The Nightmare Had Triplets (48 page)

    And Little Smirt said also: “If only my dear Mama were not what the blunt-spoken world describes as a lady of doubtful repute, then I might hope to allure her, once and a while, into permitting me the diversions which no sane abbess, no anchorite, no haloed seraph, would refuse thus implacably to the leisure hours of a young champion on his travels in the lands beyond common-sense. But against the prudishness of an aged gentlewoman who is by profession a past-mistress in the homeopathy of evil there is no possible arguing. She knows a great deal more about every practicable kind of misdemeanor than I know; and she intends to retain her superiority in knowledge, I perceive, by keeping me chaste and temperate.”

    Then Little Smirt said: “To be kept always chaste and temperate, by a dead hand, is a sad affliction for a hale young gentleman on his travels in the lands beyond common-sense. Yet upon the whole it seems wiser for me to put up with this affliction rather than to run any risk of irritating my revered and short-tempered and regrettably gifted mother. Since I regard Mama, in brief, with affection, with distrust, with unbounded reverence, and with a lively amount of fear, it follows that I had best go on looking for my wife, as I best may, under this very dreadful burden of prudence and of reason and of more than cenobitic continence.”

    After that, Little Smirt permitted the dead hand to guide him without much further resistance. And it did guide him, for some while, through a speedy and inglorious journey such as no other recorded champion had ever made in the lands beyond common-sense.

    Quite in vain did the splendors and the allurements of all superb magics such as by ordinary bedazzle a man’s judgment make their flashy appeal to Little Smirt, whom the hand of an old, cold wise-woman constrained into a saint’s innocence.... Well, and that, as he granted, was unavoidable. To the long experience of Madam Tana all the marvels and the thaumaturgies of romance, and all the seductions of evil, which moved glowingly about the lands beyond common-sense, must appear to be no more remarkable; than do keys to a locksmith or steaks to a butcher. Such matters were her own métier.

    She, as an expert, could consider, not any notion of delay on account of the beguiling solicitations of these lands’ endless wonder, but simply the points in which she herself would have made this wonder more wonderful and far more beguiling. In brief, if Madam; Tana might conceivably applaud, now and then, as a connoisseur, yet as a mother, she must remain stonily disapproving: and of this obstinacy Little Smirt must, in turn, accept the ignoble benefit, whether he wanted it or not.

    Since he approached Branlon from the east, he visited no country which Elair had traversed. But in yet other respects did the journeying of Little Smirt differ from the unchaperoned journeying of Elair very notably.

    For example, if Little Smirt approached an enchanted castle, such as Elair would have swaggered into through mere curiosity, or the hut of a Baba Yaga or a dragon’s den, such as Elair would have left occupied by death only—or even did Little Smirt so much as come near to an armed champion ready to fight any and all comers in the high cause of his lady’s honor,—then the cold hand of Madam Tana would compel a detour imperiously. Her implacable hand would at once lead Little Smirt out of the public highway, into bushes, and across ditches, and about muddy barn yards, until it had fetched him skulkingly beyond danger.

    But above all, if any woman whatever approached Little Smirt with a combining of good looks and of good will, why, then the hand of Little Smirt’s mother would assault the bosom of Little Smirt as viciously as if he were wholly to blame, and as if he had acted with unheard-of outrageousness, in provoking a young woman’s philanthropic regard.

    So did the dark magic of Madam Tana guide her beloved son through the lands beyond common-sense, without any hurt or delay, as yet, and without any least carnal indiscretion to look back on affectionately; and with his chest pinched black and blue.

    Thus all went well for a while, until by-and-by Little Smirt came to a large wood; and when he had gone but a short way among the trees of this place, he heard a divine melody. Inferring that immortals were present, but not knowing their mythology, he dismounted from his gray horse; and he prostrated himself, upon his face, behind a thick holly-bush.

    He heard next a chattering of two girls’ voices, toward which he did not venture to raise his eyes. But when this pair of goddesses had gone by, Little Smirt arose; and in the path before him lay an essential female garment.

    “Hah,” Little Smirt remarked, “but this sight inspires me. It is true that the inspiration is of a flimsy and hand-trimmed nature; but the well-gifted poet learns how to convert every sort of emotion into loveliness.”

    Thereafter he took out writing materials, and he spread the essential garment flat on the ground. But as he picked up his pen, made from a swan quill, the dead hand of Madam Tana came out of his bosom, walking clumsily upon its four fingers, like a hurt insect, and took the pen away from Little Smirt. Very hastily the left hand of Madam Tana then wrote out upon the white surface of the essential garment a sublime and austere ode, twenty-eight lines long, in praise of the beauties and the chaste charms of Bel-Imperia.

    “Now, but that is odd,” said Little Smirt. “Here are fine verses, not wholly unworthy of me. Yet I had meant these verses to express, in a rather more roguish manner, quite other sentiments, with which nobody’s wife anywhere ought to have any improper concern.”

    “Do you happen,” replied a girl’s voice, “to have seen a garment which was dropped hereabouts?”

    Little Smirt raised his eyes; and thus travelling over a pair of gold-sandaled feet, up two very well shaped, naked legs to a short red silk skirt, across a flat small belly, and between two virginal breasts, his eyes came, in a glow of complete contentment with these travels, to the beautiful face of a wood nymph, about which shone an aureole of gold-colored hair.

    “I have indeed found such a garment,” Little Smirt answered, arising tumultuously, “to the great joy off my heart; for by the approved laws of the lands beyond common-sense, that careless immortal who misplaced this garment must consent to become my love.”

    He stepped forward, smiling. Then the hand of Madam Tana pinched his breast with such viciousness that Little Smirt uttered a squeal, which he shaded off, more or less plausibly, into a sigh of heroic melancholy.

    “But, alas, my heart is given elsewhere,” Little Smirt continued, “and for that reason, O woman with most promising legs, I respectfully waive all claims to your person.”

    Thus speaking, he restored to the wood nymph the garment in question. And she inspected it with dismay, saying,—

    “Chaste but unfortunate champion displaying the fine peacock’s plume, you have defiled the royal underwear of my divine mistress with your scribblings, and there is simply no telling what will become of you.”

    “Do you conduct me to her,” said Little Smirt, his teeth chattering slightly, “and I will present my apologies for the misplacing of a poetic outburst.”

    “Well,” said the wood nymph, “it may be that, as a scholar and a man of refinement, and as a person of such lofty continence as to despise my poor charms, you can make your peace with her. It is certain that if you attempt to escape from this wood without having placated my mistress, who is Queen of the Kogaras, then the wrath of at least nine immortals will combine to destroy you in a fashion no less humorous than excruciating. So you had best come with me.”

    She then led Little Smirt into a cleared space in which stood a red summer-house; and she bade him wait there, among the seventeen figures of wrought gold, shaped like tigers and ducks and dogs and lions and deer and apes, which stood inside this summer-house.

    The wood nymph returned by-and-by, saying, “There must be a magic in your writing, for my mistress has considered it with a cooing noise and the smiles of a life-long imbecile.”

    “Aha,” said Little Smirt, “so your mistress is a good judge of poetry.”

    “I do not know about that, O most continent and ill-advised scholar. I know only that, for some reason or another reason, she appears so pleased by your sentiments as to wish to condone, in so far as that may be possible, their improper location. So do you kneel now, for my mistress approaches.”

    Little Smirt at once prostrated himself; and when the divine lady had entered the summer-house he knocked his head upon the yellow and red stone pavement of the place, crying out:

    “This unworthy stranger is from a far-off and imperfectly civilized country. Condone therefore his barbarities and overlook his existence.”

    The lady answered him: “Jestingly, but not otherwise, may the phoenix beg from the wren the loan of a feather. For what indeed, O too generous Little Smirt, is there upon this unworthy garment for me to pardon, unless it be the resplendent excess of your chaste devotion?”

    He arose swiftly; and in his arms he took his beloved Bel-Imperia.

    So was it Little Smirt discovered, in one breath: (
a
) that, without knowing it, he had reached Branlon; (
b
) that, without knowing it, he had married the Queen of the Kogaras; and (
c
) that, without knowing it, he had yet again behaved with surprising prudence for a young man of his age and heredity.

    Now the Kogaras (whom Mr. Smith had taken over from Oriental mythology) had the appearance of somewhat small, beautiful, blonde young women. They possessed tiny golden claws in place of fingernails; and it was their doom to become mortal every five hundred years, just as Bel-Imperia had become mortal, until death charitably restored them to Branlon and to their woodland pleasures in Branlon.

    Well, and since the next incarnation of Bel-Imperia was an affair comfortably remote, now began for Little Smirt a new and unclouded existence. He lived; very happily with his wife, in a modest hunting lodge builded out of copper and some sort of shining bright red stone, between the forest and the ocean: unblemished were the lawful joys of their honeymoon; grief seemed to have cut their acquaintance; no troubles visited their snug home.

    Here they fared simply. They did not live so stolidly as lived their nearest human neighbors, Elair and Oina, who reaped with untiring industry the neat fields of their own meadows so as to feed their own matter-of-fact cattle in their own prosaic farm, surrounded by the charmed forest of Branlon. Instead, day after day Little Smirt and his Bel-Imperia would go a-hunting together, or it might be a-fishing or a-birdnesting, like well-bred vagabonds: and they would fetch back, for their bronze cooking pots, red deer from Strathgor, and squirrels from Tarba, and salmon and woodcock from out of Darvan; and eggs of nine sorts from the oak-groves of Pen Loegyr; and at Clioth they speared salmon and eels, and otters also. Nor did they lack for sweet blackberries and mushrooms and tender bramble sprouts and wholesome watercress. Day after day they thus lacked for nothing which any sensible person could desire; and the nights likewise of this young couple were happy, all through their honeymoon.

    Moreover, Little Smirt had famousness. The fidelity and the strength of Little Smirt’s love, and the fine phrasing of his sublime and austere ode, had been duly reported, by his fond wife, to her fellow nymphs and associate demi-gods: they applauded such constancy; and his high-minded legend was now added to the other strange legends of Branlon. Everywhere the Wild Huntsman and the Metsik and the Gubich recited with enthusiasm that superb ode which Little Smirt, under the stress of carnal temptation, had written, in a lofty defiance of any such temptation, upon the underwear of his own wife. Among the tree-tops the Niagrusiar repeated the tale of his heroism and his chastity. The Norg and the Vargamor praised Little Smirt as a paragon of all lovers. When the Tutosel hooted at him, the tone of her voice was admiring.

    Little Smirt now and then would recall that, but for the intervening hand of his Mama, he would have written upon the famous garment such verses, and would have made, to his wife’s attendant nymph, such advances, as would have given to his fortunes a disastrously different turn, and would have won for him tributes not wholly applausive from the gold claws of the Kogaras. And at such times he would think with a sort of remorse about the old lady’s fond care of his well-being.

    Meanwhile he kept the cold hand in his breast; and the hand continued to guide and to serve him. It showed him always the most profitable road to follow; it pinched him if he was about to make a blunder and when Little Smirt wrote any verses nowadays, then the instant they were finished, the hand would unbutton his blouse, and would climb out of his bosom, like an unwieldy, rather unpleasant insect; and it would edit his verses so as to make them conform, in every detail, to the pure-minded and pastoral tastes of Branlon.

    Did his verse show any least trace of the morbid or the licentious or the pessimistic, the hand would correct all that in, so to speak, no time. It thus caused the writings of Little Smirt to remain pure and wholesome and uplifting, to the never-failing delight of the local immortals. There was nobody, said the woodland people, in any way comparable to this most praiseworthy of poets, who made you feel (as the Tutosel phrased it, from her legitimately romantic point of view, as a technical spinster) that the world was a pretty good sort of place.

    “Nevertheless,” said Little Smirt, to his wife, “I have not yet seen your august protector, that Mr. Smith who is Lord of the Forest.”

    “That will happen in due time, my husband; for time, as a wise person has remarked, cures a great many more maladies than does any properly licensed doctor.”