The Nightmare Had Triplets (31 page)

    “Come,” said the priest, who was called Belial, “but hatred is not the most becoming exercise for a gentleman’s faculties. In fact, hatred is by many theologians ranked as a cardinal enormity. This affair is grave!”

    He reflected over it sadly; and then Belial said: “Yet, after all, it was with untruthful words that you offended against decency and honor and religion likewise. So it seems only fair for you to atone with untruthful words.”

    “That is good sense, beyond doubt. But your meaning, sir, is beyond understanding.”

    “Sit here,” said the holy man, “and I will show you my meaning.”

    Volmar sat down on the shining black stone which was carved like a toad’s head. Then, just in front of him, brown Belial kindled a fire of cedar-wood, and he sprinkled a red powder upon this fire, saying:

    “In the name of Belial, may the Horned Lord command thee and drive thee hence, Raphael! In the name of Belial, may Chavajoth command thee and drive thee hence, Gabriel! Let us labor in peace, Michael! By the Needle, and by the Werewolf, we deny to you ever-meddlesome three the fine fruit of our labors.”

    Now the fire cast out lazily a thick smoke, which ascended, and which divided into colors; and then these colors took form. Thus before Volmar was made the appearance of an orchard revealed in the shadow-less, very clear first light of dawn. Through the flowering apple-trees came a cloaked man; and pausing before a window, he spoke, in a thin far-away voice.

    It was of the dawn that he spoke, as a dream speaks, telling about the evils and the doubts bred in the night time. One had for guide at this season, his thin voice declared, only the aloof stars twinkling about their own affairs frostily; or, it might be, one was misled fitfully by the untruthful moon, a furtive and blemished being, a provoker of lunacies, a known aider of thieves, and a most notable equivocator, so dubious even as to her own name that none knew beyond question whether it were Phoebe or Diana or Cynthia or Lucina.

    Volmar remarked, “Pooh!”

    Such dubieties (continued the cloaked man, still speaking as a dream speaks) were contagious; and they made uncertainties pandemic: for unfaith prospered everywhere under the weak rule of this watery sceptic; so that the lover when absent overnight from his beloved was not always absent from jealousy. Ohimé, but at night even the wise dead were betrayed into doubts of their own blessed condition, wandering about as lost ghosts, at odds with all common-sense, because these deceased persons had been tricked, by night’s doubtfulness, into relinquishing the well-earned repose which they had purchased by dying. “Stuff and nonsense!” said Volmar. Night, said the far-away thin voice, was fallacious; night coldly prevaricated; night was not to be relied on: but with each dawn came warm certainty. For Sonia arose then, in common with that lesser luminary the sun. And before her radiance the guttering stars died out like the spent candles of dark falsehood’s ended misrule, and the whey-faced moon fled, with the timidness of an exposed swindler, before the veracity of Sonia’s beauty.

    Well, and at that, an exasperated Volmar cried
out, “Bosh!”

    But in the smoke picture the window above the tall cloaked man had opened a little way, and a woman’s white hand dropped from this window a white rose. The cloaked man pressed this flower to his lips, and Volmar saw that this man had the dark face, the petulant gross mouth, and the heavy eyebrows of Volmar.

    “You perceive,” said the priest, “the good will of this good-hearted simpleton is to be won easily enough if only one goes about it in a manner sufficiently high-spoken.”

    Volmar replied, with a poet’s candor, “I have made dozens upon dozens of better morning-songs than is this labored twaddle in disrespect to the moon.”

    “Oh, but very truly!” agreed Belial, with a quickness which showed him to be the prince of critics. “And any one of your superb poems, when once it has been a bit pulled about, and has been adapted properly to this Sonia’s big brown eyes and her fine skin and her plump high breasts, and to yet other luxuries of a gentleman’s sleeping apartments, will serve you to admiration.”

    “But,” said Volmar, “but I do not desire a white rose, or any other maudlin reward, from a creature so detestable.”

    “Yes, that is quite understood. It is only for your soul’s health, which is now imperilled by the great sin of hatred,” replied Belial, “that I would urge you to lie your way into her good graces. What follows, you may regard, should you so elect, as a penance. In any case, do you look again.”

    Obeying the soft, the grave, and the yet somehow dangerous voice, Volmar saw that the magical smoke picture had taken on more subdued colors. Still the same orchard was visible, with the difference that you saw it now, a little while after sunset, in a rising golden-tinged twilight which revealed indecisively the discolored leaves of autumn and the ripe apples upon every tree. A man stood there, beneath Sonia’s window; and he spoke, as a dream speaks, saying:

    “Lady, I would that, as my words mount up to you, so likewise my thoughts might aspire to enter your presence. But they dare not. You appear to me too fine and too holy, upon this stilled evening, in which, like those western clouds, my thoughts yet keep a pink tinge of flesh. When I consider you, then my love vanishes, because, like a more gentle Gorgon, your cool glance petrifies love into worship, and you chill all un-Christian desires. You enforce me to live either as a monk or as a pagan.

    “So do I become a pagan, now that daylight dies and the flaring star of Venus reigns alone and low and strangely lovely in the green void sky. Than Venus there is no power more strong or affable. We wait together outside your window, Venus and I, in this yearning silence: there is no sound in the orchard except my sad speaking. The beauty of Venus is great and clear and kindly and inaccessible: beholding her, I think perforce about Sonia; and I lament that to such beauty I may not ascend, not even in my thinking.

    “No; I may not ascend. Yet it may be, ah, Lady, it well may be that this Venus still stoops earthward, now and then, upon her amicable missions of charity, and that she meets amicably with a more modern Anchises or with some stripling Adonis. In a mere goddess such charity is allowed; and for this reason, Lady, I would that you too were a goddess, and not a stone-cold saint enshrined in your remote purity, denying to any man the proud jewel of your heart, that diamond-like jewel, which is flawless and splendid and very hard.”

    The appearance of Sonia now stood at the window. She beckoned. The man’s figure climbed up to the window and entered it: but he looked back, as though to make sure no one was spying on him, and in the golden-tinged twilight the man’s face was the face of Volmar. Then this appearance of Volmar closed the latticed window, and nothing more was visible in the smoke wreaths.

    “So,” said the priest, “do you abandon your hatred, Volmar, and we will see to it that this false seeming becomes a true seeming. You have but to give me a little gift in tribute to my master, and he will ensure that you enter this same bedroom window in just this way. The Horned Lord will make true the words of your drunken boasting; and he will thus remove from you for all time your dishonor.”

    “That is good sense,” Volmar agreed. “For when I have not any longer lied, why, then—in so far as I can see—I shall not any longer be a liar.”

    “Moreover, Volmar, you will then be at liberty with a clear conscience to expose the girl’s worthlessness to everybody. You can in this way satisfy, not that hatred which is a sin, but that praiseworthy abhorrence of a wanton woman which is a virtue.”

    “You are still speaking good sense, as well as good piety,” said Volmar, “and yet, somehow, I do not like it.”

    “Nevertheless, my son, you ought to be very grateful to the sound reasoning which has shown you how, at the light cost of a little fornication, to be rid of all dishonor as well as of the great sin of hatred.”

    “You speak smoothly,” said Volmar, with a fretted sigh, “and I admit there is no flaw in your argument. Through her dishonor alone may my troubles be healed. Yes, Belial, you point out to me a way in which at one stroke to retrieve my good name through the ruin of her good name, and to re-establish my veracity by destroying her virtue. Moreover, you have the appearance of a holy and amiable person. Yet your feet are the feet of a huge bird, of a fierce bird of prey.”

    “Ah, yes, Volmar, for my master has put that sign upon all his priesthood. It is but a divine idiosyncrasy, a mere matter of ritual. Let us not think about such pedal peculiarities, or any other light trifles, now that you are about to exchange hatred for love and your dishonor for the respect and the envy of everybody.”

    But Volmar arose, scowling, from the dark sleek stone which was carved like a toad’s head; and to the holy man he replied with harsh stubbornness.

    “No,” said Volmar; “I will not traffic with you and your piety and your good sense and your soft chamberings. I prefer to keep my dishonor and my wicked hatred of this detestable woman. I will make no terms with her, nor with you either. I decline to dishonor the abominable creature as a fit punishment for preserving my life. To the contrary, just as I threatened, I mean by-and-by to marry her off, in all honor, to that unfortunate person who most nearly deserves her.”

    They tell now that the next person whom Volmar met was a huge shining horseman in late middle life. He was not clad meanly. Instead, his fine golden armor was adorned everywhere with rubies, as was also his triangular shield of gold; and on his breastplate of gold blazed yet other rubies. His saddle was bordered with gray eagle feathers; and trappings of red silk and of yellow silk made splendid his tall golden-colored horse. Thus handsomely fared the stranger who cried out, to dark Volmar, in friendly tones,—

    “Hail, Volmar! for after all, blood is thicker than water.”

    “Well, sir,” replied Volmar, “inasmuch as you know me far better than I know you, I dare not dispute your striking and profound observation. Moreover, you appear to be a divine personage.”

    “And why should I not be a divine personage, Volmar, inasmuch as I am your own dear Grandfather, the South Wind, come to arrange about your marriage?”

    “Hah,” said Volmar, “but it is to the marriage of somebody else that a sworn oath commits me.”

    Nevertheless, they embraced. And what happened after that has not ever been recorded with any real clearness, because Volmar was forthwith carried up, they say, into an inconceivably high place, to speak about which the powers of men’s language have never been adequate.

    It was a fertile level land, rich in broad meadows green as an emerald stone, with many blossoms falling upon the sweet-smelling orchards, where larks poured out their song tirelessly, and glad blackbirds were singing and always singing, and bees went about their little labors without ever ceasing. In the pastures of this land grazed golden horses and crimson horses and horses that were colored like the blue sky. The people of this land were a gentle and light-hearted people. There was no land more fair or more peaceful than Auster. And over Auster ruled the South Wind, living tranquilly in a large wonderful house, builded out of shining bronze, which stood among apple-trees that flowered perpetually with white and with faintly pink blossoms, and among pallid, darkly-speckled sycamore-trees that wore forever in Auster their first sparse leaves, which during the spring-time are gray rather than green.

    Well, and all the inhabitants of this high and lovely place were friendly to Volmar, their near kinsman, inasmuch as they too were akin to the South Wind.

    And the South Wind required it of him that Volmar should marry one or another of the women of Auster, so that the family of the South Wind might be continued respectably by his grandson, in this inconceivably high level land where the beauty of spring-time lasted forever.

    “But my prayer-book teaches me, sir,” replied Volmar, “that baptism precedes matrimony. And of these ladies whom you desire me to marry the like has not yet been born, much less christened.”

    For he beheld now to every side of him those women whom poets alone have beheld—howsoever briefly, and in a spring-time which did not last forever,—and by whose wonderfulness the life of their beholder has thereafter been robbed of every sharp savor. All poets have glimpsed the women of Auster; and a very few poets have contrived to ensnare in words a frail shadow of these women’s loveliness; but the life of each ageing poet has been haunted, and in some sort it has been laid waste, by his memories of that glimpse which made his lost youth miraculous now and then; and which gave to his name immortality, it might be; but which forever afterward delivered over his heart to a long loneliness, by causing all flesh-and-blood women, either as his wife or his mistress, to appear unsatisfying.

    Well, and to dark Volmar’s finding, very beautiful were the women of Auster, and very wise, and very tender, and pleasingly mirthful. There was no fault in them. And yet was theirs not a cold perfection, but a variable and a many-faceted excellence in all graces, so that each one of these women was, in herself, a host of exceedingly dear women, who stayed adorable at every instant, but not always for the same qualities. In brief, the women of Auster were as variable as the air of which they were born. But they varied never in being more fine and more noble in their form and their coloring, in their wit and their graciousness, than were the women whom human flesh clothed and restrained from perfection.

    Now these ladies regarded their dark earth-born cousin with kindness; and the South Wind was bent upon Volmar’s marrying whichsoever one of them Volmar might prefer.

    But Volmar said: “No. With no one of these fine sylphs do I either desire or intend to cohabit.”