XVI
They Come to a High Place
He was looking down at the most repulsive old woman he had ever seen. Hers was the abhorrent fatness of a spider; her flesh appeared to have the coloring and consistency of dough. She sat upon the stone pavement, knitting; her eyes, which raised to his unblinkingly, were black, secretive, and impersonally malevolent; and her jaws stirred without ceasing, in a loose chewing motion, so that the white hairs, rooted in the big mole on her chin, twitched and glittered in the sunlight.
“But one does not pay on entering,” she was saying. “One pays as one goes out. It is the rule.”
“And what do you knit, mother?” Kennaston asked her.
“Eh, I shall never know until God’s funeral is preached,” the old woman said. “I only know it is forbidden me to stop.”
So he went past her, aware that through some nameless grace the girl whom he had twice seen in dreams awaited him there, and that the girl’s face was the face of Ettarre. She stood by a stone balustrade, upon which squatted tall stone monsters—weird and haphazard collocations, as touched anatomy, of bird and brute and fiend—and she in common with these hobgoblins looked down upon a widespread comely city. The time was a bright and windy morning in spring; and the sky, unclouded, was like an inverted cup which did not merely roof Ettarre and the man who had come back to her, but enclosed them in incommunicable isolation. To the left, beyond shimmering treetops, so far beneath them that it made Felix Kennaston dizzy to look, the ruffling surface of a river gleamed. … It was in much this fashion, he recalled, that Ettarre and Horvendile had stood alone together among the turrets of Storisende.
“But now I wonder where on the face of—or, rather, so far above the face of what especial planet we may happen to be?” Kennaston marveled happily—“or east of the sun or west of the moon? At all events, it hardly matters. Suffice it that we are in love’s land today. Why worry over one particular inexplicable detail, where everything is incomprehensible?”
“I was never here before, Horvendile; and I have waited for you so long.”
He looked at her; and again his heart moved with glad adoration. It was not merely that Ettarre was so pleasing to the eye, and distinguished by so many delicate clarities of color—so young, so quick of movement, so slender, so shapely, so inexpressibly virginal—but the heady knowledge that here on dizzying heights he, Felix Kennaston, was somehow playing with superhuman matters, and that no power could induce him to desist from his delicious and perilous frolic, stirred, in deep recesses of his being, nameless springs. Nameless they must remain; for it was as though he had discovered himself to possess a sixth sense; and he found that the contrivers of language, being less prodigally gifted, had never been at need to invent any terms wherewith to express this sense’s gratification. But he knew that he was strong and admirable; that men and men’s affairs lay far beneath him; that Ettarre belonged to him; and, most vividly of all, that the exultance which possessed him was a byproduct of an unstable dream.
“Yet it is not any city of today,” he was saying. “Look, how yonder little rascal glitters—he is wearing a helmet of some sort and a gorget. Why, all those pygmies, if you look closely, go in far braver scarlets and purples than we elect to skulk about in nowadays; and there is not an office-building or an electric-light advertisement of chewing-gum in sight. No, that hotchpotch of huddled gables and parapets and towers shaped like lanterns was stolen straight out of some Doré illustration for Rabelais or Les Contes Drolatiques. But it does not matter at all, and it will never matter, where we may chance to be, Ettarre. What really and greatly matters, is that when I try to touch you everything vanishes.”
The girl was frankly puzzled. “Yes, that seems a part of the sigil’s magic. …”
XVII
Of the Sigil and One Use of It
It proved that this was indeed a part of the sigil’s wonder-working: Kennaston learned by experience that whenever, even by accident, he was about to touch Ettarre his dream would end like a burst bubble. He would find himself alone and staring at the gleaming fragment of metal.
Before long he also learned something concerning the sigil of Scoteia, of which this piece of metal once formed a part; for it was permitted him to see the sigil in its entirety, many centuries before it was shattered: it was then one of the treasures of the Didascalion, a peculiar sort of girls’ school in King Ptolemy Physcon’s city of Alexandria, where women were tutored to honor fittingly the power which this sigil served. But it is not expedient to speak clearly concerning this; and the real name of the sigil was, of course, quite different from that which Kennaston had given it in his romance.
So began an odd divided life for Felix Kennaston. At first he put his half of the sigil in an envelope, which he did in a desk in the library, under a pile of his dead uncle’s unused bookplates; whence, when occasion served, it was taken out in order that when held so as to reflect the lamplight—for this was always necessary—it might induce the desired dream of Ettarre.
Later Kennaston thought of an expedient by which to prolong his dreams. Nightly he lighted and set by his bedside a stump of candle. Its tiny flame, after he had utilized its reflection, would harmlessly burn out while his body slept with a bit of metal in one hand; and he would be freed of Felix Kennaston for eight hours uninterruptedly. To have left an electric-light turned on until he awakened, would in the end have exposed him to detection and the not-impossible appointment of a commission in lunacy; and he recognized the potentialities of such mischance with frank distaste. As affairs sped, however, he could without great difficulty buy his candles in secret. He was glad now he was well-to-do, if only because, as an incidental result of materially bettered fortunes, he and his wife had separate bedrooms.
XVIII
Treats of a Prelate and, in Part, of Pigeons
The diurnal part of Kennaston’s life was largely devoted to writing The Tinctured Veil—that amazing performance which he subsequently gave to a bewildered world. And for the rest, his waking life went on in the old round.
But this is not—save by way of an occasional parenthesis—a chronicle of Felix Kennaston’s doings in the flesh. You may find all that in Mr. Froser’s Biography. Flippant, inefficient and moody, Felix Kennaston was not in the flesh particularly engaging; and in writing this record it is necessary to keep his fat corporeal personality in the background as much as may be possible, lest it should cause you, as it so often induced us of Lichfield, to find the man repellent, and nothing more.
Now it befell that this spring died Bishop Arkwright—of the Cathedral of the Bleeding Heart—and many dignitaries of his faith journeyed to Lichfield to attend the funeral. Chief among these was a prelate who very long ago had lived in Lichfield, when he was merely a bishop. Kennaston was no little surprised to receive a note informing him that this eminent churchman would be pleased to see Mr. Felix Kennaston that evening at the Bishop’s House.
The prelate sat alone in a sparsely furnished, rather dark, and noticeably dusty room. He was like a lean effigy carved in time-yellowed ivory, and his voice was curiously ingratiating. Kennaston recognized with joy that this old man talked like a person in a book, in completed sentences and picked phrases, instead of employing the fragmentary verbal shorthand of ordinary Lichfieldian conversation: and Kennaston, to whom the slovenliness of fairly cultured people’s daily talk was always a mystery and an irritant, fell with promptitude into the same tone.
The prelate, it developed, had when he lived in Lichfield known Kennaston’s dead uncle—“for whom I had the highest esteem, and whose friendship I valued most dearly.” He hoped that Kennaston would pardon the foibles of old age and overlook this trespass upon Kennaston’s time. For the prelate had, he said, really a personal interest in the only surviving relative of his dead friend.
“There is a portrait of you, sir, in my library—very gorgeous, in full canonicals—just as my uncle left the room,” said Kennaston, all at sea. But the prelate had begun to talk—amiably, and in the most commonplace fashion conceivable—of his former life in Lichfield, and of the folk who had lived there then, and to ask questions about their descendants, which Kennaston answered as he best could. The whole affair was puzzling Kennaston, for he could think of no reason why this frail ancient gentleman should have sent for a stranger, even though that stranger were the nephew of a dead friend, just that they might discuss trivialities.
So their talking veered, as it seemed, at random. …
“Yes, I was often a guest at Alcluid—a very beautiful home it was in those days, famed, as I remember, for the many breeds of pigeons which your uncle amused himself by maintaining. I suppose that you also raise white pigeons, my son?”
Kennaston saw that the prelate now held a small square mirror in his left hand. “No, sir,” Kennaston answered evenly; “there were a great many about the place when it came into our possession; but we have never gone in very seriously for farming.”
“The pigeon has so many literary associations that I should have thought it would appeal to a man of letters,” the prelate continued. “I ought to have said earlier perhaps that I read Men Who Loved Alison with great interest and enjoyment. It is a notable book. Yet in dealing with the sigil of Scoteia—or so at least it seemed to me—you touched upon subjects which had better be left undisturbed. There are drugs, my son, which work much good in the hands of the skilled physician, but cannot be entrusted without danger to the vulgar.”
He spoke gently; yet it appeared to Kennaston a threat was voiced.
“Sir,” Kennaston began, “I must tell you that in writing of the sigil—as I called it—I designed to employ only such general terms as romance ordinarily accords to talismans. All I wrote—I thought—was sheer invention. It is true I found by accident a bit of metal, from which I derived the idea of my so-called sigil’s appearance. That bit of metal was to me then just a bit of metal; nor have I any notion, even today, as to how it came to be lying in one of my own garden-paths.”
He paused. The prelate nodded. “It is always interesting to hear whence makers of creative literature draw their material,” he stated.
“Since then, sir, by the drollest of coincidences, a famous personage has spoken to me in almost the identical words you employed this evening, as to the sigil of Scoteia. The coincidence, sir, lay less in what was said than in the apparently irrelevant allusion to white pigeons which the personage too made, and the little mirror which he too held as he spoke. Can you not see, sir,” Kennaston asked gaily, “to what wild imaginings the coincidence tempts a weaver of romance? I could find it in my heart to believe it the cream of an ironic jest that you great ones of the earth have tested me with a password, mistakenly supposing that I, also, was initiate. I am tempted to imagine some secret understanding, some hidden cooperancy, by which you strengthen or, possibly, have attained your power. Confess, sir, is not the coincidence a droll one?”
He spoke lightly, but his heart was beating fast.
“It is remarkable enough,” the prelate conceded, smiling. He asked the name of the personage whom coincidence linked with him, and being told it, chuckled. “I do not think it very odd he carried a mirror,” the prelate considered. “He lives before a mirror, and behind a megaphone. I confess—mea culpa!—I often find my little looking-glass a convenience, in making sure all is right before I go into the pulpit. Not a few men in public life, I believe, carry such mirrors,” he said, slowly. “But you, I take it, have no taste for public life?”
“I can assure you—” Kennaston began.
“Think well, my son! Suppose, for one mad instant, that your wild imaginings were not wholly insane? suppose that you had accidentally stumbled upon enough of a certain secret to make it simpler to tell you the whole mystery? Cannot a trained romancer conceive what you might hope for then?”
Very still it was in the dark room. …
Kennaston was horribly frightened. “I can assure you, sir, that even then I would prefer my peaceful lazy life and my dreams. I have not any aptitude for action.”
“Ah, well,” the prelate estimated; “it is scarcely a churchman’s part to play advocatus mundi. Believe me, I would not tempt you from your books. And for our dreams, I have always held heretically, we are more responsible than for our actions, since it is what we are, uninfluenced, that determines our dreams.” He seemed to meditate. “I will not tempt you, therefore, to tell me the whole truth concerning that bit of metal. I suspect, quite candidly, you are keeping something back, my son. But you exercise a privilege common to all of us.”
“At least,” said Kennaston, “we will hope my poor wits may not be shaken by any more—coincidences.”
“I am tolerably certain,” quoth the prelate, with an indulgent smile, “that there will be no more coincidences.”
Then he gave Kennaston his stately blessing; and Kennaston went back to his life of dreams.
XIX
Local Laws of Nephelococcygia
There was no continuity in these dreams save that Ettarre was in each of them. A dream would usually begin with some lightheaded topsyturviness, as when Kennaston found himself gazing forlornly down at his remote feet—having grown so tall that they were yards away from him and he was afraid to stand up—or lean strangers carefully and gruesomely explained the importance of the task set him by quoting fragments of the multiplication tables, or a mad bull who happened to be the King of Spain was pursuing him through a city of blind people. But presently, as dregs settle a little by a little in a glass of water and leave it clear, his dreamworld would become rational and compliant with familiar natural laws, and Ettarre would be there—desirable above all other contents of the universe, and not to be touched under penalty of ending all.
Sometimes they would be alone in places which he did not recognize, sometimes they would be living, under the Stuarts or the Valois or the Caesars, or other dynasties long since unkingdomed, human lives whose obligations and imbroglios affected Horvendile and Ettarre to much that half-serious concern with which one follows the action of a romance or a well-acted play; for it was perfectly understood between Horvendile and Ettarre that they were involved in the affairs of a dream.
Ettarre seemed to remember nothing of the happenings Kennaston had invented in his book. And Guiron and Maugis d’Aigremont and Count Emmerick and the other people in The Audit at Storisende—once more to give Men Who Loved Alison its original title—were names that rang familiar to her somehow, she confessed, but without her knowing why. And so, Kennaston came at last to comprehend that perhaps the Ettarre he loved was not the heroine of his book inexplicably vivified; but, rather, that in the book he had, just as inexplicably, drawn a blurred portrait of the Ettarre he loved, that ageless lovable and loving woman of whom all poets had been granted fitful broken glimpses—dimly prefiguring her advent into his life too, with pallid and feeble visionings. But of this he was not ever sure; nor did he greatly care, now that he had his dreams.
There was, be it repeated, no continuity in these dreams save that Ettarre was in each of them; that alone they had in common: but each dream conformed to certain general laws. For instance, there was never any confusion of time—that is, a dream extended over precisely the amount of time he actually slept, so that each dream-life was limited to some eight hours or thereabouts. No dream was ever iterated, nor did he ever twice find himself in the same surroundings as touched chronology; thus, he was often in Paris and Constantinople and Alexandria and Rome and London, revisiting even the exact spot, the very street-corner, which had figured in some former dream; but as terrestrial time went, the events of his first dream would either have happened years ago or else not be due to happen until a great while later.
He never dreamed of absolutely barbaric or orderless epochs, nor of happenings (so far as he could ascertain) elsewhere than in Europe and about the Mediterranean coasts; even within these confines his dreams were as a rule restricted to urban matters, rarely straying beyond city walls: his hypothesis in explanation of these facts was curious, but too finespun to be here repeated profitably.
For a while Kennaston thought these dreams to be bits of lives he had lived in previous incarnations; later he was inclined to discard this view. He never to his knowledge lived through precisely the same moment in two different capacities and places; but more than once he came within a few years of doing this, so that even had he died immediately after the earlier-timed dream, it would have been impossible for him to have been reborn and reach the age he had attained in that dream whose period was only a trifle later. In his dreams Kennaston’s age varied slightly, but was almost always in pleasant proximity to twenty-five. Thus, he was in Jerusalem on the day of the Crucifixion and was aged about twenty-three; yet in another dream he was at Capreae when Tiberius died there, seven years afterward, and Kennaston was then still in the early twenties: and, again, he was in London, at Whitehall, in 1649, and at Vaux-le-Vicomte near Fontainebleau in 1661, being on each occasion twenty-three or -four. Kennaston could suggest no explanation of this.
He often regretted that he was never in any dream anybody of historical prominence, so that he could have found out what became of him after the dream ended. But though he sometimes talked with notable persons—inwardly gloating meanwhile over his knowledge of what would be the outcome of their warfaring or statecraft, and of the manner and even the hour of their deaths—he himself seemed fated, as a rule, never to be anyone of importance in the world’s estimation. Indeed, as Kennaston cheerfully recognized, his was not a temperament likely to succeed, as touched material matters, in any imaginable state of society; there was not, and never had been, any workaday world in which—as he had said at Storisende—he and his like would not, in so far as temporal prizes were concerned, appear to waste at loose ends and live futilely. Then, moreover, in each dream he was woefully hampered by inability to recall preceding events in the life he was then leading, which handicap doomed him to redoubled inefficiencies. But that did not matter now, in view of his prodigal recompenses. …
It was some while before the man made the quaint discovery that in these dreams he did not in any way resemble Felix Kennaston physically. They were astray in an autumn forest, resting beside a small fire which he had kindled in the shelter of a boulder, when Ettarre chanced to speak of his brown eyes, and thereby to perplex him. But there was in this dream nothing which would reflect his countenance; and it was later, in Troy Town (Laomedon ruled the city then, and Priam they saw as a lad playing at marbles in a paved courtyard, where tethered oxen watched him over curiously painted mangers) that Kennaston looked into a steel mirror, framed with intertwined ivory serpents that had emeralds for eyes, and found there a puzzled stranger.
Thus it was he discovered that in these dreams he was a tall lean youngster, with ruddy cheeks, wide-set brown eyes, and a smallish head covered with crisp tight-curling dark-red hair; nor did his appearance ever alter, to his knowledge, in any subsequent dream. What he saw was so different from the pudgy pasty man of forty-odd who, he knew, lay at this moment in Felix Kennaston’s bed, breathing heavily and clasping a bit of metal in his pudgy hand, that the stranger in the mirror laughed appreciatively.
XX
Of Divers Fleshly Riddles
A little by a little he was beginning to lose interest in that pudgy pasty man of forty-odd who was called Felix Kennaston, and to handle his affairs more slackly. Once or twice Kennaston caught his wife regarding him furtively, with a sort of anxious distrust. …
Let there be no mistake here: Felix Kennaston had married a woman admirably suited to him, and he had never regretted that act. Nor with the advent of Ettarre, did he regret it: and never at any time would he have considered separating his diurnal existence from that of his thin beady-eyed capable wife, with graver seriousness than he would have accorded, say, to a rambling notion of some day being gripped in a trap and having no way to escape save by cutting off one of his feet. His affection for Kathleen was well-founded, proved, and understood; but, as it happens, this narrative does not chance to deal with that affection. And besides, what there was to tell concerning Kennaston’s fondness for his wife was duly set forth years ago.
Meanwhile, it began vaguely to be rumored among Kennaston’s associates that he drank more than was good for him; and toward “drugs” also sped the irresponsible arrows of surmise. He himself noticed, without much interest, that daily he, who had once been garrulous, was growing more chary of speech; and that his attention was apt to wander when the man’s or woman’s face before him spoke at any length. These shifting faces talked of wars and tariffs and investments and the weather and committee-meetings, and of having seen So-and-so and of So-and-so’s having said this-or-that, and it all seemed of importance to the wearers of these faces; so that he made pretense to listen, patiently. What did it matter?
It did not matter a farthing, he considered, for he had cheated life of its main oppression, which is loneliness. Now at last Felix Kennaston could unconcernedly acknowledge that human beings develop graveward in continuous solitude.
His life until this had been in the main normal, with its due share of normal intimacies with parents, kinsmen, friends, a poet’s ordinary allotment of sweethearts, and, chief of all, with his wife. No one of these people, as he reflected in a comminglement of yearning and complacency, had ever comprehended the real Felix Kennaston as he existed, in all his hampered strugglings and meannesses, his inadequacies and his divine unexercised potentialities.
And he, upon the other hand, knew nothing of these people with any certainty. Pettifoggeries were too easily practiced in speech or gesture, emotions were too often feigned or overcolored in expression, and unpopular thoughts were too instinctively dissembled, as he forlornly knew by his own conduct of daily life, for him to put very zealous faith in any information gained through his slender fallible five senses; and it was the cream of the jest that through these five senses lay his only means of getting any information whatever.
All that happened to him, he considered, happened inside his skull. Nothing which happened in the big universe affected him in the least except as it roused certain forces lodged in his skull. His life consisted of one chemical change after another, haphazardly provoked in some three pounds of fibrous matter tucked inside his skull. And so, people’s heads took on a new interest; how was one to guess what was going on in those queer round boxes, inset with eyes, as people so glibly called certain restive and glinting things that moved in partial independence of their setting, and seemed to have an individual vitality—those queer round boxes whence vegetation sprouted as from the soil of a planet?
Perhaps—he mused—perhaps in reality all heads were like isolated planets, with impassable space between each and its nearest neighbor. You read in the newspapers every once in a while that, because of one-or-another inexplicable phenomenon, Mars was supposed to be attempting to communicate with the Earth; and perhaps it was in just such blurred and unsatisfactory fashion that what happened in one human head was signaled to another, on those rare occasions when the signal was despatched in entire good faith. Yes, a perpetual isolation, for all the fretful and vain strivings of humanity against such loneliness, was probably a perdurable law in all other men’s lives, precisely as it had been in his own life until the coming of Ettarre.
XXI
In Pursuit of a Whisper
Nightly he went adventuring with Ettarre: and they saw the cities and manners of many men, to an extent undreamed-of by Ithaca’s mundivagant king; and among them even those three persons who had most potently influenced human life.
For once, in an elongated room with buff-colored walls—having scarlet hangings over its windows, and seeming larger than it was in reality, because of its many mirrors—they foregathered with Napoleon, on the evening of his coronation: the emperor of half-Europe was fretting over an awkward hitch in the day’s ceremony, caused by his sisters’ attempt to avoid carrying the Empress Josephine’s train; and he was grumbling because the old French families continued to ignore him, as a parvenu. In a neglected orchard, sun-steeped and made drowsy by the murmur of bees, they talked with Shakespeare; the playwright, his nerves the worse for the preceding night’s potations, was peevishly complaining of the meager success of his later comedies, worrying over Lord Pembroke’s neglect of him, and trying to concoct a masque in the style of fat Ben Jonson, since that was evidently what the theater-patronizing public wanted. And they were with Pontius Pilate in Jerusalem, on the evening of a day when the sky had been black and the earth had trembled; and Pilate, benevolent and replete with supper, was explaining the latest theories concerning eclipses and earthquakes to his little boy, and chuckling with fond pride in the youngster’s intelligent questions.
These three were a few among the prominent worthies of remoter days whom Kennaston was enabled to view as they appeared in the flesh; but, as a rule, chance thrust him into the company of mediocre people living ordinary lives amid surroundings which seemed outlandish to him, but to them a matter of course. And everywhere, in every age, it seemed to him, men stumbled amiable and shatter-pated through a jungle of miracles, blind to its wonderfulness, and intent to gain a little money, food and sleep, a trinket or two, some rare snatched fleeting moments of rantipole laughter, and at the last a decent bed to die in. He, and he only, it seemed to Felix Kennaston, could see the jungle and all its awe-inspiring beauty, wherethrough men scurried like feebleminded ants.
He often wondered whether any other man had been so licensed as himself; and prowling, as he presently did, in odd byways of printed matter—for he found the library of his predecessor at Alcluid a mine rich-veined with strangeness—Kennaston lighted on much that appeared to him significant. Even such apparently unrelated matters as the doctrine of metempsychosis, all the grotesque literature of witches, sorcerers and familiar spirits, and of muses who actually prompted artistic composition with audible voices, were beginning to fall into cloudily-discerned interlocking. Kennaston read much nowadays in his dead uncle’s books; and he often wished that, even at the expense of Felix Kennaston’s being reduced again to poverty, it were possible to revivify the man who had amassed and read these books. Kennaston wanted to talk with him.
Meanwhile, Kennaston read of Endymion and Numa, of Iason and Anchises, of Tannhäuser, and Foulques Plantagenet, and Raymondin de la Forêt, and Olger Danske, and other mortal men to whom old legend-weavers, as if wistfully, accredited the love of immortal mistresses—and of less fortunate nympholepts, frail babbling planet-stricken folk, who had spied by accident upon an inhuman loveliness, and so, must pine away consumed by foiled desire of a beauty which the homes and cities and the tilled places of men did not afford, and life did not bring forth sufficingly. He read Talmudic tales of Sulieman-ben-Daoud—even in name transfigured out of any resemblance to an amasser of reliable axioms—that proud luxurious despot “who went daily to the comeliest of the spirits for wisdom”; and of Arthur and the Lady Nimuë; and of Thomas of Ercildoune, whom the Queen of Faëry drew from the merchants’ marketplace with ambiguous kindnesses; and of John Faustus, who “through fantasies and deep cogitations” was enabled to woo successfully a woman that died long before his birth, and so won to his love, as the book recorded, “this stately pearl of Greece, fair Helena, the wife to King Menelaus.”
And, as has been said, the old idea of muses who actually prompted artistic composition, with audible voices, took on another aspect. He came to suspect that other creative writers had shared such a divided life as his was now, for of this he seemed to find traces here and there. Coleridge offered at once an arresting parallel. Yes, Kennaston reflected; and Coleridge had no doubt spoken out in the first glow of wonder, astounded into a sort of treason, when he revealed how he wrote “Kubla Khan;” so that thus perhaps Coleridge had told far more concerning the origin of this particular poem than he ever did as to his later compositions. Then, also, I have a volume of Herrick from Kennaston’s library with curious comments penciled therein, relative to “Lovers How They Come and Part” and “His Mistress Calling Him to Elysium;” a copy of Marlowe’s Tragical History of Doctor Faustus is similarly annotated; and on a flyleaf in Forster’s Life of Charles Dickens, apropos of passages in the first chapter of the ninth book, Kennaston has inscribed strange speculations very ill suited to general reading. All that Kennaston cared to print, however, concerning the hypothesis he eventually evolved, you will find in The Tinctured Veil, where he has nicely refrained from too-explicit writing, and—of course—does not anywhere point-blank refer to his personal experiences.
Then Kennaston ran afoul of the Rosicrucians, and their quaint dogmas, which appeared so preposterous at first, took on vital meanings presently; and here too he seemed to surprise the cautious whispering of men who neither cared nor dared to speak with candor of all they knew. It seemed to him he understood that whispering which was everywhere apparent in human history; for he too was initiate.
He wondered very often about his uncle. …
XXII
Of Truisms: Treated Reasonably
He seemed, indeed, to find food for wonder everywhere. It was as if he had awakened from a dragging nightmare of life made up of unimportant tasks and tedious useless little habits, to see life as it really was, and to rejoice in its exquisite wonderfulness.
How poignantly strange it was that life could afford him nothing save consciousness of the moment immediately at hand! Memory and anticipation, whatever else they might do—and they had important uses, of course, in rousing emotion—yet did not deal directly with reality. What you regretted, or were proud of, having done yesterday was no more real now than the deeds of Caesar Borgia or St. Paul; and what you looked forward to within the half-hour was as nonexistent as the senility of your unborn great-grandchildren. Never was man brought into contact with reality save through the evanescent emotions and sensations of that single moment, that infinitesimal fraction of a second, which was passing now. This commonplace, so simple and so old, bewildered Kennaston when he came unreservedly to recognize its truth. …
To live was to be through his senses conscious, one by one, of a restricted number of these fractions of a second. Success in life, then, had nothing to do with bank-accounts or public office, or any step toward increasing the length of one’s obituary notices, but meant to be engrossed utterly by as many as possible of these instants. And complete success required a finding, in these absorbing instants, of employment for every faculty he possessed. It was for this that Kennaston had always vaguely longed; and to this, if only in dreams, he now attained.
If only in dreams he debated: why, and was he not conscious, now, in his dreams, of every moment as it fled? And corporal life in banks and ballrooms and legislative halls and palaces, nowhere had anything more than that to offer mortal men.
It is not necessary to defend his course of reasoning; to the contrary, its fallacy is no less apparent than its conduciveness to unbusinesslike conclusions. But it is highly necessary to tell you that, according to Felix Kennaston’s account, now, turn by turn, he was in Horvendile’s person rapt by nearly every passion, every emotion, the human race has ever known. True, throughout these dramas into which chance plunged him, in that he knew always he was dreaming, he was at once performer and spectator; but he played with the born actor’s zest—feeling his part, as people say—and permitting the passion he portrayed to possess him almost completely.
Almost completely, be it repeated; for there was invariably a sufficient sense of knowing he was only dreaming to prevent entire abandonment to the raw emotion. Kennaston preferred it thus. He preferred in this more comely way to play with human passions, rather than, as seemed the vulgar use, to consent to become their battered plaything.
It pleased him, too, to be able to have done with such sensations and emotions as did not interest him; for he had merely to touch Ettarre, and the dream ended. In this fashion he would very often terminate an existence which was becoming distasteful—resorting debonairly to this sort of suicide, and thus dismissing an era’s social orderings and its great people as toys that, played with, had failed to amuse Felix Kennaston.