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

necessary. No doubt it handicapped the story’s progress, so to contrive matters that one subsidiary character should invariably be at hand when important doings were in execution, and should be taken more or less into everyone’s confidence⁠—but then, somehow, it made the tale seem real.

For in the writing it all seemed perfectly real to Felix Kennaston. His life was rather barren of motive now. In remoter times, when he had wandered impecuniously from one adventure to another, sponging without hesitancy upon such wealthy people as his chatter amused, there had always been exquisite girls to make love to⁠—such girls as the younger generation did not produce⁠—and the ever-present problem of whence was to come the fares for tomorrow’s hansoms, in which the younger generation did not ride. For now hansom cabs were well-nigh as extinct as velocipedes or sedan-chairs, he owned two motors, and, by the drollest turn, had money in four banks. As recreation went, he and Kathleen had in Lichfield their round of decorous social duties; and there was nothing else to potter with save the writing. And a little by a little the life he wrote of came to seem to Felix Kennaston more real, and far more vital, than the life his body was shuffling through aimlessly.

For as Horvendile he lived among such gallant circumstances as he had always vaguely hoped his real life might provide tomorrow. This Horvendile, coming unintelligibly to Storisende, and witnessing there the long combat between Sir Guiron des Rocques and Maugis d’Aigremont for possession of La Beale Alison⁠—as Kennaston’s heroine is called of course in the printed book⁠—seems to us in reading the tale no very striking figure; as in Rob Roy and Esmond, it is not to the narrator, but to the people and events he tells of, that attention is riveted. But Felix Kennaston, writing the book, lived the life of Horvendile in the long happy hours of writing, which became longer and longer; and insensibly his existence blended and was absorbed into the more colorful life of Horvendile. It was as Horvendile he wrote, seeming actually at times to remember what he recorded, rather than to invent.⁠ ⁠…

And he called it inspiration.⁠ ⁠…

So the tale flowed on, telling how Count Emmerick planned a notable marriage-feast for his sister La Beale Ettarre and Sir Guiron des Rocques, with vastly different results from those already recorded⁠—with the results, in fine, which figure in the printed Men Who Loved Alison, where Horvendile keeps his proper place as a more-or-less convenient device for getting the tale told.

But to Kennaston that first irrational winding-up of affairs, wherein a world’s creator was able to wring only contempt and pity from his puppets⁠—since he had not endowed them with any faculties wherewith to comprehend their creator’s nature and intent⁠—was always the tale’s real ending.⁠ ⁠…

So it was that the lonely man lived with his dreams, and toiled for the vision’s sake contentedly; and we of Lichfield who were most familiar with Felix Kennaston in the flesh knew nothing then of his mental diversions; and, with knowledge, would probably have liked him not a bit the better. For ordinary human beings, as all other normal forms of life, turn naturally toward the sun, and are at their best thereunder; but it is the misfortune of dreamers that their peculiar talents find no exercise in daylight. So we regarded Kennaston with the distrust universally accorded people who need to be meddling with ideas in a world which sustains its mental credit comfortably enough with a current coinage of phrases.

And therefore it may well be that I am setting down his story not all in sympathy, for in perfect candor I never, quite, liked Felix Kennaston. His high-pitched voice in talking, to begin with, was irritating: you knew it was not his natural voice, and found it so entirely senseless for him to speak thus. Then, too, the nervous and trivial grin with which he prefaced almost all his infrequent remarks⁠—and the odd little noise, that was nearly a snigger and just missed being a cough, with which he ended them⁠—was peculiarly uningratiating in a fat and middle-aged person; his weak eyes very rarely met yours full-gaze; and he was continually handling his face or fidgeting with a cigarette or twisting in his chair. When listening to you he usually nibbled at his fingernails, and when he talked he had a secretive way of looking at them.

Such habits are not wholly incompatible with wisdom or generosity, and the devil’s advocate would not advance them against their possessor’s canonization; none the less, in everyday life they make against your enjoying a chat with their possessor: and as for Kennaston’s undeniable mental gifts, there is no escaping, at times, the gloomy suspicion that fiddling with pens and ink is, after all, no fit employment for a grown man.

Felix Kennaston, to fix the word, was inadequate. His books apart, he was as a human being a failure. Indeed, in some inexpressible fashion, he impressed you as uneasily shirking life. Certainly he seemed since his marriage to have relinquished all conversational obligations to his wife. She had a curious trick of explaining him, before his face⁠—in a manner which was not unreminiscent of the lecturer in “sideshows” pointing out the peculiarities of the living skeleton or the glass-eater; but it was done with such ill-concealed pride in him that I found it touching, even when she was boring me about the varieties of food he could not be induced to touch or his finicky passion for saving every bit of string he came across.

That suggests a minor mystery: many women had been fond of Felix Kennaston; and I have yet to find a man who liked him even moderately, to offset the host who marveled, with unseemly epithets, as to what these women saw in him. My wife explains it, rather enigmatically, that he was “just a twoser”; and that, in addition, he expected women to look after him, so that naturally