The Nightmare Had Triplets (70 page)

    “
By the return of Smire into Branlon we are so forcibly reminded of the Izdubar legends of Ancient Chaldea (in which Izdubar also enters a forest, which, as Osgrave notes, is in no passage explicitly called Branlon) as to render it a source of the most lively regret that the tablets, as discovered by the late Mr. George Smith in 1872, which record the adventures of Izdubar in this forest of pines and of cedars, have been so mutilated that it is now impossible to make head or tail of the narrative. Here Palen’s text is, as usual, at variance with his commentary.
”

    It was thus, as they tell the tale in dreamland, that Smire entered a strange place in which there were no strangers; for he came back to the past of which he had rid himself when, at thirteen o’clock, he became a supreme god in Amit, and to a fondly selected assortment of those persons whom he had known during his first youth upon Earth.

    Here, to begin with, were the great famous writers with whom he had forgathered during the hours of his terrestrial splendor. They were all young again, or at least reasonably young. And yet again, from their untiring typewriters, were coming forth such masterpieces as were being applauded everywhere with an enthusiasm which made it unthinkable that, by-and-by, time and a new generation of book reviewers and the public at large were going to put aside all these masterpieces as mere classics which nobody ever read except depressed schoolchildren under the rigors of a liberal education.

    Well, and Smire recognized each one of these writers affably. But when he spoke, they did not reply to him. Instead, they all went on talking, about the quite dreadful provincialism of America, and about this crude nation’s need to regard with a more ample reverence its small civilized minority as that leaven was typified by the persons now present, and about what had been said as to their latest writings by Mencken himself, either in the
Smart Set
or in the
American Mercury,
or it might be in the Baltimore
Evening Sun;
so that Smire could not get in even a monosyllable edgewise.

    And here too, all busily typing out the most fervent and indiscreet remarks conceivable, were the dear women whom Smire had loved during his life upon Earth. Some of them were at work upon their reminiscences of Smire, but the others were preparing for publication the letters which he had written them; and they all spoke of him meanwhile with a possessive tenderness such as touched his fond heart, howsoever discomforting was the appearance of these pompadoured nitwits through his new eyeglasses. But when Smire in turn spoke, with just the first cousin of a stammer, to the adored mistresses of his terrene youth, they did not reply. They did not heed Smire the least bit, because of the all-engrossing venom with which they were now typing out their opinions of one another; and on account of this mutual animosity they had not any time to be bothering about Smire.

    So he went beyond this place where so many typewriters were clicking out the heart-history of Smire,—and getting it all quite wrong, in addition to interpolating the most outrageous whoppers, as he noted with a tolerant shrug. Inasmuch as he had put each one of these corseted and unconscionable liars into his own fictions, turn-about seemed fair play under the
nom de guerre
of biography.

    He thus passed over a bridge builded of copper, which was adorned with blue and white hangings; and then went through a jostle of young men untidily clothed, who were all in a vast hurry. He recognized most of them, but they did not heed Smire, because Henry Billups was ringing the College bell, and they feared being late for chapel.

    Well, and at these fine boys (no one of whom would have been injured in external charm by an immediate bath) Smire looked a bit wistfully, and even with a twinge of self-derision, now that he gazed on the lads who had shared in his youth. And he thought how splendid and wonderful these had appeared in a season departed out of belief; as the women had seemed to be sweeter and fairer, once, than belief could recapture; and writers moreover had glories, once, that belief could not compass to-day. For to-day you were older—older and exiled from Branlon, and having satanical glasses coldly to strengthen your vision and show you too plainly the flaws that youth had not noted—and faults which Smire now averted his eyes from, shrugging.

    “I choose,” he decided, “to criticize none of these people. None of them heed me, and that is as well; for the past is a ghost, and ghosts are not cheery companions. I loved and relinquished the phantoms seen to all sides of me, now, as my youth was unable to see them. Satan is truly an oculist worthy of praise for his skill, but poets prefer mediocrity gilded. They laud it as golden.”

    It was just after emerging from this hexametrical passage, with the calm tact which distinguished all actions of the Peripatetic Episcopalian, that Smire came to a boy who sat in a green garden without any company except a paper-bound copy of
The Master of Ballantrae.

    Well, and Smire looked at this boy for a little while, without speaking. And the boy looked up from his book, toward Smire, with respectful admiration. That was natural, perhaps; but it caused Smire to feel a momentary twinge of remorse, for just what he could not have said. He was Smire; he was habituated to the applause of all living creatures, and the firmaments had but now been at pains to declare his infinite glory; and yet, somehow, to be admired by this special boy rather troubled the eternal wanderer.

    “Can you, dear Pug,” says Smire, “tell me the way to Branlon?”

    “Why, but of course,” the boy answered, in some little surprise.

    And then he did tell Smire the way to Branlon.

    “I see,” said Smire, with an odd quietness. “No god and no wisdom, and not even the great fiend, had that secret which you alone could make clear to me once more. And with your aid only could I return to Branlon.”

    “It is not much of a place, though, sir,” said the boy. “Or at least, I am biased perhaps, because I have been there occasionally. And I suppose any place you have actually been to never does seem much of a place.”

    Smire said: “That indeed I believe to be true of all proper-spirited young males. And you, Pug, you are still young, you are human. But I am older. And besides, I am Smire. I am the most ancient of divine creatures; and that makes a difference.”

    “Does it?” asked the boy, with a quite civil pretence of interest. “At any rate, I shall soon be older, myself; and then I can be getting out of this garden.”

    Well, and at that, Smire looked about him, at the scorned charms of this garden. To Smire it seemed a garden which was wholly desirable. It was not a grand place, of course; it lacked immensities; nor was its flora one of the more striking miracles of the lands beyond common-sense. It was merely a prosaic and a fairly well-kept, hedged garden, in which flourished verbenas and geraniums and mignonette and a rose-bush or so, and a few other such homely blossoms, very modestly. And yet Smire rather liked this garden, for his own reasons.

    Moreover, he saw, as the boy could not see, that it was the haunt of those same tender, gentle Household Gods to whom Elissa—that poor, long-dead, fond, and so pleasingly plump Elissa—had made oblations upon the first afternoon that Smire came to Carthage. All that appeared such a great while ago as to make it seem odd the Household Gods should still be surviving. Nevertheless did they now minister to this boy, whom they guarded as yet; for Smire, on account of his charmed eyeglasses, could see them.

    He saw the Penates, in the form of comely grave young men who carried slender spears; and the more sturdy Lares, who likewise defended this boy, clothed somewhat drolly in the skins of large dogs. And here too was the little goddess Cunia, who had watched over this boy even in his cradle; Vitula, the provider of his innocent mirth; Stata, who protected him, to the best of her ability, from fire; kind-hearted Angerona, who attempted (and had thus far succeeded in her attempts) to avert from him anguish of mind; and soft-eyed Sentia, who as yet inclined this boy to obey all just and honorable sentiments without shrugging at them. Here was even Carnea, to whom fell the delicate function of keeping the bowels of this boy in good condition; and still many other such lesser deities were about him, unnoted by his grave clear eyes, all serving him with small ministrations. But especially was this quiet garden protected by Deverra, who carried a broom to keep neat the household, and by Pilumnus, who had under his arm a pestle in which to grind corn for the daily bread of the household, and by Intercidona, who bore in her left hand a hatchet with which to provide wood for the hearth-fire of the household.

    Such ever-busy and practical-minded bourgeois divinities had warded off from this boy, as yet, the solicitations of more wild and greater gods who prompt to adventure and to wandering and to peril. Such lower middle-class Immortals had made of this garden the boy’s home, the sheltered humdrum home which—as Smire saw, with a strange pang of regretfulness that had in it no sound logic of any sort—the boy was already intent to be leaving, and to which he would not ever be permitted to return.

    Smire asked, reflectively, “But why do you not like your way of living, dear Pug, in this wholesome and happy and untroubled place?”

    “Oh, I do not complain,” says the boy, tolerantly. “It is well enough, Mr. Smire, to wait here while the world is being prepared for me. That takes time, of course. So I am satisfied to stay on here for a while longer, until I am old enough to figure in unparalleled adventures, and to attain by derring-do my lakhs of rupees and doubloons and pieces of eight, and”—he hesitated, his down-covered cheeks becoming noticeably more pink—“and my princess.”

    “Yes; I remember,” said Smire. “There Was Once a Princess. That is an old story. Let us be thankful that it is likewise a true story.”

    “It is rather pleasant, in fact,” the boy continued, with pre-eminent fairness, “to feel that my trusty charger is now being foaled, to carry me toward famousness; and a flotilla of low rakish crafts builded in order that I may steep their decks in gore. I approve of the industry with which at this instant so many miscreants are approaching the full flowering of their iniquity, and so many maidens peril, in order that by-and-by I may eliminate both. And I like knowing that, somewhere outside this garden, my dragons are being properly hatched and nourished; that a host of wizards are treating with the proper magics my resistless sword, as well as a cutlass for me to take a-pirating; and that my princess must be at school now, in a seminary builded of red gold, just east of the sun and west of the moon, almost ready to graduate. In short, I know that the world is being made ready for me, Mr. Smire, about as quickly as any affair so important and so complex could well be managed. So I do not complain.”

    “Ah, but, my dear Pug, not every one of these things will happen to you,” says Smire, with a slow smiling.

    “What is it, then, Mr. Smire, that is going to happen to me. For I must change everything.”

    “Must you, dear Pug?” says Smire, forlornly.

    “Why, but of course, Mr. Smire. What else was I born for?”

    Well, and at that, Smire shrugged. He replied:

    “I know much. Yet that, most certainly, I do not know. And indeed, I prefer not to know. I know only that you have many fine foolish notions; that you will change nothing, not even yourself at bottom, because you will cling stubbornly to your fine foolish notions; and that by-and-by you will look back, with a large thankfulness, upon the hard knocks which they will have earned for you, prizing every one of those honorable wounds which you got ingloriously in a frail dream’s defence.”

    “Why?” said the boy, frankly perplexed by this kind of talking.

    “Why is anything true?” returned Smire, a bit moodily; “and why does anything happen? These are yet other secrets which I have not ever found out for all my long questing. And my ignorance does not matter, perhaps. Again, I do not know. I know only that, the more thanks to you and to the Father of Lies, I have now found my way back to magic Branlon.”

    Smire smiled majestically; and he said:

    “Hah, but does that matter, either? you will be asking yourself. Does anything matter except that I delay you here, and that even now my dear Pug, you are trying your very best to remain urbane, under the unmerited affliction of an elderly vagabond’s prattle, while Jessica waits for you?”

    “How did you know that, sir?” asked the boy, blushing most violently.

    And again the shoulders of Smire moved heavenward.

    “I have my limitations,” he admitted, with his not-ever-failing modesty. “But my memory stays excellent.”

    Thus speaking, Smire looked at the boy, once more, for a leisurely while. The eternal wanderer sighed then; he bowed as one bows before a superior; and he removed his enchanted eyeglasses, whereupon the boy vanished.

    After that, Smire flung away these diabolical eyeglasses. They had served Smire, at any rate, handsomely; fiends had their praiseworthy points, he reflected, with his customary broad-mindedness: yet there appeared no further need for these glasses, now that Smire had turned toward woodlands which became more and still more familiar. For now it was the wood of Darvan which a rather unaccountably downhearted Smire was skirting; and beyond that, his well-remembered road lay southerly, between Meivod and the wide ravine of Rathgor, to the charmed forest of Branlon.

    The sight of it cheered him. And the triumphant God of Branlon jauntily lighted a fresh cigarette as he entered his regained realm with every sort of appropriate emotion.