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 considered separating his diurnal existence from that of his thin
beady-eyed capable wife, with graver seriousness than he would have
accorded, say, to a rambling notion of some 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 well-founded, proved, and understood; but, as
it happens, this narrative does not chance to deal with that affection.
And besides, 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, was 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 investments and the weather and
committee-meetings, and of having seen So-and-so and of So-and-so’s
having said this-or-that, and it all seemed of importance to the wearers
of these faces; so that he made pretense to listen, patiently. What did
it matter?
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
continuous solitude.
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 unexercised potentialities.
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
vitality—those queer round boxes whence vegetation sprouted as from the
soil of a planet?
Perhaps—he mused—perhaps 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 one or
another 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 loneliness, was probably a
perdurable law in all other men’s lives, precisely as it had been in his
own life until the coming of Ettarre.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
VI
In Pursuit of a Whisper
NIGHTLY he went adventuring with Ettarre: and they saw the cities and
manners of many men, to an extent undreamed-of by Ithaca’s mundivigant
king; and among them even those three persons who had most potently
influenced human life.
For once, in an elongated room with buff-colored walls—having scarlet
hangings over its windows, and seeming larger than it was in reality,
because of its many mirrors—they foregathered with Napoleon, on the
evening of his coronation: the emperor of half-Europe 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.
In a neglected orchard, sunsteeped and made drowsy by the murmur 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, worrying over Lord Pembroke’s
neglect of him, and trying to concoct a masque in the style of fat Ben
Jonson, since that was evidently what the theater-patronizing public
wanted. And they were with Pontius Pilate in Jerusalem, 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
chuckling with fond pride in the youngster’s intelligent questions.
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 stumbled amiable and shatter-pated 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
awe-inspiring beauty, wherethrough men scurried like feeble-minded ants.
He often wondered whether any other man had been so licensed as himself;
and prowling, as he presently did, in odd byways of printed matter—for
he found the library of his predecessor at Alcluid a mine rich-veined
with strangeness—Kennaston 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
cloudily-discerned 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 Tannhäuser, and Foulques Plantagenet, and Raymondin de la Forêt, and
Olger Danske, and other mortal men to whom old legend-weavers, as if
wistfully, accredited the love of immortal mistresses—and of less
fortunate nympholepts, frail babbling planet-stricken 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 Talmudic tales of Sulieman-ben-Daoud—even in name
transfigured out of any resemblance to an amasser of reliable
axioms—that proud luxurious despot “who went daily to the comeliest of
the spirits for wisdom”; and of Arthur and the Lady Nimuë; and of Thomas
of Ercildoune, whom the Queen of Faëry drew from the merchants’
market-place 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. Coleridge 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
Kennaston’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 fly-leaf 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 will find in _The Tinctured Veil_,
where he has nicely refrained from too-explicit writing, and—of
course—does not anywhere pointblank refer to his personal experiences.
Then Kennaston ran afoul of 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 wondered very often about his uncle....
------------------------------------------------------------------------
VII
Of Truisms: Treated Reasonably
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
anticipation, whatever else they might do—and they had important uses,
of course, in rousing emotion—yet did not deal directly with reality.
What you regretted, or were proud of, having done yesterday was no more
real now than the deeds of Cæsar Borgia or St. Paul; and what you looked
forward to within the half-hour was as non-existent as the senility of
your unborn great-grandchildren. 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 unreservedly to recognize its truth....
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 bank-accounts 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 faculty he possessed. It was for this that Kennaston had
always vaguely longed; and to this, if only in dreams, he now attained.
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
than that to offer mortal men.
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 zest—feeling his part, as
people say—and permitting the passion he portrayed to possess him almost
completely.
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 their battered play-thing.
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 distasteful—resorting debonairly to this
sort of suicide, and thus dismissing an era’s social orderings and its
great people as toys that, played with, had failed to amuse Felix
Kennaston.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_Book Fourth_
══════════════════════
“_But there were dreams to sell
Ill didst thou buy:
Life is a dream, they tell,
Waking to die.
Dreaming a dream to prize,
Is wishing ghosts to rise;
And, if I had the spell
To call the buried—well,
Which one would I?_”
══════════════════════
------------------------------------------------------------------------
I
Economic Considerations of Piety
AS has been said, Kennaston read much curious matter in his dead uncle’s
library....
But most books—even Felix Kennaston’s own little books—did 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 chance-opened page lay unblurred before him, and
he saw it with a clarity denied to other men of his generation.
* * * * *
Kennaston stood by the couch of Tiberius Cæsar as he lay ill at Capreæ.
Beside 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 Cæsar
listened, made grave clucking noises of disapproval.
“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 brought me
a woefully inartistic jumble of old tales; but the populace prefers old
tales, they delight to be told what they have heard already. I shall
certainly build Christus a temple.”
So he ran on, devising the reception of Christ into the Roman pantheon,
as a minor deity 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 money-making standpoint. Then Cæsar yawned, and ordered that a company
of his Spintriæ be summoned to his chamber, to amuse him with their
unnatural diversions.
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 Heliogabalus had been modish in
different years; and would afterward dwindle, precisely as these cults
had done, into shrugged-at old-fashionedness. Then, was it not written
that they only were assuredly blessed who were persecuted for
righteousness’ sake?—Why, martyrdom was the one certain road to Heaven;
and a religion which is patronized by potentates, obviously, breeds no
martyrs.
So Charicles mingled poison in Cæsar’s drink, that Cæsar might die, and
crazed Caligula succeed him, to put all Christians to the sword. And
Charicles young Caius Cæsar Caligula—Child of the Camp, Father of
Armies, Beloved of the Gods—killed first of all.
* * * * *
Then a lean man, white-robed, and clean-shaven as to his head, was
arranging a complicated toy. He labored in a gray-walled room, lit only
by one large circular window opening upon the sea. There was an alcove
in this room, and in the alcove stood a large painted statue.
This prefigured a crowned woman, in bright parti-colored 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 three or four slender metal rods, which were not a
part of the statue, but were loosely attached to it, so that the least
wind caused them to move and jangle. There was nothing whatever in the
gray-walled room save this curious gleaming statue and the lean man and
the mechanical toy on which he labored.
He explained its workings, willingly enough. See now! you kindled a fire
in this little cube-shaped 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 string by which the
bucket was swung over a pulley, and so, moved this lever.
Oh, yes, the notion was an old one; the priest admitted he had copied
the toy from one made by Hero of Alexandria, who died years ago. Still,
it was an ingenious trifle: moreover—and here was the point—enlarge the
scale, change the cube-shaped box into the temple altar, 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 All-Mother, the holy and perpetual preserver of the human
race, would stoop to material thaumaturgy, and would condescend to
animate her sacred portals.
“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 All-Mother is compassionate to human
frailty; and this device will win back many erring feet to the true
way.”
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 steam-engine.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
II
Deals With Pen Scratches
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
Roman literature.
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 considered that
neither the doings of Assyria 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 well-meaning persons, that Omniscience devoted
eternity to puzzling out just these minutiæ, seemed at the mildest to
postulate in Omniscience a queer mania for trivialities. With the
passage 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 man’s
thoughts and dreams could outlive him, in any serious sense, and these
might survive with perhaps augmenting influence: so that Kennaston had
come to think artistic creation in words—since marble and canvas
inevitably perished—was the one, possibly, worth-while employment of
human life. But here was a crude corporal deed which bluntly destroyed
thoughts, and annihilated dreams by wholesale. To Kennaston this seemed
the one real tragedy that could be staged on earth....
Curious, very curious, it was to Kennaston, to see the burning of
sixty-three plays written by Æschylus, of a hundred and six by
Sophocles, and of fifty-five by Euripides—masterworks eternally lost,
which, as Kennaston knew, the world would affect to deplore eternally,
whatever might be the world’s real opinion in the matter.