The Cream of the Jest

"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.

IV

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 dream-world 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 Cæsars, 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.