“You really are,” Mrs. Murgatroyd re-a beamingly, “a case, with that swelled head of yours. Not but what I like a good book when I got the time for it.”
And from her left ear she brushed back her so frankly dyed hair, with the exact gesture of that girl whom Smirt was not able to forget.
“You display upon all occasions,” Smirt continued, “the imagination, the ready tact, and the vivacity also, of a York river oyster. Ah, but what a delight it is to say to you in a dream the things that no Southern gentleman can say during his waking hours! And you were always like that, I know—but how well I know it, after meditating upon the astounding fact for years!—you were always like that inside, even when in your youth you had a superficial prettiness. I daresay you were not even especially pretty. And yet, yet, I found in you all beauty, all perfection, all happiness. I found in you a magic and a poison.”
Smirt broke off talking. He had strayed, he felt, some little distance from the neat ways of urbanity. So Smirt shrugged. Afterward Smirt said:
“All that I found in you went into my books. And every man who read them has recognized in my young folly, and in my urbane derision of it, a part of himself. My books are you, you, all you! and you have not the wit to perceive it. That which you created, you cannot understand. Oh, and you created me also, teaching me to regard the ludicrousness of myself even more fondly than I did that of other persons—and yet teaching me always to remember you with a grim tenderness. For you were very useful: I concede that. It is necessary that all poets should love Mrs. Murgatroyd—Lesbia nostra, illa Lesbia, the divine romance which turns of a sudden into a gorilla grin of irony.”
“La, but how you do talk,” remarked Mrs. Murgatroyd. “Quite as fine as the letters you used to writ me—and as I often think, if they are not as good: a circus, Smirt!”
She did not laugh exactly. But her amusement came almost apoplectic.
“You have kept my letters!” said Smirt, shuddering. “That only was needed. Some day your heirs and assigns will be publishing them, of course, with doubt a portrait of you, pretty much as you now for the frontispiece. Yes, that only was needed—my insane rhapsodies in conjunction with your portrait. However, I can think offhand of very few women who are not planning to publish my letters. One volume more or less will not matter. And I desire only to make the fact plain to posterity that I did not correspond until I had copulated.”
After that, Smirt gallantly lifted to Smirt’s Mrs. Murgatroyd’s plump and small and really, he observed with surprise, quite pretty hand.
“It has been an immense comfort to say to you in this dream, dear Jessica, the things which I could not say when awake. And for the rest, I am deeply grateful, alike for your kindness and for your charity—in not marrying me, I mean,—and for your turning out to be such a wholly unattractive person afterward. Your memory has been to me an unfailing inkwell. All my heart praises that loveliness which was yours in the eyes of a boy very long ago. I praise likewise your perfidy. I praise above all the inane grossness which you now flaunt in middle life. For these three things have combined handsomely, O far too big and too wobbly and too crudely renovated source of my genius, these things have combined to make me Smirt, Smirt whom the public at large pursue, Smirt whom the gods also revere and imitate.”
Thus he boasted; and in the while he was speaking a clock struck thirteen.
“Alas and alack!” said Smirt, forebodingly, “but this is no doubt the appointed hour. And I, of all persons, have incited it. For I have forgotten to be urbane, I have been betrayed into hubris.”
PART EIGHT. FOR EACH HIS HOUR
“Whensoever the Khirghiz pass by Musta-ghata, loftiest of the Pamirs, they fall upon their knees in prayer, for upon the summit of this mountain stands the unapproachable bright city of Janaidar, built in a gulden age, and still visible from afar. In Venezuela also Humboldt observed a mountain to be strangely luminous at night, and attributed this phenomenon to the burning of hydrogen gases.”
XLV. AT THIRTEEN O’CLOCK
In the eternal city of Amit a small onyx clock (which was left over from Tana’s cave, Smirt now remembered) had just finished striking thirteen: and before Smirt stood a hooded company of seven huge persons, all robed in ash-colored gray and made ready for travel. Their leader put by his hood; and Smirt saw that this was Arathron.
Brown Arathron said: “So very soon has come the appointed hour. The liquor of the gods is almost gone, there is scarcely a drink left, only a few drops remain to us of the dark beer of Sekmet. My splendors fall away from me as the bright leaves drop pensively from a maple-tree in autumn. There is in my thoughts a smell of winter. I have lived my last hour as a Steward of Heaven. In a little while, I must be leaving forever the city of Amit, wherein all things were perfect, where each day and hour held some form of delight, and everything seemed builded for my pleasure. I had not known until to-day how beautiful is Amit. It is strange yet to be beholding Amit, wherein I have gone about always light-hearted, a god among gods.”
Then Phul, that huge hermaphrodite who was colored like silver, said:
“The horror of it troubles me, to look upon mortal tax-payers, and to know that is what each fallen must become. The strivings and the small doings of this planet’s people are taxed very heavily by time and by common-sense. I tread, as boldly as may be, down a cold gray path, to live as a tax-payer. I shall not look back. It may be that by-and-by, when I become an applauded person, perhaps a great statesman or a famous minister of the gospel, some ghost of Amit may rise to plague me and to draw from me a sigh. I shall shrug then. My thoughts will return to the higher brackets of common-sense, and to time’s surtaxes, and to my allowed deductions in the way of lying and of humbug. I shall again forget Amit, wherein I went about always light-hearted, a god among gods.”
And ruddy Phaleg said: “Time and common-sense have entrapped me. They take a huge toll of my dreams and of my hopes, and of my courage also, now that I must live as a tax-payer. I have wandered about Amit without any plan. The ghosts of many divine beings went with me. I remembered them all, the gods that were here before me, the gods that are now departing, not ever to return. Our lives narrow down to being well-thought-of. Our glory will never revive. Our strength dwindles, like a little fire under the sun of September, now that befalls the appointed hour. No one of us shall ever live again as a god lives, without paying any taxes to time or to common-sense. We return no more to Amit, wherein each one of us has gone about always light-hearted, a god among gods.”
“Oh, but come now,” said Smirt, “this is most distressing! Each of us must abide his appointed hour: I concede that. I do not mean to upset any of these cosmic arrangements. Still, I did not intend to incite the appointed hour by forgetting, for just a moment, my urbanity. And I really do think that in this instance All-Highest & Company might have deferred—a little more tactfully, let us say—the stroke of doom. For you and I, my friends, have but very lately put the planet on a properly romantic basis: it was an experiment noble in purpose, an experiment which, I make bold to say, might well have been permitted to work out to its own logical conclusions. Oh, I do not criticize this sudden, this somewhat high-handed, and indeed this virtually idiotic interference with my personal plans. But I do ask, Was it tactful?”
To that, Hagith replied only: “Homage to thee, Smirt, sole lord of Amit now, dear Master of the Shining Ones! all homage to Smirt, whose names manifold, whose transformations are sublime, whose purpose is hidden! But a thing done has an end. The appointed hour has struck. So must we depart, because the term of our stewardship is over. So must cry farewell to you, dear Master, whom we may not imitate joyously any longer.”
“I regret that, Hagith, I regret it in all sincerity: for while your efforts to realize my books, to actual my philosophy and my vision of human living were not wholly successful, yet I always felt you did your best. Nobody can do more. And besides that, the imaginings of Smirt were perhaps a little beyond your merely divine powers
.”
Then Arathron said: “That is a true saying, O Lord of Amit. Yet is it equally true that we future tax-payers must go upon the journey appointed for every Shining One.”
“Ah, but, but, after all, my dear Arathron,” Smirt consoled him, “you are only false gods, you should remember, out of an anonymous German work first published as lately as 1686.”
“And are you sure of that, dear Master?” said Arathron, brightening a little.
“I am quite sure,” Smirt replied. “You will doubt find a copy in the Library of Congress.”
“To think of that now!” said pallid Ophiel, smiling outright. “We did not know that Congressmen liked to read about us.”
“Congressmen, my dear Ophiel,” Smirt remarked, “are very often surprising people in all sorts of ways. But, as I was saying, your tenancy of this place has been so much clear gain. As false gods, you were not entitled to be here at all.”
“And besides that,” said tall golden-colored Bethor, chuckling, “inasmuch as we are only false gods, it does not matter the least bit what happens to us. I see the point, dear Master; and it is a great comfort.”
“It should be,” said Smirt. “It should delight every one of you to reflect that in defiance of all justice, and in violation of all probability, you have thus had your fling in my dream: for nobody, be he god or man, can hope to have more than that anywhere. As for the impermanency of your divine fling, alas, gentlemen, I can but remark that this is a characteristic of every known form of fling. All greatness is perishable goods: you have perhaps heard that Queen Anne is dead. We must face these losses. You would do well, my dear friends, to observe with what equanimity I am facing your losses at this very moment. For, as becomes a sound logician, I grant that all power and mirth, and all beauty, must perish inevitably, and that I, even I, it may be, shall not endure forever.”
But at that, the disemployed Stewards of Heaven cried out, in anguish,—
“Dear Master, pray do not talk to us about any such horrid notion!”
“Well, well,” Smirt soothed them, “it may be that contingency is not likely. Still, I am forced, through a proper sense of modesty, to consider that off chance now and again, because the urbane are not ever vainglorious.”
Then all the Shining Ones departed out of Amit, a great deal cheered by Smirt’s consolations, although Smirt noticed that a black dog, which had a white tail and four white feet, followed after the seven large ash-colored figures and sniffed at fourteen no longer divine legs rather hungrily.
Now at Smirt’s elbow stood an untidy young man. And he demanded of Smirt,—
“Did you ever shout into a hurricane?”
“Well, what between one thing and another,” Smirt answered, “I am afraid I never quite around to shouting into a hurricane.”
XLVI. HEIR PRESUMPTIVE
My question (the untidy young man continued, frowning) was rhetorical. So please do not put me out by attempting to answer it. I repeat, then, Did you ever shout into a hurricane? That is what I am condemned to do, crying out my just demands for applause and opulence and the homage of all publishers, in the bared teeth of a tempest,—a tempest of mediocrity which engulfs me, and which scatters among its howling winds the cry of my genius, just as mediocrity has always tried to subdue into nothingness the rebellion of superior persons.
It may be that you find the statement extreme, that you think me presumptuous. Yet should gold be esteemed the less golden because it happens to be covered with the slime and muck of unrecognition? I am like Prometheus, now that the vultures of despair eat continually at my liver, for the editors of all known magazines have rejected my manuscripts. With such bitterness does fate as yet treat me. I intend, nevertheless, to raise a proud head above the stale levels of mediocrity.
I hear you mutter, impatiently, What the hell is this jabbering about? It means, Smirt, that all passes. At an appointed hour the Stewards of Heaven have passed from their thrones in Amit, and you reign here alone. At an appointed hour you too will pass; and I intend thereafter to become your successor here. I like the looks of the place just as it stands, but when my time comes I shall liven it up a little, with a copy of Das Kapital and a few strong-backed young women.
In the mean while I write—oh, God, yes! quite unsuccessfully. Somebody or other, as you may remember, calls it spoiling good white paper with strange black marks. Yet in spite of myself I continue to make such marks upon paper. I hate writing. It is detestable. It is horrible. It is torture. It is agony. I hate it like death. Yet as one clings to life, so do I write in order that I may supplant you, Smirt.
But that is not all of it. I write in order that I live. I do not mean, in order that I may support myself: Poppa is quite well-off, on account of our famous capitalist system. No: I write in order to giving me my one unanswerable reason for existing. I seek alleviation of this most dreadful of dreadful diseases, worditis, in the balm of that applause which is due to my genius. Upon the more foggy side of oblivion my present lack of a suitably appreciative audience becomes just plain agonizing hell.
Yet, sacre dios, do you think I complain? No: I say my say and have done. I am a man of few words. That is strange, because I have many sensitive nerves. I feel life in many different forms. I suffer in many variegated forms. So it would appear but natural that I should need many words in order to express myself fully. Yet I do not. I am gifted with concinnity, that most enviable of endowments, which I found only last week in the dictionary.
Do not confound this rare talent with diffidence. An unrecognized writer, like a whore, knows no shame. That modesty which they continually outrage flees from both of them; and this fact is remarked on by their near relatives. When you happen to be very proud, as I am (for we have a family crest), these comments become painful. But I am like a betrayed—no, I mean, a knocked-up and unwed woman; nature has made me pregnant with The Word, and I must have lexicological parturition or die. In childbirth there can be no modesty. Modesty is an attribute of success and attainment: I shall have time to be modest after I have kicked you out of this place and my genius is recognized everywhere. Meanwhile I demand recognition in vain, and the gnawed crusts of egotism are all that sustain me.
It is very peculiar that I should find life a futile affair, for I am eighteen, with a fine sense of humor, and all women love me. Genius attracts women irresistibly, the canoodling pretty bitches. Then when they get knocked-up they carry on like hell. You would think it was my fault, to hear them talk, and Poppa is as bad as they are. These bourgeois people do not consider that I may be the genius who will interpret the youth of this age, the youth that is so hopelessly muddled, the youth that finds sex to be the actual motivator of all life.
Yet I do not know if this is true, or even just what it means. I often say things like that. They quite upset Mumma. Nevertheless, I am certain that I have genius, and I need not be backward about showing it. I am gold covered with the muck of this world’s stupidity. Where is that magazine editor who will wash away the scum of oblivion so that I may scintillate. It does not matter. He will come by-and-by. Until then, I ask you, I just simply ask you, to look at stuff they do publish!
I try to content myself by speaking, with cool moderation, these few well-chosen words. Yet words at their best, as I said only the other day, in a rather neat little study of a boy that screwed his sister, then had to cut her throat afterward, words are blurred tags attached to our qualities and to our passions and to all other affairs; and we human beings are like hurried shoppers looking for life’s bargains in a department store’s dim basement. The first tag that our eye catches we are apt to accept. “Smirt” is a word. People accept it just now. The tempests and the oceans of my genius will end such nonsense.
For words, I repeat, are like shouting in a hurricane, they are like a half-teaspoonful of sugar in the salt sea, and they are like a number of other things which do not at this moment occur to me. I must think up a few more comparisons at leisure. I must not, you understand
, speak rashly about words, merely because I happen to be a master of words. Noblesse oblige.
For I am a real writer. I do not write for school girls, or truck drivers, or grocers. I write for the elect few. It may be that you, Smirt, think that I am a flickering light doomed to expire without hardly casting a shadow, without ever finding a suitably appreciative audience. I do not concede that.
To the contrary, when I listen to the subconscious Me which is my genius, then I pity you, Smirt, for I know that I shall ultimately write much better than Smirt has ever written, and that I shall see into life more deeply, and feel life more sensitively, and react to life’s horror and vileness with, as it were, a wider gamut of overtones. My work will be me strong and virile than is the filigree fiddling of Smirt because my superb and forthright work will be a love child, a very lusty bastard begotten upon realism with the phallus of agony.
Oh, I do not mince matters. I say “bastard” and “phallus” right out, with the boldness of self-assured genius. You have already heard me say “bitches” and “whore”; and I say all sorts of other startling things. My titanic and lascivious utterance abounds in such discordant chords. And, far from destroying its symmetry, they bind all yet more tightly together.
As I told a girl only last night, when we were playing stink finger, and talking about Me, my intrepid indecencies are like mortar mixed with ambrosia, binding together blocks of translucent alabaster. For these things just come to me; just all of a sudden I can feel the repressed energy of my genius flare with gigantic sunbursts of cosmic power, and then I say things like “bitches” and “whore.” I do not really have to invent these things.
The Nightmare Had Triplets Page 17
