Part 3

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 “side-shows” 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 they did. To her superior knowledge of the feminine mind I can but bow: with the addition (quoting the same authority) that a “twoser” is a trousered individual addicted to dumbness in company and the very thrilliest sort of play-acting in _tête-à-têtes_.

At all events, I never quite liked Felix Kennaston—not even after I came to understand that the man I knew in the flesh was but a very ill-drawn likeness of Felix Kennaston. After all, that is the whole sardonic point of his story—and, indeed, of every human story—that the person you or I find in the mirror is condemned eternally to misrepresent us in the eyes of our fellows. But even with comprehension, I never cordially liked the man; and so, it may well be that his story is set down not all in sympathy.

With which Gargantuan parenthesis, in equitable warning, I return again to his story.

III

Of Idle Speculations in a Library

FELIX KENNASTON did not write very long that night. He fell idly to the droll familiar wondering how this dull fellow seated here in this luxurious room could actually be Felix Kennaston....

He was glad this spacious and subduedly-glowing place, and all the comfortable appointments of Alcluid, belonged to him. He had seen enough of the scrambling hand-to-mouth makeshifts of poverty, in poverty’s heart-depressing habitations, during the thirty-eight years he weathered before the simultaneous deaths, through a motor accident, of a semi-mythical personage known since childhood as “your Uncle Henry in Lichfield,” and of Uncle Henry’s only son as well, had raised Felix Kennaston beyond monetary frets. As yet Kennaston did not very profoundly believe in this unlooked-for turn; and in the library of his fine house in particular he had still a sense of treading alien territory under sufferance.

Yet it was a territory which tempted exploration with alluring vistas. Kennaston had always been, when there was time for it, “very fond of reading,” as his wife was used to state in tones of blended patronage and apology. Kathleen Kennaston, in the old days of poverty, had declaimed too many pilfered dicta concerning literary matters to retain any liking for them.

As possibly you may recall, for some years after the death of her first husband, Kathleen Eppes Saumarez had earned precarious bread and butter as a lecturer before women’s clubs, and was more or less engaged in journalism, chiefly as a reviewer of current literature. For all books she had thus acquired an abiding dislike. In particular, I think, she loathed the two volumes of “woodland tales” collected in those necessitous years, from her Woman’s Page in the _Lichfield Courier-Herald_, for the fickle general reading public, which then used to follow the life-histories of Bazoo the Bear and Mooshwa the Mink, and other “citizens of the wild,” with that incalculable unanimity which to-day may be reserved for the biographies of optimistic orphans, and to-morrow veers to _vies intimes_ of high-minded courtesans with hearts of gold.... In fine, through a variety of reasons, Mrs. Kennaston quite frankly cared even less for books, as manifestations of art, than does the average tolerably honest woman to whom books do not represent a source of income.

And you may or may not remember, likewise, what Kennaston wrote, about this time, in the “Colophon” to _Men Who Loved Alison_. With increased knowledge of the author, some sentences therein, to me at least, took on larger significance:

“No one, I take it, can afford to do without books unless he be quite sure that his own day and personality are the best imaginable; and for this class of persons the most crying need is not, of course, seclusion in a library, but in a sanatorium.

“It was, instead, for the great generality, who combine a taste for travel with a dislike for leaving home, that books were by the luckiest hit invented, to confound the restrictions of geography and the almanac. In consequence, from the Ptolemies to the Capets, from the twilight of a spring dawn in Sicily to the uglier shadow of Montfaucon’s gibbet, there intervenes but the turning of a page, a choice between Theocritus and Villon. From the Athens of Herodotus to the Versailles of St.-Simon, from Naishapur to Cranford, it is equally quick traveling. All times and lands that ever took the sun, indeed, lie open, equally, to the explorer by the grace of Gutenberg; and transportation into Greece or Rome or Persia or Chicago, equally, is the affair of a moment. Then, too, the islands of Avalon and Ogygia and Theleme stay always accessible, and magic casements open readily upon the surf of Sea-coast Bohemia. For the armchair traveler alone enjoys enfranchisement of a chronology, and of a geography, that has escaped the wear-and-tear of ever actually existing.

“Peregrination in the realms of gold possesses also the quite inestimable advantage that therein one’s personality is contraband. As when Dante makes us free of Hell and Heaven, it is on the fixed condition of our actual love and hate of divers Renaissance Italians, whose exploits in the flesh require to-day the curt elucidation of a footnote, just so, admission to those high delights whereunto Shelley conducts is purchased by accrediting to clouds and skylarks—let us sanely admit—a temporary importance which we would never accord them unbiased. The traveler has for the half-hour exchanged his personality for that of his guide: such is the rule in literary highways, a very necessary traffic ordinance: and so long as many of us are, upon the whole, inferior to Dante or Shelley—or Sophocles, or Thackeray, or even Shakespeare—the change need not make entirely for loss....”

Yes, it is lightly phrased; but, after all, it is only another way of confessing that his books afforded Kennaston an avenue to forgetfulness of that fat pasty fellow whom Kennaston was heartily tired of being. For one, I find the admission significant of much, in view of what befell him afterward.

And besides—so Kennaston’s thoughts strayed at times—these massed books, which his predecessor at Alcluid had acquired piecemeal through the term of a long life, were a part of that predecessor’s personality. No other man would have gathered and have preserved precisely the same books, and each book, with varying forcefulness, had entered into his predecessor’s mind and had tinged it. These parti-colored books, could one but reconstruct the mosaic correctly, would give a candid portrait of “your Uncle Henry in Lichfield,” which would perhaps surprise all those who knew him daily in the flesh. Of the fact that these were unusual books their present owner and tentative explorer had no doubt whatever. They were perturbing books.

Now these books by their pleasant display of gold-leaf, soberly aglow in lamplight, recalled an obscure association of other tiny brilliancies; and Felix Kennaston recollected the bit of metal he had found that evening.

Laid by the lamp, it shone agreeably as Kennaston puckered his protruding brows over the characters with which it was inscribed. So far as touched his chances of deciphering them, he knew all foreign languages were to him of almost equal inscrutability. French he could puzzle out, or even Latin, if you gave him plenty of time and a dictionary; but this inscription was not in Roman lettering. He wished, with time-dulled yearning, that he had been accorded a college education....

IV

How There Was a Light in the Fog

AS she came toward him through the fog, “How annoying it is,” she was saying plaintively, “that these moors are never properly lighted.”

“Ah, but you must not blame Ole-Luk-Oie,” he protested. “It is all the fault of Beatricê Cenci....”

Then Kennaston knew he had unwittingly spoken magic words, for at once, just as he had seen it done in theaters, the girl’s face was shown him clearly in a patch of roseate light. It was the face of Ettarre.

“Things happen so in dreams,” he observed. “I know perfectly well I am dreaming, as I have very often known before this that I was dreaming. But it was always against some law to tell the people in my nightmares I quite understood they were not real people. To-day in my daydream, and here again to-night, there is no such restriction; and lovely as you are, I know that you are just a daughter of sub-consciousness or of memory or of jumpy nerves or, perhaps, of an improperly digested entrée.”

“No, I am real, Horvendile—but it is I who am dreaming you.”

“I had not thought to be a part of any woman’s dream nowadays.... Why do you call me Horvendile?”

She who bore the face of Ettarre pondered momentarily; and his heart moved with glad adoration.

“Now, by the beard of the prophet! I do not know,” the girl said, at last.

“The name means nothing to you?”

“I never heard it before. But it seemed natural, somehow—just as it did when you spoke of Ole-Luk-Oie and Beatricê Cenci.”

“But Ole-Luk-Oie is the lord and master of all dreams, of course. And that furtive long-dead Roman girl has often troubled my dreams. When I was a boy, you conceive, there was in my room at the first boarding-house in which I can remember dieting, a copy of the Guido portrait of Beatricê Cenci—a copy done in oils, a worthless daub, I suppose. But there was evil in the picture—a lurking devilishness, which waited patiently and alertly until I should do what that silent watcher knew I was predestined to do, and, being malevolent, wanted me to do. I knew nothing then of Beatricê Cenci, mark you, but when I came to learn her history I thought the world was all wrong about her. That woman was evil, whatever verse-makers may have fabled, I thought for a long while.... To-day I believe the evil emanated from the person who painted that particular copy. I do not know who that person was, I never shall know. But the black magic of that person’s work was very potent.”

And Kennaston looked about him now, to find fog everywhere—impenetrable vapors which vaguely showed pearl-colored radiancies here and there, but no determinable forms of trees or of houses, or of anything save the face of Ettarre, so clearly discerned and so lovely in that strange separate cloud of roseate light.

“Ah, yes, those little magics”—it was the girl who spoke—“those futile troubling necromancies that are wrought by portraits and unfamiliar rooms and mirrors and all time-worn glittering objects—by running waters and the wind’s persistency, and by lonely summer noons in forests—how inconsequently they fret upon men’s heart-strings!”

“As if some very feeble force—say, a maimed elf—were trying to attract your attention? Yes, I think I understand. It is droll.”

“And how droll, too, it is how quickly we communicate our thoughts—even though, if you notice, you are not really speaking, because your lips are not moving at all.”

“No, they never do in dreams. One never seems, in fact, to use one’s mouth—you never actually eat anything, you may also notice, in dreams, even though food is very often at hand. I suppose it is because all dream food is akin to the pomegranates of Persephone, so that if you taste it you cannot ever return again to the workaday world.... But why, I wonder, are we having the same dream?—it rather savors of Morphean parsimony, don’t you think, thus to make one nightmare serve for two people? Or perhaps it is the bit of metal I found this afternoon—”

And the girl nodded. “Yes, it is on account of the sigil of Scoteia. I have the other half, you know.”

“What does this mean, Ettarre—?” he began; and reaching forward, was about to touch her, when the universe seemed to fold about him, just as a hand closes....

* * * * *

And Felix Kennaston was sitting at the writing-table in the library, with a gleaming scrap of metal before him; and, as the clock showed, it was bedtime.

“Well, it is undoubtedly quaint how dreams draw sustenance from half-forgotten happenings,” he reflected; “to think of my recollecting that weird daub which used to deface my room in Fairhaven! I had forgotten Beatricê entirely. And I certainly never spoke of her to any human being, except of course to Muriel Allardyce.... But I would not be at all surprised if I had involuntarily hypnotized myself, sitting here staring at this shiny piece of lead—you read of such cases. I believe I will put it away, to play with again sometime.”

V

Of Publishing: With an Unlikely Appendix

SO Kennaston preserved this bit of metal. “No fool like an old fool,” his commonsense testily assured him. But Felix Kennaston’s life was rather barren of interests nowadays....

He thought no more of his queer dream, for a long while. Life had gone on decorously. He had completed _The Audit at Storisende_, with leisured joy in the task, striving to write perfectly of beautiful happenings such as life did not afford. There is no denying that the typed manuscript seemed to Felix Kennaston—as he added the last touches, before expressing it to Dapley & Pildriff—to inaugurate a new era in literature.

Kennaston was yet to learn that publishers in their business capacity have no especial concern with literature. To his bewilderment he discovered that publishers seemed sure the merits of a book had nothing to do with the advisability of printing it. Herewith is appended a specimen or two from Felix Kennaston’s correspondence.

DAPLEY & PILDRIFF—“We have carefully read your story, ‘The Audit at Storisende,’ which you kindly submitted to us. It is needless for us to speak of the literary quality of the story: it is in fact exquisitely done, and would delight a very limited circle of readers trained to appreciate such delicate productions. But that class of readers is necessarily small, and the general reader would, we fear, fail to recognize the book’s merit and be attracted to it. For this reason we do not feel—and we regret to confess it—that the publication of this book would be a wise business enterprise for us to undertake. We wish that we could, in justice to you and ourselves, see the matter in another light. We are returning the manuscript to you, and we remain, with appreciation of your courtesy, etc.”

PAIGE TICKNOR’S SONS—“We have given very careful consideration to your story, ‘The Audit at Storisende,’ which you kindly submitted to us. We were much interested in this romance, for it goes without saying that it is marked with high literary quality. But we feel that it would not appeal with force and success to the general reader. Its appeal, we think, would be to the small class of cultured readers, and therefore its publication would not be attended with commercial success. Therefore in your interest, as well as our own, we feel that we must give an unfavorable decision upon the question of publication. Naturally we regret to be forced to that conclusion, for the work is one which would be creditable to any publisher’s list. We return the manuscript by express, with our appreciation of your courtesy in giving us the opportunity of considering it, and are, etc.”

And so it was with The Gayvery Company, and with Leeds, McKibble & Todd, and with Stuyvesant & Brothers. Unanimously they united to praise and to return the manuscript. And Kennaston began reluctantly to suspect that, for all their polite phrases about literary excellence, his romance must, somehow, be not quite in consonance with the standards of that person who is, after all, the final arbiter of literature, and to whom these publishers very properly deferred, as “the general reader.” And Kennaston wondered if it would not be well for him, also, to study the all-important and exigent requirements of “the general reader.”

Kennaston turned to the publishers’ advertisements. Dapley & Pildriff at that time were urging every one to read _White Sepulchers_, the author of which had made public the momentous discovery that all churchgoers were not immaculate persons. Paige Ticknor’s Sons were announcing a new edition of _The Apostates_, a scathing arraignment of plutocratic iniquities, which was heralded as certain to sear the soul to its core, more than rival Thackeray, and turn our highest social circles inside out. Then the Gayvery Company offered _Through the Transom_, a daring study of “feminism,” compiled to all appearance under rather novel conditions, inasmuch as the brilliant young author had, according to the advertisements, written every sentence with his jaws set and his soul on fire. The majority of Leeds, McKibble & Todd’s adjectives were devoted to _Sarah’s Secret_, the prize-winner in the firm’s $15,000 contest—a “sprightly romance of the greenwood,” whose undoubted aim, Kennaston deduced from tentative dips into its meandering balderdash, was to become the most sought-after book, in all institutes devoted to care of the feeble-minded. And Stuyvesant & Brothers were superlatively acclaiming _The Silent Brotherhood_, the latest masterpiece of a pornographically gifted genius, who had edifyingly shown that he ranked religion above literature, by retiring from the ministry to write novels.

Kennaston laughed—upon which side of the mouth, it were too curious to inquire. Momentarily he thought of printing the book at his own expense. But here the years of poverty had left indelible traces. Kennaston had too often walked because he had not carfare, for a dollar ever again to seem to him an inconsiderable matter. Comfortably reassured as to pecuniary needs for the future, he had not the least desire to control more money than actually showed in his bank-balances: but, even so, he often smiled to note how unwillingly he spent money. So now he shrugged, and sent out his loved romance again.

* * * * *

An unlikely thing happened: the book was accepted for publication. The Baxon-Muir Company had no prodigious faith in _The Audit at Storisende_, as a commercial venture; but their “readers,” in common with most of the “readers” for the firms who had rejected it, were not lacking in discernment of its merits as an admirable piece of writing. And the more optimistic among them protested even to foresee a possibility of the book’s selling. The vast public that reads for pastime, they contended, was beginning to grow a little tired of being told how bad was this-or-that economic condition: and pretty much everything had been “daringly exposed,” to the point of weariness, from the inconsistencies of our clergy to the uncleanliness of our sausage. In addition, they considered the surprising success of Mr. Marmaduke Fennel’s eighteenth-century story, _For Love of a Lady_, as compared with the more moderate sales of Miss Elspeth Lancaster’s _In Scarlet Sidon_, that candid romance of the brothel; deducing therefrom that the “gadzooks” and “by’r lady” type of reading-matter was ready to revive in vogue. At all events, the Baxon-Muir Company, after holding a rather unusual number of conferences, declared their willingness to publish this book; and in due course they did publish it.

There were before this, however, for Kennaston many glad hours of dabbling with proofsheets: the tale seemed so different, and so infernally good, in print. Kennaston never in his life found any other playthings comparable to those first wide-margined “galley proofs” of _The Audit at Storisende_. Here was the word, vexatiously repeated within three lines, which must be replaced by a synonym; and the clause which, when transposed, made the whole sentence gain in force and comeliness; and the curt sentence whose addition gave clarity to the paragraph, much as a pinch of alum clears turbid water; and the vaguely unsatisfactory adjective, for which a jet of inspiration suggested a substitute, of vastly different meaning, in the light of whose inevitable aptness you marveled over your preliminary obtuseness:—all these slight triumphs, one by one, first gladdened Kennaston’s labor and tickled his self-complacency. He could see no fault in the book.

His publishers had clearer eyes. His Preface, for one matter, they insisted on transposing to the rear of the volume, where it now figures as the book’s tolerably famous Colophon—that curious exposition of Kennaston’s creed as artist. Then, for a title, _The Audit at Storisende_ was editorially adjudged abominable: people would not know how to pronounce Storisende, and in consequence would hold back from discussing the romance or even asking for it at bookdealers. _Men Who Loved Ettarre_ was Kennaston’s ensuing suggestion; but the Baxon-Muir Company showed no fixed confidence in their patrons’ ability to pronounce Ettarre, either. Would it not be possible, they inquired, to change the heroine’s name?—and Kennaston assented. Thus it was that in the end his book came to be called _Men Who Loved Alison_.

But to Kennaston her name stayed always Ettarre....

The book was delivered to the world, which received the gift without excitement. The book was delivered to reviewers, who found in it a well-intentioned echo of Mr. Maurice Hewlett’s earlier mediæval tales. And there for a month or some six weeks, the matter rested.