The Nightmare Had Triplets (51 page)

    “For this reason,” Mr. Smith continued, “I cannot speak now, at this marvelous instant. For you have been restored to me. The great love of my life—and indeed the one profound passion of my existence—has been cleansed miraculously from all stains of time and, if you will permit the suggestion, of evil also. A lost dream returns very gloriously at this glad instant, bringing back to me its peace and its innocence and its beauty, in a fashion which I find to be more or less incredible. Before any such deep happiness I prefer not to voice the inadequate. No; for I am frightened by my own happiness. From its too piercing loveliness I must seek refuge in silence and—as I have admitted—in disbelief likewise. My heart rings with joy; there is a proud music in my heart but in my mind there is doubt; and in my mouth silence.

    “That is a large pity: for if I were not wholly tongue-tied,” Mr. Smith resumed, “I would hymn worthily my delight in Tana. It is about the dearness of Tana that I would be talking very handsomely, at full length, with all that perfectness of diction which has been commended by so many excellent critics when I have touched upon lesser themes. I forbear to cite their remarks; it would embarrass me. Moreover, my innate modesty forbids any disputing that when these erudite persons declared my genius to be a most notable genius, they were talking good sense. So I protest only that not even my unparalleled genius in handling words is able to do any real justice to my delight in Tana. For this reason, above all other reasons, do I remain silent, without trying to put my present joy into frail words. I dare not display
hubris
by attempting the impossible.”

    All this he said at a time when Mr. Smith sat alone with Tana, in Mr. Smith’s home, at the deep midst of the charmed forest of Branlon, whither no one of his sons had ever penetrated. And Mr. Smith, through the long while that he talked about why he was keeping silent, regarded his Tana with smiling approval.

    Well, and it was a facial expression which he now altered into a look of shocked surprise.

    “Why, but can it be,” said Mr. Smith, “that, without noticing it, I have been betrayed, yet again, into
hubris?
”

    Mr. Smith stared sharply about him; and he thus noted a wonder which was no part of the magic of Branlon, for behind him, on the mantel-piece of his own home, a black onyx clock now ticked indomitably and defied Branlon’s embargo upon all clocks. So for one instant did this small time-server materialize out of Mr. Smith’s dream about his being a master of all gods; and yet, in another instant, there was no sign of any clock to be seen anywhere. But the perturbed Lord of the Forest could still hear its ticking; and he knew, only too well, the meaning of this horrible, small, ever-busy noise.

    It assured him, he knew, that for the demi-god, no less than for the supreme god, time waited, and time made ready the dim enmities of time, and time planned a discrowning. Not even a mere modest Mr. Smith could evade time. For it was this same clock, as he now recollected, which had haunted him throughout his high-hearted dream of being supreme over everybody, by counting relentlessly every moment of his omnipotence; and by telling him that there was one instant, then another instant, and then yet another, but only one instant at a time; and by telling him that, for no living being, could any one of these instants ever return.

    These truths, of course, were mere truisms. Yet the clock’s re-appearance in Branlon, as a tangible and defiant intruder, aroused grave suspicions.

    “In that dream I believed I was Smirt. I was then conscious only of my thoughts, my interests, and my beliefs as a master of all gods, and unconscious of my present individuality as Lord of the Forest. I awoke from that dream; and it seemed to me I was myself again. Still, I cannot be certain. Still, I do not know whether at that time Smith was dreaming he was Smirt? or whether at this time sublime Smirt may condescend to dream he is Smith? or whether some third person, as Urc Tabaron believed, has dreamed about both of them? I can but accept the knowledge that the chances are two to one against my being Mr. Smith; and two to one in favor of the possibility that I still move in the affairs of a dream. All Branlon and my tall, dear, rather foolish sons may very well be but the creations of my never-idle wit and fancy and erudition. And yet Tana, I somehow know, is quite real.”

    He regarded her for an instant. And in this instant he knew that, no matter who he might happen to be, nothing else mattered except that Tana was real.

    “But the clock also is real. And in my dreams, as I can now see, any least suspicion of
hubris
will evoke always this tiny and sombre reminder, this ever-busy
memento temporis
—and, in brief, this same clock—to assure me that time labors to take away my current dream also, in due course; and to bring me, it may be, yet more dreams; but to bring even to me at last, whoever I may turn out to be, as time brings to all living creatures, death.”

    And yet too, he reflected, in all his dreams—now—would be Tana. There had been a great many other women, it was true; and there might be still more of these incidental women. But they passed; as Rani, and as Oriana, and as Airel, and as Arachne, and as yet many other very comely and most adorable creatures, had passed quite casually in his dreams, so they all passed; and that was an end of them. Well, and Tana likewise passed, it might be; but by-and-by Tana would always return. He knew that—now—with a deep and a somewhat terrified joy.

    “There is no power,” he said, aloud, “which can ever any more divide us. Or not, at least, until that ubiquitous black clock—with which you are somehow allied, I do not know how—has triumphed over my vigor and my erudition and my wit and my fancy, and until my life is quite ended.”

    “No,” replied Tana: “for I am served at all times by the powers of the moon, and by all else which is unstable and false and fickle. And so, until time ends for you, and no matter where your light heart may scamper—like a dead dry leaf,—still, Lord of the Forest, your thinking will be my kingdom.”

    At that, he took both her hands in his hands; and he looked at her with a sort of resigned fondness.

    “I do not complain,” he said, sturdily; “for your dear, deformed hands alone have brought peace to my thinking. In these strange, in these rather horrible hands, which are not like the hands of any other woman, rest my happiness—and, it may be, my misery and my destruction also. I do not understand this. It is not necessary I should understand. It is enough that when I am with you I touch contentment.”

    “Yet not utterly, poor Lord of the Forest; because in your thinking a clock ticks relentlessly, as it counts the passing away of your dream and of all your dreams.”

    His eyes remained fond; his look was unwontedly grave, his voice quiet, as Mr. Smith said:

    “I still move in a dream, dear Tana, perceiving very dimly those large truths which I know to be fixed and terrible and righteous, and which I may not understand because of my littleness. Where love is, there must be death also. This thing my dream tells me.... And you”—he said, his voice rising—“you are both!”

    “That is as it may be, Lord of the Forest: but does it make good sense to a sound logician?”

    “No, Tana: it does not make any sense at all to my brain. But my heart knows it is true. You content me because you are both love and death.”

    He shrugged then, saying: “Well, but that same Charlemagne who sent me a-hunting for my four sons, that forlorn great Emperor who might not win back to his Gilles as I to my Tana, he none the less had the root of this matter. Yes, he spoke wisely. It is far better for me—who, in spite of my wit and my fancy and my erudition, must always be the shared toy of two commonplaces—not ever to think over-gravely about this pair of supreme commonplaces which we term love and death. Yet that they are indivisible, my heart tells me; they overrule all that fine life which we foreplan in our youth, and which we do not live in our maturity; and a wise Mr. Smith—if indeed I still be Lord of the Forest—will make shift to accept the bitter along with the sweet.”

    “Then do you sit down beside me, at my feet, like a pacified child who has talked quite enough foolishness,” said Tana.

    And the Lord of the Forest obeyed her, meekly.

    She spoke then, without any haste, stroking the dark curls of his hair with formal gestures. Now the words of Tana resembled the humming of bees, they were like the sedate noise of a top turning round and round and round, ceaselessly. And they must have been magic words made powerful with a wonder unknown to the fancy and the wit and the erudition of the Lord of the Forest, because it seemed to him that their sound was the sound of a spinning-wheel upon which all the thread of his life was spun. It seemed to him that much doubting, and some discontent, and every possible ill chance, went away from him forever, in the drone of this peace-giving noise and under the fond touch of those peace-giving, deformed hands.

    Yet all the while he could hear likewise an unseen clock, a clock which was hidden somewhere, and which ticked faintly, without ever ceasing.

    “It speaks of new dreams, it may be,” the Lord of the Forest thought, drowsily, “into which I shall wander by-and-by, forgetting this special dream. And perhaps I must wander on and on, and still onward, without ever finding any assured faith or any certainty, until all dreams have ended. But, as yet, this dream endures; and I, like Faust, I reach now the moment to which I would cry out, ‘Tarry, thou art so fair!’”

    He looked upward at Tana’s dear face; and he smiled at her, sleepily, without firm belief, but with entire adoration.

    “That my dream lies, I have no grave doubt. But it is a good dream, a most charitable dream. It tells me that, through the kindly magics of Urc Tabaron, my tall sons have been drawn back to me, and that Tana also has been brought back to me, from out of very many long-perished, fond imaginings. It tells me, in brief, that the desired work of my life is done; and that I may now live in eternal contentment. Yes, all these things my dream tells me, at this fine moment, at this special and wholly splendid clock-tick. So this moment contents me; and whether my illogical dreaming reports true things or untrue things, I esteem it the part of a sound logician not to inquire.”

    “
He was 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
”

    Hereinafter we dismiss

    Usage for some little time,

    Noting that in dreamland this

    Takes the randomness of rhyme.

    Every law which dreamland knows

    Riots and leads all askance.

    So that saneliest one goes

    Toward dreamland’s fond romance

    As the fallen, unforlorn

    God of Branlon goes,—with chance

    Guiding through the gates of horn.

    The events of this story are fictitious. Nor is any character in it, excepting only the black dog, borrowed from what usage calls, somewhat inexplicably, “real life.” As go the general plan and the general standards of the story, you may find these matters to have been outlined (albeit with a Smirean tinge) as tersely as painstaking could manage, in the Twenty-fourth chapter of this book,—wherein philanthropy has employed the classic device of a parabasis in preference to detaining you hereabouts with any formal preface.

    “
In the two fragments of the
Chrestomathy
of Proklos, as discovered by Tychsen in the library of the Escurial, and by Siebenkees at Venice, there is no mention of Smire; from which circumstance it has been over-rashly inferred that this hero’s stay at Carthage was of post-Homeric invention. Yet, as Spohn has remarked, it was upon this occasion that the goddess Fortuna was first pictured as blinded and standing on a wheel. Ballinger’s emendation, if he ever made it, does not seem to have much in its favor.
”

    Be it told, to begin with, that in the mythical kingdoms of Rorn and Ecben an age-old rumor declares that the people of other planets can manage now and then, during the hours of their sleeping, to enter these kingdoms in the appearance of a native true inhabitant of the lands beyond common-sense. About such people, as go their exterior traits, you may find no hint of the unusual: not for a moment would you suspect they are merely dreaming about you. There is one test, however: these dreamers have not any sense of taste or of smell; they eat nothing. Thus alone may the cautious native of dreamland detect them.