The Nightmare Had Triplets

by Branch Cabell

  “It follows, Smire, that the seductiveness of your manner has got in the way of destiny. It has upset everything. It has made hash of history. It converts into an impossibility that which all-powerful Heaven has decreed to be inevitable.”

  “Then why,” Smire asks, reasonably, “does not this all-powerful Heaven obliterate Smire?”

  Apollo sighed; and he said, somewhat sourly: “Zeus would very much like to. Yet it is not permitted us, under the will of Moera, to destroy any one of the older gods outright. You ought to know as well as I know, Smire, that it is the doom of every god to perish more slowly, through a lessening in honor and through a dwindling away of his divine powers, until at long last he goes down into the dark cave of Clioth and is not ever heard of any more in these parts, but fares skulkingly toward Antan.”

  “Moreover,” said Smire, “it would be impossible, now I think of it, for your Zeus to obliterate anybody who has not yet been born. As between deities, Apollo, I may confide to you the circumstance that I shall not be born for ever so long. I have come back, in a dream, from out of an incredibly far-away time when the Olympians will be trite figures of speech and outmoded allusions. At all the Olympians the inhabitants of my time will jeer; and over derision not even any god has power.”

  It was a confiding as to which the young Olympian pondered for an instant; and his verdict on it was,—

  “But that, Smire, that appears to me to be nonsense.”

  “However, O well-tressed Smynthian, like a great deal of other nonsense, it is truth. Well, and to some extent, I can sympathize with your Zeus, since I too have been a supreme god who was omnipotent only within limits. But as Smire, it would seem, I am wholly omnipotent. Heaven has not any least power over the God of Branlon in his exile, for the sufficing reason that I have not as yet been born; nor, for that same quaint reason, can any evil ever touch me. My position is interesting. I must make the most of my position, now that all things are indeed possible to Smire.”

  Thus speaking, Smire lighted a cigarette. He inhaled, he meditated, he reached his heroic decision. And he said then:

  “No, Apollo; no, I shall remain in Carthage, as a well welcomed visitor to the bed of Elissa, and perhaps even as her legal husband. I do not think Tana would resent my having just one more wife during her absence. In any case, as the scion of old Southern families, I must treat with entire chivalry the fond gentlewoman who has trusted me, and who has given me, as the dear creatures phrase it, all. The Queen shall not find me ungrateful. In return for her not unexampled munificence, I shall make of her Carthage the pre-eminent city in the lands beyond common-sense. If your Æneas comes thither, I shall destroy him and thus prevent the foundation of Rome. It is necessary, in brief, to secure the welfare of my dear plump Elissa, that Rome should not be founded; and I must change the decreed history of mortal beings.”

  The face of bright Apollo had become bleak and rather terrible.

  “In that event, Smire, you will suffer for it.”

  “It is true,” Smire admitted, with a resigned sigh, as he blew out a leisurely widening smoke wreath, “yes, it is true that my erudition will sustain many considerable losses. I shall have mastered for no special purpose the complete lists of the Caesars of both empires, of their wives, of such of their children as reached maturity, and of the Popes and Anti-Popes, along with the dates of each birth, accession to office, and decease, and main data as to their chief paramours. All that I know about the lustrum, the Catacombs, the art treasures of the Vatican, the Tarquins, the respective merits of Jeritza and Bernhardt and Blanche Walsh in La Tosca, the two feasts of the Faunalia, the construction of triremes, the geese in the Capitol, the statesmanship of Rienzi, and about other allied matters, will be waste knowledge. These things will not ever have any existence. It will henceforward not even be true that in a conditional sentence the Protasis is introduced by the particle si or one of its compounds. The Ablative Absolute now perishes unborn; and the irregularities of the verb esse become a canard. In brief, all that which I know about Rome and the language of Rome and the history of Rome is destined not to be true any longer. Yet am I content to sacrifice at least part of my erudition to the welfare of Elissa, who has given me—as they say—all.”

  “But—” said Apollo.

  “That ‘all,’” Smire philosophized, “is so peculiarly circumscribed, when you come to think about it, to an area of how few inches! It bespeaks an almost morbid concentration of the feminine mind.”

  “But”, Apollo continued, in undisguised amazement, “but would you defy the will of Zeus the All-Seeing?”

  It was a question which awoke Smire, from out of his philosophic reverie, into surprise.

  “Hah, and are you still worrying about that, son of Latona? In reflection, I was penetrating otherwhere. Yet, in any case, you are wrong. I do but suggest to Zeus that, in plain civility, through mere esprit de corps, and out of respect to a supreme god emeritus, he would do well to fall in gracefully with my plan of revising all human history throughout. For I shall improve upon it, I assure you.”

  And then Smire said: “I shall revise the history of mortal beings! It is a task worthy of Smire, and his fitting life-work, which I discover to-day.”

  But Apollo replied, drily: “As a fellow poet, Smire, I can sympathize with your desire to improve upon the destiny which Heaven has allotted to men and women. Between ourselves, these forthright, practical-minded supreme gods have no striking gifts of imagination. In devising punishments, however, the Sire is not without talent.”

  “Hah!” said Smire.

  “Many Immortals,” Apollo pointed out, “have opposed High-Seated Zeus. And to obliterate them was not permitted him. Yet was their fate not enviable.”

  Then Apollo spoke of punishments such as Zeus had put upon these rebellious Immortals; and Smire wriggled reflectively, but with entire dignity.

  “Besides,” says Apollo, when he had ended the appalling catalogue, “there is Virgil to be considered.”

  “I do,” said Smire, absent-mindedly, “I do consider him, with due reverence, as a supreme poet.”

  “Yet it is you, Smire, who are condemning him not to be a supreme poet, when you prevent him from writing his Æneid.”

  “Yes, that is true,” replied Smire, still speaking as though his thoughts roved otherwhither; and he added,—

  “But to have a volcano, in active eruption, forever resting upon one’s breast must be quite uncomfortable!”

  “It is well proved to be that,” said Apollo, “if one may accept the not-ever-ending yells of Typhoeus as good evidence, now that he pays this penalty for having opposed the great Sire.”

  Smire coughed; and he said, shifting somewhat his position in his chair:

  “Moreover, you have spoken, Apollo, of the slight surgical operation which Zeus performed on his own father, after their family tiff. That would be awkward in an old Southern family, wherein one is taught to be chivalrous toward all women until reaching decrepitude by rather more natural means.”

  “But the Sire, Smire, wished to prevent Kronos from begetting any more children.”

  “Well, Apollo, and that was one way of securing his wish, very certainly. Nevertheless, it seems a bit drastic. Unfeeling, I call it, if not quite actually inurbane. And a vulture, now”—Smire added, reflectively. “A vulture possesses, I have no doubt, her good qualities, her endearing qualities even, such as induce the winds of heaven to make love to vultures and to keep vultures fertilized. But, somehow, I have not ever taken cordially to vultures since Branlon vanished under the cold gaze of many vultures. So, to have a vulture perpetually eating my liver, would—as I frankly confess—be repugnant to me. It is an idiosyncrasy, perhaps. Still, I would not like it. Through some special quirk in my nature I regard vultures with an affection which is but little less temperate than is the fondness I have for volcanoes, as bosom companions.”

  “So says Prometheus, Smire; and he says it too at the top of his voice, forever and for
ever, among the bleak crags of Caucasus, where he lies chained, with vultures forever feeding upon his entrails, because he opposed Zeus.”

  “—Not that my personal inconvenience would matter,” remarked Smire, as yet speaking with sustained absent-mindedness. “I have learned to accept all things as they come, and as they go, under Time’s wasteful ruling. But the Æneid does matter, if tolerably well educated persons are to continue taking up their second year’s study of Latin. There is nothing like a good sound education. Do I dare deprive millions of it? That is the question: for in order that the Æneid may be written, it is necessary that my adored Elissa should be betrayed by Æneas and should perish miserably.”

  The lord god of poets sighed with profound sympathy; and then remarked, with that special sort of perturbed reverence which is felt by the aesthete for altruism,—

  “These are indeed high considerations, O generous-hearted Smire, such as a philanthropic person in your dilemma ought to weigh with the ever-liberal hand of scholarship in the scales of his personal safety.”

  And Smire went on speaking, with a noble exaltation:

  “Moreover, there are but a half-dozen or so of fine epics, as against I do not know how many millions of fine women. A good poem can delight thousands of men at the same moment, whereas a good woman is restricted by prudence and physiological considerations into dispensing her pleasure-giving seriatim. I infer that a great poem is of more importance than is the happiness of any pair of lovers, even though the concerned woman be my dear plump Elissa and her distressed lover be Smire. I infer, in brief, that I ought to behave unselfishly; and that it would be unworthy of the better side of my nature to oppose Zeus, as did Typhoeus and Kronos and Prometheus.”

  The lord god of poets nodded his complete approval, with such tranquilness as he could assume off-hand. For, indeed, he was now deeply moved. Nor could he quite conceal that generous, if half-envying, enthusiasm with which, as being himself an artist, he admired the brave quiet splendor of the God of Branlon’s self-abnegation in the service of culture and polite letters. The Olympians, as Apollo reflected with some little discomfort, had not inherited either the great heart or the calm reasoning powers of their sublime predecessor when they fell heir to his kingdom.

  “But art,” said Apollo, sadly, “art demands these large sacrifices of every artist. And so, Smire, may I report that you have decided not to meddle with the decreed history of mortal beings?”

  And Smire answered heroically, without any faltering:

  “Yes, Apollo. In the high cause of art, I must leave Carthage to its doom, and Elissa to her funeral pyre, rather than bereave the world of a superb epic poem which—as, you may observe, I admit with humility—is but very slightly inferior, in one or two of its more lofty passages, to at least three of my own compositions during the time that I was a writer upon Earth.”

  It was then that the attendant priest of Apollo interposed a remark which seemed tactless.

  IX. DISPUTED OWNERSHIP

  “Ah, yes”, said the bland gray-haired Flamen of Apollo, now that this prelate leaned forward a bit, from a black-and-gold chair, with the tips of his fore-fingers and his second fingers placed neatly together; “yes, to be sure. Now you speak of the books which you wrote upon Earth, I have often wondered, I confess, why upon Earth they were written?”

  “Indeed, dear sir,” Smire replied, modestly, “I have nearly forgotten about the books I wrote in the old times before I became a supreme god and a demi-god and a wanderer in the lands beyond common-sense. So much has happened since then, you conceive.”

  “Still, Smire,” says the priest, reprovingly, “it does not become you, as a creative artist, to disparage sublime literature, no matter who wrote it.”

  “Yes, that is true,” Smire conceded, with that humbleness before logic which was one of his most astounding and unhuman traits; “and I must not permit a dislike for talking about myself to betray me into any apostasy toward art. Moreover, I confess with due humbleness that whatsoever of merit those books of mine may have displayed to your perhaps over-friendly judgment, and no matter how much of wit and of fancy and of erudition you may have been astounded by in their brilliant pages, yet these unapproached splendors were not due, not altogether, to my native talents. No, for it was then my privilege to live in a great literary era. During the sublime decade of the Nineteen-Twenties the air was full of scriptorial genius; nor had America before this time produced any writer whom the sophisticated could take seriously. In the absence of competition one could not avoid contracting eternal fame.”

  “It is an age which survives very nobly in our legends, Smire,” says the priest, gravely, “does the great literary age of which you were a main ornament. Posterity has learned to revere and to appreciate gratefully these superb writers; and so their private lives, their illicit love-affairs, their rumored perversions, their meanesses, their contemptible habits, and their worst traits in general, continue to be written about, over and yet over again, with that vicarious delight which all scholars get out of the vices of any author who becomes a classic.”

  “So we have become classics! and our fame stays eternal!” says Smire, complacently. “Well, although it seems a bit droll that this circumstance should be known to a priest of Apollo, yet is the circumstance most gratifying, so far as it goes, my dear sir, inasmuch”—Smire hazarded—“as I have not yet the desired pleasure of knowing your name.”

  “I think, Smire,” returned the bland clergyman, smiling, “that you might safely address me as Smike.”

  “Indeed, Smike, but that is a most surprising pleasure. There is but one Smike whom I ever heard of, in a book called Nicholas Nickleby. Moreover, when I last heard of you, the grass was green about your grave. Yes, and the children of Nicholas Nickleby, Esquire, of Dawlish in Devonshire, were treading upon that grass with feet so small and light that not a daisy drooped its head under their pressure. I admit that I have often wondered about the unusual resiliency of the daisies upon your grave, my dear Smike, because in the illustration all six of the younger Nicklebys were, as one might say, rather hefty brats. But to have you coming out of your grave, and sitting down, in a gold-and-black chair, in the middle of a dream, appears to me—do you know?—a performance even more unusual.”

  The priest waved a protesting hand, a most beautiful prelatic-looking hand.

  “I did not tell you, Smire, that Dickens created me: and in fact, I am myself a creator during my waking hours.”

  “Hah!” said Smire.

  “For I, Smire, I too write books during my waking hours, even though it is my misfortune to belong to an age which is more degenerate than was the all-glorious decade of the Nineteen-Twenties in every sort of magnificent literature.”

  Now Smire frowned a little. He said,—

  “That is an odd phrase, Smike, for you to be using yet again, about your waking hours.”

  “I apologize, Smire,” said the other, “for my out-of-place clumsiness; because I really did not mean to let slip the fact that I am now sound asleep; and that you are just an implausible figure in a dream I am having.”

  This was strange news for Smire. It was appalling news. Yet he faced it without any apparent discomposure. He said only:

  “To the contrary, Smike, it is I who am sound asleep. It is in my dream that you are sitting down, in a gold-and-black chair, with your long fingers touching one another at the tips never so lightly.”

  Smike answered him, with an obstinate shrug, saying:

  “It is a question of opinion, that is all, whether I be inventing you, or you me, now that we are both talking together in the lands beyond common-sense. So how does it matter, Smire, whether it is in your dream or in my dream that we are meeting?”

  “It matters a great deal, Smike, because it concerns the extent of the human imagination. That imagination is not limitless. So, for one, I cannot believe that any merely human imagination could create the God of Branlon.”

  “And what does that me
an, Smire?”

  “It means, my dear Smike, that you, sitting there before me devising such wicked prevarications in your black-and-gold chair, reveal rather wonderfully just that fine blending of perversities and of pedantries and of contradictions which might almost enable you to dream about Smire. I admit this. Indeed, I cannot express the approval with which I observe you sitting there smirking, with your gray head ducked slyly forward, with your lax wanton lips pursed up so affectedly, as though you had just made for the benefit of your classroom an elaborate professorial joke, let us say, a pun in Sanskrit; and were waiting for your cowed students to applaud. I at least applaud without any restriction the fashion in which you keep forever touching together, so very lightly, the tips of your long aesthetic-looking fingers, as though a blessing were about to be invoked. Altogether, my dear Smike, you are a delicately refined and a most dangerously subtle creature who would teach people to disbelieve in themselves. You manage, I do not know how, to look like a time-battered faun who is caricaturing an archbishop. And in brief, in every respect except one respect, the author of no person’s being ever looked so exactly as I could desire my own author to look.”

  “Now but really, Smire, you are far too flattering,” Smike replied, blushing with pleasure.

  “Not at all, my dear Smike,” Smire told him, courteously. “In my dream I am finding it no least trouble to imagine for you this appearance.”

  “Yes, but it is my dream, Smire.”

  “To the contrary, Smike, it is in my dream that we are meeting, self-evidently.”

  Well, and now Smike got up from his black-and-gold chair in anger. He said, with his voice rising:

  “I repeat to you, Smire, this is my dream that we are in! I have explained to you over and again, you tall blockhead, that I am your author and that I am simply imagining you!”

  “Come now,” said Smire, “but our little hands were never meant to scratch each other’s eyes. No, my dear Smike; no, you cannot possibly be my author. It must be quite the other way around, in plain logic. For although I find it easy to imagine you as a great author—since I have known many dozens of great authors, you must remember,—yet I cannot imagine any human author’s being great enough to imagine me.”