slept, so that each dream-life was limited to
some eight hours or thereabouts. 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 street-corner,
which had figured in some former dream; but as terrestrial time went,
the events of his first dream would either have happened years ago or
else not be due to happen until a great while later.
He never dreamed of absolutely barbaric or 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 facts was curious, but too
fine-spun to be here repeated profitably.
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 capacities and places; but more than once he came
within a few years of doing this, so that even had he died immediately
after the earlier-timed 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 pleasant proximity to twenty-five.
Thus, he was in Jerusalem on the day of the Crucifixion and was aged
about twenty-three; yet in another dream he was at Capreæ when Tiberius
died there, seven years afterward, and Kennaston was then still in the
early twenties: and, again, he was in London, at Whitehall, in 1649, and
at Vaux-le-Vicomte near Fontainebleau in 1661, being on each occasion
twenty-three 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
persons—inwardly 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 deaths—he 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 which—as he had said at
Storisende—he 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
his prodigal recompenses....
It was some while before the man made the quaint discovery that in these
dreams he did not in any way resemble Felix 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 to 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 stranger.
Thus it was he discovered that in these dreams he was a tall lean
youngster, with ruddy cheeks, wide-set brown eyes, and a smallish head
covered with crisp tight-curling dark-red hair; nor did his appearance
ever alter, to his knowledge, in any subsequent dream. What he saw was
so different from the pudgy pasty man of forty-odd who, he knew, lay at
this moment in Felix Kennaston’s bed, breathing heavily and clasping a
bit of metal in his pudgy hand, that the stranger in the mirror laughed
appreciatively.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
V
Of Divers Fleshly Riddles
A LITTLE by a little he was beginning to lose interest in that pudgy
pasty man of forty-odd who was called Felix Kennaston, and to handle his
affairs more slackly. Once or twice Kennaston caught his wife regarding
him furtively, with a sort of anxious distrust....