XXXVI
Sundry Disclosures of the Press
Such as has been described was now Felix Kennaston’s manner of living, which, as touches utilitarian ends, it might be wiser forthwith to dismiss as bred by the sickly fancies of an idle man bemused with unprofitable reading. By day his half of the sigil lay hidden in the library, under a pile of unused bookplates. But nightly this bit of metal was taken with him to bed, in order that, when held so as to reflect the candlelight—for this was always necessary—it might induce the desired dream of Ettarre; and that, so, Horvendile would be freed of Felix Kennaston for eight hours uninterruptedly.
In our social ordering Felix Kennaston stayed worthy of consideration in Lichfield, both as a celebrity of sorts and as the owner of four bank-accounts; and colloquially, as likewise has been recorded, he was by ordinary dismissed from our patronizing discussion as having long been “queer,” and in all probability “a dope-fiend,” In Lichfield, as elsewhere, a man’s difference from his fellows cannot comfortably be conceded except by assuming the difference to be to his discredit.
Meanwhile, the Felix Kennaston who owned two motors and had money in four banks, went with his wife about their round of decorous social duties; and the same Felix Kennaston, with leisured joy in the task, had completed The Tinctured Veil—which, as you now know, was woven from the dreamstuff Horvendile had fetched out of that fair country—very far from Lichfield—which is bounded by Avalon and Phaeacia and Seacoast Bohemia, and the contiguous forests of Arden and Broceliande, and on the west of course by the Hesperides.
Then, just before The Tinctured Veil was published, an accident happened.
Fate, as always frugal of display, used simple tools. Kennaston, midway in dressing, found he had no more mouthwash. He went into his wife’s bathroom, in search of a fresh bottle. Kathleen was in Lichfield for the afternoon, at a card party; and thus it was brought about that Kennaston found, lying in the corner of her bathroom press, and hidden by a bottle of Harrowby’s No. 7 Dental Delight, the missing half of the sigil of Scoteia—the half which Ettarre had retained. There was no doubt about it. He held it in his hand.
“Now, that,” said Felix Kennaston, aloud, “is rather curious.”
He went into the library, and lifted the little pile of unused bookplates; and presently the two pieces of metal lay united upon his wife’s dressing-table, between the manicure-set and the pincushion, forming a circle not quite three inches in diameter, just such as he had seen once upon the brow of Mother Isis, and again in the Didascalion when Ptolemy of the Fat Paunch was master of Egypt.
“So, Kathleen somehow found the other half. She has had it from the first. … But naturally I never spoke of Felix Kennaston; it was forbidden, and besides, the sigil’s crowning grace was that it enabled me to forget his existence. And the girl’s name in the printed book is Alison. And Horvendile is such an unimportant character that Kathleen, reading the tale hastily—I thought she simply skimmed it!—did not remember that name either; and so, did not associate the dream names in any way with my book, nor with me. … She too, then, does not know—as yet. … And, for all that, Kathleen, the real Kathleen, is Ettarre—‘whatever flesh she may wear as a garment!’ … Or, rather, Ettarre is to Kathleen as Horvendile—but am I truly that high-hearted ageless being? Eh, I do not know, for we touch mystery everywhere. I only know it is the cream of the jest that day by day, while that lean, busy sharp-eyed stranger, whose hands and lips my own hands and lips meet daily, because this contact has become a part of the day’s routine—”
But he was standing before his wife’s dressing-table, and the mirror showed him a squat insignificant burgess in shirtsleeves, with grizzled untidied hair, and mild accommodating pale eyes, and an inadequate nose, with huge nostrils, and a spacious naked-looking upper-lip. That was Felix Kennaston, so far as all other people were concerned save Kathleen. He smiled; and in the act he noted that the visual result was to make Felix Kennaston appear particularly inane and sheepish. But he knew now that did not matter. Nor did it greatly matter—his thoughts ran—that it was never permitted any man, not even in his dreams, ever to touch the hands and lips of Ettarre.
So he left there the two pieces of metal, united at last upon his wife’s dressing-table, between the manicure-set and the pincushion, where on her return she might find them, and, finding, understand all that which he lacked words to tell.
XXXVII
Considerations Toward Sunset
Then Kennaston went for a meditative walk in the abating glare of that day’s portentous sunset, wherein the tree-trunks westward showed like the black bars of a grate. It was in just such a twilight that Horvendile had left Storisende. …
And presently he came to a field which had been mowed that week. The piled hay stood in rounded heaps, suggestive to Kennaston of shaggy giant heads bursting through the soil, as in the old myth of Cadmus and the dragon’s teeth; beyond were glittering cornfields, whose tremulous green was shot with brown and sickly yellow now, and which displayed a host of tassels like ruined plumes. Autumn was at hand. And as Kennaston approached, a lark—as though shot vehemently from the ground—rose singing. Straight into the air it rose, and was lost in the sun’s abating brilliance; but still you could hear its singing; and then, as suddenly, the bird dropped earthward.
Kennaston snapped his fingers. “Aha, my old acquaintance!” he said, “but now I envy you no longer!” Then he walked onward, thinking. …
“What did I think of?” he said, long afterward—“oh, of nothing with any real clarity. You see—I touched mystery everywhere. …
“But I thought of Kathleen’s first kiss, and of the first time I came to her alone after we were married, and of our baby that was born dead. … I was happier than I had ever been in any dream. … I saw that the ties of our ordinary life here in the flesh have their own mystic strength and sanctity. I comprehended why in our highest sacrament we prefigure with holy awe, not things of the mind and spirit, but flesh and blood. … A man and his wife, barring stark severance, grow with time to be one person, you see; and it is not so much the sort of person as the indivisibility that matters with them. …
“And I thought of how in evoking that poor shadow of Ettarre which figures in my book, I had consciously written of my dear wife as I remembered her when we were young together. My vocabulary and my ink went to the making of the book’s Ettarre: but with them went Kathleen’s youth and purity and tenderness and serenity and loving-kindness toward all created things save the women I had flirted with—so that she contributed more than I. …
“And I saw that the good-smelling earth about my pudgy pasty body, and my familiar home—as I turned back my pudgy pasty face toward Alcluid, bathed now in the sun’s gold—were lovely kindly places. Outside were kings and wars and thunderous zealots, and groaning, rattling thunderous printing-presses, too, that were turning off a book called The Tinctured Veil, whereinto had been distilled and bottled up the very best that was in Felix Kennaston; but here was just ‘a citadel of peace in the heart of the trouble.’ And—well, I was satisfied. People do not think much when they are satisfied.”
But he did not walk long; for it was growing chilly, as steadily dusk deepend, in this twilight so like that in which Horvendile had left Storisende forever.
XXXVIII
One Way of Elusion
Kathleen was seated at the dressing-table, arranging her hair, when Kennaston came again into her rooms. He went forward, and without speaking, laid one hand upon each shoulder.
Now for an instant their eyes met in the mirror; and the woman’s face he saw there, or seemed to see there, yearned toward him, and was unutterably loving, and compassionate, and yet was resolute in its denial. For it denied him, no matter with what wistful tenderness, or with what wonder at his folly. Just for a moment he seemed to see that; and then he doubted, for Kathleen’s lips lifted complaisantly to his, and Kathleen’s matter-of-fact face was just as he was used to seeing it.
And thus, with no word uttered, Felix Kennaston understood that his wife must disclaim any knowledge of the sigil of Scoteia, should he be bold enough to speak of it. He knew he would never dare to speak of it in that constricted hidebound kindly life which he and Kathleen shared in the flesh. To speak of it would mean to become forthwith what people glibly called insane. So Horvendile and Ettarre were parted for all time. And Kathleen willed this, no matter with what wistful tenderness, and because of motives which he would never know—for how could one tell what was going on inside that small round head his hand was caressing? Still, he could guess at her reasons; and he comprehended now that Ettarre had spoken a very terrible truth—“All men I must evade at the last, and innumerable are the ways of my elusion.”
“Well, dear,” he said aloud; “and was it a pleasant party?”
“Oh, so-so,” Kathleen conceded; “but it was rather a mixed crowd. Hadn’t you better hurry and change your clothes, Felix? It is almost dinnertime, and, you know, we have seats for the theater tonight.”
Quite as if he, too, were thinking of trifles, Felix Kennaston took up the two bits of metal. “I have often wondered what this design meant,” he said, idly—not looking at her, and hopeful that this much allusion at least was permitted to what they dared not speak of openly.
“Perhaps Mr. Harrowby could tell you.” Kathleen also spoke as with indifference—not looking at him, but into the mirror, and giving deft final touches to her hair.
“Eh—?” Kennaston smiled. “Oh, yes, Dick Harrowby, I grant you, has dabbled a bit in occult matters, but hardly deep enough, I fancy, to explain—this.”
“At all events,” Kathleen considered, “it is a quarter to seven already, and we have seats for the theater tonight.”
He cleared his throat. “Shall I keep this, or you?”
“Why, for heaven’s sake—! The thing is of no value now, Felix. Give it to me.” She dropped the two pieces of metal into the wastebasket by the dressing-table, and rose impatiently. “Of course if you don’t mean to change for dinner—”
He shrugged and gave it up.
So they dined alone together, sharing a taciturn meal, and duly witnessed the drolleries of The Gutta-Percha Girl. Kennaston’s sleep afterward was sound and dreamless.
XXXIX
Past Storisende Fares the Road of Use and Wont
He read The Tinctured Veil in print, with curious wistful wonder. “How did I come to write it?” was his thought.
Thereafter Felix Kennaston, as the world knows, wrote no more books, save to collect his later verses into a volume. “I am afraid to write against the author of The Tinctured Veil,” he was wont flippantly to declare. And a few of us suspected even then that he spoke the absolute truth.
Meanwhile, Mr. and Mrs. Kennaston continued their round of decorous social duties: their dinner-parties were chronicled in the Lichfield Courier-Herald; and Kennaston delivered, by request, two scholarly addresses before the Lichfield Woman’s Club, was duly brought forward to shake hands with all celebrities who visited the city, and served acceptably in the vestry of his church.
Was Felix Kennaston content?—that is a question he alone could have answered.
“But why shouldn’t I have been?” he said, a little later, in reply to the point-blank query. “I had a handsome home, two motors, money in four banks, and a good-looking wife who loved and coddled me. The third prince gets no more at the end of any fairy tale. Still, the old woman spoke the truth, of course—one pays as one goes out. … Oh, yes, one pays!—that is an inevitable rule; but what you have to pay is not exorbitant, all things considered. … So, be off with your crude pessimisms, Harrowby!”
And indeed, when one comes to think, he was in no worse case than any other husband of his standing. “Who wins his love must lose her,” as no less tunefully than wisely sings one of our poets—a married bard, you may be sure—and all experience tends to prove his warbling perfectly veracious. Romancers, from Time’s nonage, have invented and have manipulated a host of staple severances for their puppet lovers—sedulously juggling, ever since Menander’s heyday, with compromising letters and unscrupulous rivals and shipwrecks and wills and testy parents and whatnot—and have contrived to show love overriding these barriers plausibly enough. But he must truly be a boldfaced rhapsodist who dared at outset marry his puppets, to each other, and tell you how their love remained unchanged.
I am thus digressing, in obsolete Thackerayan fashion, to twaddle about love-matches alone. People marry through a variety of other reasons, and with varying results: but to marry for love is to invite inevitable tragedy. There needs no side-glancing here at such crass bankruptcies of affection as end in homicide or divorce proceedings, or even just in daily squabbling: these dramas are of the body. They may be taken as the sardonic comedies, or at their most outrageous as the blustering cheap melodramas, of existence; and so lie beyond the tragic field. For your true right tragedy is enacted on the stage of a man’s soul, with the man’s reason as lone auditor.
And being happily married—but how shall I word it? Let us step into the very darkest corner. Now, my dear Mr. Grundy, your wife is a credit to her sex, an ornament to her circle, and the mainstay of your home; and you, sir, are proverbially the most complacent and uxorious of 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 this tale. …
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 his legs the other way—“when I have been telling you, from alpha to omega, what is the one great thing the sigil taught me—that everything in life is miraculous. For the sigil taught me that it rests within the power of each of us to awaken at will from a dragging nightmare of life made up of unimportant tasks and tedious useless little habits, to see life as it really is, and to rejoice in its exquisite wonderfulness. If the sigil were proved to be the top of a tomato-can, it would not alter that big fact, nor my fixed faith. No, Harrowby, the common names we call things by do not matter—except to show how very dull we are,” he ended, with that irritating little noise that was nearly a snigger, and just missed being a cough.
And I was sorely tempted. … You see, I never liked Felix Kennaston. The man could create beauty, to outlive him; but in his own appearance he combined grossness with insignificance, and he added thereto a variety of ugly senseless little mannerisms. He could evolve interesting ideas, as to Omnipotence, the universe, art, life, religion, himself, his wife, a candlestick or a comet—anything—and very probably as to me; but his preferences and his limitations would conform and color all these ideas until they were precisely what he desired to believe, no more or less; and, having them, he lacked means, or courage, to voice his ideas adequately, so that to talk with him meant a dull interchange of commonplaces. Again, he could aspire toward chivalric love, that passion which sees in womankind High God made manifest in the loveliest and most perfect of His creations; but in the quest he had succeeded merely in utilizing womenfolk either as toys to play with and put by or as drudges to wait on him; yet, with all this, he could retain unshaken his faith in and his worship of that ideal woman. He could face no decision without dodging; no temptation without compromise; and he lied, as if by instinct, at the threatened approach of discomfort or of his fellows’ disapproval: yet devils, men and seraphim would conspire in vain in any effort to dissuade him from his self-elected purpose. For, though he would do no useful labor he could possibly avoid, he could grudge nothing to the perfection of his chosen art, in striving to perpetuate the best as he saw it.
In short, to me this man seemed an inadequate kickworthy creature, who had muddled away the only life he was quite certain of enjoying, in contemplation of a dream; and who had, moreover, despoiled the lives of others, too, for the dream’s sake. To him the dream alone could matter—his proud assurance that life was not a blind and aimless business, not all a hopeless waste and confusion; and that he, this gross weak animal, could be strong and excellent and wise, and his existence a pageant of beauty and nobility. To prove this dream was based on a delusion would be no doubt an enjoyable retaliation, for Kennaston’s being so unengaging to the eye and so stupid to talk to; but it would make the dream no whit less lovely or less dear to him—or to the rest of us, either.
For it occurred to me that his history was, in essentials, the history of our race, thus far. All I advanced for or against him, equally, was true of all men that have ever lived. … For it is in this inadequate flesh that each of us must serve his dream; and so, must fail in the dream’s service, and must parody that which he holds dearest. To this we seem condemned, being what we are. Thus, one and all, we play false to the dream, and it evades us, and we dwindle into responsible citizens. And yet always thereafter—because of many abiding memories—we know, assuredly, that 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.” …
It was in appropriate silence, therefore, that I regarded Felix Kennaston, as a parable. The man was not merely very human; he was humanity. And I reflected that it is only by preserving faith in human dreams that we may, after all, perhaps some day make them come true.