would fare better than Agathon and Ion and Achæus, their admitted equals
in splendor, whose whole life-work was passing, at the feet of
Horvendile, into complete oblivion. There, too, were perishing all the
writings of the Pleiad—the noble tragedies of Homerus, and Sositheus,
and Lycophron, and Alexander, and Philiscus, and Sosiphanes, and
Dionysides. All the great comic poets, too, were burned pellmell with
these—Telecleides, 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
Phrynichus—and 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
poet’s ageless goal—to write perfectly of beautiful happenings: and of
this action’s normal by-product, which is immortality in the mouths and
minds of succeeding generations, all these were being robbed, by the
circumstance that parchment is inflammable.
Here was beauty, and wit, and learning, and genius, being wasted—quite
wantonly—never 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 book-rolls 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 composition; 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
mummy-case; and at Prior Park Kennaston watched Mrs. Elizabeth Barnes,
then acting as cook for Dr. William Warburton, destroy in making
piecrust the unique manuscript copies of three of Shakespeare’s dramas,
which had never been printed.
And—conceding Heaven to be an actual place, and attainment of its
felicities to be the object of human life—Kennaston could not, after
all, detect any fault in Amrou’s logic. Æsthetic considerations could,
in that event, but lead to profitless time-wasting where every moment
was precious.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
III
By-Products of Rational Endeavor
THEN again Kennaston stood in a stone-walled apartment, like a cell,
wherein there was a furnace and much wreckage. A contemplative friar was
regarding the disorder about him with disapproval, the while he sucked
at two hurt fingers.
“There can be no doubt that Old Legion conspires to hinder the great
work,” he considered.
“And what is the great work, father?” Kennaston asked him.
“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 plague-breeding meteors 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 it should be.”
“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 to-day 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 transgression 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 this period of time, then, may each man righteously demand
that 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 one hundred years,
since at less antiquity did none of the antediluvian fathers beget
issue, as did Adam in the same year breath was given him; and the years
of Adam’s life were nine hundred and thirty; whereby it is a reasonable
conceit of learned persons to compute him to have exceeded 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 Adam in celerity to put by his flesh.”
Then Kennaston found the alchemist had been compounding nitrum of
Memphis with sulphur, 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 court-pageants and miracle-plays,” 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 secret, and so get money to go on with the great work.”
Seeking to find the means of making life perpetual, he had accidentally
discovered gunpowder.
* * * * *
Then at Valladolid an age-stricken seaman, wracked with gout, tossed in
a mean bed and grumbled to bare walls. He, “the Admiral,” was neglected
by King Philip, the broth was unfit for a dog’s supper, his son Diego
was a laggard fool. Thus the old fellow mumbled.
Ingratitude everywhere! and had not he, “the Admiral”—“the Admiral of
Mosquito Land,” as damnable street-songs miscalled him, he whimpered, in
a petulant gust of self-pity—had 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 malignant 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 gloriam_—all should
redound to the credit of King Philip, both temporal and celestial. And
what wealth, too, a capable emissary would bring back to his
Majesty—what cargoes of raw silks, of gold and precious gems, ravished
from Kanbalu and Taidu, those famed marvelous cities!... But there was
only ingratitude and folly everywhere, and the broth was cold....
Thus the broken adventurer, Cristoforo Colombo, mumbled. He had doubled
the world’s size and resources, in his attempts to find some defenseless
nation which could be plundered with impunity; and he was dying in
ignorance of what his endeavors had achieved.
* * * * *
And Kennaston was at Blickling Hall when King Henry read the Pope’s
letter which threatened excommunication. “Nan, Nan,” the King said,
“this is a sorry business.”
“Sire,” says Mistress Boleyn, saucily, “and am I not worth a little
abuse?”
“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 candle-snuffing and a
little bell-ringing, you may take for your own all the fat abbey-lands
in these islands, and sell them for a great deal of money,” she pointed
out.
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 parcel-gilt plate to the value of
£1,188, was likewise awarded her: and the King, by thus piously defying
Romish error, earned the abbey-lands, as well as the key of a certain
bed-chamber, and the eternal approbation of zealous Protestants, for
thus inaugurating religious liberty.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
IV
“Epper Si Muove”
THESE ironies Kennaston witnessed among many others, as he read in this
or that chance-opened page from the past. Everywhere, it seemed to him,
men had 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 anywhere.”
Here was the astounding fact: the race did go forward; the race did
achieve; and in every way the race grew better. Progress through
irrational and astounding blunders, whose outrageousness bedwarfed the
wildest _clichés_ of romance, 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, too, 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 or interest....
And always the puppets moved toward greater efficiency and comeliness.
The puppet-shifter appeared to seek at once utility and artistic
self-expression. So the protoplasm—that first imperceptible pinhead of
living matter—had 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 shatter-pated man stood erect in the
world. And man, in turn, had climbed a long way from gorillaship,
however far he was as yet from godhead—blindly moving always, like fish
and reptile, toward unapprehended loftier goals.
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 presently the planet would be a silent naked
frozen clod. Would this sphere then have served its real purpose of
being, by having afforded foothold to life for a few æons?
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 dispossessed—and full, too, of glowing suns, with their
huge satellites, all slowly cooling and congealing into fitness for
life’s occupancy. 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 consideration of life’s
needs. Like a bird striving to nest in a limitless engine, insanely
building among moving wheels and cogs and pistons and pulley-bands,
whose moving toward their proper and intended purposes inevitably swept
away each nest before completion—so it might be that life passed from
moving world to world, found transitory foothold, began to build, and
was driven out.
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 by-product? and of which the existence of Felix
Kennaston was a manifestation past conceiving in its unimportance?
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 systems?
“To answer that question must be my modest attempt,” he decided. “In
fine—why 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 fewer—but, after all, it voices the sole question in which I
personally am interested....”
* * * * *
“Why is a Kennaston?” he asked himself—thus whimsically voicing the
inquiry as to whether human beings were intended for any especial
purpose. Most of us find it more comfortable, upon the whole, to stave
off such queries—with 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 on—at all events, infesting—a 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 grass-blades, 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 grass-blades 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 some intelligible purpose?
Religion, of course, assured him that the answer to his query was
written explicitly, in various books, 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 so-and-so, 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 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 two-edged 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 source
of life and Christmas presents on one side and his own fallibility on
the other, was wide enough to make the comparison suspicious. When
fathers were at their worst they punished; and when in their kindliest
and most expansive moods, why, then it was—precisely—that they told
their children fairy-stories. It seemed to Kennaston, for a while, that
all religions ended in this blind-alley.
To exercise for an allotted period divinely-recommended qualities known
as virtues, and to be rewarded therefor, by an immortal score-keeper,
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
privileged to see for himself.
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
twentieth-century church-goer. Meanwhile they had their
business-affairs, their sober chats on weather probabilities, their
staid diversions (which everywhere bored them frightfully), their family
jokes, their best and second-best clothes, their flirtations, their
petty snobbishnesses, and their perfectly irrational faith in
Omnipotence and in the general kindliness of Omnipotence—all 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
well-balanced people would not permit such jaunts to interfere with
their business-matters or home-ties; but there was no doubt men did not
like to live without religion and religion’s promise of a less trivial
and more ordered and symmetrical existence—to-morrow.
Meanwhile, men were to worry, somehow, through to-day—doing 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 to-morrow—as their priests and bonzes,
their flamens and imauns, their medicine men and popes and rectors, were
unanimous—would be quite different.
To-day 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
now—and it was this, precisely, that you were to disregard. Such was the
burden of all dead and lingering faiths alike. Here was, perhaps, only
another instance of man-kind’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 soul-satisfying, was dimly felt to be irreligious. For art
performed what religion only promised.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
V
Evolution of a Vestryman
BUT, much as man’s religion looked to a more ordered and symmetrical
existence to-morrow, just so, upon another scale, man’s daily life
seemed a continuous looking-forward to a terrestrial to-morrow.
Kennaston could find in the past—even he, who was privileged to view the
past in its actuality, rather than through the distorting media of books
and national pride—no 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 to-day was only a dull overture to
to-morrow seemed in mankind an instinctive belief. All life everywhere,
as all people spent it, was in preparation for something that was to
happen to-morrow. This was as true of Antioch as Lichfield, as much the
case with Charlemagne and Sardanapalus, with Agamemnon and
Tiglath-Pileser, as with Felix Kennaston.
Kennaston considered his own life.... In childhood you had looked
forward to being a man—a 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 course, you looked
forward to school’s beginning again, because next term was to be quite
different from the last, and moreover 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 Monte-Cristo; 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 unready posterity
stood to bracket him with Casanova or Don Juan, and however many
tourists still went with reverence to Stratford. For the rest, he had
sufficient money; and quite certainly he had met more celebrities than
any other person living. Felix Kennaston reflected that, through
accident’s signal favor, he had done all he had at any time very
earnestly wanted to do; and that the result was always disappointing,
and not as it was depicted in story-books.... He wondered why he should
again be harking back to literary standards.
Then it occurred to him that, in reality, he had always been shuffling
through to-day—somehow and anyhow—in the belief that to-morrow the life
of Felix Kennaston would be converted into a romance like those in
story-books.
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 different; 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
speaking then of having seen So-and-so, and of So-and-so’s having said
this-or-that. 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 beginning 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 nine-day 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 to-morrow.... Then he had by accident found out the
sigil’s power....