The Nightmare Had Triplets

by Branch Cabell

  No, Volmar decided, as he stumbled on toward death, he could not give his approval to the hanging of Volmar. The entire business was silly. It was peculiarly silly that this bluebird had come to inform people spring was now near at hand, quite as if that mattered, when everything would be over, within the next nine minutes, for this Volmar, for this not ever explained and incomprehensible Volmar, who seemed somehow to have become a stranger to you, and a somewhat admirable stranger, if you judged honestly, inasmuch as Volmar had rioted, and had sung, and had fought, with the best of earth’s gentry, all the long bright way from his first callow freedoms to this thick privet hedge which you were now stumbling through sidewise, with the twigs tickling your nose at a moment in which you were not able to scratch it, because of the absurd military routine that tied up your hands behind you when you could not possibly risk your last flickers of being a devil-may-care fellow by asking stupid, splendid and pious old Caspar to scratch your nose, like a dry nurse.

  Then of a sudden Volmar’s bemuddled thoughts became clear and bitter, because upon the farther side of the privet hedge he had found a cloaked woman waiting.

  “It is even as I said,” observed Volmar, jeeringly. “This lady intends to see the very last of me. She cannot bear to think that I must die a knave’s death without the spur of her beauty to hearten me now that I cry, Hail and farewell, fair Sonia!”

  Sonia put by her blue cloak. “Wicked man, for what reason must you be speaking your lies about me in my father’s great hall openly?”

  At that, his thick eyebrows went up. He appeared surprised, almost grieved.

  “Why, and did I not speak the truth, Sonia, in saying that until your life ends, you will always be remembering me—now?”

  She said, gravely: “I shall remember you. That is true. But I shall remember you with my contempt and with my hatred.”

  “Time will show,” replied Volmar. “You will recall by-and-by that I provoked certain death in order that you might remember me always. Turn about, my fair idiot, is fair play. You stay forever in my thoughts, the thoughts which end here; and so do I mean henceforward to stay forever in your thoughts through the long years to come in that quiet while after I have put by thinking and all other sorts of time-wasting. You must always remember, will-you or nill-you, my pretty prude, the drink-sodden Volmar who gave his life in order that you might remember him. With time, you will come to appreciate that very handsome compliment. And about the dead man who paid you this compliment, will-you or nill-you, Sonia, you will think, at first, with curiosity, and, by-and-by, with some tenderness.”

  She regarded him for a pensive moment, looking up at him sidewise. She smiled thinly, in replying to him,—

  “You have a knowledge of women, dark Volmar; but not enough knowledge.”

  “I do not pretend to omniscience, Lady. I say only that all which a hale youngster could learn, during the bustling days and the not unbusy nights of some fifteen years, I have learned about women in fifteen kingdoms and in more than fifteen kingdoms.”

  “Lewd Volmar,” she said, sharply, “now your debauchery ends. It ends by your being given into my hands, so that your punishment shall be as I desire.”

  She paused. Her eyes were bright and hard, her lips a straight line. She said:

  “I condemn you to live. So do you loose this long-legged sot, Caspar, and let him go free into exile without any hurt save the sting of his self-knowledge.”

  Volmar cried out, in a changed voice: “I will not accept your mercy! I am too vile!”

  “Nor would I grant you any mercy,” the girl said, “if I did not know that the sick vanities which fester in your drunken thoughts must make of anybody’s mercy a bitterness. For this reason do I punish you with my mercy,—Volmar, the braggart and the fool, the defamer of ladies, the babbler of a sot’s lies! I order that you shall live on in your soiled infamy, and be known everywhere as Volmar the Drunken Liar, and have no place in my thoughts.”

  Obeying her, the soldiers had untied Volmar. He stood clutching and unclutching his numbed fingers, and looking down at Sonia with a flushed face in which rage mingled with amusement. He said, jeeringly:

  “You have conquered for this while, Lady. You have tricked first your father out of satisfying his just anger, as now you trick me out of satisfying my dislike of your mincing, prim-mouthed hypocrisy. It is my one comfort, Sapphira, that your early rising and your glib deceits of everybody proclaim that, after all, you must think about me a great deal.”

  A patch of red in each cheek showed him that Sonia too had a temper to lose.

  “I think about no man living, Volmar the Drunken Liar, in the foul way you leer over. I keep instead my clean heart for that man who shall prove worthy of it; and as yet I have seen him nowhere.”

  At that, Volmar cried out, under the lash of her scorn, and in the anger of his humiliation:

  “Do you not let your itching need of a young man wide awake in your bed be bothering you, most detestable of women! No; for you have given me dishonor and the eternal sting of self-knowledge. But I, Volmar, the son of Smirt, I shall requite you with a fine stalwart young husband to cool your hot prudish lusts every night and all night long.”

  “My husband, lewd foul-tongued Volmar, shall be of my own choosing—yes, and he shall be a man of clean honor and a person as unlike you as I can find anywhere in the whole world.”

  “Your husband shall be of my choosing,” returned Volmar, furiously.

  “He shall not be!” said the Princess, stamping her foot.

  “But indeed he shall be, Sonia! Yes, and moreover, it is he, you bad-tempered creature, who will have to put up with your eternal arguing about everything until you have driven the man quite insane.”

  “Why, then,” said the Princess, “there will be a pair of you.”

  Volmar answered, with a demented loftiness: “Whether there be a pair of men or a round dozen of men who deplore your existence, Sonia, I at least do not mean to argue with you. No; for what I have said, I have said. You shall marry the man whom I pick out for you, this thing I swear by high heaven and by all the gold-slippered saints in it; and that is an end of the matter.”

  “But that, Volmar, that is not an end. It is only another bragging oath; and what sane saint anywhere would be giving his heed to the oath of a drunken liar?”

  Volmar said, gloomily: “I do not know. But I mean to find out.”

  So was it that Volmar was again free to wander at adventure, jeeringly observing the world’s ways. There was in his mind a difference, however, as he rode out of Osnia with no temporal possessions except his horse, his long sword and the two pistols at his belt. He was much fretted by the downfall of his drunken plans, because, just as he had meant to live always in her thoughts, so now in his thoughts was always Sonia.

  And besides that, in plain fairness, Volmar had decided, he must henceforward obey this abominable creature in regard to changing his name. When he came now to any castle, or to the court of a king, he must now bid the porter announce him as Volmar the Drunken Liar. Yes, it was this title—which was not, to Volmar’s opinion, captivating—that the South Wind’s own grandchild, and a son of the sublime Master of Gods, would hereafter have to make the best of, damn the prim slut!

  X. THE BROWN PRIEST

  They relate how Volmar came, in the shadow of five great oaks which had seen the dawn of history, and had borne acorns before human wisdom begot any large wars, to the home of a brown priest who lived alone in this quiet place. They say that this holy man had not any companion except a notably colored huge ram. This ram had bright yellow wool and a crimson head and rather dark blue horns and green feet. They tell also that to this priest Volmar confessed all the sins of Volmar; and thus spoke about that consuming hatred which Volmar now entertained toward the Princess Sonia.

  “Come,” said the priest, who was called Belial, “but hatred is not the most becoming exercise for a gentleman’s faculties. In fact, hatred is by many theologians ranked a
s a cardinal enormity. This affair is grave!”

  He reflected over it sadly; and then Belial said: “Yet, after all, it was with untruthful words that you offended against decency and honor and religion likewise. So it seems only fair for you to atone with untruthful words.”

  “That is good sense, beyond doubt. But your meaning, sir, is beyond understanding.”

  “Sit here,” said the holy man, “and I will show you my meaning.”

  Volmar sat down on the shining black stone which was carved like a toad’s head. Then, just in front of him, brown Belial kindled a fire of cedar-wood, and he sprinkled a red powder upon this fire, saying:

  “In the name of Belial, may the Horned Lord command thee and drive thee hence, Raphael! In the name of Belial, may Chavajoth command thee and drive thee hence, Gabriel! Let us labor in peace, Michael! By the Needle, and by the Werewolf, we deny to you ever-meddlesome three the fine fruit of our labors.”

  Now the fire cast out lazily a thick smoke, which ascended, and which divided into colors; and then these colors took form. Thus before Volmar was made the appearance of an orchard revealed in the shadow-less, very clear first light of dawn. Through the flowering apple-trees came a cloaked man; and pausing before a window, he spoke, in a thin far-away voice.

  It was of the dawn that he spoke, as a dream speaks, telling about the evils and the doubts bred in the night time. One had for guide at this season, his thin voice declared, only the aloof stars twinkling about their own affairs frostily; or, it might be, one was misled fitfully by the untruthful moon, a furtive and blemished being, a provoker of lunacies, a known aider of thieves, and a most notable equivocator, so dubious even as to her own name that none knew beyond question whether it were Phoebe or Diana or Cynthia or Lucina.

  Volmar remarked, “Pooh!”

  Such dubieties (continued the cloaked man, still speaking as a dream speaks) were contagious; and they made uncertainties pandemic: for unfaith prospered everywhere under the weak rule of this watery sceptic; so that the lover when absent overnight from his beloved was not always absent from jealousy. Ohimé, but at night even the wise dead were betrayed into doubts of their own blessed condition, wandering about as lost ghosts, at odds with all common-sense, because these deceased persons had been tricked, by night’s doubtfulness, into relinquishing the well-earned repose which they had purchased by dying. “Stuff and nonsense!” said Volmar. Night, said the far-away thin voice, was fallacious; night coldly prevaricated; night was not to be relied on: but with each dawn came warm certainty. For Sonia arose then, in common with that lesser luminary the sun. And before her radiance the guttering stars died out like the spent candles of dark falsehood’s ended misrule, and the whey-faced moon fled, with the timidness of an exposed swindler, before the veracity of Sonia’s beauty.

  Well, and at that, an exasperated Volmar cried out, “Bosh!”

  But in the smoke picture the window above the tall cloaked man had opened a little way, and a woman’s white hand dropped from this window a white rose. The cloaked man pressed this flower to his lips, and Volmar saw that this man had the dark face, the petulant gross mouth, and the heavy eyebrows of Volmar.

  “You perceive,” said the priest, “the good will of this good-hearted simpleton is to be won easily enough if only one goes about it in a manner sufficiently high-spoken.”

  Volmar replied, with a poet’s candor, “I have made dozens upon dozens of better morning-songs than is this labored twaddle in disrespect to the moon.”

  “Oh, but very truly!” agreed Belial, with a quickness which showed him to be the prince of critics. “And any one of your superb poems, when once it has been a bit pulled about, and has been adapted properly to this Sonia’s big brown eyes and her fine skin and her plump high breasts, and to yet other luxuries of a gentleman’s sleeping apartments, will serve you to admiration.”

  “But,” said Volmar, “but I do not desire a white rose, or any other maudlin reward, from a creature so detestable.”

  “Yes, that is quite understood. It is only for your soul’s health, which is now imperilled by the great sin of hatred,” replied Belial, “that I would urge you to lie your way into her good graces. What follows, you may regard, should you so elect, as a penance. In any case, do you look again.”

  Obeying the soft, the grave, and the yet somehow dangerous voice, Volmar saw that the magical smoke picture had taken on more subdued colors. Still the same orchard was visible, with the difference that you saw it now, a little while after sunset, in a rising golden-tinged twilight which revealed indecisively the discolored leaves of autumn and the ripe apples upon every tree. A man stood there, beneath Sonia’s window; and he spoke, as a dream speaks, saying:

  “Lady, I would that, as my words mount up to you, so likewise my thoughts might aspire to enter your presence. But they dare not. You appear to me too fine and too holy, upon this stilled evening, in which, like those western clouds, my thoughts yet keep a pink tinge of flesh. When I consider you, then my love vanishes, because, like a more gentle Gorgon, your cool glance petrifies love into worship, and you chill all un-Christian desires. You enforce me to live either as a monk or as a pagan.

  “So do I become a pagan, now that daylight dies and the flaring star of Venus reigns alone and low and strangely lovely in the green void sky. Than Venus there is no power more strong or affable. We wait together outside your window, Venus and I, in this yearning silence: there is no sound in the orchard except my sad speaking. The beauty of Venus is great and clear and kindly and inaccessible: beholding her, I think perforce about Sonia; and I lament that to such beauty I may not ascend, not even in my thinking.

  “No; I may not ascend. Yet it may be, ah, Lady, it well may be that this Venus still stoops earthward, now and then, upon her amicable missions of charity, and that she meets amicably with a more modern Anchises or with some stripling Adonis. In a mere goddess such charity is allowed; and for this reason, Lady, I would that you too were a goddess, and not a stone-cold saint enshrined in your remote purity, denying to any man the proud jewel of your heart, that diamond-like jewel, which is flawless and splendid and very hard.”

  The appearance of Sonia now stood at the window. She beckoned. The man’s figure climbed up to the window and entered it: but he looked back, as though to make sure no one was spying on him, and in the golden-tinged twilight the man’s face was the face of Volmar. Then this appearance of Volmar closed the latticed window, and nothing more was visible in the smoke wreaths.

  “So,” said the priest, “do you abandon your hatred, Volmar, and we will see to it that this false seeming becomes a true seeming. You have but to give me a little gift in tribute to my master, and he will ensure that you enter this same bedroom window in just this way. The Horned Lord will make true the words of your drunken boasting; and he will thus remove from you for all time your dishonor.”

  “That is good sense,” Volmar agreed. “For when I have not any longer lied, why, then—in so far as I can see—I shall not any longer be a liar.”

  “Moreover, Volmar, you will then be at liberty with a clear conscience to expose the girl’s worthlessness to everybody. You can in this way satisfy, not that hatred which is a sin, but that praiseworthy abhorrence of a wanton woman which is a virtue.”

  “You are still speaking good sense, as well as good piety,” said Volmar, “and yet, somehow, I do not like it.”

  “Nevertheless, my son, you ought to be very grateful to the sound reasoning which has shown you how, at the light cost of a little fornication, to be rid of all dishonor as well as of the great sin of hatred.”

  “You speak smoothly,” said Volmar, with a fretted sigh, “and I admit there is no flaw in your argument. Through her dishonor alone may my troubles be healed. Yes, Belial, you point out to me a way in which at one stroke to retrieve my good name through the ruin of her good name, and to re-establish my veracity by destroying her virtue. Moreover, you have the appearance of a holy and amiable person. Yet your f
eet are the feet of a huge bird, of a fierce bird of prey.”

  “Ah, yes, Volmar, for my master has put that sign upon all his priesthood. It is but a divine idiosyncrasy, a mere matter of ritual. Let us not think about such pedal peculiarities, or any other light trifles, now that you are about to exchange hatred for love and your dishonor for the respect and the envy of everybody.”

  But Volmar arose, scowling, from the dark sleek stone which was carved like a toad’s head; and to the holy man he replied with harsh stubbornness.

  “No,” said Volmar; “I will not traffic with you and your piety and your good sense and your soft chamberings. I prefer to keep my dishonor and my wicked hatred of this detestable woman. I will make no terms with her, nor with you either. I decline to dishonor the abominable creature as a fit punishment for preserving my life. To the contrary, just as I threatened, I mean by-and-by to marry her off, in all honor, to that unfortunate person who most nearly deserves her.”

  XI. GRIEF OF THE SOUTH WIND

  They tell now that the next person whom Volmar met was a huge shining horseman in late middle life. He was not clad meanly. Instead, his fine golden armor was adorned everywhere with rubies, as was also his triangular shield of gold; and on his breastplate of gold blazed yet other rubies. His saddle was bordered with gray eagle feathers; and trappings of red silk and of yellow silk made splendid his tall golden-colored horse. Thus handsomely fared the stranger who cried out, to dark Volmar, in friendly tones,—