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

spouses. But you are not, after all, married to the girl you met at the chancel-rail, so long and long ago, with unforgotten tremblings of the knees. Your wife, that estimable matron, is quite another person. And you live in the same house, and you very often see her with hair uncombed, or even with a disheveled temper; you are familiar with her hours of bathing, her visits to the dentist, and a host of other physical phenomena we need not go into; she does not appreciate your jokes; she peeps into your personal correspondence; she keeps the top bureau-drawer in a jumble of veils and gloves and powder-rags and hairpins and heaven knows what; her gowns continually require to be buttoned up the back in an insane incalculable fashion; she irrationally orders herring for breakfast, though you never touch it:⁠—and in fine, your catalogue of disillusionments is endless.

Hand upon heart, my dear Mr. Grundy, is this the person to whom you despatched those letters you wrote before you were married? Your wife has those epistles safely put away somewhere, you may depend on it: and for what earthly consideration would you read them aloud to her? Some day, when one or the other of you is dead, those letters will ring true again and rouse a noble sorrow; and the survivor will be all the better for reading them. But now they only prove you were once free of uplands which you do not visit nowadays: and that common knowledge is a secret every wife must share half-guiltily with her husband⁠—even in your happiest matrimonial ventures⁠—as certainly as it is the one topic they may not ever discuss with profit.

For you are married, you and she: and you live, contentedly enough, in a foursquare world, where there is the rent and your social obligations and the children’s underclothing to be considered, long and long before indulgence in rattle-pate mountain-climbing. And people glibly think of you as Mr. and Mrs. Grundy now, almost as a unit: but do you really know very much about that woman whose gentle breathing⁠—for we will not crudely call it snoring⁠—you can always hear at will o’ nights? Suppose, by a wild flight of fancy, that she is no more honest with you than you are with her?

So to Kennaston his wife remained a not unfriendly mystery. They had been as demigods for a little while; and the dream had faded, to leave it matters not what memories; and they were only Mr. and Mrs. Felix Kennaston. Concerning all of us, my fellow failures in the great and hopeless adventure of matrimony, this apologue is narrated.

Yet, as I look into my own wife’s face⁠—no more the loveliest, but still the dearest of all earthly faces, I protest⁠—and as I wonder how much she really knows about me or the universe at large, and have not the least notion⁠—why, I elect to believe that, in the ultimate, Kennaston was not dissatisfied. For all of us the dream-haze merges into the glare of common day; the dea certé, whom that fled roseate light transfigured, stands confessed a simple loving woman, a creature of like flesh and limitations as our own: but who are we to mate with goddesses? It is enough that much in us which is not merely human has for once found exercise⁠—has had its high-pitched outing, however fleet⁠—and that, because of many abiding memories, we know, assuredly, the way of flesh is not a futile scurrying through dining-rooms and offices and shops and parlors, and thronged streets and restaurants, “and so to bed.”

XL Which Mr. Flaherty Does Not Quite Explain

With the preceding preachment I wish I might end the story. For what follows⁠—which is my own little part in the story of Felix Kennaston⁠—is that discomfortable sort of anticlimax wherein the key to a mystery, by unlocking unsuspected doors, discloses only another equally perplexing riddle.

Kathleen Kennaston died in her sleep some eleven months after her husband discovered the missing half of the sigil.⁠ ⁠…

“I have a sort of headache,” she said, toward nine o’clock in the evening. “I believe I will go to bed, Felix.” So she kissed him goodnight, in just that emotionless preoccupied fashion that years of living together had made familiar; and so she left him in the music-room, to smoke and read magazines. He never saw her living any more.

Kathleen stopped in the hall, to wind the clock. “Don’t forget to lock the front door when you come up, Felix.” She was out of sight, but he could hear her, as well as the turning of the clock key. “I forgot to tell you I saw Adèle Van Orden today, at Greenberg’s. They are going down to the Beach Thursday. She told me they haven’t had a cook for three days now, and she and old Mrs. Haggage have had to do all the work. She looked it, too⁠—I never saw anyone let themselves go all to pieces the way she has⁠—”

“How⁠—? Oh, yes,” he mumbled, intent upon his reading; “it is pretty bad. Don’t many of them keep their looks as you do, dear⁠—”

And that was all. He never heard his wife’s voice any more. Kennaston read contentedly for a couple of hours, and went to bed. It was in the morning the maid found Mrs. Kennaston dead and cold. She had died in her sleep, quite peacefully, after taking two headache powders, while her husband was contentedly pursuing the thread of a magazine story through the advertising columns.⁠ ⁠…

Kennaston had never spoken to her concerning the sigil. Indeed, I do not well see how he could have dared to do so, in view of her attitude in a world so opulent in insane asylums. But among her effects, hidden away as before in the press in her bathroom, Kennaston found both the pieces of metal. They were joined together now, forming a perfect circle, but with the line of their former separation yet visible.

He showed me the sigil of Scoteia, having told