The Nightmare Had Triplets (55 page)

    “Indeed, Elissa, but—at any rate, locally—your arguments are convincing. Yes, I can well imagine, in this deep darkness, that you are Tana, a bit stoutened up; and that it is love of Tana which now animates me.” After that, followed silence. Then the Queen said: “Oh, but, my dear, dear friend, your love of Tana will be the death of me! Nevertheless, it would not be right of me to discourage the undying love which you show for Tana. Indeed, I can well sympathize, because as an unprotected young widow, but, then, I have told you about that, and at all events, no sensible man wants a bean-pole. Yes, I can well sympathize, who have lost my Sychaeus, because to Sychaeus my heart shall always remain faithful.”

    “Just so, Elissa,—and it is not at all as if I had meant you were actually fat,—just so will my heart always belong to Tana undividedly. Yet, as you say, the body of man is complex. It is subject to aspirings, to perturbations and to spasms which are not merely cardiac.”

    “That is equally true about women, dear friend, as you have now quadruply discovered.”

    “Four,” replied Smire, “is an unlucky number.” And he continued, after a prolonged pause:

    “Ouf! So in our bereavement, Elissa, we can but console each other as we best may.”

    “Ah, ah!” said the Queen; “aié! Indeed, dear Smire, to do that is our plain duty to the departed. We cannot doubt that our lost loved ones desire our happiness as whole-heartedly as we wish for theirs. We should not question that it would be to both of them a great comfort to know we are not wholly forlorn during their absence.”

    “That is logic, very certainly, Elissa, even though, from what I remember about Tana, she would add to that same great comfort by boxing my jaws and by scratching your eyes out. Nevertheless, in strict logic, it ought to please our dear dead tremendously to know that—if but in a symbolic fashion—we are commemorating their burial and prefiguring their resurrection. Yes, it is well that we should pay these repeated tributes to their memory; for than loyalty there is no virtue more praiseworthy.”

    Thereafter yet another silence ensued.

    “But you, Smire,” said the Queen, with the soft sighing of a woman fully flooded with blissfulness, “you are not merely praiseworthy. Your unflagging love for Tana is simply incredible, even in a divine being who happens to be three different persons, all at the same time.”

    “Nor can I quite believe, Elissa, that you are now rewarding in fond reverie the devotion of a sedate clergyman, such as I had understand your Sychaeus to be during the days and the nights also of his living.”

    “Sychaeus,” said the Queen, proudly, “was the High Priest of Baal-Melkart, of that great Male Principle which begets all life. He won this supreme honor, I must tell you, in a competitive examination open to the clergy of entire Northern Africa. He served very worthily his chosen god. Sychaeus was in all respects a devoted and incessant husband. But you, O divine Smire,”—she added, with delighted, hushed laughter—“you have shown me with an unanswerable logic, which depends sanely upon a sane facing of the Trinity of Material Dimensions, that the servant of no god is divine.”

    “Hah, and what does that mean, Elissa?”

    “In the morning, dear Smire, after we have been married, it will perhaps be proper for me to handle with a wife’s frankness this sublime point of theology. But not just at present, my friend. So long as I remain the inconsolable widow of Sychaeus, I must keep to my fixed rule not ever to disparage him in his own bed, no matter with whom I may happen to be sharing it.”

    “And as a heart-broken widower,” said Smire, “I applaud your reticence. It shows a wholly proper feeling. It attests a firm faithfulness to your husband such as I have not found to be pandemic among womankind. All these are great virtues which ought to be rewarded. And they shall be rewarded.”

    “Already!” she said, in astonishment; “and yet again! Truly, O divine Smire, I can but repeat that you are incredible.”

    “
To King Iarbus of Getulia

    “
Fame straightway turns her course, inflaming his soul and aggravating his rage, says Virgil; and the ensuing intervention of Mercury is a plain copy of the part played by Phoebus Apollo in the Smire epos. The Getulians, however, should not be confounded faith the Hyperboreans, for whom see Volcher’s
Mythische Geographic,
I, chap. vi. It should be remarked also that an epithet of Apollo was ‘Smynthian’ thus making natural his conjunction with Smith.
”

    Well, and they say in Branlon that now it was with Iarbus, the dark King of Getulia, that Smire was talking, in a circular room wainscoted with red enamel relieved with black strips of ebony. The ceiling was of gilded oak-beams inset liberally with large garnets and amethysts and jacinths.

    Here, clothed in a lynx skin, over which fell a soiled, rumpled tunic of fine purple cloth, slit at both sides, Iarbus sat at a carved table, made out of mahogany wood, drinking moodily the pearl-colored wine of Bactria, which he now and then flavored with cardamon seeds and the dried fat of dormice. All this part of Carthage, in brief, betrayed the exact but picturesque literary influence of Flaubert. And Smire tells Iarbus:

    “Your situation, my dear fellow, is unfortunate. I quite recognize that fact. I can but say I am unfeignedly sorry.”

    Iarbus replied sullenly; yet he did not reply until after he once more had emptied his huge goblet, made out of pink-veined crystal, such as was to be found only in Zounghar. It was carved in the shape of a sea-horse—this being the traditionary symbol of an hermaphrodite horned deity of the Getulians, Schaha-Quet-Tanitaach, the Sea-born Begetter of Gout. And Iarbus said:

    “What is your sorrow to my sorrow? You are a wicked-minded and swindling Immortal. You have violated my betrothed wife. You have robbed me of Elissa. And against an Immortal I am powerless.”

    “That is it, precisely,” said Smire: “and I quite feel for you. Yet I would distinguish. I am, in so far as I know, superhuman; but through no fault of my own. It is a point to be considered, I submit. By no course of logic can I be held responsible for the graces of person, the charm of manner, the readiness of wit, or for any other superiority which may have led Elissa to prefer my embraces to yours. I was simply born thus. I deserve no real blame for possessing these virtues. Nor of course, as you must allow me to mention in passing, can Elissa be blamed for succumbing to any such galaxy.”

    “Nevertheless,” said Iarbus, “you have robbed me of my betrothed wife.”

    “In fact, I deserve your pity,” Smire continued. “You should not regard me with mere scornful indignation, O dark son of Zeus, simply because no woman of her own accord would ever look twice at you. You who are thus blessed, ought to be compassionate toward me who am less prodigally favored by fortune. Do you fancy it can be agreeable for anyone to be compelled daily—or at any rate, every night or so—to face willy-nilly the harsh fact that for so long as one retains these graces of person, this charm of manner, and so on, one will be hunted by all women? For truly one is thus harried. And so one submits with a fortitude upon which one’s modesty forbids one to expatiate. In brief, one learns to surrender to the pertinacity of women. To attempt—in this, as it were, quotidian quandary—to preserve what has been unthinkingly called one’s personal virtue, would be irrational. To surrender at discretion is the right virtue. It is a form of altruism which saves trouble for everybody concerned.”

    “Except me,” said Iarbus. “You have robbed me of my betrothed wife. That fact remains, for all your fine words. Yes, and after I had hired three murderers for your special benefit, you turn out to be an Immortal. You ought to be ashamed of your double-dealing; you deceitful Smire!”

    “The gods, Iarbus, are as far above double-dealing as they are above feeling any remorse for it.”

    “Moreover, you two-faced Smire, you think it is clever, to declaim these large gnomic sayings. You will not feel so clever, Smire, after I have put a great curse upon you.”

    “In fact, should you put a great curse upon the low-fallen God of Branlon,” Smire admitted, fair-mindedly, “you may perhaps cause me some temporary trouble, inasmuch as you are a son of Zeus. Yes, that is not wholly a bad notion. In your place, I would curse me by all means. I would at once cry out to your Olympian father, ‘Almighty Zeus, whom the Maurusian race, that feast on painted couches, now honor with libations of wine, seest thou unmoved the destructive graces of Smire?’”

    “Almighty Zeus—” said Iarbus, docilely.

    “No, but do you pardon me, my dear fellow—”

    “And what is it now, Smire?”

    “It is merely, Iarbus, that now I recall it rather more closely, you will need that invocation a bit later on, to use against, not me, but Æneas.”

    At that, Iarbus asked, somewhat crossly, “But how can I invoke your destruction, Smire, when you keep interrupting me?”

    “Something in the Homeric rather than the Virgilian vein seems indicated,” Smire continued, after a moment’s reflection; “and in your present madness of soul under unprovoked wrongs, you could but improvise hastily. So in your place, Iarbus, I would raise both arms thus; and I would say, with all proper emphasis, ‘Hear me, O Zeus, high-seated ruler of this earth, O majestic playmate of thunders, if indeed thou dost avow thyself to be the begetter of Iarbus upon comely Garamantis!’”

    Here Iarbus broke in, saying, “Grant that he may never come again to his heart’s home in Branlon, even this Smire, this waster of words!”

    “This strutting tall chatterer!” Smire suggested—“only do you put a little more feeling into it. Let your voice tremble, Iarbus, with suppressed indignation, just as my voice trembles. That is far more effective.”

    “This shallow-hearted pedant!” said Iarbus.

    “This betrayer of confiding womanhood!” said Smire. “Come now, but you are doing much better.”

    “This jeering fool!” Iarbus cried out, “whose tongue dwells in his cheek forever!”

    “Good, oh, quite good!” said Smire. “That is apposite. That is just. Still, do you know, I would keep both I my arms up, like this. The position is more picturesque.”

    Then Iarbus said: “Hear our shared praying, my Father! For the Smire is so very fond of talking that he now helps to put a great curse upon himself rather than keep silence.”

    Smire nodded approvingly.

    “Yet,” prompted Smire, “yet if this wicked Smire be ordained, under the will of Moera, once more to tread the dear ways of Branlon and to exult in the noble doings of his tall sons, or to regard yet again the splendors of his lost kingdom, very late may he come thither, in impotence and in hopelessness, being but the ghost of his old self!”

    “Oh, but for my sanity’s sake,” cried out Iarbus, “let the not-ever-silent soft voice of this creature be silenced somehow! so that here and there a woman may preserve virtue in her conduct, and a man keep his wife virtually to himself!”

    “Excellent!” says Smire—“both in sentiment and in execution!” And he continued, with rising indignation:

    “Let all the living of this good-for-nothing Smire be a foiled and a lonely searching for that beauty which shall forever evade his grasp! Let him continually defer his high dreams because of his lewd appetites and his indolence! And in the end let him be made forever an outcast from his dear kingdom by his own frailties and by his own duplicity, so that his doom may be doubly bitter!”

    Thus they both prayed with deep fervor. They said no more, because on a sudden the praying of Iarbus and Smire was interrupted by a terrific flash of lightning and by a peal of thunder which shook the royal palace and caused eleven of its minarets to collapse.

    “Almighty Zeus gives assent,” remarked Iarbus, between chattering teeth. “Our prayers will be answered; and it is a most dreadful doom which your intermeddling pride has brought down on your own head.”

    Smire answered, complacently: “At all events, it is a suitable doom. That is the main thing. Left to yourself, my dear fellow, you would have invoked for me a premature descent into Hades, or a change of heart, or boils, or perhaps smallpox, or dandruff, or some yet other material mishaps such as would not ever seriously have annoyed the God of Branlon. For I remain, in my every incarnation, incurably the artist. Now, for the truly great artist there can be but one bitterness—to comprehend that he has become the ghost of his old self. There can be for him but one real punishment—to know that he has failed through his own fault. So I did make bold to edit your maledictions into a shape rather more commensurate with my merits. Nobody likes to be cursed stupidly. Well, but your curse is now an intelligent curse; it deals with my case comprehendingly; and an artist prefers, above all other rewards, comprehension.”

    So was it, they say in Branlon, that in the world’s morning Smire helped to invoke his own doom, on account of the restiveness with which as a practising poet he could not but hear any less talented person put words together maladroitly.

    In this manner, the inhabitants of dreamland relate, was his curse put upon Smire, through the eloquence of his own maledictions; and countersigned by the thunders of Heaven. Moreover, before these reverberating thunders had quite ended, the place of royal Iarbus had been filled sacerdotally, by the local Flamen of Apollo.

    This clergyman delivered a divinely inspired message, in choriambics, over which, as when arches are raised nobly to commemorate a returning hero’s triumph in foreign kingdoms, even so Smire lifted his eyebrows.