The Nightmare Had Triplets (64 page)

    The eternal wanderer said this as if with difficulty. His urbaneness, for that brief instant, was almost shaken. He said then:

    “I touch mystery. I find that in my dream I have somehow become two persons who are conversing the one with the other. Now that, I submit, that is a circumstance which must necessarily perturb a sound logician, because if I had been born twins I would very certainly have heard something about it before to-day.”

    Smirt answers him, still talking rather sadly: “Yet it is permitted to no god, Smire, to give up his godhead without causing some little trouble, here and there, through his duplicity.”

    “I see,” replied Smire. “Yes, and as a mere axiom, that is sound. What is an axiom between two halves of the same person? Moreover, I declare to you: (
a
) that this duplicity of ours is a far too personal duplicity, it is a confusing duplicity; and (
b
) that I have not ever given up my godhead. No, Smirt: you have been transfigured into opulence, you have been made a magnate, but I have stayed a deity; and no matter what mishaps may befall me, yet do I remain the God of Branlon.”

    Smirt paused to inspect an intaglio ring on his own finger, considerately. He appeared to find it of interest. But he looked up by-and-by, with a lazy smiling; and Smirt said:

    “That you are the God of Branlon, is a thing you keep telling people, Smire, with the persistence of a bad conscience, as you travel about everywhither in the appearance of a lean rambling vagabond. But where is your Branlon? That alone you do not tell anybody.”

    Smire answered this with some indignation.

    “I do not tell them, Smirt, because I do not know. I know only that Branlon is not a conservative province which remains stationary. It is a more baroque kingdom. It eludes cartographers; it pulls the nose of probability with the fingers of fancy; and it fosters magnanimity. It is not, in brief, a place in which sublime persons become fat and regard with so much complacency the warm friendships, and the quite innocent friendships, of course”—so did Smire interpolate gallantly—“which their wives form under hawthorn-bushes.”

    “The Countess Arachne,” replied Smirt, equably, “has a friendly nature. I believe this to be a virtue. I think that in a reigning countess it is a great virtue, inasmuch as it makes for her popularity among all sorts of people.”

    “So I can well imagine, Smirt; and I imagine too that the Spider Woman does not waste these loving friends afterward.”

    “Indeed, Smire, but she does not ever fail to prevent them from talking indiscreetly. She is careful to avert any possible scandal, even when she has no real appetite for her well-doing. But come now, you must not lead me into such open boastfulness about the many virtues of my dear wife! Instead, let us talk about you, Smire. For I perceive that you scorn my snug province.”

    Smire lifted the shocked hand of civility; but none too convincingly.

    “No, I do not at all criticize your prosperity, Smirt. Moreover, I do not refer in any way, as you may note, to your smugness as you live here among ever-flowering orange-trees and bland fountains and so much color and all softnesses. I say only that I do not like that which my duplicity has made of me.”

    “Ah, but my need was Poictesme,” says Smirt, “just as your need is Branlon. Each to his taste, is the rule in all dreams.”

    Then yet again, the Count smiled, most wonderfully, adding,—

    “Yes; and I perceive also that in order for you to recover your rustic wild realm in Branlon, my lean enemy, you must have aid.”

    “And where will I get aid?” asked Smire. “What person anywhere would have the temerity, or perhaps I might better say the loving-kindness, to offer any such aid to the lost God of Branlon?”

    Smirt told him; and then Smire whistled, meditatively. Afterward he said:

    “Why, but of course! That is logic. Yes, Smirt, you are right; and I should have thought of that long ago.”

    Well, but it was not easy to put out of your thinking what Smirt had said, speaking half sorrowfully, and yet with some malicious flavor of derision. “I ought,” had replied Smire, with unruffled affability, “to have thought of that long ago.” Trenching, it might be, upon understatement, he had thus, none the less, spoken the truth, and the complete truth.

    Yet trouble, in the not unfamiliar role of truth’s shadow, had forthwith become his oppressor unwarrantably,—holding (Smire decided) as it were, the barbarous and the unrestrained, small tyranny of a decreed outlaw who as yet, through the preoccupation of the law’s local executives with evils more immense, and the attendant sloth of a constabulary whose prime interest must remain, after all, fixed upon private, human, hearthside affairs rather than upon that plump abstraction which one finds realized now and then (but assuredly not worshipped) as a crude shrugged-at bit of civic statuary or as a dispirited figure in some mural painting (passed by how hastily!) labelled “justice”—yes, as just such an outlaw stays fortified by neglect, and is made formidable by continued inattentiveness, so here. Smire, in brief, had not thought of it long ago. He had not thought about it at all. He was, thus, sinless in logic; and in fact, was harried.

    For he thought about it now in full measure. He could think of naught else. Neither to have given to humankind a new religion nor to have altered the history of all mortal creatures had seemed an omission not deeply serious. In very deed, it had allied Smire, it had almost identified him, with the crass average of his fellow beings upon Earth as they passed—indistinguishably, after a century or so—toward extinction. So many other persons had done nothing altogether unique and forever memorable.

    Yet this risk he had dared heroically. Smire, being unparalleled (he had thought), could well venture to avoid the outré, inasmuch as in the perfection of his nature, in the unrestricted scope of his wit and fancy and erudition, rather than in the crude flare of some boisterous action, lay logically his adamantean claim upon supremacy above all living or buried or as yet unborn beings. He was Smire. That sufficed. That was a consideration which bedwarfed everything else except only this reminder, so languidly spoken, which had come to Smire through the smiling, the over-opulently curved lips of his dead self, Smirt.

    Yes, and when the dead spoke, regretfully, then the all-regretful dead hearkened. Elsewise had not so many ghosts arisen frostily, in these endless gray spaces, to confront Smire. We reverenced, we had faith in, we awaited, they said, your achievements. Where are they, Smire? And he, the appalled dreamer, he could but wave back at them, in his frightened, in his half-frantic exorcism, with hands empty except for this letter stamped with the seal of Poictesme.

    Moreover, they were not like the gnarled and toil-hardened hands of that, what was his name? oh, but yes, of that Yussuf—so did Smire reflect, staring aghast at his own fair, priest-like hands,—nor of any carpenter, nor of a ploughman, nor of a follower for gain of any craft. Poor Yussuf! for if his not-frankly-to-be-spoken-about situation had been made dreadful eternally, how dreadful likewise remained the situation of Smire thus eternally stationed behind a couple of divine, all-powerful hands quite unused for aught useful! Their pale emptiness, except for this letter, was a vast symbol, if one could but grasp its exact meaning. These moving fluttered hands had but gathered up this tiny letter and a remorsefulness, a most huge remorsefulness for not having given to mankind a more admirable religion, a more splendid history. Well, and this terror, this nightmare-like remorsefulness, had been begotten, he knew, by a dream’s logic: for in flesh-and-blood countries to be thinking about any such nonsense, was, in itself, nonsense.

    What, though, was it that nonsense was not? For if, in these endless gray spaces, cirro-cumulus clouds were now moving about Smire nonsensically, so too his mind was all clouds, it seemed to Smire the tired letter-carrier, although of course any letter which had been written throughout by that detestable, so prosperous Smirt, with his own black pen, had its assured value, all clouds without any shining in them, enormous restless pearl-colored clouds which were stirring endlessly; and which boiled over one another, very lazily; and which opened now and then with pale vistas in which you saw faintly the faces of the dead whom you had known when these faces had color and movement in them.

    It troubled Smire, the tired trudging letter-carrier, to recollect by what trivial matters these persons had been engrossed during the put-by time of their living, to recollect how unimportant and how irrevocably ended were the prosaic doings of his aforetime associates. With what harmless futile concerns had all they frittered out, instant by instant, none of which instants could ever return, the few years of their living! until by-and-by there remained not even one more instant to be thus wasted amiably and thriftlessly.

    And he, Smire, he might have contrived, not only for these persons, but for all men and women everywhere, a more noble history; he, the tired letter-carrier, he might have reshaped their thin commonplace mercantile religious notions into great splendors commensurate with the dreams of What was his name, why, but Smire, no doubt, for of course that must be his true name. Well, and instead, he had been coaxed, if not bullied exactly, into relinquishing these matters to the stainless wisdom of Heaven. And so a botched universe, all tangled somewhere outside this so-mixed-up, this seething, and this ghost-populated grayness, a most hideously botched universe confronted him.

    For Smire had not changed everything. He had got out of everything a cool criticizing enjoyment, to be sure; he had found in every moment of his living that serene dissatisfaction which to the nature of the Peripatetic Episcopalian appeared more grateful than was contentment, the fat contentment such as Smirt harvested peacefully in Poictesme. But Smire had not changed everything for all other living creatures. He had allowed Heaven to go on its own drab celestial way without any rebuke, to go on trudgingly, just as a tired letter-carrier now trudged through these endless gray spaces. He had shrugged merely, over Heaven’s absurd commonplaces, without openly interfering. Smire had not changed everything. And so when he had perished by-and-by-as perhaps he would perish, so this strange, newly-born self-distrustfulness was now whispering into the ear of a tired letter-carrier, he, even Smire,—then he would not be remembered by everybody with untrammeled astonishment forever. Here and there would be empty-minded persons discoverable, with minds void as the white hands of Smire except for this patronizing small letter, persons who were not talking about Smire, and who it might be were not even thinking about Smire, at some special instant. The reflection was annoying.

    And moreover, it was annoying to remember all those women whom Smire’s chivalry—or it might have been just his indolence, or even his lewd appetites—had permitted to usurp temporarily, at one time or another, the place which was rightfully Tana’s place in Smire’s arms. In his heart, truly, the reign of that dear, pale, dark-haired sorceress had continued always, making all other women seem, at the utmost, to be inadequate if well-meaning makeshifts: yet how much else of Smire, one reflected, had turned out to be disaffected provinces unsympathetic with the strongly centralized government of Smire’s heart! Why, but in a way, this Smire might almost be said—by hypercritical and inurbane persons—to have been faithless to Tana, and in consequence to his own high dream. And to have the dull-minded talking nonsense of that sort, howsoever unwarrantably, was annoying to a tired letter-carrier who, now that you thought of it, was Smire. For there was no truth in such nonsense. Such nonsense was annoying.

    Annoying, likewise, to any deity blessed with supremely good taste, was that ticking noise which now followed after Smire through these endless gray spaces, the ticking of a small onyx clock which he had heard ticking in some other place, he could not quite remember where: for this ticking pursued him, as he now knew, so that it might count relentlessly every moment of Smire’s living, until yet again this clock had struck thirteen. It kept telling you there was one instant, then another instant, and then still another instant; but only one instant at a time; and telling you—with a triteness how unendurable!—that no one of these instants could ever return. That ticking was inurbane. It would beget, unless you were very careful, insanity. You had far better not listen to it. It, in brief, was not at all the sort of thing which the Peripatetic Episcopalian, who must wander onward and onward and forever onward, no matter what might be the weariness in his heart, would have selected to have lurking about him, to the back of his steel-bright mind, as he trudged onward through these endless gray spaces, jauntily, oh, yes, but quite jauntily, with his hands emptied of everything excepting only Smirt’s small letter.

    Why, but to be sure,” said the All-Highest,—after He had read the letter carefully, and had asked Smire about the meaning of “mundivagant,” a word with which the old gentleman was not familiar,—“but to be sure, Smire, inasmuch as you are related to Smirt, so he tells Me, and are a—oh, yes,—a pig-headed mundivagant poet whose indiscretion he guarantees, why, to be sure, you can go on into the corridors.”

    Now Smire, for yet another instant, regarded the All-Highest with that intent silentness which was one of Smire’s rarest and most wondered-over traits. It appeared odd that this somehow perturbed-looking, elderly person, with His benevolent bald forehead and His superb white beard, should be sitting here, just as He had been at the commencement of Smire’s dreaming, when Smire had seemed to be Smirt. For the All-Highest had changed in nothing. He yet wore his pair of short, slightly curved, opaline-colored horns, and His right foot remained the hoof of a snow-white goat. He yet stayed among opaque gray clouds, seated upon one of them; and in His hand was Smirt’s letter, now that Smire was not Smirt any longer; and it was all rather confusing, now that the All-Highest was talking about corridors.