It follows, Smirt, that very soon I shall have a story accepted by one or another magazine: my genius will thus find its suitably appreciative audience; and then Smirt will be quite forgotten, you big piss-ass, because of his fundamental venality.
XLVII. WHICH REFLECTS FRANKLY
Now when the untidy young man had finished speaking, he went away, picking at his nose, and using the proceeds thriftily. And Smirt shrugged his shoulders.
“Dear me,” said Smirt, “but what an extremely blatant and unprepossessing person is my heir presumptive, with his demands for a suitably appreciative audience! I was not ever, I believe, not ever quite like that. Still, one does catch the resemblance.... Yes, it very well may be that my dream is now making bold to imply a somewhat impudent moral. So I cry a fig for all dreams!”
Nevertheless, the intrusion of this boy bothered him. Smirt seemed to be finding everywhere in his dream, like a vague and undesirable permeation, the auctorial temperament. It had seeped, as one might say, from the All-Highest to Company and to the bungling Stewards, descending thence to the lowest possible point, to its nadir, in this lewd and loud mouthed and wholly unpleasant stripling.... Yet boy—that was the odd part—might possess his quota of genius, after all.
“Each one of us,” Smirt reflected, generously, “must go through this pimply and autopathic stage in some form or another, at the beginning of every aesthetic career.”
Afterward one learned, more or less, how to produce one’s own notion of art in a manner somewhat farther removed from rebellion and blatancy. One became, it might be, urbane. The trouble was—and Smirt admitted its existence frankly—that nobody’s notion of art was intelligent save only Smirt’s notion.
So did Smirt, very reluctantly, see himself as a small lonely island of intelligence, about which lapped an unfathomable and unending and unconquerable ocean of stupidity. The varying notions of All-Highest & Company, of the Stewards, and now of this loathsome boy, had displayed, rather pathetically, an earnest desire to penetrate the secrets of creative art, in the same instant that these notions proved each of these persons to lack the needful ability. Smirt—and he must face the fact bravely—was an unparalleled genius, to whom all other creative artists were abysmally inferior; and for whom nowhere in the universe was there a suitable audience, or even a worthy disciple.
“Well, and what follows?” Smirt said, with unshaken courage. “The thought is not strange to me.”
Indeed, this thought had come to him upon several occasions (he could now recall) during his recent stay on Earth, in the time when Smirt was writing his elaborated and jewel-colored prose, of a sort, as Smirt very slowly learned, which was not any longer appreciated, or in fact quite understood, by most of Earth’s literate persons.... For a quaint heresy had sprung up among human creatures, somehow. They believed that prose, howsoever magically constructed, was only a vehicle, a species of trash wagon, meant to convey such rubbish as were human ideas, from the author’s mind to the mind of his reader. Yet no human idea, Smirt reflected, was either truthful or of any lasting use, because human ideas were evolved, of necessity, by man’s fallible mind from the data misreported by man’s inadequate senses: all human ideas were perceived, by-and-by, to be ephemeral: and the artist who for his medium employed human ideas, it mattered not of what nature, was but a sculptor who modeled in snow.
“That at least is my idea,” said Smirt; “and as a merely human idea, it is of course neither truthful nor of any lasting use. Yet I have always found it an agreeable plaything.... The sole trouble is that upon Earth I have found no fitting playfellow—just as upon Earth also, I have found no suitable audience and no worthy disciple.”
He shrugged, saying again, “Well, and what follows?”
It followed that Smirt, the supreme god of at any rate one planet, must henceforward be content to have Smirt as his limited but his truly appreciative audience. And Smirt accepted this state of affairs with his usual modesty.
For upon Earth his rather adroitly written books yet existed, as superb and ever-living relics of Smirt’s career as a human being. Upon Earth he had won, at least, his immortal glory, as a tangible prize in the prolonged game played against time and accident and one’s own frailty: to perceive this must content, and it did content Smirt, as went terrestrial matters. So his quest thereamong was finished, to Smirt’s tolerable satisfaction: and he demanded no more of Earth.
But supernally he would, no doubt, go much farther. That was the present issue which now awaited, docilely, the decision of Smirt, the supreme god of at any rate one planet, of Smirt who remained omnipotent, within limits.
XLVIII. THE SPIDER MOVES IN
Smirt stood alone in the home of the Shining Ones. He had already looked over the ramparts of Amit at the busy planet of which Smirt was now sole overlord. Mrs. B. F. Zogbaum, he perceived, had returned from visiting her parents at Galax, after having been the recipient of much flattering social attention during week-end stay in city. Threats of ultimatum loomed; wheat was down nine cents, and State Solons convened Tuesday; old Sol was on rampage, and torrid weather held its grip throughout West; striker was slain & several hurt in mine clashes; Jap chiefs were offering big arms budget; and, in Chicago, outlaws met doom in machine gun battle with 50 police, Mayor issues statement.
All, in brief, was very much as it had been before Smirt entered Amit, now that human living had returned to its confused and threadbare and highly improbable realism. It was a spectacle before which Smirt shook his divine head affably; for a god must not be unurbanely severe with the small toys of his whim: yet, as an artist, he would most certainly have to see to it there were many witty and fanciful and erudite changes made everywhere in that planet during its forthcoming regime of monotheism.
Meanwhile Smirt stood alone in the palace of Arathron. Dust gathered there, and in the gods’ council chamber the spider was at her work, with the unhurried businesslike air of one who comprehended how much needed to be done hereabouts before this place could be made presentable to destruction and a fit home for her young.
“A good day to you, Mrs. Arachnomorpha,” said Smirt, “and a never ending line of husbands! But is it necessary that Smirt’s heaven should be hung with your cobwebs?”
The spider regarded him with eight simple eye and replied in frank astonishment:
“This is strange. I do not quite know what to make of this. In all my life, Smirt, you are the first man who has ever spoken to me.”
“In these days, ma’am, very many persons tend to neglect these lesser courtesies. But I, none the less, I continue to foster the urbane.”
“The fact does you credit,” said the spider. “Yet I do not think that I know you, Smirt, nor you me. And a widow, which I happen to be at just this present moment, has to be careful—”
“To the contrary, ma’am, I do know you, for I recognized you, at first glance, by your fine air of aristocracy. And what, to be sure, could be more natural than is this je ne sais quoi? For you come of the old race of Trilobites, who lived in the prehistoric oceans. There is no old Southern family who can compare with your family, ma’am, for you are an arachnid of the order Araneae, of the sub-order Opisthatheze, and of the tribe Arachnomorpha.”
“These are fine words, Smirt. But how can I be certain that I deserve all these handsome compliments?”
“Because, ma’am, the plane of the articulation of your mandibles is horizontal. Your fangs close almost transversely inwards. And your coxal glands open on the third somite of the cephalothorax. Such proofs are indisputable. They are scientific; and they establish your family beyond question.”
The spider silently made a little chewing motion before replying.
“There may be,” the spider admitted, “something in what you say. But to me it sounds like male talk; and in that there is only a craziness and a bluster and a squealing.”
“Ah, but, Mrs. Arachnomorpha, let us not raise any question of sex! For in love you do not figure to advantage.”
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“Where is this love?” asked the spider; “and when was I ever in it?”
“Love is the soul’s awakening, ma’am; it is the revealment of the divine nature which survives somehow in all human beings; it is the attainment of supreme felicity; and it is a number of other fine things. It is also the preliminary step to having children.”
“Oh, that! Now I can understand you, Smirt. But if you meant so-and-so”—and the spider named this conjunction with the explicitness of a privy wall—“then why did you not say it sensibly, instead of talking so much nonsense about what you call love?”
“Well, ma’am, there is a certain innate sense of modesty in all male creatures; and we never do quite conquer it.”
But what, the spider then asked, could Smirt possibly know about the spider’s indulgence in an exercise which the spider again mentioned?
“Ah, but come now, Mrs. Arachnomorpha,” Smirt interrupted her hastily, “let us restate the question. Let us phrase it, What can you know about my love affairs? That sounds much better, it really does sound a great deal better to a Southern gentleman, my dear lady.”
“What, then, Smirt, do you know about my love-affairs?”
This was a matter over which Smirt shook his dark curls a bit sadly. He replied:
“More than I find to be wholly applaudable, ma’am. For at love you are sluggish: that is a grave fault in any gentlewoman. At best, your lover can but hope to woo you into a dubious non-resistance of his devotion, by bringing you a fresh fly, which you eat placidly during your mating. And, for dessert, you eat up your most recent husband.”
“Not always,” said the spider, regretfully. “He is too quick for me sometimes. But then that is a husband, all over. He only cares for one thing. After that, he runs away like a coward, and he leaves his wife without a morsel of food.”
“There is perhaps something to be said on both sides,” Smirt stated reflectively. “But you, Mrs. Arachnomorpha, are rather terrible. You have no need of intelligence. Art does not enter into your life. You go for months, I daresay, without reading a book, or even so much as looking over the morning paper. You do not bother at all about justice or piety or philosophy. You desire only a home and a hundred or two children. You labor always to spend your life in killing and eating, not out of any malice or any personal greed, but merely in order that you may grow in size and provide sustenance for more and more spider eggs—and so, by-and-by, for your babies.”
At that, the spider began again to chew silently upon imaginary food. She said then:
“Such, Smirt, is my maternal affection. Such is my altruism. It is only that I am logical about both these virtues, where most mothers and most altruists are not logical. But I, Smirt, I care for the future of my race, whole-heartedly, and with clear eyes.”
“It is that which terrifies me,” said Smirt, with unwonted gravity. “You are actuated by those high moral motives such as always make the urbane uncomfortable. You abase us, you bedwarf all artists and their piddling ways. You remind me of those superior persons who write so instructively about the housing conditions of the poor, or about the political outlook in Washington, or about the progress of the Negro, or about the collapse of civilization; and who thus trouble me, week after week, with the knowledge that I ought to take a very deep interest in the welfare of my fellow creatures, whereas in point of fact I do not care a bit about their welfare. I find, in brief, every sort of altruism to be applaudable and high-minded and of profound interest, Mrs. Arachnomorpha; but I find it, also, to be uncontagious.”
“Then do you leave off all this male talk,” replied the spider, “so that I can get on with the spinning and the weaving and the embroidery which I want to be doing in this place.”
With that, she began to enlarge and strengthen her giant web yet further. And Smirt considered her enterprise pensively.
“I admire,” he reflected, “from the very bottom of my heart, I admire the high moral motives which sustain this praiseworthy insect through a career of not ever ending hard work and butchery. Yet I do not share them, somehow. They do not incite me to become either a silk-weaver or an assassin. No; I remain still the Peripatetic Episcopalian. I remain an artist in living also, whether I like it or not. And as such, as a bon vivant, I prefer at all times to accept that middle world in which men take no side in great conflicts, and decide no great causes, and make great refusals: setting thus for myself the limits within which the great art of living, undisturbed by any moral ambition, does its most sincere and surest work.”
XLIX. RECESSION OF THE PAST
The spider toiled nimbly. About the golden throne of Arathron she had builded her web, surely and dexterously, so that now this throne was the centre of a vast silken wheel. In the throne of heaven the spider thus sat upside down and alone, silent, swaying a little, and waiting patiently for whatever prey luck might send. Indeed she had done her part; hers was the well-earned rest of the victor in a finished quest. She had reclaimed this place for oblivion marking it with the soft sign of her cobwebs, which are the authentic mark of things done with and cast by forever. All Amit was now a part of the past.
And out of the past came many persons. They thronged about Smirt with the seeming that each had worn when Smirt had known these persons upon Earth, in an era very long ago ended upon Earth.
“We played with you, we opposed you, we counseled you, we loved you,” they said, in thin voices, “and to-day we live nowhere except in your memory. It has been a great while since any living man recalled our doings. Give us new life, you whose every wish must be fulfilled. The spider triumphs here, spreading ruin everywhither through her high moral motives, and all heaven becomes an affair of the past. Yet you are Smirt, with omnipotence in your pocket. You have but to wish for our renewed living. Let us live again, do you make splendid this desolate place with your memories, so that your old delights and the zest of your youth and the incredibility of Smirt’s exploits may revive, and endure forever.”
But Smirt shook his head. Here indeed was temptation. His past life, so rich in passion and gusto and scandal, so over-brimming with tender and heroic happenings, was a fund upon which any creative artist might draw profitably. To perpetuate Smirt’s past would be in every respect pleasing; and in fact, when viewed carefully, what theme other than Smirt could be esteemed quite worthy of Smirt’s employment? For here was a theme at once majestic and interesting and of deep importance to the public at large; a theme as to which his knowledge was unique; and a theme, too, which his biographers would forever mishandle, even until Doomsday.
To set them right, by making immortal all Smirt’s past, would be a great charity. Moreover, to revive these perished lives into which he had entered, lives which but for him would be wasted, that also would be a charity; and it was likewise in every way an alluring task. Yet, howsoever dear the past, the most deep desires of Smirt aimed otherwhither.
So he shook his head smilingly.
Then the once famous writers whom he had known in the flesh all looked at him with aggrieved eyes. They were done with, these ardent rebels, they who had flouted, in never so many editions, the Puritan and the Conformist and the Rotarian, and whatever else in their native land they happened to think about when they were typing, throughout the glad days of their vigor. They had made a noise in the world for their granted while: then time and young critics and the public at large, and fame also, had put them aside. So to Smirt, who declined to revive them, they all said, “Farewell.”
After that, the dear women whom Smirt had loved came also, in the delightful clothes of their youth. And if their numerousness might just at first appear a little perturbing, yet was their tact wonderful; for they seemed not to notice one another, they seemed not to have been comparing notes; and they came to him, not at all as the cohabitation of their parents, had made them in crude human flesh, but far more radiantly did they approach Smirt, each one of them bedazzling him with some special loveliness such as Smirt’s own fancy had invented for
this woman to wear in his eyes, and in Smirt’s heart also, throughout the term of her lease. And they each said, “Farewell.”
So they all cried, “Farewell!” with sweet and aggrieved voices. But one of these fair phantoms came toward him in a long silvery-colored robe, embroidered with black stars and with black suns and with black comets; and this woman alone did not cry, “Farewell!”
“For I,” this smiling, grave woman said, “I am served at all times by the powers of the moon, and by all else which is unstable and false and feeble. And so, until time ends for you, and no matter where your light heart may scamper—like a dead dry leaf,—still, Smirt, your thinking will be my kingdom. For my deformed hands alone may bring peace to your thinking; in your thinking my clock ticks relentlessly, at every instant; and my voice is as the wind’s voice, a voice which you can no longer understand, poor Smirt, and none the less cannot ever put out of your thinking.”
Smirt saw that his own hands had lifted toward this woman, a little, before he clenched them. He let fall at each side of him a still clenched hand, urbanely enough, and yet with a tinge of hauteur; for a sound logician does not like to be bothered with inconvenient truths.
After that, Smirt again shook his head smilingly. And he spoke with some inconsequence, saying:
“There is not any longer in my dreaming a princess. No, Tana; for in middle age we put aside that remnant of the Middle Ages: one woman becomes much like another woman: and our hearts are made safe for democracy.”
Then the young college mates with whom his youth had been shared came also. Each of these whom time had not slain officially, time had left gray and unardent. Most of them had bungled their living, and every one of these boys had died, it seemed Smirt, a great while ago. But they came now in the seeming of their remote youth, just as when Smirt had known them, when every sort of pleasant and heroic adventure awaited them, they foreknew, tomorrow. Hurt and wistful and puzzled, all these betrayed boys came toward Smirt, crying out against time’s coarsening touch, and against the infamies being reputable, and against the sure ruin of not being reputable, and against inescapable death also. Then they all said, “Farewell.”
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