The Nightmare Had Triplets

by Branch Cabell

  But again Smirt had lifted his divine hand in protest.

  “I cannot grant your logic,” said Smirt, “and in consequence I cannot grant your requests either. No, I desire for you all good luck at Wen-Ching, and at Peeping also, because I recognize the value of a sound classical education. But I will not give away my creations gratis: the tithes of my temple must be kept up. And besides that, enjoyable as I have found your adoration, I do have to create the legend of Arachne—”

  “That is an excellent idea,” remarked the young man in a snappy gray suit of Kolledge Kustom Kut Klothes, “for the Imperial Typewriter Company is now embarking on a campaign in which it is proposed to use six well-known deities. So pray permit me toil straighten your coat sleeve. Look a little to the left, with the chin the least bit farther up, if you do not I mind, and now, just a trifle more pleasant, please, splendid, that will do nicely, you can see the proofs Tuesday morning.”

  “But—” Smirt replied, ineffectively.

  “Our plans,” the young man explained, “require a personal portrait in which you are seated at the Imperial Portable Typewriter, O Master of the Gods. We beseech also a letter from you pointing out the extreme utility of our machine and how effectually it can be carried about and used under all circumstances. The company takes pleasure in presenting you with one of the newest models of the Imperial Portable Typewriter—”

  “But—” Smirt remarked.

  “—Upon which,” the young man continued, “you can finish the legend of Arachne in no time at all. Your photographs and your letter will be reproduced and distributed to twenty thousand Imperial dealers, from coast to coast, and we will tie in with your publishers to advertise the legend of Arachne as one of our products.”

  “But,” Smirt repeated, “before that I must create the legend of Arachne.”

  “Yet do you first allow me, O Master of the Gods,” said an elderly butcher, “to tender my sincere and my most hearty congratulations on your superb craftsmanship in the legend of Arachne. How I chortled and chuckled over the cleverness of the dialogue and your deep understanding of the humors and ironies of life! Will you please be good enough to copy out and autograph for me the second paragraph upon page 120, and thus add an inestimable treasure to my collection of your creations?”

  “Will you not give me a signed photograph?” asked the baker, “for I think very highly of the legend of Arachne. It grips the reader.”

  “In this manuscript,” said the candlestick maker, “I have set forth my views upon Sovietism, sin, silver, suicide, Siam, and civic sanitation. I believe that this manuscript will peculiarly appeal to the gifted creator of the legend of Arachne. So do you kindly read it, and make the necessary alterations, not later than; next Wednesday, and then tell me to what publisher I ought to send it.”

  Thereupon came bustling into Smirt’s temple Tom, and Dick, and Harry, along with Madame Quelquechose and Senora Etcetera and Lady Ampersand, and after these came Anon and Ibid and the world and his wife, and Mrs. Murgatroyd came also.

  “Master of the Gods,” said Tom, Dick and Harry speaking in unison, “now that we are eighteen, sex has become very wonderful to us, and we desire talk about it. We think, Master, that there is something about great minds such as you and we possess which remains eternally naïve: only fools become accustomed to miracles. The Puritan, the dunce, and the rustic start out by sneering; they end by accepting mutely. The radio, the Venus of Milo, the electric light, the overture to Tannhäuser, Arcturus, fornication, and Christopher Marlowe are all very obvious to such lost souls. But the genius says: ‘I do not understand how it is possible. Of course I must believe, because I can see and hear, but it remains none the less incredible.’ Because he has genius he lives in unending wonder. The fool quickly accepts and as quickly forgets. Take sex, for example—”

  It was a mandate at which Smirt sighed a trifle impatiently.

  “Ah, but why not,” said Smirt, “take something else? Why do you striplings not ever take anything else as your hackneyed theme?”

  “Because, Master,” replied Tom, Dick and Harry, “the ordinary man flops on the most beautiful of all beautiful things, the female body; he assaults it with his own body; he tumbles off: and he forgets the entire matter, all in five minutes. But a genius can pour out all his libido on the altars of Venus and never fail to be puzzled, to be filled with a glorious wonderment, or to be amazed always anew. The miracle fascinates him; it arouses both unbelief and a passionate adoration. He likes it; he wants to do it again. That, Master, is what we think about sex. That is why we believe that each one of us four is a genius. Are we not right?”

  Smirt inclined his divine head gravely. And he said, even more gravely:

  “Well, it all depends, my dear lads. In any event, your dicta upon this most vital and highly important subject are of such interest that I must now avert from them with a great deal of sincere regret, in order that I may create the legend of Arachne. And so, some other day perhaps—”

  “Whenever I talk with people who have read only the legend of Arachne,” Senora Etcetera declared—“whereas I of course have read all your books, over and yet over again—then I get rattle-headed. It seems to me that they have not found in your books what I have found. Which proves, does it not, that I am more sensitively sensitized? Yes, oh, yes indeed! Some people have wicked minds. You are naughty at times, O Master of the Gods, but I worship you wholeheartedly, because you are amusing at all times, which is the very nicest thing that a god can be.”

  “But I, I adore you, Master of the Gods,” remarked Madame Quelquechose, “and I wish that you could be wholly mine. Of course you do not really exist. You are just a beautiful dream I have dreamed.”

  “Do you think so?” said Smirt, dubiously: for this notion seemed rather to complicate matters.

  “Oh, but beyond doubt,” replied Madame Quelquechose; “and I am glad of that, too, because in real life I am deeply in love with a quite different kind of person. Monsieur Quelquechose thinks most highly of him. So he fits into my reality; but you fit into the dream.”

  “Yes, Smirt the supreme god is a dream,” said Lady Ampersand, “and I am his living quotation. Every time my lips part in talking, his sweet words fall therefrom. If that wicked girl in the fairy tale had but read the fine books of Smirt, she might so easily have dropped his lovely words instead of those horrid toads.”

  “And Smirt is my dream also,” put in Mrs. Murgatroyd. “I think his books are perfectly wonderful. I am very proud to have known him before he became divine. I tell everybody about him. I simply cannot imagine what it was I saw in Murgatroyd.”

  “I also,” said the world’s wife, “I have dreamed about the beautiful high brow, the dark Byronic curls, the refined Grecian nose, the firm chin, and the sensitive mouth which reveals only enough to make its hearers hungry for yet more of Smirt. O lovely Master of the Gods, I am wholly glad that I dreamed you. Now do you tell us about your philosophy of life.”

  Then they all cried out confusedly:

  “What will be the future trend of Southern literature?”

  “Do you compose on the typewriter? Do you dictate? And do you write in the morning or in the evening?”

  “Is alcohol injurious, and are we, or are we not, upon the verge of a vast spiritual awakening?”

  “Tell us frankly which one of your own books do you like best?”

  “What about correspondence courses in short story writing, who is your favorite author, and ought children to be taught to believe in Santa Claus? Why is the American Spectator? Do you write every day or do you wait for inspiration to move you?”

  “What, Smirt, are your religious beliefs in not over two hundred words? What constitutes your ideal of; true womanhood? When is your next book to appear and what are you going to call it?”

  All these questions they asked confusedly without waiting for any answer. And all the while, too, the public at large became more pallid. The colors went out of their faces and out of t
heir hair and out of their clothing also. They became like ghosts, nor were they any longer distinct in outline. They were like blown tatters of fog, they were like mere cigarette smoke, now that, very much as Airel and Elair had vanished, so did a wind carry away, gently, all except one of the public at large; but as they passed out of Smirt’s temple they still shrilled and chirped and twittered their questions.

  “Master of the Gods,” said the young girl who remained in Smirt’s temple, “I am called Dorothy—”

  “I prefer Arachne,” Smirt answered, sighing.

  “—And, Master, you did not ever answer my letter—about your lecturing.”

  “I remember that there was once a princess,” Smirt said, with sigh number two, “and you also, my child, I seem to remember, but in a different role.”

  XXXVIII. A LECTURE FOR DOROTHY

  I remember you perfectly (Smirt continued.) Writing in behalf of the two literary societies of your college, you, my dear Dorothy, have asked if, and when, and at what fee per evening, I would agree to lecture in your college auditorium, as to whatsoever topic I may elect—although you aidfully added you were certain that “a message” from me concerning Modern Trends in Literature would be of deep interest to the students, the faculty, and their friends,—and you have asked also that I advise you whether “anything along this line” would be “worth my while.”

  To be frank with you (Smirt went on, as he lighted a fresh cigarette, and leaned back, rather more comfortably, on his pedestal, it would not be worth my while—nor your while either. I still marvel, with an aged and resigned wonder, at the quaint notion that some possible profit is to be got, by anybody concerned, from inducing the professional man of letters to lecture. You would not ask in just this off-hand fashion, I imagine, that same author to perform upon the college auditorium piano, before the students, the faculty, and their friends, or to adorn the auditorium walls with mural paintings. You would incline, first, to make sure of his musical gifts or of his ability to paint.

  Nor—and this is an analogue even more exact—nor would you address to that author an invitation to appear, upon a set evening, before the students, the faculty, and their friends, and thereupon to enliven the gathering by singing Celeste Aïda or The Last Rose of Summer. The singer and the author (along with the actor, the lecturer, and the crossword-puzzle maker) do utilize a common material, in that each of them employs words; and yet, after hardly more than a half-hour’s steady thinking about this matter, you will begin to divine, my dear Dorothy, that all these persons use words variously, in accord with the tenets and the limitations of perceptibly different arts.

  I grant that members of a race so multifarious as to produce both men and women may be able in more than one art. It is humanly possible, I mean, for an author to “speak” passably: but the event is rare. Looking back through a long and terrible vista of auctorial lectures, I can recall one woman writer who “spoke” (upon I have no least notion what subject) with a simple and cordial virtuosity such as kept me through a contented hour’s length mentally purring. I delight, because of that well-nigh unique memory, to recognize, in Zona Gale, an actually accomplished writer who actually could “speak,” and with whom “speaking” was a fine art finely practiced. To the other side, without any unwise name-calling, I think of a woman who had published sundry volumes of the most bland and charming essays ever penned by; an American, and of her dictatorial, her sullen, and her gross conduct of the one lecture I was fated to hear her deliver. That was an all-tragic afternoon, which robbed me forever of any further pleasure in the writings of an over large and regrettably vocal snapping turtle.

  The epiphany of this harridan remains to me, I repeat, a continued distress—and yet, only in degree. For how many other soul-chilling, how many haggardly vivacious females do I recall, all of who “spoke” upon the inconsequent ground that the knew more or less about writing! And with what circumspection did I shun their books afterward!

  As to male authors, I clap one hand on my he and rest the other hand on the family Bible, in the while I protest that every one of them whom I have heard “speak” showed then at his worst. Even did he orate smoothly, without fidgets, without forlornly clearing his throat, and without too often seeking respite in the ice-water pitcher, yet did his inane utterance glister, as it were, with the greasy high-mindedness and the tin-plated goodfellowship which no public speaker can very well avoid. In most cases this did not matter, because the majority of persons who write badly enough to be in demand as lecturers are charlatans or bunglers at all seasons: but to observe bedizened in any such humbug the man of real talent is painful.

  It is painful because there drift about, in that more rarefied air of the platform, some fumes, some straying gases, which affect the intelligence. A few victims these effluvia reduce to gulping, to the conscientious coughing of Camille, or to blank merciful unintelligibility: but the more hapless they intoxicate coram populo. And as a pragmatic people, we have learned to accept this fact. We do not note, as a rule, how wildly does the babblement made upon platforms by the habitué’s of this dire eminence differ from the at least relatively sane speech of our school-teachers and our politicians and our clergy in their private life. It is tacitly understood by everybody that, when “speaking,” the professional “speaker” expects his sentiments to be received at a liberal discount, and upon this full dress occasion will introduce no one of his beliefs in their working clothes.

  All oratory I, in brief, (with the appropriate glibness of a person who knows nothing whatever about it) assume to be an art with its own formal conventions. But I am certain it is an art through which none may attain to self-expression; and in this respect it differs by a world’s width from authorship.

  I mean that the writer, at his desk, so long as he toils over the progress of composition, can imagine that somewhere outside the door of his study an intelligent and sympathetic audience, well worth all painstaking, awaits his masterpiece. To that “acute but honorable minority” he can address himself freely, with glad confidence, and without compromise.

  Let no such happy man turn lecturer! I entreat, with an emotion, you may note, which rises naturally into blank verse. For when once this misled visionary mounts the platform, he becomes conscious that no supermen assemble to honor him. His flesh and blood audience is not even, in any real sense, sympathetic: at best, it stays receptive, waiting to be wooed, waiting to be roused into approval of him, by its own standards. He perceives, too, that this audience (in common with any audience ever assembled anywhere) is not, or at least is not pre-eminently, intelligent. As a whole it very much prefers, it demands, and it visibly awaits, those sleek false formulae which the wise honor with lip service in public. So the entrapped word-monger begins with his “Ladies and gentlemen,” and after loosing this trial balloon of fancy he is soon well under way in imaginative truckling.

  I have been privileged at odd times to sit, serene and dutiless, upon the rostrum whence some less lucky author was presently to address his public; and I have considered his raw material. Not ever did the spectacle prove exhilarating: never did I covet his job. To be applauded by such people seemed to me, in all honesty, compromising. Sloth, and ostentation, and a timid lechery, and light-headedness, and self-conceit, and disapproval, and inattention, and boredom, I found over-plainly inscribed on the raised faces turned usward. And in yet more liberal quantities, of course, was to be seen gaping at us that dull-mindedness which continues to betray an uncoerced people into paying for, and even into using, tickets for a lecture.

  Now I daresay, my dear Dorothy, that these are the prevailing traits in any human assemblage, of the better sort, when one views it without prejudice. I admit that, in the last outcome, it is to just this partially cultured audience every American artist must appeal. But my point is that the American author who is seduced into lecturing cannot any more evade this discouraging fact, inasmuch as night after he encounters a roomful of his own atrocious admirers, in the persons of you
and of the other flibbert-gibbet students and of the depressed faculty and of their frowsy friends—and, in brief, of the public at large.

  He regards perforce this squatted herd of Mammalia at close range; and no further delusion is possible. Here are the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker, here are Tom, Dick and Harry, but above all here are Madame Quelquechose and Senora Etcetera and Lady Ampersand and Mrs. Murgatroyd. The dream-vendor—the purveyor of all beautiful and lofty imaginings, the promoter of divine dissatisfactions—stands face to face with the public at large. He sees immediately before him his paymasters, in the sensual, the bored, the chuckle-headed, and the smug middle-classes of an imperfectly civilized nation, upon whose favor and whose shifty whims he and his famousness and all our national are dependant, at the last pinch.

  The point is, furthermore, that no intelligent person in such circumstances will elect to speak with intelligence. Instead, “subdued,” as the phrase runs “to what he works in,” he will cannily assume the thin virtues, the high-minded illogic, and the false good-humor which all better-thought-of Americans admire; he will prattle; and he will thus earn his lecture fee honestly, by purveying the sane and edifying entertainment he promised.

  But the more wise, the more cautious writer, remains snug in his study, at play with his words, and happily imagining that he addresses an all-worthy audience. That audience is in some sense the master-work of every writer’s invention. That audience does not exist anywhere in flesh, and at bottom he knows this. But in his bemused fancy that audience exists clearly enough throughout the while that he writes, and for that while it contents him.

  XXXIX. THE OLD DIFFICULTY

  “Then, why, Master of the Gods,” asked the girl Dorothy, when Smirt had ended his speaking, “are you not contented?”