The Nightmare Had Triplets (43 page)

    “Moreover, if I remain here, madame, I must necessarily despatch a number of them before I have the chance to express my contempt at full length. The slain persons would thus miss the point of my discourse. Yes, you are right. It will be more adequate to direct against the chief of police a satiric poem denouncing his department and all members of it in such terms as will blight the remainder of his existence and consign everybody of his profession to eternal shame.”

    Thus speaking, Clitandre the poet highwayman mounted his black mare, and resuming his black mask, he bowed ceremoniously. He then rode away, in a local hailstorm of hurtless bullets, leaving Marianne, unharmed and unrobbed, to be rescued by the complacent constabulary.

    When Clitandre had returned to Volmar’s home, upon the southern borders of Branlon, he found Mr. Smith was spending the evening there. They all supped together, except Mr. Smith, who ate nothing. After that, when the King of Osnia’s daughter was about her dish-washing, and when well-fuddled Volmar had gone to sleep upon a couch under a robe of sables, then Mr. Smith took from out of a bag that was woven of gold threads a chess-board, made of gold and of rubies, and the chess men carved in onyx and moulded in bright orichalc. Thus handsomely did he play at chess with Clitandre in the while that the young highwayman talked about the day’s doings.

    Nor was it a great while before the Lord of the Forest had heard his tall thieving son’s fine rhapsodies about Marianne indulgently.

    “Child of a dream,” replied Mr. Smith, “when I released you from a deep dungeon it was in order that you might follow after your own dreams unhindered. So do you continue by all means to adore this blonde dream-woman. And do you count on my aid whensoever it may be needed. Check.”

    “Sir,” said Clitandre, in a warm glow of enthusiasm, which promptly cost him a bishop, “you remain the most splendid of patrons. I regret only that you do not empower me to steal something in your behalf, because, as I shall always remember, I would have been hanged last spring, on account of the Duke of Melphés best pair of candlesticks, but for your staunch friendship for my parents.”

    “Let us distinguish, Clitandre!” replied Mr. Smith, modestly. “I was not ever your father’s true friend, even though I did know sublime Smirt, I flatter myself, better than did most people. I very often thank fortune for this fact, upon at least two grounds. Check again, I believe. As for your mother Arachne, well, but as I always said, there was something about the way in which her head was set on her neck that I found specially charming; and her predilection for eating her husbands, after she had once used them, was after all but the combining of a certain fastidiousness with the virtue of thrift. So it follows, my dear boy, yes, it follows that I delight to see the son of Arachne making a young idiot of himself thus wholesomely.”

    “Ah, sir, but Madame Marianne is perfection!” said Clitandre, as he castled.

    “She customarily is,” returned Mr. Smith, “at your age. Check. And that she thinks well of you I do not doubt, for you have much the look of your father.”

    “It is good hearing, sir,” replied Clitandre, reverently, and with the loss of a knight, “that I should in any manner resemble that divine hero whose great fame had no equal either upon earth or in heaven.”

    “Well, in a way, Clitandre—check—that is true, just as that is true about the Borgias and Mary’s little lamb and Judas Iscariot. Still, one does distinguish. Check.”

    “Yet one does not split hairs, sir—except at the grave cost of tonsorial blasphemy—in according reverence to sublime Smirt. Yes; the game is yours, Lord of the Forest. Nor can I play now another chess game,” said Clitandre, rising, “because I have an engagement which summons me forth.”

    It was an announcing which Mr. Smith received with urbane disapproval, in the while that he leaned back, and lighted a cigarette, and remarked:

    “You work too hard, Clitandre. Yes, you inherit your mother’s untiring industry. That is a fault on the right side, of course: still, it is not well, after giving all day to highway robbery, for you to devote the night season to burglary. No mortal constitution can stand a strain so incessant.”

    “Sir, it is not larceny but love which to-night requires my attention.”

    Now was Mr. Smith abeam with divine complacency; and he said:

    “Why, but can it be that, impressed by the
bel air
and the fine eyes which you got from your father, this Marianne has granted you an assignation?”

    Clitandre was horrified; and he showed as much, in declaring:

    “Such an event, sir, is as far beyond my merits as it exceeds the imaginable limits of my revered lady’s condescension. I can think of nothing more dreadful, or more sacrilegious, than is this notion of my approaching Madame Marianne as one normally does approach lesser creatures.”

    “Truly,” replied Mr. Smith, “but it takes a long while of blundering to convince any young poet that every woman is made out of flesh and blood. Only at the cost of many sleepless nights, and of much toil and digging in dark places, does he grant that which the more stolid accept as a plain axiom in the first dawn of puberty. But let us discuss matters of less universal interest.”

    “In fact, sir, I think it would be a great deal better not to think about any such enormities in connection with her whom I worship whole-heartedly, and to whom my eternal faithfulness is pledged for all time. No, Lord of the Forest, I propose to pass this night with a young woman named Nicole, whom I met in Arleoth this morning; and whose elderly husband, by good luck, is now absent from home.”

    “Come now,” said Mr. Smith, “but to console the bereaved, even the temporarily bereaved, and to comfort the lonely, and perhaps also to labor in place of the impotent, is, from every point of view, a fine employment for charitably inclined young men.”

    “In that case, Lord of the Forest, I shall ask you to excuse me until breakfast—”

    In reply, Mr. Smith exhaled philosophically a smoke wreath, which if not in all a paternal blessing was at any rate a consent of unflawed urbanity.

    “Moreover,” Mr. Smith resumed, “it is praiseworthy that you should intend to remain faithful to your adored Marianne in your thoughts and in your verse-making rather than in your body. It shows a quite proper respect for the operations of the mind, as opposed to one’s merely animal faculties. So must both charity and ethics counsel you, Clitandre, to go forward at once to the consummation of your unhallowed desires.”

    “Why, then, Lord of the Forest, I shall say goodnight to you—”

    “And besides that, in its every aspect,” Mr. Smith continued, affably, “love is a most interesting passion. As has been well remarked, love is a divine rage and enthusiasm, which seizes on man, and works a revolution in his entire being: it unites him to his race; it carries him with new sympathy into nature; it enhances the power of his senses; it opens his imagination; and it adds to his character heroic and sacred attributes.”

    “Very well, then,” said Clitandre, taking up his plumed hat: “then, with your permission, I shall attempt at once to develop my character; and to open my imagination, I believe you said it was, sir; and to enter with sympathy into the workings of nature; and to unite myself with my race, or in any event with one charming member of it.”

    “By all means, my dear boy!” Mr. Smith urged him. “For somewhat unreasonably has a carping lawyer protested that it is wrong for man, who was made for the contemplation of heaven and of all noble objects, to kneel before any lesser idol in the shape of a fair woman,—and thus make of himself a slave to his own servant, the eye, which was given him for more serious purposes. Yet the eye is a faithful and far-reaching servant; we do well to reward it with the edifying spectacle of beauty in a hot sweat. Moreover, now I think of it, neither Bacon nor Emerson has as yet said these superb things. But they will say them by-and-by: and the truth of sage sayings is not a matter of chronology. So do you go at once to your Nicole.”

    “I shall obey you with pleasure, sir, the moment that you have ended speaking thus learnedly.”

    “For why indeed should anybody be speaking at any such length about love?” Mr. Smith assented. “To do that is time-wasting. What only matters is that it is in vain we resist the passion of love. So let the wise person yield to it silently, without any prolonged and useless talking. As yet another philosopher is going to declare, I do not know just how many hundred years from this evening, it is far wiser to contend with bulls, lions, bears, and ferocious giants, than with love. Love domineers over every living creature, and can make mighty, or lunatic, or sorrowful, whomsoever love touches. It follows that the man is no better than a fool, or an idiot, or at utmost a school-teacher, who does not acknowledge, through a tribute of awe-stricken dumbness, that this same love is an exceedingly great god. For all these reasons, Clitandre, you ought, in my opinion, to make haste to serve this great god, instead of dawdling here and talking about love thus endlessly.”

    “I intend to do that, sir, as soon as I may. Only, it is you, Lord of the Forest, who are detaining me here with your eloquent advice to go away at once.”

    This was a statement which self-evidently grieved Mr. Smith, by its large unreason. So he said:

    “Now you are talking long-winded nonsense, Clitandre, because it is well known that no young person was ever yet checked in the pursuit of his amours by any advice, no matter how good that advice might be. Yes, and you talk a great deal of nonsense, Clitandre.”

    “Why, but only about facts, sir,” Clitandre answered; “and all facts are of considerable interest to a sound logician.”

    “Ah, ah!” said Mr. Smith.

    “And when I say ‘considerable’,” Clitandre explained, “I mean worthy of being considered.”

    “Do you get along with you to your Nicole!” replied a well-pleased Mr. Smith, “inasmuch as the impudence of this younger generation proclaims them to be beyond saving morally.”

    Clitandre came to the little frame-and-plaster house in the Street of St. Silenus at about ten o’clock; and huge was his surprise to discover the second floor of this house brilliantly illuminated. He most certainly had not expected this; it seemed unacceptable; yet, finding the garden gate unlocked, as Nicole had promised him it would be, he went in, and he passed to the rear of the place. Here also, just as had been arranged, the side door proved to be ajar.

    He tapped discreetly; but nobody answered him. By-and-by Clitandre entered the dark passageway, and he crept gently upstairs. He came to a flaringly lighted room, and thus peeped through the doorway, upon an interior which he adjudged to be startling, for immediately before him, upon a broad table in the centre of the room, lay two naked bodies.

    Of these, one was the corpse of a young man whom Clitandre did not remember to have seen earlier. But the other stripped corpse, beyond any doubt, was that of plump, merry, black-haired Nicole—yes, very obviously, of black-haired Nicole—whom Clitandre had hoped to admire—it was an ironic reflection—in precisely this state of undress. For another odd thing, at the big fireplace beyond this so dreadfully burdened table, three of the constables of Arleoth, in their dark green-and-silver uniforms, were burning the straw mattresses of a bed. Clitandre inferred that these men must have been destroying the clothing of the dead also, for the air smelt unpleasantly of burned cloth. From over the mantel a neatly painted Virgin and Child smiled down upon everything benignantly.

    “But then, Valère, what can you expect of a known rascal like that?” one policeman was saying.

    “Indeed, Ariste, I remember him ten years ago,” said the second policeman, coughing. “Fit to strangle you, this smoke is. No, but nearer twelve it must have been, because that was in my first wife’s time.”

    “A superb woman, that, Valère! A sad loss to a great many of your male friends!”

    “You may well say that, Ariste. We are here to-day and gone to-morrow. Yes, and he was just the same then, if not more so, on account of his being younger in those times. No butter would ever melt in his mouth, bless you! Oh, no! not at any price. But the lawyer found out different, you remember.”

    They all three laughed heartily at that.

    “Ah, but indeed we do remember, Valère. Him, with his bald head and his fine alibi!” said the third policeman, as he stirred up the close packed straw, with a long curtain rod. “Like an egg!”

    “And she was not the first of them, either,” pointed out Ariste, virtuously. “My, but how it all comes back!”

    “No, and not by a good armful, if you mean the fat widow woman. Careful there, Geronte, or you will have that there chimney on fire! What did you mean, Ariste, by ‘a great many of my male friends?’”

    “You were not talking about your male friends, Valère, but about the fat widow woman. You will doubtless recollect that she married the grocer, after all, she did, just the same, Lord help him!”

    “Yes,” agreed the red-haired third policeman, “and there was a baby in rather less than no time, I seem to remember. So he got out of that too.”

    “They do, mostly,” Valère remarked, despondently, “until it makes an honest man fair fit to question Providence. But I still do not see what you meant by ‘a great many of my male friends’.”

    “Why, but I meant, of course, that all policemen admire virtue, Valère, because they necessarily see so little of it.”

    So was it that the three constables of Arleoth discoursed lazily, as they burned up a pair of large straw mattresses under the supervision of a smiling Virgin in blue and white and of a Child who blessed them with two eternally lifted fingers; and as Clitandre tiptoed, with a softness begotten by experience, away from Nicole’s room.