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

For now by turn⁠—as murderer, saint, herdsman, serf, fop, pickpurse, troubadour, monk, bravo, lordling, monarch, and in countless other estates⁠—Kennaston tasted those fruitless emotions which it is the privilege of art to arouse⁠—joys without any inevitable purchase-price, regrets that were not bitter, and miseries which left him not a penny the worse.

But it was as a lover that his role most engrossed him, in many dreams wherein he bore for Ettarre such adoration as he had always wistfully hoped he might entertain toward some woman some day, and had not ever known in his waking hours. It was sober truth he had spoken at Storisende: “There is no woman like you in my country, Ettarre. I can find no woman anywhere resembling you whom dreams alone may win to.” But now at last, even though it were only in dreams, he loved as he had always dimly felt he was capable of loving.⁠ ⁠… Even the old lost faculty of verse-making seemed to come back to him with this change, and he began again to fashion rhymes, elaborating bright odd vignettes of foiled love in out-of-the-way epochs and surroundings. These were the verses included, later, under the general title of “Dramatis Personæ,” in his Chimes at Midnight.

He wrote of foiled love necessarily, since not even as a lover might he win to success. It was the cream of some supernal jest that he might not touch Ettarre; that done, though but by accident, the dream ended, and the universe seemed to fold about him, just as a hand closes. He came to understand the reason of this. “Love must look toward something not quite accessible, something not quite understood,” he had said at Storisende: and this phrase, so lightly despatched, came home to him now as pregnant truth. For it was this fact which enabled him to love Ettarre, and had always prevented his loving any other woman.

All mortal women either loved some other man, and went with him somewhither beyond the area of your daily life, and so, in time were forgotten; or, else, they loved you, and laid bare to you their minds and bodies⁠—and neither of these possessions ever proved so remarkable, when calmly viewed, as to justify continued infatuation therewith. Such at least Felix Kennaston had always found to be the case: love did not live, as lovers do, by feeding; but, paradoxically, got strength by hungering. It should be remembered, however, that Felix Kennaston was a poet.⁠ ⁠…

He would sometimes think of the women who had loved him; and would speculate, with some wistfulness, if it was invariably true, as with his own amorous traffic, that love both kept and left its victims strangers to each other? He knew so little of these soft-lipped girls and women, when everything was said.⁠ ⁠…

Yet there had been⁠—he counted⁠—yes, time had known eight chaste and comely gentlewomen, in all, who had “given themselves to him,” as the hackneyed phrase was. These eight affairs, at any event, had conformed to every tradition, and had been as thoroughgoing as might romantically be expected: but nothing much seemed to have come of them; and he did not feel in the upshot very well acquainted with their heroines. His sole emotion toward them nowadays was that of mild dislike. But six of them⁠—again to utilize a venerable conjunction of words⁠—had “deceived their husbands” for the caresses of an impecunious Kennaston; and the other two had anticipatorily “deceived” the husbands they took later: so that they must, he reflected, have loved Felix Kennaston sincerely. He was quite certain, though, that he had never loved any one of them as he had always wanted to love. No one of these women had given him what he sought in vain. Kennaston had felt this lack of success dispiritedly when, with soft arms about him, it was necessary to think of what he would say next. He had always in such circumstances managed to feign high rapture, to his temporary companion’s entire satisfaction, as he believed; but each adventure left him disappointed. It had not roused in him the overwhelming emotions lovers had in books, nor anything resembling these emotions: and that was what he had wanted, and had not ever realized, until the coming of Ettarre.⁠ ⁠…

He had made love, as a prevalent rule, to married women⁠—allured, again, by bookish standards, which advanced the commerce of Lancelot with Guinevere, or of Paolo Malatesta with his brother’s wife, as the supreme type of romantic passion. On more practical grounds, Kennaston preferred married women, partly because they were less stupid to converse with in general, and in particular did not bring up the question of marrying you; and in part because the husband in the background helped the situation pictorially⁠—this notion also now seemed to be of literary origin⁠—besides furnishing an unfailing topic of conversation. For unfaithful or wavering wives, to Kennaston’s finding, peculiarly delighted in talking about their husbands; and in such prattle failed either to exhibit the conventional remorse toward, or any very grave complaint against, the discussed better-half. The inconsistency would have worried Kennaston’s sense of justice, had not these husbands always been so transparently certain of Kennaston’s insignificance.⁠ ⁠… Although judging of necessity only from his own experience, Kennaston was unable conscientiously to approve of adulterous love-affairs: they tended too soon toward tediousness; and married women seemed horribly quick to become matter-of-fact in the details of a liaison, and ready almost to confuse you with the husband.

The giggle and chatter of young girls Kennaston had always esteemed unalluring, even in his own youth. He had admired a number of them extravagantly, but only as ornamental objects upon which very ill-advisedly had been conferred the gift of speech. Today he looked back wistfully at times, as we must all do, to that girl who first had asked him if he was sure that he respected her as much as ever: but it was with the mental annotation that she had seven children now, and, as Kathleen put it,