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William Wells Brown - "A Tale of the Southern States"

Arthur Conan Doyle - "The Stark Munro Letters"

Hjalmar Hjorth Boysen - "Tales From Two Hemispheres"

Henry James - "The Aspern Papers, by Henry James"

The Certain Hour

J >> James Branch Cabell >> The Certain Hour




But, as it is, our epitaphs will probably be nothing of
the sort. So that there lurks, you see, much virtue in
this `if only.'"
Impervious to nonsense, she asked, "And have I not
earned the right to lament that you are changed?"
"I haven't robbed more than six churches up to
date," he grumbled. "What would you have?"
The answer came, downright, and, as he knew,
entirely truthful: "I would have had you do all that
you might have done."
But he must needs refine. "Why, no--you would have
made me do it, wrung out the last drop. You would have
bullied me and shamed me into being all that I might
have been. I see that now." He spoke as if in wonder,
with quickening speech. "Pauline, I haven't been
entirely not worth while. Oh, yes, I know! I
know I haven't written five-act tragedies which would
be immortal, as you probably expected me to do. My
books are not quite the books I was to write when you
and I were young. But I have made at worst some neat,
precise and joyous little tales which prevaricate
tenderly about the universe and veil the pettiness of
human nature with screens of verbal jewelwork. It is
not the actual world they tell about, but a vastly
superior place where the Dream is realized and
everything which in youth we knew was possible comes
true. It is a world we have all glimpsed, just once,
and have not ever entered, and have not ever forgotten.
So people like my little tales. . . . Do they induce
delusions? Oh, well, you must give people what they
want, and literature is a vast bazaar where customers
come to purchase everything except mirrors."
She said soberly, "You need not make a jest of it.
It is not ridiculous that you write of beautiful and
joyous things because there was a time when living was
really all one wonderful adventure, and you remember
it."
"But, oh, my dear, my dear! such glum discussions
are so sadly out-of-place on such a night as this," he
lamented. "For it is a night of pearl-like radiancies
and velvet shadows and delicate odors and big friendly
stars that promise not to gossip, whatever happens. It
is a night that hungers, and all its undistinguishable
little sounds are voicing the night's hunger for masks
and mandolins, for rope-ladders and balconies and
serenades. It is a night . . . a night wherein I
gratefully remember so many beautiful sad things that
never happened . . . to John Charteris, yet surely
happened once upon a time to me . . ."
"I think that I know what it is to remember--better
than you do, Jack. But what do you remember?"
"In faith, my dear, the most Bedlamitish occur-

rences! It is a night that breeds deplorable
insanities, I warn you. For I seem to remember how I
sat somewhere, under a peach-tree, in clear autumn
weather, and was content; but the importance had all
gone out of things; and even you did not seem very
important, hardly worth lying to, as I spoke lightly of
my wasted love for you, half in hatred, and--yes, still
half in adoration. For you were there, of course. And
I remember how I came to you, in a sinister and
brightly lighted place, where a horrible, staring frail
old man lay dead at your feet; and you had murdered
him; and heaven did not care, and we were old, and all
our lives seemed just to end in futile tangle-work.
And, again, I remember how we stood alone, with visible
death crawling lazily toward us, as a big sullen sea
rose higher and higher; and we little tinseled
creatures waited, helpless, trapped and
yearning. . . . There is a boat in that picture; I
suppose it was deeply laden with pirates coming to slit
our throats from ear to ear. I have forgotten that
part, but I remember the tiny spot of courtplaster just
above your painted lips. . . . Such are the jumbled
pictures. They are bred of brain-fag, no doubt; yet,
whatever be their lineage," said Charteris,
happily, "they render glum discussion and platitudinous
moralizing quite out of the question. So, let's
pretend, Pauline, that we are not a bit more worldly-
wise than those youngsters who are frisking yonder in
the Gymnasium--for, upon my word, I dispute if we have
ever done anything to suggest that we are. Don't let's
be cowed a moment longer by those bits of paper with
figures on them which our too-credulous fellow-idiots
consider to be the only almanacs. Let's have back
yesterday, let's tweak the nose of Time intrepidly."
Then Charteris caroled:

"For Yesterday! for Yesterday!
I cry a reward for a Yesterday
Now lost or stolen or gone astray,
With all the laughter of Yesterday!"

"And how slight a loss was laughter," she mur-

mured--still with the vague and gentle eyes of a day--

dreamer--"as set against all that we never earned in
youth, and so will never earn."
He inadequately answered "Bosh!" and later, "Do
you remember----?" he began.
"Yes, she remembered that, it developed. And "Do
you remember----?" she in turn was asking later. It
was to seem to him in retrospection that neither for
the next half-hour began a sentence without this for-

mula. It was as if they sought to use it as a master-
word wherewith to reanimate the happinesses and sorrows
of their common past, and as if they found the
charm was potent to awaken the thin, powerless ghosts
of emotions that were once despotic. For it was as if
frail shadows and half-caught echoes were all they
could evoke, it seemed to Charteris; and yet these
shadows trooped with a wild grace, and the echoes
thrilled him with the sweet and piercing surprise of a
bird's call at midnight or of a bugle heard in prison.
Then twelve o'clock was heralded by the College
bell, and Pauline arose as though this equable deep-
throated interruption of the music's levity had been a
signal. John Charteris saw her clearly now; and she
was beautiful.
"I must go. You will not ever quite forget me,
Jack. Such is my sorry comfort." It seemed to Char-
teris that she smiled as in mockery, and yet it was a
very tender sort of derision. "Yes, you have made your
books. You have done what you most desired to do. You
have got all from life that you have asked of life.
Oh, yes, you have got much from life. One prize,
though, Jack, you missed."
He, too, had risen, quiet and perfectly sure of
himself. "I haven't missed it. For you love me."
This widened her eyes. "Did I not always love you,
Jack? Yes, even when you went away forever, and there
were no letters, and the days were long. Yes, even
knowing you, I loved you, John Charteris."
"Oh, I was wrong, all wrong," he cried; "and yet
there is something to be said upon the other side, as
always. . . ." Now Charteris was still for a
while. The little man's chin was uplifted so that
it was toward the stars he looked rather than at
Pauline Romeyne, and when he spoke he seemed to
meditate aloud. "I was born, I think, with the desire
to make beautiful books--brave books that would
preserve the glories of the Dream untarnished, and
would re-create them for battered people, and re-awaken
joy and magnanimity." Here he laughed, a little
ruefully. "No, I do not think I can explain this
obsession to any one who has never suffered from it.
But I have never in my life permitted anything to stand
in the way of my fulfilling this desire to serve the
Dream by re-creating it for others with picked words,
and that has cost me something. Yes, the Dream is an
exacting master. My books, such as they are, have been
made what they are at the dear price of never
permitting myself to care seriously for anything else.
I might not dare to dissipate my energies by taking any
part in the drama I was attempting to re-write, because
I must so jealously conserve all the force that was in
me for the perfection of my lovelier version. That may
not be the best way of making books, but it is the only
one that was possible for me. I had so little natural
talent, you see," said Charteris, wistfully, "and I was
anxious to do so much with it. So I had always to be
careful. It has been rather lonely, my dear. Now,
looking back, it seems to me that the part I have
played in all other people's lives has been the role of
a tourist who enters a cafe chantant, a fortress, or a
cathedral, with much the same forlorn sense of
detachment, and observes what there is to see that may
be worth remembering, and takes a note or two, perhaps,
and then leaves the place forever. Yes, that is how I
served the Dream and that is how I got my books. They
are very beautiful books, I think, but they cost me
fifteen years of human living and human intimacy, and
they are hardly worth so much."
He turned to her, and his voice changed. "Oh, I
was wrong, all wrong, and chance is kindlier than I
deserve. For I have wandered after unprofitable gods,
like a man blundering through a day of mist and fog,
and I win home now in its golden sunset. I have
laughed very much, my dear, but I was never happy until
to-night. The Dream, as I now know, is not best served
by making parodies of it, and it does not greatly
matter after all whether a book be an epic or a
directory. What really matters is that there is so
much faith and love and kindliness which we can share
with and provoke in others, and that by cleanly,
simple, generous living we approach perfection in the
highest and most lovely of all arts. . . . But you, I
think, have always comprehended this. My dear, if I
were worthy to kneel and kiss the dust you tread in I
would do it. As it happens, I am not worthy. Pauline,
there was a time when you and I were young together,
when we aspired, when life passed as if it were to the
measures of a noble music--a heart-wringing, an
obdurate, an intolerable music, it might be, but always
a lofty music. One strutted, no doubt--it was because
one knew oneself to be indomitable. Eh, it is
true I have won all I asked of life, very horribly
true. All that I asked, poor fool! oh, I am weary of
loneliness, and I know now that all the phantoms I have
raised are only colorless shadows which belie the
Dream, and they are hateful to me. I want just to
recapture that old time we know of, and we two alone.
I want to know the Dream again, Pauline,--the Dream
which I had lost, had half forgotten, and have so
pitifully parodied. I want to know the Dream again,
Pauline, and you alone can help me."
"Oh, if I could! if even I could now, my dear!"
Pauline Romeyne left him upon a sudden, crying this.
And "So!" said Mr. Charteris.
He had been deeply shaken and very much in earnest;
but he was never the man to give for any lengthy while
too slack a rein to emotion; and so he now sat down
upon the bench and lighted a cigarette and smiled. Yet
he fully recognized himself to be the most enviable of
men and an inhabitant of the most glorious world
imaginable--a world wherein he very assuredly meant to
marry Pauline Romeyne say, in the ensuing September.
Yes, that would fit in well enough, although, of
course, he would have to cancel the engagement to
lecture in Milwaukee. . . . How lucky, too, it was
that he had never actually committed himself with Anne
Willoughby! for while money was an excellent thing to
have, how infinitely less desirable it was to live
perked up in golden sorrow than to feed flocks upon the
Grampian Hills, where Freedom from the mountain height
cried, "I go on forever, a prince can make a
belted knight, and let who will be clever. . . ."

"--and besides, you'll catch your death of cold,"
lamented Rudolph Musgrave, who was now shaking Mr.
Charteris' shoulder.
"Eh, what? Oh, yes, I daresay I was napping," the
other mumbled. He stood and stretched himself
luxuriously. "Well, anyhow, don't be such an un-
mitigated grandmother. You see, I have a bit of rather
important business to attend to. Which way is Miss
Romeyne?"
"Pauline Romeyne? why, but she married old General
Ashmeade, you know. She was the gray-haired woman in
purple who carried out her squalling brat when Taylor
was introducing you, if you remember. She told me,
while the General was getting the horses around, how
sorry she was to miss your address, but they live three
miles out, and Mrs. Ashmeade is simply a slave to the
children. . . . Why, what in the world have you been
dreaming about?"
"Eh, what? Oh, yes, I daresay I was only napping,"
Mr. Charteris observed. He was aware that within they
were still playing a riotous two-step.



BALLAD OF PLAGIARY

"Freres et matres, vous qui cultivez"

PAUL VERVILLE.



Hey, my masters, lords and brothers, ye that till the fields of
rhyme,
Are ye deaf ye will not hearken to the clamor of your time?

Still ye blot and change and polish--vary, heighten and
transpose--
Old sonorous metres marching grandly to their tranquil close.

Ye have toiled and ye have fretted; ye attain perfected speech:
Ye have nothing new to utter and but platitudes to preach.

And your rhymes are all of loving, as within the old days when
Love was lord of the ascendant in the horoscopes of men.

Still ye make of love the utmost end and scope of all your art;
And, more blind than he you write of, note not what a modest part

Loving now may claim in living, when we have scant time to spare,
Who are plundering the sea-depths, taking tribute of the air,--

Whilst the sun makes pictures for us; since to-day, for good or
ill,
Earth and sky and sea are harnessed, and the lightnings work our
will.

Hey, my masters, all these love-songs by dust-hidden mouths were
sung
That ye mimic and re-echo with an artful-artless tongue,--

Sung by poets close to nature, free to touch her garments' hem
Whom to-day ye know not truly; for ye only copy them.

Them ye copy--copy always, with your backs turned to the sun,
Caring not what man is doing, noting that which man has done.

We are talking over telephones, as Shakespeare could not talk;
We are riding out in motor-cars where Homer had to walk;
And pictures Dante labored on of mediaeval Hell
The nearest cinematograph paints quicker, and as well.

But ye copy, copy always;--and ye marvel when ye find
This new beauty, that new meaning,--while a model stands behind,

Waiting, young and fair as ever, till some singer turn and trace
Something of the deathless wonder of life lived in any place.

Hey, my masters, turn from piddling to the turmoil and the
strife!
Cease from sonneting, my brothers; let us fashion songs from
life.

Thus I wrote ere Percie passed me. . . . Then did I epitomize
All life's beauty in one poem, and make haste to eulogize
Quite the fairest thing life boasts of, for I wrote of Percie's
eyes.




EXPLICIT DECAS POETARUM

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