The Nightmare Had Triplets

by Branch Cabell

  And they said also: “Do not leave us, Smirt! We who are well-thought-of citizens must live drowsily without dreams. We can but borrow a dream here and there from the unpractical, and from the untruthful a friendly lie or two, to cheat us into warm magnanimity. Of your nonsense we nave a grave need, to drug us into forgetfulness of our stupid selves and of our little manner of living. Our common-sense has confined us in a treadmill of rational doings: there is no nonsense about us, and our souls perish respectably. Liberate us, O Smirt, from the never-ending tyranny of our common-sense! Yet do you have a care that the door of our treadmill be left open, so that we may be returning at will to the gray round of its genteel reiterancies. For we do not desire to live always with irony; we do not want your wit and fancy along with our morning coffee, thank you very much; and it would be a most upsetting thing did the unveiled face of beauty come prying into our office hours. Only when we have nothing of real importance to attend to can the well-thought-of delight in art’s foolishness.”

  Now when Smirt heard this appeal, he looked at his admirers with some natural pride, and he opened his mouth affably. But before he could speak he became aware of an incredibly beautiful blonde princess, dressed in white silk, and wearing upon her forehead a huge pearl hung from a silver circlet.

  She had touched his arm, saying:

  “So! And will you trifle with the public at large, Smirt, as lightly as you trifled with me?”

  “I am sorry,” Smirt answered, with frank regret, because he had not ever seen anywhere a creature more lovely; “I know there was once a princess. But I do not remember you.”

  XI. THE BLONDE PRINCESS

  You must permit me then (the blonde princess replied) to recount the history of our acquaintance. It dates back a great many years, to the time when I was but a child, and indeed remained still a virgin. For although profoundly corrupted in nature, and though since infancy I had dreamed of the most subtle depravities, I had not lost that which the imaginative might call my innocence at the age of fourteen years. I had been content until that time with debauches of the fancy and with unshared pleasures such as well-brought-up girl children induce only in private.

  You came now and then to visit our palace, but at first you paid me no attention. Nevertheless I felt drawn toward you, and I regarded you furtively at all times. I thought continually about your manly beauties, and the thought led me into many solitary excesses of a nature I need not discuss.

  A little later you permitted yourself to take minor liberties, such as tweaking my ear, or shaking playfully my immature breasts, or chucking me under the chin. When you met me in the Hallway of Lions or when I went with you to the palm garden, you would thus tease or caress me laughingly, even in the presence of the King my father, who saw no evil, peace be to his ashes!

  I wished nothing better than to acquiesce in your impudence toward one in my exalted station. I shuddered with desire to know what thing in me and in my royal blood was in movement whenever you touched me. I observed you with never failing interest.... Indeed, I can well recall that one day, in speaking to my sublime father about the wounds you had received in the war against Carthage, you offered to show him a scar which you had on your person, and for which you had avenged yourself by splitting the skull of the Nubian mercenary who inflicted it. I modestly withdrew from the apartment. But after passing through the doorway I paused, I looked back, and peeping between the curtains, I continued to observe you with interest. You unbuttoned your trousers and to my great joy displayed a magnificent thigh, bronzed and gleaming, overgrown with black wavy hairs, and traversed by a long rose-colored scar, which seemed to me very pretty in the dark flesh and the black hairs which surrounded it. I greatly wished to see what remained hidden under your shirt, but it was impossible to perceive anything definitely.

  I had no affection for you, yet I desired to be crushed, to be conquered, to be defiled by you, Smirt, though it were but for a few moments. Girls have these passing fancies. So whenever you looked at me after the day I saw your naked hairy thigh, I was deeply stirred; I blushed; and when you touched me I shuddered with pleasure.

  You invited me to visit your library. I came full of hunger for an adventure which would be tangible, and so might perhaps rid me of desires which, because they were not yet satisfied, had assumed unpleasant proportions and gave me no peace.

  I was not destined to inspect your wealth of rare first editions and of the inscribed books presented to you by their admiring authors, nor was I to delight in your wittily derogatory comments upon such of these writers as were your personal friends. For before showing me these books, you exhibited to me your home at large, and so led me into your bedroom. Upon entering this intimate chamber, all closed and quiet, and smelling so delightfully of soap and cigarette smoke and leather, I was as if stupefied. My alarms, my curiosities, and my hopes, now aroused in all my body such violent palpitations that I was half suffocated, and I felt my hands and feet to be very cold.

  You caused me to sit upon a red-covered sofa; you sat beside me; and in the while that with your customary ease and elegance you talked about stamp collecting and the fiscal policy of Napoleon, you laughed continually with an unnatural and constrained air. Your eyes had become so strange that I was both afraid and enchanted. I did not know what to say. I was ashamed, and I became red as a sunset.

  By-and-by you squeezed each of my hands. With your fore-finger you tickled the palm of my hand, very gently; and drawing me into your lap, you commenced to kiss me upon the ear, murmuring and whispering so indistinctly that I understood nothing. The room was now silent. All seemed unbelievably silent. I could hear only my own heart beating frantically..

  For a little while I remained motionless upon your knees, while your right arm embraced me, and you continued to kiss lightly my hair, my cheeks, my neck. I felt myself dying of pleasure, for never had I experienced such delight. But now your left hand had strayed indiscreetly, and it thus provoked new ardors. You questioned me in a voice so hoarse that I was frightened.

  I could not answer at first, so much was I troubled. I said by-and-by that you ought to be ashamed of yourself.

  You arose then, you went to turn the key in the door, you drew down the shades of three windows nearly to the bottom, and you returned to me, who panted with shame, with terror, and with desire. You began to undress me in the twinkling of an eye, with hot hands that ran fondly over my bared flesh. You knelt to take off my shoes; upon arising you removed also my chemise and my drawers, which were of the quaint old full-bottomed pattern then worn by all women. Afterward, lifting your willing victim in both arms, you carried me like a sacrifice toward the altar of your bed. I regarded it as a sample of your forethought that the coverlets of this bed were already hospitably turned down.

  Need I continue? To particularize the ensuing events would require a peculiarly Gallic touch: and the French themselves have the proverb, La femme assez sait qui sait vivre et se taire. Or, as the Scots phrase it, She kens muckle wha kens when to haud her tongue. All modern languages, in fine, preserve, in one or another variant, the sage Latin saying, Mulier sapit qui pauca loquitur. Since I believe this sentiment to be alike wise and applicable to this special stage of my narrative, I shall now honor this sentiment.

  And in fact it appears sufficient to remark that the brief pain which you gave you repaid with a dozen delights. It seemed to me that I drowned in pleasure. Yet many of your doings astonished my inexperience, especially, I remember, when at the supreme moment of our first encounter you bellowed gently, like a refined bull. When you arose, at last, combing back your dishevelled dark curls with your fingers, and uttering deep sighs of satisfaction, I too was content.

  After we had bathed and dressed carefully, so as to abstain from all appearance of evil, as the Apostle Paul has directed, then I regarded myself in your mirror. I was impressed with the strange and almost frightening beauty which I had at this moment. My face was flushed delicately, my lips were as red as though stained
with wet blood, and my eyes glittered with an inhuman lustre. I was proud of myself. I exulted both in the pleasure which I had received and in that which I had given.

  You made me promise not ever to return to your embraces, so that the memory of our debauch might endure in untarnished splendor; and this I did promise, with all my heart. I had never known a day more glorious or happy: it seemed to me I had begun to live only during the one hour and twenty-five minutes which I had passed in your convivial and educative bed; but I knew those eighty-five minutes could not ever be recaptured. Besides, at no instant did I feel for you any affection.

  You came no more to the palace. I did not see you again. It occurred to me that my sublime father had perhaps caused you to be executed, after the usual tortures; but so taxing had become the ever widening range of my anatomical studies, under an efficient corps of varied instructors, that I lacked time to inquire into this matter.

  Such, Smirt, was the history of our acquaintance.

  When the blonde princess had finished her recital, Smirt frowned a little. He shook his head.

  “I am sorry,” he said, “but I do not remember you, at this present stage in my dream. The scar exists; but it was not given by a Nubian mercenary. There are yet other discrepancies in your story, alike of archaeology and of local color, as well as, I modestly admit, of arithmetic. Still more perplexing, however, is the fact that you describe your release from technical virtue with an exactitude and a convincing truthfulness which prove you not to be female.”

  “Why, Smirt, but whatever nonsense are you talking? Is this the bosom of a man? Do you feel here the thighs of a man? Or for that matter—”

  “Pardon me,” Smirt said, withdrawing his hand, “but I am to be convinced in this delicate affair neither by sight nor touch, nor by any other of my senses. I prefer to be guided by experience.”

  “And yet in a tête-à-tête, Smirt, no Southern gentleman ought to begrudge the evidence of his senses.”

  “Nevertheless,” Smirt replied, “I can remember seducing no young woman who did not afterward contend—quite as though I had not been present during the whole transaction—that I had either persuaded her against her will or brutally overpowered her resistance. I can recall no gentlewoman into whose life I have brought romance who did not display afterward, more or less volubly, this quaint hallucination. You do not display it: and I deduce, as a sound logician, that you are not female.”

  The princess stared at him, smiling a little oddly. You saw that the large pearl she wore upon her forehead had altered in its coloring: for it glowed now like a ruby.

  And Smirt continued to speak with extreme and careful politeness:

  “No, I do not remember you. I can but suggest that during the prolonged career of a Peripatetic Episcopalian one necessarily forgets much. There need be no personal side to such forgetfulness. I do not remember you: that is all. Nor do I quite understand, my dear sir, why you should have enkindled in every part of your body to this fiery red color, and have sprouted two horns and a very long forked tail—Why, but what the devil!”

  “Formerly,” agreed the so remarkably transformed princess, “I was called that. But what with the progress of science and of scepticism, and the need to cut down our operating expenses, and the great popularity of mergers, affairs have been altered.”

  XII. —& COMPANY

  As the junior partner,” the appalling fiend continued, “it is a part of my duties to relieve the old gentleman of all these routine affairs in the way of temptation and carnality and so on. Yes, Smirt, we have conducted business for a long while now as All-Highest & Company.”

  The speaker and Smirt were at this instant sitting astride upon a flash of lightning, confronting each other, so that Smirt journeyed face forward, and the scarlet devil courteously rode backwards, as these two travelled with a great and yet almost unremarkable rapidity through space. They encountered no wind, since between the stars there is no atmosphere. Smirt had thus no actual feeling of movement; and it seemed to him a rather odd thing, this sensation of sitting quite still on a flash of lightning.

  Yet he saw that above and below, and on every side of Company and Smirt, glittered various constellations, and all these appeared constantly to shift in position and to pass away, so quickly travelled the flash of lightning through endless space. And Smirt noted yet another odd thing: the right foot of Company was human, but the left foot was shaped like the hoof of a goat.

  “Let us distinguish,” said Smirt, when he had wholly got his bearings: “for I was not tempted in the least.”

  Red Company shrugged. “And why should you be, Smirt, with so many plump and juicy young women about, as alike as peas in a pod to begin with, and to end with, as alike as wives in a bed? I flushed, I assure you, to be tempting anybody of your wide experience and savoir faire with such trumpery bait; but the old gentleman has in these matters His own notions. Unprogressive, I fear. And even these notions I bungled. So you saw through me, of course. You caught at once my slight slip in feminine psychology, because you understand women better than I do.”

  “Oh, that, Company, that is a mere matter of experience. You should see more of them, that only is needed. Indeed it occurs to me that, with a little more experience of women, you might find women of a decided usefulness in your own province, of stirring up disquiet and wickedness among men.”

  “I shall make a note of that, Smirt,” said the fiend gratefully; and he produced a small red note-book with a red pencil. “Meanwhile I am flustered. Your acumen has quite dumbfounded me at the moment I was going on to offer you strange sins and infamous pleasures and all the subtler refinements of abominable love. Oh, just the usual routine! There is no need to go into it now. To the contrary, it is a relief to me to be spared such uncongenial nonsense. The old gentleman writes all those speeches, I must tell you. He reads Oscar Wilde a great deal.”

  “Why, then, since your evil devices have failed, to what cause, Company, should I attribute the pleasure of your company, or perhaps,” Smirt continued, with his unfailing flair for that variousness which is the life of prose, “perhaps one had better say of your society, on this flash of lightning?”

  “It is merely that, since our management of Earth does not please you,” replied Company, as he indicated a planet now only some few million miles ahead of them, “you have here a specimen of our later style of work, which we would be delighted to present with the firm’s compliments.”

  “And what would I do with that planet, Company?”

  “Why, whatsoever you elected, Smirt, now that you have baffled my diabolical arts and retain the old gentleman’s pocket piece. For that, I must tell you, confers omnipotence—within limits.”

  “Oh, I see. The coin is a talisman which confers omnipotence—within limits. That is quite convenient.”

  Thereupon Smirt took out of his pocket the forty reis piece, and he wished for a package of cigarettes. How it happened there is no telling, but straightway the coin lay in Smirt’s hand on top of a package of cigarettes which Smirt regarded with chill disapproval. Not even in the matter of smoking did these divine beings appear intelligent.

  “Plain Virginia tobacco—along with a box of matches, please,” said Smirt long-sufferingly; and at once his will was accomplished.

  Then Smirt resumed his conversation with the Lord of Evil, saying: “Why good tobacco should ever be degraded with a mixture of Turkish tobacco is more than my limited imagination has yet been able to conceive. No, Company: I appreciate your offer, and I thank you most heartily for these cigarettes. But for me to exercise my omnipotence—even within limits—over any planet, would involve my becoming the God of that planet. It would mean responsibility. No; I very much prefer to criticize, and to disparage urbanely, the conduct of a world for which someone else is responsible.”

  “That is true, Smirt, as we have often learned to our cost. Ah, but what dashing epigrams you have made about both good and evil with that fine urbanity of yours!”

>   “Oh, but come now,” Smirt comforted Company, “there was nothing personal intended. In all I have written as to your universe, I, as an Episcopalian, believed—in so far of course as any absolute conviction permitted to an Episcopalian—that neither member of your firm existed. So none of my wit and fancy and erudition was consciously aimed at either of you. I simply did not know of your existence, far less of your consolidation; but we live and learn.”

  “In fact, as the hair dwindles, Smirt, the wits increase.”

  Smirt looked at his dreadful companion for a moment. Smirt lighted a cigarette, and Smirt said,—

  “You remind me, Company, of a good story that is going the rounds.”

  “Then let us have it, Smirt, for my sense of humor is devilish keen.”

  “Stop me if you have heard this,” Smirt urged; and he continued:

  “A good story is going the rounds about a skittish banker, whose hair, in spite of all his precautions, is beginning to grow thin. His partner in business, it seems, was summoned to the telephone late one evening, and under the impression that this was a long-distance call, did not answer—”

  “Ah, yes,” said Company, “but all partners are like that. I know them. For I too have a partner; and between ourselves, Smirt, I sometimes think I might just as well have a palsy.”

  “You surprise me, Company—”