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

I had thought from the first there would prove to be supernal double-dealing back of all this. The Wardens of Earth sometimes unbar strange windows, I suspect⁠—windows which face on other worlds than ours; and They permit this-or-that man to peer out fleetingly, perhaps, just for the joke’s sake; since always They humorously contrive matters so this man shall never be able to convince his fellows of what he has seen, or of the fact that he was granted any peep at all. The Wardens without fail arrange what we call⁠—gravely, too⁠—“some natural explanation.”

Kennaston showed me the sigil of Scoteia, having told this tale.⁠ ⁠…

“You are interested in such things, you see⁠—just as Kathleen said. And I have sometimes wondered if when she said, ‘Perhaps Mr. Harrowby could tell you,’ the words did not mean more than they seemed then to mean⁠—?”

I was interested now, very certainly. But I knew that Kathleen Kennaston had referred not at all to my interest in certain of the less known sides of existence, which people loosely describe as “occult.”

And slowly, I comprehended that for the thousandth time the Wardens of Earth were uncompromised; that here too They stayed unconvicted of negligence in Their duty: for here was at hand the “natural explanation.” Kennaston’s was one of those curious, but not uncommon, cases of self-hypnosis, such as Fehlig and Alexis Bidoche have investigated and described. Kennaston’s first dream of Ettarre had been an ordinary normal dream, in no way particularly remarkable; and afterward, his will to dream again of Ettarre, cooperating with his queer reading, his temperament, his idle life, his belief in the sigil, and cooperating too⁠—as yet men may not say just how⁠—with the hypnotic effects of any trivial bright object when gazed at steadily, had been sufficient to induce more dreams. I could understand how it had all befallen in consonance with hackneyed laws, insane as was the outcome.

And the prelate and the personage had referred, of course, to the then-notorious nineteenth and twentieth chapters of Men Who Loved Alison, in which is described the worship of the sigil of Scoteia⁠—and which chapters they, in common with a great many other people, considered unnecessarily to defile a noble book. The coincidence of the mirrors was quaint, but in itself came to less than nothing; for as touches the two questions as to white pigeons, the proverb alluded to by the personage, concerning the bird that fouls its own nest, is fairly familiar, and the prelate’s speech was the most natural of prosaic inquiries. What these two men had said and done, in fine, amounted to absolutely nothing until transfigured in the crucible of an ardent imagination, by the curious literary notion that human life as people spend it is purposeful and clearly motived.

For what Kennaston showed me was the metal top of a cold cream jar. I am sure of this, for Harrowby’s Crême Cleopatre is one of the most popular articles our firm manufactures. I hesitate to tell you how many thousand husbands may find at will among their wives’ possessions just such a talisman as Kennaston had discovered. I myself selected the design for these covers when the stuff was first put in the market. They are sealed on, you may remember, with gray wax, to carry out the general idea that we are vending old Egyptian secrets of beauty. And the design upon these covers, as I have since been at pains to make sure, is in no known alphabet. P. N. Flaherty (the artist implicated) tells me he “just made it up out of his head”⁠—blending meaningless curlicues and dots and circles with an irresponsible hand, and sketching a crack across all, “just to make it look ancient like.” It was along this semblance of a fracture⁠—for there the brittle metal is thinnest⁠—that the cover first picked up by Kennaston had been broken. The cover he showed me was, of course, complete.⁠ ⁠… So much for Mr. Flaherty’s part in the matter; and of hieroglyphic lore, or any acquaintance with heathenry beyond his gleanings from the moving pictures, I would be the last person to suspect him.

It was natural that Mrs. Kennaston should have used Harrowby’s Crême Cleopatre habitually; for indeed, as my wife had often pointed out, Mrs. Kennaston used a considerable amount of toilet preparations. And that Mrs. Allardyce should have had a jar of Harrowby’s Crême Cleopatre in her handbag was almost inevitable: there is no better restorative and cleanser for the complexion, after the dust and dirt of a train-journey, as is unanimously acknowledged by Harrowby & Sons’ advertisements.

But there is the faith that moves mountains, as we glibly acknowledge with unconcernment as to the statement’s tremendous truth; and Felix Kennaston had believed in his talisman implicitly from the very first. Thus, through his faith, and through we know not what soul-hunger, so many long hours, and⁠—here is the sardonic point⁠—so many contented and artistically-fruitful hours of Kennaston’s life in the flesh had been devoted to contemplation of a mirage. It was no cause for astonishment that he had more than once surprised compassion and wonder in his wife’s eyes: indeed, she could hardly have failed to suspect his mind was affected; but, loving him, she had tried to shield him, as is the way of women.⁠ ⁠… I found the whole matter droll and rather heartbreaking. But the Wardens of Earth were uncompromised, so far as I could prove. Whatever windows had or had not been unbarred, there remained no proof.⁠ ⁠…

So I shook my head. “Why, no,” said I, with at worst a verbal adhesion to veracity. “I, for one, do not know what the design means. Still, you have never had this deciphered,” I added, gently. “Suppose⁠—suppose there had been some mistake, Mr. Kennaston⁠—that there was nothing miraculous about the sigil, after all⁠—?”

I cannot tell you of his expression; but it caused me for the moment to feel disconcertingly little and obtuse.

“Now, how can you say that, I wonder!” he marveled⁠—and then, of course, he fidgeted, and crossed