“Well, but let us see about that,” said Smire. “The entire affair is puzzling. But matters do fall out a bit unaccountably, now and then, in a dream.”
Thus speaking, he followed Arachne toward the castle of Brunbelois.
XIX. WE ENTER BRUNBELOIS
Well, and they say in Branlon that at the great pleasure house of Brunbelois (which had been remarkably changed from its primal condition, as this fortress was first erected by King Helmas the Deep-Minded) the Pope was just leaving, accompanied by his two bastards, the Duke of Gandia and the Cardinal-Bishop of Valencia. This necessitated some slight delay; and so, while the Holy Father made his adieux to the ever-smiling Count of Poictesme, Smire waited among yet other by-standers.
In this way did he regard at leisure that Smirt who had once been a god, and then a shop-keeper; and who was now a well-to-do nobleman entertaining Heaven’s terrene representative, in the form of Rodrigo Borgia, Bishop of Rome, Servant to the Servants of God, Ruler of the World, Father of Princes and of Kings, and the Earthly Vicar of Jesus Christ Our Saviour. Well, and except for Smire’s charity there would not ever have been any Popes; his Holiness would have remained a mere nobody. Yet far more strange a thing was it for Smire to be looking directly upon the Smirt who had once been Smire; and to observe the brightly colored ease, the superbness, and the shining elegance of Smirt’s manner of living nowadays, ever since Smirt had gone out of his capital letters to become a retired capitalist.
For this Smirt nowadays (so was Smire informed, by a huge-nosed Dominican friar) lived at all moments a life which was woven harmoniously, as it were, of color and of music and of fair forms, of gems, pictures and velvets; a life which was high-hearted and bland and golden; and which yet at bottom, the friar said, was tinged wickedly by its disregard of all excellences which were not sensuous. The court over which Smirt ruled with grace and sweetness, and with tenderness even, was not ever gross; yet its bright serenity was in some sort made diabolical (said Fra Girolamo, at any rate) through its indifference to all moral values, values which Smirt’s manner of living neither aspersed nor commended.
In brief, neither virtue nor vice was now recognized in Poictesme. One lived pleasurably, doing that which for the instant seemed most pleasure-giving and most satisfying to delicate and courtly curiosities,—now deriving this keen, sweet thrill of the senses from a fine madrigal, now from delight in a beautifully curved woman’s body or from the more slender body of a boy; and next, it might be, from admiring the cool loveliness of a saint’s picture or from the finesse of an adroitly contrived assassination or from devout worship before a wonderfully carved crucifix. Each exercise was a form of art, a loving essay in appreciative criticism, conducted with gracious leisure, with reflective interest. Such was the current mode in Poictesme; and this mode, said Fra Girolamo, was most damnable.
Smire did not wholly agree with the black-robed monk. But Smire lacked time, at this instant, to define his own urbane balance between aesthetics and morality, on account of the welcomes which were being given to Smire, after the three Borgias had ridden away, so resplendently, among the fanfares of gold-wrought, golden-voiced trumpets.
For now the brightly-clad lords and the ladies also, the philologians, the humanists and the silversmiths, the poets, painters and philosophers, the suave priests, the staid merchants and the slim gay page boys—and, in short, all the hundreds of persons who attended the well-to-do Count of Poictesme—each greeted Smire, saying:
“Hail, Smire! Over and yet over again have we heard of you in fine myths, as the world-wandering poet without any home or equal; and you are most heartily welcome to the court of Poictesme.”
Then of a sudden they all vanished, like a fading of colored mists; and all-powerful Smirt, the high Count of Poictesme, was talking with Smire, the illustrious wanderer, in private. And Smire, for the once, had become almost taciturn; for this seemed, they declare in Branlon, the most discomposing adventure which had ever befallen Smire in the lands beyond common-sense.
PART FIVE. WHICH INVOLVES DUPLICITY
“It is because of the inevitable duality of Smirt and Smire (remarks Laurens) that breaks the slow-gathering storm, through laws of causation which work pitilessly under the apparently chaotic weaving of the medieval pattern; and which, after this fatal tasting of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, leave no instinct of poetic justice unsatisfied. Ellis agrees; but adds acutely that, although the sacred Vedas describe the cosmogonic tree under different names, yet as Acvattha, or Pippala, it was visited by two beings, prefiguring Day and Night, of whom the last-named alone partook of the tree’s fruit.”
XX. OF SMIRT IN OPULENCE
The affair began quietly enough. They were now alone together, in a room made fair with cool marbles and shining silver, with enamels and finely bound manuscripts and mosaics, and with florid, bright huge majolica vases which contrasted quite handsomely with the dimmed elegance of so much Delia Robbia earthenware. The wide walls of this large and airy, well-shaded room were painted with impish Cupids and with ambiguously smiling, epicene saints; with a Triumph of Bacchus; and with a Magdalen peculiarly luscious in her undraped repentance over an amused-looking skull.
Here was it, then, that Smirt regarded Smire considerately, with the kindliness of a great nobleman who perceives his inferior may be made useful.
“Ah, but let us not stand upon ceremonies,” says Smirt, graciously. “You may sit down, messire.”
“Hah!” replied Smire.
Yet Smire availed himself of his granted privilege, still watching Smirt very warily. Smire’s stool was of citron-wood; his apparel was time-worn. But Smirt sat beneath a gold-fringed canopy, clothed in crimson and gold garments, with a broad collar of graven chalcedonies about his neck. And behind Smirt were black hangings upon which had been embroidered ten stallions worked in pale silver thread.
Smirt continued: “You are not native to this part of the lands beyond common-sense, nor are the ways of Poictesme the ways of Branlon. Nevertheless, Poictesme—so they tell me—is pastiche; Poictesme is old hat; Poictesme is sophomoric; and moreover—so they tell me—Poictesme is pseudo this, and pseudo that, and quite probably pseudo the other. There is no class struggle in Poictesme. We need, I infer, new blood. So you, Smire, are most heartily welcome.”
Smire answers him, without any shifting of the vagabond’s dark and steadfast and strangely shining eyes,—
“Alas, Count, but only for a little while is it permitted me to remain in Poictesme.”
“Yet why need you be denying my service, Smire? for I pay handsomely.”
“None questions your munificence, sir,” said Smire; and he went on, with that not-ever-failing civility which had made him a pre-eminent figure in royal courts, in dungeons, and in mythology, saying:
“Your open-handedness is a proverb, Count Smirt, and a fable well known to all the lands beyond common-sense. But I am a poet, a lean shiftless poet, whose heart’s home stays in another country; and it is needful for every great poet to obey the dictates of his own heart.”
Smirt said: “I had not hitherto heard of this rule of rhetoric. Nor does it explain the heart-breaking music which great poets have made in their books.”
“It explains, rather, the heart-breaking mess which they have made in their biographies,” Smire submitted.
“Moreover,” said the Count, drily, “it reminds me that the Countess Arachne would not like you to be leaving us.”
That was uncommonly awkward. Yet Smire, with a polite sigh, and with unruffled features, replied affably:
“I would not for worlds—not for constellations, not for the entire Milky Way—be denying the wishes of any lady, if the decision rested solely with me. It is but that I serve nine ladies nowadays. I refer to the Muses, not here to mention the leader of their choir, the God of the Silver Bow. In brief, sir, I am indissuadably a poet. So I must follow my dream. It is my heritage; and I dare not betray it.”
“Nevertheless, you have betr
ayed others, Smire.”
Smire looked at Smirt, levelly, with dark steadfast narrowed eyes. Smire said,—
“Yes; for I have betrayed you.”
Well, and at that the Count flashed his bright pensive smile. He said,—
“Over and yet over again you have betrayed me,—just as I, Smire, have betrayed you, so my thinking tells me, over and yet over again.”
The stillness which followed, after he had spoken, was rather uncomfortable. Nor did it seem right to Smire that when he looked at the well-to-do Count of Poictesme he could see only, beneath a light coronet with ten rubies in it, his own face looking back at him.
Truly, it was stouter than Smire’s face; there was in it a sort of fat contentment. Yet it was a wholly noble face, a stilled face without any emotion whatever in it except some mild curiosity. So does one look, Smire reflected, at an insect about the genus of which one is not certain. But, no, he decided; no, for one does not regard an insect with so much sadness as you perceived now in the face of Smirt.
“Who are you?” Smire asked, by-and-by, a bit hoarsely, “who have stolen my old high name and still wear it?”
“I am Smirt,” said the Count, without ever shifting that intent, and strange, and half-amused, and half-sorrowful gazing toward Smire. “Once I was Smirt in capital letters,—and at that time I was a master of all gods. But for a woman’s sake I gave up heaven. I became a shop-keeper, peddling small magics very profitably. So did I rise, through my strict attention to business, from being a mere grandiose god strutting windily about heaven, to be a well-to-do nobleman ruling over a snug province, with money in the bank.”
Smire tells him: “Yet I too was once a master of gods. And at that time I was called Smirt.”
The eternal wanderer said this as if with difficulty. His urbaneness, for that brief instant, was almost shaken. He said then:
“I touch mystery. I find that in my dream I have somehow become two persons who are conversing the one with the other. Now that, I submit, that is a circumstance which must necessarily perturb a sound logician, because if I had been born twins I would very certainly have heard something about it before to-day.”
Smirt answers him, still talking rather sadly: “Yet it is permitted to no god, Smire, to give up his godhead without causing some little trouble, here and there, through his duplicity.”
“I see,” replied Smire. “Yes, and as a mere axiom, that is sound. What is an axiom between two halves of the same person? Moreover, I declare to you: (a) that this duplicity of ours is a far too personal duplicity, it is a confusing duplicity; and (b) that I have not ever given up my godhead. No, Smirt: you have been transfigured into opulence, you have been made a magnate, but I have stayed a deity; and no matter what mishaps may befall me, yet do I remain the God of Branlon.”
Smirt paused to inspect an intaglio ring on his own finger, considerately. He appeared to find it of interest. But he looked up by-and-by, with a lazy smiling; and Smirt said:
“That you are the God of Branlon, is a thing you keep telling people, Smire, with the persistence of a bad conscience, as you travel about everywhither in the appearance of a lean rambling vagabond. But where is your Branlon? That alone you do not tell anybody.”
Smire answered this with some indignation.
“I do not tell them, Smirt, because I do not know. I know only that Branlon is not a conservative province which remains stationary. It is a more baroque kingdom. It eludes cartographers; it pulls the nose of probability with the fingers of fancy; and it fosters magnanimity. It is not, in brief, a place in which sublime persons become fat and regard with so much complacency the warm friendships, and the quite innocent friendships, of course”—so did Smire interpolate gallantly—“which their wives form under hawthorn-bushes.”
“The Countess Arachne,” replied Smirt, equably, “has a friendly nature. I believe this to be a virtue. I think that in a reigning countess it is a great virtue, inasmuch as it makes for her popularity among all sorts of people.”
“So I can well imagine, Smirt; and I imagine too that the Spider Woman does not waste these loving friends afterward.”
“Indeed, Smire, but she does not ever fail to prevent them from talking indiscreetly. She is careful to avert any possible scandal, even when she has no real appetite for her well-doing. But come now, you must not lead me into such open boastfulness about the many virtues of my dear wife! Instead, let us talk about you, Smire. For I perceive that you scorn my snug province.”
Smire lifted the shocked hand of civility; but none too convincingly.
“No, I do not at all criticize your prosperity, Smirt. Moreover, I do not refer in any way, as you may note, to your smugness as you live here among ever-flowering orange-trees and bland fountains and so much color and all softnesses. I say only that I do not like that which my duplicity has made of me.”
“Ah, but my need was Poictesme,” says Smirt, “just as your need is Branlon. Each to his taste, is the rule in all dreams.”
Then yet again, the Count smiled, most wonderfully, adding,—
“Yes; and I perceive also that in order for you to recover your rustic wild realm in Branlon, my lean enemy, you must have aid.”
“And where will I get aid?” asked Smire. “What person anywhere would have the temerity, or perhaps I might better say the loving-kindness, to offer any such aid to the lost God of Branlon?”
Smirt told him; and then Smire whistled, meditatively. Afterward he said:
“Why, but of course! That is logic. Yes, Smirt, you are right; and I should have thought of that long ago.”
XXI. A GOD’S REMORSE
Well, but it was not easy to put out of your thinking what Smirt had said, speaking half sorrowfully, and yet with some malicious flavor of derision. “I ought,” had replied Smire, with unruffled affability, “to have thought of that long ago.” Trenching, it might be, upon understatement, he had thus, none the less, spoken the truth, and the complete truth.
Yet trouble, in the not unfamiliar role of truth’s shadow, had forthwith become his oppressor unwarrantably,—holding (Smire decided) as it were, the barbarous and the unrestrained, small tyranny of a decreed outlaw who as yet, through the preoccupation of the law’s local executives with evils more immense, and the attendant sloth of a constabulary whose prime interest must remain, after all, fixed upon private, human, hearthside affairs rather than upon that plump abstraction which one finds realized now and then (but assuredly not worshipped) as a crude shrugged-at bit of civic statuary or as a dispirited figure in some mural painting (passed by how hastily!) labelled “justice”—yes, as just such an outlaw stays fortified by neglect, and is made formidable by continued inattentiveness, so here. Smire, in brief, had not thought of it long ago. He had not thought about it at all. He was, thus, sinless in logic; and in fact, was harried.
For he thought about it now in full measure. He could think of naught else. Neither to have given to humankind a new religion nor to have altered the history of all mortal creatures had seemed an omission not deeply serious. In very deed, it had allied Smire, it had almost identified him, with the crass average of his fellow beings upon Earth as they passed—indistinguishably, after a century or so—toward extinction. So many other persons had done nothing altogether unique and forever memorable.
Yet this risk he had dared heroically. Smire, being unparalleled (he had thought), could well venture to avoid the outré, inasmuch as in the perfection of his nature, in the unrestricted scope of his wit and fancy and erudition, rather than in the crude flare of some boisterous action, lay logically his adamantean claim upon supremacy above all living or buried or as yet unborn beings. He was Smire. That sufficed. That was a consideration which bedwarfed everything else except only this reminder, so languidly spoken, which had come to Smire through the smiling, the over-opulently curved lips of his dead self, Smirt.
Yes, and when the dead spoke, regretfully, then the all-regretful dead hearkened. Elsewise had not so many
ghosts arisen frostily, in these endless gray spaces, to confront Smire. We reverenced, we had faith in, we awaited, they said, your achievements. Where are they, Smire? And he, the appalled dreamer, he could but wave back at them, in his frightened, in his half-frantic exorcism, with hands empty except for this letter stamped with the seal of Poictesme.
Moreover, they were not like the gnarled and toil-hardened hands of that, what was his name? oh, but yes, of that Yussuf—so did Smire reflect, staring aghast at his own fair, priest-like hands,—nor of any carpenter, nor of a ploughman, nor of a follower for gain of any craft. Poor Yussuf! for if his not-frankly-to-be-spoken-about situation had been made dreadful eternally, how dreadful likewise remained the situation of Smire thus eternally stationed behind a couple of divine, all-powerful hands quite unused for aught useful! Their pale emptiness, except for this letter, was a vast symbol, if one could but grasp its exact meaning. These moving fluttered hands had but gathered up this tiny letter and a remorsefulness, a most huge remorsefulness for not having given to mankind a more admirable religion, a more splendid history. Well, and this terror, this nightmare-like remorsefulness, had been begotten, he knew, by a dream’s logic: for in flesh-and-blood countries to be thinking about any such nonsense, was, in itself, nonsense.
What, though, was it that nonsense was not? For if, in these endless gray spaces, cirro-cumulus clouds were now moving about Smire nonsensically, so too his mind was all clouds, it seemed to Smire the tired letter-carrier, although of course any letter which had been written throughout by that detestable, so prosperous Smirt, with his own black pen, had its assured value, all clouds without any shining in them, enormous restless pearl-colored clouds which were stirring endlessly; and which boiled over one another, very lazily; and which opened now and then with pale vistas in which you saw faintly the faces of the dead whom you had known when these faces had color and movement in them.
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