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The Line of Love

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THE LINE OF LOVE

BY

JAMES BRANCH CABELL


1921




TO

ROBERT GAMBLE CABELL I




"He loved chivalrye,
Trouthe and honour, fredom and curteisye.
And of his port as meek as is a mayde,
He never yet no vileinye ne sayde
In al his lyf, unto no maner wight.
He was a verray parfit gentil knyght."




_Introduction_


The Cabell case belongs to comedy in the grand manner. For fifteen years
or more the man wrote and wrote--good stuff, sound stuff, extremely
original stuff, often superbly fine stuff--and yet no one in the whole of
this vast and incomparable Republic arose to his merit--no one, that is,
save a few encapsulated enthusiasts, chiefly somewhat dubious. It would
be difficult to imagine a first-rate artist cloaked in greater obscurity,
even in the remotest lands of Ghengis Khan. The newspapers, reviewing
him, dismissed him with a sort of inspired ill-nature; the critics of a
more austere kidney--the Paul Elmer Mores, Brander Matthewses, Hamilton
Wright Mabies, and other such brummagem dons--were utterly unaware of
him. Then, of a sudden, the imbeciles who operate the Comstock Society
raided and suppressed his "Jurgen," and at once he was a made man. Old
book-shops began to be ransacked for his romances and extravaganzas--many
of them stored, I daresay, as "picture-books," and under the name of the
artist who illustrated them, Howard Pyle. And simultaneously, a great
gabble about him set up in the newspapers, and then in the literary
weeklies, and finally even in the learned reviews. An Englishman, Hugh
Walpole, magnified the excitement with some startling _hochs_; a single
_hoch_ from the Motherland brings down the professors like firemen
sliding down a pole. To-day every literate American has heard of Cabell,
including even those presidents of women's clubs who lately confessed
that they had never heard of Lizette Woodworth Reese. More of his books
are sold in a week than used to be sold in a year. Every flapper in the
land has read "Jurgen" behind the door; two-thirds of the grandmothers
east of the Mississippi have tried to borrow it from me. Solemn _Privat
Dozenten_ lecture upon the author; he is invited to take to the
chautauqua himself; if the donkeys who manage the National Institute of
Arts and Letters were not afraid of his reply he would be offered its
gilt-edged ribbon, vice Sylvanus Cobb, deceased. And all because a few
pornographic old fellows thrust their ever-hopeful snouts into the man's
tenth (or was it eleventh or twelfth?) book!

Certainly, the farce must appeal to Cabell himself--a sardonic mocker,
not incapable of making himself a character in his own _revues_. But I
doubt that he enjoys the actual pawing that he has been getting--any more
than he resented the neglect that he got for so long. Very lately, in the
midst of the carnival, he announced his own literary death and burial,
and even preached a burlesque funeral sermon upon his life and times.
Such an artist, by the very nature of his endeavors, must needs stand
above all public-clapper-clawing, pro or con. He writes, not to please
his customers in general, nor even to please his partisans in particular,
but to please himself. He is his own criterion, his own audience, his own
judge and hangman. When he does bad work, he suffers for it as no holy
clerk ever suffered from a gnawing conscience or Freudian suppressions;
when he does good work he gets his pay in a form of joy that only artists
know. One could no more think of him exposing himself to the stealthy,
uneasy admiration of a women's club--he is a man of agreeable exterior,
with handsome manners and an eye for this and that--than one could
imagine him taking to the stump for some political mountebank or getting
converted at a camp-meeting. What moves such a man to write is the
obscure, inner necessity that Joseph Conrad has told us of, and what
rewards him when he has done is his own searching and accurate judgment,
his own pride and delight in a beautiful piece of work.

At once, I suppose, you visualize a somewhat smug fellow, loftily
complacent and superior--in brief, the bogus artist of Greenwich Village,
posturing in a pot-hat before a cellar full of visiting schoolmarms, all
dreaming of being betrayed. If so, you see a ghost. It is the curse of
the true artist that his work never stands before him in all its imagined
completeness--that he can never look at it without feeling an impulse to
add to it here or take away from it there--that the beautiful, to him, is
not a state of being, but an eternal becoming. Satisfaction, like the
praise of dolts, is the compensation of the aesthetic cheese-monger--the
popular novelist, the Broadway dramatist, the Massenet and Kipling, the
Maeterlinck and Augustus Thomas. Cabell, in fact, is forever fussing over
his books, trying to make them one degree better. He rewrites almost as
pertinaciously as Joseph Conrad, Henry James, or Brahms. Compare "Domnei"
in its present state to "The Soul of Melicent," its first state, circa
1913. The obvious change is the change in title, but of far more
importance are a multitude of little changes--a phrase made more musical,
a word moved from one place to another, some small banality tracked down
and excised, a brilliant adjective inserted, the plan altered in small
ways, the rhythm of it made more delicate and agreeable. Here, in "The
Line of Love," there is another curious example of his high capacity for
revision. It is not only that the book, once standing isolated, has been
brought into the Cabellian canon, and so related to "Jurgen" and "Figures
of Earth" at one end, and to the tales of latter-day Virginia at the
other; it is that the whole texture has been worked over, and the colors
made more harmonious, and the inner life of the thing given a fresh
energy. Once a flavor of the rococo hung about it; now it breathes and
moves. For Cabell knows a good deal more than he knew in 1905. He is an
artist whose work shows constant progress toward the goals he aims
at--principally the goal of a perfect style. Content, with him, is always
secondary. He has ideas, and they are often of much charm and
plausibility, but his main concern is with the manner of stating them. It
is surely not ideas that make "Jurgen" stand out so saliently from the
dreadful prairie of modern American literature; it is the magnificent
writing that is visible on every page of it--writing apparently simple
and spontaneous, and yet extraordinarily cunning and painstaking. The
current notoriety of "Jurgen" will pass. The Comstocks will turn to new
imbecilities, and the followers of literary parades to new marvels. But
it will remain an author's book for many a year.

By author, of course, I mean artist--not mere artisan. It was certainly
not surprising to hear that Maurice Hewlett found "Jurgen" exasperating.
So, too, there is exasperation in Richard Strauss for plodding
music-masters. Hewlett is simply a British Civil Servant turned author,
which is not unsuggestive of an American Congressman turned philosopher.
He has a pretty eye for color, and all the gusto that goes with
beefiness, but like all the men of his class and race and time he can
think only within the range of a few elemental ideas, chiefly of a
sentimental variety, and when he finds those ideas flouted he is
horrified. The bray, in fact, revealed the ass. It is Cabell's
skepticism that saves him from an Americanism as crushing as Hewlett's
Briticism, and so sets him free as an artist. Unhampered by a mission,
happily ignorant of what is commended by all good men, disdainful of the
petty certainties of pedagogues and green-grocers, not caring a damn
what becomes of the Republic, or the Family, or even snivelization
itself, he is at liberty to disport himself pleasantly with his nouns,
verbs, adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, prepositions and pronouns,
arranging them with the same free hand, the same innocent joy, the same
superb skill and discretion with which the late Jahveh arranged carbon,
nitrogen, sulphur, hydrogen, oxygen and phosphorus in the sublime form
of the human carcass. He, too, has his jokes. He knows the arch effect
of a strange touch; his elaborate pedantries correspond almost exactly
to the hook noses, cock eyes, outstanding ears and undulating Adam's
apples which give so sinister and Rabelaisian a touch to the human
scene. But in the main he sticks to more seemly materials and designs.
His achievement, in fact, consists precisely in the success with which
he gives those materials a striking newness, and gets a novel vitality
into those designs. He takes the ancient and mouldy parts of speech--the
liver and lights of harangues by Dr. Harding, of editorials in the New
York _Times_, of "Science and Health, with a Key to the Scriptures," of
department-store advertisements, of college yells, of chautauqual
oratory, of smoke-room anecdote--and arranges them in mosaics that
glitter with an almost fabulous light. He knows where a red noun should
go, and where a peacock-blue verb, and where an adjective as darkly
purple as a grape. He is an imagist in prose. You may like his story and
you may not like it, but if you don't like the way he tells it then
there is something the matter with your ears. As for me, his experiments
with words caress me as I am caressed by the tunes of old Johannes
Brahms. How simple it seems to manage them--and how infernally difficult
it actually is!

H. L. MENCKEN.

_Baltimore, October 1st, 1921_.




_Contents_

CHAPTER

THE EPISTLE DEDICATORY

I THE EPISODE CALLED THE WEDDING JEST

II THE EPISODE CALLED ADHELMAR AT PUYSANGE

III THE EPISODE CALLED LOVE-LETTERS OF FALSTAFF

IV THE EPISODE CALLED "SWEET ADELAIS"

V THE EPISODE CALLED IN NECESSITY'S MORTAR

VI THE EPISODE CALLED THE CONSPIRACY OF ARNAYE

VII THE EPISODE CALLED THE CASTLE OF CONTENT

VIII THE EPISODE CALLED IN URSULA'S GARDEN

IX THE EPISODE CALLED PORCELAIN CUPS

X THE ENVOI CALLED SEMPER IDEM




THE EPISTLE DEDICATORY

_"In elect utteraunce to make memoriall,
To thee for souccour, to thee for helpe I call,
Mine homely rudeness and dryghness to expell
With the freshe waters of Elyconys well."_


MY DEAR MRS. GRUNDY: You may have observed that nowadays we rank the
love-story among the comfits of literature; and we do this for the
excellent reason that man is a thinking animal by courtesy rather
than usage.

Rightly considered, the most trivial love-affair is of staggering import.
Who are we to question this, when nine-tenths of us owe our existence to
a summer flirtation? And while our graver economic and social and psychic
"problems" (to settle some one of which is nowadays the object of all
ponderable fiction) are doubtless worthy of most serious consideration,
you will find, my dear madam, that frivolous love-affairs, little and
big, were shaping history and playing spillikins with sceptres long
before any of these delectable matters were thought of.

Yes, even the most talked-about "questions of the day" are sometimes
worthy of consideration; but were it not for the kisses of remote years
and the high gropings of hearts no longer animate, there would be none to
accord them this same consideration, and a void world would teeter about
the sun, silent and naked as an orange. Love is an illusion, if you
will; but always through this illusion, alone, has the next generation
been rendered possible, and all endearing human idiocies, including
"questions of the day," have been maintained.

Love, then, is no trifle. And literature, mimicking life at a
respectful distance, may very reasonably be permitted an occasional
reference to the corner-stone of all that exists. For in life "a
trivial little love-story" is a matter more frequently aspersed than
found. Viewed in the light of its consequences, any love-affair is of
gigantic signification, inasmuch as the most trivial is a part of
Nature's unending and, some say, her only labor, toward the peopling of
the worlds.

She is uninventive, if you will, this Nature, but she is tireless.
Generation by generation she brings it about that for a period weak men
may stalk as demigods, while to every woman is granted at least one hour
wherein to spurn the earth, a warm, breathing angel. Generation by
generation does Nature thus betrick humanity, that humanity may endure.

Here for a little--with the gracious connivance of Mr. R. E. Townsend,
to whom all lyrics hereinafter should be accredited--I have followed
Nature, the arch-trickster. Through her monstrous tapestry I have traced
out for you the windings of a single thread. It is parti-colored, this
thread--now black for a mourning sign, and now scarlet where blood has
stained it, and now brilliancy itself--for the tinsel of young love
(if, as wise men tell us, it be but tinsel), at least makes a
prodigiously fine appearance until time tarnish it. I entreat you, dear
lady, to accept this traced-out thread with assurances of my most
distinguished regard.

The gift is not great. Hereinafter is recorded nothing more weighty than
the follies of young persons, perpetrated in a lost world which when
compared with your ladyship's present planet seems rather callow.
Hereinafter are only love-stories, and nowadays nobody takes love-making
very seriously....

And truly, my dear madam, I dare say the Pompeiians did not take Vesuvius
very seriously; it was merely an eligible spot for a _fête champêtre_.
And when gaunt fishermen first preached Christ about the highways, depend
upon it, that was not taken very seriously, either. _Credat Judaeus_; but
all sensible folk--such as you and I, my dear madam--passed on with a
tolerant shrug, knowing "their doctrine could be held of no sane man."

* * * * *

APRIL 30, 1293--MAY 1, 1323

"_Pus vezem de novelh florir pratz, e vergiers reverdezir rius e fontanas
esclarzir, ben deu quascus lo joy jauzir don es jauzens_."


It would in ordinary circumstances be my endeavor to tell you, first of
all, just whom the following tale concerns. Yet to do this is not
expedient, since any such attempt could not but revive the question as to
whose son was Florian de Puysange?

No gain is to be had by resuscitating the mouldy scandal: and, indeed,
it does not matter a button, nowadays, that in Poictesme, toward the end
of the thirteenth century, there were elderly persons who considered the
young Vicomte de Puysange to exhibit an indiscreet resemblance to Jurgen
the pawnbroker. In the wild youth of Jurgen, when Jurgen was a
practising poet (declared these persons), Jurgen had been very intimate
with the former Vicomte de Puysange, now dead, for the two men had much
in common. Oh, a great deal more in common, said these gossips, than the
poor vicomte ever suspected, as you can see for yourself. That was the
extent of the scandal, now happily forgotten, which we must at outset
agree to ignore.

All this was in Poictesme, whither the young vicomte had come a-wooing
the oldest daughter of the Comte de la Forêt. The whispering and the
nods did not much trouble Messire Jurgen, who merely observed that he
was used to the buffets of a censorious world; young Florian never heard
of this furtive chatter; and certainly what people said in Poictesme did
not at all perturb the vicomte's mother, that elderly and pious lady,
Madame Félise de Puysange, at her remote home in Normandy. The
principals taking the affair thus quietly, we may with profit emulate
them. So I let lapse this delicate matter of young Florian's paternity,
and begin with his wedding._




CHAPTER I

_The Episode Called The Wedding Jest_


1. _Concerning Several Compacts_

It is a tale which they narrate in Poictesme, telling how love began
between Florian de Puysange and Adelaide de la Forêt. They tell also how
young Florian had earlier fancied other women for one reason or another;
but that this, he knew, was the great love of his life, and a love which
would endure unchanged as long as his life lasted.

And the tale tells how the Comte de la Forêt stroked a gray beard, and
said, "Well, after all, Puysange is a good fief--"

"As if that mattered!" cried his daughter, indignantly. "My father, you
are a deplorably sordid person."

"My dear," replied the old gentleman, "it does matter. Fiefs last."

So he gave his consent to the match, and the two young people were
married on Walburga's Eve, on the day that ends April.

And they narrate how Florian de Puysange was vexed by a thought that was
in his mind. He did not know what this thought was. But something he had
overlooked; something there was he had meant to do, and had not done: and
a troubling consciousness of this lurked at the back of his mind like a
small formless cloud. All day, while bustling about other matters, he had
groped toward this unapprehended thought.

Now he had it: Tiburce.

The young Vicomte de Puysange stood in the doorway, looking back into the
bright hall where they of Storisende were dancing at his marriage feast.
His wife, for a whole half-hour his wife, was dancing with handsome
Etienne de Nérac. Her glance met Florian's, and Adelaide flashed him an
especial smile. Her hand went out as though to touch him, for all that
the width of the hall severed them.

Florian remembered presently to smile back at her. Then he went out of
the castle into a starless night that was as quiet as an unvoiced menace.
A small and hard and gnarled-looking moon ruled over the dusk's secrecy.
The moon this night, afloat in a luminous gray void, somehow reminded
Florian of a glistening and unripe huge apple.

The foliage about him moved at most as a sleeper breathes, while Florian
descended eastward through walled gardens, and so came to the graveyard.
White mists were rising, such mists as the witches of Amneran
notoriously evoked in these parts on each Walburga's Eve to purchase
recreations which squeamishness leaves undescribed.

For five years now Tiburce d'Arnaye had lain there. Florian thought of
his dead comrade and of the love which had been between them--a love more
perfect and deeper and higher than commonly exists between men--and the
thought came to Florian, and was petulantly thrust away, that Adelaide
loved ignorantly where Tiburce d'Arnaye had loved with comprehension.
Yes, he had known almost the worst of Florian de Puysange, this dear lad
who, none the less, had flung himself between Black Torrismond's sword
and the breast of Florian de Puysange. And it seemed to Florian unfair
that all should prosper with him, and Tiburce lie there imprisoned in
dirt which shut away the color and variousness of things and the
drollness of things, wherein Tiburce d'Arnaye had taken such joy. And
Tiburce, it seemed to Florian--for this was a strange night--was
struggling futilely under all that dirt, which shut out movement, and
clogged the mouth of Tiburce, and would not let him speak; and was
struggling to voice a desire which was unsatisfied and hopeless.

"O comrade dear," said Florian, "you who loved merriment, there is a
feast afoot on this strange night, and my heart is sad that you are not
here to share in the feasting. Come, come, Tiburce, a right trusty
friend you were to me; and, living or dead, you should not fail to make
merry at my wedding."

Thus he spoke. White mists were rising, and it was Walburga's Eve.

So a queer thing happened, and it was that the earth upon the grave
began to heave and to break in fissures, as when a mole passes through
the ground. And other queer things happened after that, and presently
Tiburce d'Arnaye was standing there, gray and vague in the moonlight as
he stood there brushing the mold from his brows, and as he stood there
blinking bright wild eyes. And he was not greatly changed, it seemed to
Florian; only the brows and nose of Tiburce cast no shadows upon his
face, nor did his moving hand cast any shadow there, either, though the
moon was naked overhead.

"You had forgotten the promise that was between us," said Tiburce; and
his voice had not changed much, though it was smaller.

"It is true. I had forgotten. I remember now." And Florian shivered a
little, not with fear, but with distaste.

"A man prefers to forget these things when he marries. It is natural
enough. But are you not afraid of me who come from yonder?"

"Why should I be afraid of you, Tiburce, who gave your life for mine?"

"I do not say. But we change yonder."

"And does love change, Tiburce? For surely love is immortal."

"Living or dead, love changes. I do not say love dies in us who may hope
to gain nothing more from love. Still, lying alone in the dark clay,
there is nothing to do, as yet, save to think of what life was, and of
what sunlight was, and of what we sang and whispered in dark places when
we had lips; and of how young grass and murmuring waters and the high
stars beget fine follies even now; and to think of how merry our loved
ones still contrive to be, even now, with their new playfellows. Such
reflections are not always conducive to philanthropy."

"Tell me," said Florian then, "and is there no way in which we who are
still alive may aid you to be happier yonder?"

"Oh, but assuredly," replied Tiburce d'Arnaye, and he discoursed of
curious matters; and as he talked, the mists about the graveyard
thickened. "And so," Tiburce said, in concluding his tale, "it is not
permitted that I make merry at your wedding after the fashion of those
who are still in the warm flesh. But now that you recall our ancient
compact, it is permitted I have my peculiar share in the merriment, and I
may drink with you to the bride's welfare."

"I drink," said Florian, as he took the proffered cup, "to the welfare of
my beloved Adelaide, whom alone of women I have really loved, and whom I
shall love always."

"I perceive," replied the other, "that you must still be having your
joke."

Then Florian drank, and after him Tiburce. And Florian said, "But it is a
strange drink, Tiburce, and now that you have tasted it you are changed."

"You have not changed, at least," Tiburce answered; and for the first
time he smiled, a little perturbingly by reason of the change in him.

"Tell me," said Florian, "of how you fare yonder."

So Tiburce told him of yet more curious matters. Now the augmenting mists
had shut off all the rest of the world. Florian could see only vague
rolling graynesses and a gray and changed Tiburce sitting there, with
bright wild eyes, and discoursing in a small chill voice. The appearance
of a woman came, and sat beside him on the right. She, too, was gray, as
became Eve's senior: and she made a sign which Florian remembered, and it
troubled him.

Tiburce said then, "And now, young Florian, you who were once so dear to
me, it is to your welfare I drink."

"I drink to yours, Tiburce."

Tiburce drank first: and Florian, having drunk in turn, cried out, "You
have changed beyond recognition!"

"You have not changed," Tiburce d'Arnaye replied again. "Now let me tell
you of our pastimes yonder."

With that he talked of exceedingly curious matters. And Florian began to
grow dissatisfied, for Tiburce was no longer recognizable, and Tiburce
whispered things uncomfortable to believe; and other eyes, as wild as
his, but lit with red flarings from behind, like a beast's eyes, showed
in the mists to this side and to that side, for unhappy beings were
passing through the mists upon secret errands which they discharged
unwillingly. Then, too, the appearance of a gray man now sat to the left
of that which had been Tiburce d'Arnaye, and this newcomer was marked so
that all might know who he was: and Florian's heart was troubled to note
how handsome and how admirable was that desecrated face even now.

"But I must go," said Florian, "lest they miss me at Storisende, and
Adelaide be worried."

"Surely it will not take long to toss off a third cup. Nay, comrade, who
were once so dear, let us two now drink our last toast together. Then go,
in Sclaug's name, and celebrate your marriage. But before that let us
drink to the continuance of human mirth-making everywhere."

Florian drank first. Then Tiburce took his turn, looking at Florian as
Tiburce drank slowly. As he drank, Tiburce d'Arnaye was changed even
more, and the shape of him altered, and the shape of him trickled as
though Tiburce were builded of sliding fine white sand. So Tiburce
d'Arnaye returned to his own place. The appearances that had sat to his
left and to his right were no longer there to trouble Florian with
memories. And Florian saw that the mists of Walburga's Eve had departed,
and that the sun was rising, and that the graveyard was all overgrown
with nettles and tall grass.

He had not remembered the place being thus, and it seemed to him the
night had passed with unnatural quickness. But he thought more of the
fact that he had been beguiled into spending his wedding-night in a
graveyard, in such questionable company, and of what explanation he could
make to Adelaide.

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