The Nightmare Had Triplets (10 page)

    “
Hamlet!
yes, I remember
Hamlet,
” replied Company. “
Hamlet
is by Shakespeare. Shakespeare is the greatest of all writers of English.”

    “In his time, my dear sir,” Smirt answered; and he so fell into a sudden silence.

    “But, Smirt, that is what everyone tells me—that; Shakespeare is still the greatest of all writers of English. I am not like the old gentleman: I have written no book, and I do not pretend to be literary, you understand.”

    “And I do not argue the matter, Company. I know that many persons affect to admire the writings of that—of that person. Tastes differ: some few of us have learned to appreciate the delicacies and the splendors of prose writing as an actual art: and that is all.”

    Now the fiend looked at Smirt, for an instant, with a grin which Smirt did not like especially. But Smirt did not say anything further to this scarlet ignoramus; and if Smirt seemed a trifle stately and reserved, it was for a sufficient reason.

    “Your suggestions as to iniquity also shall be duly considered,” said Company, after making an entry in his little red book, “and in my modest way, I shall trust to profit by them. In the mean time,” he continued, just as the flash of lightning struck the ground noiselessly, and so vanished with every bit of Company except his voice, “in the mean time, this, I believe, is your grave, where I was instructed to leave you.”

    “
Even during the Han Period learned Confucian writers believed that prosperity, erudition and high official rank were secured by giving to one’s ancestors grave-sites on which they could look with satisfaction and gratitude. The
lin,
or
unicorn,
is related to have appeared in China from time as a harbinger of good government, or at the birth of a virtuous ruler.
”

    It surprised Smirt, thus to be standing at his own grave. Yet the range of his first disquiet was soon checked by the discovery that he and his wife had self-evidently been buried in this place a great while ago. It followed that for him to be upset, at this late date, by the deaths of these people would be out of all reason. Why, but he and Jane, to judge by these very old-looking tombstones, and by the gray spider webs which were about each grave, must have lain here undisturbed for several hundred years. As a close student of human nature, Smirt knew that no human grief can outwear a century. He inferred, as a sound logician, that the emotion of which he was now conscious could not be grief.

    “And besides,” he reflected, “it is likely that Smirt has a great many graves. The blonde princess knew me in what I can but assume to be an earlier incarnation. I have no doubt lived in many such incarnations. In fact, I can now perceive, dimly, that ever since time began—or at all events, ever since urbanity first came into being—the Peripatetic Episcopalian has followed, upon his discreet path midway between piety and atheism, after that beauty which does not exist; he has hungered in all eras for the impossible, irrespective of any moral ambition; and continually his own self-sufficiency has slain him. In every land lies the grave of Smirt, who could not ever be content with the half-handed and humorless doings of All-Highest & Company, Ergo, I cannot display any special emotion over any special one of my multitudinous graves without exhibiting undue favoritism.”

    Smirt looked up toward heaven, pensively. He directed thither an urbane smile; and Smirt said:

    “The dull-mindedness of Your futile and charming world, All-Highest, has yet again disposed of me, unavailingly. For I still survive, You may note. And from my most recent graveside I remark that when You gave man reason, he did but cease to believe in You: there was no great hurt done, either way. But You granted him imagination also. You permitted him to create in his dreams another world than Your world. He became then Your critic, for it was apparent to him that his inventions went beyond Your inventions.”

    Smirt waved a protesting hand to forestall any divine reply. “In all humbleness, sir, I admit that my notions may be wrong: but I cannot believe they are wrong. A thunderbolt would not, I can assure You, convince me, and any such display of brute force would but lay You open to the charge of peevishness. Besides that, I really do think quite favorably of Your inventions, so far as they go. I have delighted in Your world: for its beauty, its curiousness, and its unintentional humor, I give all thanks. But my heart I have given to the world which I create in my dreams.”

    He looked down, toward the grave of his wife. “And to you also, my dearest, my heart was given.”

    After that, Smirt said: “You should be a proud woman, Jane, that after I do not know how many years your husband is lamenting you. You have been dead now for a great while. It was not this afternoon that you went out to play contract bridge with the Ralston girls. It was in a faraway time you left me, for your tombstone is very old. I regret that faraway time.”

    Smirt said: “And I have but one complainment to make against you, or it may be four complainments. You could not let a fire alone: you must forever be poking at it, and you needed to be pulling it about, until there was no fire, but only the remnants of a fire. And when my shirts and my underclothes came back from the laundry you would not put them at the bottom of the pile, so that I could wear my shirts and my underclothes in a regular rotation. And besides that, you would not put your own shoes down in a sensible way, either, after you took them off: you put always the left shoe on the right side, and the right shoe on the left, so that I was continually straightening after you.”

    He blinked a little, wondering at this unaccountable moistness of his eyes.

    And Smirt said then: “But my fourth complainment is that you never permitted me to wish I was married to somebody else. You made of me a man who did not have but one wife, and at times that made me wonder if I could be a real genius? There was no other distinguished writer, and there was no famous artist of any kind, but had his third wife, or perhaps his fifth wife, and was getting on with her so very badly that he would soon have another wife. But I had only you, my dearest, and I desired only you; and your common-sense made me over into as good a husband as could be expected.”

    He considered that fact with frank wonder. Yes, he had been an excellent husband.

    And Smirt said also: “You were a wise woman, Jane. It did not matter to you that in my mind I was unfaithful and followed after a beauty which does not exist. You knew that mere human thinking does not amount to much, after all. You knew that men were very often up to such nonsense. It was a thing which you had to put up with, like dentists, and like rainy weather, and like traffic policemen. You did not bother about such male talk and male foolishness. You did not care at all that I made mirth and beauty; you would have liked it better if I had made shoes or sermons or prescriptions; but, as matters fell about in this imperfect world, the genius of your husband was a matter which you had to put up with; so you condoned it loyally. You made me as good a wife as could be expected.”

    And finally Smirt said: “It is very right that when the tourists and the lovers of fine literature come here to weep over the grave of Smirt they must weep over your grave also. It is proper that every biographer should put a picture of you in all my biographies, and that the orators should speak nicely about you at my centenaries until time ends. So do I cry out to you, my dearest, who have been dead now for a great long while, Hail and farewell!”

    Then only did Smirt perceive those persons who had surrounded him.

    It was on the top of a bleak mountain, seemingly, that Smirt, pausing in soliloquy, looked up from the two graves. He saw that some fourteen persons had gathered about him, in a gray twilight; and the butcher said:

    “The more the merrier. Smirt is in our midst. Polly put the kettle on! Never had I hoped to find among us that genius who depicts with such utter loveliness, such impish wit, and such tender humanity, man’s endless searching after the golden dream which he creates for himself.”

    “Pleased to meet you, Smirt,” said the baker. “You must promise to pay us a nice long visit. I never saw you looking better. Anyone with a soul to appreciate beauty will find in countless pages of your books that which no other living writer can offer.”

    And the candlestick maker remarked: “Now, but this is a pleasure! I admire your style as much as I deplore your morals. Yet both of us bring light into dark places; and all men of ability should know one another.”

    “But this is affecting,” Smirt exclaimed; “for it is you, my admirers, who have gathered at this graveside!”

    Tom answered him: “You bet your bottom dollar. Have a look at the real Simon Pure.”

    “None others need apply,” said Dick. “We are the public at large. We only are the lords of distinguished persons; and we agree, just now, that your books are whimsical, elfin, and even romantic, without being banal.”

    And Harry said confidentially: “Trademark blown on each bottom. Your writings are pure and beneficent. A Boston policeman can read your collected works without a blush. The most innocent maiden of fifteen can read any book of yours from cover to cover and then lay it down completely disappointed.”

    “And how, my admirers, are you called in this planet?”

    “We are roses by any other name,” replied Madame Quelquechose. “But a few great persons know that we rule over them, the poor fish. Each of these fish, when he had perceived our omnipotence, became insane.”

    “The fish went cuckoo,” Senora Etcetera explained.

    “Cuckoo, jug-jug-jug, tirili-lio, caw-caw, tweet-tweet-tweet, cluck, quack-quack! No sane fish has ever dared to think about our idiocy.”

    “And do we worry?” asked Lady Ampersand, contemptuously. “We who alone are eternal and almighty are not honored in public by the well-thought-of. Which shows that twice two makes hay while the sun shines. Polly put the kettle on! But for my part, I find in the sex experience greater possibilities for acquiring insight than in any other experience. Why should not you and I, Smirt, now step into those bushes for the purpose of discovering reason, destiny, or what you will, and thus solve the riddle of the universe?”

    “Am I to understand, then,” said Smirt, a little perturbed, “that you who admire me are not wholly right in the head?”

    Anon answered him, leering and mowing: “We see all, hear all, know all, invent all, and exalt all. We dethrone also. Our sanity beggars description. We think, just now, that your books are very deep. One needs quite a knowledge of world literature and mythology to understand them.”

    “Our sanity must be seen to be appreciated,” Ibid cried out. “Make an appointment. Line forms to the right. We have neuroses and radios, but what has become of those old-fashioned winters? I would rank your books among the better-class fantasies in all modern literature.”

    “I really cannot report,” said Smirt, “that the management of this planet is completely satisfactory if you ladies and gentlemen be my only admirers hereabouts.”

    “I think your books are perfectly wonderful,” said Mrs. Murgatroyd.

    “We regard you as one of our leading writers,” declared the world. “You strike a responsive chord in the hearts of every type of reader.”

    “Oh, but you do put such cute things in your books!” said the world’s wife. “How can any one person even write so many pretty books as you have written? I too once knew a poet. Oh, a beautiful poet! But he is dead now. Yes, quite dead! Yet I shall always treasure the poems he made up about me. Mr. World is not at all literary. Mr. World is a Puritan, without any
joie de vivre.
Do you compose on the typewriter?”

    “It all depends,” said Smirt,—“and, well, good-evening, everybody!”

    They replied confusedly: “Do not leave us, Smirt! We are the true gods, but men dare not worship us openly, because of our feeble-mindedness. Great wits to madness are so near allied. Those false gods whom men pretend to hold in honor dwell very far beneath us. They are quite impossible persons. No gods are dependable except the public at large. What author, do you think, has most influenced you? You must pay us all a nice long visit, because rolling stones collect no moss. So you must teach us to regard man as a proletarian collectivist.”

    “But no, upon the whole, ladies and gentlemen, I think that I must be leaving you.”

    They became angry then, and joining hands, they all danced about Smirt in a circle, crying out in the gray twilight:

    “What is that to us? Absence makes the heart grow fonder. You display a superlative egotism gone rank and stale, a pathetic vanity, and a smug self-satisfaction raised to a point beyond calculation. Polly put the kettle on! Smirt, Smirt, he deals in dirt! We think, just now, that you are, finally, unimportant. You buzz about in your season of sunshine, over your filthy little fantasies, like a blue-bottle fly over cow-dung.”

    “What is that?” Smirt exclaimed. “I do not follow your similes.”

    They replied: “But we, the public at large, we abide here, ruling over all that lives. Do have another cup of tea! Your prose is hopelessly artificial and over ornamented and self-conscious. We saw you in the old doctor’s barnloft. But that was under another planet, and zero weather has crept south. So do you now tell us, without any more shilly-shally, what will be the future trend of literature in the South?” Smirt did not answer them. Instead, Smirt had passed onward, unhurriedly, with complete dignity, to regard a young woman whose employment appeared unusual.