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

tumbrils should come to fetch them to the Place de la Révolution. They stood beneath a narrow barred window, set high in the wall, so that thin winter sunlight made the girl’s face visible. Misery was about them, death waited without: and it did not matter a pennyworth.

“Ettarre, I know today that all my life I have been seeking you. Very long ago when I was a child it was made clear that you awaited me somewhere; and, I recollect now, I used to hunger for your coming with a longing which has not any name. And when I went about the dusty world I still believed you waited somewhere⁠—till I should find you, as I inevitably must, or soon or late. Did I go upon a journey to some unfamiliar place?⁠—it might be that unwittingly I traveled toward your home. I could never pass a walled garden where green treetops showed without suspecting, even while I shrugged to think how wild was the imagining, that there was only the wall between us. I did not know the color of your eyes, but I knew what I would read there. And for a fevered season I appeared to encounter many women of earth who resembled you⁠—”

“All women resemble me, Horvendile. Whatever flesh they may wear as a garment, and however time-frayed or dull-hued or stained by horrible misuse that garment may seem to be, the wearer of that garment is no less fair than I, could any man see her quite clearly. Horvendile, were that not true, could our great Author find anywhere a woman’s body which wickedness and ugliness controlled unchecked, all the big stars which light the universe, and even the tiny sun that our earth spins about, would be blown out like unneeded candles, for the Author’s labor would have been frustrated and misspent.”

“Yes; I know now that this is true.⁠ ⁠… See, Ettarre! Yonder woman is furtively coloring her cheeks with a little wet red rag. She does not wish to seem pale⁠—or is it that she wishes to look her best?⁠—in the moment of death.⁠ ⁠… Ettarre, my love for you whom I could not ever find, was not of earth, and I could not transfer it to an earthly woman. The lively hues, the lovely curvings and the fragrant tender flesh of earth’s women were deft to cast their spells; but presently I knew this magic was only of the body. It might be I was honoring divinity; but it was certain that even in such case I was doing so by posturing before my divinity’s effigy in tinted clay. Besides, it is not possible to know with any certainty what is going on in the round glossy little heads of women. ‘I hide no secrets from you, because I love you,’ say they?⁠—eh, and their love may be anything from a mild preference to a flat lie. And so, I came finally to concede that all women are creatures of like frailties and limitations and reserves as myself, and I was most poignantly lonely when I was luckiest in love. Once only, in my life in the flesh, it seemed to me that a woman, whom I had abandoned, held in her hand the sigil visibly. That memory has often troubled me, Ettarre. It may be that this woman could have given me what I sought everywhere in vain. But I did not know this until it was too late, until the chance and the woman’s life alike were wasted.⁠ ⁠… And so, I grew apathetic, senseless and without any spurring aspiration, seeing that all human beings are so securely locked in the prison of their flesh.”

“When immortals visit earth it is necessary they assume the appearance of some animal. Very long ago, as we have seen, Horvendile, that secret was discovered, which so many myths veil thinly: and have we not learned, too, that the animal’s fleshly body is a disguise which it is possible to put aside?”

“That knowledge, so fearfully purchased at the Sabbat, still troubles me, Ettarre.⁠ ⁠… Monsieur le Prince, I regret the circumstance, but⁠—as you see⁠—my snuffbox is quite empty. Ah, but yes, as you very justly observe, rappee, repose and rationality are equally hard to come by in these mad days.⁠ ⁠… Is that not droll, Ettarre? This unvenerable old Prince de Gâtinais⁠—once Grand Duke of Noumaria, you remember⁠—has been guilty in his career of every iniquity and meanness and cowardice: now, facing instant death, he finds time to think of snuff and phrase-making.⁠ ⁠… But⁠—to go back a little⁠—I had thought the Sabbat would be so different! One imagined there would be cauldrons, and hags upon prancing broomsticks, and a black goat, of course⁠—”

“How much more terrible it is⁠—and how beautiful!”

“Yet⁠—even now I may not touch you, Ettarre.”

“My friend, all men have striven to do that; and I have evaded each one of them at the last, and innumerable are the ways of my elusion. There is no man but has loved me, no man that has forgotten me, and none but has attempted to express that which he saw and understood when I was visible.”

“Do I not know? There is no beauty in the world save those stray hints of you, Ettarre. Canvas and stone and verse speak brokenly of you sometimes; all music yearns toward you, Ettarre, all sunsets whisper of you, and it is because they waken memories of you that the eyes of all children so obscurely trouble and delight us. Ettarre, your unattainable beauty tears my heart. There is nothing, nothing in me that does not cry out for love of you. And it is the cream of a vile jest that I am forbidden ever to win quite to you, ever to touch you, ever to see you even save in my dreams!”

“Already this dream draws toward an end, my poor Horvendile.”

And he saw that the great doors⁠—which led to death⁠—were unclosing: and beyond them he saw confusedly a mob of red-capped