The Nightmare Had Triplets

by Branch Cabell

  “You speak sagely, madame,” said Clitandre; “so now do you scream with equal wisdom. In this way will the affair be settled to everyone’s satisfaction.”

  Angelique opened her mouth experimentally; and then this brown-haired, stoutish, kind-hearted young woman shrugged in despair.

  “I cannot do it,” she confessed, with a half-sob. “Logic prompts me to such a shriek as was never heard in any one of the dear Queen’s torture chambers. And yet, the nobility of your devotion, my fine young man, to my darling here—well, it chokes me, because I too adore Marianne. No: I simply cannot bring myself to be the cause of your destruction. Instead, I shall go back to my own rooms. And then only Marianne will be compromised and turkey-gobbled at.”

  “I am foiled,” declared Clitandre, “by that mania for self-sacrifice which is habitual to all good women. The guardsmen at this instant are searching for me. At any moment they may forcibly enter this room. My detection is inevitable. And both of you elect to risk eternal dishonor by tacitly emulating clams. It is compassionate, it is seraphic, it is heroic; but it is likewise injudicious.”

  In his desperation, the young poet knelt humbly at the feet of Marianne. “For an entire year, lacking but the month of May, during which I stole boys for the King of Tarob, I have adored you. Reward my devotion, beloved, with one single yell which will save your honor.”

  “Clitandre,” she answered, “I cannot yell. It would not be dignified.”

  “Oh, and at such an instant, my heart’s dearest, do you intend to stand upon dignity!”

  “To the contrary,” she replied, sombrely, “I intend now to reward your devotion at some risk of killing it.”

  “You speak of impossibilities,” Clitandre said, with a fond smile, “because so long as life lasts, I shall love the most pure and fair and noble lady whom I have known.”

  “We must see to it, then, Clitandre, that your life is preserved at least long enough”—the girl returned, touching half maternally his dark hair as he yet knelt before her—“for you, O my dear, foolish, very handsome poet, to finish your great poem.”

  Marianne went to the window opening upon the public park; and, stooping, she unclosed the compartment beneath this window. She drew forth from the compartment a stoutly made rope-ladder, well-weighted, and she lowered this over the window-sill. The upper end of this ladder, you now saw, was permanently fastened beneath the window-sill.

  “In fact,” thought Angelique, admiringly, “it is a splendid, an always handy, and a stable contrivance, such as not even the fat Bishop of Arleoth would hesitate to climb up and down, with his pearl earrings. Nor, I infer, did he. Oh, but yes, one can now well understand how, even in this well-guarded third-story apartment, my sweet Marianne’s friends have managed to cultivate her friendship, the minx!”

  “You perceive, Master Clitandre,” said Marianne, in her sweet, always gentle voice, “that it is simple enough to descend from this room into the park of Miradol.”

  He had risen. He now lifted a haggard gaze from this permanently installed rope-ladder which, in the same instant, had established the continuance of his safety and the unworthiness of his love. For there was really, he reflected, not any mistaking the implications of a ladder which connected his Marianne’s apartments with a public park.

  No; the moral standards of court life were not the moral standards which he had learned to revere at his mother’s knee when, at all available moments between the indigestion of her last widowhood and the fever of her next marriage, she had lovingly taught him how to distinguish between evil and good. This most beautiful, blonde and saintlike maid of honor was, from an ethical standpoint, no better than the plump, charming bourgeoise Nicole. In the same evening poor Clitandre had thus found himself to be betrayed by the only women to whom, within the last month, he had sworn undying affection: and he began to doubt if true constancy could be a virtue at all known to any female person.

  “I perceive, indeed,” Clitandre remarked, with his voice breaking, “that to enter and to leave this bedchamber is a simple matter. I perceive the real nature of you fine court ladies. I perceive the great depths of my folly; and fiends grin there.”

  Marianne returned, with sincere compassion: “My adored child, I did not seek your somewhat exigent love. I did not merit it, either, perhaps. But I prized it. And I had only my choice between the risk of killing your love and the certainty of killing you, Clitandre. And I really do think you are being rather ungrateful, to resent not being hanged.”

  He answered, “It would have been more kindly, madame, to let me die in my ignorance; for I must die now, when my time comes, without faith in anything in this world.”

  He turned then to the jewel-littered dressing-table, pointing toward its heaped brilliancies. He spoke sharply.

  “And are these also paste, madame, like your beauty and your purring innocence, your modesty and your coy virtues?”

  She replied frankly, moved to an unaccustomed humility by the young highwayman’s grief. “They are the gifts, Clitandre, of those yet other men who have descended this ladder.”

  Ceremoniously the proud freebooter took from his finger a sapphire ring; and he dropped it among the many-colored gems, saying:

  “I must pay my toll, then with the sole trinket I have about me. I leave also yet other gifts. For I leave, in this dreadful, gilded and brightly cushioned and sweet-smelling room, my youth and a poem not ever finished. Oh, but I know very well that with the aid of time I shall forget you and the dear anguishes of my boyhood likewise. But I shall not ever forget that poem which, had you been worthier—or if you had but shown the grace to continue deluding me—would have become one of the world’s most great and ever-living love songs.”

  For an instant Clitandre was silent. He spoke by-and-by, with restrained grief, saying:

  “You and I must quite perish now, Marianne. Yet it might well have been that my adoration and your bright cheating loveliness would have survived us for a brave long while, could I but have retained my ignorance for a month more, or even for a week or two. We would have lived on forever—with Launcelot and Queen Guenevere, with Romeo and his Juliet, with King Solomon and his Shulamite (whose deservedly famous name, I believe, no Biblical commentator has as yet unearthed), and with yet other of the standard major saints in Love’s calendar. In far-off centuries, in unimaginable cities as yet unbuilded, and in undreamed-of remote lands which at this present speaking have not fallen under the spell of polite letters, young hearts would have thrilled with my passion, and young eyes would have turned you-ward enkindled with a poet’s ecstasy, forever and forever, my sweet, if only I could have remained a blind owl, a dolt, an enamored loud-braying jackass, long enough to complete ‘A Garland for Marianne.’ Indeed, I have no real doubt that in due season—and with, perhaps, some of the more lively passages omitted—my poem would have been adorned with editorial notes and used as a textbook in many colleges.”

  Clitandre spread outward both hands in despair. He said, drearily:

  “Yes, we have lost our immortality by, at utmost, a fortnight. The reflection is bitter. I could have finished my masterwork quite cosily in the city jail while I was waiting to be hanged. But alas! your misguided kindness, Madame Marianne, has brought into my life an element of sophistication; you have contaminated my mind with cynicism; and no great poem was ever completed except from vast stores of naïveté’. So I shall not be a supreme poet now. I shall sink back into the drab, jogtrot, humdrum life of a general practitioner of larceny, until my time comes to be turned off, on some prosaic scaffold or another. Many ages yet unborn will not honor the centenary of my birth.”

  Marianne, standing beside the dressing-table, replied only:

  “You will forget me. Yes, only this very moment, Clitandre, you said you would forget me. But, then, it is not as if you men, yes, every one of you, were not exactly alike. You have not the constancy and the more tactful reticence of women.”

  Clitandre regarded her piteously for
an instant. He sighed: and he inclined his head in forlorn assent. Afterward he moved sadly toward the rope-ladder, when Angelique caught at his arm.

  “My infants,” said plump, practical-minded Angelique, “even in the presence of a great tragedy, it is needful to keep one’s head.”

  Thus speaking, she turned out the three lamps. “So now, now at least, my dear lad, the public at large will not see you climbing out from a brilliantly illuminated window. For the rest, a thing done has an end. It is quite understood that literature is impoverished; that your vocabulary is unequal to the occasion; and that your heart is broken. Yet for the sake of your neck’s integrity, Master Clitandre, do you now get out of this window quietly, without any more rhetoric.”

  Instead, the infatuated young man had stepped toward Marianne. His arms clasped her, and his lips met her lips, in the darkness.

  “You have slain a great poet, my sweet,” said Clitandre, “not knowing that which you did. None the less do I beseech of posterity that mankind may forgive you as utterly as I now forgive.”

  Then he left the two maids of honor, by way of the same ladder which had helped, with polite discretion, so many other fine gentlemen to effect their departure from happiness.

  XXXVII. THE COMPASSION OF WOMEN

  At the window the two girls watched the young poet’s descent; they half saw, in the starlight, his politely raised hat after he had reached earth; and they divined too his prompt disappearance into a grove of laurel-trees. They breathed the sweet scents of the spring night, as the good odors of growing plants arose from the park of Miradol. With extreme caution they drew up the rope-ladder; and they put it back into its hiding place.

  Kissing each other happily, they then cried out, the one to the other:

  “My pet, our reputations are saved!”

  “My darling, our good names remain spotless!”

  After that, Angelique rekindled the three lamps, heaving a vast sigh of relief.

  “And so,” replied Marianne, with a more gentle sigh of true sorrow, “so ends my too brief romance. I really do believe in prudence, and in circumspection, and in appearances, and in all maidenly virtues, Angelique, as heartily as does anybody; and yet, somehow, it is sad to reflect that a poet has died in this room to-night, killed by these virtues.”

  But Angelique was now looking at the dressing-table, with well-widened brown eyes.

  “It would seem undeniable,” she replied, “that your fine-talking young thief did not depart altogether in the unpractical role of a poet. Here is his twopenny ring, for you to remember him by. But your dear, beautiful diamond necklace, I perceive, is not here. You will be put to the pleasure of replacing it.”

  “Come now,” said Marianne, in warm admiration, “but that was a superb gesture; and at last Clitandre has done something except talk! In the same instant that he embraced me here in the dark, Clitandre was acquiring with his left hand my best piece of jewelry. For I, Angelique, I am now no more to him than is any other woman. He has expressed the fact, with a fine sense of symbolism, to an accompaniment of brisk action. Yes, I admire Clitandre. I begin to think that, after all, he will get on in this world.”

  And yet, after Angelique had left her for the night, Marianne fell to thinking somewhat wistfully about her lost poet lover. She had shaken, if she had not wholly wrecked, his faith in womankind; and that of course would be to him a great aid in his career. Well, and she hoped that professionally Clitandre would prosper. None the less, there were so very many competent men of business, and so few fine poets, the girl reflected forlornly.

  Heigho, but upon this night she had killed a poet in order to confirm a beginning thief in the pursuit of his rather sordid, commonplace vocation! And that Clitandre, the poor, young, ruined, very dear romantic, did not mean ever to pardon this poet’s murder, was well shown by the ruthlessness with which he had adopted toward his repudiated love an attitude coldly professional. In thus ending all possible private relations between Marianne and himself, he had behaved sensibly, and with a plain monetary profit: yet for a young poet to behave sensibly in his love-affairs entails always an anguish, and in fact a sort of temporary felo-de-se, such as Marianne could not but pity from her heart’s bottom.

  Fond and ever-tender is the sympathy of a well-reared young woman; though it be extended to all living beings, and even to the most liberal-handed of her decrepit lovers, yet toward a good-looking young man it fares gladliest: and for that reason, at this same instant, Angelique also, in her own rooms, was thinking, with a lively compassion, about Clitandre. He had lost Marianne forever; and that was a great pity, men being what they were in their silly notions about pink-mouthed blondes. Still, the necklace was of a tidy value, apart from the fact that it could so easily be broken up and then reset unrecognizably. It would make, for example, a pair of magnificent bracelets.

  Yes, beyond doubt, Angelique reflected broad-mindedly, the chance to acquire in the darkness all those beautiful diamonds, with complete safety, had been too tempting for flesh and blood to resist. She did not really blame Clitandre. Instead, Angelique took out the necklace, from the pocket of her pink dressing-gown, and she put it in her jewel-case, with a charitably condoning smile.

  PART FIVE. THE BOOK OF LITTLE SMIRT

  “In Chang-Chu … in 1933–34 there were 25,606 elementary schools, with 9,680,734 pupils, and 1,292 kindergartens, with 107,236 pupils. There were also 546 secondary schools for boys, 733 girls’ high schools, 104 normal schools of wizardry, 31 other high schools, 911 technical schools, and 50 special technical schools for the higher branches of magic. Through the influence of American customs, English, as the language of commerce, has become a required study in the elementary schools, but not in print!’

  XXXVIII. MARRIAGE OF BEL-IMPERIA

  Now the tale speaks of the fourth magic of Urc Tabaron, telling how it upset the economy of Madam Tana’s household in far-away Chang-Chu. Madam Tana was a wise-woman with a tidy practice in abstruse arts. She lived in retirement, seeing few persons except her clients; her one servant, Klinck, who was supposed to be a familiar spirit; and her son, Little Smirt,—as she had named the boy in honor of his father, that sublime Master of the Gods, whom Madam Tana had met in a cave during the days of her now remote youthfulness.

  This Little Smirt was a well-thought-of young scholar, whom his mother’s watchfulness had made remarkable throughout all Chang-Chu for the sobriety of his conduct. In the dissipations common to young men he took no part: he remained chaste and pious. His elders with one voice applauded Little Smirt; and they cited him to their own sons as a fine example of what these sons ought to be, and, most regrettably, were not.

  Well, and one day, when Madam Tana was abroad in the discharge of her profession, great was Little Smirt’s surprise to find himself visited by Bel-Imperia, the famous singing-girl, with whom Little Smirt had before to-day exchanged a few repartees but no familiarity.

  Madam Tana’s misshapen and remarkably tinted servant brought to them a tray containing wine and bread and cakes and apples. Then Little Smirt entreated Bel-Imperia to favor him with a song.

  —Whereupon the young lady began a funeral dirge; and Little Smirt pulled an uncommonly long face.

  “These mortuary sentiments,” he remarked, “while judicious and improving to the mind, and for all that they are expressed with a suitable amount of gloom, cannot reasonably accord with the quite other sentiments of any fortunate male person to whom it has been granted to gaze upon the unparalleled charms Bel-Imperia.”

  She replied, modestly, “The elephant of your approval, Little Smirt, has seated itself, with misguided condescension, upon the tadpole of my merit.”

  “I would not deny,” Little Smirt continued, “that from virtually prehistoric times the elegy has been familiar and generally popular form of art. Indeed two very fine examples of the elegy may be encountered as early as in the nineteenth and the twenty-four books of the Iliad. I allude, of course, to the lament of Briseis for Patroclus
and of Andromache for Hector. But evening draws on, with Mama apt to return at any moment; and so, without going into the possibly non-Homeric origin of this poem, I remark merely that an elegy is not exhilarating.”

  Bel-Imperia smiled sadly; and she began a love song. Little Smirt applauded that liberally.

  “For it is thus that I love you, Bel-Imperia,” said Little Smirt, “with the large difference that your song does not express one tenth—or, indeed, any fraction, or jot, or gleam, or even a light shadow—of my unrestrained adoration, which will outlive all time.”

  “Time passes at a variety of paces; but always he approaches a grave-yard,” declared the singing-girl. “On this day, which is set for my funeral, it appears unbecoming for the inconsiderable brain of Bel-Imperia to extend any hospitality to thoughts of love.”

  “Bluntness,” replied Little Smirt, “was ever the herald of sincere passion. You speak nonsense, Bel-Imperia. This is not the day of your funeral but of your wedding: for here at hand are all matters demanded by the local custom of Chang-Chu for our immediate marriage.”

  “Well,” said the singing-girl, “but an accomplished tall scholar like you, Little Smirt, must go his own willful way though the dead bar it.”

  Thereafter they exchanged the two apples of peace, they tasted the sons-and-grandsons cakes, they shared the nuptial cup of rice wine, they ate together the bread of long life: and Little Smirt (who had inherited from his divine father a fine talent for instructing his hearers) spoke captivatingly, for about five minutes, as to the wedding customs of various lands. When these ceremonies had been performed, Bel-Imperia arose; and she began to sing a tender and gracious melody, which was called, so the girl said, “The Dark Road to Branlon.”

  “My wife,” said Little Smirt, “that is a strange sweet song, and a new song, too, I am thinking, for the words of it are not known to me.”