The Nightmare Had Triplets (61 page)

    “Nevertheless,” says the archangel—who was now smiling complacently, now that Gabriel appraised the adroit arguments of Gabriel and the fine help which his eloquence had been to Heaven,—“nevertheless, Smire, you are still arguing the affair in a way that detains me here while you talk on and on without ever stopping.”

    “Why, but, dear me, so I am!” says Smire, tolerantly. “Yet it is your side I am arguing. That is a point to be considered, I submit. Left to yourself, you would never have convinced me as to the aesthetic justice of your embassy. But now, Gabriel, you may go forward intrepidly to that poor, dear, small pretty Miriam—whose living, so she told me, was to produce nothing in particular! Go, Gabriel, bearing your glad tidings! Yes; and take with you also my most hearty congratulations upon the really brilliant way, my dear fellow, in which your case has been presented to my attention as an artist.”

    So was it, they say in Branlon, that Smire agreed not to interfere with the religion which, in Nazareth, was then being established for mankind by the stainless wisdom of Heaven; that, for art’s sake, he gave up Miriam, just as, yet earlier, he had sacrificed Elissa in the same lofty cause; and that he elected to circumvent himself rather than hear any less gifted person put words together maladroitly.

    “
The mutability which Smire exhibits during the Middle Ages may most easily be accounted for by pre—supposing that, just as Wace says, ‘the minstrel has sung his ballad, the story-teller told over his story, so frequently—and a little by a little each has decked and painted—until, by reason of these embellishments, the truth about Smire stands hid in the midst of a tale, and history goes masking as fable.’ Yet this interpretation is not needful, if we regard Smire either as a storm-god or with incredulity.
”

    As they tell the tale in Branlon, it was after this that, for a long, rambling while, Smire had many places of living; and in each one of them lived notably. Here again, the stories which are told about Smire, by the inhabitants of magic Branlon, multiply into disconnection; and they form a bright strange cycle to which his heroic figure alone lends coherence.

    Thus, it was Smire who taught Merlin Ambrosius not to be over-obedient to Merlin’s fell father, and yet not to act unfilially toward this too talented fiend either, declare the Vilas, that fair tribe of fairy huntswomen. But the story as it is told by the Vargamors (who have charge of the wolves of Branlon) says that Merlin’s tutor in this sort of politic urbanity must have been Blaise the Hermit, because (say the Vargamors) at just this time Smire was in Western Asia helping King Omit to conquer the Soldan of Syria’s castle at Montabure, and to carry off the Soldan’s daughter to become the wife of victorious Omit, after but one night’s pleasuring with Smire. Both parties agree it was shortly after this period that Smire was detained for nine years by Dame Melusine, upon rather intricately intimate terms, in the wood of Columbiers.

    Then the Norgs, those elves who inhabit tree-trunks, tell how Queen Yseult left Tristran because of her heart’s hunger for Smire; and tell also of the urbane way in which Smire got rid of the mad Irishwoman, returning her, through his not-ever-failing sense of propriety, not to Tristran but to her legal husband. At no price did the Peripatetic Episcopalian think it becoming to recognize adultery as a
fait accompli
among one’s own acquaintances: for propriety had to be kept hallowed. Well, and Smire played his part in the dreadful battle at Roncesvaux, that is certain: it was here he saw for the last time fair flaxen-haired Roland, and left on the dead champion’s eyelids two silver coins. The unhappy infatuation for Smire which led high-spirited, lovely Fenice (the Emperor of Constantinople’s tenth daughter) into committing so many atrocious crimes, need not detain us here; but among the Gnomes of Branlon this is a favorite hearthside story.

    Nevertheless, dissatisfaction stayed the eternal companion of Smire, among all these so glorious doings which got him no step nearer to Branlon or to the witch-woman Tana, for whom his heart longed, say the people of Branlon. They add that Smire did not ever seem to share in the normal top-lofty pretensions of a chivalrous gentleman, nor did he take any firm outrageous stand with the sorcerers and the man-eating giants, the vampires, the hell-hags, the pagan tyrants and the fire-breathing dragons, of his high-colored surroundings. Between good and evil, he still went his own cool way with serene vivacity. He was, for this reason, admired and distrusted by everybody, even by that all-envied woman who for the while had Smire in her bed and by the potentate who was taking Smire’s counsel.

    When he came a-wandering to any court, then it was the king of that country who took Smire by the hand and seated the great wise poet at the king’s side. The king wondered to see that Smire did not eat the goose or the peacock, or even taste the king’s wine. But he wondered mutely. What king dare interrogate Smire? Bishops liked to talk with him about the more subtle points of theology, he made clear the law to judges, he instructed armed captains in the art of war, and admirals as to seamanship. Daily he showed painters just what was wrong with their canvases, he explained to statesmen what honesty meant, and he taught butlers how to carve properly; but gentlewomen he delighted night after night with a cultured and princely impartiality. One could not find a better-built man in this world, they said, nor anywhere between the sun’s rise and its downsetting a companion more courteous and untiring. They did not seek farther.

    Smire in this way grew very famous; for he went wandering about everywhither, looking for Branlon, without ever finding his lost kingdom or losing his affability. He became the target of applausive wonder in all quarters of the lands beyond common-sense; and about his great doings were fashioned, both in the Langue d’Oil and the Langue d’Oc, new songs, wherein, let it be admitted, strict probability is now and then handled with a poet’s license.

    Yet his great doings seemed to Smire’s even more great modesty to be trivial.

    “To talk,” he said—“that is the main, the supreme privilege, of mankind, shared only with the radio and the parrot. My virtues, it may be, are unique, my deeds are reported unequalled, and my intelligence, so they tell me, has not any parallel; but my words only are immortal.”

    The more envious among men replied to him:

    “And we, Smire, are not immortal. Such is our consolation, our sole hope of not having to listen to you by-and-by.”

    But the women said, with a grave smile and a soft sidewise glancing:

    “Let us talk, then, in private. My husband will not be at home to-morrow.”

    Meanwhile, let it be repeated, as Smire was admired everywhere, so was he distrusted. Omniscience is its own penalty, so that nowhere in Christendom was there anybody able to accept Smire as a phenomenon wholly natural, or, in conceding his wondrousness to be a miracle, to grant that it was necessarily of a celestial origin.

    “Numbers have come to him from different parts of the kingdom,” records the Abbot of Tarba, “and to them, if they be men of authority, he explains all doubts as to every matter on which he is questioned. Moreover, he purveys knowledge none asked for. In the one same breath I have heard—yea, and others with me—this Smire discourse, with broad erudition, as to St. Peter, simony and holograph wills, the signing of the Jay Treaty and how to play ombre. He has made clear to our brethren the construction of the single-flued boiler, five singularities to be noted in the lamprey, and the proper use of the drip-mould in architecture; whereafter he talked to us about embolism, both of the calendar and of blood vessels, and the sumptuary laws of Justinian the First, and the false nose of the second Justinian. God alone might possess such knowledge honestly: and God (let us be thankful therefor!) has a memory less inclusive.”

    In the opinion of Barnacus, Smire was either the blessed St. Joseph of Arimathea, who got immortality by preserving the Holy Grail, or Ahasuerus, that cursed cobbler, who got immortality through his impoliteness. To the one side, Smire had talked freely about the six forms of the Grail as it had been revealed to devout persons in legend. He enumerated these forms before Barnacus, in the Duke’s house at Melphé, naming them
videlicet:
as a silver dish; as a crystal vase filled with blood; as a cup joined with a bleeding lance; as a resplendent jewel which made youth perpetual; as a gold plate with the head of John the Baptist in it; and, finally, as a visitation, far more formless, “made not of wood, nor of any manner of metal, nor was it of stone, nor of horn, nor of bone.” That seemed conclusive; for St. Joseph alone could know this much concerning the Grail.

    But, to the other side, Smire had been just as eloquent that day as to the six forms of shoe-making; and had spoken, with the urbane authority conceivable only in a shoe-maker of many centuries’ practice (records Barnacus), as to the standard screw, the McKay sewed, the Goodyear welt, the Goodyear turned, the littleway, and the stitchdown. So the question of immortal Smire’s true identity remained open.

    To have aroused any suspicion of being the Wandering Jew seems bad enough. But Thomas of South Miradol, striking a note yet more sinister, believed Smire to be Antichrist, “that long prophesied Man of Sin, with unblinking eyes, who is able to promulgate doubts everywhere, through the majesty of his bearing, the grace of his manner, his lively eloquence, his vast learning in humane sciences, all polite arts, pornography, and our Holy Scriptures,—which last-named he delights to wrest wickedly to the overthrowing of good dogmas, setting up idolatrously in their stead an invincible good-will toward everybody. This lewd-living person has confessed publicly that some of his best friends are Jews, a thing horrible to relate; yet inasmuch as in this impiety he was overheard by Leah, the most truthful of all my concubines, there can be little doubt as to its utterance. Beyond question, he is Antichrist.”

    It was through this large mingling of doubtfulness and of admiration and of perplexed gossip (they relate in Branlon) that illustrious Smire sauntered affably—keeping, as he said, a fair sense of humor to be his walking stick,—in the long, rambling while that he went about the lands beyond common-sense looking everywhere, without any success, for his lost kingdom and for his heart’s one love. It was thus that he came, by-and-by, to the woman called Jane.

    Jane was a fine-looking severe person, who had reached that age when a woman’s hair will no longer remain tidy about the back of her neck. She was darning a black sock with a competence born of long practice. A rather large round basket containing yet other socks, all which were black, lay beside her. And she sat, scowling over her labors, in a shadowed place beneath dying trees, from which dangled the huge, fat, lightly-swaying, dingy pendants and the great cobweb-colored festoons of the gray Spanish moss that was killing these trees. About her flourished many stiff small scrub palmettoes and the most prickly sort of cacti.

    Well, and Smire says to Jane, as was the custom of the country,—

    “Hail, friend! do you go seeking work or avoiding work?”

    She replied: “There is no need of the first, no chance of the second, so long as that husband of mine has breath in his body, and keeps chasing after women. Do you look at the socks he has worn out in doing it.”

    “I infer you are unhappily married,” says Smire.

    And Jane looked at him sternly, over the top of her steel-rimmed spectacles. Of a sudden she smiled, almost. She said then:

    “I am not married at all, Heaven help me. It is only that for twenty years, and for more than twenty years, I have had my husband to put up with, day in and night out.”

    “And what sort of person,” asked Smire, “is this husband of yours?”

    She described the abandoned rascal, in the while she continued her darning frettedly. And Smire said, by-and-by,—

    “Yes, yes; I remember him; for I have seen this person.”

    “Why, then,” says Jane, “you have seen also what an idiot I was ever to have married him.”

    “I dispute that, dear lady,” said Smire, politely. “There are many women who would envy you your husband.”

    “Why should they not?” says Jane, flavoring her inquiry with the extreme vinegar of indignation.

    She was not scowling now. She was glaring at him, in a manner which appalled Smire into an entire moment of complete silence.

    “—And why,” Jane continued, “have they not the good sense, or the decency either, to leave the fine fool alone?”

    “Why, indeed?” Smire assented, meekly,—“and I mean that to be an answer to both questions.”

    “But it is not as if they could keep him for long,” she boasted. “There is no woman under the sun and above bothering about honesty who could do that.”

    Smire looked at her; and he said nothing whatever.

    “—As I very well know,” she said, “through having tried to.”

    And still Smire said nothing.

    “Drat the man!” she added.

    “By all means,” Smire agreed, whole-heartedly, “let us drat him. He deserves it. Yet during the perhaps uncomfortable process of his dratting, you ought to remember there is no flesh-and-blood woman whom he would not see roasted, or whom he would not with his own hands chop up into mincemeat, rather than let your little finger be hurt.”

    “You are telling me something I know well enough,” said Jane; “but it is something he never tells me, or gives any sign of. Instead,” she added, in a sort of contained cold fury, “he writes and he writes and he keeps on writing his small foolish books.”