Little Smirt now and then would recall that, but for the intervening hand of his Mama, he would have written upon the famous garment such verses, and would have made, to his wife’s attendant nymph, such advances, as would have given to his fortunes a disastrously different turn, and would have won for him tributes not wholly applausive from the gold claws of the Kogaras. And at such times he would think with a sort of remorse about the old lady’s fond care of his well-being.
Meanwhile he kept the cold hand in his breast; and the hand continued to guide and to serve him. It showed him always the most profitable road to follow; it pinched him if he was about to make a blunder and when Little Smirt wrote any verses nowadays, then the instant they were finished, the hand would unbutton his blouse, and would climb out of his bosom, like an unwieldy, rather unpleasant insect; and it would edit his verses so as to make them conform, in every detail, to the pure-minded and pastoral tastes of Branlon.
Did his verse show any least trace of the morbid or the licentious or the pessimistic, the hand would correct all that in, so to speak, no time. It thus caused the writings of Little Smirt to remain pure and wholesome and uplifting, to the never-failing delight of the local immortals. There was nobody, said the woodland people, in any way comparable to this most praiseworthy of poets, who made you feel (as the Tutosel phrased it, from her legitimately romantic point of view, as a technical spinster) that the world was a pretty good sort of place.
“Nevertheless,” said Little Smirt, to his wife, “I have not yet seen your august protector, that Mr. Smith who is Lord of the Forest.”
“That will happen in due time, my husband; for time, as a wise person has remarked, cures a great many more maladies than does any properly licensed doctor.”
“Yes, but when will it happen that the Lord of the Forest will see fit to applaud my verses?”
“It will happen,” replied Bel-Imperia, “just as everything else happens in Branlon. And by that, I mean it will happen when Mr. Smith so desires; but not earlier.”
XLV. THE FROG THAT TALKED
Little Smirt prospered in this way until one morning when he and his wife Bel-Imperia went together to look for mushrooms, of which Little Smirt was peculiarly fond. Fair Bel-Imperia had about her a beautiful cloak of two colors, of purple and of bright green; she wore a gown of yellow silk tied up with a knot between her thighs; she went buskined; and in one hand she, who remained always a huntress, carried two spears of ash-wood tipped with bright steel.
Well, and as they walked through the forest they came to a large tree which they recognized to be the product of some art alien to the magic of Branlon, because the trunk and the branches and the leaves also of this tree were white, like clouded glass. For another odd thing, which they both noticed, upon the lowest branch of this tree sat a scarlet frog, about as large as a three-year-old child, a frog which wore only a black breech clout and a huge, elaborately curled, black periwig. Moreover, this frog was speaking about Madam Tana.
“Her abstruse arts have not served Madam Tana,” the frog sang, “now that she pursues them single-handed. Oho, cries the malevolent White Rabbit, peering out from the moon, oho, and am I to be fobbed off with the doings of one hand, while its fellow serves the pastoral romanticism of Branlon? Oho, but my old servant has fallen away into secretive welldoing; and for this breach of faith I must be requited and righted, O benighted lost Tana, poor Tana! Oho, Tana, Tana!”
“But what batrachian abuse is this,” said Bel-Imperia, “which enters into the realm of my revered protector, the Lord of the Forest, and yet is not a part of his venerable magic?”
“It is an evil magic,” Little Smirt returned. And then, to the scarlet frog, which he knew to be the ambiguous servant of Madam Tana, he cried out,—
“Klinck, Klinck, and how do affairs prosper with my Mama?”
“Oh, very excellently, and in accord with the desires of all reputable persons, Little Smirt,” replied Klinck. “Nobody can work the magic of a wise-woman except with the left hand.”
“That is true,” said Little Smirt. “All Mama’s magic is of the left hand, so that her loss of this left hand, now I think of it, must be rather inconvenient. Mama cannot preside properly, as Queen of the Synagogue, over the impressive ceremonies of the Lesser Sabbat, now that she has not any left hand to be kissed, in addition to other portions of her dear self, by the neophytes.”
“That is but a small part of her present worries, Little Smirt.”
“With her left hand,” continued Little Smirt—and he also was now the prey of some worriment—“must be mixed the philtre of powdered earthworms and of periwinkle which awakes amorous desires,—as well as the philtres which inspire, severally, courage, and feminine confidence, and high-hearted delusions, and kindly insanity. Why, but those strong philtres were the main sources of my dear Mama’s livelihood!”
“Well, and nowadays she can brew none of them,” said Klinck, in the abrupt and unfeeling tones which disfigure now and then the deportment of most demons.
“When Mama has been retained to defend a client against this or the other troublesome enemy,” said Little Smirt, in an increasingly uneasy frame of mind, “it is with her left hand that the black-handled knife must be dipped into the blood of a gander during the moon’s increase.”
“Nobody knows that better than I do, Little Smirt. Would you teach a familiar spirit his own business?”
“Moreover, Klinck, it is with her poor dear left hand that the wax image of this enemy must be so disposed of as to make firm her client’s peace of mind even until Judgment Day.”
“That is true, Little Smirt, though I do not see why you should thus continue to instruct me, after my five thousand years of steady practice as a familiar spirit.”
But by this time Little Smirt was fairly aghast; and he cried out:
“With her left hand must be tied that chaste knot which prevents a marriage from resulting in any erotic behavior; and with the left hand must be kindled the inspiring fires of St. John if a wise-woman hopes to get out of them any real encouragement of a client’s praiseworthy desire for virility. Why, Klinck, Klinck, a wise-woman who has been bereft of her left hand is no longer fitted to succeed in her philanthropic profession!”
“That is undeniable, Little Smirt, even though you might have thought about it a bit sooner. Nowadays it would wring your heart, Little Smirt—and mine too, if I had any—to see Madam Tana toiling away, quite in vain, with her right hand.”
“Ruin is my just portion,” remarked Little Smirt, “for I have treated my dear Mama with out-and-out inconsideration!”
Then Klinck said, chuckling unpleasantly in the shadow of his enormous black periwig:
“No; the right hand cannot work the special magic of a wise-woman, as we both know. The right hand has so often failed Madam Tana, even in compounding the most simple sedative mixtures, that her once liberal income from the heirs of deceased wealthy persons has dwindled away into virtually nothing. In brief, the old lady has quite lost her most dreadful reputation, and she is no more honored nowadays than as if she had been virtuous from her cradle upwards.”
“And it was her great-spirited desire to serve my desire,” said Little Smirt, very miserably, “which has led my dear Mama into this terrible pickle!”
“Yes, Little Smirt; and moreover, the old woman’s cheated clients are all in a rage against her.”
“Alas,” said Little Smirt, groaning like a bellows, “but this is indeed horrible hearing, because all the most prominent people employed my Mama!”
“Well, and now her lunar masters have forsaken her, Little Smirt, on account of her pure-minded doings here in Branlon; her arts fail, on account of her left hand’s loss: and at this instant she is locked up in the city jail of Chang-Chu, on account of nine civil suits brought by the vestrymen and the clergy whose affairs she has misconducted.”
“But, oh, dear me!” said Little Smirt; and he began now to tear at his black hair in anguish.
“Nevertheless, let me add for your comfort, Little Smirt,” said Klinck—and his scarlet froglike face had become sympathetic—“that your mother is not to be burned alive in the market-place immediately. This awkward delay, I must tell you, has been caused by the late illness of the public torturer, who is not yet well enough to conduct the preliminaries of Madam Tana’s burning, in a fine mustard-yellow robe painted with nine black devils.”
Little Smirt sobbed, “Klinck, you are breaking my heart!”
“Aha, but do not give way to despair, Little Smirt, for the doctors report he is doing quite nicely.”
“But I did not mean that at all, you infernal infernal spirit! I meant that, even as I said in my folly, there is no love in any way comparable in its unreason to the love which a mother cherishes for her son. I meant that I still do not understand this phenomenon; to the trained mind of a scholar it appears quaint and irrational. And I meant also that I must go to her at once, because this persecuted, very wonderful, dear woman is more noble than any virtuous person alive anywhere; and all that I have, I owe to her love and to her self-sacrifice and to the untiring ways of her cunning.”
“Then the more fool you,” replied Klinck, “to be going back into any such great disrepute and great danger! But in any event, I have discharged my errand.”
With that, Klinck vanished. And he took with him—as Little Smirt at once noticed, with a scholar’s interest in all quaint and irrational-seeming phenomena—the large and strange, ghost-like, gaunt white tree from which red-colored Klinck had been talking.
XLVI. RELATIVE TO TWO WOMEN
At this instant, the cold hand in Little Smirt’s bosom moved clutchingly; and of a sudden, the hand was no longer there.
Then Bel-Imperia wept, saying: “Now the partridge of peace departs for the dark marshes of misfortune; now the lemon of lamentation curdles the cream of companionship: for the way of the immortal Kogaras is not the way of mankind. To return to your human world is forbidden me until my next incarnation, when I shall again assume mortal flesh, yes, and feathers likewise, in the form of a starling, which is what made me think about partridges.”
“We can but be patient, my wife,” Little Smirt submitted. “So, when may your next incarnation be looked for?”
“Alas, my husband, I shall be hatched out in Scotland about four hundred and ninety-nine years hence, as mortal beings compute their almanacs outside the charmed forest of Branlon.”
“Truly I shall need a great deal of patience,” said Little Smirt, “and I fear lest my patience, after all, when I am that old, may result in no extreme ecstasies.”
“Indeed, my dear husband, if you leave Branlon, then our life together is at an end for all time. Nor is there any least moral need to unloose the black dog of your duty against the bland cat of contentment. My husband, I, who am the twenty-third daughter of a banyan-tree, think highly of filial piety. Yet the known virtues of your revered mother are chiefly remarkable for their non-existence; if you return to her, you can but hope to share her poverty and her disgrace, along with, it well may be, her yellow robe and her faggots: whereas here our happiness is untroubled.”
Thus speaking, as clearly as tears permitted, Bel-Imperia clung fondly to her beloved Little Smirt; and he embraced her with equal fondness, replying, in heart-broken accents:
“O fairest and most graceful of womankind! O most soft and bright and sweet-smelling! O my dear wife, more elegant than the gazelle, more pure than the snows of winter! Truly, my heart is taken in the snare of love; and of my own will I can deny you nothing, for in your transcendent body lives my delight, and by your amiable disposition my contentment has been fed nourishingly. In all the wide world no happiness like the happiness of your husband has been seen or told.”
Then he gently put aside his Bel-Imperia; and wiping his tear-dimmed eyes, with a fine handkerchief made out of lawn ornamented with drawn thread-work, Little Smirt continued:
“Yet all my happiness, and all my local fame as a well-inspired poet, and you too, my adored wife, I owe to the ingenuity of my dear Mama. Who am I that, from my shrewd choice of a womb in which to start life, I should expect benefits which would prove eternal? She has bought for me such felicity as no other man has known, my wife, in bringing me to enjoy your tender and refined affection, which I in no way deserved, through the exercise of abstruse arts over which I had no mastery.”
“She is an abominable creature,” declared Bel-Imperia. And for this once the small and beautiful blonde wife of Little Smirt spoke, in the role of a daughter-in-law, without any polite Oriental flavor of metaphor or of periphrasis, as well as with unmistakable ill-temper.
Yet Little Smirt answered her in the calm tones of a scholar.
“You assert that Mama is an abominable creature; and from the standpoint of a strict moralist, your statement is perhaps true. But then I am not a strict moralist. My moral tone is consolingly low, a mere whisper. It follows that if ever I begrudge any sacrifice to my dear Mama, I beseech that Heaven’s justice may take hold of me by the hair, and the anger of hell may grasp both my ankles, so that Little Smirt may be torn asunder for this world’s welfare. No, my adored wife; no, I must leave you instantly, in order to serve, if I indeed may yet serve, that great-spirited and unmoral being whose flesh is my flesh, and whose ways are my ways, and to whom my heart also, as I now find, belongs in its entirety.”
“Oh, but a mountain of rhetoric,” sobbed Bel-Imperia, “has given birth to the mouse of malignity; the fair moon of our marriage is obscured by a mist of much pig-headed nonsense; and the man does not love me any longer!”
—To which, Little Smirt replied, as he thoughtfully took out of her hand the two spears of ash-wood tipped with bright steel:
“My wife, let us not indulge in unscholarly overstatement! Let us be rational! Not ever until this moment has the man loved you; for not ever until this moment has Little Smirt been, if but partly, a man.”
Thereafter, all grief, but all firmness too, he quitted his beloved Bel-Imperia, whose tiny claws at this instant glinted everywhither in the throes of hysteria and of hatred. It was really a most fortunate thing for both these unhappy lovers that Little Smirt had shown his consideration for his wife’s better nature by removing both those sharp-pointed spears from her keeping, Little Smirt reflected.
Meanwhile he trudged onward, a lost vagabond now, to get Madam Tana out of prison, and away from the unwholesome influence of the public torturer, as Little Smirt best might. But he felt doubly lost now that he was not any longer guided, nor aided to escape from his wife’s shrieks for vengeance, by the dead hand of Little Smirt’s all-intimidating and all-knowing Mama.
XLVII. THE JUDGMENT OF MR. SMITH
Now, when Little Smirt had gone but a short way, still carrying the two spears, he found seated on a log a tall gentleman of majestic and agreeable demeanor. Beside him lay a silver staff tipped with a fir-cone.
Toward Little Smirt this personage raised a pair of remarkably bright and steadfast eyes; and after one final meditative puff he put aside, with a most graceful gesture, his cigarette. Then the sublime stranger spoke affably, saying:
“A victory and a blessing go with you, Little Smirt! Yet for what reason do you desert my protégée, the Queen of the Kogaras, with such limited ceremony that she is demanding I either change your opinions or else blast you with lightnings?”
Little Smirt trembled, now that at long last he beheld the all-powerful Mr. Smith. But Little Smirt, in his despair, as he laid down the two hunting spears, replied boldly enough:
“I will tell you all, Lord of the Forest. And if, after hearing my misadventures, you desire to punish me with lightnings, or with an earthquake, or with any other symptom of divine irritation, for the deceits which I and my dear Mama have put upon my beloved wife and upon the pure-minded immortals of Branlon, then I shall not cry out. For between us, we have well earned it.”
Thereafter Little Smirt told his story, relating everything just as it
had happened. And Mr. Smith—after an uncharacteristic season of taciturnity, during which he had listened with close attention to Little Smirt—began by-and-by to smile, with a most reassuring benevolence.
“Come now,” he remarked, “but after all, you are not, at heart, the depressingly virtuous young gentleman about whom Bel-Imperia, and in fact entire Branlon, has been telling me.”
“Alas, Lord of the Forest, it is true that I have behaved with uncompromising rectitude from my youth up; and I have painstakingly preserved my fidelity as a married man: yet I was bullied into the practice of all these virtues by my resistless mother. It follows that the moral credit is hers, whereas I have got only the inconvenience.”
Now the bright eyes of Mr. Smith kept on looking reflectively at this tall, badly frightened, half-blubbering, and yet resolute Little Smirt; and in the pleased heart of Mr. Smith moved some compassion and a grave envy, because of the quaint ways of young people.
“You have loyalty,” Mr. Smith pointed out. “You have given up, of your own will, your wife, whom you love, and the delights of your life here in this most magnificently designed forest—which I cannot doubt you appreciate,—in order to serve Madam Tana’s welfare in the uninviting atmosphere of a jail. Now, as a sound logician, my dear boy, I have not ever been able to convince myself, upon the ignoble low grounds of reason, that any man or woman was a creature sufficiently admirable to merit the sacrifice of another person’s comfort: yet, in spite of logic, I do now and then give way to my loyal memories of your all-wonderful mother. Moreover, Little Smirt, you have a sense of the mot juste, for you describe your mother as ‘resistless’. Yes, that is a pair of superb virtues: and I rejoice we should share them in common.”
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