The Nightmare Had Triplets

by Branch Cabell

  It troubled Smire, the tired trudging letter-carrier, to recollect by what trivial matters these persons had been engrossed during the put-by time of their living, to recollect how unimportant and how irrevocably ended were the prosaic doings of his aforetime associates. With what harmless futile concerns had all they frittered out, instant by instant, none of which instants could ever return, the few years of their living! until by-and-by there remained not even one more instant to be thus wasted amiably and thriftlessly.

  And he, Smire, he might have contrived, not only for these persons, but for all men and women everywhere, a more noble history; he, the tired letter-carrier, he might have reshaped their thin commonplace mercantile religious notions into great splendors commensurate with the dreams of What was his name, why, but Smire, no doubt, for of course that must be his true name. Well, and instead, he had been coaxed, if not bullied exactly, into relinquishing these matters to the stainless wisdom of Heaven. And so a botched universe, all tangled somewhere outside this so-mixed-up, this seething, and this ghost-populated grayness, a most hideously botched universe confronted him.

  For Smire had not changed everything. He had got out of everything a cool criticizing enjoyment, to be sure; he had found in every moment of his living that serene dissatisfaction which to the nature of the Peripatetic Episcopalian appeared more grateful than was contentment, the fat contentment such as Smirt harvested peacefully in Poictesme. But Smire had not changed everything for all other living creatures. He had allowed Heaven to go on its own drab celestial way without any rebuke, to go on trudgingly, just as a tired letter-carrier now trudged through these endless gray spaces. He had shrugged merely, over Heaven’s absurd commonplaces, without openly interfering. Smire had not changed everything. And so when he had perished by-and-by-as perhaps he would perish, so this strange, newly-born self-distrustfulness was now whispering into the ear of a tired letter-carrier, he, even Smire,—then he would not be remembered by everybody with untrammeled astonishment forever. Here and there would be empty-minded persons discoverable, with minds void as the white hands of Smire except for this patronizing small letter, persons who were not talking about Smire, and who it might be were not even thinking about Smire, at some special instant. The reflection was annoying.

  And moreover, it was annoying to remember all those women whom Smire’s chivalry—or it might have been just his indolence, or even his lewd appetites—had permitted to usurp temporarily, at one time or another, the place which was rightfully Tana’s place in Smire’s arms. In his heart, truly, the reign of that dear, pale, dark-haired sorceress had continued always, making all other women seem, at the utmost, to be inadequate if well-meaning makeshifts: yet how much else of Smire, one reflected, had turned out to be disaffected provinces unsympathetic with the strongly centralized government of Smire’s heart! Why, but in a way, this Smire might almost be said—by hypercritical and inurbane persons—to have been faithless to Tana, and in consequence to his own high dream. And to have the dull-minded talking nonsense of that sort, howsoever unwarrantably, was annoying to a tired letter-carrier who, now that you thought of it, was Smire. For there was no truth in such nonsense. Such nonsense was annoying.

  Annoying, likewise, to any deity blessed with supremely good taste, was that ticking noise which now followed after Smire through these endless gray spaces, the ticking of a small onyx clock which he had heard ticking in some other place, he could not quite remember where: for this ticking pursued him, as he now knew, so that it might count relentlessly every moment of Smire’s living, until yet again this clock had struck thirteen. It kept telling you there was one instant, then another instant, and then still another instant; but only one instant at a time; and telling you—with a triteness how unendurable!—that no one of these instants could ever return. That ticking was inurbane. It would beget, unless you were very careful, insanity. You had far better not listen to it. It, in brief, was not at all the sort of thing which the Peripatetic Episcopalian, who must wander onward and onward and forever onward, no matter what might be the weariness in his heart, would have selected to have lurking about him, to the back of his steel-bright mind, as he trudged onward through these endless gray spaces, jauntily, oh, yes, but quite jauntily, with his hands emptied of everything excepting only Smirt’s small letter.

  XXII. BEYOND THE ALL-HIGHEST

  Why, but to be sure,” said the All-Highest,—after He had read the letter carefully, and had asked Smire about the meaning of “mundivagant,” a word with which the old gentleman was not familiar,—“but to be sure, Smire, inasmuch as you are related to Smirt, so he tells Me, and are a—oh, yes,—a pig-headed mundivagant poet whose indiscretion he guarantees, why, to be sure, you can go on into the corridors.”

  Now Smire, for yet another instant, regarded the All-Highest with that intent silentness which was one of Smire’s rarest and most wondered-over traits. It appeared odd that this somehow perturbed-looking, elderly person, with His benevolent bald forehead and His superb white beard, should be sitting here, just as He had been at the commencement of Smire’s dreaming, when Smire had seemed to be Smirt. For the All-Highest had changed in nothing. He yet wore his pair of short, slightly curved, opaline-colored horns, and His right foot remained the hoof of a snow-white goat. He yet stayed among opaque gray clouds, seated upon one of them; and in His hand was Smirt’s letter, now that Smire was not Smirt any longer; and it was all rather confusing, now that the All-Highest was talking about corridors.

  “And what,” Smire asks Him, “shall I find in these corridors?”

  The benign old gentleman shook His horned head, saying, in the instant that He accepted the offering of a cigarette:

  “I cannot tell you, Smire. They are beyond Me.”

  “Yes,” said Smire, politely passing the matches before he had lighted his own cigarette; “but I had understood, sir, that You, as the All-Highest, were omniscient.”

  “And so I am, Smire, in a manner of speaking. Thanks, very much.”

  “Why, then, You must know the truth about everything, including the House of Moera.”

  “One may know a great deal about trouble,” replied the All-Highest, exhaling tranquilly, “and still prefer to keep out of it. Now for that same reason do I remain forever outside the House of Moera as its official doorkeeper. She does not permit smoking in there, by the bye. And you will have to get past the True Trinity as you best can.”

  “But who, All-Highest, or perhaps which, or it may be what, are the True Trinity?”

  “You will so soon be finding out for yourself, Smire, that it hardly seems worth while for Me to be explaining about them.”

  “Hah!” said Smire, “but I do not altogether like this. This is puzzling.”

  “So many things are,” returned the All-Highest. “I have often noticed it.”

  “Equally, sir, if You will permit me to say so, is it puzzling that You, the All-Highest, should be a personal friend of that creature called Smirt.”

  The All-Highest replied, deprecatingly: “Ah, but then he was always most democratic in his ways. Your distinguished kinsman has a heart which is generous. He is affable to everybody.”

  “I see,” Smire admitted. “So he patronizes You graciously. And indeed, if I had permitted it, he would even have patronized me. This Smirt has no fear of hubris, that is certain; and one shudders to think of the great downfalling which such follies must be preparing for him. However, let us not think of that. It is too harrowing. Meanwhile, I wonder”—says Smire, with his not-ever-failing savoir faire—“I wonder in just what circumstances You and he could have encountered each other?”

  The All-Highest fell promptly into this innocent trap. He said, stroking His white beard:

  “I shall never forget it, Smire. I was sitting here, on this very cloud, reading a book full of all sorts of free-thinking such as had convinced Me that I could not possibly exist. It had left Me quite down-hearted. Then Smirt came; and in no time at all, after paying such compl
iments to My Own Book, a little thing called the Bible, which you may have run across somewhere, such compliments as I really would rather not repeat, for you know how it sounds, Smire,—why, Smirt put the entire matter in a proper light. He was devastating to all free-thinkers; whereas, to the other side, in talking about Me, he was quite affable. In short, his criticisms were both just and trenchant. His frankness was most gratifying. So I gave him a charmed pocket-piece and a planet. The planet did not amount to much, of course, with so many of them spinning about, but I believe the coin was rather unusual.”

  “Yes: I remember, All-Highest. It was a forty reis coin issued in 1820 by John the Sixth, by the grace of God King of Portugal, Brazil and Algarvez: and it conferred omnipotence, within limits. I yet have the coin, You perceive: for it still provides me with cigarettes and with matches. Yes, that was just how it happened when I too was Smirt, and when there was not any duplicity about me.”

  The old gentleman did not hide His surprise.

  “But, dear Me, Smire, do you mean that you are two-faced and are not to be relied on?”

  “It is worse than that, sir; for I appear to be twins.”

  “Yet is that any special misfortune, Smire?” asked the All-Highest, rumpling His white hair. “There appear to be quite a number of twins about. I have often noticed it. Now, if you take rabbits, for instance—”

  “I decline to take rabbits, All-Highest. I had almost as soon take cold or umbrage or leave of my senses. Nevertheless, now You raise the point, I suppose that here and there may be found persons to declare that my having become twins, far from being a calamity, ought rather to be regarded as a high-minded form of altruism. For You know what women are.”

  “Do I?” said the All-Highest, a little dubiously.

  “Beyond question, sir,” replied Smire, adroitly: “for how otherwise could You have written any book with such characters in it as Eve, and Rebecca, and Rahab, and Jael, and Bathsheba, and Jezebel, and so many other splendid examples of misogyny?”

  “Ah, yes, My Book!” said the old gentleman, beaming. “Do you know, Smire, My Book is still selling quite nicely? And in fact I did hear—just between ourselves, you know—that it had been mentioned rather favorably for the Nobel prize.”

  “And indeed it is mere Scandinavian inconsistency,” Smire assured Him, “which has for so long stood between You and that well-merited honor. Your position in the world’s literature is established. Yet do they refuse to look on You as a living author, sir, in the same instant that they address prayers to You; and for one, I never heard of such nonsense.”

  “Neither did I,” said the All-Highest. “It is quite beyond Me; and in fact, I believe—But what do you believe, Smire?”

  Not off-hand, it appeared, could the Peripatetic Episcopalian answer this question. Instead, he said, judicially,—

  “Well, now, that all depends, sir.”

  “Yes, no doubt,” agreed the All-Highest, a trifle bewildered; “but just what does it depend on?”

  “It depends, of course, upon whether You mean in point of fact or in theory.”

  “Yet what is the exact difference?” said the All-Highest, more and more puzzled; “for now you are getting beyond Me.”

  “Oh, but, sir, but there is a very vast difference,” Smire answered Him. “Let us appraise, for instance, one of the characters in Your Book. Let us take, for example, my belief about Jared.”

  “He,” said the All-Highest, “was of the seventh generation of the sons of Adam. Dear Me, but how it all comes back! Yes, yes; I remember Jared perfectly.”

  “You do not,” said Smire, reprovingly. “Jared was of the sixth generation. Adam begat Seth, and Seth begat Enos; and Enos, Cainan; and Cainan, Mahalaleel; and Mahalaleel, in the first flush of patriarchal youth, at a mere sixty-five, begat Jared. You really ought to be more familiar with the Holy Scriptures, sir, in Your position.”

  “I have so little time for reading, Smire,” says the All-Highest, apologetically, “what with first one solar system and then another getting into continual disrepair nowadays. The suns are not what they used to be.”

  “That, sir, does not alter the principle of the thing. However! This Jared lived an hundred sixty and two years, and he begat Enoch; and Jared lived, after he begat Enoch, eight hundred years, and begat sons and daughters; and all the days of Jared were nine hundred sixty and two years; and he died. Now I believe that to be the complete truth about Jared, in point of fact.”

  The All-Highest nodded confirmingly.

  “Oh, but it was, Smire, I can assure you. I was quite careful about My figures.”

  “Yes, but in theory, All-Highest, I believe that at bottom the true living of Jared had not anything in particular to do with Your statistics. I believe that, being human, Jared did not live in the external truth, among his flocks, his corn, his oil and his camel’s hair tents, nor among those anonymous, and unnumbered, and perhaps a whit flippantly disposed-of, sons and daughters, but in the phantasmagoric chamber of his brain, without ever adventuring out of his own skull, wherein nonsense alone stayed his eternal companion. I believe You did not appreciate Jared when You dismissed his terrene living in that summary, sweeping and succinct fashion. No; for You omitted far too much.”

  “Now, but really this sort of—let us say, this rather literary talk—is beyond Me, Smire. What did I omit, Smire?”

  Smire replied, with a tinge of sternness almost shocking in one of his suave demeanor:

  “You omitted his dreams, All-Highest, and the absurd fancies which gave him heart to go on living for a whole nine hundred and sixty-two years in such a world as You have cobbled up, a world which does not in the least bit resemble Branlon. You omitted those dreams in which Jared refashioned Your handiwork into some sort of competence. You omitted the dreams in which his conduct was of a nature over which the urbane, I confess it, would prefer to pass lightly.”

  “Men,” said the All-Highest, fidgeting now, and throwing by the stump of His cigarette rather peevishly, “are bad enough in all conscience during their waking hours—”

  “Yes,” Smire assented; “but in his dreams, sir, this Jared was far worse. In his dreams he arraigned You unanswerably. He exposed You as the crude bungler that You are. And in his dreams he builded a world far more beautiful and a vast deal more just than You have been able to contrive.”

  “But how do you know so much about Jared?” asked the All-Highest, with a hint of sullenness.

  “I do not know, sir. I am telling You simply what I believe about Jared in theory, because I know that Jared also was human. I am telling You what I believe in theory, and with every sort of regret, sir, about every human being that has ever lived under Your mismanagement,—among the patchwork, the obscenities, the raw odds and ends, of Your uninspired makings,—and, in brief, among such botcheries as compare quite unfavorably with the fair forest of Branlon.”

  “Your Branlon, Smire,” returned the All-Highest—Who was now frowning outright, under white shaggy eyebrows—“is a mere dream.”

  “That is it, precisely, sir. And the dream is better than the reality. It is just that which I lament. I lament that You, who created the reality, should not have had a more rich vein of inventiveness. I lament that You are not a true poietes. Hah, but I do not at all blame You, sir, for this misfortune. I commiserate, rather. And if I speak thus frankly, in a strain not wholly adulatory, or even it may be in the irritating accents of one who speaks for Your own good, it is but, I can assure You, All-Highest”—thus Smire interpolated, kindly—“it is but because, for the true poietes, there can be no trifling with veracity. He must avoid veracity as though it were Paris green or an informative weekly periodical or a believer in prohibition. And in brief,”—Smire added, with decision—“Your universe is not Branlon. That alone is my criticism.”

  “Now I have heard your criticism,” said the All-Highest, in a voice which no longer pretended to be tranquil, “do you stop talking! Do you stop it at once! for this sort of t
alking is a good way beyond My celestial endurance.”

  “Oh, but I repeat, sir,” Smire reminded the old gentleman, consolingly, “that it is not You Whom I am blaming for the shabby and second-rate state of Your universe. No, All-Highest; for beyond doubt, as a demiurge, You and every one of the angels that served under You have done Your best. Angels could do no more. But to me—to me only among the indeserving, fate-favored poetai, to whom mere dunder-headed blind fortune has allotted a richer and a finer creative genius than, through no fault of Yours, adorns Heaven,—to me alone, sir, was the chance afforded to grant mankind a more splendid religion and a history more noble than You have been able to contrive for mankind. And I did not do it! I did not repair Your inefficiencies, All-Highest, not even the most striking of them. I did not change everything. So the true fault is mine; for the continued existence of Your feeble patchwork devices I am wholly to blame; and it follows, sir, that not by the breadth of one prematurely gray hair ought You to be holding Yourself answerable for the sloth of my altruism.”

  To this effect spoke the God of Branlon in a superb seizure of repentance. And the All-Highest answered him, with great earnestness:

  “Go away! Go away from Me, Smire! I cannot stand any longer the strain of this conversation. In just one more half-second your bland, babbling, pig-headed, imbecile self-conceit will have driven Me insane. What then would become of everything? So, as a particular personal favor to Me—as an act of piety, my dear fellow, and for the salvation of the universe at large,—do you please stop talking, here at all events! and go to the Devil!”

  “Hah, but, sir, what is the difference?” asked Smire, with raised eyebrows. “He is as bad as You. I mean, of course, from art’s standpoint. For truly, he bungles his iniquitous duties in a fashion wholly painful to the discerning. I, You conceive, I have been tempted by him, as, quite probably, You have not ever been tempted. So I know his methods better than You do. Well! and I was embarrassed, I blushed to the very tips of my toes, to hear anybody putting words together so maladroitly, and contriving deceits of such barbarous crudity. Now in Branlon, sir, there is no fiend, there is hardly a wood demon, whose wiles are not quite resistless.”