James Branch Cabell - Figures of Earth

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Title: Figures of Earth

Author: James Branch Cabell

Release Date: March 19, 2004 [eBook #11639]

Language: English

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FIGURES OF EARTH

A Comedy of Appearances

JAMES BRANCH CABELL

Illustrated by Frank C. Pape

1921

"Cascun se mir el jove Manuel, Qu'era del mom lo plus valens

dels pros."

Contents

AUTHOR'S NOTE

A FOREWORD

PART ONE: THE BOOK OF CREDIT

CHAPTER

I HOW MANUEL LEFT THE MIRE

II NIAFER

III ASCENT OF VRAIDEX

IV IN THE DOUBTFUL PALACE

V THE ETERNAL AMBUSCADE

VI ECONOMICS OF MATH

VII THE CROWN OF WISDOM

VIII THE HALO OF HOLINESS

IX THE FEATHER OF LOVE

PART TWO: THE BOOK OF SPENDING

X ALIANORA

XI MAGIC OF THE APSARASAS

XII ICE AND IRON

XIII WHAT HELMAS DIRECTED

XIV THEY DUEL ON MORVEN

XV BANDAGES FOR THE VICTOR

PART THREE: THE BOOK OF CAST ACCOUNTS

XVI FREYDIS

XVII MAGIC OF THE IMAGE-MAKERS

XVIII MANUEL CHOOSES

XIX THE HEAD OF MISERY

XX THE MONTH OF YEARS

XXI TOUCHING REPAYMENT

XXII RETURN OF NIAFER

XXIII MANUEL GETS HIS DESIRE

XXIV THREE WOMEN

PART FOUR: THE BOOK OF SURCHARGE

XXV AFFAIRS IN POICTESME

XXVI DEALS WITH THE STORK

XXVII THEY COME TO SARGYLL

XXVIII HOW MELICENT WAS WELCOMED

XXIX SESPHRA OF THE DREAMS

XXX FAREWELL TO FREYDIS

XXXI STATECRAFT

XXXII THE REDEMPTION OF POICTESME

PART FIVE: THE BOOK OF SETTLEMENT

XXXIII NOW MANUEL PROSPERS

XXXIV FAREWELL TO ALIANORA

XXXV THE TROUBLING WINDOW

XXXVI EXCURSIONS FROM CONTENT

XXXVII OPINIONS OF HINZELMANN

XXXVIII FAREWELL TO SUSKIND

XXXIX THE PASSING OF MANUEL

XL COLOPHON: DA CAPO

To

SIX MOST GALLANT CHAMPIONS

Is dedicated this history of a champion: less to repay than to

acknowledge large debts to each of them, collectively at outset, as

hereafter seriatim.

[Illustration]

Author's Note

Figures of Earth is, with some superficial air of paradox, the one

volume in the long Biography of Dom Manuel's life which deals with Dom

Manuel himself. Most of the matter strictly appropriate to a Preface you

may find, if you so elect, in the Foreword addressed to Sinclair Lewis.

And, in fact, after writing two prefaces to this "Figures of

Earth"--first, in this epistle to Lewis, and, secondly, in the remarks[1]

affixed to the illustrated edition,--I had thought this volume could

very well continue to survive as long as its deficiencies permit,

without the confection of a third preface, until I began a little more

carefully to consider this romance, in the seventh year of its

existence.

[Footnote 1: Omitted in this edition since it was not possible to include

all of Frank C. Pape's magnificent illustrations.--THE PUBLISHER]

But now, now, the deficiency which I note in chief (like the superior

officer of a disastrously wrecked crew) lies in the fact that what I had

meant to be the main "point" of "Figures of Earth," while explicitly

enough stated in the book, remains for every practical end

indiscernible.... For I have written many books during the last quarter

of a century. Yet this is the only one of them which began at one

plainly recognizable instant with one plainly recognizable imagining. It

is the only book by me which ever, virtually, came into being, with its

goal set, and with its theme and its contents more or less

pre-determined throughout, between two ticks of the clock.

Egotism here becomes rather unavoidable. At Dumbarton Grange the library

in which I wrote for some twelve years was lighted by three windows set

side by side and opening outward. It was in the instant of unclosing one

of these windows, on a fine afternoon in the spring of 1919, to speak

with a woman and a child who were then returning to the house (with the

day's batch of mail from the post office), that, for no reason at all, I

reflected it would be, upon every personal ground, regrettable if, as

the moving window unclosed, that especial woman and that particular

child proved to be figures in the glass, and the window opened upon

nothingness. For that, I believed, was about to happen. There would be,

I knew, revealed beyond that moving window, when it had opened all the

way, not absolute darkness, but a gray nothingness, rather sweetly

scented.... Well! there was not. I once more enjoyed the quite familiar

experience of being mistaken. It is gratifying to record that nothing

whatever came of that panic surmise, of that second-long nightmare--of

that brief but over-tropical flowering, for all I know, of

indigestion,--save, ultimately, the 80,000 words or so of this book.

For I was already planning, vaguely, to begin on, later in that year,

"the book about Manuel." And now I had the germ of it,--in the instant

when Dom Manuel opens the over-familiar window, in his own home, to see

his wife and child, his lands, and all the Poictesme of which he was at

once the master and the main glory, presented as bright, shallow, very

fondly loved illusions in the protective glass of Ageus. I knew that the

fantastic thing which had not happened to me,--nor, I hope, to

anybody,--was precisely the thing, and the most important thing, which

had happened to the gray Count of Poictesme.

So I made that evening a memorandum of that historical circumstance; and

for some months this book existed only in the form of that memorandum.

Then, through, as it were, this wholly isolated window, I began to grope

at "the book about Manuel,"--of whom I had hitherto learned only, from

my other romances, who were his children, and who had been the sole

witness of Dom Manuel's death, inasmuch as I had read about that also,

with some interest, in the fourth chapter of "Jurgen"; and from the

unclosing of this window I developed "Figures of Earth," for the most

part toward, necessarily, anterior events. For it seemed to me--as it

still seems,--that the opening of this particular magic casement, upon

an outlook rather more perilous than the bright foam of fairy seas, was

alike the climax and the main "point" of my book.

Yet this fact, I am resignedly sure, as I nowadays appraise this

seven-year-old romance, could not ever be detected by any reader of

"Figures of Earth," In consequence, it has seemed well here to confess

at some length the original conception of this volume, without at all

going into the value of that conception, nor into, heaven knows, how

this conception came so successfully to be obscured.

So I began "the book about Manuel" that summer,--in 1919, upon the back

porch of our cottage at the Rockbridge Alum Springs, whence, as I recall

it, one could always, just as Manuel did upon Upper Morven, regard the

changing green and purple of the mountains and the tall clouds trailing

northward, and could observe that the things one viewed were all

gigantic and lovely and seemed not to be very greatly bothering about

humankind. I suppose, though, that, in point of fact, it occasionally

rained. In any case, upon that same porch, as it happened, this book was

finished in the summer of 1920.

And the notes made at this time as to "Figures of Earth" show much that

nowadays is wholly incomprehensible. There was once an Olrun in the

book; and I can recall clearly enough how her part in the story was

absorbed by two of the other characters,--by Suskind and by Alianora.

Freydis, it appears, was originally called Hlif. Miramon at one stage of

the book's being, I find with real surprise, was married _en secondes

noces_ to Math. Othmar has lost that prominence which once was his. And

it seems, too, there once figured in Manuel's heart affairs a

Bel-Imperia, who, so near as I can deduce from my notes, was a lady in a

tapestry. Someone unstitched her, to, I imagine, her destruction,

although I suspect that a few skeins of this quite forgotten Bel-Imperia

endure in the Radegonde of another tale.

Nor can I make anything whatever of my notes about Guivret (who seems to

have been in no way connected with Guivric the Sage), nor about Biduz,

nor about the Anti-Pope,--even though, to be sure, one mention of this

heresiarch yet survives in the present book. I am wholly baffled to

read, in my own penciling, such proposed chapter headings as "The

Jealousy of Niafer" and "How Sclaug Loosed the Dead,"--which latter is

with added incomprehensibility annotated "(?Phorgemon)." And "The Spirit

Who Had Half of Everything" seems to have been exorcised pretty

thoroughly.... No; I find the most of my old notes as to this book

merely bewildering; and I find, too, something of pathos in these

embryons of unborn dreams which, for one cause or another, were

obliterated and have been utterly forgotten by their creator, very much

as in this book vexed Miramon Lluagor twists off the head of a not quite

satisfactory, whimpering design, and drops the valueless fragments into

his waste-basket.... But I do know that the entire book developed,

howsoever helterskelter, and after fumbling in no matter how many blind

alleys, from that first memorandum about the troubling window of Ageus.

All leads toward--and through--that window.

The book, then, was published in the February of 1921. I need not here

deal with its semi-serial appearance in the guise of short stories:

these details are recorded elsewhere. But I confess with appropriate

humility that the reception of "Figures of Earth" by the public was, as

I have written in another place, a depressing business. This romance, at

that time, through one extraneous reason and another, disappointed

well-nigh everybody, for all that it has since become, so near as I can

judge, the best liked of my books, especially among women. It seems,

indeed, a fact sufficiently edifying that, in appraising the two

legendary heroes of Poictesme, the sex of whom Jurgen esteemed himself a

connoisseur, should, almost unanimously, prefer Manuel.

For the rest,--since, as you may remember, this is the third preface

which I have written for this book,--I can but repeat more or less what

I have conceded elsewhere. This "Figures of Earth" appeared immediately

following, and during the temporary sequestration of, "Jurgen." The fact

was forthwith, quite unreticently, discovered that in "Figures of Earth"

I had not succeeded in my attempt to rewrite its predecessor: and this

crass failure, so open, so flagrant, and so undeniable, caused what I

can only describe as the instant and overwhelming and universal triumph

of "Figures of Earth" to be precisely what did not occur. In 1921

Comstockery still surged, of course, in full cry against the imprisoned

pawnbroker and the crimes of his author, both literary and personal; and

the, after all, tolerably large portion of the reading public who were

not disgusted by Jurgen's lechery were now, so near as I could gather,

enraged by Manuel's lack of it.

It followed that--among the futile persons who use serious, long words

in talking about mere books,--aggrieved reproof of my auctorial

malversations, upon the one ground or the other, became in 1921

biloquial and pandemic. Not many other volumes, I believe, have been

burlesqued and cried down in the public prints by their own

dedicatees.... But from the cicatrix of that healed wound I turn away. I

preserve a forgiving silence, comparable to that of Hermione in the

fifth act of "A Winter's Tale": I resolve that whenever I mention the

names of Louis Untermeyer and H.L. Mencken it shall be in some

connection more pleasant, and that here I will not mention them at all.

Meanwhile the fifteen or so experiments in contrapuntal prose were, in

particular, uncharted passages from which I stayed unique in deriving

pleasure where others found bewilderment and no tongue-tied irritation:

but, in general, and above every misdemeanor else, the book exasperated

everybody by not being a more successfully managed re-hashing of the

then notorious "Jurgen."

Since 1921, and since the rehabilitation of "Jurgen," the notion has

uprisen, gradually, among the more bold and speculative thinkers, that

perhaps I was not, after all, in this "Figures of Earth" attempting to

rewrite "Jurgen": and Manuel has made his own friend.

James Branch Cabell

Richmond-in-Virginia

30 April 1927

A FOREWORD

"Amoto quoeramus seria ludo"

To

SINCLAIR LEWIS

MY DEAR LEWIS:

To you (whom I take to be as familiar with the Manuelian cycle of

romance as is any person now alive) it has for some while appeared, I

know, a not uncurious circumstance that in the _Key to the Popular Tales

of Poictesme_ there should have been included so little directly

relative to Manuel himself. No reader of the _Popular Tales_ (as I

recall your saying at the Alum when we talked over, among so many other

matters, this monumental book) can fail to note that always Dom Manuel

looms obscurely in the background, somewhat as do King Arthur and

white-bearded Charlemagne in their several cycles, dispensing justice

and bestowing rewards, and generally arranging the future, for the

survivors of the outcome of stories which more intimately concern

themselves with Anavalt and Coth and Holden, and with Kerin and Ninzian

and Gonfal and Donander, and with Miramon (in his role of Manuel's

seneschal), or even with Sclaug and Thragnar, than with the liege-lord

of Poictesme. Except in the old sixteenth-century chapbook (unknown to

you, I believe, and never reprinted since 1822, and not ever modernized

into any cognizable spelling), there seems to have been nowhere an

English rendering of the legends in which Dom Manuel is really the main

figure.

Well, this book attempts to supply that desideratum, and is, so far as

the writer is aware, the one fairly complete epitome in modern English

of the Manuelian historiography not included by Lewistam which has yet

been prepared.

It is obvious, of course, that in a single volume of this bulk there

could not be included more than a selection from the great body of myths

which, we may assume, have accumulated gradually round the mighty though

shadowy figure of Manuel the Redeemer. Instead, my aim has been to make

choice of such stories and traditions as seemed most fit to be cast into

the shape of a connected narrative and regular sequence of events; to

lend to all that wholesome, edifying and optimistic tone which in

reading-matter is so generally preferable to mere intelligence; and

meanwhile to preserve as much of the quaint style of the gestes as is

consistent with clearness. Then, too, in the original mediaeval

romances, both in their prose and metrical form, there are occasional

allusions to natural processes which make these stories unfit to be

placed in the hands of American readers, who, as a body, attest their

respectability by insisting that their parents were guilty of

unmentionable conduct; and such passages of course necessitate

considerable editing.

II

No schoolboy (and far less the scholastic chronicler of those last final

upshots for whose furtherance "Hannibal invaded Rome and Erasmus wrote

in Oxford cloisters") needs nowadays to be told that the Manuel of these

legends is to all intents a fictitious person. That in the earlier half

of the thirteenth century there was ruling over the Poictoumois a

powerful chieftain named Manuel, nobody has of late disputed seriously.

But the events of the actual human existence of this Lord of

Poictesme--very much as the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa has been

identified with the wood-demon Barbatos, and the prophet Elijah, "caught

up into the chariot of the Vedic Vayu," has become one with the Slavonic

Perun,--have been inextricably blended with the legends of the Dirghic

Manu-Elul, Lord of August.

Thus, even the irregularity in Manuel's eyes is taken by Vanderhoffen,

in his _Tudor Tales_, to be a myth connecting Manuel with the Vedic

Rudra and the Russian Magarko and the Servian Vii,--"and every

beneficent storm-god represented with his eye perpetually winking (like

sheet lightning), lest his concentrated look (the thunderbolt) should

reduce the universe to ashes.... His watery parentage, and the

storm-god's relationship with a swan-maiden of the Apsarasas (typifying

the mists and clouds), and with Freydis the fire queen, are equally

obvious: whereas Niafer is plainly a variant of Nephthys, Lady of the

House, whose personality Dr. Budge sums up as 'the goddess of the death

which is not eternal,' or Nerthus, the Subterranean Earth, which the

warm rainstorm quickens to life and fertility."

All this seems dull enough to be plausible. Yet no less an authority

than Charles Garnier has replied, in rather indignant rebuttal: "Qu'ont

ete en realite Manuel et Siegfried, Achille et Rustem? Par quels

exploits ont-ils merite l'eternelle admiration que leur ont vouee les

hommes de leur race? Nul ne repondra jamais a ces questions.... Mais

Poictesme croit a la realite de cette figure que ses romans ont faite si

belle, car le pays n'a pas d'autre histoire. Cette figure du Comte

Manuel est reelle d'ailleurs, car elle est l'image purifiee de la race

qui l'a produite, et, si on peut s'exprimer ainsi, l'incarnation de son

genie."

--Which is quite just, and, when you come to think it over, proves Dom

Manuel to be nowadays, for practical purposes, at least as real as Dr.

Paul Vanderhoffen.

III

Between the two main epic cycles of Poictesme, as embodied in _Les

Gestes de Manuel_ and _La Haulte Histoire de Jurgen_, more or less

comparison is inevitable. And Codman, I believe, has put the gist of the

matter succinctly enough.

Says Codman: "The Gestes are mundane stories, the History is a cosmic

affair, in that, where Manuel faces the world, Jurgen considers the

universe.... Dom Manuel is the Achilles of Poictesme, as Jurgen is its

Ulysses."

And, roughly, the distinction serves. Yet minute consideration

discovers, I think, in these two sets of legends a more profound, if

subtler, difference, in the handling of the protagonist: with Jurgen all

of the physical and mental man is rendered as a matter of course;

whereas in dealing with Manuel there is, always, I believe, a certain

perceptible and strange, if not inexplicable, aloofness. Manuel did thus

and thus, Manuel said so and so, these legends recount: yes, but never

anywhere have I detected any firm assertion as to Manuel's thoughts and

emotions, nor any peep into the workings of this hero's mind. He is

"done" from the outside, always at arm's length. It is not merely that

Manuel's nature is tinctured with the cool unhumanness of his father the

water-demon: rather, these old poets of Poictesme would seem, whether of

intention or no, to have dealt with their national hero as a person,

howsoever admirable in many of his exploits, whom they have never been

able altogether to love, or entirely to sympathize with, or to view

quite without distrust.

There are several ways of accounting for this fact,--ranging from the

hurtful as well as beneficent aspect of the storm-god, to the natural

inability of a poet to understand a man who succeeds in everything: but

the fact is, after all, of no present importance save that it may well

have prompted Lewistam to scamp his dealings with this always somewhat

ambiguous Manuel, and so to omit the hereinafter included legends, as

unsuited to the clearer and sunnier atmosphere of the _Popular Tales_.

For my part, I am quite content, in this Comedy of Appearances, to

follow the old romancers' lead. "Such and such things were said and done

by our great Manuel," they say to us, in effect: "such and such were the

appearances, and do you make what you can of them."

I say that, too, with the addition that in real life, also, such is the

fashion in which we are compelled to deal with all happenings and with

all our fellows, whether they wear or lack the gaudy name of heroism.

Dumbarton Grange

October, 1920

[Illustration]

PART ONE

THE BOOK OF CREDIT

TO

WILSON FOLLETT

Then _answered the Magician dredefully: Manuel, Manuel, now I shall

shewe unto thee many bokes of_ Nygromancy, _and howe thou shalt cum by

it lyghtly and knowe the practyse therein. And, moreouer, I shall shewe

and informe you so that thou shall have thy Desyre, whereby my thynke it

is a great Gyfte for so lytyll a doynge_.

I

How Manuel Left the Mire

They of Poictesme narrate that in the old days when miracles were as

common as fruit pies, young Manuel was a swineherd, living modestly in

attendance upon the miller's pigs. They tell also that Manuel was

content enough: he knew not of the fate which was reserved for him.

Meanwhile in all the environs of Rathgor, and in the thatched villages

of Lower Targamon, he was well liked: and when the young people gathered

in the evening to drink brandy and eat nuts and gingerbread, nobody

danced more merrily than Squinting Manuel. He had a quiet way with the

girls, and with the men a way of solemn, blinking simplicity which

caused the more hasty in judgment to consider him a fool. Then, too,

young Manuel was very often detected smiling sleepily over nothing, and

his gravest care in life appeared to be that figure which Manuel had

made out of marsh clay from the pool of Haranton.

This figure he was continually reshaping and realtering. The figure

stood upon the margin of the pool; and near by were two stones overgrown

with moss, and supporting a cross of old worm-eaten wood, which

commemorated what had been done there.

One day, toward autumn, as Manuel was sitting in this place, and looking

into the deep still water, a stranger came, and he wore a fierce long

sword that interfered deplorably with his walking.

"Now I wonder what it is you find in that dark pool to keep you staring

so?" the stranger asked, first of all.

"I do not very certainly know," replied Manuel "but mistily I seem to

see drowned there the loves and the desires and the adventures I had

when I wore another body than this. For the water of Haranton, I must

tell you, is not like the water of other fountains, and curious dreams

engender in this pool."

"I speak no ill against oneirologya, although broad noon is hardly the

best time for its practise," declared the snub-nosed stranger. "But what

is that thing?" he asked, pointing.

"It is the figure of a man, which I have modeled and re-modeled, sir,

but cannot seem to get exactly to my liking. So it is necessary that I

keep laboring at it until the figure is to my thinking and my desire."

"But, Manuel, what need is there for you to model it at all?"

"Because my mother, sir, was always very anxious for me to make a figure

in the world, and when she lay a-dying I promised her that I would do

so, and then she put a geas upon me to do it."

"Ah, to be sure! but are you certain it was this kind of figure she

meant?"

"Yes, for I have often heard her say that, when I grew up, she wanted me

to make myself a splendid and admirable young man in every respect. So

it is necessary that I make the figure of a young man, for my mother was

not of these parts, but a woman of Ath Cliath, and so she put a geas

upon me--"

"Yes, yes, you had mentioned this geas, and I am wondering what sort of

a something is this geas."

"It is what you might call a bond or an obligation, sir, only it is of

the particularly strong and unreasonable and affirmative and secret sort

which the Virbolg use."

The stranger now looked from the figure to Manuel, and the stranger

deliberated the question (which later was to puzzle so many people) if

any human being could be as simple as Manuel appeared. Manuel at twenty

was not yet the burly giant he became. But already he was a gigantic and

florid person, so tall that the heads of few men reached to his

shoulder; a person of handsome exterior, high featured and blond, having

a narrow small head, and vivid light blue eyes, and the chest of a

stallion; a person whose left eyebrow had an odd oblique droop, so that

the stupendous boy at his simplest appeared to be winking the

information that he was in jest.

All in all, the stranger found this young swineherd ambiguous; and there

was another curious thing too which the stranger noticed about Manuel.

"Is it on account of this geas," asked the stranger, "that a great lock

has been sheared away from your yellow hair?"

In an instant Manuel's face became dark and wary. "No," he said, "that

has nothing to do with my geas, and we must not talk about that"

"Now you are a queer lad to be having such an obligation upon your head,

and to be having well-nigh half the hair cut away from your head, and to

be having inside your head such notions. And while small harm has ever

come from humoring one's mother, yet I wonder at you, Manuel, that you

James Branch Cabell - Figures of Earth

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