Rascogne bounded onto his horse. “A chase! A merry chase!” he cried gaily, and galloped away over the western horizon. A moment later his pursuers pounded past the coach, a motley horde of ruffianly bounty hunters seeking the reward for the highwayman’s head.
“Ah, malediction,” spoke Zulkeh. “The villain has struck again!”
Suddenly the florid and well-dressed man of some middle years pointed to the northern horizon. “Look!”
Turning, all saw Rascogne de Sevigneois furiously galloping toward the coach, pursued now not only by the Hue and Cry but also by the Lynch Mob and the Band of Outraged Fathers and Husbands. The highwayman pounded up to the coach, cleaved the manacles binding the youth with one blow of his sword, swept the erstwhile prisoner onto his saddle, and galloped away over the southern horizon. A moment later his pursuers mounted past the coach, leaving the dust of a small army in their wake.
“Ah, malediction,” spoke Zulkeh. “The villain has struck again!”
* * *
Such were the last words penned by the illustrious Alfred CCLVI, to whom we bid a sad adieu. Sad, first, for the untimely passing of this great chronicler in the prime of his powers. Sadder still, for his demise led to the succession of Alfred CCLVII.
Every great line has blots on its escutcheon, and Alfred CCLVII is one of the greater ones on the noble clan of the Alfredae. To begin with, Alfred CCLVII was a mere apprentice at the time of his ascension to the inkwell. Heretofore, under the tutelage of Alfred CCLVI—who was known not to be overly admiring of his student—he had been restricted to the writing of chapter headings. This necessary, but of course not sufficient, aspect of the chronicler’s trade, was known by all Alfredae to be his sole skill, in which, truth be told, he was not skillful.
And here lay the first of his two great faults. Of the second of these, his grotesque egomania, I will speak in a moment. But the first of his faults was perhaps even worse. For Alfred CCLVII was given, even in the writing of chapter headings, to verbosity.
Know, gentle reader, and I speak here as an experienced and accomplished chronicler in my own right (as the gentle reader has already had occasion to judge, from his perusal of these preceding pages of our tale), that of all the sins and foibles which afflict the writer—be that writer a scribe or a scribbler, a diarist or a dramatist, a narrator or a notary—there is none so foul, so odious, so disreputable, so arrant, so untoward, so deplorable, so infamous and so peccant as verbosity, yes, I say again, verbosity, that malignant cancer of the narrator’s craft, which, under its many names—whether those be the names preferred by the educated gentility: wordiness, long-windedness, prolixity, superfluity or garrulity; or yet those more exact and fine-focused terms which are the natural optation of the scholar, the rigor of whose training in the necessity of precise meaning naturally leads them to such labels as: longiloquence, largiloquence, grandiloquence, multiloquence, polylogy and rodomontade, not to mention the yet-more-technical terms of the specialist: nimiety, pleonasm and amphigory (or amphigouri, as the purists insist); or those euphemisms which are, not surprisingly, the terms of choice of the verbose themselves, I speak here of: circumlocution, loquacity and eloquence; or even, for we should not in natural pride of our intellect and refinement ignore their cultural contributions, meager and crude though these be, the coarse epithets which are oft heard from the lips of the uneducated and unwashed: chatter, jabber, prattle, gabble, babble, blabber and blather—wreaks the greatest havoc of all the literary vices upon the heart of literature and narrative itself, that heart being, although most (even exceptionally well-read) literates are unconscious—say rather, not fully conscious—even of its existence, much less its centrality, the fundamental bond of trust which develops ‘twixt writer and reader as these twain intersect, though indirectly and at a distance (a distance measured not simply in space but in time), without which education itself becomes an impossibility, for the reader becomes wearied and overtaxed, and thus loses his concentration, indeed, even his interest, while—what is worse!—the writer loses all sense of the purpose of his craft, the which is not to aggrandize himself, in a frivolous display of empty virtuosity, but to impart to the reader the pith and the meat of the tale which he tells, and in so doing, loses all grasp on reality and reason, falling thus further and further into the fell sway of those psychologic disorders which we know as solipsism and egomania.