The Nightmare Had Triplets (20 page)

    Smirt looked at her ruefully. “You,” he remarked “you are the sort of audience I find everywhere. It is to people who believe such untrue and immoral axioms that I must try to explain Smirt. It is like trying to explain the principles of wireless telegraphy to a deaf and dumb Abyssinian, to a person who does not know any more about the language I am speaking than I do about wireless telegraphy. In a general way, of course, I have followed its evolution down to the present day, from the theoretical work of Clerk Maxwell in 1865, and the first experimental proofs of Heinrich Hertz in 1887; but I do not pretend to be an expert in wireless telegraphy. No, I am merely Smirt: I have my good and bad moral qualities, very much as I have my teeth and my knack for phrase making, but I am neither virtuous nor wicked, any more than I am dental or verbal.”

    “But—” said the red-haired girl.

    “No, my child, you are quite wrong. No, I am Smirt, I am a special and indivisible medley, a mixture in which, I pause to assure you, my egotisms are neither more nor less an ingredient than are my bicuspids or my epigrams. And I cannot communicate Smirt, I cannot make him comprehensible to the dull-minded gods or to the flighty-minded public at large. That, child, is the old difficulty, the enduring difficulty—that I can find for myself no really appreciative audience in the universe as it is now constituted; and that I must put up with being worshipped by adorers who do not even know what I am talking about.”

    Whatever had been on the tip of Dorothy’s tongue, you now saw, she had reconsidered saying it. The girl asked, instead,—

    “Yet is it necessary, Master, always to be talking about yourself?”

    “But of course, dear child, that is necessary; that is unavoidable. For I am an artist. And every artist has his own special temperament which colors his work, his perceptions, his thoughts, his doings, and his talking, with an unique tinge. He perceives nothing, he can think about nothing, and of course he speaks nothing, which is not in some degree egoistic. Homer, in brief, is always Homeric.”

    The girl Dorothy reflected. “And is it good to be an artist?”

    “Why, but how should I know, my dear? I have
never been anything else. I would put it that the lark turns to his singing inevitably, because both he and it are larks; and he does not speculate whether he might have lived more contentedly as a horse, or it might be as a hippopotamus, in so far at least as any lark has discussed the matter with me personally.”

    Now the girl shook her sleek round red head in forlorn fashion. And she said:

    “No, Master of the Gods, I do not understand you. For it seems to me that you talk nonsense, that you are at large pains to talk nonsense—”

    “That is urbanity,” Smirt pointed out. “It is a sort of armor.”

    “—And yet, under it all, you are unhappy, Master of the Gods. At no instant are you freed of unhappiness.”

    “And that, my dear,” said Smirt lightly, “is logic. For I have only my disciples, who make parodies, and my worshippers, who address to me the wrong sort of anthems.”

    She came to him, touching his hand. “Can I help you, Master?”

    Now his mouth widened at each end, a trifle uglily, he suspected, like the mouth of a mastiff. Smirt spoke with deliberate harshness.

    “For ten minutes, Dorothy, or it might be for quarter of an hour, I could make use of you. I could
employ you as one does a drug. You are young. You are female. That suffices.”

    She replied gravely: “Let it suffice. For it is not right that you should be unhappy, Master of the Gods.”

    He looked at her then in half quizzical admiration. “These are suggestions which pain me,” Smirt said. “You are an idiot. Compassion is not really the same thing as justice and piety and philosophy. Yet I am nine-tenths—no, I am ninety-nine-hundredths—in love with you. For that reason I shall not defile your sublime idiocy. No; it is right enough that I should be unhappy. And I shall get along, somehow, so long as I avoid
hubris.
”

    After that, Smirt kissed the girl Dorothy, with cool and urbane affection. Then he dismissed her from his temple, saying,—

    “Get along with you! swoosh! shoo!”

    —Which was all very well, Smirt reflected; and which displayed that proper respect for womanhood such as graces any Southern gentleman who is past his prime. The only trouble was that the girl’s talking had revealed to Smirt his pre-eminent need to be rid of Smirt’s pre-eminence.

    “
No specific reason can be assigned for the disappearance of the terms ‘thou,’ ‘thee’ and ‘thine’ from current speech. These words were familiar usage in Old English, but during the Middle English period were gradually superseded by the plural ‘you’ (or ‘ye’) and ‘your.’ On 30 August 1924 the Prince of Wales dined with President Coolidge at the White House, returning in the evening to Syosset, N. Y.
”

    “Come now,” said Smirt, “but this is intolerable. It is not only that I can find nowhere upon earth, nor in any supernal region to which I have yet had access, my fit audience. It is not only that even in Amit the public at large pursue me with the slur of fond admiration, and instead of delighting in my wit, my profundity, and my graceful prose style, delight only in my opinions as to topics about which I have no opinions. These troubles I can face with philosophy: they are common to all persons of genius. Another trouble goes deeper. Another trouble is unique. I alone of creative artists have been afflicted with divine disciples, and the Shining Ones have caught my manner far too successfully. All is urbanity and loveliness and topsy-turvy folk-lore and wellbred despair, with Smirtlings travelling toward all points of the compass upon irrational quests. All human life has become a bare-faced plagiarism from my books.”

    He turned to the vast stores of his scholarship for the requisite goetia. He invoked the All-Highest in the appropriate formula, and hardly had he so much as spoken the words “
Shem hamporasch
” when the archangel Azrael appeared.

    “Now but this is indeed a surprise,” said Smirt, cordially shaking hands with the Dark Angel, “and a most delightful surprise, to be sure, for all that it was not exactly you whom I summoned.”

    “All-Highest & Company present their compliments, Smirt. They acknowledge your favor of even date, the contents of which have been duly noted.”

    “Ah, yes, for I may tell you in confidence, my deal Azrael, this is an affair of some importance, involving as it does the cosmos, the scheme of human life and the reorganization of all current celestial government. I am ready now to help your principals with semi-official report, with a well-thought-out bill complaints, and with a vast deal of constructive criticism.”

    “A personal interview is not possible, Smirt. Highest & Company present their compliments desire not ever again to be bothered with your nonsense. You will pardon my use of the word ‘nonsense’, I am sure, upon the understanding that I act simply as a messenger.”

    “I quite understand, my dear Azrael. Nevertheless, I have here”—and Smirt took out his forty reis piece—“omnipotence within limits. My wishes within limits cannot be denied.”

    “But I,” said Azrael, in naïve surprise, “am the Angel of Death. I do not know anything about omnipotence. I have never encountered it. Of what nature is this omnipotence?”

    Thereupon the Angel of Death looked Smirt full in the face and considered Smirt gravely.

    And Smirt a bit hastily offered him a cigarette, because Smirt did not at all like being looked at by those pensive, dark, and yet pitying eyes, whose appraising of Smirt troubled him as no other thing had ever before troubled Smirt. And it was a bother too that Azrael remained so indeterminate in appearance as to be rather more like a cloud than an archangel.

    “In fact,” said Smirt, “let us change the subject. You do not smoke? You are wise. It is a quite dreadful habit. So your principals thought I was talking nonsense. Dear me, but these business men! these executives! They are fine fellows, in their way, but one cannot make them understand the bare rudiments of common-sense or of sound art. I merely pointed out to your firm that their conduct of the universe, aside from being irrational in some respects, was in yet other respects unaesthetic.”

    “That is true,” replied Azrael, with the air of one who consults a memorandum. “Yes, that has been reported. You required also, Smirt, that the affairs of the universe should henceforward be conducted without order or system.”

    “Oh, but come now!” Smirt answered, with the promptness of a sound logician. “Let us distinguish! I did but explain to your firm that they were conducting the universe in a seditious manner, not only from the point of view of my religion as an Epicopalian, but likewise from the point of view of my most carefully thought-out theories concerning For it is the function of art to interpret and to comment upon life. Now a foreordered and sensible conducted universe, as I made clear to them, affords no ground for unfavorable comment and needs no special interpreting. It both explains and justifies itself. It offers the most brilliant genius no least pretext for being tolerant and urbane and ironic.”

    “You required also, Smirt, that the planets should be remolded and mankind attired differently. You lectured the Creator of all things upon the laws of creation, and the Lord of all evil you instructed in the first principles of evil.”

    “Well, and why not?” Smirt asked reasonably, “I have done a good bit of book reviewing in my day!”

    “But above all, Smirt, you talked. You talked and you talked and you talked. You talked so endlessly, it has been reported, that All-Highest & Company could not even guess at what you were talking about.” Smirt resorted first to his cigarette and, after that, to entire frankness.

    “In fact, Azrael, I was not greatly impressed by the intellectual grasp of either of your principals. And I did suggest that the firm ought to fall in with more modem ideas. I advised your principals, for the sake of their own good repute, to make of their universe a meaningless muddle wherein each human life becomes a hopeless and richly colored adventure, very much as it is in all my books. And out of the kindness of my heart I threw in a few other suggestions—rather informally, you know, and just as they occurred to me.”

    “You appear to have done that,” Azrael conceded. “It was like, they report, the never ending and senseless and quite unendurable noise of a blue-bottle fly.”

    “It was like what!” said Smirt. “Oh, but never mind!”

    “Like a blue-bottle fly,” Azrael told him, with relish.

    “I heard you the first time. I am not deaf, my dear Azrael.”

    “But you asked me, Smirt—”

    “Well, and if I did, there is no earthly sense in repeating things over and over again. It sounds doddering. It is not sensible. Nor is it sensible, I can now see, to argue with such obsolete survivals as a Personal Creator and a Personal Devil. They prefer, it seems, to cling to their out-of-date and quite inartistic notions. To such hidebound conservatism there is no reply. They have my permission to jog on in the old rut. So now that is settled, Azrael. Let us dismiss the unpleasant topic. Let us stop talking about insects, for I have a grievance far above bugs.”

    Then Azrael spread out, almost wearily, those great shadowy hands which had conquered Caesar and Tamburlaine also; and Azrael sighed dejectedly.

    “What is it, Smirt, that you now desire?”

    “I desire, in the first place, to point out that all my books are registered under the copyright law of 1909—including, of course, the amendment added on August 1912. Nevertheless do the Shining Ones infringe these copyrights daily. They dramatize my stories, they pilfer my best phrases, they have turned my superb notions into flat reality. I am surrounded by apes, pirates and plagiarists; and I desire, Azrael, to consult a competent lawyer.”

    “Then why, Smirt, do you not do so?”

    “But how is that possible? In the romantic fine world which I invented there were no such humdrum
creatures as modern lawyers. It follows that in the planet patched up by my imitators there are no lawyers, and I in consequence am bereft of legal advice.”

    “That, Smirt, is called poetic justice. You have created a world of your own. And you find it to be even less habitable than the world from which you escaped.”

    “Again, Azrael, I would distinguish. It is merely that I respect my art, and gave over a lifetime to its perfection. To-day my most novel devices have been made clichés, my most killing paradoxes are axioms. My books have become mere reportorial realism now that all human life is modeled after my books; and I decline to put up with any such concatenation of annoyances.”

    Thus speaking, Smirt sank back into a sitting position at the foot of the copper pedestal from which he had been answering the petitions of his adorers; and he waved both his hands in a gesture equally emphatic and graceful. Smirt remarked gaily:

    “In brief, my dear fellow, I yield to that stupidity against which the very gods are powerless because it has infected them through and through. I accept, without further comment, the queer tastes of All-Highest & Company. So now, Azrael, now let my dream end, and let me return to my own name, whatever that may be, and to my accustomed habitation upon Earth.”

    “All-Highest & Company present their compliments, Smirt; and consider that you and your like have done enough mischief upon Earth.”

    That was an announcement which raised Smirt’s eyebrows as far as urbanity and his facial muscle permitted.

    “It is true,” said Smirt, “that to exemplify the urbane, day in and day out, among a nation which is not capable of being urbane at any time, does stir up some little, quite natural envy and irritation, Someday I must show you my press clippings. Yet the backwardness of America, I submit, is no sound reason for my being left in the middle of a distasteful dream, a dream in which I have no audience except the supreme powers of heaven and the public at large, and am forced every day to consider a worldful of my own notions as they have been misunderstood and travestied by the Shining Ones. You compel me to point out that in plain fairness you, who are the Angel of Death, should at the very least rid me of my divine plagiarists.”