The Cords of Vanity: A Comedy of Shirking by James Branch Cabell (free reads .txt) 📖

It must be conceded I completely lost my temper; shortly afterward neither of us was speaking with excessive forethought; and each of us languidly advanced a variety of observations which were more dexterous than truthful. But I followed the intractable heiress to the Moncrieffs that spring, in spite of this rebuff, being insufferably provoked by her unshakable assumptions of my friendship and of nothing more.

3

It was perhaps a week later she told me: "This, beyond any reasonable doubt, is the Forest of Arden."

"But where Rosalind is is always Arden," I said, politely. Yet I made a mental reservation as to a glimpse of the golf-links, which this particular nook of the forest afforded, and of a red-headed caddy in search of a lost ball.

But beyond these things the sun was dying out in a riot of colour, and its level rays fell kindlily upon the gaunt pines that were thick about us two, converting them into endless aisles of vaporous gold.

There was primeval peace about; an evening wind stirred lazily above, and the leaves whispered drowsily to one another over the waters of what my companion said was a "brawling loch," though I had previously heard it reviled as a particularly treacherous and vexatious hazard. Altogether, I had little doubt that we had reached, in any event, the outskirts of Arden.

"And now," quoth she, seating herself on a fallen log, "what would you do if I were your very, very Rosalind?"

"Don't!" I cried in horror. "It wouldn't be proper! For as a decent self-respecting heroine, you would owe it to Orlando not to listen."

"H'umph!" said Rosalind. The exclamation does not look impressive, written out; but, spoken, it placed Orlando in his proper niche.

"Oh, well," said I, and stretched myself at her feet, full length,—which is supposed to be a picturesque attitude,—"why quarrel over a name? It ought to be Gamelyn, anyhow; and, moreover, by the kindness of fate, Orlando is golfing."

Rosalind frowned, dubiously.

"But golf is a very ancient game," I reassured her. Then I bit a pine-needle in two and sighed. "Foolish fellow, when he might be—"

"Admiring the beauties of nature," she suggested.

Just then an impudent breeze lifted a tendril of honey-coloured hair and toyed with it, over a low, white brow,—and I noted that Rosalind's hair had a curious coppery glow at the roots, a nameless colour that I have never observed anywhere else….

"Yes," said I, "of nature."

"Then," queried she, after a pause, "who are you? And what do you in this forest?"

"You see," I explained, "there were conceivably other men in Arden—"

"I suppose so," she sighed, with exemplary resignation.

"—For you were," I reminded her, "universally admired at your uncle's court,—and equally so in the forest. And while Alfred—or, strictly speaking, Gamelyn, or, if you prefer it, Orlando,—is the great love of your life, still—"

"Men are so foolish!" said Rosalind, irrelevantly.

"—it did not prevent you—"

"Me!" cried she, indignant.

"You had such a tender heart," I suggested, "and suffering was abhorrent to your gentle nature."

"I don't like cynicism, sir," said she; "and inasmuch as tobacco is not yet discovered—"

"It is clearly impossible that I am smoking," I finished; "quite true."

"I don't like cheap wit, either," said Rosalind. "You," she went on, with no apparent connection, "are a forester, with a good cross-bow and an unrequited attachment,—say, for me. You groan and hang verses and things about on the trees."

"But I don't write verses—any longer," I amended. "Still how would this do,—for an oak, say,—

"I found a lovely centre-piece
Upon the supper-table,
But when I looked at it again
I saw I wasn't able,
And so I took my mother home
And locked her in the stable."

She considered that the plot of this epic was not sufficiently inevitable. It hadn't, she lamented, a quite logical ending; and the plot of it, in fine, was not, somehow, convincing.

"Well, in any event," I optimistically reflected, "I am a nickel in. If your dicta had emanated from a person in Peoria or Seattle, who hadn't bothered to read my masterpiece, they would have sounded exactly the same, and the clipping-bureau would have charged me five cents. Maybe I can't write verses, then. But I am quite sure I can groan." And I did so.

"It sounds rather like a fog-horn," said Rosalind, still in the critic's vein; "but I suppose it is the proper thing. Now," she continued, and quite visibly brightening, "you can pretend to have an unrequited attachment for me."

"But I can't—" I decisively said.

"Can't," she echoed. It has not been mentioned previously that Rosalind was pretty. She was especially so just now, in pouting. And, therefore, "—pretend," I added.

She preserved a discreet silence.

"Nor," I continued, with firmness, "am I a shambling, nameless, unshaven denizen of Arden, who hasn't anything to do except to carry a spear and fall over it occasionally. I will no longer conceal the secret of my identity. I am Jaques."

"You can't be Jaques," she dissented; "you are too stout."

"I am well-built," I admitted, modestly; "as in an elder case, sighing and grief have blown me up like a bladder; yet proper pride, if nothing else, demands that my name should appear on the programme."

"But would Jaques be the sort of person who'd—?"

"Who wouldn't be?" I asked, with appropriate ardour. "No, depend upon it, Jaques was not any more impervious to temptation than the rest of us; and, indeed, in the French version, as you will find, he eventually married Celia."

"Minx!" said she; and it seemed to me quite possible that she referred to Celia Reindan, and my heart glowed.

"And how," queried Rosalind, presently, "came you to the Forest of
Arden, good Jaques?"

I groaned once more. "It was a girl," I darkly said.

"Of course," assented Rosalind, beaming as to the eyes. Then she went on, and more sympathetically: "Now, Jaques, you can tell me the whole story."

"Is it necessary?" I asked.

"Surely," said she, with sudden interest in the structure of pine-cones; "since for a long while I have wanted to know all about Jaques. You see Mr. Shakespeare is a bit hazy about him."

"So!" I thought, triumphantly.

And aloud, "It is an old story," I warned her, "perhaps the oldest of all old stories. It is the story of a man and a girl. It began with a chance meeting and developed into a packet of old letters, which is the usual ending of this story."

Rosalind's brows protested.

"Sometimes," I conceded, "it culminates in matrimony; but the ending is not necessarily tragic."

I dodged exactly in time; and the pine-cone splashed into the hazard.

"It happened," I continued, "that, on account of the man's health, they were separated for a whole year's time before—before things had progressed to any extent. When they did progress, it was largely by letters. That is why this story ended in such a large package.

"Letters," Rosalind confided, to one of the pines, "are so unsatisfactory. They mean so little."

"To the man," I said, firmly, "they meant a great deal. They brought him everything that he most wished for,—comprehension, sympathy, and, at last, comfort and strength when they were sore needed. So the man, who was at first but half in earnest, announced to himself that he had made a discovery. 'I have found,' said he, 'the great white love which poets have dreamed of. I love this woman greatly, and she, I think, loves me. God has made us for each other, and by the aid of her love I will be pure and clean and worthy even of her.' You have doubtless discovered by this stage in my narrative," I added, as in parenthesis, "that the man was a fool."

"Don't!" said Rosalind.

"Oh, he discovered it himself in due time—but not until after he had written a book about her. As the Coming of Dawn the title was to have been. It was—oh, just about her. It tried to tell how greatly he loved her. It tried—well, it failed of course, because it isn't within the power of any writer to express what the man felt for that girl. Why, his love was so great—to him, poor fool!—that it made him at times forget the girl herself, apparently. He didn't want to write her trivial letters. He just wanted to write that great book in her honour, which would make her understand, even against her will, and then to die, if need be, as Geoffrey Rudel did. For that was the one thing which counted—to make her understand—" I paused, and anyone could see that I was greatly moved. In fact, I was believing every word of it by this time.

"Oh, but who wants a man to die for her?" wailed Rosalind.

"It is quite true that one infinitely prefers to see him make a fool of himself. So the man discovered when he came again to bring his foolish book to her,—the book that was to make her understand. And so he burned it—in a certain June. For the girl had merely liked him, and had been amused by him. So she had added him to her collection of men, —quite a large one, by the way,—and was, I believe, a little proud of him. It was, she said, rather a rare variety, and much prized by collectors."

"And how was she to know?" said Rosalind; and then, remorsefully:
"Was it a very horrid girl?"

"It was not exactly repulsive," said I, as dreamily, and looking up into the sky.

There was a pause. Then someone in the distance—a forester, probably, —called "Fore!" and Rosalind awoke from her reverie.

"Then—?" said she.

"Then came the customary Orlando—oh, well! Alfred, if you like. The name isn't altogether inappropriate, for he does encounter existence with much the same abandon which I have previously noticed in a muffin. For the rest, he was a nicely washed fellow, with a sufficiency of the mediaeval equivalents for bonds and rubber-tired buggies and country places. Oh, yes! I forgot to say that the man was poor,—also that the girl had a great deal of common-sense and no less than three longheaded aunts. And so the girl talked to the man in a common-sense fashion—and after that she was never at home."

"Never?" said Rosalind.

"Only that time they talked about the weather," said I. "So the man fell out of bed just about then, and woke up and came to his sober senses."

"He did it very easily," said Rosalind, almost as if in resentment.

"The novelty of the process attracted him," I pleaded. "So he said—in a perfectly sensible way—that he had known all along it was only a game they were playing,—a game in which there were no stakes. That was a lie. He had put his whole soul into the game, playing as he knew for his life's happiness; and the verses, had they been worthy of the love which caused them to be written, would have been among the great songs of the world. But while the man knew at last that he had been a fool, he was swayed by a man-like reluctance against admitting it. So he laughed—and lied—and broke away, hurt, but still laughing."

"You hadn't mentioned any verses before," said Rosalind.

"I told you he was a fool," said I. "And, after all, that is the entire story."

Then I spent several minutes in wondering what would happen next. During this time I lost none of my interest in the sky. I believed everything I had said: my emotions would have done credit to a Romeo or an Amadis.

"The first time that the girl was not at home," Rosalind observed, impersonally, "the man had on a tan coat and a brown derby. He put on his gloves as he walked down the street. His shoulders were the most indignant—and hurt things she had ever seen. Then the girl wrote to him,—a strangely sincere letter,—and tore it up."

"Historical research," I murmured, "surely affords no warrant for such attire among the rural denizens of tranquil Arden."

"You see," continued Rosalind, oblivious to interruption, "I know all about the girl,—which is more than you do."

"That," I conceded, "is disastrously probable."

"When she realised that she was to see the man again—Did you ever feel as if something had lifted you suddenly hundreds of feet above rainy days and cold mutton for luncheon, and the possibility of other girls' wearing black evening dresses, when you wanted yours to be the only one in the room? Well, that is the way she felt at first, when