The Nightmare Had Triplets

by Branch Cabell

  And still Smire said nothing.

  “Drat the man!” she added.

  “By all means,” Smire agreed, whole-heartedly, “let us drat him. He deserves it. Yet during the perhaps uncomfortable process of his dratting, you ought to remember there is no flesh-and-blood woman whom he would not see roasted, or whom he would not with his own hands chop up into mincemeat, rather than let your little finger be hurt.”

  “You are telling me something I know well enough,” said Jane; “but it is something he never tells me, or gives any sign of. Instead,” she added, in a sort of contained cold fury, “he writes and he writes and he keeps on writing his small foolish books.”

  “I am truly sorry,” Smire answered, with a slight frown, “that his books are inferior books.”

  “They are the best books in the world,” Jane said, proudly. “The newspapers have pieces about them, quite long pieces. And there are pictures of him too. People everywhere read his books. I read a whole chapter in one of them once when I was having influenza. So I would thank you not to be running down his great books in that small foolish way. But I would rather have a real husband all to myself than all the fine noble books that have been since time’s beginning.”

  Then Smire said: “The good artist cannot ever be a good husband. That is known. In fact, it is not possible for any woman to marry an artist of real parts. At utmost, she can but adopt him; and forever afterward put up with having an unsatisfactory child dawdling about the house in long trousers. I do not envy that woman. She cannot understand how this long-legged, very shiftless child may be working at his own trade when he is doing nothing whatever. She cannot understand that when he gets into bed with some other woman he is still working at his own trade. She cannot understand that at every moment of the day, and of the night also, whether he wants to or not, he is working at his own trade. She understands only the plain fact that she has not any husband.”

  Smire took the hand of the woman called Jane. He patted it. He smiled, with a sort of philosophic vivacity.

  And Smire said also: “For I remember you, Jane, and how it was that I had to go beyond your grave and my grave before I could come into my kingdom. I remember my complainments against you, my flippant shallow complainments. Well, and I have wandered far away from you, into the lands beyond common-sense. Yet I remember, and I remember with a sort of jeering remorsefulness, our living together in flesh and blood. It was rather dreadful. Love deep beyond any describing made a third with us. But contentment did not ever make a fourth, or have any share in our housekeeping together. Instead, we must squabble always. Only our love was dumb in that noisy, fretted, and forever bickering household.”

  Jane said, very clearly, and in calm tones which were more chilling than the blasts of an Arctic winter,—

  “You are talking nonsense; and I really do wonder at you, at your age!”

  After that, Smire said: “There are no words for this love. I cannot pack it up snugly in a paragraph as one puts clothes into a suitcase. I can but babble about it, O very dear, unlovely and detestable woman. During that far-away time of our flesh-and-blood ménage I could live neither with you nor without you in any comfort. For you were superficial: you thought only about important matters, quite as though the living together of a man and a woman could ever depend upon anything except incessant hourly trifles. You would not humor me in trifles; that was your all-ruinous error. Could you not ever learn that I hated you when you interrupted me in the reading of my letters? that I declined upon any terms to eat chipped beef? that I disliked finding your steel-rimmed spectacles left in the bathroom, in the soapdish—?”

  “A great many things, things which you would not like to have me talking about,” Jane replied, with a dark mingling of dignity and of the most sinister implications, “are worse than that. I never did anything of the sort. Besides, I had just left them there for a minute, even if it was the next morning.”

  “—Or that it fretted me,” Smire continued, “always to be stumbling over your shoes placed in the middle of the floor, with your left shoe on the right side and your right shoe on the left side? that I regarded your belching in my presence as an open reflection upon my good taste in marrying you? that your well-meant and quite sensible nagging to do this, that or the other thing which I had intended doing, bored me into an irrational obstinacy against ever doing it? or that I cherished you with a profound, a frightened, and a speechless affection, O my dearest, because you were the one flesh-and-blood person whom I had ever loved truly anywhere?”

  He paused momentarily, his voice shaken with tender and unutterable emotions; and then Smire said:

  “Come now, but that is odd. For I rather fancy I have noticed that young woman somewhere before today.”

  In this way did he understate his amazement, because it was at this instant that the Arachne who had betrayed Smire in the time that he was Smirt, and who had caused him to lose heaven, was to be seen at a little distance away.

  “I do not like that woman. I have no patience with the creature,” declared Jane, at once. “I would not do it even if there was nothing else, and as anybody with good sense and two eyes in their head can see for themselves, there is a great deal else, not to speak of the disgusting way she is rolling her calf’s eyes at you—”

  “But you are speaking of it, with the large charity of a rattlesnake,” Smire pointed out; “and after ‘anybody’ you ought to say, not ‘their’ and ‘themselves’, but ‘his’ and ‘himself.’”

  “Ought I indeed!” says Jane, scornfully, “when I am speaking about anybody with good sense! or are you telling me that any man anywhere has it?”

  “Well, then,” Smire agreed, amiably, “let us say ‘her’ and ‘herself.’”

  Jane observed, in complete disgust: “That is so exactly like you! You do not ever know your own mind, not for two minutes. You really do talk like an idiot. And sometimes I cannot but wonder at you.”

  “So do I, sometimes, my dove. But all I meant was—”

  “That is not what we were talking about,” Jane snapped at Smire. “Yes, and very well do you know it. The real point is that make-believe woman, as I was trying to tell you, when you began to interrupt me, over and yet over again, in a way that would try the patience of any saint in the almanac—”

  “You mean, calendar,” said Smire.

  Then Jane said: “I do not mean anything of the sort, for what is the difference? We get one from the life insurance company every year. I keep it in the kitchen; and you can see it there for yourself. There is no least difference between an almanac and a calendar.”

  “There is this difference,” Smire began, “when you talk about saints—”

  “But I am not talking about saints,” Jane reminded him, vigorously. “I never said one word about saints. Very far from it. I am talking about that trollop. And you keep wriggling away from the point. You always do. Because, just as I have told you over and yet over again”—Jane said, glaring toward Arachne—“the real point is that the disgusting make-believe creature casts no shadow; and that shows you as plain as the nose on your face she is not real.”

  “Nevertheless,” replied Smire, “she has beauty, or at any rate, her own dark slender sort of prettiness; she is not middle-aged; and she does not argue about everything.”

  “No, not that hussy,” Jane stated, cryptically. “You will never catch her arguing about it, not with anything in a pair of pants. Though whatever anybody can see in her, even an old goat like you!”

  Then Jane put down the sock she had finished, saying, with cold remoteness:

  “Do you please yourself, however. You will, anyhow, because of all the pig-headed creatures that I ever saw! Or anybody else either! And it is not as if I cared the least bit, one way or the other. At your age too, with hardly a dozen good teeth in your head! Stop grinning at me like a sick cat! and do not be coming back by-and-by saying that I did not warn you quite plainly in advance just what would happen.”

 
Smire said: “If ever I do come back, why, then I shall admit, with every sort of proper mendacity and breast-beatings, that you left no stone unturned—or, for that matter, any stone uncast. I always did, my darling, you may remember, during the time of our living together. But at present, as you ought to remember likewise, we are both of us dreaming. What occurs in a dream, I suggest, ought not to be taken too seriously. Indeed, it is an instance of rather touching fidelity, I submit, that I should thus share with you even my dreams. And anyhow, you have not any firm grounds of complaint, I repeat, now we are both dreaming.”

  “About those dreams of yours, and the sort of other women that get into them,” Jane remarked, taking up another sock, and looking at it with reflective disapproval, “I could say a great deal. Especially when I remember those four men that were courting me when I first made a fool of myself about you. Yes, and all the other fine chances that I had. But then it is not as if I really wanted to hurt your feelings. I am not like some people I could mention. For instance, I do not think it is very, very clever to hurt anybody’s feelings by using those long silly words which I do not understand and do not want to understand, thank you! Not that I ever really listen to you. Who would? Moreover, if I have told you once, I must have told you a thousand times, that you ought to trim your toe-nails more carefully. Do you look at this sock now! and then tell me whatever in the world is anybody ever to do with you!”

  Smire shrugged.

  “As an honest woman, you should continue to love, honor and obey. Stop snarling, darling! The plain truth is that you are fond enough of me, only you would die rather than say it. So let us be grateful that in the flesh we no longer have to live on as intimate strangers, fretting each other hourly with our small, silly, implacable bickerings.”

  He stooped. He kissed his Jane, fondly, upon a slightly wrinkled cheek.

  She colored with pleasure; she scowled; and she said,—

  “Oh, get along with you!”

  “I shall do that,” he replied, sighing, “for we must make the most of our dreams. It is a horrible reflection, O most dear and most irritating of all living creatures, that at any instant we may awaken to our shared middle-age and to tedium and to sincere affection and to our incessant squabblings. Meanwhile, it is permitted me—inasmuch as in my dreams I am still the God of Branlon—to follow after Arachne.”

  With that settled, he left Jane, still indignantly darning his socks, underneath dying trees, among small, stiff, rather faded looking palmettoes and all the more prickly sorts of cactus plants.

  XVIII. —AND DELIGHTS ARACHNE

  Smire advanced statelily toward Arachne in the spring woods. All this part of the forest of Acaire was now virginal with frail new leaves and with white-flowering hawthorn-bushes and delicate white dogwood blossoms. Many birds were singing to each side of Smire as he came thus toward the Spider Woman who a great while ago had betrayed his supreme godhead when he was Smirt, and after that had attempted to devour him.

  He remained wholly affable. In his manner you could perceive a well-justified reproachfulness; and yet about his divine lips now hovered a smilingness, the mere sketch of a smile, like the bright elfin herald of a divine charity which was going, after all, not to be too severe with Arachne for her excesses in thrift.

  That an urbane husband should openly resent having been betrayed, was of course unthinkable. And for the rest, this dear, shy, dark-haired Spider Woman had always eaten up her husbands, rather than waste them, after they had once been used matrimonially. It had been parsimony perhaps, just as it had certainly been foolish, for Arachne to attempt the applying of any such cheese-paring toward Smire; but then many women were creatures of habit; nor was thriftiness in one’s wife a quality which the wise person would reprehend over-sweepingly. It was a fault, no doubt, this connubial, cool, rather miserly cannibalism; still, the errancy was on the right side, the dear child was but carrying a fine virtue to extremes. Such sentiments did the majestic but reserved smiling of Smire now adumbrate.

  Well, and Arachne smiled back at him with adorable shyness. She did not—it was evident—she did not in the least recollect Smire, whom she had drawn down out of heaven and attempted to dine on. So, instead of manifesting any suitable terror and remorse, Arachne spoke now in the spring woods, with a sweet and girlish innocence, saying, as was the land’s custom,—

  “Hail, tall comely hero, whose like I have not ever seen.”

  “I thank you for that greeting,” returned Smire, gravely; “and do you tell me who it is that you are yourself.”

  “I am Arachne, the wife of Smirt.”

  “Yes, that is as it should be, Arachne, even though your title should happen not to be unique.”

  “—And it is Smirt,” she continued—very graciously, in her willingness to explain even the obvious for the benefit of this handsome vagabond,—“who rules over all the lands in these parts now that my dear husband has become the high Count of Poictesme.”

  “Now, but does he indeed rule over Poictesme?” asked Smire. “And does he dwell hereabouts as your husband?”

  You could not but wonder at the superb creature’s air of surprise over facts perfectly well known to everybody in the neighborhood, Arachne decided. Nevertheless, she replied, with indulgence:

  “Beyond any doubt such is the case. It has been the case ever since Smirt became a retired capitalist.”

  “Then this Smirt,” said Smire,—and for once, he seemed to be well-nigh at a loss for that benign sort of speaking which had everywhere delighted the judicious since he first got into folk-lore,—“then this Smirt is a most fortunate person.”

  “In fact, Poictesme is a well-to-do province. But money,” sighed Arachne, “money is not everything, nor is a count’s title either, O tall comely hero.”

  Smire smiled. Smire by this time was armed cap-à-pie with the bright armor of his affability. He produced now the voice which was an intoxication; and he put on that fond look of respectful devotion which was a virtuosity. Smire said,—

  “Nor is it because of his money and his lands and his castles and his great name, Arachne, that a wide worldful of heart-broken male creatures are now envying this Smirt.”

  “Why, but whatever do you mean?” she inquired, coloring up very deliciously.

  “Let us rest here, Arachne, for an instant, under this hawthorn-bush. For here would I tell you my meaning. Here would I display great and lively proofs of my deep desire to serve you who are the dear beautiful wife of Smirt.”

  “But the place is lonely,” she returned, with sedate propriety, “and I do not know what liberties you might be attempting.”

  He said: “It is not permitted me to call any gentlewoman a liar, Arachne. Yet I think that you do know quite well.”

  “You insult my helplessness, you rude impudent lewd vagabond, now that I am sitting down, so far from any protection, in this soft pile of dead leaves; and it is shameful for you to mistreat a count’s wife in this way, now I have rolled up my fine cloak of ermine like a pillow.”

  He replied, with a moodiness which, at this special instant, the Countess thought strange:

  “It was Smirt who mistreated you, Arachne, by giving you his heart’s love and his fond faith. But I treat you more fairly, giving you comprehension.”

  Well, and at that, she laughed softly, saying,—

  “In fact, O most shameless and hugely gifted of men, my dear husband does not understand me.”

  Smire said then: “Hah, madame, but I understand you quite thoroughly. I understand both of us. I am a time-dusted rogue, a shopworn braggart, naked of faithfulness toward anybody. And you, Arachne, are a sly strumpet, a trull, a baggage, a cheating drab, a fair she-goat in rut, for whose love’s sake Smirt lost heaven. So you perceive that we couple nicely. We were well meant for each other’s contentment, you punk, you swindling fine jade, you slim itching harlot!”

  She replied, fondly, “You are not very polite.”

  So was it that the old story starte
d all over again in the spring woods, under a hawthorn-bush, upon a soft pile of dead leaves.

  “And what is your calling, O my wonderful lover?” Arachne asked, by-and-by.

  “I am called Smire; and by profession, madame—or so at least says the lower right hand corner of all my visiting cards—I am a poet.”

  “Then, O incredible and so hugely gifted Smire, you must come with me to high Brunbelois, to make for me songs by daylight, and yet other diversions afterward, and in general to console my sad life at the court of my dear husband.”

  “In fact, madame, I imagine that, as you mentioned a while since, your husband does not understand you.”

  “Ah, but not in the least!” says she. “For poor Smirt was once a supreme god; and the gods do not understand women.”

  “Nor can the devils, either, I believe,” replied Smire. “Hah, very certainly, no male creature of any description understands women; and that is a good thing for everybody concerned.”

  Then he added, “Yes; I have heard that this Smirt was a god; and I have heard too of his fine doings in Amit.”

  “Oh, that!” she says, shrugging. “Now but really you have no least vague conception, O well-beloved Smire, what a quite dreadful time I had in making my dear husband give up his sublime notions and start a well-paying shop. However, it was just then that the styles changed in mythology, by the commands of Moera; and Smirt in this way went out of capital letters to become Count Smirt of Poictesme.”

  “I see.” replied Smire. “Yet the way I heard the story, was that, after his betrayal by some woman or another, this great Smirt became, under a name which at present escapes my recollection, a mere wanderer travelling everywhither in search of a kingdom which was not called Poictesme, but something quite different.”

  “That is nonsense, you may be sure,” says Arachne. “For here is the castle of Brunbelois to prove it; and inside the castle you may find poor dear Smirt himself living at his ease.”