The Nightmare Had Triplets (15 page)

    “Wherefore do you fight, the one child of Heaven against another? I call upon you to be reconciled and to become as brothers. Be of one heart and of one mind, and turn your forces against the enemies of true religion. That is my advice to you to-day, as it was my advice yesterday to another pair of gamecocks, to the Sieurs Oliver and Roland.”

    Thus speaking, the angel waved a palm branch over each of the two champions, to denote that the honors of their interrupted duel were evenly divided, and the angel vanished. Kilian of the Red Marsh agreed with Smirt that the angel had spoken sensibly, in all points except one. They could not become as brothers, Kilian considered, until one of them had married the other’s sister.

    “But I have no sister,” said Smirt.

    “That does not matter,” Kilian replied, “for I have a sister, whose good looks are equalled only by her piety. It is true she was carried away by Crogan Knobald, the Dwarf King, and that she married him last year.”

    “Yet is it well, my dear Kilian, to come between husband and wife?”

    “But is it seemly, Smirt, to be contradicting an angel? You forget that my sister is noted for her piety.”

    “Oh, well, of course, if you put it that way!” said Smirt. “Moreover, you mentioned her good looks also. And besides, it may be that your sister, in addition to her good looks, has also the good fortune to be called Arachne?”

    Kilian was frankly puzzled. “But how, Smirt, could she be called anything of that sort?”

    “Why, one has sponsors,” Smirt explained. “And they come forward, either immediately after the Second Lesson at Morning or Evening Prayer, or at such other time as the Minister shall appoint—”

    But Kilian stayed unconvinced. “Be that as it may be, Smirt, my sister is called Oriana; and I have never heard her called anything else.”

    “Then I am still in the wrong legend,” said Smirt. “But that, after all, is no reason for flying in the face of an angel.”

    They gave over their talking for that while, and they went through a patch of fir-trees, to an iron door with gold writing on it. They beat in the door. They came thus to a rose garden where it was always June, because the garden was fenced with a golden thread, such as used to defend the palaces of the Æsir in the older time; and this thread prevented the entrance of any other month. They could not break this thread, they found, but they stooped and crawled under it without any special difficulty, because they were not months.

    When the Dwarf King came out angrily against these trespassers, he came in gold armor, with a bright carbuncle in his helmet; and his delight to see his brother-in-law was unbounded. “Kilian of my heart, my pulse and my treasure,” Crogan declared, in a thin and high-pitched voice, “there is nobody I would be embracing more willingly.”

    “Health and good days!” cried out Kilian, hugging the doomed monarch with compassion.

    Then Crogan embraced Smirt also, saying, “Health and long life, O friend’s friend!”

    “The pleasure,” Smirt replied, “is inexpressible. And I desire for you, sir, as long a life as piety may permit.”

    After that, the three men went together into the underground home of Crogan Knobald. A soft twilight reigned in the vast hall of the palace. The walls were of polished marble, inlaid with obscene designs in gold and silver, for Crogan was not of the true religion. The floor of this hall was formed of a single agate, so far as Smirt could make out; the ceiling was of sapphire; and from this ceiling hung shining rubies, like so many red stars in the blue sky of a spring evening.

    There was nowhere any palace more remarkable than was this palace, which, as Crogan Knobald explained, the Dwarf King had inherited, along with his rose garden, from his great-great-grandfather, King Laurin of Gargazon. The palace did, however, need to be equipped with a more modern lighting system, Smirt reflected, in the same instant Smirt perceived he was wholly wrong.

    For all at once the entire place became brilliant as an August morning, now that Oriana had entered. Her girdle and necklace were jeweled with thirty-nine gems, and in her coronet was a diamond, the third largest of all diamonds known in the lands beyond common-sense; and this diamond shone like the sun, bringing the brightness of day whithersoever it came. But Oriana was far more beautiful than any one of these things, with a sedate and a saintlike loveliness. No man could take his eyes from the quiet and radiant and holy face of Oriana; nor did Smirt make any such hopeless attempt.

    When Crogan went to fetch wine, then Smirt complimented the lady, with his customary ease and elegance, upon her fine fortune in being able to rule in this wonderful palace as its queen.

    She replied in unaffected sincerity that, although she would never forget the home and the friends of her girlhood, no woman could be more fortunate than was Oriana in her present estate. Crogan was always good and kind, and she had learned to esteem the countless virtues of her dear husband, upon an un-carnal plane, because Crogan Knobald was not so sensually disposed and obsessed as were most other men. There was in his love no grossness and no crude materialism, this dove-like and saintly queen told them, on account of a providential accident in his youth.

    “He was injured just here,” she explained to Smirt.

    Smirt replied, “Ouch!”

    “It has followed,” Oriana continued, “that, while this remains, he is burdened with neither of these; and our affection is thus kept perfect and holy.”

    Then Kilian told of the angel’s command, and Oriana began to look at Smirt more and more thoughtfully. In her gray-colored, very large eyes he perceived unshed tears. She bent toward him, she laid her hand in Smirt’s lap, saying sorrowfully:

    “My friend, what choice have I in this matter? The ways of Heaven are beyond our conjecture and beyond our disputing, equally. Yet you, I observe, have not ever been chastened by any accident: your love will be gross and material, I fear. It will trouble me vigorously. Oh, but at each instant I become more certain of that fact.”

    “Divine Oriana,” Smirt replied sympathetically, patting her hand, “in this world we must all bear our crosses.”

    “In this world,” said Kilian, “there is nothing like inspecting the property before one signs a lease. You are both prudent and virtuous, my sister.”

    “I do not understand what you are talking about, Kilian; but yours, Smirt, is a pious reflection.” And it was plain, now that Oriana had withdrawn her hand pensively from under Smirt’s half detaining hand, that Oriana had found comfort in Smirt’s axiom. “Yes, we must all bear our crosses, howsoever enormous, for the will of Heaven must not be disputed. I will put poison in Crogan’s wine,” said Oriana, and she proceeded to do so.

    The Dwarf King died quickly, in considerable astonishment, you could see, but without any apparent pain.

    Then Smirt made ready to take Oriana as his wife, and Kilian sat down beside them, smilingly anticipative, now that the angel’s command was about to be obeyed in every particular. But hardly had the three of them prepared with all suitable fervor to observe these religious duties when the two brothers of Crogan Knobald came into the underground palace.

    They were impious heathen persons, who did not respect angels. Instead they came, bearing willow wands, with dark anger in their hearts; and they cast Druid spells sacrilegiously, in the while that they upset the plainly expressed will of Heaven.

    So was Kilian transformed into a green toad, and Oriana into a dove-colored snake, which at once swallowed the green toad. But upon Smirt the depraved brothers of Crogan Knobald laid the Curse of Two Fortnights.

    Now the wits of Smirt were put away from Smirt’s keeping by the Curse of Two Fortnights. He who had sat among the gods, now wandered in a lonely savageness, dribbling at the mouth which no longer conversed affably. Instead, Smirt moaned and whimpered like a hurt dog; and Smirt lived in the wilder lands beyond common-sense as a beast lives, nakedly, searching after roots and grubs, and then leaving them untasted, because upon no occasion during his dream did Smirt eat any food.

    He made his lair in a stone city, upon which its special doom had fallen, in the older times, turning all to stone. The olive-trees and the palm-trees of this city were of stone; in the quiet streets and bazaars, and in the houses of this city, you found men and women and children of various sizes, all eternally poised in whatsoever trivial or commonplace action they were engrossed by when, without any warning, its doom fell upon this city, and changed all its people into bluish-gray stone statues, in the midst of their shopping and love-making and stolid talking. Thus had a remarkably beautiful girl, of eighteen or thereabouts, been left forever straining at the stool in an outhouse; and one middle-aged citizen had been petrified while he was shaving. For another queer thing, there were in this city four large spider webs, the largest which Smirt had ever seen, and in each of them dangled the skeleton of a young man picked clean of flesh.

    Here Smirt fared very lonelily, seeing no human creature. In his clouded mind there was panic, and remorse troubled him also, but he could not divine for what reason; nor did Smirt think urbane thoughts under the Curse of Two Fortnights.

    He thought always of the dead persons whom he had known, and of how little their lives had mattered. All these persons had passed away, fritteringly, giving over one moment after another moment to kindly and laborious and trivial doings, until no more moments remained. They had made nothing; they had achieved nothing; and nothing survived of them except a few torn and scattered memories in Smirt’s clouded mind.

    For his mind was all clouds, it seemed to him, gray clouds which moved continuously, 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. And yet his mind was a ticking also, the ticking of a black onyx clock which he had seen and had heard ticking in some happier place, he did not remember where; and this ticking counted relentlessly every moment of Smirt’s living, telling you there was one instant, then another instant, and then yet another, but only one instant at a time, and telling you that no one of these instants could ever return.

    And besides that, his mind was a thin buzzing and a futile blustering, like the noise which is made by a blue-bottle fly; so that this restive little noise was combined with a not ever resting ticking, in a mixture which troubled Smirt a great deal as he wandered about the dead city of Ras Sem. It was not cheering to observe its petrified citizens forever arrested in the midst of their kindly and laborious and trivial doings. And to consider them quite urbanely proved, a difficult matter.

    For you could not think properly with a cloudiness and a ticking and a buzzing. These were not the instruments, Smirt reflected, with which people made urbane thoughts. And he knew very well what he needed.

    What I need, what I really need, to think with,” Smirt said, in strict confidence, to a black dog—which was not utterly black, however, because it had a white muzzle and a white tail and! four white feet also—“is a brain.”

    “That is true,” replied the black dog. “And it ought to weigh not less than forty-two ounces, of which the gray substance should represent about thirty-eight per cent, of the entire weight. I must tell you this, Smirt, because now that you have lost your wits they have been foisted upon me, of all luckless creatures.”

    “I rather liked having my wits,” said Smirt, wistfully.

    “But I do not like having your wits,” said the black dog. “I detest them cordially. They are forcing me at this very instant to tell you that your main trouble is aphasia. You forget things.”

    “I cannot concede that, black dog, for I do not remember anything I have forgotten.”

    “You forget, for example,” said the unhappy black dog—who was now being compelled, willy-nilly, to use Smirt’s intelligence just as Smirt had formerly used it—“that the Gallitzin Tunnel through the Alleghany Mountains, eleven miles west of Altoona, Pennsylvania, is only 3600 feet long.”

    “In fact,” said Smirt, with some show of interest, “why should any human life be longer than a tunnel? I had not thought of the matter in that light. But, now my own wits have pointed it out, I can see that if my life were just 3600 feet long I would be in a sad taking.”

    Then the black dog began to smile in a way which, somehow, appeared equivocal, and he wagged his white tail with contentment.

    “Moreover, Smirt,” said the black dog, “you forget that the metal chromium was discovered and isolated by Vauquelin in 1797.”

    “Whereas I am not isolated at all!” said Smirt, brightening still more. “I have never been isolated. So that I am far luckier than chromium, or than beryllium either, upon which Vauquelin played the same trick during the following year.”

    “Finally, Smirt, you forget that the chief interest of North Dakota is agriculture, which produces in that state every cereal and other crop known to the north temperate zone.”

    “Whereas I am not the least bit interested in agriculture!” Smirt declared happily. “I never have been. Nor do I have to live in North Dakota, where, as I now recall, black dog, nine and six-tenths less fortunate people do have to live to every square mile. I would find it quite intolerable to have to associate every day with six-tenths of a person. And all this, just as you say, I am spared. Well, well, but there is nothing like logic: and it does pay, in the long run, to reason these things out to the bottom with one’s own wits.”