The Nightmare Had Triplets (47 page)

    Madam Tana then struck him with her remaining hand, saying,—

    “It is in fact the curse of a she-wolf that she bears cubs.”

    “Oh, but, Mama, but you have quite misunderstood a refined classical allusion,” Little Smirt protested, rubbing his cheek.

    “That is possible, you young windbag, even though your saying so does not make it any whit the more probable. At all events, do you now stop your eternal chattering, which reminds me but too unpleasantly of your divine father; and do you be off to your hussy in Branlon.”

    “I owe to you at all times obedience,” replied Little Smirt, fondly.

    He wondered, in his touched heart, why they must at every minute be squabbling, in defiance of the deep love between them; and he suspected that, if he got from his father a certain loquaciousness, it must have been from his unspeakably more dear Mama that Little Smirt had inherited a reliable talent for making himself disagreeable. Well, but heredity, he reflected, was a vast problem; and the present instant seemed rather ill-chosen for its complete solution.

    After that, he kissed his dear but intolerable mother; he put on his purple cap adorned with a jaunty peacock feather; and he took up his spear, which had two tassels on it, to denote a hero and a scholar.

    He then mounted his gray horse, turning westward. So was it that Little Smirt set forth in search of a dead woman, with the lopped-off charmed hand of another woman to guide him.

    Now the hand of his mother was to Little Smirt an unfailing aid. It lay in his bosom like a cold frog. But at every forking of the road, the hand would indeed move sluggishly, he found; and it would thus show to Little Smirt which fork led toward Branlon. It guided him in this way across nine kingdoms, six duchies, and four principalities, without at any time leaving him doubtful as to what was the right road and the right course of prudence also.

    For example, when he had ridden but a short distance, across a barren and hillocky plain, broken here and there by large white stones and by tall clumps of coarse whip-like grass, he came to seven palm-trees. Among these trees stood a gold-colored pavilion, about which lay scattered the bones of dead men. Above the entrance to this tent hung an empty birdcage; and at the entrance to this tent, near a table-top of jacinth placed on two stools of ivory, sat a woman clothed in scarlet who was wholly beautiful.

    “Health and fair days!” said Little Smirt.

    She replied, “Health and fair days, and delectable nights also!”

    “Aha,” said Little Smirt, “but that is a timely wish, for already the evening draws on.”

    She came near to his stirrup, stately in her gait as the peacock under whose plume Little Smirt travelled, and graceful in her every movement as is the swaying bough. This much Little Smirt observed: for his mind was now seeking similes; so he marveled at the glorious hair of this woman, which had the color of midnight, and at her skin white as lime, and at her gleaming eyes like the large stars in a time of frost.

    “Truly the evening draws on,” said this most; lovely lady; “and the wise birds are already going to bed in the tree-tops above us. They are at liberty keep one another awake there, even until dawn. But for me this is a more desolate evening, tall youth: for my husband has gone upon a long journey, from which he will not return until to-morrow afternoon; and he has left me here, quite alone, to guard his treasure, as I best may.”

    Little Smirt said: “So you have treasures here, me beautiful of ladies, at your own free disposal, inasmuch as your husband will not be returning until to-morrow afternoon? Of what nature are the treasures?”

    “Can you not guess, O gently speaking, sweet troubler of my heart?”

    “Well, in most Oriental countries,” replied Little Smirt, soberly, “such treasures would, in all likelihood, consist of fine carpets of raw silk and fringed mats of scented goats’ leather; and cups of carnelian studded with rubies, and gay satins and figured brocades; and large camel bladders filled with ambergris and with musk and with camphor; and perhaps you have likewise a number of knicknacks made out of ebony and of ivory and of Andalusian copper.”

    “You have not hit it as yet, O fair scholar more comely than the moon. I guard thirty treasures: but no one of them have you mentioned, nor have they maddened you with delight in them, as yet.”

    “Oh! ah!” said Little Smirt, whose profound studies had, of course, included Spanish and a great host of old Spanish customs. “Can it be, O my life, that, of these thirty treasures, three are white and three are black and three are red? Is it possible, O woman of beauty, that, of these treasures, three are long and three are short and three are wide?”

    “Indeed, that is the exact way of it, dear scholar more ruddy than the sun,” she returned, smiling: “and so great is my joy in your handsomeness, so boundless is my desire to increase your knowledge, that if you will but come into this tent, then I will show you every one of those treasures which are the peculiar delight of my husband.”

    “Well, inasmuch as Gregory the Great tells us seeing is believing, that appears to me a fair test,” Little Smirt answered, “if only because it is not righteous for any scholar, whatsoever may be the funds of his secular information, to dispute the word of a pope.”

    And then, just as he made ready to dismount from his horse, the cold hand in his bosom pinched him with a vigorousness which caused Little Smirt to gasp.

    “Nevertheless, madame,” Little Smirt continued, gravely, after one instant’s pausing, “those treasures which belong by law to your husband ought not to be looked at and handled, and variously enjoyed, by any other person. No, I commend your warm hospitality; but upon second thought, I shall not accept it.”

    Then he rode on, without taking very much pleasure in the high-mindedness of his own conduct, because hospitality is a virtue, he felt, which ought to be encouraged rather than snubbed. Indeed, for all Little Smirt could tell, he might have acted with extreme rudeness toward the lady’s husband also; and that possibility rather troubled the conscience of Little Smirt.

    He did not, of course, know the nationality of this beautiful and well-shaped young woman’s husband: but as a scholar, whose studies had included ethnology Little Smirt did know that the peoples of various lands expressed their hospitality in various ways. Well, and this so tactfully absent husband, quite conceivably (it now occurred to Little Smirt), might be a native of some one of those lands in which hospitality was made tangible, and every sort of good luck was favored—and a woman’s liking for variety was indulged also—by the loan of the host’s wife overnight.

    For, as Little Smirt reflected, this friendly practice obtained everywhere among the Eskimos, the Himalayans, the Guarani, and the Dyaks of Sidin in West Borneo. It had long been customary among the Arabs and the heroic races of Ireland. Moreover, the people of Caindu in Eastern Tibet considered the loan of one’s wife to a stranger to provoke the immediate favor of the local gods and a prompt increase of the lender’s prosperity. Throughout all New South Wales any such loan was known to be an infallible method of averting every threatened misfortune … Oh, but, yes, the situation in which Little Smirt now found himself was quite deplorable: for, conceding the lady’s husband to be a member of any one of these races, then Little Smirt would not merely have snubbed this gentleman’s benevolence. He would actively have provoked for the poor man out-and-out bad luck, through an uncharitable display of morose continence.

    “But then,” Little Smirt decided, “it is not as if Mama had any regard for ethnology or were ever the least bit broad-minded as to the welfare of other people. And it follows, from her old-fashioned selfishness, that I am not permitted to satisfy my interest—natural to a scholar—in the quaint local custom through which the tent of this lady is kept surrounded by gnawed skeletons.”

    And another time Little Smirt came—across a broad shallow river, in which naked shepherds floundered about, waist-deep, shouting and laughing, and swearing too, now and then, as they dipped their sheep—to a broad plain dotted with cypress-trees and with white houses and with church towers. He thus approached a sacred hill, about which male persons of all ages were assembling to honor the creator of every mortal being in that special neighborhood, the great god Phallus.

    This hill was overgrown with cypress and pomegranate and myrtle; in this grove were twelve hundred priestesses, each one of whom waited alone in a small two-roomed residence, that had a peculiarly shaped knocker on its door of teak-wood; every one of these priestesses, whensoever any man knocked, was ready to assist him in the prescribed ritual, except only during the four days’ holiday which each priestess enjoyed every month; and this sacred hill was enclosed by a high fence, made out of copper spears, adorned with big love-knots of green copper, and broken here and there with tall gates of figured brass.

    “I would do well to honor this great god Phallus,” reflected Little Smirt, because the range of his studies had, of course, included comparative religion.

    But no sooner had he approached the bridge, handsomely builded out of copper and spread with bright scarlet cloths, by which you crossed the deep moat surrounding this sacred hill, than once more the hand of Little Smirt’s mother pinched him.

    And again Little Smirt rode on, shaking his head; for, inasmuch as he himself was of divine descent, he did not like ever to see any person neglecting his religious duties; and the god to whom Little Smirt had perforce denied exaltation, was a most famous and ancient deity. Him by-and-by Little Smirt addressed in the following terms.

    “O father of all living creatures!” said Little Smirt; “the provider of life’s most ardent pleasures the animated, the ever-resurgent hope of our immortality, through whose genial labors the youth of each mortal generation is renewed unimpaired in the generation which succeeds it! I cannot guess through what gloomy error my race condemns you to live swaddled in many concealments, and to seek out a hiding place in small dark dens of cotton or of silk or of balbriggan.”

    Then Little Smirt said: “In regard to this vital point we behave without any decency. For we walk about with unblushingly unveiled faces, upon which are inscribed plainly our stupidities, our pettiness, our misdeeds; and in brief, we flaunt before Heaven every possible argument for mankind’s immediate extermination. But we hide away, like an infamy, the creative power of all men; even in its infancy do we wrap up in a napkin that talent which may yet enable us to make a new race superior to ourselves. Yea, we avert, even in sermons, from the ever-lively promise of mankind’s future. Our folly is heart-breaking; our indecency is beyond description.”

    And Little Smirt said also: “Oh, but very great is our folly! For we foster despair and pessimism, and misanthropy also, by displaying everywhere in public the faces of our fellow creatures. But we do not ever encourage any optimism by causing—through one or another slight change in our national costume—every adult male to make manifest at all moments his creative gifts. We do not keep visible these powers at every street corner, to be for us a glad covenant with the future; and to lighten even the drab terrors of democracy with an ever-present reminder that the land which we infest is by-and-by to be repopulated throughout. We ignore the sole hope of posterity.”

    He looked back now, for the last time, at the sacred gardens into which so many piously excited persons were thronging to discharge their religious duties.

    And again Little Smirt cried out, with unfeigned regret, to the great god Phallus.

    Yet Little Smirt still spoke with that fine affability which the son of a master of gods ought to exhibit to all his father’s underlings. And Little Smirt said:

    “Alas, O divine one, whereas both the spirit and the flesh are wholly willing to carry out your appointed ritual, the attentiveness of my dear Mama is far too unwinking for me to contend against it. I lament my apparent incivility; and I apologize. Do you remember that the affection of my mother constrains me! Do you think indulgently about how many mothers have constrained you, O divine one, in those happy night seasons when they opposed your utmost endeavors and quite wore them out. And in brief do you, who serve most women delightedly, now pardon me, who have no choice except to obey, even in the gnashed teeth of my religious convictions, the most dear of all womankind.”

    So was it that Little Smirt journeyed toward Branlon without ever carrying the hooves of his gray horse or the gleam of his gay peacock feather out of the set way unprofitably. And he found that a young champion, in travelling through the lands beyond common-sense thus partially chaperoned by his mother, got on with almost distasteful celerity. His success everywhere was unfailing—as yet,—whatsoever might be the deficiencies in his self-indulgence.

    He stayed, nevertheless, intelligent, in addition to being, more or less, a physical coward. He thus recognized that the point of view of an aged wise-woman, whom many decades of professional practice had familiarized with all sorts of enormities, must necessarily differ from the point of view of a young man in whom inexperience was tempered only by the thin pleasures of profound scholarship.

    “Mama is right,” he decided, “just as she always is right in every question of logic. I lament that rightness, at least now and then. I could wish, now and then, that my mother had not applied for so many years to all branches of human wickedness the homeopathic arts of a wise-woman. I could desire, now and then, but particularly during these long lonely evenings, that Mama were not such an expert in iniquity, or so old a hand at directing, in exchange for a moderate fee, all carnal temptations, as to foreknow but too clearly the results of my dallying with either.”