showed him a squat insignificant burgess in shirtsleeves, with grizzled
untidied hair, and mild accommodating pale eyes, and an inadequate nose,
with huge nostrils, and a spacious naked-looking upper-lip. That was
Felix Kennaston, so far as all other people were concerned save
Kathleen. He smiled; and in the act he noted that the visual result was
to make Felix Kennaston appear particularly inane and sheepish. But he
knew now that did not matter. Nor did it greatly matter—his thoughts
ran—that it was never permitted any man, not even in his dreams, ever to
touch the hands and lips of Ettarre.
So he left there the two pieces of metal, united at last upon his wife’s
dressing-table, between the manicure-set and the pincushion, where on
her return she might find them, and, finding, understand all that which
he lacked words to tell.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
II
Considerations Toward Sunset
THEN Kennaston went for a meditative walk in the abating glare of that
day’s portentous sunset, wherein the tree-trunks westward showed like
the black bars of a grate. It was in just such a twilight that
Horvendile had left Storisende....
And presently he came to a field which had been mowed that week. The
piled hay stood in rounded heaps, suggestive to Kennaston of shaggy
giant heads bursting through the soil, as in the old myth of Cadmus and
the dragon’s teeth; beyond were glittering cornfields, whose tremulous
green was shot with brown and sickly yellow now, and which displayed a
host of tassels like ruined plumes. Autumn was at hand. And as Kennaston
approached, a lark—as though shot vehemently from the ground—rose
singing. Straight into the air it rose, and was lost in the sun’s
abating brilliance; but still you could hear its singing; and then, as
suddenly, the bird dropped earthward.
Kennaston snapped his fingers. “Aha, my old acquaintance!” he said, “but
now I envy you no longer!” Then he walked onward, thinking....
* * * * *
“What did I think of?” he said, long afterward—“oh, of nothing with any
real clarity. You see—I touched mystery everywhere....
“But I thought of Kathleen’s first kiss, and of the first time I came to
her alone after we were married, and of our baby that was born dead....
I was happier than I had ever been in any dream.... I saw that the ties
of our ordinary life here in the flesh have their own mystic strength
and sanctity. I comprehended why in our highest sacrament we pre-figure
with holy awe, not things of the mind and spirit, but flesh and
blood.... A man and his wife, barring stark severance, grow with time to
be one person, you see; and it is not so much the sort of person as the
indivisibility that matters with them....
“And I thought of how in evoking that poor shadow of Ettarre which
figures in my book, I had consciously written of my dear wife as I
remembered her when we were young together. My vocabulary and my ink
went to the making of the book’s Ettarre: but with them went Kathleen’s
youth and purity and tenderness and serenity and loving-kindness toward
all created things save the women I had flirted with—so that she
contributed more than I....
“And I saw that the good-smelling earth about my pudgy pasty body, and
my familiar home—as I turned back my pudgy pasty face toward Alcluid,
bathed now in the sun’s gold—were lovely kindly places. Outside were
kings and wars and thunderous zealots, and groaning, rattling thunderous
printing-presses, too, that were turning off a book called _The
Tinctured Veil_, whereinto had been distilled and bottled up the very
best that was in Felix Kennaston; but here was just ‘a citadel of peace
in the heart of the trouble.’ And—well, I was satisfied. People do not
think much when they are satisfied.”
But he did not walk long; for it was growing chilly, as steadily dusk
deepened, in this twilight so like that in which Horvendile had left
Storisende forever.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
III
One Way of Elusion
KATHLEEN was seated at the dressing-table, arranging her hair, when
Kennaston came again into her rooms. He went forward, and without
speaking, laid one hand upon each shoulder.
Now for an instant their eyes met in the mirror; and the woman’s face he
saw there, or seemed to see there, yearned toward him, and was
unutterably loving, and compassionate, and yet was resolute in its
denial. For it denied him, no matter with what wistful tenderness, or
with what wonder at his folly. Just for a moment he seemed to see that;
and then he doubted, for Kathleen’s lips lifted complaisantly to his,
and Kathleen’s matter-of-fact face was just as he was used to seeing it.
And thus, with no word uttered, Felix Kennaston understood that his wife
must disclaim any knowledge of the sigil of Scoteia, should he be bold
enough to speak of it. He knew he would never dare to speak of it in
that constricted hide-bound kindly life which he and Kathleen shared in
the flesh. To speak of it would mean to become forthwith what people
glibly called insane. So Horvendile and Ettarre were parted for all
time. And Kathleen willed this, no matter with what wistful tenderness,
and because of motives which he would never know—for how could one tell
what was going on inside that small round head his hand was caressing?
Still, he could guess at her reasons; and he comprehended now that
Ettarre had spoken a very terrible truth—“_All men I must evade at the
last, and innumerable are the ways of my elusion._”
“Well, dear,” he said aloud; “and was it a pleasant party?”
“Oh, so-so,” Kathleen conceded; “but it was rather a mixed crowd. Hadn’t
you better hurry and change your clothes, Felix? It is almost
dinner-time, and, you know, we have seats for the theater to-night.”
Quite as if he, too, were thinking of trifles, Felix Kennaston took up
the two bits of metal. “I have often wondered what this design meant,”
he said, idly—not looking at her, and hopeful that this much allusion at
least was permitted to what they dared not speak of openly.
“Perhaps Mr. Harrowby could tell you.” Kathleen also spoke as with
indifference—not looking at him, but into the mirror, and giving deft
final touches to her hair.
“Eh—?” Kennaston smiled. “Oh, yes, Dick Harrowby, I grant you, has
dabbled a bit in occult matters, but hardly deep enough, I fancy, to
explain—this.”
“At all events,” Kathleen considered, “it is a quarter to seven already,
and we have seats for the theater to-night.”
He cleared his throat. “Shall I keep this, or you?”
“Why, for heaven’s sake—! The thing is of no value now, Felix. Give it
to me.” She dropped the two pieces of metal into the wastebasket by the
dressing-table, and rose impatiently. “Of course if you don’t _mean_ to
change for dinner—”
He shrugged and gave it up.
* * * * *
So they dined alone together, sharing a taciturn meal, and duly
witnessed the drolleries of _The Gutta-Percha Girl_. Kennaston’s sleep
afterward was sound and dreamless.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
IV
Past Storisende Fares the Road of Use and Wont
HE read _The Tinctured Veil_ in print, with curious wistful wonder. “How
did I come to write it?” was his thought.
Thereafter Felix Kennaston, as the world knows, wrote no more books,
save to collect his later verses into a volume. “I am afraid to write
against the author of _The Tinctured Veil_,” he was wont flippantly to
declare. And a few of us suspected even then that he spoke the absolute
truth.
* * * * *
Meanwhile, Mr. and Mrs. Kennaston continued their round of decorous
social duties: their dinner-parties were chronicled in the _Lichfield
Courier-Herald_; and Kennaston delivered, by request, two scholarly
addresses before the Lichfield Woman’s Club, was duly brought forward to
shake hands with all celebrities who visited the city, and served
acceptably in the vestry of his church.
Was Felix Kennaston content?—that is a question he alone could have
answered.
“But why shouldn’t I have been?” he said, a little later, in reply to
the pointblank query. “I had a handsome home, two motors, money in four
banks, and a good-looking wife who loved and coddled me. The third
prince gets no more at the end of any fairy tale. Still, the old woman
spoke the truth, of course—one pays as one goes out.... Oh, yes, one
pays!—that is an inevitable rule; but what you have to pay is not
exorbitant, all things considered.... So, be off with your crude
pessimisms, Harrowby!”
* * * * *
And indeed, when one comes to think, he was in no worse case than any
other husband of his standing. “Who wins his love must lose her,” as no
less tunefully than wisely sings one of our poets—a married bard, you
may be sure—and all experience tends to prove his warbling perfectly
veracious. Romancers, from Time’s nonage, have invented and have
manipulated a host of staple severances for their puppet
lovers—sedulously juggling, ever since Menander’s heyday, with
compromising letters and unscrupulous rivals and shipwrecks and wills
and testy parents and what not—and have contrived to show love
overriding these barriers plausibly enough. But he must truly be a
boldfaced rhapsodist who dared at outset marry his puppets, to each
other, and tell you how their love remained unchanged.
I am thus digressing, in obsolete Thackerayan fashion, to twaddle about
love-matches alone. People marry through a variety of other reasons, and
with varying results: but to marry for love is to invite inevitable
tragedy. There needs no side-glancing here at such crass bankruptcies of
affection as end in homicide or divorce proceedings, or even just in
daily squabbling: these dramas are of the body. They may be taken as the
sardonic comedies, or at their most outrageous as the blustering cheap
melodramas, of existence; and so lie beyond the tragic field. For your
true right tragedy is enacted on the stage of a man’s soul, with the
man’s reason as lone auditor.
And being happily married—but how shall I word it? Let us step into the
very darkest corner. Now, my dear Mr. Grundy, your wife is a credit to
her sex, an ornament to her circle, and the mainstay of your home; and
you, sir, are proverbially the most complacent and uxorious of spouses.
But you are not, after all, married to the girl you met at the
chancel-rail, so long and long ago, with unforgotten tremblings of the
knees. Your wife, that estimable matron, is quite another person. And
you live in the same house, and you very often see her with hair
uncombed, or even with a disheveled temper; you are familiar with her
hours of bathing, her visits to the dentist, and a host of other
physical phenomena we need not go into; she does not appreciate your
jokes; she peeps into your personal correspondence; she keeps the top
bureau-drawer in a jumble of veils and gloves and powder-rags and
hair-pins and heaven knows what; her gowns continually require to be
buttoned up the back in an insane incalculable fashion; she irrationally
orders herring for breakfast, though you never touch it:—and in fine,
your catalogue of disillusionments is endless.
Hand upon heart, my dear Mr. Grundy, is this the person to whom you
despatched those letters you wrote before you were married? Your wife
has those epistles safely put away somewhere, you may depend on it: and
for what earthly consideration would you read them aloud to her? Some
day, when one or the other of you is dead, those letters will ring true
again and rouse a noble sorrow; and the survivor will be all the better
for reading them. But now they only prove you were once free of uplands
which you do not visit nowadays: and that common knowledge is a secret
every wife must share half-guiltily with her husband—even in your
happiest matrimonial ventures—as certainly as it is the one topic they
may not ever discuss with profit.
For you are married, you and she: and you live, contentedly enough, in a
four-square world, where there is the rent and your social obligations
and the children’s underclothing to be considered, long and long before
indulgence in rattle-pate mountain-climbing. And people glibly think of
you as Mr. and Mrs. Grundy now, almost as a unit: but do you really know
very much about that woman whose gentle breathing—for we will not
crudely call it snoring—you can always hear at will o’ nights? Suppose,
by a wild flight of fancy, that she is no more honest with you than you
are with her?
* * * * *
So to Kennaston his wife remained a not unfriendly mystery. They had
been as demi-gods for a little while; and the dream had faded, to leave
it matters not what memories; and they were only Mr. and Mrs. Felix
Kennaston. Concerning all of us, my fellow failures in the great and
hopeless adventure of matrimony, this apologue is narrated.
Yet, as I look into my own wife’s face—no more the loveliest, but still
the dearest of all earthly faces, I protest—and as I wonder how much she
really knows about me or the universe at large, and have not the least
notion—why, I elect to believe that, in the ultimate, Kennaston was not
dissatisfied. For all of us the dream-haze merges into the glare of
common day; the _dea certé_, whom that fled roseate light transfigured,
stands confessed a simple loving woman, a creature of like flesh and
limitations as our own: but who are we to mate with goddesses? It is
enough that much in us which is not merely human has for once found
exercise—has had its high-pitched outing, however fleet—and that,
because of many abiding memories, we know, assuredly, the way of flesh
is not a futile scurrying through dining-rooms and offices and shops and
parlors, and thronged streets and restaurants, “and so to bed.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
V
Which Mr. Flaherty Does Not Quite Explain
WITH the preceding preachment I wish I might end the story. For what
follows—which is my own little part in the story of Felix Kennaston—is
that discomfortable sort of anticlimax wherein the key to a mystery, by
unlocking unsuspected doors, discloses only another equally perplexing
riddle.
Kathleen Kennaston died in her sleep some eleven months after her
husband discovered the missing half of the sigil....
“I have a sort of headache,” she said, toward nine o’clock in the
evening. “I believe I will go to bed, Felix.” So she kissed him
goodnight, in just that emotionless preoccupied fashion that years of
living together had made familiar; and so she left him in the
music-room, to smoke and read magazines. He never saw her living any
more.
Kathleen stopped in the hall, to wind the clock. “Don’t forget to lock
the front door when you come up, Felix.” She was out of sight, but he
could hear her, as well as the turning of the clock key. “I forgot to
tell you I saw Adèle Van Orden to-day, at Greenberg’s. They are going
down to the Beach Thursday. She told me they haven’t had a cook for
three days now, and she and old Mrs. Haggage have had to do all the
work. She looked it, too—I never saw any one let themselves go all to
pieces the way she has—”
“How—? Oh, yes,” he mumbled, intent upon his reading; “it is pretty bad.
Don’t many of them keep their looks as you do, dear—”
And that was all. He never heard his wife’s voice any more. Kennaston
read contentedly for a couple of hours, and went to bed. It was in the
morning the maid found Mrs. Kennaston dead and cold. She had died in her
sleep, quite peacefully, after taking two headache powders, while her
husband was contentedly pursuing the thread of a magazine story through
the advertising columns....
Kennaston had never spoken to her concerning the sigil. Indeed, I do not
well see how he could have dared to do so, in view of her attitude in a
world so opulent in insane asylums. But among her effects, hidden away
as before in the press in her bathroom, Kennaston found both the pieces
of metal. They were joined together now, forming a perfect circle, but
with the line of their former separation yet visible.
He showed me the sigil of Scoteia, having told this tale....
* * * * *
I had thought from the first there would prove to be supernal
double-dealing back of all this. The Wardens of Earth sometimes unbar
strange windows, I suspect—windows which face on other worlds than ours;
and They permit this-or-that man to peer out fleetingly, perhaps, just
for the joke’s sake; since always They humorously contrive matters so
this man shall never be able to convince his fellows of what he has
seen, or of the fact that he was granted any peep at all. The Wardens
without fail arrange what we call—gravely, too—“some natural
explanation.”
Kennaston showed me the sigil of Scoteia, having told this tale....
“You are interested in such things, you see—just as Kathleen said. And I
have sometimes wondered if when she said, ‘Perhaps Mr. Harrowby could
tell you,’ the words did not mean more than they seemed then to mean—?”
I was interested now, very certainly. But I knew that Kathleen Kennaston
had referred not at all to my interest in certain of the less known
sides of existence, which people loosely describe as “occult.”
And slowly, I comprehended that for the thousandth time the Wardens of
Earth were uncompromised; that here too They stayed unconvicted of
negligence in Their duty: for here was at hand the “natural
explanation.” Kennaston’s was one of those curious, but not uncommon,
cases of self-hypnosis, such as Fehlig and Alexis Bidoche have
investigated and described. Kennaston’s first dream of Ettarre had been
an ordinary normal dream, in no way particularly remarkable; and
afterward, his will to dream again of Ettarre, co-operating with his
queer reading, his temperament, his idle life, his belief in the sigil,
and co-operating too—as yet men may not say just how—with the hypnotic
effects of any trivial bright object when gazed at steadily, had been
sufficient to induce more dreams. I could understand how it had all
befallen in consonance with hackneyed laws, insane as was the outcome.
And the prelate and the personage had referred, of course, to the
then-notorious nineteenth and twentieth chapters of _Men Who Loved
Alison_, in which is described the worship of the sigil of Scoteia—and
which chapters they, in common with a great many other people,
considered unnecessarily to defile a noble book. The coincidence of the
mirrors was quaint, but in itself came to less than nothing; for as
touches the two questions as to white pigeons, the proverb alluded to by
the personage, concerning the bird that fouls its own nest, is fairly
familiar, and the prelate’s speech was the most natural of prosaic
inquiries. What these two men had said and done, in fine, amounted to
absolutely nothing until transfigured in the crucible of an ardent
imagination, by the curious literary notion that human life as people
spend it is purposeful and clearly motived.
For what Kennaston showed me was the metal top of a cold cream jar. I am
sure of this, for Harrowby’s Crême Cleopatre is one of the most popular
articles our firm manufactures. I hesitate to tell you how many thousand
husbands may find at will among their wives’ possessions just such a
talisman as Kennaston had discovered. I myself selected the design for
these covers when the stuff was first put in the market. They are sealed
on, you may remember, with gray wax, to carry out the general idea that
we are vending old Egyptian secrets of beauty. And the design upon these
covers, as I have since been at pains to make sure, is in no known
alphabet. P. N. Flaherty (the artist implicated) tells me he “just made
it up out of his head”—blending meaningless curlicues and dots and
circles with an irresponsible hand, and sketching a crack across all,
“just to make it look ancient like.” It was along this semblance of a
fracture—for there the brittle metal is thinnest—that the cover first
picked up by Kennaston had been broken. The cover he showed me was, of
course, complete.... So much for Mr. Flaherty’s part in the matter; and
of hieroglyphic lore, or any acquaintance with heathenry beyond his
gleanings from the moving pictures, I would be the last person to
suspect him.
It was natural that Mrs. Kennaston should have used Harrowby’s Crême
Cleopatre habitually; for indeed, as my wife had often pointed out, Mrs.
Kennaston used a considerable amount of toilet preparations. And that
Mrs. Allardyce should have had a jar of Harrowby’s Crême Cleopatre in
her handbag was almost inevitable: there is no better restorative and
cleanser for the complexion, after the dust and dirt of a train-journey,
as is unanimously acknowledged by Harrowby & Sons’ advertisements.
But there is the faith that moves mountains, as we glibly acknowledge
with unconcernment as to the statement’s tremendous truth; and Felix
Kennaston had believed in his talisman implicitly from the very first.
Thus, through his faith, and through we know not what soul-hunger, so
many long hours, and—here is the sardonic point—so many contented and
artistically-fruitful hours of Kennaston’s life in the flesh had been
devoted to contemplation of a mirage. It was no cause for astonishment
that he had more than once surprised compassion and wonder in his wife’s
eyes: indeed, she could hardly have failed to suspect his mind was
affected; but, loving him, she had tried to shield him, as is the way of
women.... I found the whole matter droll and rather heartbreaking. But
the Wardens of Earth were uncompromised, so far as I could prove.
Whatever windows had or had not been unbarred, there remained no
proof....
* * * * *
So I shook my head. “Why, no,” said I, with at worst a verbal adhesion
to veracity. “I, for one, do not know what the design means. Still, you
have never had this deciphered,” I added, gently. “Suppose—suppose there
had been some mistake, Mr. Kennaston—that there was nothing miraculous
about the sigil, after all—?”
I cannot tell you of his expression; but it caused me for the moment to
feel disconcertingly little and obtuse.
“Now, how can you say that, I wonder!” he marveled—and then, of course,
he fidgeted, and crossed his legs the other way—“when I have been
telling you, from alpha to omega, what is the one great thing the sigil
taught me—that everything in life is miraculous. For the sigil taught me
that it rests within the power of each of us to awaken at will from a
dragging nightmare of life made up of unimportant tasks and tedious
useless little habits, to see life as it really is, and to rejoice in
its exquisite wonderfulness. If the sigil were proved to be the top of a
tomato-can, it would not alter that big fact, nor my fixed faith. No,
Harrowby, the common names we call things by do not matter—except to
show how very dull we are,” he ended, with that irritating little noise
that was nearly a snigger, and just missed being a cough.
And I was sorely tempted.... You see, I never liked Felix Kennaston. The
man could create beauty, to outlive him; but in his own appearance he
combined grossness with insignificance, and he added thereto a variety
of ugly senseless little mannerisms. He could evolve interesting ideas,
as to Omnipotence, the universe, art, life, religion, himself, his wife,
a candlestick or a comet—anything—and very probably as to me; but his
preferences and his limitations would conform and color all these ideas
until they were precisely what he desired to believe, no more or less;
and, having them, he lacked means, or courage, to voice his ideas
adequately, so that to talk with him meant a dull interchange of
commonplaces. Again, he could aspire toward chivalric love, that passion
which sees in womankind High God made manifest in the loveliest and most
perfect of His creations; but in the quest he had succeeded merely in
utilizing womenfolk either as toys to play with and put by or as drudges
to wait on him; yet, with all this, he could retain unshaken his faith
in and his worship of that ideal woman. He could face no decision
without dodging; no temptation without compromise; and he lied, as if by
instinct, at the threatened approach of discomfort or of his fellows’
disapproval: yet devils, men and seraphim would conspire in vain in any
effort to dissuade him from his self-elected purpose. For, though he
would do no useful labor he could possibly avoid, he could grudge
nothing to the perfection of his chosen art, in striving to perpetuate
the best as he saw it.