The Cream of the Jest

So, between lust and greed, the King was persuaded. In the upshot, "because"- as was duly set forth to his lieges -"a virtuous monarch ought to surround his throne with many peers of the worthiest of both sexes," Mistress Anne Boleyn was created Marchioness of Pembroke, in her own right, with a reversion of the title and estates to her offspring, whether such might happen to be legitimate or not. A pension of £1,000 per annum, with gold, silver and parcel-gilt plate to the value of £1,188, was likewise awarded her: and the King, by thus piously defying Romish error, earned the abbey-lands, as well as the key of a certain bed-chamber, and the eternal approbation of zealous Protestants, for thus inaugurating religious liberty.

IV

"Epper Si Muove"

THESE ironies Kennaston witnessed among many others, as he read in this or that chance-opened page from the past. Everywhere, it seemed to him, men had labored blindly, at flat odds with rationality, and had achieved everything of note by accident. Everywhere he saw reason to echo the cry of Maugis d'Aigremont – "It is very strange how affairs fall out in this world of ours, so that a man may discern no plan or purpose anywhere."

Here was the astounding fact: the race did go forward; the race did achieve; and in every way the race grew better. Progress through irrational and astounding blunders, whose outrageousness bedwarfed the wildest clichés

of romance, was what Kennaston found everywhere. All this, then, also was foreplanned, just as all happenings at Storisende had been, in his puny romance; and the puppets here, too, moved as they thought of their own volition, but really in order to serve a dénouement in which many of them had not any personal part or interest…

And always the puppets moved toward greater efficiency and comeliness. The puppet-shifter appeared to seek at once utility and artistic self-expression. So the protoplasm – that first imperceptible pinhead of living matter – had become a fish; the fish had become a batrachian, the batrachian a reptile, the reptile a mammal; thus had the puppets continuously been reshaped, into more elaborate forms more captivating to the eye, until amiable and shatter-pated man stood erect in the world. And man, in turn, had climbed a long way from gorillaship, however far he was as yet from godhead – blindly moving always, like fish and reptile, toward unapprehended loftier goals.

But, just as men's lives came to seem to Kennaston like many infinitesimal threads woven into the pattern of human destiny, so Kennaston grew to suspect that the existence of mankind upon earth was but an incident in the unending struggle of life to find a home in the universe. Human inhabitancy was not even a very important phase in the world's history, perhaps; a scant score or so of centuries ago there had been no life on earth, and presently the planet would be a silent naked frozen clod. Would this sphere then have served its real purpose of being, by having afforded foothold to life for a few æons?

He could not tell. But Kennaston contemplated sidereal space full of such frozen worlds, where life seemed to have flourished for a while and to have been dispossessed – and full, too, of glowing suns, with their huge satellites, all slowly cooling and congealing into fitness for life's occupancy. Life would tarry there also, he reflected; and thence also life would be evicted. For life was not a part of the universe, not a product of the universe at all perhaps, but, rather, an intruder into the cosmic machinery, which moved without any consideration of life's needs. Like a bird striving to nest in a limitless engine, insanely building among moving wheels and cogs and pistons and pulley-bands, whose moving toward their proper and intended purposes inevitably swept away each nest before completion – so it might be that life passed from moving world to world, found transitory foothold, began to build, and was driven out.

What was it that life sought to rear? – what was the purpose of this endless endeavor, of which the hatching of an ant or the begetting of an emperor was equally a by-product? and of which the existence of Felix Kennaston was a manifestation past conceiving in its unimportance? Toward what did life aspire? – that force which moved in Felix Kennaston, and thus made Felix Kennaston also an intruder, a temporary visitor, in the big moving soulless mechanism of earth and water and planets and suns and interlocking solar systems?

"To answer that question must be my modest attempt," he decided. "In fine – why is a Kennaston? The query has a humorous ring undoubtedly, in so far as it is no little suggestive of the spinning mouse that is the higher the fewer – but, after all, it voices the sole question in which I personally am interested…"

____________________