The Nightmare Had Triplets

by Branch Cabell

  Then Smike agreed, spitefully, “It is true, Smire, that you are one of my more obtuse inventions.”

  “Hoh!” replied Smire, with the high and becoming scornfulness best suited to any such silly aspersion of his unparalleled mental gifts.

  “—For you, Smire,” Smike continued, “are the production of a dreamer whose dreams nowanights are superficial and bogus,—of one who had the taste and talent of the dilettante along with such aspirations and pretentions as nothing would satisfy short of creating a vast and many-volumed cosmos which has been vitiated throughout into a necropolis by its basic venality and miscomprehension of economics.”

  “Alas! “said Smire.

  “—Of one, Smire, who has remarked openly, although I blush to repeat such enormities, that he burns with generous indignation over this world’s pig-headedness and injustice at no time whatever.”

  “Dear me!” said Smire.

  “—Of one who in an era of world-wide social readjustments affects the feeble creed of the brawnless aesthete,” Smike went on, sternly.

  Smire replied only, “Alackaday!”

  “—And in short, Smire, of one who is blind to the dignity, the merit and the reasonableness of that sturdy Americanism which has been imported from out of Russia and Germany by our leading authorities upon Americanism—and indeed of one who is forever disqualified from understanding true Americanism by his American ancestry. Such, Smire, is your creator in his less pleasing aspects, according to every sort of good up-to-date criticism; and such, as has been remarked by every recent composer of his obituary notice, is the snappish, senile and sneering snobbishness of which you, O most luckless Smire, are the regrettable offspring.”

  “Such,” Smire returned, firmly, “is not my creator.”

  “And yet,” continued Smike, “that in his better inspired moments your creator has his admirers, you may see for yourself.”

  Thereupon Smike performed magic.

  X. TOUCHING UNHOLY COMPANY

  Well, and when Smike performed his magic, such was the potency of it that straightway, from out of the earlier part of that dream about the ownership of which Smike and Smire were disputing, came the public at large. Here, first of all, were the baker and the butcher, and the candlestick maker accompanied them. Here were Tom, Dick and Harry; and Ibid and Anon came with these. Here likewise, advancing at a rate somewhat more leisurely, were Lady Ampersand and Senora Etcetera and Madame Quelquechose, and the world and his wife, and very fat Mrs. Murgatroyd also, still dressed in bright flesh-colored pink.

  Smire at any rate had cause to remember each one of them; because even though it were Smike who had invented these appreciative persons in his dream, yet it was sublime Smire whom these fourteen connoisseurs of fine literature had seemed to pursue, with their never-tiring adulation, from one planet to another planet. And for this reason it was, no doubt, that Smire smiled resignedly.

  But now, without heeding Smire the least bit, the public at large knelt in a devout semi-circle about Smike.—Whereafter they fell at once to worshipping Smike after their own ritual and to inquiring of Smike:

  “Do you compose upon the typewriter?” “If I send you a book will you autograph it?” “Whom do you consider to be the most promising of our younger Southern writers?”

  “Do you write in the morning or in the evening?” “What is your favorite recipe, your opinion of immortality, and your ideal woman, within not more than two hundred words?”

  And so on and so on, said they, speaking confusedly, each at the same time.

  Thus they spoke, worshipping Smike. But Smire, whom the public at large had once followed after with this sort of worship, they now did not notice at all.

  Well, and they say in Branlon that after the great shock of his first surprise, the way in which Smire did not notice these light-minded turncoats was gigantic. Just as though nothing whatever had happened to interrupt him, he went on with his proofs as to whose dream he was in.

  “—For I, my dear Smike,” Smire continued, equably, “I am incredible. My history is out of all reason. It follows that the God of Branlon must perforce have been invented by the Moera who makes mythologies, and who creates every authentic god. My story has just her inimitable insane touch which relies upon faith blindly and which wantonly insults reason. Granting that you, as a mere human being, my dear Smike, had ever imagined the God of Branlon, then by all human standards your mind must necessarily be unbalanced; in consequence, nothing you might say would be worth listening to; and as a result, I decline any further to pursue the quite painful theme.”

  “Still—” said Smike, frowning among his worshippers, and wholly confounded by the resistless logic of the God of Branlon.

  “No, my dear fellow,” replied Smire; “no, you really must not plead with me, in this torrent, this flood, this cataclysm, of misguided eloquence, to regard you as mentally unbalanced. The impersonation of a half-wit is not worthy of you. Modesty alone forbids me to add that this disguise is peculiarly inappropriate when you are tempting a god blessed with some little wit and fancy and erudition.”

  “But what do you mean, Smire?” says Smike, yet more and more frettedly perplexed.

  Smire answered, reminiscently, “I mean that in my dreaming there was once a princess.”

  “Tut!” said Smike, flushing somewhat. “There have been dozens of them in my dreaming about you. There have been as many princesses as there were in the ancient tales about Jurgen. Yes, and they have all pursued you in just the old hackneyed way they pursued him.”

  “Women do lack inventiveness, under the strain of self-submission,” Smire regretted. “However, this princess was peculiarly beautiful, my dear Smike. She excelled in every charm except, as I lament having to tell you, chastity. Well, and when I repelled the exuberance of her unmaidenly advances, she turned at once into a large red-and-black devil called Company. He had been made the junior partner in the firm of All-Highest & Company, so he told me, during the recent amalgamation of good and evil brought about by the depression of our moral standards.”

  “Yes, yes,” Smike assented, in glib haste; “and he carried you off on a flash of lightning, I remember. You see I remember it; and I could not possibly remember any such thing unless it had been a part of my dreaming about you, I can assure you, my dear Smire.”

  “I mean also,” Smire went on speaking, very gently, “your left foot. I mean it is cloven, I mean that your entire left leg is quite visibly the leg of a black goat, as you can observe for yourself.”

  —Whereupon Smike looked downward; and he scowled horridly.

  “Tut, tut!” said the detected Devil, in an uncontrolled outburst of hellish fury; “but to think of my not thinking about a thing like that when, under the appearance which you have in flesh and blood, I was arranging your everlasting ruin and the eternal destruction of your faith in yourself!”

  “It was injudicious, very certainly, my dear Company.”

  Now the fiend spread out his beautiful hands—those hands which so strangely resembled the hands of Smire,—in an attitude of surrender. The embarrassment of the Prince of Darkness was quite painful to witness.

  “My oversight was unworthy of Hell,” he admitted. “I can but say I am sorry. So my arts fail again, before your not-ever-failing acumen, all-seeing Smire; and there is absolutely no deceiving you, not even with the high-minded sentiments of the best current criticism.”

  “It is simply that all facts are of considerable interest to a sound logician, my dear Company,” Smire tells him, kindly “So I did consider the fact of your having a cloven hoof; and it flavored from the very first, I admit, my interpretation of your talking, just as a calf’s foot flavors a jelly. I inferred, in brief, that as you once attempted to betray me into eternal damnation with the wiles of the flesh, so you were now trying to entrap me with sophistries into doubting my divine origin and my sublime mission. Yet I can assure you it is of no avail, for at any rate five reasons, which have occurred to me in passin
g—”

  “Eh!” said the fiend; “now but do not trouble yourself to give me these reasons—”

  “To begin with, my dear Company—”

  “Oh!” said the Devil; “but let us not talk about it any more!”

  “It is not, my dear Company, that I object to the wiles of the flesh, in their proper place, which I take to be the bedroom—”

  “Ah!” said the fiend; “yes, you are right, no doubt; but do you please stop talking about it!”

  “—Nor to sophistries either, my dear Company, in their own place, which, as it happens, is not infrequently the bedroom—”

  “Do you stop talking! do you stop just for one half-second, if you can possibly manage ever to stop talking!” wailed the poor Devil; “for I cannot any longer endure the fluent, not-ever-ending, urbane talking of Smire.”

  —Whereafter he fled, still keeping the appearance of Smike. Behind him followed the public at large, begging him for his autograph.

  And this is what Smire said then:

  “Evil attempted to delay me, in the trappings of a fair woman, handsomely tinted; and to persuade me that I was but flesh, mere mortal flesh: yet I tarried for no delights of the flesh. Evil attempted to delay me with the notion that I was but a dream, a lean mortal dream struggling among colored shadows, like a maimed colt of the nightmare: but I tarried for no play with such thinking. For I am Smire; I am to be bound neither by flesh nor fancy. No matter what mishaps may befall me, yet do I remain the God of Branlon.”

  With that decided upon, Smire lighted a cigarette; and he said, complacently,—

  “It follows in plain logic that I must have been invented by the Moera who makes all mythologies, and who creates every authentic god; nor will I ever acknowledge that any creator less exalted could possibly have contrived Smire.”

  PART THREE. WHICH ADVANCES IN PERIL

  “Smire, beyond any doubt, is the old sun-god, Thammuz of the Sabeans; so that to Smire remain attached many myths of the sun-god. His wanderings in the East may most neatly be explained by this theory, through which his adventures there become mythopoeic figures of the sun descending among storm clouds, or inflames of crimson, always to arise again in unlessened glory. The objection of Nabori, that the sun does not set in the East, should be dismissed as trivial, in view of the aptness of this theory in most other respects.”

  XI. THE LONG QUEST

  So was it, they say in Branlon, that because of his fondness for education and for polite letters, Smire decided not to improve upon the history of mortal beings as this history had been made up by the stainless wisdom of Heaven; and that through his shrewdness he escaped also from forming any direct alliance with Hell. As became the Peripatetic Episcopalian, he elected to steer a discreet middle-course between the large, the dangerous and the somewhat too enthusiastic forces of good and evil, in the while that Smire went his urbane way, searching after his lost kingdom and the witch-woman Tana, to whom the heart of Smire had been given eternally.

  In this fashion does Smire enter the folk-lore of Branlon; and many are the tales told, the ballads sung, in the lands beyond common-sense, about Smire’s superb doings after he had left Carthage. The Kogaras, for example (those small blonde nymphs, peculiar to Branlon, who have metal claws in place of finger-nails), say it was now that Smire went a-wandering with Alexander the Two-Horned, in that emperor’s world-wide quest for the water of immortality; and as an imperial adviser waxed high in honor. The great fame of Smire, who had directly under his thumb an emperor with two horns, say the Kogaras, flew forth into unmapped regions; he was honored everywhere, they relate; and they tell too how, on account of the fond liking which the Emperor’s young nineteenth wife took for Smire, and through the openness of her desire and her transports, Smire was sold into slavery by the displeased Emperor.

  But the Metsiks deny this. The Metsiks are small black dwarfs who ride about Branlon on gold-colored goats, and are noted for truthfulness. Well, and in the legend told by the Metsiks, it was with the Duke of Edom that Smire forgathered after he had left Carthage; and lived in every sort of comfort and solace and delight. This Duke had red hair all over his huge body, like a thick scarlet garment; and the counsel of Smire got for him likewise the sword of Methuselah. It was with this sword that Duke Esau killed Nimrod in the great tower at Babel, and took away from the imperial huntsman’s warm corpse that shirt which Jahveh had cut out and had stitched together for Adam in the garden of Eden. This shirt had been embroidered, moreover, by Jahveh’s own divine hand, with all the wild beasts and birds that were on the face of the earth, each worked in its proper colors; and in consequence, this shirt was much valued, as a curiosity perhaps unique.

  Well, and it was upon Duke Esau’s third wife, on account of such chivalrous kissing and coupling as the kind heart of Smire could not deny to any distressed gentlewoman, say the Metsiks, that Smire begot Eliphaz, from whom descended Vespasian the destroyer of all Jewry. It was not by Alexander the Two-Horned, but by Duke Esau, the Metsiks contend, that Smire was sold, to an armed caravan of merchant traders, for thirty-seven pieces of silver such as are called dirhams. Their account is certainly the more circumstantial: and besides that, the Kogaras incline a great deal more toward fanciful loose speaking than do the Metsiks. This fact should be weighed.

  Both legends, however (as they have been collated by Professor Afanyakof, of the University of Sorram, in the seven volumes of his somewhat superficial Smire Mythos), unite here. They agree that Smire was then stripped of all clothing, and put on sale, in a vaulted doorway of syenite, before the King’s palace at Heliopolis. They tell how love and longing and passion got hold of the well-to-do ladies of Heliopolis, so that they bid for Smire with enthusiasm, each crying out:

  “Glory be to Him Who formed Smire! Not until today, O kind Allah, have Thy blessings been made manifest.”

  Among these gentlewomen ensued a riot, in which twenty-four were killed. But in the end, Smire was acquired legally by the King’s favorite wife, whose delight in her bargain was such that she did not sleep at all for the next seven nights. And the story goes on to relate how King Ridhwan became displeased that his own wife, who owed the kingdom a better example, should be living in open sin with an unbeliever who did not worship either a bull or a crocodile, or even a bonfire, as did all the better-thought-of persons in and about Heliopolis.

  The pious King ordered the execution of this Smire, who would worship only the God of Branlon. Then, says this legend, the broad scimitar of the public headsman was blunted publicly and shivered into splinters, when it struck the stiff neck of Smire. Before this miracle, King Ridhwan knelt at the foot of his own golden throne. He prayed aloud for forgiveness, and for a continuance of the greatness and the glory and the length of life and the divinely attested chasteness of Smire. So did Smire depart from out of Heliopolis unhurt, to continue the search after his lost kingdom and his heart’s one love.

  For yet other traditions relating to Smire’s living at this period, it appears best to refer the reader to the great monograph by Dr. L. Luken, the incumbent Zegeas of Druim, in which you may find all the essential folk-lore of Branlon to have been abridged with a scholarship which leaves little to be desired. The point here is that at bottom this legend, as people tell it in the lands beyond common-sense, remains always the same. It does not really vary, under its countless garnishings. The sublime virtues of Smire gain for him the fond favor—nay, the doting—of this or the other potentate, along with the adoration of the potentate’s wife; then rude, base, masculine selfishness and a desire to turn great queens into privately owned chattels rebel against the vast chivalry of Smire toward all women; so that through his own excellence is Smire made, in these many legends, over and yet over again, an exile. That is all.

  Thus indefatigably, thus cruelly, pursued by be-dwarfed kings, and hunted by enamored women, the bright, comely, kind-hearted, garrulous, deposed pagan god—says Dr. Luken—“now passes, as it were, through a glittering mist of c
amels and of minarets and of sherbets and of casual murders and of lightning-quick loves and of palm-trees and of bastinados.”

  XII. WHAT PEOPLE SAID

  In very deed, on account of the seductiveness of his person and the seductiveness, how far more dangerous to its possessor, of his kind heart, Smire at this time lived as a hunted being, as the prey of his own splendors. For he seemed daily to increase (if that were possible) in majesty and in amorous grace, remarked many damsels who had faces bright as the moon.

  Their cheeks were like anemones; their lips coral-red; and their breasts resembled two pomegranates of even size: all, in brief, was of the very best style of Oriental imagery as concerned these damsels. Poetic rumors declared that the navel of any one of them would hold a full ounce of benzoin ointment. It was certain, in any case, that they all had teeth white as a string of camomile petals and eyes black as ink.

  Now these eyes wantoned whensoever Smire passed them; when he had gone his urbane way, these damsels became thin as a toothpick; they languished like plucked marigold flowers; and some seven out of each ten would hang themselves in despair.

  “The height of Smire’s beauty is no less remarkable than is the depth of his wisdom,” said the amirs and the sultans, the caliphs and the maharajahs.

  Their eunuchs answered them: “Handsome is as handsome does. We do not approve of this Smire.”

  But the viziers and the young sheiks, the merry barbers and the stout porters in the bazaars cried out,—

  “Great is the abundance of Smire’s erudition; blessed are we that behold the sporting of his wit; through his sprightly fancy our sorrows are changed into joy.”