The Nightmare Had Triplets

by Branch Cabell

  “Hail, Volmar! for after all, blood is thicker than water.”

  “Well, sir,” replied Volmar, “inasmuch as you know me far better than I know you, I dare not dispute your striking and profound observation. Moreover, you appear to be a divine personage.”

  “And why should I not be a divine personage, Volmar, inasmuch as I am your own dear Grandfather, the South Wind, come to arrange about your marriage?”

  “Hah,” said Volmar, “but it is to the marriage of somebody else that a sworn oath commits me.”

  Nevertheless, they embraced. And what happened after that has not ever been recorded with any real clearness, because Volmar was forthwith carried up, they say, into an inconceivably high place, to speak about which the powers of men’s language have never been adequate.

  It was a fertile level land, rich in broad meadows green as an emerald stone, with many blossoms falling upon the sweet-smelling orchards, where larks poured out their song tirelessly, and glad blackbirds were singing and always singing, and bees went about their little labors without ever ceasing. In the pastures of this land grazed golden horses and crimson horses and horses that were colored like the blue sky. The people of this land were a gentle and light-hearted people. There was no land more fair or more peaceful than Auster. And over Auster ruled the South Wind, living tranquilly in a large wonderful house, builded out of shining bronze, which stood among apple-trees that flowered perpetually with white and with faintly pink blossoms, and among pallid, darkly-speckled sycamore-trees that wore forever in Auster their first sparse leaves, which during the spring-time are gray rather than green.

  Well, and all the inhabitants of this high and lovely place were friendly to Volmar, their near kinsman, inasmuch as they too were akin to the South Wind.

  And the South Wind required it of him that Volmar should marry one or another of the women of Auster, so that the family of the South Wind might be continued respectably by his grandson, in this inconceivably high level land where the beauty of spring-time lasted forever.

  “But my prayer-book teaches me, sir,” replied Volmar, “that baptism precedes matrimony. And of these ladies whom you desire me to marry the like has not yet been born, much less christened.”

  For he beheld now to every side of him those women whom poets alone have beheld—howsoever briefly, and in a spring-time which did not last forever,—and by whose wonderfulness the life of their beholder has thereafter been robbed of every sharp savor. All poets have glimpsed the women of Auster; and a very few poets have contrived to ensnare in words a frail shadow of these women’s loveliness; but the life of each ageing poet has been haunted, and in some sort it has been laid waste, by his memories of that glimpse which made his lost youth miraculous now and then; and which gave to his name immortality, it might be; but which forever afterward delivered over his heart to a long loneliness, by causing all flesh-and-blood women, either as his wife or his mistress, to appear unsatisfying.

  Well, and to dark Volmar’s finding, very beautiful were the women of Auster, and very wise, and very tender, and pleasingly mirthful. There was no fault in them. And yet was theirs not a cold perfection, but a variable and a many-faceted excellence in all graces, so that each one of these women was, in herself, a host of exceedingly dear women, who stayed adorable at every instant, but not always for the same qualities. In brief, the women of Auster were as variable as the air of which they were born. But they varied never in being more fine and more noble in their form and their coloring, in their wit and their graciousness, than were the women whom human flesh clothed and restrained from perfection.

  Now these ladies regarded their dark earth-born cousin with kindness; and the South Wind was bent upon Volmar’s marrying whichsoever one of them Volmar might prefer.

  But Volmar said: “No. With no one of these fine sylphs do I either desire or intend to cohabit.”

  “Pish!” said the South Wind, “and likewise Tush! and moreover, Why not?”

  “Because,” replied Volmar, “I find their perfections uncongenial.”

  “Bah!” said the South Wind, “but your reason is not reasonable.”

  “Yet, Grandfather, I do not aspire toward ladies that are more lovely than are any ladies that ever wore warm flesh.”

  —To which the South Wind returned, “Fiddle-dedee!”

  “I dislike these sylphs, for example, because they live untroubled with pimples, or even with enough biliousness to result in a sour breath; and are not ever subject to belching.”

  “You become coarse, my grandson. We of Auster prefer sentiments which are properly elevated.”

  Then Volmar said: “Yet these women lack blemishes, Grandfather, to an extent which I find fatal to deep affection. They are flawless. No moles and no blackheads, and not even any broken blotched veins, disfigure their bodies, so far as I have yet investigated their bodies.”

  The South Wind coughed disapprovingly. He—as a gentleman of the old school—after his well-earned repose upon nine thousand and twenty-eight bosoms, considered these investigations to be a matter of course, but not a matter of conversation.

  And Volmar paused before that admonitory cough. He grinned somewhat, in the same moment that he continued to regard this fine-looking, divine, grave, stupid, and very dear old gentleman with sincere fondness.

  “Yes, and indeed, Grandfather, I could name a great many other feminine frailties to which the women of Auster are not subject; but it would be more kindly of me to spare your old-fashioned and superb romanticism. We will let it suffice that I have not anything in common with these fair paragons. Such are the women about whom young poets dream, and to whom they address rhapsodies: but at my age one is no longer a young poet; at my age one prefers a few imperfections, as being far more companionable to live with. So I cry a fig for the women of Auster, because such lovely and all-admirable beings are not the desire of my heart.”

  “You annoy me, Volmar,” replied his perplexed grandfather, “by this morbid dwelling on the distasteful. You repel me by preferring the second rate to the best.”

  Thus speaking, the old gentleman refreshed himself liberally, with bubbling bright green wine, which he drank from out of a great crystal goblet rimmed with a broad band of gold. He asked, in divine scorn,—

  “What is it, then, that your so famous heart does desire?”

  “Under the correction of experience, sir, I imagine that I desire—I mean, of course, in due season, because there is no real hurry about it—a true mate, both in my frailties and, if the need rise, in my appetites as an animal. For I, Grandfather, I am weak, I am foul, it may be. At any rate, I am not perfect, no matter what you might think, sir, on account of your natural partiality for me.”

  “Hoh!” said the South Wind.

  Then Volmar said, “So I prefer a true mate, of a reasonably inferior nature, to whom neither my modest best nor my somewhat immodest worst will appear contemptible.”

  “You disgust me, Volmar,” declared the grieved South Wind: “and yet truly you cannot help being the son of a great but gross-minded god”—here he bowed reverently—“the sublime Smirt. Ah, but it was a luckless hour for everybody concerned in which that omnipotent person took an advantage of my dear daughter’s innocence and of the hospitality which she gave without any stint to every sort of philosopher in her own bed!”

  Thereafter the South Wind sighed. He looked rather despondently at this shock-headed grandson for whom he had planned a divine future thus fruitlessly: but there was no understanding this younger generation, he reflected; and they must go their own way, unaided by their elders’ wisdom, to destruction.

  Yet the old gentleman continued, affectionately enough:

  “No, my poor Volmar, you are not suited to dwell in, far less to rule over, the kingdom of Auster. And so, be off with you. Avaunt! Scat!”

  “Very willingly will I avaunt and scat also,” replied Volmar. “For these sylphs are well enough; yet I do not desire them, any more than I desire the dead Witc
h of Endor, or the three Furies, or that hateful Sonia, who is the most detestable of earth’s women. How then can even a drunken liar pretend to care about the women of Auster one way or the other? And besides, it is quite time that I picked out for the abominable, smug, bad-tempered creature her unfortunate husband.”

  Thus did it come about that no magic of the upper world was able to hold Volmar. Instead, just as he had evaded, in the home of Belial, the dictates of religion and honor, so now he derided the proud service of beauty and of perfection, holding high his wild dark head; and he returned to the middle earth which had borne and nurtured, among its other fauna, that errant philosopher who begot Volmar.

  XII. MR. SMITH AS TO KEYS

  They relate next how Volmar met with a pedlar, a majestic but affable person, having incredibly steadfast eyes. This pedlar sat on a mile-stone (which was inscribed “4 Ms. to Garian”), upon the southern outskirts of the forest of Branlon, smoking a cigarette; and he was peddling small magics.

  “Of what nature are these magics,” asked Volmar, “which you peddle in the lands beyond common-sense, wherein all magics are more common than huckleberries or than handsaws or than hard-headed women?”

  “Why, at this season, sir, as it happens, I am marketing the products of a very special magic. These little leaden keys”—explained the pedlar, spreading open his pack—“when they are used idiotically, enable people to escape from the color and beauty, the noble language and the quaintness and the affluence and the contentment, of their lives here, and to enter into quite other lives which are uniformly unpleasant, and which customarily are degraded in their pursuits.”

  “But to seek out any such ignoble existence is, quite certainly, idiotic,” Volmar agreed.

  “My customers, sir, are human. It comes to pretty much the same thing. So these knicknacks remain exceedingly popular everywhere, among the nobility and gentry, to whom the wit and fancy and wide erudition of their creator have denied sordidness and all serious calamities. For these dull-colored keys are strong amulets, I must tell you, which enable the light-hearted and quaint and the so nicely dressed nobility of these parts to lead, if but for an hour or two, the lives of yokels or of convicts or of bankrupts or of diseased pimps or of broken-down harlots; and they one and all come back from these little outings into stupidity and squalor very much refreshed.”

  “But do the people of Rorn, and of Ecben over yonder, love ugliness? and cherish discomfort? and desire infamy?” asked Volmar.

  Well, and he got his answer first in the form of a smoke puff and then in the words of a similar philosophy.

  “The nobility and gentry of the lands beyond common-sense,” replied the pedlar, “are necessarily all poets at heart, if not in rhythmic performance. For this reason they must necessarily desire that which they lack and contemn that which they possess. Such is the foible of all poets; and since time began, nobody, in so far as I know, has ever found any real cure for this foible.”

  “I believe that is so,” said Volmar, humanly deducing the universal from his own special case.

  “My dear sir, but beyond any doubt it is a fact; and all facts are of considerable interest to a sound logician.”

  “Possibly,” said Volmar.

  “When I say ‘considerable’,” the pedlar explained, “I mean worthy of being considered.”

  “I can grant you that,” Volmar said generously.

  “Yes, but,” asked the pedlar, “but how many people ever do consider anything or anybody thoroughly, and quietly, and sub rosa, and in particular, sub—as I have heard learned persons describe this special angle of vision—specie aeternitatis.”

  “Indeed, I know as little about that matter as I care,” replied Volmar; and he asked afterward,—

  “What is your name, O most talkative pedlar?”

  “I am called nowadays Mr. Smith.”

  “Well, Mr. Smith, I desire none of your abominable leaden keys, nor do I insist upon any more of your endless talking. Instead, I go seeking the near road to some noble adventure.”

  “Ah, but, sir,” this Mr. Smith told him, “our gentry have put by all other adventures in order to look for the most excellent princess in the lands beyond common-sense, now that our young King Feodor of Rorn declares he will marry no other person.”

  “Hah, Splendor of God!” cried Volmar.

  “That is an exceedingly handsome oath, dark sir, to which, as I now recall, William the Conqueror was very much addicted. Yet an equally great monarch, King Louis the Eleventh of France, used to swear ‘by God’s Easter!’ Certainly, this King Louis was a wise man; but he was no wiser than Socrates, who customarily swore ‘by the Bitch!’ And Zeno, another notably wise person, who founded the sect of the Stoics, chose to swear ‘by the Caper-tree!’ Tastes differ, you perceive, even in profanities, among the very best people. So, what, after all, my dear young sir, just what does your exceedingly handsome oath signify?”

  “It signifies that I know this princess,” replied Volmar; “and that I find her the most detestable of women; and that your unfortunate King shall marry her if, after I have once seen the man, I think this impudent, wife-seeking, crowned, very wealthy Feodor deserves any fate so dreadful.”

  “‘He shall marry her,’ you remarked,” said the pedlar; “and that likewise sounded most splendidly. Yet who are you, my young Hector, to compel a king?”

  “I am Volmar, the son of Smirt, a most famous philosopher, who was worth ten of your Zenos and your Socrateses.”

  “So, so!” said Mr. Smith, in urbane surprise; and for some while he looked at Volmar pensively. Then the pedlar smiled, saying:

  “The arts of Urc Tabaron are dependable. And since you term Smirt a philosopher, I infer that your mother must have been Rani, the South Wind’s third daughter.”

  “That is true, Mr. Smith, although I do not in the least follow your logic.”

  “Ah, but I follow you, big, blustering, shock-headed son of Smirt, now that you go single-handed to impose your will on a king,” replied Mr. Smith, admiringly.

  “Very well,” said Volmar. “Do you come with me, and I will show you just how to do that.”

  XIII. THE KING WITHOUT STAIN

  So then, as young King Feodor sat with his counsellors in his palace of white stone in the fair city of Garian, the porter came to ask audience for a pedlar and a drunken liar in regard to the King’s marriage.

  “With what mummery,” said the King, “are we interrupted in our talk of this marriage? Admit them.”

  This was done. Volmar bowed civilly enough—for Volmar—toward North, South, East and West, and after that he bowed to the King.

  Then he looked very hard, across the broad table of fair white oak, at King Feodor. Volmar thought, first of all, with a poet’s irrelevance,—

  “Life is going to bruise and to hurt and to damage this fine boy most damnably.”

  His second thought was: “I have found my man. Here is a king without stain. I love, I hate, I revere, I pity, and I can just manage to sneer at, the manifest virtues of this superb crowned youngster in his ermine and his purples of two shades. Yes, here, beyond doubt, is that damnable Sonia’s fit mate.”

  Aloud, he said, jeeringly: “Hail, sire! And do you contrive a royal reward for Volmar the Drunken Liar, now that he brings you fair tidings as to the most excellent princess in the lands beyond common-sense.”

  The King replied: “Ho, drunken liar, but that all-perfect lady appears to be perplexingly plentiful. Here, upon this sheet of parchment are listed, in letters of gold, ten royal spinsters and two widows, each one of whom, this or the other of my twelve counsellors assures me, is the most excellent princess in the lands beyond common-sense.”

  Volmar said: “I do not know whether your counsellors are bribed men or self-seeking men or mere idiots; but I do know that in no king’s palace may that woman be found who is fit to live as a chambermaid to Sonia, the daughter of King Ludwig of Osnia.”

  “Her name is not here, Volmar th
e Drunken Liar, among those twelve women whom my counsellors declare to be the most excellent princesses in the lands beyond common-sense.”

  “Then, King, you are counselled by such persons as outrival Volmar in their untruths and their shamelessness.”

  Thus speaking, Volmar turned to observe the King’s counsellors; and he found them a noble company. Four of these learned men wore scarlet robes adorned with peacock feathers and with the heads and breasts of gaily colored birds imported from Persia. Another four went in robes of Tyrian yellow bordered with a fringe of cedar bark. And the other four had sea-green robes, heavily quilted, which were trimmed with the fur of the dormouse and of the marten.

  Volmar scowled at the entire dozen impartially. From his left hand he removed his glove, and he flung it down before these gentlemen, saying:

  “I, Volmar the Drunken Liar, demand the Judgment of God. Let him among you fine counsellors who declares that Sonia is not both the most excellent and the most hateful princess in the lands beyond common-sense now lift my glove. After that, we will fight, either with swords or with pistols or with battering-rams—or, if my opponent so prefers it, with sharp knitting needles—until the one or the other of us is dead.”

  “God being that which the wisdom of all better-thought-of people assures us He is,” the King answered, “your offer appears reasonable; your choice of weapons bespeaks your broad-mindedness: and a Christian monarch must admit the Judgment of God.”

  Then his counsellors said: “Nay, sire, for high Heaven’s sake, let us not be dragging Heaven impiously into any question of the realm’s public welfare. It is expedient, for this reason or the other reason, that some one of these dozen princesses be declared the most excellent princess in the lands beyond common-sense, and that you should marry her on account of her super-eminence, whether she has it or not.”