The Cream of the Jest

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.