The Nightmare Had Triplets (75 page)

    “Bah!” said the black dog.

    But at this exact point he was interrupted.

    The black dog was interrupted at this point by the public at large. They thronged the wharf; and their faces were radiant.

    “—For the world-famous What-did-you-say-his-name-was returns to us,” the baker shouted, waving happily his round white cap, “in the person of yonder tall and dark and superbly handsome being.”

    “He has every mental and physical gift which members of the human race could desire,” cried the butcher, flourishing his huge cleaver, like a banner before an all-conqueror, “and while they call him I forget just what in public, yet his private morals are quite dreadful.”

    “Born from a long line of distinguished ancestors,” the candlestick maker chimed in, “his coat of arms is authentic. And I have heard also that his dinner coat has two outside breast pockets.”

    Then Tom told them: “He wears silk underwear most elaborately monogrammed. The
Herald Tribune
says that his books strike a responsive chord in the hearts of every type of reader. What did he write?”

    “I forget at present,” replied Dick, “but he keeps nine mistresses, and he smokes a specially imported brand of tobacco, and each one of his books is the very finest book that William Lyon Phelps has ever encountered anywhere. So we must all read his books.”

    “He composes his books into a dictaphone before breakfast,” said Harry. “For breakfast he has onion soup with two cups of Benedictine. And he won the Pulitzer prize, or the Harper prize, or the O. Henry prize, or some prize, anyhow, as you will all remember, for something or other.”

    —Whereupon Madame Quelquechose replied: “Yes, I remember that he wrote something or other, because the
Saturday Review of Literature
said he was fond of fishing. In fact, he is an ardent angler and one of our greatest living writers.”

    “And then too it has been the hobby of his leisure hours to form an unequalled collection of Early American antiques,” remarked Senora Etcetera. “That shows such a proper feeling, I think. And moreover, he got into trouble over his income taxes.”

    “They may have called it that, but it was really for sodomy,” declared Lady Ampersand. “You see, the man is a confirmed vegetarian—or perhaps it was a Communist. Anyhow, I saw something about it in a newspaper. So his books may be quite worth while.”

    “Yes, but the real point as to his high position in literature is that story about him and the Queen of Roumania,” said Anon.

    “Not at all,” Ibid assured them. “He has shown conclusively that we are upon the brink of something or other. And two prominent clergymen and a senator from out West have agreed with him. So I most certainly must borrow one of his books.”

    “No, it does not specially matter, my darling, what his books are like,” the world replied, to his wife, with indulgence. “But people are talking about his books. So you ought to ask for his books at the library.”

    “I think his books are perfectly wonderful,” declared Mrs. Murgatroyd, “and I only wish to goodness I could remember something about his books. I believe I will buy one of his books.”

    All this they exclaimed with the fervor of virtuosi, because of their enthusiasm for fine literature and their regard for the seven great auctorial virtues. And it was with a pleased attentiveness that the graceful object of universal interest thus heard the public at large acclaim his home-coming into the realms of flesh and blood.

    “Public Agog Greets Noted Author,” he remarked, gratefully.

    For here, as the man recognized with all proper reverence, now that he had returned from the lands beyond common-sense, here were the true rulers of a more rational world than his restless dreams could ever have invented. Here were the all-powerful folk who, in a sturdy day-lit era of enlightened democracy, determined what gods might be worshipped, what heroes honored, what fantasies unloosed in the name of government, what fames made immortal, and what crimes glorified. These people had the final say as to all flesh-and-blood affairs. They decided everything, at long last. But in particular, as the patrons of the best-paying magazines and of lending libraries, did they determine what special compounds of wit, fancy and erudition might be applauded, as ever-living literary masterpieces, for entire weeks. So was it that the
poietes,
the dream-vendor, now saw before him, yet again, his paymasters, in the kind-hearted, the chuckle-headed and the snobbish middle-classes of an imperfectly civilized nation, upon whose favor and whose unpredictable whims he and his famousness, and every form of art, and all flesh-and-blood affairs, and the general fate of mankind stayed, at the last pinch, dependent.

    Well, but thus far, matters had sped favorably. Jane waited for him; he had the Devil’s own word for it that her grim attentiveness would make certain his paradisaical future; and the public at large were according him, to the full reach of their all but omnipotent powers, the customary tributes of acknowledged literary genius.

    That was the reflection which caused him to shrug in the same instant that he stepped ashore, still treading jauntily, to meet the supreme judges of human success and of human failure in a world with no nonsense about it.