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

already forgotten his existence. Hand-in-hand they stood in the bright room, young, beautiful and glad. Silently their lips met.

Horvendile closed the door, and so left Storisende forever. Without he came into a lonely quiet-colored world already expectant of dawn’s occupancy. Already the tree-trunks eastward showed like the black bars of a grate. Thus he walked in twilight, carrying half the sigil of Scoteia.⁠ ⁠…

Book Second

“Whate’er she be⁠—
That inaccessible She
That doth command my heart and me:

“Till that divine
Idea take a shrine
Of crystal flesh, through which to shine:

“Let her full glory,
My fancies, fly before ye;
Be ye my fictions⁠—but her story.”

VIII Of a Trifle Found in Twilight

Thus he walked in twilight, regretful that he must return to his own country, and live another life, and bear another name than that of Horvendile.⁠ ⁠… It was droll that in his own country folk should call him Felix, since Felix meant “happy”; and assuredly he was not preeminently happy there.

At least he had ended the love-business of Ettarre and Guiron happily, however droll the necessitated makeshifts might have been.⁠ ⁠… He had very certainly introduced the god in the car, against Horatian admonition, had wound up affairs with a sort of transformation scene.⁠ ⁠… It was, perhaps, at once too hackneyed and too odd an ending to be aesthetically satisfactory, after all.⁠ ⁠… Why, beyond doubt it was. He shrugged his impatience.

“Yet⁠—what a true ending it would be!” he reflected. He was still walking in twilight⁠—for the time was approaching sunset⁠—in the gardens of Alcluid. He must devise another ending for this high-hearted story of Guiron and Ettarre.

Felix Kennaston smiled a little over the thought of ending the romance with such topsy-turvy anticlimaxes as his woolgathering wits had blundered into; and, stooping, picked up a shining bit of metal that lay beside the pathway. He was conscious of a vague notion he had just dropped this bit of metal.

“It is droll how all great geniuses instinctively plagiarize,” he reflected. “I must have seen this a half-hour ago, when I was walking up and down planning my final chapters. And so, I wove it into the tale as a breast-ornament for Ettarre, without ever consciously seeing the thing at all. Then, presto! I awake and find it growing dark, with me lackadaisically roaming in twilight clasping this bauble, just as I imagined Horvendile walking out of the castle of Storisende carrying much such a bauble. Oh, yes, the processes of inspiration are as irrational as if all poets took after their mothers.”

This bit of metal, Kennaston afterward ascertained, was almost an exact half of a disk, not quite three inches in diameter, which somehow had been broken or cut in two. It was of burnished metal⁠—lead, he thought⁠—about a sixteenth of an inch in thickness; and its single notable feature was the tiny characters with which one surface was inscribed.

Later Felix Kennaston was destined to puzzle over his inability to recollect what motive prompted him to slip this glittering trifle into his pocket. A trifle was all that it seemed then. He always remembered quite clearly how it sparkled in the abating glare of that day’s portentous sunset; and how the tree-trunks westward showed like the black bars of a grate, as he walked slowly through the gardens of Alcluid. Alcluid, be it explained, was the queer name with which Felix Kennaston’s progenitors had seen fit to christen their fine country home near Lichfield.

IX Beyond Use and Wont Fares the Road to Storisende

Kennaston was to recall, also, that on this evening he dined alone with his wife, sharing a taciturn meal. He and Kathleen talked of very little, now, save the existent day’s small happenings, such as having seen So-and-so, and of So-and-so’s having said this-or-that, as Kennaston reflected in the solitude of the library. But soon he was contentedly laboring upon the book he had always intended to write some day.

Off and on, in common with most high-school graduates, Felix Kennaston had been an “intending contributor” to various magazines, spasmodically bartering his postage-stamps for courteously-worded rejection-slips. Then, too, in the old days before his marriage, when Kennaston had come so near to capturing Margaret Hugonin and her big fortune, the heiress had paid for the printing of The King’s Quest and its companion enterprises in rhyme, as well as the prose Defence of Ignorance⁠—wide-margined specimens of the farfetched decadence then in vogue, and the idol of Kennaston’s youth, when he had seriously essayed the parlor-tricks of “stylists.”

And it was once a familiar story how Marian Winwood got revenge on Felix Kennaston, when he married Kathleen Saumarez, by publishing, in a transparent guise of fiction, all the love-letters he had written Miss Winwood; so that Kennaston might also have claimed to be generally recognized as the actual author of her Epistles of Ananias, which years ago created some literary stir.

But this book was to be different from any of his previous compositions. To paraphrase Felix Kennaston’s own words (as recorded in the colophon to Men Who Loved Alison), he had determined in this story lovingly to deal with an epoch and a society, and even a geography, whose comeliness had escaped the wear-and-tear of ever actually existing. He had attempted a jaunt into that “happy, harmless Fable-land” which is bounded by Avalon and Phæacia and Seacoast Bohemia, and the contiguous forests of Arden and Broceliande, and on the west of course by the Hesperides, because he believed this country to be the one possible setting for a really satisfactory novel, even though its byways can boast of little traffic nowadays. He was completing, in fine, The Audit at Storisende⁠—or, rather, Men Who Loved Alison, as the book came afterward to be called.

Competent critics in plenty have shrugged over Kennaston’s pretense therein that the romance is translated from an ancient manuscript. But to Kennaston the clerk Horvendile, the fictitious first writer of the chronicle and eyewitness of its events, was