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

love’s land today. Why worry over one particular inexplicable detail, where everything is incomprehensible?”

“I was never here before, Horvendile; and I have waited for you so long.”

He looked at her; and again his heart moved with glad adoration. It was not merely that Ettarre was so pleasing to the eye, and distinguished by so many delicate clarities of color⁠—so young, so quick of movement, so slender, so shapely, so inexpressibly virginal⁠—but the heady knowledge that here on dizzying heights he, Felix Kennaston, was somehow playing with superhuman matters, and that no power could induce him to desist from his delicious and perilous frolic, stirred, in deep recesses of his being, nameless springs. Nameless they must remain; for it was as though he had discovered himself to possess a sixth sense; and he found that the contrivers of language, being less prodigally gifted, had never been at need to invent any terms wherewith to express this sense’s gratification. But he knew that he was strong and admirable; that men and men’s affairs lay far beneath him; that Ettarre belonged to him; and, most vividly of all, that the exultance which possessed him was a byproduct of an unstable dream.

“Yet it is not any city of today,” he was saying. “Look, how yonder little rascal glitters⁠—he is wearing a helmet of some sort and a gorget. Why, all those pigmies, if you look closely, go in far braver scarlets and purples than we elect to skulk about in nowadays; and there is not an office-building or an electric-light advertisement of chewing-gum in sight. No, that hotchpotch of huddled gables and parapets and towers shaped like lanterns was stolen straight out of some Doré illustration for Rabelais or Les Contes Drolatiques. But it does not matter at all, and it will never matter, where we may chance to be, Ettarre. What really and greatly matters, is that when I try to touch you everything vanishes.”

The girl was frankly puzzled. “Yes, that seems a part of the sigil’s magic.⁠ ⁠…”

XVII Of the Sigil and One Use of It

It proved that this was indeed a part of the sigil’s wonder-working: Kennaston learned by experience that whenever, even by accident, he was about to touch Ettarre his dream would end like a burst bubble. He would find himself alone and staring at the gleaming fragment of metal.

Before long he also learned something concerning the sigil of Scoteia, of which this piece of metal once formed a part; for it was permitted him to see the sigil in its entirety, many centuries before it was shattered: it was then one of the treasures of the Didascalion, a peculiar sort of girls’ school in King Ptolemy Physcon’s city of Alexandria, where women were tutored to honor fittingly the power which this sigil served. But it is not expedient to speak clearly concerning this; and the real name of the sigil was, of course, quite different from that which Kennaston had given it in his romance.

So began an odd divided life for Felix Kennaston. At first he put his half of the sigil in an envelope, which he did in a desk in the library, under a pile of his dead uncle’s unused bookplates; whence, when occasion served, it was taken out in order that when held so as to reflect the lamplight⁠—for this was always necessary⁠—it might induce the desired dream of Ettarre.

Later Kennaston thought of an expedient by which to prolong his dreams. Nightly he lighted and set by his bedside a stump of candle. Its tiny flame, after he had utilized its reflection, would harmlessly burn out while his body slept with a bit of metal in one hand; and he would be freed of Felix Kennaston for eight hours uninterruptedly. To have left an electric-light turned on until he awakened, would in the end have exposed him to detection and the not-impossible appointment of a commission in lunacy; and he recognized the potentialities of such mischance with frank distaste. As affairs sped, however, he could without great difficulty buy his candles in secret. He was glad now he was well-to-do, if only because, as an incidental result of materially bettered fortunes, he and his wife had separate bedrooms.

XVIII Treats of a Prelate and, in Part, of Pigeons

The diurnal part of Kennaston’s life was largely devoted to writing The Tinctured Veil⁠—that amazing performance which he subsequently gave to a bewildered world. And for the rest, his waking life went on in the old round.

But this is not⁠—save by way of an occasional parenthesis⁠—a chronicle of Felix Kennaston’s doings in the flesh. You may find all that in Mr. Froser’s Biography. Flippant, inefficient and moody, Felix Kennaston was not in the flesh particularly engaging; and in writing this record it is necessary to keep his fat corporeal personality in the background as much as may be possible, lest it should cause you, as it so often induced us of Lichfield, to find the man repellent, and nothing more.

Now it befell that this spring died Bishop Arkwright⁠—of the Cathedral of the Bleeding Heart⁠—and many dignitaries of his faith journeyed to Lichfield to attend the funeral. Chief among these was a prelate who very long ago had lived in Lichfield, when he was merely a bishop. Kennaston was no little surprised to receive a note informing him that this eminent churchman would be pleased to see Mr. Felix Kennaston that evening at the Bishop’s House.

The prelate sat alone in a sparsely furnished, rather dark, and noticeably dusty room. He was like a lean effigy carved in time-yellowed ivory, and his voice was curiously ingratiating. Kennaston recognized with joy that this old man talked like a person in a book, in completed sentences and picked phrases, instead of employing the fragmentary verbal shorthand of ordinary Lichfieldian conversation: and Kennaston, to whom the slovenliness of fairly cultured people’s daily talk was always a mystery and an irritant, fell with promptitude into the