The Nightmare Had Triplets (6 page)

    “You speak rather strangely, my dear—”

    “To begin with—”

    And at that, Smirt spread out both his hands, gaily remorseful.

    “I know. I apologize again, Arachne, and I remark only that I never saw a gateway so thick with cobwebs as is this gateway. It is more like the lair of a spider than it is like a gateway. Oh, but yes, beyond any doubt, Arachne, this is a strange gate through which you have walked into my dream.”

    “It very well may be, Smirt, for it leads to a strange place.”

    “And what is that place called, Arachne?”

    She told him.

    “Oh, but come now,” Smirt replied, laughing, “that is an irrational and an excessive name for any person to be giving his home in this select residential section. Yet I have noticed that the retired business man is given to these outbursts of wild fancy.”

    “He is not retired from business,” the girl said,—“as yet.”

    “And how is this unretiring person called?”

    She told him that also.

    Smirt took her astonishing meaning. “You tell me that beyond this very wall He is to be found! Oh, but come now, this must be seen to. I am grateful to you. And do not bother, my dear child, about your lost legend. You shall be restored in due course to all its glories, to its fine improbabilities, and to its bereaved inhabitants, who, I am sure, must miss you a great deal. Goddess or no goddess, it is not fitting that an unchaperoned young woman who began life as a mythical figure should be condemned to live at loose ends in the queer world which the newspapers tell about. I shall see to that likewise.”

    She reached up, touching his shoulder, and coming much nearer to him.

    “But, Smirt,—you speak now of the impossible.”

    “The most of my doings, Arachne, are impossible. I have often noticed it. My wife also refers to the fact, now and then, when something has occurred to upset her.”

    “And besides,” Arachne declared, “with that Jane of yours, who I am sure must watch you like a hawk, and probably has every reason to, what with the way you rattle on without giving the girl a chance to get in a word edgewise, and besides, even if I did rather like you, we do not really know each other as yet, Smirt, and it is not right for us to be together in this lonesome place, where there is no telling what impudence you might be up to, now it is growing darker and darker, with no one in sight of us, so that I would not be able to get any help, no matter how loudly I might scream—”

    “My dear young woman,” Smirt interrupted crisply, “do stop fiddling with my coat button! and scat! I mean, merely as a beguiling ingénue, in which role you are an agreeable commonplace. As an exile from romance, do you by all means remain here, at your proper distance, and accept my sworn oath to restore you to your lost estate in the lands beyond common-sense.”

    “I am grieved that you should have quite misunderstood me, Smirt, for I am not in the least that kind of girl, and I wonder whatever oath you are talking about?”

    “I am talking about that oath, Arachne, which I now swear by such matters as I cordially reverence. I refer to the acumen of Sir Thomas Browne, which first perceived that fine prose should be kept undebased by deep thought; to the theology of William Congreve, through which the unpardonable sin was found to be clumsiness; and to the trimness of Robert Louis Stevenson, which completely baffles description. I refer to the painstaking and suave inclusiveness of Pater; to the higher carelessness of Saki; and to the pleasant eddies, to the ampleness, and to the ultimate, the ineffable Tightness, of every paragraph which was written by W. M. Thackeray. I refer also to the general contents of my own works. It is by these seven great mysteries that I now give you my oath, Arachne, to restore to you your lost estate in the lands beyond common-sense. In the mean while, you have told me that beyond this wall He is to be found in person; and as a Peripatetic Episcopalian, I esteem it my plain duty to investigate, first of all, your surprising report.”

    With that said, Smirt pushed open the cobweb-covered gate, and he went in to the All-Highest.

    “
He took a cymbal or bell, and rang therewith, as they use to ring to dinner in cloisters, at the sound whereof many creatures of divers kinds came down from the mount, some like apes, some like cats, some having faces like men, to the number of 4200 of these creatures, all crying but,
—‘
Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.
’”

    The All-Highest was a perturbed looking elderly gentleman, with a benevolent bald forehead and a superb white beard. It was slightly puzzling to observe that the All-Highest had two short horns, and that His right foot was like the hoof of a goat. It seemed odd also that in this place there should be nothing except opaque gray clouds, upon one of which the All-Highest was sitting, with a small book in His lap.

    But Smirt had other matters to consider, now that, after accepting one of Smirt’s cigarettes, the All-Highest was speaking of George Bernard Shaw with virtually American disfavor. “For I do frankly consider, Smirt, that in this rigmarole about a Black Girl, which I have just been looking over, Mr. Shaw has disparaged My Book in a most unfriendly manner.”

    “I would distinguish, All-Highest,” replied Smirt, leaning back comfortably upon his own cloud. “In the first place, the book—by which I do not mean Your Bible, but only
The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God
—has been out a great while. The cognoscenti have forgotten it very completely, for we do not regard gravely any book which antedates the present publishing season—”

    “Yes, but all our books come to us, Smirt, through the Salvation Army. People do not give them any new books.”

    “—For in our larger centres of culture,” Smirt continued, “books deteriorate rapidly. It is due, I am told, partly to the shallowness of modern culture and partly to the great amount of sulphur dioxide in the atmosphere of our cities, due to combustion—”

    “Yes, but,” said the All-Highest, “we were not talking about sulphur dioxide, and I do not see how we ever got on any such topic.”

    “In fact, All-Highest, it is my misfortune to have an over-vigorous and too inclusive mind,” said Smirt, frankly. “My thoughts for this reason embrace a wide variety of subjects with a quickness which many persons before You, sir, have found some difficulty in following—”

    “But we were not talking about your mind, Smirt.”

    “Now that You mention it, I believe You are right. I was saying that in the second place, Mr. Shaw must be regarded as one of the larger suns in the astronomy of English literature.”

    “Oh, but were you saying that, Smirt?” the All-Highest asked, doubtfully,—“for it seems an odd thing I did not hear you.”

    “Yes,” said Smirt, “one may no more deny the brilliancy of his genius than one may question the brightness of the sun.”

    Now the All-Highest clutched at His white hair with both hands and appeared slightly worried. “It was I who made the sun, Smirt. And it really is rather nice and shiny, I think; but I quite honestly do not see how we got to talking about the sun either, nor what it has to do with a most uncivil Irishman.”

    “I mean, All-Highest, that, after reading every word of the book now in Your hand, the thought occurred to me that upon at least two occasions the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature has been self justifying. I mean that after the 1930 award Mr. Sinclair Lewis responded in kind by giving to the Nobel Prize Fund an amount of invaluable advertising such as could not otherwise have been secured for double the money. I mean also that when the 1925 award was made to Mr. Bernard Shaw, as the author ‘who had mostly contributed to the benefit of mankind during the preceding year,’ the fact that Mr. Shaw had published no book during the preceding year did cause a noticeable number of persons to interpret the seeming compliment as a rather brutally accurate criticism of his later writings.”

    The All-Highest brightened so visibly that Smirt perceived he was on the right track. And Smirt continued:

    “For what, after all, do we find in the trumpery tale which has had the misfortune to displease You. A black girl sets forth to search for You, conveniently equipped with her Bible and a knobkerry—”

    “Only this morning, Smirt, I looked that up in the dictionary. It seems that a knobkerry is the Kafir equivalent of a shillalah.”

    “Quite so, All-Highest. Well, and as I was saying, she encounters You in a number of Your avatars, as You appeared variously to Moses, to Job, to Koheleth, to Micah, and to Jesus. All these does the black girl confound, seriatim, with the logic of Voltaire and the knobkerry of Mr. Shaw. Under the combined assault each one of Your avatars vanishes: and then—for we face here a flash of wit designed to captivate the village atheist—then likewise vanishes yet another bit of the Bible.”

    The old gentleman’s brow empurpled. He said:

    “It is to that, to that infamous slander, I object in particular. So many persons have disproved My existence, from time to time, that I do not at all mind being regarded as an obsolete superstition. A great many of my best friends are atheists. But I do resent any such jealous reflections on the enduring qualities of My Book, which is still selling excellently.”

    “As a fellow author, All-Highest, I delight to recognize in You the auctorial temperament,” said Smirt pensively. “As a fellow author I sympathize. I would but point out that after all these set-tos with You, sir, the black girl decides—yes, here it is, sir, at the bottom of page 74—‘that it is wiser to take Voltaire’s advice by cultivating her garden and bringing up her pickaninnies than to spend her life imagining she can find a complete explanation of the universe by laying about her with a knobkerry.’”

    “And what, Smirt, do you infer from that?”

    “I find in that sentence, All-Highest, something very like a formal palinode. It is a sentence which leads me to imagine that, after laying about him for some and forty years with his own knobkerry—with the shillalah of a peculiarly fine intelligence—at least one free-thinker did not ever light on ‘a complete explanation’ of any universe which was populated by both his admirers and Your admirers. I infer, in brief, from this sentence, that a free-thinker, think he never so freely, and for no matter how many decades, may come to notice that he does not know everything, not even at the comparative maturity of his later seventies, not even after some forty years of explaining everything with entire lucidity; and I believe that every free-thinker is called upon by-and-by to face—if but obliquely, if only for an instant—this surprising outcome.”

    The All-Highest smiled. He declared, in half-chuckling protest:

    “Come now, Smirt, that appears a great deal to deduce from one sentence; yet there may be something in what you say. And with your permission I will try another one of those excellent cigarettes.”

    “In fact, sir,” Smirt continued, “this is a state of mind which is reached sooner or later by the best informed. No one of us understands everything. I myself, for example, do not know what De Witt Clinton is thinking about so intently on this United States Internal Revenue cigarette stamp. I do not know why the clock on the front page of the
Herald Tribune
is set at twelve minutes after six; nor why the King of Hearts and the Jack of Clubs are the only male court cards not to have a mustache; nor why a barber’s pole should always revolve its three-colored spiral downwards. What lightness, what élan, I have often reflected, sir, would be gained did this pole revolve more aspiringly upwards, with the appropriate optimism of its owner’s imaginings in regard to the benefits of shampoos and of singeing and of hair tonics—”

    “These are indeed deep mysteries, Smirt; but we were not talking about shampoos, nor do I perceive what hair tonics have to do with any jealous and silly attacks on My Book—which, I might mention, is still selling excellently.”

    “I was about to observe, All-Highest, that every at all rational free-thinker must come by-and-by to question the main article of his own faith, as it was defined by Mr. Gilbert Chesterton, in the remote days when Mr. Chesterton had genius, that because something has satisfied generations of men it must be untrue. With a little more experience, sir, one begins to suspect that not even God can be disposed of by having at Him with a knobkerry. Under such treatment God vanishes, it is true: but it seems equally true that God may, just possibly, not find in that special form of address any reason for taking the addresser into His complete confidence.”

    After glancing everywhither, from under His shaggy white brows, and after making sure nobody was listening, the All-Highest spoke, in a confidential lowered voice, saying,—

    “I admit, simply between ourselves, Smirt, that I do not find assault and battery an endearing ritual of worship, howsoever popular it becomes nowadays.”

    “And I promise You, All-Highest,” Smirt replied, reassuringly, “that I shall never approach You in this fashion. I confess to a little dubiety whensoever anybody takes the bleak trouble to point out that through no human logic can be justified Your existence, sir. It occurs to me, I mean, that before advancing this two-edged argument one would be called upon, first, to justify in logic one’s own existence; and I have yet to meet the man who could do this.”

    “Come now,” said the old gentleman, as pleased as in the cliché is Punch, “but that is handsomely said. You speak well, Smirt, with a broad-mindedness which I do not often encounter among modern writers. Such speaking deserves a reward. So to you, Smirt, I will gladly explain everything.”