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To Louisa Nelson
“At me ab amore tuo diducet nulla senectus.”
The Cream of the Jest
A Comedy of Evasions
BookFirst
“Give place, fair ladies, and begone, Ere pride hath had a fall! For here at hand approacheth one Whose grace doth stain you all.
“Ettarre is well compared Unto the Phœnix kind, Whose like was never seen or heard, That any man can find.”
I
Palliation of the Gambit
Much has been written critically about Felix Kennaston since the disappearance of his singular personality from the field of contemporary writers; and Mr. Froser’s Biography contains all it is necessary to know as to the facts of Kennaston’s life. Yet most readers of the Biography, I think, must have felt that the great change in Kennaston no long while after he “came to forty year”—this sudden, almost unparalleled, conversion of a talent for tolerable verse into the full-fledged genius of Men Who Loved Alison—stays, after all, unexplained. …
Hereinafter you have Kennaston’s own explanation. I do not know but that in hunting down one enigma it raises a bevy; but it, at worst, tells from his standpoint honestly how this change came about.
You are to remember that the tale is pieced together, in part from social knowledge of the man, and in part from the notes I made as to what Felix Kennaston in person told me, bit by bit, a year or two after events the tale commemorates. I had known the Kennastons for some while, with that continual shallow intimacy into which chance forces most country people with their near neighbors, before Kennaston ever spoke of—as he called the thing—the sigil. And, even then, it was as if with negligence he spoke, telling of what happened—or had appeared to happen—and answering my questions, with simply dumbfounding personal unconcern. It all seemed indescribably indecent: and I marveled no little, I can remember, as I took my notes. …
Now I can understand it was just that his standard of values was no longer ours nor really human. You see—it hardly matters through how dependable an agency—Kennaston no longer thought of himself as a man of flesh-and-blood moving about a world of his compeers. Or, at least, that especial aspect of his existence was to him no longer a phase of any particular importance.
But to tell of his thoughts, is to anticipate. Hereinafter you have them full measure and, such as it is, his story. You must permit that I begin it in my own way, with what may to you at first seem dream-stuff. For I commence at Storisende, in the world’s youth, when the fourth Count Emmerick reigned in
