The Nightmare Had Triplets

by Branch Cabell

  “Moreover, upon every aesthetic ground, I cannot but notice that this dream reflects some little credit upon its dreamer. That I admit to be an ingratiating circumstance which prompts me—we artists being what we most notoriously have always been—to accept, if but out of auctorial vanity, your odd notion that you do not exist in reality but only in my imagination. Toward you, my dear fellow, in this uncertain condition, which you must necessarily find harrowing, I extend, of course, all appropriate sympathy; but as .concerns me, I perforce stay content.”

  Now the wizard stroked his majestic white beard; and from under his shaggy eyebrows he regarded the Lord of the Forest almost compassionately.

  “You are not content,” said Urc Tabaron. “You never will be, I imagine, no matter how much you may chatter and try to cheat yourself. Such is your nature. And because of that nature—as I well know—you will by-and-by be asking of me an odd number of magics to revive, and to draw back to you, some portion of your lost dreams about being Smirt.”

  “Ah, but come now,” said Mr. Smith, indulgently, “you are now aping Roland and Turpin and Charlemagne, in this talk about ‘lost dreams’. ‘Lost dreams’ are quite out of date: they are an anachronism; they are as completely Victorian as the religious doubts of Mrs. Humphry Ward or the economics of Karl Marx or a painting of dead ducks in the dining room. Let us keep clear of the obsolete, even in a nightmare. Let us intrepidly meet our dreams as they come. Let us not lose but cherish them with the respect they deserve; and acclaim without any faltering their complete handsomeness. For I, I have dreams which are upon a scale commensurate to my talents. And I accept the inevitable, in an awed silence, because after all it was divine Providence, rather than my personal endeavors, that got for me my unusual talents. So let us avoid hubris.”

  “And what manner of strange monster may that be?” Urc Tabaron interrupted.

  “Hubris, my dear fellow, was the name given to that over-weening pride which destroyed Oedipus, and Prometheus, and so many other protagonists of Greek drama. Hubris is an injudicious amount of self-conceit and self-complacency. Hubris, in brief, is my bête noire, which I avoid zealously, just as I would avoid too much talking, or too much smoking, or any other indulgence which I knew to be ill-advised. I distrust hubris. That is why I am now ready very humbly to accept the inevitable, my dear Urc Tabaron, without criticizing unfavorably its entirely pleasant aspect, inasmuch as my life here as a local deity leaves nothing whatever to be desired, by me.”

  VII. MR. SMITH UPON FATHERHOOD

  Then Mr. Smith went away jauntily, toward his home in the midst of the forest. He said, with contentment:

  “Though Branlon be but a dream, yet Branlon is wonderful. It abounds in the superb improbabilities of myth, and at will I create to inhabit Branlon new myths also. These attend me, who am Lord of the Forest, and we make sport together in this wood. The entire effect is baroque and rococo, of course; my bucolics incline to the school of Chinese Chippendale. Yet this Branlon contents me. I would not willingly be leaving Branlon.”

  No, for he had always admired, and he had liked most cordially, this forest of Branlon during the time when he had thought it merely his native home, in which he had awakened from his dream about being a master of gods. Now the surprising discovery that all Branlon was but a part of another dream, and that his own abilities had created all the wonder and the beauty of Branlon, rather troubled Mr. Smith, on account of his remarkable modesty. It was a discovery which could not but tempt any person, he felt, in the direction of pride and vainglory.

  It accounted, too, for a certain vagueness about the trees and the vegetation in general, because he had never known much about botany. Moreover, he could now see that, in this charmed forest, the flora of the north-temperate and of the sub-tropical zones were mixed a bit indiscriminately. Yet if his inattentive recollection of mere trees and bushes had furnished Branlon without any scientific and slavish adherence to veracity, with what lavishness had Branlon been peopled by his erudition!

  There was hardly any mythology, he reflected, which had not helped to colonise Branlon. Not only had Branlon its fauns and satyrs and nymphs of the eight classes, its fays and its gnomes and its wood spirits, such as you found in all forests of the lands beyond common-sense: Branlon displayed a population very much more varied. In Branlon, for example, were to be met the Kogaras, and the Vilas, and the Glibiches. The Metsik went about Branlon, mounted on a wild boar with golden bristles; and in the tree-tops of Branlon could be seen now and then the tiny red caps of the Ni’agriusar as they peeped down at you.

  Moreover, the Wild Huntsman, green clad and wearing upon his head the horns of a stag, rode impressively about Branlon, side by side with the Tutosel, who dressed as a nun, and who hooted, very delightfully, like an owl. The Kirnis guarded the cherry-trees of Branlon; in the hollow tree-stumps of Branlon lived the Norg; and the Vargamor had charge of the wolves of Branlon. And there were hundreds of yet other quaint woodland creatures come out of the folk-lore of all nations to live happily together in Branlon.

  Yes, Branlon reflected some little credit upon its compiler, Mr. Smith admitted, even in the teeth of his never-failing modesty. It was exceedingly good to be Lord of the Forest.

  After that, Mr. Smith said: “Yet it does trouble me, that when I was not merely a local deity, but a supreme god, I begot children. My wives in that very lofty dream were Tana, who served darkly the sinister white rabbit which lives in the moon, under a cassia-tree; and Airel of the Brown Hair, a conversation woman dwelling upon a glass mountain; and Rani, the South Wind’s third daughter, an erratic queen of philosophers, in her fine paper palace erected upon a weather vane. Moreover, I imprudently married Arachne, the Spider Woman, who lives everywhere, and who devours her mate. I do not count Oriana, the Dwarf King’s widow, for even though I did marry Oriana also, yet I was prevented from the discharge of my marital duties. I regret the omission, which circumstances made unavoidable: but above all do I regret Tana, whose deformed hands brought peace to my thinking.”

  That was it, he reflected. From many women he had got pleasure: but the strange hands of Tana (upon neither of which was there a little finger) had brought him peace. He remembered always the charming, the unexplained, tranquillity of that moment when he had sat at the feet of Tana, and she had caressed the dark curls of his hair, and had spoken magic words,—those incomprehensible and humming and droning words which were like the sound of a spinning-wheel. That moment, in all his long dream about being a master of gods, and throughout so much of applause and glory, and among all the prodigies and the love-making and the adulation which delighted him everywhere in his proud dream—that moment had been his one moment of contentment. There was in this fact no apparent sense; and perceiving this, he sighed, as became a sound logician who is confronted by the inexplicable.

  “However, upon four of these women I begot children. That memory troubles me. It may be that these hapless children of mine are yet astray in that uncomfortably exalted dream from which I have been released to become well-satisfied and bucolic Mr. Smith in, as I now learn, a quite different sort of dream.”

  It was a situation which brought out his charmed pocket piece, because the affair called, rather clamantly, for some cigarettes and some matches to facilitate clear thinking.

  “Now this Charlemagne yet keeps with him fine flaxen-haired Roland, the fair son of a dream which has forsaken its dreamer. It is true that about the historic figure of Charlemagne have grown up so many romantic accretions as to render all his doings open to doubt. I considered it suspicious, for example, that this eighth-century emperor should be followed by an armed company of musketeers in costumes of the seventeenth century; nor were the four elephants with gilded tusks, which transported his luggage, un-flavored with anachronism.”

  Mr. Smith weighed for some while these mysteries; and he decided that, while such mixtures were frequent enough in the lands beyond common-sense, yet he could not make anything out of them by any rul
e of sound logic.

  In consequence, Mr. Smith said: “Yes, it may well be that this Charlemagne is but a king of romance who exists only in, and by virtue of, my rich-colored superb dreaming about him. Yet in my present dream, if I still move in the affairs of a dream, I permit Charlemagne to keep his Roland, the one being whom Charlemagne yet loves; but I deny myself the dear company of my own sons. To do that, is to carry philanthropy and self-sacrifice too far. For I also am a king of romance, ruling over Branlon; and in Branlon that which I desire must happen. So I will, yes, after all, I will humor Urc Tabaron by accepting from him four magics, because kings ought to be gracious to everybody. And with these magics I will draw variously out of my ancient dreaming the four children whom I begot as Smirt. I will draw them to Branlon, so that at worst, like the great Emperor Charlemagne, I shall not be bereft of my children.”

  Then the tale tells that he went back to Urc Tabaron. And the tale declares that the gray wizard answered the Lord of the Forest sternly, saying:

  “No, Lord of the Forest, because I prophesied that you would ask of me an odd number of magics. You cannot expect me to soil my good name as a soothsayer by pretending that four is an odd number.”

  “Yet four is an excellent number, my dear fellow, as the Four Evangelists and the main points of the compass and every bridge-table will testify—”

  “Nevertheless, Lord of the Forest, that which you ask is quite out of reason. To regain your contentment you will need by-and-by five magics to draw out of an old dream, not four, but five, of your gaudy human-shaped illusions. And even then—I imagine—your nature being what it is, your contentment will hardly outlive one clock-tick.”

  “Well,” Mr. Smith replied, graciously, “I shall not haggle with a friend whom I esteem beyond vocal expression. So in place of the four magics which I consented to accept from you, I will now accept five. But let us not talk any nonsense about clock-ticks: there is no clock in this forest.”

  PART TWO. THE BOOK OF VOLMAR

  “Throughout Osnia farming is unusually highly developed. In 1934 the yield of grains, wheat, wild oats, rye, scotch, bourbon, barley and maize was 7,104,578 metric tons from 8,727,251 acres. Sugar beet production was 3,961,428 metric tons from 322,807 acres. The mineral wealth of this kingdom likewise is considerable, coal, iron, graphite, blarney stones, copper and garnets being abundant. The revenues of Osnia during 1934, as figured in lakhs of rupees, showed a deficit of 47.01.”

  VIII. HOW THEY BRAGGED

  Now the tale speaks of the first magic of Urc Tabaron which Mr. Smith used in Branlon; and the tale tells about how, in far-away Osnia, this magic began its working when it loosened the loud tongue of Count Gaubert.

  “At the siege of Moscow,” declared this Count Gaubert, “I unhorsed the proud Tzar Alexis, rolling him over in a ditch publicly, while five armies applauded.”

  “Hah, but with only a handful of men,” cried out Andrew of Lower Chamgui, “I captured and I burned the two-score-and-two extremely strong and compact towers of El Gazib. For that reason do the Turks still shudder at a mention of my name.”

  “All this is nothing,” replied Jocelyn of Brienne, “inasmuch as it was I who killed the Sultan of Babylon, and cut him into halves, and tore the black wicked heart out of his pagan body. Now he, I would have you know, was called Saleh Nagim Addim Aijub; and that is a name before which everyone shudders.”

  Thus they boasted: for to-day the King of Osnia held a suitably royal feast in honor of his daughter’s birthday; and after the gentlemen who served him had eaten well, and had drunk yet more zealously—in the large hall hung everywhere with those strange banners which Rudolph the Lame took from the King of the Land of Shadows in his last battle, among the cliffs of Toysan—these gentlemen were now making their brags, as an entertainment for the Princess Sonia. So the one told of his warfaring, and then the other excelled him in confessing to superb and unequalled exploits in battle. Seventeen of them thus outbragged the other. Then Volmar, the dark wanderer said:

  “You have taken cities and heathen lords and suchlike other toys, it may be. But I have taken the fancy of a Christian princess, and that is a fairer thing to be having.”

  “Come,” said King Ludwig, frowning, “but what sort of Christian, much more a princess, would be giving her fancy to a sot and a shock-headed vagabond?”

  “She is the most wise of all princesses,” replied Volmar, “in that she has perceived my merits. She is the most lovely of princesses that are now alive.”

  “Be silent, dark tippler!” cried out Earl Othnar. “There is no woman anywhere more beautiful than our Princess Sonia.”

  Then dozens of yet other gentlemen arose to protest angrily that this patriotic tenet of the kingdom of Osnia was a true tenet and remained a mere axiom among intelligent persons.

  Volmar, who was now drunk to the point when all which a man desires appears plausible, swayed on his feet a little; but his glazed dark eyes did not turn from the Princess Sonia, where she sat beside the King her father under a gold-fringed cloth of estate.

  She was very nobly dressed this evening, in a close gown of crimson and gold. She wore a diadem of gold inset with rubies; about the neck and the hem of her gown showed a strip of ruddy fox fur. But her face was like the new moon, Volmar reflected, so thin, so clear, so bright, so unapproachable, was its loveliness.

  “It is true,” said Volmar, with a judicious hiccough, “that there is no person more beautiful than Sonia. Nor is there any princess more wise than is Sonia. She has, for a woman, really remarkable powers of penetration. She has perceived my merits, where even I did not perceive them. And in return for my merits, gentlemen, she has given me her fancy, and until life ends, she will be remembering me with love.”

  All they who heard him had heard, at first, in mere wonderment. That at a king’s banquet any male person should boast of his high and peculiar standing in a lady’s heart, appeared, to the chivalrous gentry of Osnia, a performance as incredible as that, in the same circumstances, any self-respecting gentleman would omit to lie about his high and peculiar standing in warfare. In brief, the rules of polite usage had been violated; insulted decency shrieked for vengeance; and every nobleman’s sword was now out.

  But the King stilled them. “With your swords, gentlemen,” said King Ludwig, very handsomely, “it is permitted you to kill yet other gentlemen. But not dogs.”

  Well, and at that, all the nobility of Osnia necessarily dropped their swords in order to applaud the antithesis.

  Then the King said, to Caspar, the captain of the royal guard:

  “Take away Volmar the dark wanderer to a dungeon. This day is sacred, inasmuch as it is my daughter’s birthday: no bloodshed must mar to-day. But at dawn tomorrow, when, this hulking beast is sober, and awake to his own infamy, do you cut off his head, and bring it up to me with my breakfast, so that I may be sure his poisoned tongue is silenced forever.”

  “My king and my father,” said Sonia, speaking angrily, in a young girl’s unthinking way, where the experienced, sage King had. spoken with deliberation, “it is not proper that you should let your great modesty check the keen judgment and the fine eloquence which the whole world admires!”

  “I have no doubt that you speak with entire justice, my daughter; but just what do you mean?”

  “I mean, sire, that we all know you are thinking, and are eager to be saying—in your own superb fashion, such as the rhetoric of no other king equals—that it is not right this braggart should meet death honorably under the clean axe-edge. It is not right that his lying tongue should be brought back into the palace it has defiled.”

  “Nevertheless—” said King Ludwig.

  “Oh, but I agree with you,” the Princess assured him. “I did not understand this matter until you expressed it thus nobly and forcibly.”

  “Yet—” said the King.

  “But you, sire, as you must permit me to tell you frankly, have compounded the fine honey of your eloquence with the firm hand
of your wisdom.”

  “Ah, but have I indeed, my daughter?”

  “Very certainly you did that, sire, when you declared this insane slanderer ought to be hanged, and then buried whole in our dung-heap, because it is only in a dung-heap that such filth belongs. And I quite agree with you.”

  “The wrong was yours, my dear daughter,” replied King Ludwig, indulgently: “and even though you have somewhat forestalled my remarks, apart from mixing your metaphors, it is proper that the punishment of your wrong should be whatsoever you desire. So you may do with him what you like.”

  “Do you mark that, Caspar,” said the Princess; and the gray captain answered:

  “I hear, Lady, and I obey the King’s saying. I shall do with this Volmar that which you order.”

  IX. DOOM OF A LIAR

  So was it that Volmar—whom the Master of Gods, then passing as an errant philosopher, had begotten upon Rani, the South Wind’s third daughter—spent this night in a deep dungeon, without any comforters except a pitcher of water and three rats. But at dawn, Caspar and five soldiers, each armed with a musket, bring Volmar into a field to the back of the palace, with a rope about his neck and with his hands bound behind him.

  Well, and that, he reflected, that was a most uncomfortable way in which to be walking, on this uneven meadow land, where the new grass showed sparsely. You stumbled perforce; you appeared undignified, not to say drunk; nor, when walking thus, could you keep your broad shoulders handsomely erect.

  It seemed silly to be annoying the last moments of a gentleman with these small inconveniences: but all professional soldiers were hidebound and unimaginative people who went always by routine, Volmar reflected gravely. Even his loved commander and lion-hearted friend, King Aluric of Atlantis, had at bottom possessed no real imagination, Volmar went on in profound meditation, as, for that matter, the dear fellow’s verses showed somewhat plainly, now that nobody was afraid of Aluric any longer, with blond blustering Aluric safely buried in the Place of the Sea God, as indeed were most of the persons whom you had known intimately, although no one of the others, of course, had a fine tomb in a heathen temple, but rather they were lodged helter-skelter in every quarter of earth, in all sorts of mortuary circumstances—even if no one of them lay snug under a dung-heap,—because both as a poet and as a soldier this Volmar had adventured so widely, and so noisily, and so enjoyably, that for it all to be ending within the next ten minutes, in the field just beyond that privet hedge upon which a bluebird perched, appeared simply silly.