The Nightmare Had Triplets

by Branch Cabell

  “Now you become commonplace, tall child of a dream, for I cannot guess how many thousands of persons have said to me that same thing.”

  “Nor am I the child of a dream,” Elair then stated, with a continued vast patience. “I am the unworthy son of that sublime Smirt who had such tremendous adventures in the old days; and who became a master of gods; and who rode away, in the company of a red-colored devil called Company, upon a flash of lightning; and who so met my dear mother, upon a glass mountain, in a planet which Smirt owned in fee simple.”

  It was a précis of Elair’s origin which Mr. Smith appeared to regard with urbane but frank scepticism. Mr. Smith coughed delicately, saying,—

  “Need I point out, Elair, to a person of your sound judgment, that, inasmuch as happenings of this exact nature do not happen except in dreams, it follows that you, Elair—who were the result of this not wholly conventional rendezvous—must necessarily have been a by-product of this same Smirt’s dreaming, and perhaps of his indigestion?”

  “Indeed, but you had far better not point out any such scandal as to my ancestry,” replied Elair, angrily.

  “So, then, you see for yourself,” said Mr. Smith, spreading out his very beautifully shaped white hands.

  By this deduction was Elair a bit puzzled. Still, he said, amicably enough:

  “Well, why, of course, Lord of the Forest, so long as you leave the entire matter to my judgment, there is no possible room for quarrel—And yet, after all, Lord of the Forest, just what do I see?”

  “Why, you see that you yourself do not dispute your origin, on account of your remarkable and your profound intelligence.”

  “Nevertheless, sir—”

  “—For you perceive that origin to be oneirodyniac.”

  “Oh, but do I indeed, Lord of the Forest?”

  “Yes, Elair, you perceive it to be virtually unequalled.”

  “Well, but—” said Elair.

  “And I, Elair, if you will permit me to say so, I rejoice to behold your sanity, your self-control, and your rare poise, after having been confronted by this discovery.”

  But all these compliments Elair waved aside with a huge hand; and he benignantly answered:

  “You are a little bit too flattering, Lord of the Forest. No, no: I would not say quite that.”

  “Yes, and your not saying it, Elair, is what I have somewhere heard described as the defect of your qualities. But I say it, Elair, because I can say without impropriety all that from saying which you are prevented by the well-known modesty you got from your father.”

  “Ah, ah! But, then, really, sir—” Elair remarked, from a point somewhere between pleasure and embarrassment, and a good way removed from any least comprehension as to what this demi-god might be talking about.

  “Now modesty, I repeat, is a fine virtue, Elair.”

  “Indeed, I have often heard of it, Lord of the Forest.”

  “It prevails especially among women, Elair, so the women all tell us.”

  “Nevertheless—” said Elair.

  “Why, but, upon my word, that is true,” replied Mr. Smith. “I am extremely glad, my dear fellow, you should have pointed that out. Yes, among women, modesty is very often a most puzzling and incalculable virtue, and a plain virtue of ritual. You are quite right, Elair; and I follow your argument with entire approval. As in Sumatra, for example, the knees, so in Persia the breasts, are the only parts of her body which a well-bred woman will not display freely to the public. In some sections of the United States, such as Georgia and Mississippi—and, I believe, also in certain portions of Vermont—it is considered immodest for a woman to exhibit her navel in mixed company. Yet their modesty incites Mohammedan women to go always with their faces veiled; whereas in China either to display or to mention her foot would disgrace for life any properly brought-up female.”

  “Still—” said Elair.

  “Yes,” Mr. Smith assented, “but that also is wholly true. Even where, as in most countries of Central Africa, a gentlewoman is accustomed to go stark naked, and thus exhibits her entire person, she yet manages to preserve a becoming modesty by having her body tattooed with attractive designs. Yes, I am glad that you should have brought up all these facts, Elair, because they are of considerable interest to a sound logician.”

  “It was merely that they occurred to me in passing, Lord of the Forest. Nevertheless, just what has all this modesty to do with your curious notion about my being the son of a dream?”

  “Ah, that concerns your own modesty, Elair. For I say, in all calmness, that most people would be confounded by any such discovery as you have just made, about this oneirodyniac problem. They would become indignant. They would argue. Whereas you, Elair, you confront the inevitable with a composure which I can but describe as marmoreal, and which I envy beyond any describing at all.”

  “Well, but in this world, sir,” replied a quite mollified and a gravely condescending Elair, “one does learn by-and-by to take problems as they come. Avoid haste, that is the main thing. Do not ever let them flurry you. Take them to bed with you, if you like. Remember always that there is no least need to make any fuss over them. Yes, sir, it really does pay, in the long run, not to make any fuss over them. Just turn them over quietly.”

  “I can but bow to your far wider experience, my dear boy,” replied Mr. Smith,—“without venturing to endorse all these sage axioms about women.”

  “So, do you think I am still talking about women?” Elair asked, a little uncertainly.

  “I apologize, Elair. I admit the adroit rebuke. You alluded to them, far more tactfully, just as ‘problems’. Yet you very well know how to dispose of them, under any and all descriptions, I can see; and so, one need not worry as to your future.”

  Thus speaking, Mr. Smith went away; and Elair slightly tilted his wreath of red rowan berries, in order to scratch pensively at Elair’s black head.

  “The poor lad,” said Mr. Smith, “has leaden wits and a heart of gold. Yes, Branlon and the unreasonable small magic of Branlon will hold him, even though it might perhaps be just as well to advise that little gray witch about his footsteps.”

  But Elair said: “This Lord of the Forest is a queer person. He is, perhaps, slightly insane. He, most certainly, is lewd-minded; and he is infected with much self-conceit. Yet he was not very far wrong when called them ‘problems.’”

  XXVI. THE WATER OF AIRDRA

  Elair brooded over his problem. The days passed. Then Elair sighed, and he told Oina that the one way out of their difficulty was for her to become his wife. “For I cannot desert you, child. And it is not right for us to be living together without being married.”

  “Your will is my will, Elair. But it is that Fergail woman whom you love.”

  “It is Fergail,” Elair corrected this inaccurate young person, “whom I worship. Still, I am fond of you. Your cooking pleases me. And I daresay we would get on together well enough. Besides that, I have but a little chance of winning Fergail, because I have not any notion where a person can find the Water of Airdra.”

  “Yet is Fergail the queen of this world’s women, as you have told me time and again, Elair, until I simply cannot stand it any longer, Elair.”

  “And why, Oina, should I not tell you that which is true? Yet it is equally true that Fergail must belong, not to me, but to that lucky champion who shall bring to her the Water of Airdra, or some other magical drink, by which her youth will be made steadfast.”

  “Indeed I remember very well,” Oina replied, smiling reflectively, as she went on with her sewing, upon a pair of plain gray serviceable hose for Elair the Song-Maker, “how my dear father laughed when he heard that news, asking me how I would fancy this fine queen for my stepmother.”

  “Ah, yes,” Elair assented; “so you lied to me in declaring that you had heard no talk of Queen Fergail!”

  For an instant she appeared startled, biting her lip. Then Oina very placidly went on with her sewing.

  “It was a matter,”
Oina declared, with an almost violent lack of interest, “which passed quite out of my mind. For what is this Fergail to me?”

  “And after all,” Elair said, complacently, “I was right when I thought Urc Tabaron would know this secret if any person knew it. In such deductions I am not often mistaken, because—like Mr. Smith—I appraise matters logically. Well, and do you know, Oina, logic now points out to me that if your father had ever laid his eyes on Queen Fergail, it is wholly certain he would have made her your stepmother, because there is no man so wise or so infirm but his heart becomes a bonfire at his first sight of Queen Fergail?”

  At that, Oina put by, neatly, upon her little table, the pair of plain gray serviceable hose. She arose. She looked up, for one heart-beat, at Elair the Song-Maker. She went quietly to a cupboard. She returned with a gold phial.

  “Here, wicked Elair, is the Water of Airdra. Urc Tabaron procured it long and very long ago, as a proof of his art’s perfection. But he was too wise to make any use of it, he said, after he had invoked three old wispy women, and had talked with them. ‘The Norns, howsoever frequent may be their blunders, deserve our respect.” he said, ‘because they control the fate of all men. I consent therefore to their unflattering opinion that this Fergail is better suited to be my granddaughter.”

  Then Oina gulped, saying: “I do not know what that meant. I know only that this bold-faced bad Fergail is yours for the asking.”

  After that, Oina wept quietly.

  Elair waited, clenching his hands. He thought about the sea-green color of Fergail’s eyes and about the red color in the curved lips of Fergail and about the black and yellow color of the flames which would burn Oina. He said then,—

  “I shall not ask.”

  “But why not, Elair?”

  “Because, Oina, in the first place, logic points out that I cannot settle any matter in which the Norns have a finger. In the second place”—his voice broke—“I cannot leave you, most dear and brave and most untruthful of children.”

  Thus speaking, he took Oina in his arms. When her lips were free, she declared gravely, “Your will is my will, Elair.”

  XXVII. A WIZARD’S ONE OVERSIGHT

  Well, and that night, while Elair slept, Oina arose from her bed. She took up Elair’s broad dagger, and she tiptoed out of the gray house to the clay pathway in front of the gray house. She cut from the pathway two of Elair’s footprints; she painted them with cinnabar, the color of her heart’s blood, speaking the Married Woman’s rune; and in the oven she placed these two footprints, saying:

  “Burn, O footsteps of Elair! Burn and bake firm, O footsteps of my beloved! Harden and Become fixed for all time! Let there be no varying henceforward in the footsteps of Elair! So may the footsteps of Elair not ever depart from the clay of this pathway. So shall his dear folly be forevermore the happiness of my heart, and all his needs, even until this tall man dies, shall be tended faithfully by my busy hands.”

  In this way did the weak conquer the strong; and so was Elair the Song-Maker led to abandon his wide adventurings and become a married man. In his heart was Fergail firmly enthroned, as the most beautiful and the wisest and the most worshipful of all women. And in his keeping stayed the gold phial with which his adored Fergail might be won at any moment, whensoever he chose to leave Oina.

  Well, and that, he reflected, that might come about, by-and-by; but at this special instant, with a baby on the way, and with the clearing which Elair was now extending northerly from the gray house only half done, that must wait. Then their son was born; and no mortal could have deserted Oina just now, in her proud happiness, Elair reflected, as he set about his spring plowing.

  For the champion whom kings had praised, and whom queens had not left unrewarded, had turned farmer now, since a man must needs fill in his time somehow in this ever-peaceful forest. His sword and his pistols and his suit of battle lay by unused; in his little home, in his tilled neat fields, and in his well-tended cattle, Elair’s interest became deeper and yet more deep. Just temporarily, he had put by his harp of maple-wood and its too loud music, as being impractical with a baby in the house; and later, after his son Conan was not any longer a baby, Elair did not return straightway to his song-making, what with one thing and another.

  For example, one of his first needs was to dispose of Urc Tabaron’s thaumaturgies. When Elair went into the untidy huge room in which the wizard had conducted his studies, then Elair stood confounded by the profusion of magic-working materials heaped up at every side pell-mell. His mother Airel of the Brown Hair had worked magic, it was true, in her own small way, so that in childhood Elair had picked up a fair smattering of the first principles of magic. But here were the materials amassed, during a century-long lifetime, by an untiring student and a supreme master of all abstruse arts; and Elair simply did not know what to do with such priceless and such highly dangerous implements.

  So he experimented most warily; and although he made some disastrous mistakes, yet he got many pleased hours of diversion from the garnered wisdom of his father-in-law.

  Now Elair conjured up, at one time or another, hundreds of white or black or gray spirits, with the various formulae which he found recorded in Urc Tabaron’s neat tremulous handwriting; and all these immortals came promptly to serve the desires of Elair. Even the supreme genii of the Sixth Hour obeyed the magic of Urc Tabaron.

  These genii were eager to make Elair the ruler of all this world (just as Elair’s sublime father had once been, Elair reflected), and to reveal to Elair the occult virtues of plants and of precious stones, of fire and air and earth and water, of milk and salt. Nay, they proffered yet more: for Tabris, the leader of these genii, said that all created nature would henceforward keep no secrets from Elair. The mysteries of form would be penetrated by him, and the illusive vestures of time and of space would be laid aside for his benefit, declared Haatan, the Lord of Concealed Treasures: and while Elair did not grasp precisely what Haatan might mean, the proposal sounded fair enough, and even generous.

  In brief, these seven celestial spirits offered him omniscience, and omnipotence also, in regard to all earthly affairs, with a composure which Elair at first regarded as a thought strange, until he had recollected that to these great genii a planet must seem very little, if at all, more valuable than a pebble. In their keeping were many thousands and, it might be, millions of planets.

  And in any case, Elair had no special need of a planet. He wanted Fergail. He explained therefore his more modest requirements, asking of the genii simply a plan by which he and his wife Oina and his love Fergail might all live together happily.

  —Whereafter the seven genii replied, in abashment, that the mathematics of heaven had not ever mastered the problem of dividing one man between two women without an untidy and huge remainder of discord.

  They vanished then, so that no trace remained of Susabo, the Lord of Voyages, or of Nitika, the Lord of Gems, or of Zaran, the Lord of Vengeance, or of any one of these seven supreme genii. And Elair, after shaking gravely his rowan-crowned head, set about charms of a more diabolical nature.

  So was hell emptied of the seven spirits who had served Urc Tabaron in the lower branches of his art. So to Elair came Barbatos (that same fallen angel whose tongue was cut out by Michael) riding in a fiery chariot and carrying in his left hand a viper; Agares, Duke of the East, as yet defiantly bearing the forfeited sword of an archangel; Phobetor, in the shape of a dusky green cloud; Beleth, mounted on a pale horse, sounding harshly an iron trumpet; Focalor, who had three heads, like the head of a cat, of a Knight Templar, and of a peacock; Haop, who in most respects resembled a four-footed raven, except that he had also the tusks of a boar; and Gurson, who appeared to-day in the form of a pallidly beautiful boy, with scaly black wings, riding on the back of a camel.

  “And what would you be doing here, gentlemen?” Elair demanded, with a vast politeness, of this most horrible assemblage.

  They replied to him reverently; but not wholly in words....
No; for beyond their speaking was a not quite heard music, Elair reflected. He seemed aware of a great sea of malevolent, and fierce, and lascivious music, like a sea that followed with high-hearted lustiness after a leprous moon and all the dear poisons of the moon’s cold corruption, a sea which agonized under perverse tides of moon-maddened ecstasies,—raising everywhere, beneath winds that had come out of worlds less innocent than ours, their proud waves of flashing and bitter and evil beauty. Through that frantic sea of music, hell spoke; hell called to Elair, rejoicingly and half wooingly; and the foul greatness of hell delighted him, even in the teeth of his sedate better judgment, by its horrifying magnificence... Well, and now it was as though across this immense insane sea of infernal music—as sprucely as trim little paper boats, Elair reflected—that the brisk answers of Elair’s servants came to him.

  “We desire, sir,” said Beleth, “to instruct you in the languages of all mankind and of the even lower animals.”

  “Likewise,” declared the three heads of Focalor, “in all abstract sciences; in moral philosophy; in sooth-saying with judicious reservations; in every practical use of theology; and in the wax modeling of your adversaries so that, as the wax melts, they also will waste away with disease.”

  “We will show you,” Haop croaked, genially, “how to control pestilences most fatally; and how to employ bankers and libels and stars of the fourth magnitude with equal destructiveness.”

  Phobetor said, “We will teach you the most generally popular methods of secret murder and of blighting crops and of souring the milk of a cow and of provoking small earthquakes.”

  “You may learn from us,” put in Agares, brandishing terribly his huge sword, “how to release tempests from blue skies and any moderately sinful person from purgatory; and to induce among your unfriends boils or insanity or rheumatism, whichever you may elect.”