The Nightmare Had Triplets

by Branch Cabell

  “Your situation, my dear fellow, is unfortunate. I quite recognize that fact. I can but say I am unfeignedly sorry.”

  Iarbus replied sullenly; yet he did not reply until after he once more had emptied his huge goblet, made out of pink-veined crystal, such as was to be found only in Zounghar. It was carved in the shape of a sea-horse—this being the traditionary symbol of an hermaphrodite horned deity of the Getulians, Schaha-Quet-Tanitaach, the Sea-born Begetter of Gout. And Iarbus said:

  “What is your sorrow to my sorrow? You are a wicked-minded and swindling Immortal. You have violated my betrothed wife. You have robbed me of Elissa. And against an Immortal I am powerless.”

  “That is it, precisely,” said Smire: “and I quite feel for you. Yet I would distinguish. I am, in so far as I know, superhuman; but through no fault of my own. It is a point to be considered, I submit. By no course of logic can I be held responsible for the graces of person, the charm of manner, the readiness of wit, or for any other superiority which may have led Elissa to prefer my embraces to yours. I was simply born thus. I deserve no real blame for possessing these virtues. Nor of course, as you must allow me to mention in passing, can Elissa be blamed for succumbing to any such galaxy.”

  “Nevertheless,” said Iarbus, “you have robbed me of my betrothed wife.”

  “In fact, I deserve your pity,” Smire continued. “You should not regard me with mere scornful indignation, O dark son of Zeus, simply because no woman of her own accord would ever look twice at you. You who are thus blessed, ought to be compassionate toward me who am less prodigally favored by fortune. Do you fancy it can be agreeable for anyone to be compelled daily—or at any rate, every night or so—to face willy-nilly the harsh fact that for so long as one retains these graces of person, this charm of manner, and so on, one will be hunted by all women? For truly one is thus harried. And so one submits with a fortitude upon which one’s modesty forbids one to expatiate. In brief, one learns to surrender to the pertinacity of women. To attempt—in this, as it were, quotidian quandary—to preserve what has been unthinkingly called one’s personal virtue, would be irrational. To surrender at discretion is the right virtue. It is a form of altruism which saves trouble for everybody concerned.”

  “Except me,” said Iarbus. “You have robbed me of my betrothed wife. That fact remains, for all your fine words. Yes, and after I had hired three murderers for your special benefit, you turn out to be an Immortal. You ought to be ashamed of your double-dealing; you deceitful Smire!”

  “The gods, Iarbus, are as far above double-dealing as they are above feeling any remorse for it.”

  “Moreover, you two-faced Smire, you think it is clever, to declaim these large gnomic sayings. You will not feel so clever, Smire, after I have put a great curse upon you.”

  “In fact, should you put a great curse upon the low-fallen God of Branlon,” Smire admitted, fair-mindedly, “you may perhaps cause me some temporary trouble, inasmuch as you are a son of Zeus. Yes, that is not wholly a bad notion. In your place, I would curse me by all means. I would at once cry out to your Olympian father, ‘Almighty Zeus, whom the Maurusian race, that feast on painted couches, now honor with libations of wine, seest thou unmoved the destructive graces of Smire?’”

  “Almighty Zeus—” said Iarbus, docilely.

  “No, but do you pardon me, my dear fellow—”

  “And what is it now, Smire?”

  “It is merely, Iarbus, that now I recall it rather more closely, you will need that invocation a bit later on, to use against, not me, but Æneas.”

  At that, Iarbus asked, somewhat crossly, “But how can I invoke your destruction, Smire, when you keep interrupting me?”

  “Something in the Homeric rather than the Virgilian vein seems indicated,” Smire continued, after a moment’s reflection; “and in your present madness of soul under unprovoked wrongs, you could but improvise hastily. So in your place, Iarbus, I would raise both arms thus; and I would say, with all proper emphasis, ‘Hear me, O Zeus, high-seated ruler of this earth, O majestic playmate of thunders, if indeed thou dost avow thyself to be the begetter of Iarbus upon comely Garamantis!’”

  Here Iarbus broke in, saying, “Grant that he may never come again to his heart’s home in Branlon, even this Smire, this waster of words!”

  “This strutting tall chatterer!” Smire suggested—“only do you put a little more feeling into it. Let your voice tremble, Iarbus, with suppressed indignation, just as my voice trembles. That is far more effective.”

  “This shallow-hearted pedant!” said Iarbus.

  “This betrayer of confiding womanhood!” said Smire. “Come now, but you are doing much better.”

  “This jeering fool!” Iarbus cried out, “whose tongue dwells in his cheek forever!”

  “Good, oh, quite good!” said Smire. “That is apposite. That is just. Still, do you know, I would keep both I my arms up, like this. The position is more picturesque.”

  Then Iarbus said: “Hear our shared praying, my Father! For the Smire is so very fond of talking that he now helps to put a great curse upon himself rather than keep silence.”

  Smire nodded approvingly.

  “Yet,” prompted Smire, “yet if this wicked Smire be ordained, under the will of Moera, once more to tread the dear ways of Branlon and to exult in the noble doings of his tall sons, or to regard yet again the splendors of his lost kingdom, very late may he come thither, in impotence and in hopelessness, being but the ghost of his old self!”

  “Oh, but for my sanity’s sake,” cried out Iarbus, “let the not-ever-silent soft voice of this creature be silenced somehow! so that here and there a woman may preserve virtue in her conduct, and a man keep his wife virtually to himself!”

  “Excellent!” says Smire—“both in sentiment and in execution!” And he continued, with rising indignation:

  “Let all the living of this good-for-nothing Smire be a foiled and a lonely searching for that beauty which shall forever evade his grasp! Let him continually defer his high dreams because of his lewd appetites and his indolence! And in the end let him be made forever an outcast from his dear kingdom by his own frailties and by his own duplicity, so that his doom may be doubly bitter!”

  Thus they both prayed with deep fervor. They said no more, because on a sudden the praying of Iarbus and Smire was interrupted by a terrific flash of lightning and by a peal of thunder which shook the royal palace and caused eleven of its minarets to collapse.

  “Almighty Zeus gives assent,” remarked Iarbus, between chattering teeth. “Our prayers will be answered; and it is a most dreadful doom which your intermeddling pride has brought down on your own head.”

  Smire answered, complacently: “At all events, it is a suitable doom. That is the main thing. Left to yourself, my dear fellow, you would have invoked for me a premature descent into Hades, or a change of heart, or boils, or perhaps smallpox, or dandruff, or some yet other material mishaps such as would not ever seriously have annoyed the God of Branlon. For I remain, in my every incarnation, incurably the artist. Now, for the truly great artist there can be but one bitterness—to comprehend that he has become the ghost of his old self. There can be for him but one real punishment—to know that he has failed through his own fault. So I did make bold to edit your maledictions into a shape rather more commensurate with my merits. Nobody likes to be cursed stupidly. Well, but your curse is now an intelligent curse; it deals with my case comprehendingly; and an artist prefers, above all other rewards, comprehension.”

  So was it, they say in Branlon, that in the world’s morning Smire helped to invoke his own doom, on account of the restiveness with which as a practising poet he could not but hear any less talented person put words together maladroitly.

  VII. “NEC DEUS INTERSIT—”

  In this manner, the inhabitants of dreamland relate, was his curse put upon Smire, through the eloquence of his own maledictions; and countersigned by the thunders of Heaven. Moreover, before these reverber
ating thunders had quite ended, the place of royal Iarbus had been filled sacerdotally, by the local Flamen of Apollo.

  This clergyman delivered a divinely inspired message, in choriambics, over which, as when arches are raised nobly to commemorate a returning hero’s triumph in foreign kingdoms, even so Smire lifted his eyebrows.

  “I,” he remarked, “I am a fallen god. My abjectedness I do not dispute. I observe only that there is a certain fitness in all things, and an etiquette above the hacked corpse of which mere decency is now wailing.”

  “And what,” the priest asks of him, “would that mean if it meant anything?”

  “It means, my dear gray-haired sir,” Smire replied, to the priest of Apollo, “that these newcomers upon Olympus are perhaps well enough, in their own nouveau riche way. I do not criticize them.”

  “Indeed,” says the priest, “but you had far better not do anything of that sort, with Zeus sitting over us, still holding a thunder-bolt in his hand.”

  “No,” Smire continued, temperately; “I say nothing whatever, as you may note with some natural surprise, about parvenus, or about the crass methods of parvenus, or about the ill breeding which all parvenus appear doomed to flaunt everywhere rather disgustingly. I pass lightly over these horrors, without even alluding to them.”

  “Now but do you indeed?” asks the priest, doubtfully.

  “Yes,” Smire assured him; “yes, I stand only upon my seniority as a divine being. So I very certainly shall not come to the temple of Phoebus Apollo.”

  “But,” the priest answered, “to deny the will of a god is blasphemy.”

  And with the respect due to every truth, of howsoever deplorable a nature, Smire admitted this fact, saying:

  “Blasphemy is involved, beyond doubt. Yes; as the most venerable of all gods hereabouts, I detect plain blasphemy in the blunt summons of your master: and he may well thank his lucky star, the Sun, for my indulgent refusal to take seriously his impudence.”

  “Tut! this is heresy,” the bland priest reminded Smire. “It is irreligion, it is the insane pride forerunning a great fall. This is schismatic, it is criminal.”

  “I agree with you,” Smire assured him. “It is even inurbane. Nevertheless, the young fellow’s deficiency, as you may observe, has aroused in me no anger. One should not expect too much of a godling, of a beginning divinity, who as yet hardly knows his way about heaven.”

  “Hush!” said the priest, now somewhat appalled.

  “I would but point out to your Phoebus Apollo,” Smire continued, “the neat principles of civility. That is a plain matter of etiquette, a plain duty which I pay meekly to my own self-respect.”

  “You had much better stop talking such dreadful dangerous matter,” the priest protested, “for the God of the Silver Bow shoots truly, without ever missing his mark.”

  “Indeed,” Smire assented, amiably, “with the proprieties thus honored, I shall forthwith become as silent as a bivalve, as mild and as sweetly flavored as an apricot.”

  —Whereafter Smire added, with his habitual superb generosity:

  “Yes, O most bland and gray-haired Flamen of Apollo. As men of the world, you and I, of course, cannot endure seeing the affair bungled. But with the proprieties thus suitably honored, I will now permit the lord god of poets to indulge in an epiphany in my library to-morrow afternoon, at, let us say, four o’clock, since it is my custom to receive literary people at that hour.”

  “Already I am here,” replied the god, sternly.

  And indeed, in the sudden but unsurprising way in which most persons enter your dreams, Phoebus Apollo now stood at Smire’s elbow. So was it that Smire found himself to be committed to an heroic but desperate duelling against the celestial forces of Olympus.

  VIII. GOD OF THE SILVER BOW

  They say in Branlon that Phoebus Apollo was young and ardent, but wholly grave. He was clothed splendidly, they relate, in a sort of large, gold-wrought bath-towel with a scarlet bordering, flung over his left shoulder; and this garment an imperceptible wind at all times kept disposed modestly, in the best style of mythological illustrations. He was crowned with entwined laurel leaves. And besides that, for one instant, a crow and a hawk were to be observed circling about his head, just as to the left side of him showed a swan and a cock, and at the right side, a wolf accompanied by a huge golden-colored grasshopper; but within yet another moment this zoological exhibit had vanished, unobtrusively. Now the two deities regarded each the other with divine eyes, which do not ever twitch or blink. And Smire greeted Phoebus Apollo with a civilness which was not unrestrained.

  “Lord god of poets,” said Smire, “as a poet, I salute you reverently. Yet, as a Master of Gods who once reigned in Amit before the Kronids were ever heard of, and who at that time was omnipotent within limits, I am asking as politely as seems warranted, What is the meaning of your feeble-minded impudence in summonsing, of all persons, me, to your two-penny temple to dance attendance upon the leisure of any Kronid?”

  “I have come,” said Phoebus Apollo, “as the ambassador of High-Seated Zeus—”

  “After summonsing me,” said Smire, “as if the God of Branlon were the defendant in some court case, or a violator of traffic laws, or, what is worse, a mere juryman!”

  “—As the ambassador,” Apollo repeated, “of the great Sire. It is decreed you must leave Carthage.”

  “Hah, Apollo! and for what reason must I leave Carthage?”

  The young god replied: “My nephew Æneas approaches. His ships will be wrecked to-morrow morning in the Tuscan sea, near the Agates, by the Sire’s orders, at about half-past eleven. The Winds like to have luncheon at twelve. So must it be brought about that by the end of this week, shipwrecked Æneas will be entering Carthage to beseech the Queen’s hospitality.”

  Smire answered: “I shall receive the impeccant Trojan, whose one great fault is his over-fondness for talking, as an old friend. In fact, he has been familiar to me ever since my second year in Latin.”

  “But for you to do that, Smire, is not possible.”

  Upon the broad brow of Smire displeasure inscribed its autograph. And Apollo remarked, with haste:

  “I mean, only in a manner of speaking. We know that all things are possible to Smire. And yet—”

  “And yet what are you stuttering about, Lord of the Silver Bow?” Smire demanded, implacably.

  “Why, to be frank with you, God of Branlon, it is just this fact—that all things are possible to Smire—which now troubles Olympus.”

  “And in what way, Apollo, can my little abilities, such as they may or may not be, have had the misfortune to annoy my successors in heaven?”

  “It is the beauty of your person, sublime Smire, and the unfailing charm of your manner which have been found obnoxious.”

  “Yet again, O far-darting Apollo, I am being blamed for qualities which I cannot help possessing. You are talking as unreasonably about my personal magnetism as did Iarbus.”

  “Nevertheless,” said the young god, fidgeting before the bland logic of Smire, “a fixed doom has been set for Æneas and Elissa. They must love each other—”

  It was a supernal decreeing which the Peripatetic Episcopalian at once waved aside with his not-ever-failing broad-mindedness.

  “Yes, yes,” replied Smire; “you refer to that brief indiscretion in a cave, to that twenty-minutes amour, in recording which Virgil has anticipated the reticence of a Pulitzer Prize winner. Yet after all, in a widow, my dear fellow, what material difference does it make? and is it worth our while to be bothering about calisthenics so popular? about games which, like checkers and dominoes, have their place in every home circle?”

  “They must love each other,” Apollo repeated; “and when Æneas deserts Elissa—”

  “Or rather Dido,” Smire interpolated, helpfully, “since it is thus that Elissa will be called more generally in the long time to come.”

  “—When he deserts her, in order to found Rome”, said Apollo, “then she must ki
ll herself. Such is the great Sire’s decree; and in this way, on account of my nephew’s unfaith, will begin a long warring between Rome and Carthage.”

  Smire nodded. And Apollo knew the majestic pre-historic deity had turned mentally toward the unparalleled treasure-house of his information, now that Smire said,—

  “You refer, of course, O unbearded Delphicus, to the first, second, and third Punic Wars, which will rage between 268 and 146 B. C.”

  “Now, but do I?” said Apollo, doubtfully, because he was a bit troubled by Smire’s unexampled erudition as to the future.

  “Yes, beyond question, you do,” Smire assured the young god. “However, these wars are so far away from us just now that I do not see why we need bother about them, either.”

  “But, Smire,” Apollo replied, very patiently, “it is upon this long warring that all human history, for I do not know how many centuries, must pivot. It is a murdering and a plundering and a burning which must last until Carthage has been destroyed. It is a disregard of common-sense and of property values, it is a large triumphing of iniquity everywhere, such as has been decreed by the stainless wisdom of Heaven. These wars are fixed and unalterable.”

  “Oh, ah!” says Smire, pensively, “but now I begin to understand. Well, I think that Elissa will not fall in love with Æneas. And in consequence, there will be no Punic Wars, nor any such absurd history as has been decreed for mankind by the stainless wisdom of Heaven.”

  “That is clearly impossible”—the official representative of Heaven now admitted—“so long as the Queen stays infatuated with you. No woman will ever have eyes for Æneas, or for any other male person, so long as Smire remains within arm’s reach.”

  “I blush helplessly,” replied Smire, “because I cannot extract from my harried past any event with which to confute you. And what follows?”