The Nightmare Had Triplets

by Branch Cabell

  “For myself,” says Smire, “my estate, as a fallen and devolved god, appears rather less enviable. Yet it is certain that I have no part in Branlon, because Smith is Lord of the Forest of Branlon,—should he ever reawaken. It is certain that I have no part in the Poictesme over which Smirt is yet ruling very gloriously in his smug grandeur and sedate cuckoldom. In brief, I am now a disregarded vagabond in the lands beyond common-sense; I have no more power in these lands. So I must go now to encounter that testing about which Phoebus Apollo told me.”

  Thus speaking, Smire left Branlon forever, turning northward toward the dark cave of Clioth. And as he went, Smire says to himself, still speaking very jauntily:

  “Yet somewhere, in some flesh-and-blood country, the woman who is called Jane awaits me, that rather terrible dear woman; and my day there is not over, so long as I remain a poietes, a fore-doomed ‘maker,’ whose fate it is to make beautiful notions just such as are Poictesme and Branlon. Well! and that I shall continue to do, forever and ever, without having any choice in the matter. For I am one of that small band, standing out as isolated figures far separated down the ages, who have the gift of speech; and who are not workers in this or that, not ploughmen nor carpenters nor followers for gain of any craft; but who serve the Muses and the leader of their choir, the God of the Silver Bow.”

  XXXVI. AS TO ARTISTS IN CLIOTH

  They relate in Branlon that Smire goes down, jauntily, oh, but most jauntily, into the dark cave of Clioth. To each side of this place was a row of crumbling altars engraved with devout old inscriptions; and it was lighted, far more obscurely than Smire would have preferred, with a blue glowing, like a tainted phosphorescence, somewhere between that of decay and of moonshine. Here Smire encountered many dim and dissatisfied and most dreadful shapings, about which it is not possible to speak with comfort, because into the grim cave of Clioth—a place which was so improbable that no human being could believe in it—descended all fallen gods when the power had gone out of them.

  So was it that the God of Branlon also shared, at long last, in the fate common to every god. So was it that he came, with benign urbanity, into that most horrid haven which (as Smire phrased it) had for so great a while served Madame Moera as her waste-basket, inasmuch as it was into Clioth that she had dropped, by-and-by, every one of the countless divine beings with whom yet earlier she had adorned this or the other mythology; and had so brought it about that now, to each side of Smire, showed the discarded deities of strange lands and of long-destroyed kingdoms, in a most troubling confusion of huge forms, seen indistinctly, in a faint blue glowing, a glowing which at first revealed to you very tall monsters having the heads of lions or of bulls or of hawks, or else formed like giant boars or like sheep or like fishes; and which, after this, showed you yet other monsters that gesticulated feebly with eight phantom-like arms and inspected your jaunty passing-by with three pallid male faces unbelievably blended together into the one time-wasted dreary countenance; and which illuminated likewise, with its sickly, blue, low steady flaring, as you went yet further onward, the ruined loveliness and the imbecile blank staring of many other large-limbed beings, shaped in all respects like age-withered men and women, that had once reigned all-gloriously in heaven; and that had been adored everywhere, in the superb and high-hearted, long-perished times before human belief had been withdrawn from the service of these deities, and in this way had left them palsied and wit-stricken and impotent.

  For so incredible a place was the cave of Clioth that no human being could believe in it; whereas solely by virtue of and through a religious contact with human belief, had the divine inventions of Moera been able to keep their celestial attributes. When bereft of it, they had thus, of course, become mere feeble-minded illusions such as now haunted the cave of Clioth. Only of the God of Branlon was this not true, because to him any sort of belief had been a luxury rather than a necessity. So might the Peripatetic Episcopalian, alone of deposed gods, yet move at his own discretion, and with an unabated jauntiness, about the grim cave of Clioth, inasmuch as he alone of them could breathe freely in its too doubtful atmosphere, an atmosphere by which all his fellow divinities had been made invalid through being robbed of their reasonableness. And this was an outcome (or so at least Smire reflected) which went to show you pretty plainly that scepticism paid a fair dividend.

  Well, and Smire noticed a great many among these, his horrific and huge and pitiable co-heirs of oblivion, with a polite interest. In fact, toward gaunt Phoebus Apollo and scowling Zeus and the frail, desolate vacant-eyed Stewards of Heaven he nodded in open affability, because of old times’ sake.

  “However, inasmuch as it is not decent to be criticizing any god in his desuetude,” says Smire, to his stately companion, let us not molest the unfortunate creatures.”

  And Virgil answered: “We have now passed the deposed gods and the dark ways through which they go down into Antan. I agree with you, it is quite as well.”

  For Publius Vergilius Maro, majestic and laurel-crowned, was now walking at Smire’s side, to guide Smire. This much, indeed, any reflective person would have expected the chief citizen of Mantua to do, after Smire, at a great cost to himself, had made possible the writing of Virgil’s Æneid; and in consequence, Smire had accepted this well-merited courtesy without any crude comment upon it.

  Instead, he paused only to compare the cave of Clioth with the Grotto of Antiparos, with Peak Cavern in Derbyshire, with Fingal’s Cave, with the cave of Adullam, with Dame Venus’ cave in the Horselberg, with Luray Caverns, with Mammoth Cave, with the Ear of Dionysius, and with St. Michael’s Cave at Gibraltar. He enumerated the dimensions, the historical importance and the more striking features of each one of these caves as quickly as might be. Whereafter, with his not-ever-failing auctorial adaptiveness, Smire began at once to talk, in quite friendly approval, about Virgil’s employment of aposiopesis and onomatopoeia, quoting both the Quos ego and the Quadrupedante passages with an appreciation over which immortal Virgil smirked like an authoress before an insult to her virtue.

  So, as Virgil had once guided Dante into the nine circles of Hell and beyond the seven terraces of Purgatory, just so did Virgil conduct Smire into the dark cave of Clioth, and beyond the blank gazing of demented gods, and then yet further onward, through a vaguely glowing blue twilight, wherein they did not encounter any creature whatever, now that Smire must go back into human living.

  “It will be to you a downfall of sorts”—thus did Virgil consider, with that special complacent sympathizing which artists of every nature evince toward the mishaps of their fellow practitioners,—“yes, it is a most pitiable collapse, after your superb career in these parts; but at all events, human living is quickly done with.”

  “Pulveris exegui—” replied Smire, tactfully; and now, yet again, Virgil bowed and fidgeted, with the startled, the distrusting civility of a writer who, hearing himself quoted, does not know quite what to do about it.

  “Yes,” Smire continued, and he spoke with a most resolute sprightliness in the blue twilight of Clioth; “yes, every commotion of the human soul—if, for dear rhetoric’s sake, I may postulate the existence of any such article—and all human conflicts, howsoever bustling, are quieted by-and-by, rather dreadfully soon, by the casting of a little dust. Nevertheless, let us not disparage the humdrum and heroic routine of human living. No, my dear Virgil, it would be in vain for you to play the advocate of pessimism: for upon this point, I must firmly decline to be guided by any rational notions, no matter how widely they may have been applauded by the un-reflective.”

  “But I, Smire,” Virgil replied, in surprise, “I did not ever disparage human living. To the contrary, I was blamed, by Bavius and by Maevius also, for romanticizing it.”

  Well, and a smile found its brief resting-place upon the fine quizzical lips of Smire before they were yet again talking. And Smire said:

  “Indeed, I myself, Virgil, have noted the heroic figure which you made out of my dear, plump Elissa.
You improved vastly upon the result of her parents’ collaboration. And yet”—Smire added, handsomely—“to be accused of romanticizing, has been the common fate of every great philosopher who approached life with his eyes open. I regret that at this present instant I cannot show you my press clippings. You would find them simply incredible. No, I did not refer to your books, one or two of which indeed I might have signed without blushing, after a bit of revision.”

  “I thank you,” says Virgil.

  “Not in the least, my dear fellow,” Smire answered: “for I meant only that in the quaint milieu to which I am returning, we have been favored, over and yet over again, with a host of sane observations as to human life as it actually is, in all its unendurable drab horror, its futile unimportance, and its predestination to end, as do all other tragedies of an equally trite nature, in death.”

  “But are you indeed thus idiotically bothered, Smire? Dear me!”

  And Virgil now clucked four or five times in the blue twilight, like a majestic but sympathizing hen.

  “Yes, Virgil: and moreover, these misguided persons mention the starkness of human living quite fearlessly. They point out that—on account, one gathers, of the failure of Divine Providence to profit by the wisdom of our liberal weeklies—all human living under our present economic conditions is hopelessly awry, and lewd, and malign; and that in general it is given over to a dumb misery such as cannot possibly express its taciturnity within less than 200,000 words.”

  Then Virgil answered: “That is an old story, Smire; the books of Bavius and of Maevius were of this nature, I believe. I cannot say that I ever read these books. But they sold handsomely when Augustus was Emperor. And what does it matter now?”

  “That, Virgil, that is my exact point,” says Smire. “Such truisms as to the insufferableness, the many woes, the ever-present discomforts, and the undoubted triviality of human life, are as negligible in art as they are in actuality. And so, for every practical purpose, they are not true at all. That is why the urbane person must give to any rational consideration of human living that honor which is always due. to a droll impossibility. I mean, of course, he must laugh at it.”

  —To which Virgil replied: “Doubtless; and laughter is good. Yet you, my poor friend, you are laughing just now, I suspect, upon the wrong side of the mouth. One does not laugh with much gusto in the dark cave of Clioth, among the ruined outcome of so much faith and of high imaginings and of whole-hearted worship.”

  “He laughs,” Smire continued, firmly, “because of his urbane delight in the circumstance that—during at all events our present imperfect state of society—every human life is lived by a human being.”

  “But your remarks, Smire,” says Virgil, still a bit puzzled, “keep the ring of a truism.”

  “It is equally a truism,” replied Smire, warming to his subject, “that every man remains always so far a romanticist as to find his own doings of unflagging importance. Now the height of all mortal romanticism, as I generously admit, is the strange faith of a ‘realistic’ writer that his wretched book ought either to be written or published; yet upon planes less extravagant the human imagination continues to do fairly well. It is still engaged, to a rather amazing degree, by such purely personal trivia as love and hatred, by marriage and parenthood; it regards death with an emotion which, if unadvisedly squandered upon a mere commonplace, is none the less vivid; and it admires, nay, it even prompts, a pursuit of the old heroic virtues of Hector and Bayard, to an extent relatively rare among other and more ‘realistic’ mammals such as mice and hyenas and polecats.”

  “But—” says Virgil.

  “Please do not interrupt me, Virgil! It is annoying to be interrupted. It forces me to point out that an urbane person would not ever seek to monopolize the entire conversation as you are now doing, with your constant interruptions. As I was about to say, then, there is no blinking the fact that, no matter how unpromising, to the sane bystander, may be the physical circumstances of this or the other human life, and even though, to the bystander, they may seem as trite as are the known circumstances of that poor dear Jared’s living, yet every human life is conducted by that incurable romanticist, a human being, who views everything through the transforming lens of his own personal pleasure in it; who contemns all logic because of his wholesome self-centeredness; and who continually acts—here is the odd part—with an irrational nobleness.”

  “I do not deny that, Smire; but I have heard that you have denied it, over and yet over again.”

  “I have never denied anything of the sort, Virgil. And besides, if I did, I was but indulging in the privilege, which an urbane person reserves jealously, of talking nonsense every once in a while. Yet, once more, you have interrupted me! As I was saying, then—but just what was I saying, Virgil, when you derailed the train of my argument with your loquaciousness?”

  Virgil smiled; his white teeth gleamed in the dreadful blue glowing of the cave of Clioth. And Virgil said:

  “You were compounding some sort of consolatory rhetoric, Smire, in order to poultice the hurt of your downfall, from the large ways and the noble doings of a revered deity, into prosaic human living.”

  “Hah, but what, in comparison, my dear Virgil, is the career of a deity? For I recapture now the trend of my remarks. I was about to remark that every human life, in the eyes of the one person who honors it with lifelong attention—by which, of course, I mean the person who is living it—remains an affair of not-ever-failing zest, on account of his own superb, short-sighted, selfish concernment in it. And I was about to marvel, quite mutely, at the more than celestial wonder of prosaic human living as it is yet conducted by the staid average citizen.”

  “Now but, to the contrary—” says Virgil.

  “Not at all, my dear fellow,” says Smire. “He outrivals any mythology. He is a fact which bedwarfs folk-lore. For his is not merely the mild adventuring of a knight errant riding on horseback through a forest infested by dragons and ogres, each conquerable through good luck. Here is one who rides gaily among constellations upon a spinning pellet of continents and oceans; who is hunted always by time and death, those devourers whom no luck can conquer; and who yet cultivates meanwhile the unseasonable dissipations of loyalty, of shaving, and of preserving a stout heart. Nay, more: in such unbelievable surroundings, the more unobservant and the less handsomely talented among human beings have been known even to write ‘realistic’ novels about the squalor of these surroundings. Now to do any one of these things is not divine, I submit. To the contrary, it is insane. It is wholly moonstruck, in the most gallant vein of romance. So I, at least, I observe with an awed silence the superb lives which, in such touch-and-go circumstances, my fellow creatures are living, chattily, and hilariously even, with an implausible gusto, to each side of me. I perceive, in brief, the incredible, the brain-staggering and the heartwarming heroism of commonplace human living. And as a virtuoso of humor, I infer that to live as a commonplace human being, is to produce the supreme triumph of romantic irony, in a fashion denied to deities.”

  —Whereafter Smire extended his soft, white hands, in a modest gesture, saying:

  “Well, Virgil! And so it is to this ambitious task, of becoming a prosaic human being, that I have decided henceforward to devote my faculties—such as they may or may not be, of course.”

  And Smire paused, for an instant, both because he was a bit out of breath and because he could now see a dim sort of daylight ahead of them.

  Again, Virgil was smiling, benignantly.

  “You compound a fine poultice,” he avowed. “And your long talking has served your need now that we approach Acheron. Your talking has kept both your tongue and your mind busy. Your talking, my poor fallen god, has well drugged your passage through the dark cave of Clioth.”

  Smire shrugged. Yet in point of fact he had not really noticed any of the indescribable horrors about him (so they declare in Branlon), on account of the pleased interest with which, from his first entrance into the cav
e of Clioth, and throughout his stay there, Smire had been following the progress of his own remarks.

  PART EIGHT. WHICH ENDS WITH APPLAUSE

  “It has been plausibly argued by Fletcher that the three-fold nature of Smire may have suggested to Greek poets the fable of Geryon, who because he was king of three islands called Balearides, is figured to have had three bodies; or perhaps, because there were three persons of the same name, whose minds and affections were so united that they seemed to be governed and to live by one soul; or, it may be, for some other reason. It appears highly significant that the oxen of Geryon were guarded by a dog with two heads.”

  XXXVII. ON A GRAY BEACH

  Now when Smire comes to the long gray beach, still treading jauntily, then an ancient gray ferry boat waited there. But it was laden with no passengers; and the dark ferryman, sitting alone on the vacant deck, seemed to drowse over his one long, black-colored oar.

  About the beach, however, wandered miscompounded vague souls, in whom seethed too much vinegar to make comfortable any further living in the world of flesh and blood, and whom so much oil had saturated rancidly as to disbar the stench of their existence from the lands beyond common-sense. So they now hovered in this place, betwixt and between, masquerading, in long gowns made out of provincial newspapers, as the Nine Muses.

  All these derided Smire now that he came forth from Branlon. And they cried, severally:

  “Branlon is a decadent nostalgia.”

  “Branlon is pastiche.”