The Cream of the Jest, James Branch Cabell [smart ebook reader .TXT] 📗

don’t know about that; but, in any event, people prefer to read about the life they are familiar with.”

“You touch on a disheartening truth. People never want to be told anything they do not believe already. Yet I quite fail to see why, in books or elsewhere, anyone should wish to be reminded of what human life is actually like. For living is the one art in which mankind has never achieved distinction. It is perhaps an obscure sense of this that makes us think the begetting of mankind an undiscussable subject, and death a sublime and edifying topic.”

“Yes⁠—? I dare say,” Kathleen assented vaguely. “This herring is really very good, Felix. I think you would like it, if you just had not made up your mind to be stubborn about it⁠—” Then she spoke with new animation: “Felix, Margaret Woods was in Louvet’s yesterday morning, having her hair done for a dinner they gave the railroad crowd last night, and of all the faded washed-out looking people I ever saw⁠—! And I can remember her having that hideous brown dress long before she was married. Of course, it doesn’t make any difference to me that she didn’t see fit to invite us. She was one of your friends, not mine. I was only thinking that, since she always pretended to be so fond of you, it does seem curious the way we are invariably left out.”

So Kennaston did not embroider verbally his theme⁠—of Living Adequately⁠—as he had felt himself in vein to do could he have found a listener.

“Some day,” he ruefully reflected, “I shall certainly write a paper upon The Lost Art of Conversing with One’s Wife. Its appeal, I think, would be universal.”

Then his eggs came.⁠ ⁠…

XIV Peculiar Conduct of a Personage

Shortly afterward befell a queer incident. Kennaston, passing through a famed city, lunched with a personage who had been pleased to admire Men Who Loved Alison, and whose remunerative admiration had been skilfully trumpeted in the public press by Kennaston’s publishers.

There were some ten others in the party, and Kennaston found it droll enough to be sitting at table with them. The lean pensive man⁠—with hair falling over his forehead in a neatly-clipped bang, such as custom restricts to children⁠—had probably written that morning, in his official capacity, to innumerable potentates. That handsome bluff old navy-officer was a national hero: he would rank in history with Perry and John Paul Jones; yet here he sat, within arms’-reach, prosaically complaining of unseasonable weather. That bearded man, rubicund and monstrous as to nose, was perhaps the most powerful, as he was certainly the most wealthy, person inhabiting flesh; and it was rumored, in those Arcadian days, that kingdoms did not presume to go to war without securing the consent of this financier.

And that exquisitely neat fellow, looking like a lad unconvincingly made-up for an octogenarian in amateur theatricals, was the premier of the largest province in the world: his thin-featured neighbor was an aeronaut⁠—at this period really a rara avis⁠—and went above the clouds to get his livelihood, just as ordinary people went to banks and offices. And chief of all, their multifarious host⁠—the personage, as one may discreetly call him⁠—had left unattempted scarcely any role in the field of human activities: as ranchman, statesman, warrior, historian, editor, explorer, athlete, coiner of phrases, and re-discoverer of the Decalogue, impartially, he had labored to make the world a livelier place of residence; and already he was the pivot of as many legends as Charlemagne or Arthur.

The famous navy-officer, as has been said, was complaining of the weather. “The seasons have changed so, since I can remember. We seem to go straight from winter into summer nowadays.”

“It has been rather unseasonable,” assented the financier; “but then you always feel the heat so much more during the first few hot days.”

“Besides,” came the judicious comment, “it has not been the heat which was so oppressive this morning, I think, as the great amount of humidity in the air.”

“Yes, it is most unpleasant⁠—makes your clothes stick to you so.”

“Ah, but don’t you find, now,” asked the premier gaily, “that looking at the thermometer tends to make you feel, really, much more uncomfortable than if you stayed uninformed as to precisely how hot it was?”

“Well! where ignorance is bliss it is folly to be wise, as I remember to have seen stated somewhere.”

“By George, though, it is wonderful how true are many of those old sayings!” observed the personage. “We assume we are much wiser than our fathers: but I doubt if we really are, in the big things that count.”

“In fact, I have often wondered what George Washington, for example, would think of the republic he helped to found, if he could see it nowadays.”

“He would probably find it very different from what he imagined it would be.”

“Why, he would probably turn in his grave, at some of our new fangled notions⁠—such as prohibition and equal suffrage.”

“Oh, well, all sensible people know, of course, that the trouble with prohibition is that it does not prohibit, and that woman’s place is the home, not in the mire of politics.”

“That is admirably put, sir, if you will permit me to say so. Still, there is a great deal to be said on both sides.”

“And after all, is there not a greater menace to the ideals of Washington and Jefferson in the way our present laws tend uniformly to favor rich people?”

“There you have it, sir⁠—today we punish the poor man for doing what the rich man does with entire impunity, only on a larger scale.”

“By George, there are many of our so-called captains of industry who, if the truth were told, and a shorter and uglier word were not unpermissible, are little better than malefactors of great wealth.”

This epigram, however heartily admired, was felt by many of the company to be a bit daring in the presence of the magnate: and the lean secretary spoke hastily, or at