The Nightmare Had Triplets

by Branch Cabell

  Thus speaking, Smire sat down gracefully upon the counter, and he chucked Madame Moera under the chin.

  “It is a great shame,” said Smire, “that a woman of your good looks and of your charm of manner should occupy any position so lonely. For it is your will which over-rules the will of all gods. You are supreme. You are incomprehensible. You have no equal, and you are so far above all male creatures, whether divine or human, that you cannot condescend to make any one of us happy.”

  She colored with pleasure; she scowled; and she said:

  “Oh, get along with you. For why would I want to be doing anything of that sort? You are talking nonsense, Smire.”

  “Not at all, my dear lady. In your official capacity, you are ruthless. Nevertheless, as a woman you are subject, I cannot doubt, to the more tender emotions.”

  “You probably say that to every woman you meet,” returned Moera. “So I do not take it the least bit seriously. Still, why do you think that?”

  “I think that unavoidably, Madame Moera, in the light of my rather wide experience. It is only the ugly women who are harsh and soured. No handsome woman has a hard heart. This biological fact is well known to every urbane person.”

  “So, and do you think to be wheedling me, Smire?”

  “Madame, let the thought perish. It is unworthy of either of us. What you have written as to my divine destiny, in that great book of yours, remains changeless. I know that perfectly.”

  “Then what do you want of me?” demands Moera.

  “I desire, in the first place,” says Smire, “to salute your genius. It is not—I concede—unfailing. You could learn much by a rather more careful study of my creative methods. Nevertheless do I admit freely my inferiority, by and large; for if I have invented much beauty and an ironic vein of my own—this being a point which I dare not argue against the unanimous applause of all the better-thought-of critics,—yet you have invented Smire. I have been, in my day, a demiurge honored, by the more kindly, with my quota of adulation; but I have created at no time, I have not ever pretended to create, any character so marvelous, in every conceivable respect, as is Smire. I concede that quite humbly, you observe, without any least humming and hawing.”

  “I perceive indeed that you lack the ever-jealous self-conceit of most authors, Smire. It does you vast credit.”

  “And do you know,” Smire continues, “that I somewhat envy you this high moment’s experience? For we creative artists potter with words and cadences, with our rhetorical devices and our commas and our supernal aspirations, without ever tiring, rather fruitlessly as a rule. Then of a sudden, by accident, as it were, we make up, out of these odds and ends, a character which in some sort lives; and which promptly becomes independent of its creator. But never, I am sure, did Esmond or Don Juan, did Falstaff or Odysseus or Babbitt or Sherlock Holmes or Faust, or Mesdames Grundy and Gamp, come out of ink and paper into flesh, thus visibly and so tangibly, to interchange civilities with his or with her inventor. Yes, Madame Moera; yes, I cannot but envy you this chat with the Smire whom you created.”

  She was now smiling, almost. But she said only,—

  “I shall endeavor, you rogue, not to be too proud of you.”

  “By all means, let us avoid hubris.” Smire assented; and he turned toward fields more critical, saying:

  “I cannot but deplore the plot in which you involved Smire. Yet do not be embarrassed. Shakespeare and Moliere were equally unable to contrive an adequate story into which to put Shylock and Tartuffe. So I do not complain. I remark merely that my tragic declension, from an admired popular writer to a mere supreme god, and thence to a demi-god, and from that to an heroic and all-lovable vagabond, is far too ruthless. Nor do I at all understand the evolution of my better traits; for I began as that pompous and condescending smirt; and my nature, under so many excessive degradations, has improved steadily, so everyone tells me, in cheerfulness and in amiability and in all other virtues.”

  Her eyes, her remarkably keen eyes had narrowed somewhat, in the while she was answering,—

  “That, you can have no doubt, is to reward you for having so unremittently avoided hubris.”

  “Aha, but now you touch me, dear lady. I have done my small best; and to hear of its triumph is, of course, gratifying. So I can but ask you to overlook my blushes now that, of all persons, you applaud.”

  “I shall do so the more readily, Smire, on account of the fact that they stay imperceptible.”

  “I disguise my well-doing, madame, as an affair of course. Well, and is my not-ever-failing virtue, that virtue which Madame Moera, and not I, put into me—by which I mean my avoidance of hubris,—is this innate and discreet modesty of mine to be repaid rightly at the end of my story?”

  She asks now, in the time that she smiled stiffly, with a rigid sort of indulgence,—

  “What payment do you desire?”

  And he answers, sturdily, “I desire once more to see Branlon and that Tana to whom my heart, as distinguished from a few other physical possessions, remains ever faithful.”

  “Very well, then, that is permitted you,” Madame Moera said, with a swift and a strangely furtive chuckling. “You have but to confer with the Wrong Oculist; and after his improper treatment you shall once more see Branlon and your Tana also.”

  Smire said: “That sounds cryptic; but I am suitably grateful. So do you now tell me how may I come to the Wrong Oculist.”

  “You have but to go your own way, Smire, your own cool urbane way; for that way can end nowhere else.”

  Smire shrugged at that; and he replied merely:

  “Why, then, Madame Moera, I shall say good-bye. Yet I must first thank you for having made me Smire—or Smith, or Smirt, or whosoever else it may have been that you entertained yourself by making me,—because upon no consideration would I consent to be anybody else.”

  The doom that is above all gods looked now at this especial devolved god pensively, peering over the top of her steel-rimmed spectacles with an aloof flavor of contrition. And Moera said,—

  “You have had rather a hard time of it, child.”

  “No living creature has ever suffered a more tragic fate,” Smire admitted, with gusto. “But the point, the true point, is that I have enjoyed every moment of my affliction. So from the bottom of my heart, Madame Moera, do I thank you for my relentless declension.”

  After that, Smire kissed the tight-lined, but not unwilling, lips of Moera with a respectful ardor; and he so left the perplexed, the grim, but still not implacably smiling woman.

  XXVI. COLLOQUY OF ANIMALS

  They relate in Branlon that the way of Smire was now barred by three enormous monsters, each one of which was thrice the height of Smire. And these said, with a brutal firmness:

  “We are the Sheep, the Cow, and the Hog. We are the True Trinity. We are alike the need, the preservers, and the models, of civilized man. Without our aid, he could not live. Without our example to go by, he could not maintain his respectability. Without us, human nature, at its highest state of development, could not exist: for it is we three who are blended in man’s being; and who keep him, as any obsolete poet or revered politician might declare without stuttering, praiseworthy.”

  Smire answered them, “Expound!”

  Then the Sheep said: “I am the conscience of mankind. My desire is for quietness; but my dread of being left alone is more great than is my dislike of tumult. To be alone with myself I find unendurable; it causes me to bleat without ceasing. Rather than be alone with myself I will follow after anyone of my fellows, no matter whither he leads. It is well to herd with one’s companions always, so that the butcher may overlook you, who are but one among so many. That is my most holy teaching: for I am the conscience of mankind.”

  The Cow said: “I am the mind of mankind. I desire quietness; I dislike that which is unfamiliar. I run away from it very clumsily, but with all the speed which is permitted me. I wish only to lie down somewhere in comfort, chewing the cud of that whic
h was fresh and living yesterday, for old food is best. Old food agrees with me. I do not like to be disagreed with. Yet one thing alone enrages me; and that is to have anybody troubling my calves. You must not meddle with my calves. I will defend my own offspring frantically, at all hazards, even in the red shambles of the butcher: for I am the mind of mankind.”

  And the Hog said: “I am the body of mankind. Both my confreres agree that the less said about me, the better. I do not argue with them. I prefer not ever to argue with anyone’s mind or conscience. Instead, I evade both, with a half-hearted grunting, for I prefer quietness, such quietness as thrives only in deep mire: and yet must I forever be leaving my soft comfortable mire, because of my need to eat every food and to copulate with every sow. It is a great pity that I cannot do this before the butcher comes. It causes me to grunt and to squeal.”

  Then they all said together, “How may you hope to go beyond us?”

  Smire answered them: “Inasmuch as Wordsworth is a poet with whom I make bold to doubt your familiarity, in these modern unpoetical times, O omnipotent monsters, I shall not remark that once you were seven. Nowadays the Horse, the Ass, the Dog, and the Cat, have become luxuries. But the True Trinity endures. Without the three of you, even nowadays, no sort of snug living would be possible to the run of mankind. You are alike the sign and the cornerstone of the domesticity of the public at large. You prefigure, just as you say, the body and the conscience and the mind of the public at large. Well! but what have these facts to do with me, who am the God of Branlon?”

  At that, they bleated, they lowed, and they grunted, as they looked down toward little Smire, with huge disapproving eyes. And they said to him:

  “We are your conscience, your mind, and your body, inasmuch as you also are human. It is our will that you shall not go beyond us. For we are all three domestic animals; and your Branlon is a wild foolishness.”

  Then, reaching up as far as he could to pat the huge Sheep’s fore-leg, Smire answered, to the first of the True Trinity:

  “O Sheep who are the conscience of Smire, it was in order to behold your most beautiful, soft, golden-colored fleecing that the Argonauts went a-voyaging. It was with a sheep like you that Pan purchased the virgin body of Artemis, who never yielded to any other persuasiveness. You are a hollow-horned ruminant; the theory which once made you akin to the Udad is now known to be quite untenable, for you form a group impossible of exact definition, so imperceptibly do sheep pass into goats; and that is a large parable. In the pride which you take in your ancestry you are well justified, for as the turbary sheep (or Ovis aries palustris) you trace from the neolithic age. Feed my sheep, it is a famed saying; and my flock is in Branlon.”

  Hearing these remarks, the huge Sheep bleated in its sleep, with complacency, for it now slumbered.

  Afterward Smire said: “O Cow who are the mind of Smire, you have been milked by full many a maiden all forlorn. So do you consider, good Cow, consider! and remember that your tail would reach to heaven if only your tail were long enough. Indeed, you once filled all heaven: nine stars were then inset in your belly; your udders were painted in green quenat color; and between your fore-legs was written, ‘I am what is in me.’ In this guise did you bring forth Indras, and great Odin likewise, when you were the Cow of Heaven. Isis borrowed your wise head in Kheraha, so that the wit and fancy and erudition with which your brains are infested might be of help in her long search for the fourteen lost fragments of Osiris. It was you who jumped over the moon. The astounded stars, planets and asteroids then chanted ‘Hey-diddle-diddle!’ so great was their wonder at this nimble, very fertile Cow which is the deep and all-contriving mind of Smire.”

  So the huge Cow went to sleep contentedly.

  And Smire said: “O Hog who are the body of Smire, to subdue you upon Mount Erymanthus was the third labor of Herakles, but it was never my labor in any place. You are sacred both to St. Anthony and to Thor: against such sanctity who dare strive? Atalanta pursued you in Calydon, that famous fair huntress; and yet other ladies have pursued you—not, as Milton has remarked, without dust and heat. Vishnu in his third avatar was shaped as you are shaped, going the whole hog. Vainly is it fabled how the great God of the East slew you, in the sixty-first hymn of the Rigvedas, because you are immortal. You are an undying parable.”

  “But am I indeed?” the huge Hog grunted.

  “Beyond any doubt,” replied Smire, affably. “Your tusk gave life to Adonis, when you ripped him out of the myrrh-tree which was his mother; and by-and-by your tusk killed Adonis. From these facts do all learned persons infer that you are the darkness which begets and then conquers the sun-god in every solar myth. So, most clearly, you are a parable, O Hog who are the body of Smire. You could not possibly be anything else.”

  “And what if I am?” says the Hog, speaking defensively, from somewhere between the dubious and the indignant.

  Smire answers him, “I would but point out to you, O Hog who are the body of Smire, that it is the right part of a parable to further, and not ever to check, the progress of a poet.”

  “That is sound swinish logic,” the huge Hog agreed; “and I need a good nap after listening to you.”

  So the Hog likewise closed his eyes, the fierce eyes which glared down at you from among so many stiff white bristles. And Smire passed beyond the True Trinity, to confer at leisure with the Wrong Oculist.

  XXVII. “LAUGH AND LIE DOWN”

  Now in the waiting-room of the Wrong Oculist, which was handsomely decorated with the rare Bay of Naples pictorial wall-paper, it appeared somewhat odd to find Oliver Cromwell and King Charles the First of England playing amicably at chess,—especially because the severed head of the last named was held in his left hand so that he might observe the board while with his right hand he moved the pieces. However, matters often fall out a bit unaccountably in dreams, Smire decided; and inasmuch as both the Great Puritan and the King of Cavaliers seemed undisturbed by his coming, affairs might easily have fallen out far worse.

  They greeted him with politeness. Yet they did not cease from their playing. For this special game between the Cavalier and the Puritan was not ever over, they said, and the two of them must go on playing until Death died.

  That must be weary waiting; and so would not one or the other of you gentlemen permit me to take his place for some while? Smire suggested, because of the God of Branlon’s never-failing desire to make things pleasant for everybody.

  —Whereupon both Cromwell and King Charles smiled sadly, telling him that the gaming between Cavalier and Puritan must go on forever, between these two alone, so long as humankind lasted; and until, once for all, the question had been settled whether over humankind reigned the great virtue of justice or the great virtue of charity.

  “And sometimes,” said the pallid beautiful head of King Charles, “one of us seems to be triumphing and sometimes the other. But neither ever wins outright. So the eternal game must go on so long as any clock ticks anywhere; and there is no resting for us two who believed, as we still believe, each in his own dream, wholeheartedly.”

  “Alas, gentlemen,” replied Smire, and his divine shoulders stirred slightly upward, “as a poietes, I too believe in my own special dream. Beyond doubt, there is the small difference that I regard every sort of belief as a luxury rather than a necessity. And for the rest, I incline to suspect that over all mankind reigns the vice of inadequacy.”

  “That,” they replied, both speaking together, “is nonsense.”

  “Yes,” Smire assented; “yet many excellent thinkers have come, by-and-by, to regard the entire universe as a large exercise in nonsense, as the fine masterpiece of a supernal W. S. Gilbert. For myself, I adopt a middle ground: and it seems to me that since humankind has not anything to do with the conduct of the universe in practice, we would do wisely not to bother about it in thought.”

  “That is why,” returned Cromwell—frowning where the King smiled—“we may neither of us waste time to contend with you. So do y
ou lie down, my spruce Laodicean, resting snugly upon that soft couch of no particular color until the flamy coming of Old Legion.”

  Smire humored the Lord Protector, with Smire’s not-ever-failing affability, saying only,—

  “Very well, Mr. Williams.”

  —Whereupon Cromwell scowled, because of course he did not like to be reminded that he had entered history under an alias, and had caused to be ever-living a name which was not his own name actually.

  But Smire (as at other seasons) did not bother about the Puritan, now that Smire lay down upon the soft couch of no particular color. He lay on his back; and so could see only the stars, because there was not any ceiling to this queer waiting-room. Yet above him were all the stars of heaven made visible; and as Smire looked at them, then into the thinking of Smire came a randomness and a drowsing.

  XXVIII. REGARDING THE STARS

  Now was Smire visited by a languor and a perturbed drowsiness that at first was full of remorse for remote doings which he could not quite remember. But this died away, by-and-by, as he lay flat on his back looking affably toward heaven. Yes; he approved of the stars. Their display was wholly creditable. It was well worthy of the lands beyond common-sense. It was a pageant such as you did not see in any city of flesh-and-blood lands, no matter how enormous or up-to-date might be the resources of that city.

  For in a flesh-and-blood city (thus Smire reflected, half napping) one does not see the stars. Now and then, upon an evening in spring, when the days are long, and when the street lights are not turned on until very late, one notes, it may be, the evening star low in the west. It floats, as though half submerged, in a green sky, above ugly, angular, dark house-tops. It is lovely; but strangely alien. To the unwise who regard it, this star recalls happenings just as alien, happenings that you shared with persons who were once both loved and familiar. They are dead now, or else they have been transformed into paunchy, gray-haired strangers. Secretly we who are yet living abhor the thought of having once been familiar with any person who is dead. Secretly we detest these gray-haired strangers who remember fond follies which we resent their remembering. Because of these things the wise person does not regard the evening star. He says, “It is very pretty.” He then lowers his eyes from the green heavens, and he turns his thoughts toward the probability of what there will be for dinner. No: in a flesh-and-blood city (Smire reflected) one does not ever truly see the stars. They are eclipsed by so many electric lights which flare and glitter. From afar one might see the murky diffused brightness of the city, like the dull glare of that hell in which the intelligentsia (who have not the intelligently reserved judgment of the Peripatetic Episcopalian) are at shrill pains to disbelieve. In the city all is a twinkle and a shallow sparkling. The red and the yellow and the green lights of traffic shift glowingly. The shop windows are resplendent, now abloom with complete parlor suites, now pallid with refrigerators, and now coyly flushing with pink underwear. And always, overhead, the electric signs glitter and twinkle so that one may not see beyond them. One can observe only that So-and-So’s whiskey is the best, that Thingumbob’s shoes are worn by the elite, that every known brand of cigarette is kind to your throat, that pickles are unparalleled, and that Tweedledum is now playing in his great metropolitan success, for three days only, to roars of laughter. With such tidings does a flesh-and-blood city shut out the stars; and the heavens speak also of Sea Food, of Flick’s Famous Bar, of a Luncheonette, of Drugs and Soda, of Banks and Trust Companies, of Sizzling Steaks, of Chop Suey, and of cathartics beyond facile numbering.