The Nightmare Had Triplets (67 page)

    She laid down the shroud she was knitting for a god in the great pantheon of reviewers. She said,—

    “You have the sound reason, Smire, that I am Moera.”

    “Come now,” he cried out, with a deal more of jauntiness in his voice than he found in his heart, “but this is a most pleasant surprise! So I confront at long last that power which is above all gods. Well, and I cannot but wonder if you are that which, in our bungling way, we call justice, or loving-kindness, or perhaps chance, or it may be a mere cosmic chemistry?”

    She inquires coldly, “Shall I tell you, Smire?”

    And he answers: “Not for worlds, my dear lady. The affairs of your management, if you indeed be Moera, do not concern me. My interests have been made more parochial through a monarch’s loyalty to the welfare of his own kingdom. My official status, I must tell you, compels me to attend only to the doings of the God of Branlon, and to worship no other deity. So is it permitted me to remain frankly an egoist where all other persons are compelled to tell lies about their altruism.”

    She coughed. She consulted the large book which lay open before her.

    “I note, Smire, that you wish to see Branlon once more; and that the trouble is with your eyes. They need treatment.”

    “That is it, no doubt,” says Smire,—“so that my appointment must be with an oculist. Yet how could it come to be written down in that book?”

    “There is no truth of any sort, Smire, but is written down in the book of Moera.”

    “The urbane person,” replied Smire, “will not ever dispute, or accept unreservedly, the word of a gentlewoman. Yet your statement is sweeping. It is perhaps even a bit excessive. Do you find written in your book, for example, how much money is earned annually by the newsboys of the United States, and through what cause, or just when, Gypsies first appeared in Europe?”

    She looked in the great volume. Astoundingly, she read out the correct answers.

    And when Smire tried her with yet other questions—asking who was the Chief Traffic Manager of the Norwegian State Railways, and what it meant when an army officer was blued, and into how many stones the Cullinan diamond was cut, and why a barber’s pole revolves downward, and what were the four different noises made by the seventeen-year locust,—then the result was the same. She answered every question correctly, and she even imitated the seventeen-year locust, with an exactness which Smire himself could not have improved on, out-of-hand.

    “Now do I perceive,” said Smire, reverently, “that you are indeed Madame Moera, the great Doom above every god, in these lands beyond common-sense. Hail, therefore, thou player with celestial ruin, thou deviser of divine nothingness! thou who dost bring to naught all that which faith begets, and who dost remake what made thee! Deliver me from the two Gray Ones who sit forever in the East and the West of the Sky, as the Wardens of Heaven and as the Wardens of Earth, and who make firm the secret places of death! for thy names are Eternity and Inevitableness.”

    “No, Smire; for my name is Moera.”

    “I would not willingly argue any question so personal,” says Smire; “but in point of fact, it is also
Æsa,
whereas your other name—your nickname, as it were, among your more intimate friends, during the levities of light social chitchat—is Aupeh-nef-naaem-tauat-apu. That was a circumstance quite generally known to the more cultured prelates of the ancient Egyptians.”

    Thus speaking, Smire sat down gracefully upon the counter, and he chucked Madame Moera under the chin.

    “It is a great shame,” said Smire, “that a woman of your good looks and of your charm of manner should occupy any position so lonely. For it is your will which over-rules the will of all gods. You are supreme. You are incomprehensible. You have no equal, and you are so far above all male creatures, whether divine or human, that you cannot condescend to make any one of us happy.”

    She colored with pleasure; she scowled; and she said:

    “Oh, get along with you. For why would I want to be doing anything of that sort? You are talking nonsense, Smire.”

    “Not at all, my dear lady. In your official capacity, you are ruthless. Nevertheless, as a woman you are subject, I cannot doubt, to the more tender emotions.”

    “You probably say that to every woman you meet,” returned Moera. “So I do not take it the least bit seriously. Still, why do you think that?”

    “I think that unavoidably, Madame Moera, in the light of my rather wide experience. It is only the ugly women who are harsh and soured. No handsome woman has a hard heart. This biological fact is well known to every urbane person.”

    “So, and do you think to be wheedling me, Smire?”

    “Madame, let the thought perish. It is unworthy of either of us. What you have written as to my divine destiny, in that great book of yours, remains changeless. I know that perfectly.”

    “Then what do you want of me?” demands Moera.

    “I desire, in the first place,” says Smire, “to salute your genius. It is not—I concede—unfailing. You could learn much by a rather more careful study of my creative methods. Nevertheless do I admit freely my inferiority, by and large; for if I have invented much beauty and an ironic vein of my own—this being a point which I dare not argue against the unanimous applause of all the better-thought-of critics,—yet you have invented Smire. I have been, in my day, a demiurge honored, by the more kindly, with my quota of adulation; but I have created at no time, I have not ever pretended to create, any character so marvelous, in every conceivable respect, as is Smire. I concede that quite humbly, you observe, without any least humming and hawing.”

    “I perceive indeed that you lack the ever-jealous self-conceit of most authors, Smire. It does you vast credit.”

    “And do you know,” Smire continues, “that I somewhat envy you this high moment’s experience? For we creative artists potter with words and cadences, with our rhetorical devices and our commas and our supernal aspirations, without ever tiring, rather fruitlessly as a rule. Then of a sudden, by accident, as it were, we make up, out of these odds and ends, a character which in some sort lives; and which promptly becomes independent of its creator. But never, I am sure, did Esmond or Don Juan, did Falstaff or Odysseus or Babbitt or Sherlock Holmes or Faust, or Mesdames Grundy and Gamp, come out of ink and paper into flesh, thus visibly and so tangibly, to interchange civilities with his or with her inventor. Yes, Madame Moera; yes, I cannot but envy you this chat with the Smire whom you created.”

    She was now smiling, almost. But she said only,—

    “I shall endeavor, you rogue, not to be too proud of you.”

    “By all means, let us avoid
hubris.
” Smire assented; and he turned toward fields more critical, saying:

    “I cannot but deplore the plot in which you involved Smire. Yet do not be embarrassed. Shakespeare and Moliere were equally unable to contrive an adequate story into which to put Shylock and Tartuffe. So I do not complain. I remark merely that my tragic declension, from an admired popular writer to a mere supreme god, and thence to a demi-god, and from that to an heroic and all-lovable vagabond, is far too ruthless. Nor do I at all understand the evolution of my better traits; for I began as that pompous and condescending smirt; and my nature, under so many excessive degradations, has improved steadily, so everyone tells me, in cheerfulness and in amiability and in all other virtues.”

    Her eyes, her remarkably keen eyes had narrowed somewhat, in the while she was answering,—

    “That, you can have no doubt, is to reward you for having so unremittently avoided
hubris.
”

    “Aha, but now you touch me, dear lady. I have done my small best; and to hear of its triumph is, of course, gratifying. So I can but ask you to overlook my blushes now that, of all persons, you applaud.”

    “I shall do so the more readily, Smire, on account of the fact that they stay imperceptible.”

    “I disguise my well-doing, madame, as an affair of course. Well, and is my not-ever-failing virtue, that virtue which Madame Moera, and not I, put into me—by which I mean my avoidance of
hubris,
—is this innate and discreet modesty of mine to be repaid rightly at the end of my story?”

    She asks now, in the time that she smiled stiffly, with a rigid sort of indulgence,—

    “What payment do you desire?”

    And he answers, sturdily, “I desire once more to see Branlon and that Tana to whom my heart, as distinguished from a few other physical possessions, remains ever faithful.”

    “Very well, then, that is permitted you,” Madame Moera said, with a swift and a strangely furtive chuckling. “You have but to confer with the Wrong Oculist; and after his improper treatment you shall once more see Branlon and your Tana also.”

    Smire said: “That sounds cryptic; but I am suitably grateful. So do you now tell me how may I come to the Wrong Oculist.”

    “You have but to go your own way, Smire, your own cool urbane way; for that way can end nowhere else.”

    Smire shrugged at that; and he replied merely:

    “Why, then, Madame Moera, I shall say good-bye. Yet I must first thank you for having made me Smire—or Smith, or Smirt, or whosoever else it may have been that you entertained yourself by making me,—because upon no consideration would I consent to be anybody else.”

    The doom that is above all gods looked now at this especial devolved god pensively, peering over the top of her steel-rimmed spectacles with an aloof flavor of contrition. And Moera said,—

    “You have had rather a hard time of it, child.”

    “No living creature has ever suffered a more tragic fate,” Smire admitted, with gusto. “But the point, the true point, is that I have enjoyed every moment of my affliction. So from the bottom of my heart, Madame Moera, do I thank you for my relentless declension.”

    After that, Smire kissed the tight-lined, but not unwilling, lips of Moera with a respectful ardor; and he so left the perplexed, the grim, but still not implacably smiling woman.

    They relate in Branlon that the way of Smire was now barred by three enormous monsters, each one of which was thrice the height of Smire. And these said, with a brutal firmness:

    “We are the Sheep, the Cow, and the Hog. We are the True Trinity. We are alike the need, the preservers, and the models, of civilized man. Without our aid, he could not live. Without our example to go by, he could not maintain his respectability. Without us, human nature, at its highest state of development, could not exist: for it is we three who are blended in man’s being; and who keep him, as any obsolete poet or revered politician might declare without stuttering, praiseworthy.”

    Smire answered them, “Expound!”

    Then the Sheep said: “I am the conscience of mankind. My desire is for quietness; but my dread of being left alone is more great than is my dislike of tumult. To be alone with myself I find unendurable; it causes me to bleat without ceasing. Rather than be alone with myself I will follow after anyone of my fellows, no matter whither he leads. It is well to herd with one’s companions always, so that the butcher may overlook you, who are but one among so many. That is my most holy teaching: for I am the conscience of mankind.”

    The Cow said: “I am the mind of mankind. I desire quietness; I dislike that which is unfamiliar. I run away from it very clumsily, but with all the speed which is permitted me. I wish only to lie down somewhere in comfort, chewing the cud of that which was fresh and living yesterday, for old food is best. Old food agrees with me. I do not like to be disagreed with. Yet one thing alone enrages me; and that is to have anybody troubling my calves. You must not meddle with my calves. I will defend my own offspring frantically, at all hazards, even in the red shambles of the butcher: for I am the mind of mankind.”

    And the Hog said: “I am the body of mankind. Both my confreres agree that the less said about me, the better. I do not argue with them. I prefer not ever to argue with anyone’s mind or conscience. Instead, I evade both, with a half-hearted grunting, for I prefer quietness, such quietness as thrives only in deep mire: and yet must I forever be leaving my soft comfortable mire, because of my need to eat every food and to copulate with every sow. It is a great pity that I cannot do this before the butcher comes. It causes me to grunt and to squeal.”

    Then they all said together, “How may you hope to go beyond us?”

    Smire answered them: “Inasmuch as Wordsworth is a poet with whom I make bold to doubt your familiarity, in these modern unpoetical times, O omnipotent monsters, I shall not remark that once you were seven. Nowadays the Horse, the Ass, the Dog, and the Cat, have become luxuries. But the True Trinity endures. Without the three of you, even nowadays, no sort of snug living would be possible to the run of mankind. You are alike the sign and the cornerstone of the domesticity of the public at large. You prefigure, just as you say, the body and the conscience and the mind of the public at large. Well! but what have these facts to do with me, who am the God of Branlon?”

    At that, they bleated, they lowed, and they grunted, as they looked down toward little Smire, with huge disapproving eyes. And they said to him:

    “We are your conscience, your mind, and your body, inasmuch as you also are human. It is our will that you shall not go beyond us. For we are all three domestic animals; and your Branlon is a wild foolishness.”

    Then, reaching up as far as he could to pat the huge Sheep’s fore-leg, Smire answered, to the first of the True Trinity:

    “O Sheep who are the conscience of Smire, it was in order to behold your most beautiful, soft, golden-colored fleecing that the Argonauts went a-voyaging. It was with a sheep like you that Pan purchased the virgin body of Artemis, who never yielded to any other persuasiveness. You are a hollow-horned ruminant; the theory which once made you akin to the Udad is now known to be quite untenable, for you form a group impossible of exact definition, so imperceptibly do sheep pass into goats; and that is a large parable. In the pride which you take in your ancestry you are well justified, for as the turbary sheep (or
Ovis aries palustris
) you trace from the neolithic age. Feed my sheep, it is a famed saying; and my flock is in Branlon.”