THE CREAM OF THE JEST:

A Comedy of Evasions

by

James Branch Cabellby ـJames Branch Cabell̠

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[Frontispiece Image]

[Title Page Image]

"Le pays où je voulais aller, tu m'y as mené en songe, cette nuit, et tu étais belle… ah! que tuétais belle!… Mais, comme je n'ai aimé que ton ombre, tu me dispenseras, chère tête, de remercier ta réalité."

TO

LOUISA NELSON

"At me ab amore tuo diducet

nulla senectus"

Contents

Preface

BOOK FIRST

I – Introduces the Ageless Woman

II – Wherein a Clerk Appraises a Fair Country

III – Of the Double-Dealer's Traffic with a Knave

IV – How the Double-Dealer was of Two Minds

V – Treats of Maugis D'Aigremont's Pottage

VI – Jouneys End: With the Customary Unmasking

BOOK SECOND

I – Of a Triple Found in Twilight

II – Beyone Use and Wont Fares the Road to Storisende

III – Of Idle Speculations in a Library

IV – How There was a Light in the Fog

V – Of Publishing: With an Unlikely Appendix

VI – Suggesting Themes of universal Appeal

VII – Peculiar Conduct of a Personage

VIII – Of Vain Regret and Wonder in the Dark

BOOK THIRD

I – They Come to a High Place

II – Of the Sigil and One Use of It

III – Trreats of a Prelate and, in Part, of Pigeons

IV – Local Laws of Nephelococcygia

V – Of Divers Fleshly Riddles

VI – In Pursuit of a Whisper

VII – Of Truisms: Treated Reasonably

BOOK FOURTH

I – Economic considerations of Piety

II – Deals With Pen Scratches

III – By-Products of Rational endeavor

IV – "Epper Si Muove"

V – Evolution of a Vestryman

BOOK FIFTH

I – Of Poetic Love: treated with Poetic Inefficiency

II – Cross-Purposes in Spacious Times

III – Horvendile to Ettarre: At Whitehall

IV – HOrvendile to Ettarre: At Vaux-Le-Vicomte

V – Horvendile to Ettarre: Is the Conciergerie

VI – Of One Enigma That Threatened to Prove allegorical

VII – Treats of Witches, Mixed Driks, and the Weather

BOOK SIXTH

I – Sundry Disclosures of the Press

II – Considerations Toward Sunset

III – One Way of Elusion

IV – Past Storisende Fares the Road of Use and Wont

V – Which Mr. Flaherty Does Not Quite Explain

Preface

MUCH has been written critically about Felix Kennaston since the disappearance of his singular personality from the field of contemporary writers; and Mr. Froser's Biography contains all it is necessary to know as to the facts of Kennaston's life. Yet most readers of the Biography, I think, must have felt that the great change in Kennaston no long while after he "came to forty year"- this sudden, almost unparalleled, conversion of a talent for tolerable verse into the full-fledged genius of Men Who Loved Alison – stays, after all, unexplained…

Hereinafter you have Kennaston's own explanation. I do not know but that in hunting down one enigma it raises a bevy; but it, at worst, tells from his standpoint honestly how this change came about.

You are to remember that the tale is pieced together, in part from social knowledge of the man, and in part from the notes I made as to what Felix Kennaston in person told me, bit by bit, a year or two after events the tale commemorates. I had known the Kennastons for some while, with that continual shallow intimacy into which chance forces most country people with their near neighbors, before Kennaston ever spoke of – as he called the thing – the sigil. And, even then, it was as if with negligence he spoke, telling of what happened – or had appeared to happen – and answering my questions, with simply dumbfounding personal unconcern. It all seemed indescribably indecent: and I marveled no little, I can remember, as I took my notes…

Now I can understand it was just that his standard of values was no longer ours nor really human. You see – it hardly matters through how dependable an agency – Kennaston no longer thought of himself as a man of flesh-and-blood moving about a world of his compeers. Or, at least, that especial aspect of his existence was to him no longer a phase of any particular importance.

But to tell of his thoughts, is to anticipate. Hereinafter you have them full measure and, such as it is, his story. You must permit that I begin it in my own way, with what may to you at first seem dream-stuff. For I commence at Storisende, in the world's youth, when the fourth Count Emmerick reigned in Poictesme, having not yet blundered into the disfavor of his papal cousin Adrian VII… With such roundabout gambits alone can some of us approach – as one fancy begets another, if you will – to proud assurance that life is not a blind and aimless business; not all a hopeless waste and confusion; and that we ourselves may (by-and-by) be strong and excellent and wise.