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

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 Gulio 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 bedchamber, and the eternal approbation of zealous Protestants, for thus inaugurating religious liberty.

XXVI “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 dénouement 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