The Nightmare Had Triplets

by Branch Cabell

  “But then,” Little Smirt decided, “it is not as if Mama had any regard for ethnology or were ever the least bit broad-minded as to the welfare of other people. And it follows, from her old-fashioned selfishness, that I am not permitted to satisfy my interest—natural to a scholar—in the quaint local custom through which the tent of this lady is kept surrounded by gnawed skeletons.”

  And another time Little Smirt came—across a broad shallow river, in which naked shepherds floundered about, waist-deep, shouting and laughing, and swearing too, now and then, as they dipped their sheep—to a broad plain dotted with cypress-trees and with white houses and with church towers. He thus approached a sacred hill, about which male persons of all ages were assembling to honor the creator of every mortal being in that special neighborhood, the great god Phallus.

  This hill was overgrown with cypress and pomegranate and myrtle; in this grove were twelve hundred priestesses, each one of whom waited alone in a small two-roomed residence, that had a peculiarly shaped knocker on its door of teak-wood; every one of these priestesses, whensoever any man knocked, was ready to assist him in the prescribed ritual, except only during the four days’ holiday which each priestess enjoyed every month; and this sacred hill was enclosed by a high fence, made out of copper spears, adorned with big love-knots of green copper, and broken here and there with tall gates of figured brass.

  “I would do well to honor this great god Phallus,” reflected Little Smirt, because the range of his studies had, of course, included comparative religion.

  But no sooner had he approached the bridge, handsomely builded out of copper and spread with bright scarlet cloths, by which you crossed the deep moat surrounding this sacred hill, than once more the hand of Little Smirt’s mother pinched him.

  And again Little Smirt rode on, shaking his head; for, inasmuch as he himself was of divine descent, he did not like ever to see any person neglecting his religious duties; and the god to whom Little Smirt had perforce denied exaltation, was a most famous and ancient deity. Him by-and-by Little Smirt addressed in the following terms.

  “O father of all living creatures!” said Little Smirt; “the provider of life’s most ardent pleasures the animated, the ever-resurgent hope of our immortality, through whose genial labors the youth of each mortal generation is renewed unimpaired in the generation which succeeds it! I cannot guess through what gloomy error my race condemns you to live swaddled in many concealments, and to seek out a hiding place in small dark dens of cotton or of silk or of balbriggan.”

  Then Little Smirt said: “In regard to this vital point we behave without any decency. For we walk about with unblushingly unveiled faces, upon which are inscribed plainly our stupidities, our pettiness, our misdeeds; and in brief, we flaunt before Heaven every possible argument for mankind’s immediate extermination. But we hide away, like an infamy, the creative power of all men; even in its infancy do we wrap up in a napkin that talent which may yet enable us to make a new race superior to ourselves. Yea, we avert, even in sermons, from the ever-lively promise of mankind’s future. Our folly is heart-breaking; our indecency is beyond description.”

  And Little Smirt said also: “Oh, but very great is our folly! For we foster despair and pessimism, and misanthropy also, by displaying everywhere in public the faces of our fellow creatures. But we do not ever encourage any optimism by causing—through one or another slight change in our national costume—every adult male to make manifest at all moments his creative gifts. We do not keep visible these powers at every street corner, to be for us a glad covenant with the future; and to lighten even the drab terrors of democracy with an ever-present reminder that the land which we infest is by-and-by to be repopulated throughout. We ignore the sole hope of posterity.”

  He looked back now, for the last time, at the sacred gardens into which so many piously excited persons were thronging to discharge their religious duties.

  And again Little Smirt cried out, with unfeigned regret, to the great god Phallus.

  Yet Little Smirt still spoke with that fine affability which the son of a master of gods ought to exhibit to all his father’s underlings. And Little Smirt said:

  “Alas, O divine one, whereas both the spirit and the flesh are wholly willing to carry out your appointed ritual, the attentiveness of my dear Mama is far too unwinking for me to contend against it. I lament my apparent incivility; and I apologize. Do you remember that the affection of my mother constrains me! Do you think indulgently about how many mothers have constrained you, O divine one, in those happy night seasons when they opposed your utmost endeavors and quite wore them out. And in brief do you, who serve most women delightedly, now pardon me, who have no choice except to obey, even in the gnashed teeth of my religious convictions, the most dear of all womankind.”

  XLII. THE INGLORIOUS JOURNEY

  So was it that Little Smirt journeyed toward Branlon without ever carrying the hooves of his gray horse or the gleam of his gay peacock feather out of the set way unprofitably. And he found that a young champion, in travelling through the lands beyond common-sense thus partially chaperoned by his mother, got on with almost distasteful celerity. His success everywhere was unfailing—as yet,—whatsoever might be the deficiencies in his self-indulgence.

  He stayed, nevertheless, intelligent, in addition to being, more or less, a physical coward. He thus recognized that the point of view of an aged wise-woman, whom many decades of professional practice had familiarized with all sorts of enormities, must necessarily differ from the point of view of a young man in whom inexperience was tempered only by the thin pleasures of profound scholarship.

  “Mama is right,” he decided, “just as she always is right in every question of logic. I lament that rightness, at least now and then. I could wish, now and then, that my mother had not applied for so many years to all branches of human wickedness the homeopathic arts of a wise-woman. I could desire, now and then, but particularly during these long lonely evenings, that Mama were not such an expert in iniquity, or so old a hand at directing, in exchange for a moderate fee, all carnal temptations, as to foreknow but too clearly the results of my dallying with either.”

  And Little Smirt said also: “If only my dear Mama were not what the blunt-spoken world describes as a lady of doubtful repute, then I might hope to allure her, once and a while, into permitting me the diversions which no sane abbess, no anchorite, no haloed seraph, would refuse thus implacably to the leisure hours of a young champion on his travels in the lands beyond common-sense. But against the prudishness of an aged gentlewoman who is by profession a past-mistress in the homeopathy of evil there is no possible arguing. She knows a great deal more about every practicable kind of misdemeanor than I know; and she intends to retain her superiority in knowledge, I perceive, by keeping me chaste and temperate.”

  Then Little Smirt said: “To be kept always chaste and temperate, by a dead hand, is a sad affliction for a hale young gentleman on his travels in the lands beyond common-sense. Yet upon the whole it seems wiser for me to put up with this affliction rather than to run any risk of irritating my revered and short-tempered and regrettably gifted mother. Since I regard Mama, in brief, with affection, with distrust, with unbounded reverence, and with a lively amount of fear, it follows that I had best go on looking for my wife, as I best may, under this very dreadful burden of prudence and of reason and of more than cenobitic continence.”

  After that, Little Smirt permitted the dead hand to guide him without much further resistance. And it did guide him, for some while, through a speedy and inglorious journey such as no other recorded champion had ever made in the lands beyond common-sense.

  Quite in vain did the splendors and the allurements of all superb magics such as by ordinary bedazzle a man’s judgment make their flashy appeal to Little Smirt, whom the hand of an old, cold wise-woman constrained into a saint’s innocence.... Well, and that, as he granted, was unavoidable. To the long experience of Madam Tana all the marvels and the thaumaturg
ies of romance, and all the seductions of evil, which moved glowingly about the lands beyond common-sense, must appear to be no more remarkable; than do keys to a locksmith or steaks to a butcher. Such matters were her own métier.

  She, as an expert, could consider, not any notion of delay on account of the beguiling solicitations of these lands’ endless wonder, but simply the points in which she herself would have made this wonder more wonderful and far more beguiling. In brief, if Madam; Tana might conceivably applaud, now and then, as a connoisseur, yet as a mother, she must remain stonily disapproving: and of this obstinacy Little Smirt must, in turn, accept the ignoble benefit, whether he wanted it or not.

  Since he approached Branlon from the east, he visited no country which Elair had traversed. But in yet other respects did the journeying of Little Smirt differ from the unchaperoned journeying of Elair very notably.

  For example, if Little Smirt approached an enchanted castle, such as Elair would have swaggered into through mere curiosity, or the hut of a Baba Yaga or a dragon’s den, such as Elair would have left occupied by death only—or even did Little Smirt so much as come near to an armed champion ready to fight any and all comers in the high cause of his lady’s honor,—then the cold hand of Madam Tana would compel a detour imperiously. Her implacable hand would at once lead Little Smirt out of the public highway, into bushes, and across ditches, and about muddy barn yards, until it had fetched him skulkingly beyond danger.

  But above all, if any woman whatever approached Little Smirt with a combining of good looks and of good will, why, then the hand of Little Smirt’s mother would assault the bosom of Little Smirt as viciously as if he were wholly to blame, and as if he had acted with unheard-of outrageousness, in provoking a young woman’s philanthropic regard.

  So did the dark magic of Madam Tana guide her beloved son through the lands beyond common-sense, without any hurt or delay, as yet, and without any least carnal indiscretion to look back on affectionately; and with his chest pinched black and blue.

  XVIII. ON A LOST GARMENT

  Thus all went well for a while, until by-and-by Little Smirt came to a large wood; and when he had gone but a short way among the trees of this place, he heard a divine melody. Inferring that immortals were present, but not knowing their mythology, he dismounted from his gray horse; and he prostrated himself, upon his face, behind a thick holly-bush.

  He heard next a chattering of two girls’ voices, toward which he did not venture to raise his eyes. But when this pair of goddesses had gone by, Little Smirt arose; and in the path before him lay an essential female garment.

  “Hah,” Little Smirt remarked, “but this sight inspires me. It is true that the inspiration is of a flimsy and hand-trimmed nature; but the well-gifted poet learns how to convert every sort of emotion into loveliness.”

  Thereafter he took out writing materials, and he spread the essential garment flat on the ground. But as he picked up his pen, made from a swan quill, the dead hand of Madam Tana came out of his bosom, walking clumsily upon its four fingers, like a hurt insect, and took the pen away from Little Smirt. Very hastily the left hand of Madam Tana then wrote out upon the white surface of the essential garment a sublime and austere ode, twenty-eight lines long, in praise of the beauties and the chaste charms of Bel-Imperia.

  “Now, but that is odd,” said Little Smirt. “Here are fine verses, not wholly unworthy of me. Yet I had meant these verses to express, in a rather more roguish manner, quite other sentiments, with which nobody’s wife anywhere ought to have any improper concern.”

  “Do you happen,” replied a girl’s voice, “to have seen a garment which was dropped hereabouts?”

  Little Smirt raised his eyes; and thus travelling over a pair of gold-sandaled feet, up two very well shaped, naked legs to a short red silk skirt, across a flat small belly, and between two virginal breasts, his eyes came, in a glow of complete contentment with these travels, to the beautiful face of a wood nymph, about which shone an aureole of gold-colored hair.

  “I have indeed found such a garment,” Little Smirt answered, arising tumultuously, “to the great joy off my heart; for by the approved laws of the lands beyond common-sense, that careless immortal who misplaced this garment must consent to become my love.”

  He stepped forward, smiling. Then the hand of Madam Tana pinched his breast with such viciousness that Little Smirt uttered a squeal, which he shaded off, more or less plausibly, into a sigh of heroic melancholy.

  “But, alas, my heart is given elsewhere,” Little Smirt continued, “and for that reason, O woman with most promising legs, I respectfully waive all claims to your person.”

  Thus speaking, he restored to the wood nymph the garment in question. And she inspected it with dismay, saying,—

  “Chaste but unfortunate champion displaying the fine peacock’s plume, you have defiled the royal underwear of my divine mistress with your scribblings, and there is simply no telling what will become of you.”

  “Do you conduct me to her,” said Little Smirt, his teeth chattering slightly, “and I will present my apologies for the misplacing of a poetic outburst.”

  “Well,” said the wood nymph, “it may be that, as a scholar and a man of refinement, and as a person of such lofty continence as to despise my poor charms, you can make your peace with her. It is certain that if you attempt to escape from this wood without having placated my mistress, who is Queen of the Kogaras, then the wrath of at least nine immortals will combine to destroy you in a fashion no less humorous than excruciating. So you had best come with me.”

  She then led Little Smirt into a cleared space in which stood a red summer-house; and she bade him wait there, among the seventeen figures of wrought gold, shaped like tigers and ducks and dogs and lions and deer and apes, which stood inside this summer-house.

  The wood nymph returned by-and-by, saying, “There must be a magic in your writing, for my mistress has considered it with a cooing noise and the smiles of a life-long imbecile.”

  “Aha,” said Little Smirt, “so your mistress is a good judge of poetry.”

  “I do not know about that, O most continent and ill-advised scholar. I know only that, for some reason or another reason, she appears so pleased by your sentiments as to wish to condone, in so far as that may be possible, their improper location. So do you kneel now, for my mistress approaches.”

  Little Smirt at once prostrated himself; and when the divine lady had entered the summer-house he knocked his head upon the yellow and red stone pavement of the place, crying out:

  “This unworthy stranger is from a far-off and imperfectly civilized country. Condone therefore his barbarities and overlook his existence.”

  The lady answered him: “Jestingly, but not otherwise, may the phoenix beg from the wren the loan of a feather. For what indeed, O too generous Little Smirt, is there upon this unworthy garment for me to pardon, unless it be the resplendent excess of your chaste devotion?”

  He arose swiftly; and in his arms he took his beloved Bel-Imperia.

  XLIV. PROSPERITY OF A FRAUD

  So was it Little Smirt discovered, in one breath: (a) that, without knowing it, he had reached Branlon; (b) that, without knowing it, he had married the Queen of the Kogaras; and (c) that, without knowing it, he had yet again behaved with surprising prudence for a young man of his age and heredity.

  Now the Kogaras (whom Mr. Smith had taken over from Oriental mythology) had the appearance of somewhat small, beautiful, blonde young women. They possessed tiny golden claws in place of fingernails; and it was their doom to become mortal every five hundred years, just as Bel-Imperia had become mortal, until death charitably restored them to Branlon and to their woodland pleasures in Branlon.

  Well, and since the next incarnation of Bel-Imperia was an affair comfortably remote, now began for Little Smirt a new and unclouded existence. He lived; very happily with his wife, in a modest hunting lodge builded out of copper and some sort of shining bright red stone, between the forest
and the ocean: unblemished were the lawful joys of their honeymoon; grief seemed to have cut their acquaintance; no troubles visited their snug home.

  Here they fared simply. They did not live so stolidly as lived their nearest human neighbors, Elair and Oina, who reaped with untiring industry the neat fields of their own meadows so as to feed their own matter-of-fact cattle in their own prosaic farm, surrounded by the charmed forest of Branlon. Instead, day after day Little Smirt and his Bel-Imperia would go a-hunting together, or it might be a-fishing or a-birdnesting, like well-bred vagabonds: and they would fetch back, for their bronze cooking pots, red deer from Strathgor, and squirrels from Tarba, and salmon and woodcock from out of Darvan; and eggs of nine sorts from the oak-groves of Pen Loegyr; and at Clioth they speared salmon and eels, and otters also. Nor did they lack for sweet blackberries and mushrooms and tender bramble sprouts and wholesome watercress. Day after day they thus lacked for nothing which any sensible person could desire; and the nights likewise of this young couple were happy, all through their honeymoon.

  Moreover, Little Smirt had famousness. The fidelity and the strength of Little Smirt’s love, and the fine phrasing of his sublime and austere ode, had been duly reported, by his fond wife, to her fellow nymphs and associate demi-gods: they applauded such constancy; and his high-minded legend was now added to the other strange legends of Branlon. Everywhere the Wild Huntsman and the Metsik and the Gubich recited with enthusiasm that superb ode which Little Smirt, under the stress of carnal temptation, had written, in a lofty defiance of any such temptation, upon the underwear of his own wife. Among the tree-tops the Niagrusiar repeated the tale of his heroism and his chastity. The Norg and the Vargamor praised Little Smirt as a paragon of all lovers. When the Tutosel hooted at him, the tone of her voice was admiring.