The Nightmare Had Triplets (71 page)

    Nothing was changed. The enchanted forest, so far as its returning god could detect, stayed just as he had compiled it, now that he came, through great aisles of oak-trees, toward the gray house in which his divine arts had established the most admirable and the most stupid of Smire’s sons, Elair the Song-Maker.

    They tell in Branlon how Smire begot this son upon Airel, a conversation woman who dwelt in a tower of blue glass, among mountains of white glass and black glass; and how, through the magics of Urc Tabaron, this Elair had been drawn out of the West, into Branlon, forsaking a most beautiful crowned queen because of his delight in the praiseworthy cooking of Urc Tabaron’s one daughter, Oina the Gray Witch. And they add that here was great-thewed Elair, the reformed poet, digging away in his neat vegetable garden.

    “Hail, son of Airel!” Smire cried out, happily.

    But Elair did not raise the black, bullet-shaped head about which glowed that wreath of red rowan-berries which Elair wore at all times on account of his obligation. Elair did not pause in his digging.

    Could the boy have become deaf? Smire wondered. He approached Elair, smilingly; and he clapped his hand upon Elair’s shoulder. What followed was surprising: for Elair went on digging, without ever looking up from the ground.

    “My son,” said Smire—and he gulped, for no reason at all,—“but do you not know your father?”

    Well, and Elair did not heed him, any more than the great writers with whom Smire had forgathered, and the dear women whom Smire had loved, and the fine boys who had been the college mates of Smire, during his terrestrial prime, had heeded Smire but a moment since. Elair continued his digging.

    And one now noted the shadow of Elair, where it lay huddled on the dug-up, dark-colored earth, heaving monotonously, as Elair went on with his digging. Elair was created solidly; there was a great deal of him; and every bit of Elair the Song-Maker intercepted the sun’s rays with decision. But when Smire looked toward his own shadow, there was no shadow under the feet of Smire.

    “Otototoi!” says Smire, as his thoughts harked back to the woman called Jane, “but the disgusting make-believe creature casts no shadow! and that shows you as plain as the nose on your face that he is not real!”

    No; he was not real any longer, he admitted. For Smire (as he now knew) went as a phantom about the forest of Branlon; and Elair could not hear the voice of Smire, nor feel the hand of Smire which clutched at Elair’s shoulder, nor in any way at all could Elair perceive the urbane, but now vaporous, God of Branlon, who had created Elair.

    “Come now,” continued Smire, in his enforced monologue, while Elair went on digging cheerfully, “but it seems that I have re-entered Branlon as the ghost of my old self; and that the sound of my voice has become inaudible to my own inventions. I do not like these two mishaps, this pair of calamities; for indeed they are as ugly as the ankles of a trained nurse. Nobody could say more. Yet I do not doubt that through patience—and through an apt use of those perhaps not negligible mental gifts which so many well-thought-of judges have ascribed to me,—I can arrange these mishaps in a trice, or in two trices, it may be, or at the very worst, in the twinkling of a bed post.”

    Thus speaking, Smire shrugs; and he goes into the gray house which had once belonged to Urc Tabaron, before his familiar spirit wrung the lean neck of this all-powerful wizard; and in which Urc Tabaron had contrived so many magics for Smire’s delight in the fine days before Smire had become a phantom.

    Smire goes into the gray house; and in that neat place, neat Oina the Gray Witch was cooking Elair’s dinner. She did not reply to the bland salutation of her father-in-law, nor did the demure gray little woman appear to see him when he stood full before her. He cried out to her affably that he had returned once more to rule over Branlon. She did not hear him; and so, as he observed with some gratitude, could not note the tremor which was now in his serene, self-confident, velvet-soft voice.

    When he tried to lift up a pan from her neat kitchen table, so that in this way he might rouse her attention, then it was as though the pan, instead of Smire, were a phantom. It was like a vapor, through which his fingers passed, feeling nothing. His hand, as he noted with a considerate and a virtually impersonal interest, appeared merely to close upon itself; nor could his fingertips feel their contact with the palm of his own hand.

    He could not pinch himself, he discovered: there was nothing to take hold of. For sublime Smire had come into magic Branlon as the mere ghost of his former self; it was his doom now, his long-deferred doom, which he himself had invoked, to drift unnoticed, like an imperceptible mist, among the creations of his wit, his fancy, and his erudition; and in no way could he get their attention.

    “Yet it was Moera herself who promised me—!”

    Then Smire shrugged, very lightly.

    “Now that I think of it, she promised me only, as a reward for my artful wheedling of Madame Moera, that I should again see Branlon. And I do see it, I see it without any let or obstruction. She has kept her promise, quite literally. Come now, but it appears the cantankerous, stupid, all-powerful creature has her own sense of humor! She has been pleased to attempt, in her dealings with, of all persons, me, irony. I would not dispraise irony. To do that, would very ill become me, who am considered a past master of this special rhetorical device. Yet I consider this stroke of it to be misplaced. Dog, as they say, ought not to eat dog.”

    —Whereafter he shrugged yet again. And he laughed also.

    For he now reflected that somewhere in this forest must be Tana, that dear sorceress, to whom the heart at least of Smire had been given eternally.

    They tell in Branlon how Smire had freed Tana from the malignity of the White Rabbit who lives in the moon; and how the last bit of magic which Smire got from Urc Tabaron had been used to make everlasting the youth of Tana. They say that, as a wise-woman who, for unarithmeticable centuries, had applied to all branches of human wickedness her homeopathic arts, Tana was a deal more than familiar with phantoms. And so, they add, with his heart’s one true deep love, with Tana at least, Smire knew that he could communicate.

    He passed hastily toward the centre of the forest. And now yet another son of Smire, the tall highwayman Clitandre, on his thrifty way to that afternoon’s larceny, rode down upon Smire: but the black mare galloped, unfelt, through and beyond this Smire who was only a phantom, and Glitandre did not heed his creator at all.

    Smire comes to his own snug home, in the deep midst of the charmed forest of Branlon. Not anything was changed in this place. All seemed as it had been when the Lord of the Forest fell asleep at his Tana’s feet; and had awakened, among bleak crags, under the cold gaze of many vultures.

    And besides that, in this place still sat a tall dark girl, who was dressed in long silvery-colored robes which were embroidered everywhere with black stars and black suns and black comets. She was as lovely and as dear as ever, so the returning god perceived, in the grip of his desperate terror.

    “Hah, my beloved,” said Smire then, at his very jauntiest, “and so at long last I have returned to you. For to Smire all things are possible.”

    Even in the while he was speaking, he heard a clock strike. Its tones were remarkably soft and sweet, and indeed, almost caressing. It struck thirteen.

    He saw that at the feet of Tana sat a sublime and handsome personage, sound asleep, with his divine head between Tana’s knees. Beside this demi-god lay a tall silver staff tipped with a fir-cone; and his peaceful, faintly smiling face was the face of Smire.

    And Smire saw likewise that if Tana at all heard the voice of Smire, she gave not any sign of such hearing. Instead, the dark girl continued to smile secretively; and her thoughts seemed to be fixed upon matters very far away. Her deformed hands, upon neither of which was there a little finger, still caressed the dark curls of the demi-god who sat at her feet; and from her lips, which were colored as if with newly-shed blood, came indistinguishable, soft, humming words, like the sound of a spinning-wheel. Beside her, ticked a black onyx clock, which had just struck, yet again, the improbable hour at which Smirt became a supreme god. And at Tana’s feet sat the fallen, conquered Lord of the Forest sunk deep in his tranquil dreaming.

    It was a spectacle before which Smire philosophized, with complete urbanity, saying:

    “Very truly, Smire has been made an outcast from Branlon by his own frailties, which are now the frailties of an imponderable ghost; and by his own duplicity likewise, now that I have somehow become both Smire and Smith. Nay, more: for I know that I am Smirt also. Yes, it is rather through out-and-out triplicity that I have been thus split up and subdivided into insignificance. And just as it was Arachne who betrayed Smirt, so is it Tana who has betrayed Smith!”

    After that, he cried out to Tana the Wise-Woman, in a muddled, whirling and sincere fashion such as, through respect to that godhead which Smire had enjoyed at one time, they do not speak in Branlon. They relate only that the sorceress did not hear him. She went on chanting strange, humming words, they record. And they add that, after a little while of such sobbing, rather pitiable, unheeded talk, Smire shrugged, in aloof superiority to Smire’s helplessness.

    “Moreover,” he said, “a betrayal or so does not affect my own constancy. Where all else fails, I at least have kept faith. Truly, it is well that, now I employ my handkerchief, I should keep faith in my handkerchief. For one must be logical. My handkerchief has been marked, with destiny’s own private brand of indelible ink, ‘Smire.’ My handkerchief, in this way, assures me that I have taken no hurt from the subtle arts of this ever-smiling Tana. In those strange, in those rather horrible hands, which are not like the hands of any other woman, rests the future of Smith but not of Smire. And therefore—as becomes a sound logician—Smire now shrugs over the deep devices of this wise-woman, quite tolerantly, with that cool and unshaken self-composure which is one of the most amazing characteristics of the Peripatetic Episcopalian. I have destiny’s own word for it that nobody has betrayed me. I am not Smirt, I am not Smith. I am Smire, to whom all things are no longer possible, to whom nothing is possible. And my unconcern is thus demonstrated to be complete.”

    —Whereafter, under the consoling effects of logic, he put up his handkerchief jauntily.

    “Hah, and as Smire,” says he, “I cannot treat any gentlewoman with less respect than I give to a handkerchief. I elect to keep faith in Tana also. I choose to believe that in her own good hour she will bid this Smith re-awaken, to rule over all Branlon at his Tana’s side.”

    It was then that Smire put his vaporous arms about Tana, crying out to her desperately. The smiling girl did not at all heed him. And the lost, futile ghost of Smire shrugged, yet again, saying:

    “But I disdain jealousy. I do not any longer value Tana to the extent of this snap of my long white fingers which I now make before her deceiving, most lovely face, so contemptuously. If my voice shakes and my eyes blur immoderately, now that I depart from Tana, that is my own affair. I do not know of any cause in sound logic for me to be perturbed, either one way or another. I know only that I am not Smith any longer, any more than I am Smirt. To the contrary, I am triplets, being three persons in one god. And that, of course, was to be expected, inasmuch as the triunity of its supreme god is a feature common to every one of the mythologies which Moera has made.”

    Then sublime Smire wrung his white, fluttering hands, saying,—

    “Oh, Tana, Tana, but I talk and talk, I talk senselessly in my great hurt; and you do not heed me, you deny me even the deep peace of death; and it is ordered that I must leave you forever!”

    Now Tana spoke, for the first time, such words as Smire comprehended. But it was to the demi-god at her feet she was speaking, and it was at Smith she looked.

    “Sleep soundly, and dream on all-happily, O my dear, very foolish lover,” says 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, in your shallow futile dreaming, your light heart may scamper—like a dead dry leaf,—still, O my dearest, your thinking shall be my kingdom, very lovingly tended; nor will I ever let any evil enter it.”

    “What help is that to me?” cries out the forlorn ghost of sublime Smire.

    And none answers him.

    So he shrugs, by-and-by, saying: “Then let the Devil’s will be done! For Smire there remains only the woman who is called Jane, that most cantankerous person in large steel-rimmed spectacles, that wife whom an inhospitable fiend has picked out for Smire, because she is the one woman in any place who is capable of foisting off Smire upon Heaven. Yes, my own dreams have betrayed me. Yet my fixed refuge survives, in that paradise of which I became in some sort a co-founder when I indulgently allowed the Archangel Gabriel to lay open paradise to all mankind. I infer that a kind deed is seldom wasted.”

    Smire paused here. He turned his back upon Tana. He looked affably about him. And he said now:

    “Well, but my modesty is proverbial. On account of my modesty I must continue to avoid
hubris
with my accustomed resolution, and tact, and superiority to every sort of temptation, and in brief, with a combination of such fine congenital traits as in itself would betray any other owner of these traits into
hubris.
Nevertheless am I compelled, by the plain evidence of my perhaps unusually developed senses, to observe that the fair dream which I created—when I was Lord of the Forest—as yet endures thrivingly, to every side of me. And my innate superb good-taste—for possessing which, let us remember, I am not in any way praiseworthy, any more than if I had been born with, in place of it, a hare-lip—now compels me to admit that all Branlon is a most beautiful and double-edged and wholly glorious dream.”