The Nightmare Had Triplets (68 page)

    Hearing these remarks, the huge Sheep bleated in its sleep, with complacency, for it now slumbered.

    Afterward Smire said: “O Cow who are the mind of Smire, you have been milked by full many a maiden all forlorn. So do you consider, good Cow, consider! and remember that your tail would reach to heaven if only your tail were long enough. Indeed, you once filled all heaven: nine stars were then inset in your belly; your udders were painted in green
quenat
color; and between your fore-legs was written, ‘I am what is in me.’ In this guise did you bring forth Indras, and great Odin likewise, when you were the Cow of Heaven. Isis borrowed your wise head in Kheraha, so that the wit and fancy and erudition with which your brains are infested might be of help in her long search for the fourteen lost fragments of Osiris. It was you who jumped over the moon. The astounded stars, planets and asteroids then chanted ‘Hey-diddle-diddle!’ so great was their wonder at this nimble, very fertile Cow which is the deep and all-contriving mind of Smire.”

    So the huge Cow went to sleep contentedly.

    And Smire said: “O Hog who are the body of Smire, to subdue you upon Mount Erymanthus was the third labor of Herakles, but it was never my labor in any place. You are sacred both to St. Anthony and to Thor: against such sanctity who dare strive? Atalanta pursued you in Calydon, that famous fair huntress; and yet other ladies have pursued you—not, as Milton has remarked, without dust and heat. Vishnu in his third avatar was shaped as you are shaped, going the whole hog. Vainly is it fabled how the great God of the East slew you, in the sixty-first hymn of the
Rigvedas,
because you are immortal. You are an undying parable.”

    “But am I indeed?” the huge Hog grunted.

    “Beyond any doubt,” replied Smire, affably. “Your tusk gave life to Adonis, when you ripped him out of the myrrh-tree which was his mother; and by-and-by your tusk killed Adonis. From these facts do all learned persons infer that you are the darkness which begets and then conquers the sun-god in every solar myth. So, most clearly, you are a parable, O Hog who are the body of Smire. You could not possibly be anything else.”

    “And what if I am?” says the Hog, speaking defensively, from somewhere between the dubious and the indignant.

    Smire answers him, “I would but point out to you, O Hog who are the body of Smire, that it is the right part of a parable to further, and not ever to check, the progress of a poet.”

    “That is sound swinish logic,” the huge Hog agreed; “and I need a good nap after listening to you.”

    So the Hog likewise closed his eyes, the fierce eyes which glared down at you from among so many stiff white bristles. And Smire passed beyond the True Trinity, to confer at leisure with the Wrong Oculist.

    Now in the waiting-room of the Wrong Oculist, which was handsomely decorated with the rare Bay of Naples pictorial wall-paper, it appeared somewhat odd to find Oliver Cromwell and King Charles the First of England playing amicably at chess,—especially because the severed head of the last named was held in his left hand so that he might observe the board while with his right hand he moved the pieces. However, matters often fall out a bit unaccountably in dreams, Smire decided; and inasmuch as both the Great Puritan and the King of Cavaliers seemed undisturbed by his coming, affairs might easily have fallen out far worse.

    They greeted him with politeness. Yet they did not cease from their playing. For this special game between the Cavalier and the Puritan was not ever over, they said, and the two of them must go on playing until Death died.

    That must be weary waiting; and so would not one or the other of you gentlemen permit me to take his place for some while? Smire suggested, because of the God of Branlon’s never-failing desire to make things pleasant for everybody.

    —Whereupon both Cromwell and King Charles smiled sadly, telling him that the gaming between Cavalier and Puritan must go on forever, between these two alone, so long as humankind lasted; and until, once for all, the question had been settled whether over humankind reigned the great virtue of justice or the great virtue of charity.

    “And sometimes,” said the pallid beautiful head of King Charles, “one of us seems to be triumphing and sometimes the other. But neither ever wins outright. So the eternal game must go on so long as any clock ticks anywhere; and there is no resting for us two who believed, as we still believe, each in his own dream, wholeheartedly.”

    “Alas, gentlemen,” replied Smire, and his divine shoulders stirred slightly upward, “as a
poietes,
I too believe in my own special dream. Beyond doubt, there is the small difference that I regard every sort of belief as a luxury rather than a necessity. And for the rest, I incline to suspect that over all mankind reigns the vice of inadequacy.”

    “That,” they replied, both speaking together, “is nonsense.”

    “Yes,” Smire assented; “yet many excellent thinkers have come, by-and-by, to regard the entire universe as a large exercise in nonsense, as the fine masterpiece of a supernal W. S. Gilbert. For myself, I adopt a middle ground: and it seems to me that since humankind has not anything to do with the conduct of the universe in practice, we would do wisely not to bother about it in thought.”

    “That is why,” returned Cromwell—frowning where the King smiled—“we may neither of us waste time to contend with you. So do you lie down, my spruce Laodicean, resting snugly upon that soft couch of no particular color until the flamy coming of Old Legion.”

    Smire humored the Lord Protector, with Smire’s not-ever-failing affability, saying only,—

    “Very well, Mr. Williams.”

    —Whereupon Cromwell scowled, because of course he did not like to be reminded that he had entered history under an alias, and had caused to be ever-living a name which was not his own name actually.

    But Smire (as at other seasons) did not bother about the Puritan, now that Smire lay down upon the soft couch of no particular color. He lay on his back; and so could see only the stars, because there was not any ceiling to this queer waiting-room. Yet above him were all the stars of heaven made visible; and as Smire looked at them, then into the thinking of Smire came a randomness and a drowsing.

    Now was Smire visited by a languor and a perturbed drowsiness that at first was full of remorse for remote doings which he could not quite remember. But this died away, by-and-by, as he lay flat on his back looking affably toward heaven. Yes; he approved of the stars. Their display was wholly creditable. It was well worthy of the lands beyond common-sense. It was a pageant such as you did not see in any city of flesh-and-blood lands, no matter how enormous or up-to-date might be the resources of that city.

    For in a flesh-and-blood city (thus Smire reflected, half napping) one does not see the stars. Now and then, upon an evening in spring, when the days are long, and when the street lights are not turned on until very late, one notes, it may be, the evening star low in the west. It floats, as though half submerged, in a green sky, above ugly, angular, dark house-tops. It is lovely; but strangely alien. To the unwise who regard it, this star recalls happenings just as alien, happenings that you shared with persons who were once both loved and familiar. They are dead now, or else they have been transformed into paunchy, gray-haired strangers. Secretly we who are yet living abhor the thought of having once been familiar with any person who is dead. Secretly we detest these gray-haired strangers who remember fond follies which we resent their remembering. Because of these things the wise person does not regard the evening star. He says, “It is very pretty.” He then lowers his eyes from the green heavens, and he turns his thoughts toward the probability of what there will be for dinner. No: in a flesh-and-blood city (Smire reflected) one does not ever truly see the stars. They are eclipsed by so many electric lights which flare and glitter. From afar one might see the murky diffused brightness of the city, like the dull glare of that hell in which the intelligentsia (who have not the intelligently reserved judgment of the Peripatetic Episcopalian) are at shrill pains to disbelieve. In the city all is a twinkle and a shallow sparkling. The red and the yellow and the green lights of traffic shift glowingly. The shop windows are resplendent, now abloom with complete parlor suites, now pallid with refrigerators, and now coyly flushing with pink underwear. And always, overhead, the electric signs glitter and twinkle so that one may not see beyond them. One can observe only that So-and-So’s whiskey is the best, that Thingumbob’s shoes are worn by the elite, that every known brand of cigarette is kind to your throat, that pickles are unparalleled, and that Tweedledum is now playing in his great metropolitan success, for three days only, to roars of laughter. With such tidings does a flesh-and-blood city shut out the stars; and the heavens speak also of Sea Food, of Flick’s Famous Bar, of a Luncheonette, of Drugs and Soda, of Banks and Trust Companies, of Sizzling Steaks, of Chop Suey, and of cathartics beyond facile numbering.

    Once in these cities wise men studied the stars, Smire remembered. They knew then that all the planets aided, and ruined, and controlled, in a never-idle fashion, all the doings of humankind. Mars, they said, is in the first house, with the Sun ill dignified, thus presaging many wounds by fire and iron: then were they troubled, foreseeing the pillage and the ravishments and the high platitudes of war. Venus, glowing placidly in the grip of the Scorpion, foretold success in one’s current love-affair. Or else Jupiter was at hand to bestow, variously, either prudence or glory, or a tendency to fat, or perhaps hair which curled naturally and a mole on the right foot. Such faiths were not true perhaps; but they had then lent to man’s living a charming assurance that high forces at every instant overlooked his destiny and attended to it with painstaking carefulness. It gave dignity to a stomach-ache, for example, to know that it was caused by a celestial conspiracy on the Moon’s part, or to a cold in the head when you reflected it had come straightway, addressed to you in particular, all the 86,000,000 miles, more or less, between you and the planet Mercury; whereas during a visit to the privy it must have been soul-inspiring to consider that every least detail of your enforced anchoretism was being honored, and was given even its own odor of sanctity, by Saturn’s aloof, grim sallow patronage.

    In the mountain places, and above the querulous great ocean, the stars yet glow and glitter and throng sparklingly, thought Smire; and it is there permitted the people of flesh-and-blood lands to regard these stars, in the light of their more modern superstition that these are stupendous suns about which circle worlds such as is that quaint planet, Earth, by the millions. The heavens then become as inconceivable by the human mind as is a national debt. Infinity unveils its calm features, very tranquilly; and before their gorgon-like cool grandeurs the mind petrifies. Well, but the “truths” of astronomy (as we glibly termed the incomprehensible), and its inconceivable immensities, were not true, perhaps; here again must the Peripatetic Episcopalian reserve judgment; yet at all events they lent to man’s living a charming assurance that the fate of one man in this infinitude could not be regarded seriously. As astrology fostered man’s pride, so did astronomy compel his mind’s quietude. In the mountain places, and beside the ocean, a man perceived that what happened to him could not appreciably matter. And so his little soul might find peace. So yet again would the all-kindly stars grant comfort to their beholders.

    But in the cities of flesh-and-blood one does not see the stars. In such incredible cities the heavens reveal to mankind, more snappily, that So-and-So’s whiskey is the best. The firmaments declare to mankind the glories of Trust Companies and of Chop Suey. And far above the heads of mankind just such unseen fingers as wrote out the doom of Chaldea above the pleasure house of Belshazzar, in ever-shifting fiery letters, are inscribing the glad news that Tweedledum is now playing in his great metropolitan success, for three days only.

    —Or so at least did Smire reflect, in that troubled drowsiness which now visited Smire, as he lay upon the soft couch of no particular color, waiting for the Wrong Oculist.

    Now when on a sudden Smire awakened from his half drowsing, then he found the Wrong Oculist to be a pictorial and exuberant test of any possible patient’s eyesight. For this oculist was dressed to the nines (as they say) in a crimson and black coat with enormous steel buttons. He wore a most stupendously frizzed wig with a pigtail; his wrists were aflutter with ruffles, and he had at his throat a quite liberal cascade of frilled linen. He glittered everywhere with too much jewelry and with a superfluity of watch fobs; his snuff-box, with which he chanced just now to be in consultation, seemed a veritable nebula of diamonds. All about him, in short, was of the most flaring mode of the latter part of the eighteenth century, because this flamboyant personage had been forced to come out of the Age of Reason before he could deal with his patients irrationally. Moreover, he had come wearing a small half-mask of black velvet, which hid the upper part of his face. Well, and since it would have been untactful to notice that his left leg was the leg of a goat (although both his legs, to be sure, had been clothed, deceitfully, in red gold-clocked stockings), or to comment upon the trailing, forked, scaly, scarlet-colored tail which flapped about everywhither on the floor behind him, like a huge dying fish, Smire did not refer in any way to these matters; but consented to appear thoroughly hoodwinked by his ancient and inveterate tempter.