She replied: “My husband, many words are the frailty of women. So let us now dismiss my ignoble song, as of no least practical importance to anybody, because the fact has been justly noted by philosophers that music cannot even cure a toothache.”
“Well, I would not pretend,” Little Smirt said, “to have made any really thorough study of music, inasmuch as my mastery of several instruments, including the dulcimer, the trombone, the shawm, and the piccolo, remains as yet theoretic—”
“I am sure, my husband,” she again interrupted him, respectfully, “that, since you are a master of all noteworthy arts, the contemptible instruments which you name cannot rationally have deserved your valuable attention. And I never did like the piccolo either.”
“My wife,” he exhorted her, “let us not indulge in unscholarly overstatement! Three or four things are unknown to me with absolute certainty, and perhaps a full dozen.”
“Now you are being over-modest, my husband; and I cannot believe the garnered fruit of your studies to be thus speckled.”
“In fact, now that we discuss music, it does occur to me,” Little Smirt admitted, “that horns and trumpets were invented by the Etrurians. I consider it remarkable that the first organ is said to have been made by a barber. I believe that the earliest flutes of which we have record were manufactured, variously, from the wood of the lotus-tree and the leg-bone of a kid. To the other side, I do not just at present recall the origin of the lyre, of the triangle, of the harp, or even of the barbitos, which is mentioned favorably by both Anacreon and Sappho.”
“My husband, I accept with due gratitude all these savory crumbs from the high table of your omniscience, where eloquence feasts uninterruptedly with learning.”
“But,” Little Smirt continued, “as a practising poet, I do, quite naturally, know by heart all the world’s better-thought-of songs, from its earlier epics, bucolics and idyls, down to the current madrigals, sestinas and epithalamiums. Yet your fine song, my wife, I do not know at all. And I deduce it must be a brand-new song.”
“My husband,” replied Bel-Imperia, “it is an old song, as ancient as human grief, and as far out of fashion nowadays as are the naïve magics of April or the neat turn of an epigram. For that reason I will write out the words of this song, here upon the august walls of your revered and infernally accomplished mother; so that at leisure your acute mind may trifle with such debased futilities as the offensive Bel-Imperia has but lately rendered with the voice of a rain-crow.”
Then, using a red crayon, beautiful Bel-Imperia wrote upon the wall the words which she had just sung. Little Smirt read them slowly and perplexedly, for these words seemed now without any meaning. He turned, to say as much, as well as to protest against the unjust simile of a rain-crow; and he perceived that his wife had vanished.
“That is a fine trick to be playing upon an impatient bridegroom,” said Little Smirt, merrily, as he looked first behind all the screens and then under the divans.
XXXIX. CONCLUSIONS OF MADAM TANA
“For what reason, O my son and most undignified of all fools,” demanded Madam Tana, who entered at this moment—attended by her servant Klinck, who came hopping ponderously behind her, carrying a market basket,—“for what reason, O heavenly afflicted creature, are you lying down upon my rugs peeping under my divans? and what do you mean by this silly talk about the impatience of a bridegroom?”
“All men, Mama,” Little Smirt replied to her, dusting his knees, “are bidden to seek heaven: but, as goes your second question, I shall spare your blushes by not answering it.”
“You need not,” declared Madam Tana; “inasmuch as my senses have well served me, both in my highhearted youth and in my austere old age. Yet when, O my son and most unhappily misguided of idiots, did you become a bridegroom?”
“It was but a moment since, Mama, or it might have been five minutes ago, that I married Bel-Imperia, the fair singing-girl.”
The old wise-woman looked at him very gravely. Her shrivelled underlip quivered; yet when she spoke, it was with her usual harshness.
“Bel-Imperia died the day before yesterday,” said Madam Tana. “Her burial tablets have been erected; her not in the least remarkable body has been put under ground; and all probable needs of this hussy beyond the tomb have been duly provided for and burned, in the form of a paper coach, six paper chairs, a box of cosmetics and of rubber goods, a paper bed large enough to accommodate two persons, and a neat fortune in counterfeit paper money. I know this, because I have but newly returned from her funeral. So do you explain to me, O my son, just what has happened.”
Little Smirt, in a state of some natural confusion, told of how Bel-Imperia had visited him; and Madam Tana’s scarlet-colored servant—for red was the hue of Klinck everywhere—croaked out an assent as to this having been no dream but a true happening.
“That the girl was not mortal seemed plain to anybody,” said Klinck, “inasmuch as at her finger-tips she had bright shining claws, and her body cast no shadow. I noted these facts, but considered them none of my business. And besides, Madam Tana has had many such improbable visitors since she deserted sublime Smirt to follow after the white rabbit that lives in the moon. I have learned to serve all such visitors without comment.”
“Then do you continue to do so,” said Madam Tana, striking him: but to Little Smirt she said, gently,—
“O my unfortunate son, do you likewise continue.”
Little Smirt obeyed her, giving a complete account of his wedding; and the old woman listened, nodding her wise gray head.
“You appear honorably to have married a dead person,” she said, at last. “This is serious, O my son; and from all points of view you would have done far better to have indulged illegally that disgraceful appetite for immodest young females which I have so constantly caught you attempting to satisfy.”
“Oh, but, Mama,” Little Smirt protested, “a sound knowledge of anatomy is needful to all scholars.”
“—For whether this dead trollop,” Madam Tana went on, “will be re-born as a bird or an animal or a human being, and whether male or female, depends upon the meritorious actions of her last life. I imagine that most singing-girls evolve into some lower order of vermin. But in any case, the spirit of Bel-Imperia will keep its power over your spirit.”
“I desire that, Mama, for my hand and my heart likewise have been given to Bel-Imperia, and I cannot live without her.”
“I spoke in very much this way, my son, in the days of my youthfulness, when a white rabbit ended the love between me and that good-for-nothing father of yours. But time cured me.”
After that, Madam Tana stood for a while with her gray head tilted backward, peering as if in perplexed disapproval at the strange red writing upon her wall, of which Little Smirt could make nothing; and her withered lips moved silently. She was puzzling out, you perceived, some meaning, after all; and she sighed over it.
Then the wise-woman burned incense in a brass tray until the tray was filled with ashes. She smoothed flat these ashes. She held up the still-smoking brass tray above her head, with both hands, and she cried out the Thief Charm, saying:
“Aragoni Parandamo Eptalicon Lamboured! Be it shown what power has stolen the soul of my son!”
Afterward Madam Tana lowered the tray; and Little Smirt saw that upon the ashes was now an imprint.
“It is like the hoof of a goat.” said Little Smirt.
“Yes,” said Madam Tana, “for this is Urc Tabaron’s signature. This involves the Lord of the Forest. So it seems you have married yourself into the entourage of a sort of god, or, at any rate, of a local deity. You might have done worse, when one considers matters calmly—and allows for your hard-headed imbecility,—inasmuch as that worthless father of yours was a very great god, and you cannot well help taking after him. In any event, everything is plain now; and you must seek for your Bel-Imperia in Branlon.”
“By what road, Mama, shall I come to Branlon?”
“I will
find you a guide,” said the old woman.
XL. THE DEAD HAND
Madam Tana returned by-and-by, bearing in her right hand her left hand, which, as Little Smirt saw with astonishment, had been chopped off her wrist. Now it was a peculiarity of the hands of Madam Tana that she had been born without any little finger upon either hand.
She spoke sullenly to Little Smirt, saying: “This hand will be your guide. Do you lay it in your breast. Then when my hand presses upon your right side, do you turn to the left; but when the cold fingers of my hand clutch at your shallow and worthless heart, do you turn to the right; and so will you come to Branlon across this world and across half the lands beyond common-sense.”
Little Smirt said, “But why have you thus mutilated yourself, Mama, in order to serve my desire?”
She replied, with venom: “In order, O tall blockhead and most addlepated of all fine-looking imbeciles, that your desire might be served. There was not any other way.”
Well, and at that, Little Smirt embraced her, weeping copiously.
“There is no love,” he remarked, “in any way comparable in its unreason to the love which a mother cherishes for her son.”
She pushed him away from her, saying, “Nonsense, you great clodhopper!”
“Yet every mother,” Little Smirt continued, “first encounters her son in childbed as the direct provoker of sufferings which are reputed to be considerable; she needs perform for the brat throughout his childhood all those uncaptivating if sanitary tasks which are necessitated by the unreticence of the young; and her reward is that, should she by-and-by make of him a mammal at all suited to polite circles, it is in the home of some other woman that the jackanapes will be displaying the sparse virtues so painfully and so laboriously taught him by his dear mother. He is for her, in short, a source of anguish, of hard work, of dirt, of anxiety, and of ingratitude; and she requites him with love. It is a phenomenon I do not at all understand.”
“There are many things which you do not understand, you gross long-legged dunce,” declared Madam Tana, “and among these I would include your own incessant talking.”
“Yes, Mama,” replied Little Smirt, meekly, “even though, with care, I do now and then catch the general drift of it. Anyhow, I was going on to remark that, just as of all sons I am perhaps the most unworthy, so among mothers are you beyond doubt the best.”
“Well—” she said, speaking almost gently.
“Nor do I exclude,” Little Smirt continued, “the most pre-eminent of the world’s mothers. Indeed, when I consider Niobe, and Nature, and Eve, and Rachel, and Necessity, and Cornelia (who was the mother of the Gracchi, Mama), and the old woman who lived in a shoe, and that very famous she-wolf who suckled Romulus and Remus—why, then, Mama, I feel wholly certain that by rights you belong somewhere in this noble category.”
Madam Tana then struck him with her remaining hand, saying,—
“It is in fact the curse of a she-wolf that she bears cubs.”
“Oh, but, Mama, but you have quite misunderstood a refined classical allusion,” Little Smirt protested, rubbing his cheek.
“That is possible, you young windbag, even though your saying so does not make it any whit the more probable. At all events, do you now stop your eternal chattering, which reminds me but too unpleasantly of your divine father; and do you be off to your hussy in Branlon.”
“I owe to you at all times obedience,” replied Little Smirt, fondly.
He wondered, in his touched heart, why they must at every minute be squabbling, in defiance of the deep love between them; and he suspected that, if he got from his father a certain loquaciousness, it must have been from his unspeakably more dear Mama that Little Smirt had inherited a reliable talent for making himself disagreeable. Well, but heredity, he reflected, was a vast problem; and the present instant seemed rather ill-chosen for its complete solution.
After that, he kissed his dear but intolerable mother; he put on his purple cap adorned with a jaunty peacock feather; and he took up his spear, which had two tassels on it, to denote a hero and a scholar.
He then mounted his gray horse, turning westward. So was it that Little Smirt set forth in search of a dead woman, with the lopped-off charmed hand of another woman to guide him.
XLI. CHASTITY OF A SCHOLAR
Now the hand of his mother was to Little Smirt an unfailing aid. It lay in his bosom like a cold frog. But at every forking of the road, the hand would indeed move sluggishly, he found; and it would thus show to Little Smirt which fork led toward Branlon. It guided him in this way across nine kingdoms, six duchies, and four principalities, without at any time leaving him doubtful as to what was the right road and the right course of prudence also.
For example, when he had ridden but a short distance, across a barren and hillocky plain, broken here and there by large white stones and by tall clumps of coarse whip-like grass, he came to seven palm-trees. Among these trees stood a gold-colored pavilion, about which lay scattered the bones of dead men. Above the entrance to this tent hung an empty birdcage; and at the entrance to this tent, near a table-top of jacinth placed on two stools of ivory, sat a woman clothed in scarlet who was wholly beautiful.
“Health and fair days!” said Little Smirt.
She replied, “Health and fair days, and delectable nights also!”
“Aha,” said Little Smirt, “but that is a timely wish, for already the evening draws on.”
She came near to his stirrup, stately in her gait as the peacock under whose plume Little Smirt travelled, and graceful in her every movement as is the swaying bough. This much Little Smirt observed: for his mind was now seeking similes; so he marveled at the glorious hair of this woman, which had the color of midnight, and at her skin white as lime, and at her gleaming eyes like the large stars in a time of frost.
“Truly the evening draws on,” said this most; lovely lady; “and the wise birds are already going to bed in the tree-tops above us. They are at liberty keep one another awake there, even until dawn. But for me this is a more desolate evening, tall youth: for my husband has gone upon a long journey, from which he will not return until to-morrow afternoon; and he has left me here, quite alone, to guard his treasure, as I best may.”
Little Smirt said: “So you have treasures here, me beautiful of ladies, at your own free disposal, inasmuch as your husband will not be returning until to-morrow afternoon? Of what nature are the treasures?”
“Can you not guess, O gently speaking, sweet troubler of my heart?”
“Well, in most Oriental countries,” replied Little Smirt, soberly, “such treasures would, in all likelihood, consist of fine carpets of raw silk and fringed mats of scented goats’ leather; and cups of carnelian studded with rubies, and gay satins and figured brocades; and large camel bladders filled with ambergris and with musk and with camphor; and perhaps you have likewise a number of knicknacks made out of ebony and of ivory and of Andalusian copper.”
“You have not hit it as yet, O fair scholar more comely than the moon. I guard thirty treasures: but no one of them have you mentioned, nor have they maddened you with delight in them, as yet.”
“Oh! ah!” said Little Smirt, whose profound studies had, of course, included Spanish and a great host of old Spanish customs. “Can it be, O my life, that, of these thirty treasures, three are white and three are black and three are red? Is it possible, O woman of beauty, that, of these treasures, three are long and three are short and three are wide?”
“Indeed, that is the exact way of it, dear scholar more ruddy than the sun,” she returned, smiling: “and so great is my joy in your handsomeness, so boundless is my desire to increase your knowledge, that if you will but come into this tent, then I will show you every one of those treasures which are the peculiar delight of my husband.”
“Well, inasmuch as Gregory the Great tells us seeing is believing, that appears to me a fair test,” Little Smirt answered, “if only because it is not righteous for any scholar, whatsoever ma
y be the funds of his secular information, to dispute the word of a pope.”
And then, just as he made ready to dismount from his horse, the cold hand in his bosom pinched him with a vigorousness which caused Little Smirt to gasp.
“Nevertheless, madame,” Little Smirt continued, gravely, after one instant’s pausing, “those treasures which belong by law to your husband ought not to be looked at and handled, and variously enjoyed, by any other person. No, I commend your warm hospitality; but upon second thought, I shall not accept it.”
Then he rode on, without taking very much pleasure in the high-mindedness of his own conduct, because hospitality is a virtue, he felt, which ought to be encouraged rather than snubbed. Indeed, for all Little Smirt could tell, he might have acted with extreme rudeness toward the lady’s husband also; and that possibility rather troubled the conscience of Little Smirt.
He did not, of course, know the nationality of this beautiful and well-shaped young woman’s husband: but as a scholar, whose studies had included ethnology Little Smirt did know that the peoples of various lands expressed their hospitality in various ways. Well, and this so tactfully absent husband, quite conceivably (it now occurred to Little Smirt), might be a native of some one of those lands in which hospitality was made tangible, and every sort of good luck was favored—and a woman’s liking for variety was indulged also—by the loan of the host’s wife overnight.
For, as Little Smirt reflected, this friendly practice obtained everywhere among the Eskimos, the Himalayans, the Guarani, and the Dyaks of Sidin in West Borneo. It had long been customary among the Arabs and the heroic races of Ireland. Moreover, the people of Caindu in Eastern Tibet considered the loan of one’s wife to a stranger to provoke the immediate favor of the local gods and a prompt increase of the lender’s prosperity. Throughout all New South Wales any such loan was known to be an infallible method of averting every threatened misfortune … Oh, but, yes, the situation in which Little Smirt now found himself was quite deplorable: for, conceding the lady’s husband to be a member of any one of these races, then Little Smirt would not merely have snubbed this gentleman’s benevolence. He would actively have provoked for the poor man out-and-out bad luck, through an uncharitable display of morose continence.
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