The Nightmare Had Triplets (72 page)

    Smire went contentedly enough about the charmed forest of Branlon, admiring the splendors of Smith’s dream. Now that Smire was an outcast, and had not any part in Branlon, it was permitted him to applaud with both hands the irrational and delicate finesse of beauty which flourished to each side of him, because he could now do this without incurring any such suspicion of self-conceit as had always appeared abhorrent to his extreme sense of decorum. For Smire to regard approvingly the fine doings of Smire had been, of course, an unavoidable duty imposed upon Smire, over and yet over again, by the dictates of reason, so that as a liberty-loving person, he could get no real pleasure out of his compulsory self-approval. But for Smire to applaud Smith, and the urbane exercises of Smith’s superb wit and resistless fancy and unlimited erudition, was the generous tribute of a sublime artist to his peer. It was a transaction which reflected credit on both of them.

    In this way did the baroque glories of Branlon content Smire, just as perhaps forever and forever, the slender magic of Branlon would content all dreamers who were so lucky as to escape thither during the hours of their sleeping. These glories endured. They lived on, as yet, in fair thin colors, in figments grotesque but wholly gracious, and in shapes pleasingly fantastical, to each side of Smire. And whether or not that Smith, that negligible mere demi-god who had invented these sylvan splendors, awakened presently or did not ever awaken from his tranquil sleeping, had become (as Smire reverently recognized, because of his whole-hearted devotion to art) a matter of quite trivial importance. It is true that the question no longer concerned Smire.

    But Smith, Smire decided, Smith had dreamed worthily. He had given form to his dream; and had brought to adorn it his bright knickknacks of scholarship—the lovingly repolished small change, as it were, of folk-lore,—and the ingratiating light elfin strokes of Smith’s fancy, and the temperately asparkle tiny gems, so laboriously quarried, of Smith’s wit, until at last his dream glowed and lived on, as yet, in cool loveliness. It was an outcome beside which that still unsolved riddle—whether Smith and Smirt and Smire were all one person, or perhaps some yet other person?—did not matter in the least.

    “That person has not changed everything,” says Smire. “By his progress the religion and the history of mankind remain unaffected, in a way that seems almost callous. But his dreams endure. And his dreams have their points, their benefactions even, inasmuch as to humankind they offer, in their own manner, distinction and clarity and beauty and symmetry and tenderness and truth and urbanity. That is not everything perhaps which mankind desires; the appeal, rather, is to virtuosi: and yet are these fine virtues.”

    Thus generously did Smire applaud Smith and Smith’s handiwork. For what alone mattered to Smire, as an appreciative art critic, was that the baroque small forest of Branlon endured; and that in wonderfulness, and in its own sort of Chinese Chippendale charm, and in its variousness, Branlon excelled all other forests in the lands beyond common-sense. There was hardly any mythology which had not helped to colonize Branlon, as Smire now observed, because Smith, that acquisitive artist, had invaded all pantheons in his restless pursuit of every nature of fabled prettiness and of picturesque oddities.

    So not only had Branlon its fauns and satyrs and nymphs of the eight classes, its fays and its gnomes and its wood spirits, such as you found in all forests of the lands beyond common-sense. Branlon displayed a population very much more varied. In Branlon, for example, were to be met the Kogaras, and the Vilas, and the Giibiches. In the tree-tops of Branlon could be seen now and then the tiny red caps of the Niagriusar as they peeped down at you. Through Branlon roved the Norg and the Vargamor and the Kirnis. And there were hundreds of yet other quaint woodland creatures come out of the folk-lore of all nations to live happily together in Branlon, and to entertain those dreamers who entered Branlon during the hours of their sleeping.

    Moreover, Branlon was stocked with a fine horde of nominally pernicious monsters, for the benefit of such dreamers as enjoyed the performance of heroic exploits. And these monsters had been trained to perfection. They ramped and they roared soul-chillingly; their fighting was quite gratifyingly ferocious; whereas toward the end of each combat their death-agonies were conducted in the most lively vein of tragic acting, of a splendiferous old sturdy school. These urbane monsters did not ever dash the pleasure of their putative destroyers with modern histrionic notions about “naturalism” and “restraint”; but entered into the spirit of the game handsomely.

    So Branlon continued to be the resort of very many dreamers. Through the green aisles of Branlon, bound on improbable questings, fared the glad dreamers, coming each from a far-away planet, drawn by the magic of Smith and exulting to share in his fancies. That which their day-lit living denied them they got of these fancies, freely. The day-dreams of youth revived and were nurtured in Branlon, finding the princess, long longed-for, whose beauty was brighter than daylight; finding a strength and a joy unknown to one’s everyday living; finding that dragons and were-wolves and other fantastical monsters rather enjoyed being slaughtered by champions splendid as you were, now, in your dreams. For in Branlon the dreamers perceived they themselves were mythic, without any blemishes—poets and sages and war-men, equally blessed with all talents, and granted the love of all women, now that again they were youngsters to whom death, chance, and the spoilings wrought by the rat-like gnawing of Time, seemed distant and feeble. So, for their dreams they applauded Smith, and were thankful for Branlon.

    Yes (Smire decided, now that he averted from hexameters), Branlon seemed a superb place. It contented all the baroque foibles—the rococo tendencies, perhaps—of the Peripatetic Episcopalian. So there was never any place more beautiful, to the fond eyes of Smire, than was this forest over which now ruled the four sons whom Smire had begotten in the fine days when he was Smirt; and whom he had fetched from remote countries, magically, in the fine days when he was Smith; and whom he regarded lovingly on this equally fine day that he went among them as an imperceptible ghost. Into the home of each one of his dear sons he wandered, now for the last time; and he saw that all prospered with them.

    To the south of Branlon ruled Volmar; that dark-browed blacksmith, with his princess, the King of Osnia’s daughter. In the northern part of the wood, Elair the Song-Maker went soberly about his farming. To the west, Clitandre the highwayman rode nightly in the pursuit of his own equally healthful open-air employment. Clitandre was married now, so Smire discovered, to a somewhat prudish but kind-hearted court lady, Madame Angelique of Ecben, who was a fond help to Clitandre in his thieving. And in the east, on the seashore, in a pavilion builded of red rocks and copper, Little Smirt continued to write verse of a wholly dull and edifying nature about the charms of his blonde small wife, who was Queen of the Kogaras. In brief, a new dynasty had been established in Branlon; youth reigned in Branlon untroubled, now that the woodland creatures paid homage to the four sons of the Master of Gods; Time had not entered Branlon with any rat-like gnawings; and all was quite as it should be.

    “For myself,” says Smire, “my estate, as a fallen and devolved god, appears rather less enviable. Yet it is certain that I have no part in Branlon, because Smith is Lord of the Forest of Branlon,—should he ever reawaken. It is certain that I have no part in the Poictesme over which Smirt is yet ruling very gloriously in his smug grandeur and sedate cuckoldom. In brief, I am now a disregarded vagabond in the lands beyond common-sense; I have no more power in these lands. So I must go now to encounter that testing about which Phoebus Apollo told me.”

    Thus speaking, Smire left Branlon forever, turning northward toward the dark cave of Clioth. And as he went, Smire says to himself, still speaking very jauntily:

    “Yet somewhere, in some flesh-and-blood country, the woman who is called Jane awaits me, that rather terrible dear woman; and my day there is not over, so long as I remain a
poietes,
a fore-doomed ‘maker,’ whose fate it is to make beautiful notions just such as are Poictesme and Branlon. Well! and that I shall continue to do, forever and ever, without having any choice in the matter. For I am one 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.”

    They relate in Branlon that Smire goes down, jauntily, oh, but most jauntily, into the dark cave of Clioth. To each side of this place was a row of crumbling altars engraved with devout old inscriptions; and it was lighted, far more obscurely than Smire would have preferred, with a blue glowing, like a tainted phosphorescence, somewhere between that of decay and of moonshine. Here Smire encountered many dim and dissatisfied and most dreadful shapings, about which it is not possible to speak with comfort, because into the grim cave of Clioth—a place which was so improbable that no human being could believe in it—descended all fallen gods when the power had gone out of them.

    So was it that the God of Branlon also shared, at long last, in the fate common to every god. So was it that he came, with benign urbanity, into that most horrid haven which (as Smire phrased it) had for so great a while served Madame Moera as her waste-basket, inasmuch as it was into Clioth that she had dropped, by-and-by, every one of the countless divine beings with whom yet earlier she had adorned this or the other mythology; and had so brought it about that now, to each side of Smire, showed the discarded deities of strange lands and of long-destroyed kingdoms, in a most troubling confusion of huge forms, seen indistinctly, in a faint blue glowing, a glowing which at first revealed to you very tall monsters having the heads of lions or of bulls or of hawks, or else formed like giant boars or like sheep or like fishes; and which, after this, showed you yet other monsters that gesticulated feebly with eight phantom-like arms and inspected your jaunty passing-by with three pallid male faces unbelievably blended together into the one time-wasted dreary countenance; and which illuminated likewise, with its sickly, blue, low steady flaring, as you went yet further onward, the ruined loveliness and the imbecile blank staring of many other large-limbed beings, shaped in all respects like age-withered men and women, that had once reigned all-gloriously in heaven; and that had been adored everywhere, in the superb and high-hearted, long-perished times before human belief had been withdrawn from the service of these deities, and in this way had left them palsied and wit-stricken and impotent.

    For so incredible a place was the cave of Clioth that no human being could believe in it; whereas solely by virtue of and through a religious contact with human belief, had the divine inventions of Moera been able to keep their celestial attributes. When bereft of it, they had thus, of course, become mere feeble-minded illusions such as now haunted the cave of Clioth. Only of the God of Branlon was this not true, because to him any sort of belief had been a luxury rather than a necessity. So might the Peripatetic Episcopalian, alone of deposed gods, yet move at his own discretion, and with an unabated jauntiness, about the grim cave of Clioth, inasmuch as he alone of them could breathe freely in its too doubtful atmosphere, an atmosphere by which all his fellow divinities had been made invalid through being robbed of their reasonableness. And this was an outcome (or so at least Smire reflected) which went to show you pretty plainly that scepticism paid a fair dividend.

    Well, and Smire noticed a great many among these, his horrific and huge and pitiable co-heirs of oblivion, with a polite interest. In fact, toward gaunt Phoebus Apollo and scowling Zeus and the frail, desolate vacant-eyed Stewards of Heaven he nodded in open affability, because of old times’ sake.

    “However, inasmuch as it is not decent to be criticizing any god in his desuetude,” says Smire, to his stately companion, let us not molest the unfortunate creatures.”

    And Virgil answered: “We have now passed the deposed gods and the dark ways through which they go down into Antan. I agree with you, it is quite as well.”

    For Publius Vergilius Maro, majestic and laurel-crowned, was now walking at Smire’s side, to guide Smire. This much, indeed, any reflective person would have expected the chief citizen of Mantua to do, after Smire, at a great cost to himself, had made possible the writing of Virgil’s
Æneid;
and in consequence, Smire had accepted this well-merited courtesy without any crude comment upon it.

    Instead, he paused only to compare the cave of Clioth with the Grotto of Antiparos, with Peak Cavern in Derbyshire, with Fingal’s Cave, with the cave of Adullam, with Dame Venus’ cave in the Horselberg, with Luray Caverns, with Mammoth Cave, with the Ear of Dionysius, and with St. Michael’s Cave at Gibraltar. He enumerated the dimensions, the historical importance and the more striking features of each one of these caves as quickly as might be. Whereafter, with his not-ever-failing auctorial adaptiveness, Smire began at once to talk, in quite friendly approval, about Virgil’s employment of aposiopesis and onomatopoeia, quoting both the
Quos ego
and the
Quadrupedante
passages with an appreciation over which immortal Virgil smirked like an authoress before an insult to her virtue.

    So, as Virgil had once guided Dante into the nine circles of Hell and beyond the seven terraces of Purgatory, just so did Virgil conduct Smire into the dark cave of Clioth, and beyond the blank gazing of demented gods, and then yet further onward, through a vaguely glowing blue twilight, wherein they did not encounter any creature whatever, now that Smire must go back into human living.