The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck: A Comedy of Limitations, James Branch Cabell [that summer book .TXT] 📗

Patricia meditated.

She said, with utter solemnity, "Anathema maranatha! oh, hell to damn! may the noses of all respectable people be turned upside down and jackasses dance eternally upon their grandmothers' graves!"

"Patricia—!" cried a shocked colonel.

"I mean every syllable of it. No, Rudolph; I can't help it if the vinaigretted beauties of your boyhood were unabridged dictionaries of prudery. You see, I know almost all the swearwords there are. And I read the newspapers, and medical books, and even the things that boys chalk up on fences. In consequence I am not a bit whiteminded, because if you use your mind at all it gets more or less dingy, just like using anything else."

He could not help but laugh, much as he disapproved. Patricia fluttered and, as a wren might have done, perched presently upon his knee.

"Rudolph, can't you laugh more often, and not devote so much time to tracing out the genealogies of those silly people, and being so tediously beautiful and good?" she asked, and with a hint of seriousness. "Rudolph, you don't know how I would adore you if you would rob a church or cut somebody's throat in an alley, and tell me all about it because you knew I wouldn't betray you. You are so infernally respectable in everything you do! How did you come to bully me that day at the Library? It seems almost as if those two were different people… doesn't it, Rudolph?"

"My dear," the colonel said whimsically, "I am afraid we are rather like the shepherdess and the chimney-sweep of the fable I read you very long ago. We climbed up so far that we could see the stars, once, very long ago, Patricia, and we have come back to live upon the parlor table. I suppose it happens to all the little china people."

She took his meaning. Each was aware of an odd sense of intimacy. "Everything we have to be glad for now, Rudolph, is the rivet in grandfather's neck. It is rather a fiasco, isn't it?"

"Eh, there are all sorts of rivets, Patricia. And the thing one cannot do because one is what one is, need not be necessarily a cause for grief."

It was excellent to see Jack Charteris again, as Colonel Musgrave did within a few days of this. Musgrave was unreasonably fond of the novelist and frankly confessed it would be as preposterous to connect Charteris with any of the accepted standards of morality as it would be to judge an artesian-well from the standpoint of ethics.

Anne was not yet in Lichfield. She had broken the journey to visit a maternal grand-aunt and some Virginia cousins, in Richmond, Charteris explained, and was to come thence to Matocton.

"And so you have acquired a boy and, by my soul, a very handsome wife,
Rudolph?"

"It is sufficiently notorious," said Colonel Musgrave. "Yes, we are quite absurdly happy." He laughed and added: "Patricia—but you don't know her droll way of putting things—says that the only rational complaint I can advance against her is her habit of rushing into a hospital every month or so and having a section or two of her person removed by surgeons. It worries me,—only, of course, it is not the sort of thing you can talk about. And, as Patricia says, it is an unpleasant thing to realize that your wife is not leaving you through the ordinary channels of death or of type-written decrees of the court, but only in vulgar fractions, as it were—"

"Please don't be quite so brutal, Rudolph. It is not becoming in a Musgrave of Matocton to speak of women in any tone other than the most honeyed accents of chivalry."

"Oh, I was only quoting Patricia," the colonel largely said, "and—er—Jack," he continued. "By the way, Jack, Clarice Pendomer will be at Matocton—"

"I rejoice in her good luck," said Charteris, equably.

"—and—well! I was wondering—?"

"I can assure you that there will be no—trouble. That skeleton is safely locked in its closet, and the key to that closet is missing—more thanks to you. You acted very nobly in the whole affair, Rudolph. I wish I could do things like that. As it is, of course, I shall always detest you for having been able to do it."

Charteris said, thereafter: "I shall always envy you, though, Rudolph. No other man I know has ever attained the good old troubadourish ideal of domnei—that love which rather abhors than otherwise the notion of possessing its object. I still believe it was a distinct relief to a certain military officer, whose name we need not mention, when Anne decided not to marry you."

The colonel grinned, a trifle consciously. "Well, Anne meant youth, you comprehend, and all the things we then believed in, Jack. It would have been decidedly difficult to live up to such a contract, and—as it were—to fulfil every one of the implied specifications!"

"And yet"—here Charteris flicked his cigarette—"Anne ruled in the stead of Aline Van Orden. And Aline, in turn, had followed Clarice Pendomer. And before the coming of Clarice had Pauline Romeyne, whom time has converted into Polly Ashmeade, reigned in the land—"

"Don't be an ass!" the colonel pleaded; and then observed, inconsequently: "I can't somehow quite realize Aline is dead. Lord, Lord, the letters that I wrote to her! She sent them all back, you know, in genuine romantic fashion, after we had quarreled. I found those boyish ravings only the other day in my father's desk at Matocton, and skimmed them over. I shall read them through some day and appropriately meditate over life's mysteries that are too sad for tears."

He meditated now.

"It wouldn't be quite equitable, Jack," the colonel summed it up, "if the Aline I loved—no, I don't mean the real woman, the one you and all the other people knew, the one that married the enterprising brewer and died five years ago—were not waiting for me somewhere. I can't express just what I mean, but you will understand, I know—?"

"That heaven is necessarily run on a Mohammedan basis? Why, of course," said Mr. Charteris. "Heaven, as I apprehend it, is a place where we shall live eternally among those ladies of old years who never condescended actually to inhabit any realm more tangible than that of our boyish fancies. It is the obvious definition; and I defy you to evolve a more enticing allurement toward becoming a deacon."

"You romancers are privileged to talk nonsense anywhere," the colonel estimated, "and I suppose that in the Lichfield you have made famous, Jack, you have a double right."

"Ah, but I never wrote a line concerning Lichfield. I only wrote about the Lichfield whose existence you continue to believe in, in spite of the fact that you are actually living in the real Lichfield," Charteris returned. "The vitality of the legend is wonderful."

He cocked his head to one side—an habitual gesture with Charteris—and the colonel noted, as he had often done before, how extraordinarily reminiscent Jack was of a dried-up, quizzical black parrot. Said Charteris:

"I love to serve that legend. I love to prattle of 'ole Marster' and 'ole Miss,' and throw in a sprinkling of 'mockin'-buds' and 'hants' and 'horg-killing time,' and of sweeping animadversions as to all 'free niggers'; and to narrate how 'de quality use ter cum'—you spell it c-u-m because that looks so convincingly like dialect—'ter de gret hous.' Those are the main ingredients. And, as for the unavoidable love-interest—" Charteris paused, grinned, and pleasantly resumed: "Why, jes arter dat, suh, a hut Yankee cap'en, whar some uv our folks done shoot in de laig, wuz lef on de road fer daid—a quite notorious custom on the part of all Northern armies—un Young Miss had him fotch up ter de gret hous, un nuss im same's he one uv de fambly, un dem two jes fit un argufy scanlous un never spicion huccum dey's in love wid each othuh till de War's ovuh. And there you are! I need not mention that during the tale's progress it is necessary to introduce at least one favorable mention of Lincoln, arrange a duel 'in de low grouns' immediately after day-break, and have the family silver interred in the back garden, because these points will naturally suggest themselves."

"Jack, Jack!" the colonel cried, "it is an ill bird that fouls its own nest."

"But, believe me, I don't at heart," said Charteris, in a queer earnest voice. "There is a sardonic imp inside me that makes me jeer at the commoner tricks of the trade—and yet when I am practising that trade, when I am writing of those tender-hearted, brave and gracious men and women, and of those dear old darkies, I very often write with tears in my eyes. I tell you this with careful airiness because it is true and because it would embarrass me so horribly if you believed it."

Then he was off upon another tack. "And wherein, pray, have I harmed Lichfield by imagining a dream city situated half way between Atlantis and Avalon and peopled with superhuman persons—and by having called this city Lichfield? The portrait did not only flatter Lichfield, it flattered human nature. So, naturally, it pleased everybody. Yes, that, I take it, is the true secret of romance—to induce the momentary delusion that humanity is a superhuman race, profuse in aspiration, and prodigal in the exercise of glorious virtues and stupendous vices. As a matter of fact, all human passions are depressingly chicken-hearted, I find. Were it not for the police court records, I would pessimistically insist that all of us elect to love one person and to hate another with very much the same enthusiasm that we display in expressing a preference for rare roast beef as compared with the outside slice. Oh, really, Rudolph, you have no notion how salutary it is to the self-esteem of us romanticists to run across, even nowadays, an occasional breach of the peace. For then sometimes—when the coachman obligingly cuts the butler's throat in the back-alley, say—we actually presume to think for a moment that our profession is almost as honest as that of making counterfeit money…."

The colonel did not interrupt his brief pause of meditation. Then the novelist said:

"Why, no; if I were ever really to attempt a tale of Lichfield, I would not write a romance but a tragedy. I think that I would call my tragedy Futility, for it would mirror the life of Lichfield with unengaging candor; and, as a consequence, people would complain that my tragedy lacked sustained interest, and that its participants were inconsistent; that it had no ordered plot, no startling incidents, no high endeavors, and no especial aim; and that it was equally deficient in all time-hallowed provocatives of either laughter or tears. For very few people would understand that a life such as this, when rightly viewed, is the most pathetic tragedy conceivable."

"Oh, come, now, Jack! come, recollect that your reasoning powers are almost as worthy of employment as your rhetorical abilities! We are not quite so bad as that, you know. We may be a little behind the times in Lichfield; we certainly let well enough alone, and we take things pretty much as they come; but we meddle with nobody, and, after all, we don't do any especial harm."

"We don't do anything whatever in especial, Rudolph. That would be precisely the theme of my story of the real Lichfield if I were ever bold enough to write it. There seems to be a sort of blight upon Lichfield. Oh, yes! it would be unfair, perhaps, to contrast it with the bigger Southern cities, like Richmond and Atlanta and New Orleans; but even the inhabitants of smaller Southern towns are beginning to buy excursion tickets, and thereby ascertain that the twentieth century has really begun. Yes, it is only in Lichfield I can detect the raw stuff of a genuine tragedy; for, depend upon it, Rudolph, the most pathetic tragedy in life is to get nothing in particular out of it."

"But, for my part, I don't see what you are driving at," the colonel stoutly said.

And Charteris only laughed. "And I hardly expected you to do so,
Rudolph—or not yet, at least."

  "I am contented by remembrances—
  Dreams of dead passions, wraiths of vanished times,
  Fragments of vows, and by-ends of old rhymes—
  Flotsam and jetsam tumbling in the seas
  Whereon, long since, put forth our argosies
  Which, bent on traffic in the Isles of Love,
  Lie foundered somewhere in some firth thereof,
  Encradled by eternal silences."

  "Thus, having come to naked bankruptcy,
  Let us part friends, as thrifty tradesmen do
  When common ventures fail, for it may be
  These battered oaths and rhymes may yet ring