The Cream of the Jest James Branch Cabell (recommended ebook reader TXT) 📖

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 dreamworld 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 Caesars, 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.

There was, be it repeated, no continuity in these dreams save that Ettarre was in each of them; that alone they had in common: but each dream conformed to certain general laws. For instance, there was never any confusion of time⁠—that is, a dream extended over precisely the amount of time he actually slept, so that each dream-life was limited to some eight hours or thereabouts. No dream was ever iterated, nor did he ever twice find himself in the same surroundings as touched chronology; thus, he was often in Paris and Constantinople and Alexandria and Rome and London, revisiting even the exact spot, the very street-corner, which had figured in some former dream; but as terrestrial time went, the events of his first dream would either have happened years ago or else not be due to happen until a great while later.

He never dreamed of absolutely barbaric or orderless epochs, nor of happenings (so far as he could ascertain) elsewhere than in Europe and about the Mediterranean coasts; even within these confines his dreams were as a rule restricted to urban matters, rarely straying beyond city walls: his hypothesis in explanation of these facts was curious, but too finespun to be here repeated profitably.

For a while Kennaston thought these dreams to be bits of lives he had lived in previous incarnations; later he was inclined to discard this view. He never to his knowledge lived through precisely the same moment in two different capacities and places; but more than once he came within a few years of doing this, so that even had he died immediately after the earlier-timed dream, it would have been impossible for him to have been reborn and reach the age he had attained in that dream whose period was only a trifle later. In his dreams Kennaston’s age varied slightly, but was almost always in pleasant proximity to twenty-five. Thus, he was in Jerusalem on the day of the Crucifixion and was aged about twenty-three; yet in another dream he was at Capreæ when Tiberius died there, seven years afterward, and Kennaston was then still in the early twenties: and, again, he was in London, at Whitehall, in 1649, and at Vaux-le-Vicomte near Fontainebleau in 1661, being on each occasion twenty-three or -four. Kennaston could suggest no explanation of this.

He often regretted that he was never in any dream anybody of historical prominence, so that he could have found out what became of him after the dream ended. But though he sometimes talked with notable persons⁠—inwardly gloating meanwhile over his knowledge of what would be the outcome of their warfaring or statecraft, and of the manner and even the hour of their deaths⁠—he himself seemed fated, as a rule, never to be anyone of importance in the world’s estimation. Indeed, as Kennaston cheerfully recognized, his was not a temperament likely to succeed, as touched material matters, in any imaginable state of society; there was not, and never had been, any workaday world in which⁠—as he had said at Storisende⁠—he and his like would not, in so far as temporal prizes were concerned, appear to waste at loose ends and live futilely. Then, moreover, in each dream he was woefully hampered by inability to recall preceding events in the life he was then leading, which handicap doomed him to redoubled inefficiencies. But that did not matter now, in view of his prodigal recompenses.⁠ ⁠…

It was some while before the man made the quaint discovery that in these dreams he did not in any way resemble Felix Kennaston physically. They were astray in an autumn forest, resting beside a small fire which he had kindled in the shelter of a boulder, when Ettarre chanced to speak of his brown eyes, and thereby to perplex him. But there was in this dream nothing which would reflect his countenance; and it was later, in Troy Town (Laomedon ruled the city then, and Priam they saw