The Nightmare Had Triplets (17 page)

    Then at Atlantis Smirt consulted, without any least success, the supreme oracle of Poseidon, in a circular temple builded of ivory and of silver, and capped with tall pinnacles of gold and orichalc. Through four of the Fortunate Islands likewise did Smirt seek after Arachne’s legend without finding any trace of it. And Smirt travelled among more barbarous peoples too, among men that had the heads and the soft pendant ears of setter dogs, and among men who were shaped like eels, and among men who were so oddly constructed as to possess, each one of them in his own person, the organs proper to both sexes. And among none of these peoples could Smirt find the legend of Arachne.

    After that, Smirt questioned the Samoyeds, another remarkably hirsute nation, whose faces were upside down, and who shed their skins once a year. And Smirt questioned the Umeloi, the Hill-Dwellers, a black people with flaming red eyes and very bright yellow hair, who lived in elm-trees, in large egg-shaped nests made out of gaily colored bird feathers. And Smirt questioned also the terrible army of Gog and Magog, where they lay encamped in the Caucasus Mountains, waiting until the hour came for them to destroy all this world and to ravage the golden city of Jehovah.

    But everywhere Smirt questioned in vain. None of these peoples had the desired legend, and learned person with whom Smirt talked in the lands beyond common-sense could tell Smirt anything about the Arachne whose trivial pretty face stayed so obstinately in Smirt’s thinking.

    “It is needful,” said Smirt, “that something should be done at once about this unsatisfactory state of affairs.”

    Now the appearance of Arachne haunted Smirt, saying: “You have talked, and strutted, and talked,—and then you have talked some more. But you have not ever found my legend, you have not restored to me any of my lost estate in these lands beyond common-sense, as you most faithfully promised you would do, when you swore a great oath by those curious gods of yours.”

    “That is true, Arachne.... And for the rest, as a matter of course I have talked. One has to keep up the conversation. But I most certainly have not strutted. My modesty is proverbial.”

    Then the appearance of Arachne would smile somewhat. “It does not matter,” she said, cryptically. “I rather like it.”

    “In fact, Arachne, now that you have brought up the topic, modesty is a rare virtue.”

    “And it seems particularly praiseworthy, Smirt, in any Virginian gentleman who has so little to be modest about, does it not?”

    “Come now, Arachne, but that also is true! You have a logical mind, my dear—”

    She had colored up deliriously. But she frowned also, saying,—

    “To begin with—”

    “I know,” said Smirt. “But I do not apologize, because you really are my dear, at all events during this special stage of my dream. And in any case, I was only going on to observe that my virtues, whatsoever they may or may not happen to be, have thus far availed nothing.”

    “They have brought us two together, Smirt. It may be that before long,” the girl said, with an odd, an almost hungry look, “they will bring us a great deal more closely together. There is a quiet little place over yonder—”

    “It is that outcome which I desire, my darling, even though it be far more than has been merited by my wit, my fancy, my profundity, and by yet other mental gifts with which a few excellent critics have been so kind as to accredit me—oh, but beyond doubt, through that habitual excess of charity which distinguishes most book reviewers,—and to which, Arachne, I shall not further allude lest I appear boastful. Some day I must show you my press clippings. Nevertheless, and with all these talents, I have failed thus far, I repeat, in two quests.”

    “Your modesty really is,” she remarked, with conviction, “rather wonderful. But I do like it, somehow. I find it appetizing. And as I was saying, just over yonder—”

    “For I know, Arachne,” Smirt continued, “I know very well that I adore you. Yet I do not know anything else about you, inasmuch as I have not yet recovered your legend; and I do not know who I may happen to be, either. That is the great drawback to having an over-vigorous and too inclusive mind. It is a mind, Arachne, which embraces a wide variety of subjects with a quickness I cannot possibly follow. So we are both lost, my dearest, we are lost forever, I am very much afraid, in the encyclopaedic dreaming of Smirt.”

    She appeared puzzled now; and she protested,—

    “But you yourself are Smirt—”

    “That is perhaps true,” he admitted. “It is a point upon which one necessarily reserves judgment. Yet who is Smirt?”

    “Why, Smirt,” the girl replied triumphantly, “is you.”

    “I do not deny that, Arachne. At least, as a sound logician, I do not deny it outright. Yet I once dreamed, I must tell you, I dreamed, more or less like the philosopher Chuang Tzu, that I was a blue-bottle fly. I was then conscious only of my thoughts, my interests and my beliefs as a blue-bottle fly, and unconscious of my present individuality as a man. I awoke from that dream, and it seemed to me I was myself again—”

    Now the girl’s innocent brown eyes had become like lovely saucers.

    “And why, dear Smirt, should you not be yourself again, after you had waked up, when it was probably just something you ate? And that reminds me—”

    “But do you not see my dilemma, Arachne? I cannot be certain whether I belong to the Mammalia or to the Diptera. Still, I do not know whether I was at that time the Peripatetic Episcopalian dreaming I was a blue-bottle fly, or whether I am at this time a blue-bottle fly dreaming I am the Peripatetic Episcopalian.”

    Then Arachne said, “But all that is nonsense.”

    “Is it?” Smirt asked, with unconcealed dubiety. “I am not sure. Only a woman is ever sure. And that is because the more honest of you do not pretend to a sense of humor.”

    “All your devisings are nonsense,” Arachne continued. “You play—like a great dear baby—with your plain out-and-out nonsense, and with your silly chop logic, and, above all, you play with your words, so that no other person can get in even one word edgewise. And yet I rather like that too, somehow. For how could anybody possibly be a blue-bottle fly?”

    “I was about to say—” Smirt began to answer. But the girl interrupted him, saying shyly:

    “Ah, but let us not talk any longer in this open road, with people coming and going, and staring at us so all the time. For just over yonder there is a little parlor, Smirt, a very quiet neat place, where we could talk quite undisturbed, if only I could trust you not to attempt any liberties such as we might both regret afterward, because you really do have such a way with you, dear Smirt, that a girl feels utterly helpless—”

    “You wrong me, my darling. You misunderstand the nature of a Southern gentleman,” said Smirt, mildly horrified. “A Southern gentleman does not ever take advantage of an unprotected female, no matter what be the temptation, so I have always heard. And meanwhile I was about to say—when you interrupted me, Arachne, and began to rub up against me like a kitten in this way, which, although highly agreeable, does rather interfere with our conversation—I was about to say, I repeat, that no man can live happily with any woman who cultivates a sense of humor. It is a fact for which five explanations occur to me—”

    “Then do you explain them to yourself at leisure, dear Smirt, now that I am going out of the lands beyond common-sense, in which I have no estate and no legend.”

    And with that, the pouting and slightly disappointed looking appearance of Arachne vanished, as irresponsibly as it had arrived.

    “Come now,” said Smirt, “but this will never do. The girl is simply charming. What is far better, she is charmingly simple. No, I cannot have my adored Arachne thus flickering about like a Jill o’ lantern or a Wilhelmina o’ the wisp, nor can I myself eternally be travelling everywhither in a jiffy. No, my duty is plain. It is needful that I return to Amit, a god among godlings; and that in Amit I create for Arachne a new legend.”

    “
In very much this way has St. George
[
Egori
]
taken over many Pagan legends; and in one of the semi-sacred
byline [
v. Bezsonov,
Kaleki Perekhozhie],
he turns round the oaks and the mountains, like Vertodub and Vertogor. Nevertheless, these
byline
may be ranked as fictions: i.e. as facts of real life (as then understood), applied to non-existent, un-vouched, or legendary individuals.
”

    Now the Shining Ones sat at the ramparts of their supernal home, busied with all sorts of romance making in the approved manner of Smirt. And Smirt, their acknowledged master, the chief of this planet’s gods, meditated alone in his temple. Since he could not find the legend of Arachne, he must make her a new legend and a better legend: that was obvious. Meanwhile, when once he had got together the tools of his thaumaturgy, and had ready his paper and his carbon ink and his customary black pen, he found that a number of more or less irrelevant matters invaded his divine mind, to delay creativeness; and about these matters he thought perforce, just to get them out of the way, so that he could settle down to his work with undivided attention.

    He did not, he reflected, think about that mortal woman Jane who had been his wife upon Earth, and who had died a great long while ago. He thought,
instead, about the churchyard of St.-Peter’s-in-the-East, in Oxford, and of its serene beauty under a June sunset; about what had happened, so delightfully, to Janet Ormerod and Smirt, in the south doorway of this church, a rich specimen of Norman work, badly obscured by the porch with a parvise, or upper story, characteristic of the fifteenth century; about the curious etymology of the word “hearse”; and about the various tariff duties on baking soda, card cases, toothbrushes, cheese, zinc, and Spanish cedar, whether in logs or in sawn planks.

    He thought about a dusty disused room and the ancient odors, suggesting an embalmed body, of that room’s blue-and-gray-striped, bare mattress, in the while that he and Mrs. Murgatroyd were misbehaving themselves; about how odd it was that in his present dream his power to smell anything appeared to have been remitted; and about the disruption of the Whig party in 1852, when General Winfield Scott carried only four states.

    With these matters disposed of, Smirt laid out upon the table ten sheets of writing paper; he scratched his nose; he uncorked his ink bottle; and he sat thinking for a few moments.

    Smirt did not think about Jane. To the contrary (as he noted, with continued approval of such abstinence) he thought about Beerbohm Tree’s fine
production of
King Henry the Eighth,
at His Majesty’s Theatre in 1911, and about the young girl who played Anne Bullen kneeling to be crowned, in the last scene, with her long neck bent far forward, just as it would bend later over the executioner’s block; and about how it was another Jane, a Jane Seymour, who had caused this. He thought about the gargoyles upon Notre Dame; about the silver ring he had bought at the first World’s Fair; about the
Washington Post March;
about how at college he saw a road company act
Othello,
and how he coupled later in the night with the woman who had acted the part of Roderigo; about how very pleasant was the combination of Bartlett pears with Gruyere cheese; about how odd it was that, thus far in his dream, he had gone continuously without food; and about an immoral and philosophic Swiss waiter at a small hotel in the small Rue d’Alger, just off the Rue de Rivoli.

    Then Smirt thought about Marian, a white blur in her nightgown, as they both waited at their bedroom doors, immediately across the hall from each other, to make sure that the rest of the house was asleep; about the unreliability of rubber as an investment, both in the stock market and elsewhere; about Florence, her perfect body, in which Smirt had been able to find no flaw anywhere except in the slight grossness of her wrist and her ankles, and about her
extraordinary tumescence; and about how droll it was that only 261 words should be spoken by Lady Macbeth during the entire tragedy.

    After that, Smirt dipped his pen in the ink; he attempted to remove a non-existent small hair, or it might have been a non-existent dust grain, from the point of his pen, with the fore-finger and the thumb of his left hand; and he sat for a while thinking.

    Smirt did not think about Jane. He thought about the tax blank (Form III6) upon which you figured out the allowed deduction for royalties already taxed in foreign countries; about how very carefully the Federal Government and the Supreme Court had cooperated to promote disloyalty among authors by taxing them with less rationality and with less fairness than were taxed the followers of any other profession; about Perseus in his old age, at Argos, brooding upon that which his eyes alone of living eyes had seen, when the bright shield of young Perseus reflected the face of Medusa; about an anemone noticed in the spring of 1897; about fireflies loitering over a meadow just beyond a railway bridge in the same year of grace; and about goldfish, including comets, shobunkins, moors, telescopes, and fantails.

    He thought about prose made fine and elaborate; about Mona Lisa’s seniority to the rocks among which she sits, about Ecclesiastes and Isaiah, about the quintessence of dust, about just, mighty and subtle opium, about the drums and tramplings of three conquests, and about the sedulous ape; about American literature, from its acknowledged masterpieces all the way up to mediocre writing; about warm water and mustard, and the better-thought-of book reviewers, and the unfairness of some few of them in compelling you to like them as persons; about that little dark-haired Jeanne, who, for all that she had made away with Smirt’s scarf pin in the morning, really did reveal breasts like white apples, and had so justified Theocritus; about a boy whom Smirt had found to be even more wonderful than himself, dead long ago of tuberculosis; about
A Toccata of Galuppi’s,
about
Cranford,
about
Proverbs in Porcelain,
about Kenneth Grahame’s books, and about
Chastelard;
and about death, which ended all mirth and prettiness utterly, and which made such an excellent literary theme.