The Nightmare Had Triplets

by Branch Cabell

  And the great-natured and kindly persons whom Smirt had known in his childhood, these likewise looked at him now, with the high-up faces of grown people, who were incomprehensible beings, but who protected you from every sort of ill, even from strange dogs and lightning, and who made living a safe and unchanging affair for a little boy. And they too said, “Farewell.”

  Then there was only the first of all his memories, in the coffee-colored, thin and gray-haired face of his nurse. But this Negro woman’s face he could not well see, because of the tears in his eyes. And she said, “Farewell.”

  So was Smirt rid of his past. He would not ever again, he reflected, think about the dead persons whom he had known and about how little their lives had mattered. He would not, he assured himself, any longer remember that he had entered intimately into a great many lives, as wholly done with to-day as was the living of Hannibal or of Hector, and had thus seen what kindly and laborious and trivial doings appeared to consume the main part of every human existence fritteringly. He would not need to bother any more about the amiable futility of mankind. Instead, at long last, Smirt had forever put aside that forever plaguing thought. He was very well rid of his past.

  He was rid of it now that from his pocket he took the forty reis piece, and now that he spoke his wish, because at that instant a large deal which he had known upon Earth, and many of Earth’s creature whom he had loved, went away from him, visibly, like thinning mists. And the spider also had disappeared, for now, in the spider’s place, at the centre of the great silken snare spread everywhither about the gold throne of heaven, sat the young girl Arachne.

  “You have behaved very foolishly,” she said, without any marked displeasure.

  And to that he replied conclusively, saying,—

  “I am Smirt.”

  L. THE DREAM AND THE BUSINESS

  He trembled; he pulsed very joyously with fine juvenile ardors. Never had Smirt imagined any being more dear than was this girl Arachne, seated there at the centre of the vast spider web which spread out into all quarters of heaven. He came toward her, in a state of emotion which surprised Smirt, and which delighted him too, for he had not hoped to recapture such naïveté. He knelt, kissing both her hands.

  He said, “From the first moment I saw you I was doomed.”

  “I liked you too,” she admitted—“I mean, just a little.”

  “I have moved since then as in a dream, Arachne.”

  “And to what end, dear Smirt?” said the girl fondly.

  “To a most sublime end, Arachne. For we two inherit the eternal city of Amit. It seems quite a cosy place for a honeymoon. We could not possibly do better, I submit, than to become the ruling gods of this planet—increasing its pantheon at your convenience, my darling. The affair is easily managed, because I am familiar enough, for all working purposes, with the great words of power which control human beings. We two would be omnipotent and very glorious persons, with temples and bishops and vestrymen and sewing circles and so on. An entire planet would be in our keeping—”

  “That is it exactly, dear Smirt. One house and one man and whatever babies the years may send, are more than a plenty for any one woman to be looking after.”

  And to that dictum, after a little reflection, Smirt nodded—upon the whole—in approval. For upon reflection he doubted if the Peripatetic Episcopalian, at any time during his long travels through uncountable centuries, had ever lost heaven, in this direct tangible fashion, for the sake of a woman. To do that was a splendid, a gigantic feat; and it crowned fittingly a tremendous career. This Smirt, he reflected, was at bottom a delightfully heroic person: you could not but admire a person who did things like that.

  “So be it,” said Smirt. “I shall obey the dictates of my heart. I surrender to your blandishments, my dear, just as you do to mine. I am well content to have you drag me down, from divinity, into common-place business life and sedate domesticity.... Because it is just as I told Company: I do not really care to assume the responsibility of being God. No, it is far better fun to criticize, and to disparage urbanely, the conduct of a world for which some one else is responsible. I have tried being omnipotent—within limits,—and the utmost I have got out of it, until this moment, has been a fair supply of cigarettes and of matches.... So let us by all means not become gods. Let us leave Amit, crying our eternal farewell to the lands beyond common-sense; and even in the crude light of everyday, it may be, I shall create for you a new legend.”

  “But no, dear Smirt, for as a self-respecting business man,” she replied, at once, “you would have to do that by lamplight, if you want to, after the babies have gone to sleep, Smirt, because you will be busy all day in the shop, for so long”—she added, with a fond smile flashed upward at Smirt—“as the biggest of all my babies may happen to live.”

  He accepted this also, saying: “But I stipulate that our shop shall have a small bell that tinkles whensoever a customer opens the door. Upon that one single point I am adamant, elsewhere wax. Yes, with the bell agreed on, Arachne, I will now consent to dream that I become a shopkeeper, a sinew of industry, and a bulwark of the social fabric.”

  Then the girl looked at him thoughtfully. “So, Smirt, and do you think that our meeting is a dream?”

  “I am sure of it, Arachne, for only in dreams is such happiness permitted as I feel at this instant. Only in dreams does one encounter a young person as beautiful as I find you to be. And for another reason, just now, out of the tail of my eye, I saw a spider turn into you: which is a thing, I submit, that could not possibly happen except in a dream.”

  The innocent brown eyes had widened beyond belief, in the while that Arachne answered him, sweetly,—

  “Of course not, dear Smirt, for that is almost preposterous notion.”

  “So we are agreed after all, you perceive,” said Smirt. “And we must necessarily deduce, as becomes a sound logician, that Smirt—whoever Smirt may happen to be—is still dreaming.”

  “But, Smirt”—and you saw now that this lovely child was troubled—“inasmuch as I am only a part of your dream, or of somebody else’s dream, for really you do mix up a person so, then I am not real at all.”

  “You are something far better, Arachne,” he comforted her. “You are adorable. And if only my dream … If it continues long enough, then I who am gifted, willy-nilly, with a great deal of not ever resting wit and fancy—”

  “Yes, but, dear Smirt, but, I believe, you have already told me about that.”

  “—I shall create for you, I repeat, Arachne, if only you will stop interrupting me, a very lovely legend. Then, it may be, I shall put you into this legend, at an eternal remove from my daily life; and with yet another masterwork of romance completed, I may wander into quite different dreams. It is a possibility we should face frankly. For all artists are made like that, my dear; there is no curing them: and of this fact it seems only fair to warn you in advance.”

  “But no one of these things matters as yet; and besides,” the girl Arachne added, with a delightfully sparkling sort of optimism, “besides, it may be that another doom awaits you.”

  It was then Smirt took both her little hands in his hands, and he said gravely:

  “That reminds me, my adored one, that you really must be very careful in the future. About the past I say nothing, inasmuch as no urbane person believes in a double standard of morality for the two sexes. Moreover, I do not object to motherhood, or to altruism either, when it is practiced in moderation. But if any at all serious doom were to befall me in this dream, you see, I would wake up.”

  “Oh!” said Arachne, flushing deliriously. After that she turned pale, for the poor girl perceived what a trap she had been caught in, by a sound logician.

  And Smirt had the grace to be a little ashamed of his artfulness when he saw the adorable child’s dismay, and the deep shock which it had been to her to find a husband getting so completely out of hand that she could not ever hope to dispose of him nutriciously. Yet Smirt would make lovi
ng amends, he assured his disturbed conscience. He would devote the entire remainder of his dream to protecting and to coddling Arachne, so that she would not really, in the long run, regret his outwitting of her girlish and ill-considered first plan.

  Smirt therefore addressed his Arachne with extreme fondness, saying:

  “Yes, my adored child, I would, wake up at once. My entire dream—including you, my beloved—would then vanish instantly. So pray do let me impress upon you, once and for all, the fact that you must not loose upon me any such dietary doom as you may be outlining, through mere force of habit, inside that very beautiful small head of yours. To do that, Arachne, would but be to contrive your own suicide, along with—need I say?—the destruction of all your oncoming descendants. So I make bold to hope that your maternal affection and your altruism may combine to dissuade you, my precious, from any such fatal step.”

  “It is true,” said the Spider Woman, speaking from a perturbed point somewhere between ruefulness and admiration, “that the dictates of these two virtues must be honored, at any cost. Nevertheless, this is a sly trick, and it is a mean trick, which you have played on me, dear Smirt, by putting me in your dreams and upsetting my whole manner of living.”

  “All is fair in love, my sweet pet,” Smirt consoled her; “and besides, what occurs in a dream does not count. You should not take it too seriously. The one thing which counts at all, my very dearest, is that the dreaming of Smirt—whoever Smirt may happen to be—still continues a while longer, just as irrationally as it began.”

  “And yet—that likewise is nonsense, dear Smirt.”

  “Why, but of course it is, my darling. It is life.” With that settled, they left heaven, in order to look for a suitable small shop.

  EXPLICIT

  SMITH

  A Sylvan Interlude

  BY BRANCH CABELL

  “To look at the man is but to court deception … for no man lives in the external truth, among salts and acids, but in the warm, phantasmagoric chamber of his brain, with the painted windows and the storied walls”

  NEW YORK: MCMXXXV

  ROBERT M. McBRIDE & COMPANY

  SMITH

  COPYRIGHT, 1935

  BY JAMES BRANCH CABELL

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  FIRST EDITION

  For

  JOHN LOTTIER CABELL

  Jauntily as Mr. Smith

  Ordains that Branlon be a jumble,

  Heaven makes each man a myth—

  Narrow-minded, ardent, humble,

  Loosely-living, love-led, mean,

  Opinionated, greedy, grieving,

  Timid, noble, gay, obscene,

  Trustless; and in self-deceiving

  Inimitably past believing.

  Equably as Mr. Smith

  Regards his children’s odd appearance,

  Canny persons traffic with

  All their kindred’s incoherence.

  Brethren need not criticize

  Each the other’s variant metal

  Loudly—nor in any wise

  Let x the pot flout y the kettle.

  PART ONE. THE BOOK OF BRANLON

  “The present value of standing timber in the forest of Branlon is estimated at $480,000,000. Of the forest lands some 65% we owned by professional wizards and companies having saw mills, pulp mills, paper mills, etc. About 90% of the sawn and planed wood is exported, 70% of the wood pulp, and 6o% of the paper as it is specially prepared for romance writing. Pine, ebony, fir, redwood, maple, mahogany and other valuable cabinet woods are produced here, in addition to magic and much cedar for the manufacture of cigar boxes.”

  I. HOW CHARLEMAGNE CAME

  They recount how Charlemagne, the Franks’ Emperor, combined religion with his family squabbles by setting forth to relieve the Pope at Rome. That holy city was then being besieged by the Emperor’s father-in-law, Desiderius, King of the Lombards, whom Charlemagne proposed to destroy piously. They relate how, upon the primitive road between the kingdoms of Rorn and Ecben, the great army of Charlemagne came to the forest of Branlon. And they tell how a pedlar (who had just put aside a cigarette) stood in the Emperor’s way, barring the all-conqueror’s armed advance with a wooden staff, and crying out that upon this forest had been laid an enchantment.

  “Expound,” said the Emperor.

  “Highness,” replied the pedlar, “the nature of this magic is not comprehended any longer. But in the old time, and in the days which have gone out of man’s memory, Mr. Smith was Lord of this forest.”

  “Now, of Mr. Smith,” the Emperor declared, with his hands and his voice, all three, uplifted by his deep wonder, “I have never heard in any myth or legend. Yet Mr. Smith is a most marvelous divine name. It is strange and terrible. It appals. It is ruthless. It is a name which in every respect befits a divine being.”

  “Well,” the pedlar explained, “and hereabouts a not very important sort of divine being did wear this name—but not ruthlessly—a long while before any Pharaoh had reigned or bright Babylon became mighty. Wolves hunted where your fine city of Aachen now stands, highness; seven fishermen held Tyre; nor had Troy arisen in that quiet day when Mr. Smith was a little god ruling over this forest, a god friendly to all mankind, and to the light-haired daughters of mankind in particular.”

  “It is known,” said the Emperor, with that harsh curtness which befitted a good Christian, “that the lewd gods of the heathen are to-day changed into demons.”

  “That is known everywhere, highness. But Mr. Smith was not any longer a god when the Crucifixion was accomplished, for the eternal redemption of mankind, and was properly entered in the police records of Judea. It was then a great while since Mr. Smith had been famous in all prayer-books as a divine being and as the leader of the Seven Stewards of Heaven, ruling over them in his own paradise, in high Amit, under another name than the name of Smith.”

  “But what was that name?”

  The pedlar replied, reverently, “He was then called Smirt.”

  “And that superb monosyllable,” declared Charlemagne, “is a large miracle which I have encountered before to-day, although I do not recollect in what place it was.”

  “That is likely, highness: for sublime Smirt was once known in every place. But he relinquished heaven, on account of a woman. He descended into the estate of a local deity; and his epithet became Smith, a name so narrowly famous that not even the most learned Romans in the days of Augustus have dared hazard a conjecture as to the nature of his cult.”

  “Yes, yes!” said the Emperor.

  “For I, highness, I do not agree with Herbastein, that Varro cites an inscription in which Smith is joined with Pomona.”

  “Spare me,” the Emperor commanded, “all this misplaced erudition.”

  “I obey, highness, remarking only that the passage occurs nowhere in the treatise called De lingua Latina. So Mr. Smith became less known, and even yet less widely known, as the loud centuries marched by, without any deliberation of Mr. Smith; and one after another, a host of spruce parvenu gods ruled over the planet which All-Highest & Company had first given to sublime Smirt.”

  “In this world,” the Emperor philosophized, “all greatness must have its tumble.”

  “Yet the truly great,” said the pedlar, “will tumble gracefully. They remain always urbane. At all events, Mr. Smith had kept only this forest when the Olympians flourished. He was not known in any heaven; he was honored at utmost, here and there, by peasants and by pessimists and by poets. Strong Jahveh, when he smote down the Olympians, had not any cause to distrust Mr. Smith, the local deity of Branlon, or to covet his lean sacrifices of salt and of fruit, of hexameters and of slim maidens with pale-colored hair. For this reason, Mr. Smith was not changed, nor was his domain altered. He still kept that very little kingdom which he had chosen here in this forest after Arachne betrayed him—in his own shop, highness,—and after the shock of her blood-thirst had awakened him from his long dream of being Smirt.”

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nbsp; “I have it now!” said the Emperor. “I remember that superb and quite indescribable being, because”—here Charlemagne inclined his head reverently—“because Smirt once came to my court, in a jiffy. His wit, his fancy, and the vast stores of his erudition, were limitless. Indeed, he himself told me so. And he was then looking, I can recall, for a girl named Arachne.”

  “That is probable, highness. They record that, in his long dream about his own omnipotence, Smirt was much pestered by women. And upon four of them he begot children, who were born of a dreaming god and of a woman who existed, it may be, only in the dreams of that god.”

  Charlemagne said, pondering, “But all this appears to me to be nonsense.”

  “It is quite plainly nonsense,” agreed the pedlar. “Nevertheless, it was a fact; and all facts are of considerable interest to a sound logician. So this fact forever afterward troubled Mr. Smith. It troubled him because, to a sound logician, the deduction was far too obvious, that for children, and quadruply for four children, born of such most irregular parentage, there could be no place in any world known to us.”

  “Still—” said the Emperor.

  “No, highness, but I can assure you that inference was a mere matter of logic. Not even Aristotle, in his Constitution of Athens and his History of Animals, has disputed this point.”