Part 6

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 fine-spun 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 Capreæ 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 any one 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.

V

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.

VI

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 mundivigant 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, sunsteeped 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 feeble-minded 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’ market-place 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 fly-leaf 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 pointblank 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....

VII

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 Cæsar Borgia or St. Paul; and what you looked forward to within the half-hour was as non-existent 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 play-thing.

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.

_Book Fourth_

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“_But there were dreams to sell Ill didst thou buy: Life is a dream, they tell, Waking to die. Dreaming a dream to prize, Is wishing ghosts to rise; And, if I had the spell To call the buried—well, Which one would I?_”

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I

Economic Considerations of Piety

AS has been said, Kennaston read much curious matter in his dead uncle’s library....

But most books—even Felix Kennaston’s own little books—did not seem now to be affairs of heavy moment. Once abed, clasping his gleaming broken bit of metal, and the truthful history of all that had ever happened was, instead, Kennaston’s library. It was not his to choose from what volume or on which page thereof he would read; accident, as it seemed, decided that; but the chance-opened page lay unblurred before him, and he saw it with a clarity denied to other men of his generation.

* * * * *

Kennaston stood by the couch of Tiberius Cæsar as he lay ill at Capreæ. Beside him hung a memorable painting, by Parrhasius, which represented the virgin Atalanta in the act of according very curious assuagements to her lover’s ardor. Charicles, a Greek physician, was telling the Emperor of a new religious sect that had arisen in Judea, and of the persecutions these disciples of Christus were enduring. Old Cæsar listened, made grave clucking noises of disapproval.

“It is, instead, a religion that should be fostered. The man preached peace. It is what my father before me strove for, what I have striven for, what my successors must strive for. Peace alone may preserve Rome: the empire is too large, a bubble blown so big and tenuous that the first shock will disrupt it in suds. Pilate did well to crucify the man, else we could not have made a God of him; but the persecution of these followers of Christus must cease. This Nazarene preached the same doctrine that I have always preached. I shall build him a temple. The rumors concerning him lack novelty, it is true: this God born of a mortal woman is the old legend of Dionysos and Mithra and Hercules, a little pulled about; Gautama also was tempted in a wilderness; Prometheus served long ago as man’s scapegoat under divine anger; and the cult of Pollux and Castor, and of Adonis, has made these resurrection stories hackneyed. In fine, Charicles, you have brought me a woefully inartistic jumble of old tales; but the populace prefers old tales, they delight to be told what they have heard already. I shall certainly build Christus a temple.”

So he ran on, devising the reception of Christ into the Roman pantheon, as a minor deity at first, and thence, if the receipts at his temple justified it, to be raised to greater eminence. Tiberius saw large possibilities in the worship of this new God, both from a doctrinal and a money-making standpoint. Then Cæsar yawned, and ordered that a company of his Spintriæ be summoned to his chamber, to amuse him with their unnatural diversions.

But Charicles had listened in horror, for he was secretly a Christian, and knew that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. He foresaw that, without salutary discouragement, the worship of Christus would never amount to more than the social fad of a particular season, just as that of Cybele and that of Heliogabalus had been modish in different years; and would afterward dwindle, precisely as these cults had done, into shrugged-at old-fashionedness. Then, was it not written that they only were assuredly blessed who were persecuted for righteousness’ sake?—Why, martyrdom was the one certain road to Heaven; and a religion which is patronized by potentates, obviously, breeds no martyrs.

So Charicles mingled poison in Cæsar’s drink, that Cæsar might die, and crazed Caligula succeed him, to put all Christians to the sword. And Charicles young Caius Cæsar Caligula—Child of the Camp, Father of Armies, Beloved of the Gods—killed first of all.

* * * * *

Then a lean man, white-robed, and clean-shaven as to his head, was arranging a complicated toy. He labored in a gray-walled room, lit only by one large circular window opening upon the sea. There was an alcove in this room, and in the alcove stood a large painted statue.