The Nightmare Had Triplets (73 page)

    “It will be to you a downfall of sorts”—thus did Virgil consider, with that special complacent sympathizing which artists of every nature evince toward the mishaps of their fellow practitioners,—“yes, it is a most pitiable collapse, after your superb career in these parts; but at all events, human living is quickly done with.”

    “
Pulveris exegui
—” replied Smire, tactfully; and now, yet again, Virgil bowed and fidgeted, with the startled, the distrusting civility of a writer who, hearing himself quoted, does not know quite what to do about it.

    “Yes,” Smire continued, and he spoke with a most resolute sprightliness in the blue twilight of Clioth; “yes, every commotion of the human soul—if, for dear rhetoric’s sake, I may postulate the existence of any such article—and all human conflicts, howsoever bustling, are quieted by-and-by, rather dreadfully soon, by the casting of a little dust. Nevertheless, let us not disparage the humdrum and heroic routine of human living. No, my dear Virgil, it would be in vain for you to play the advocate of pessimism: for upon this point, I must firmly decline to be guided by any rational notions, no matter how widely they may have been applauded by the un-reflective.”

    “But I, Smire,” Virgil replied, in surprise, “I did not ever disparage human living. To the contrary, I was blamed, by Bavius and by Maevius also, for romanticizing it.”

    Well, and a smile found its brief resting-place upon the fine quizzical lips of Smire before they were yet again talking. And Smire said:

    “Indeed, I myself, Virgil, have noted the heroic figure which you made out of my dear, plump Elissa. You improved vastly upon the result of her parents’ collaboration. And yet”—Smire added, handsomely—“to be accused of romanticizing, has been the common fate of every great philosopher who approached life with his eyes open. I regret that at this present instant I cannot show you my press clippings. You would find them simply incredible. No, I did not refer to your books, one or two of which indeed I might have signed without blushing, after a bit of revision.”

    “I thank you,” says Virgil.

    “Not in the least, my dear fellow,” Smire answered: “for I meant only that in the quaint milieu to which I am returning, we have been favored, over and yet over again, with a host of sane observations as to human life as it actually is, in all its unendurable drab horror, its futile unimportance, and its predestination to end, as do all other tragedies of an equally trite nature, in death.”

    “But are you indeed thus idiotically bothered, Smire? Dear me!”

    And Virgil now clucked four or five times in the blue twilight, like a majestic but sympathizing hen.

    “Yes, Virgil: and moreover, these misguided persons mention the starkness of human living quite fearlessly. They point out that—on account, one gathers, of the failure of Divine Providence to profit by the wisdom of our liberal weeklies—all human living under our present economic conditions is hopelessly awry, and lewd, and malign; and that in general it is given over to a dumb misery such as cannot possibly express its taciturnity within less than 200,000 words.”

    Then Virgil answered: “That is an old story, Smire; the books of Bavius and of Maevius were of this nature, I believe. I cannot say that I ever read these books. But they sold handsomely when Augustus was Emperor. And what does it matter now?”

    “That, Virgil, that is my exact point,” says Smire. “Such truisms as to the insufferableness, the many woes, the ever-present discomforts, and the undoubted triviality of human life, are as negligible in art as they are in actuality. And so, for every practical purpose, they are not true at all. That is why the urbane person must give to any rational consideration of human living that honor which is always due. to a droll impossibility. I mean, of course, he must laugh at it.”

    —To which Virgil replied: “Doubtless; and laughter is good. Yet you, my poor friend, you are laughing just now, I suspect, upon the wrong side of the mouth. One does not laugh with much gusto in the dark cave of Clioth, among the ruined outcome of so much faith and of high imaginings and of whole-hearted worship.”

    “He laughs,” Smire continued, firmly, “because of his urbane delight in the circumstance that—during at all events our present imperfect state of society—every human life is lived by a human being.”

    “But your remarks, Smire,” says Virgil, still a bit puzzled, “keep the ring of a truism.”

    “It is equally a truism,” replied Smire, warming to his subject, “that every man remains always so far a romanticist as to find his own doings of unflagging importance. Now the height of all mortal romanticism, as I generously admit, is the strange faith of a ‘realistic’ writer that his wretched book ought either to be written or published; yet upon planes less extravagant the human imagination continues to do fairly well. It is still engaged, to a rather amazing degree, by such purely personal trivia as love and hatred, by marriage and parenthood; it regards death with an emotion which, if unadvisedly squandered upon a mere commonplace, is none the less vivid; and it admires, nay, it even prompts, a pursuit of the old heroic virtues of Hector and Bayard, to an extent relatively rare among other and more ‘realistic’ mammals such as mice and hyenas and polecats.”

    “But—” says Virgil.

    “Please do not interrupt me, Virgil! It is annoying to be interrupted. It forces me to point out that an urbane person would not ever seek to monopolize the entire conversation as you are now doing, with your constant interruptions. As I was about to say, then, there is no blinking the fact that, no matter how unpromising, to the sane bystander, may be the physical circumstances of this or the other human life, and even though, to the bystander, they may seem as trite as are the known circumstances of that poor dear Jared’s living, yet every human life is conducted by that incurable romanticist, a human being, who views everything through the transforming lens of his own personal pleasure in it; who contemns all logic because of his wholesome self-centeredness; and who continually acts—here is the odd part—with an irrational nobleness.”

    “I do not deny that, Smire; but I have heard that you have denied it, over and yet over again.”

    “I have never denied anything of the sort, Virgil. And besides, if I did, I was but indulging in the privilege, which an urbane person reserves jealously, of talking nonsense every once in a while. Yet, once more, you have interrupted me! As I was saying, then—but just what was I saying, Virgil, when you derailed the train of my argument with your loquaciousness?”

    Virgil smiled; his white teeth gleamed in the dreadful blue glowing of the cave of Clioth. And Virgil said:

    “You were compounding some sort of consolatory rhetoric, Smire, in order to poultice the hurt of your downfall, from the large ways and the noble doings of a revered deity, into prosaic human living.”

    “Hah, but what, in comparison, my dear Virgil, is the career of a deity? For I recapture now the trend of my remarks. I was about to remark that every human life, in the eyes of the one person who honors it with lifelong attention—by which, of course, I mean the person who is living it—remains an affair of not-ever-failing zest, on account of his own superb, short-sighted, selfish concernment in it. And I was about to marvel, quite mutely, at the more than celestial wonder of prosaic human living as it is yet conducted by the staid average citizen.”

    “Now but, to the contrary—” says Virgil.

    “Not at all, my dear fellow,” says Smire. “He outrivals any mythology. He is a fact which bedwarfs folk-lore. For his is not merely the mild adventuring of a knight errant riding on horseback through a forest infested by dragons and ogres, each conquerable through good luck. Here is one who rides gaily among constellations upon a spinning pellet of continents and oceans; who is hunted always by time and death, those devourers whom no luck can conquer; and who yet cultivates meanwhile the unseasonable dissipations of loyalty, of shaving, and of preserving a stout heart. Nay, more: in such unbelievable surroundings, the more unobservant and the less handsomely talented among human beings have been known even to write ‘realistic’ novels about the squalor of these surroundings. Now to do any one of these things is not divine, I submit. To the contrary, it is insane. It is wholly moonstruck, in the most gallant vein of romance. So I, at least, I observe with an awed silence the superb lives which, in such touch-and-go circumstances, my fellow creatures are living, chattily, and hilariously even, with an implausible gusto, to each side of me. I perceive, in brief, the incredible, the brain-staggering and the heartwarming heroism of commonplace human living. And as a virtuoso of humor, I infer that to live as a commonplace human being, is to produce the supreme triumph of romantic irony, in a fashion denied to deities.”

    —Whereafter Smire extended his soft, white hands, in a modest gesture, saying:

    “Well, Virgil! And so it is to this ambitious task, of becoming a prosaic human being, that I have decided henceforward to devote my faculties—such as they may or may not be, of course.”

    And Smire paused, for an instant, both because he was a bit out of breath and because he could now see a dim sort of daylight ahead of them.

    Again, Virgil was smiling, benignantly.

    “You compound a fine poultice,” he avowed. “And your long talking has served your need now that we approach Acheron. Your talking has kept both your tongue and your mind busy. Your talking, my poor fallen god, has well drugged your passage through the dark cave of Clioth.”

    Smire shrugged. Yet in point of fact he had not really noticed any of the indescribable horrors about him (so they declare in Branlon), on account of the pleased interest with which, from his first entrance into the cave of Clioth, and throughout his stay there, Smire had been following the progress of his own remarks.

    “
It has been plausibly argued by Fletcher that the three-fold nature of Smire may have suggested to Greek poets the fable of Geryon, who because he was king of three islands called Balearides, is figured to have had three bodies; or perhaps, because there were three persons of the same name, whose minds and affections were so united that they seemed to be governed and to live by one soul; or, it may be, for some other reason. It appears highly significant that the oxen of Geryon were guarded by a dog with two heads.
”

    Now when Smire comes to the long gray beach, still treading jauntily, then an ancient gray ferry boat waited there. But it was laden with no passengers; and the dark ferryman, sitting alone on the vacant deck, seemed to drowse over his one long, black-colored oar.

    About the beach, however, wandered miscompounded vague souls, in whom seethed too much vinegar to make comfortable any further living in the world of flesh and blood, and whom so much oil had saturated rancidly as to disbar the stench of their existence from the lands beyond common-sense. So they now hovered in this place, betwixt and between, masquerading, in long gowns made out of provincial newspapers, as the Nine Muses.

    All these derided Smire now that he came forth from Branlon. And they cried, severally:

    “Branlon is a decadent nostalgia.”

    “Branlon is pastiche.”

    “Branlon is old hat.”

    “There is no class struggle in Branlon.”

    “In Branlon one does not face the realities of life.”

    “In Branlon there is no grave consideration of such modern problems as most deeply intrigue the intelligentsia during this week-end.”

    “Branlon is sophomoric.”

    “Branlon does not reflect the American scene fearlessly.”

    “In short, Branlon is pseudo this, and pseudo that, but above all, it is pseudo the other.”

    Well, and to these nine starvelings Smire replied, with his not-ever-failing courtesy, saying:

    “Yet let us distinguish, O unremittent advisers. To me at least, it appears that you have over-wisely compounded with the Cow, the Sheep and the Hog. You would have every man a blending of these three beasts, and no more than a blending of these tamed three, who have found out a way of living that is always sound-minded and useful, and stays untroubled by any futile dreaming. They consider only their sties and their pastures. And yet, in spite of your wisdom, and in sacrilege to the True Trinity, O my too fond advisers, men dream. In dreams they evade the sleek pastures which prudence affords; they leap very nimbly out of the sties which have been builded by reason. They repair thence to Branlon, in the semblance of gods, quite as I have done. For in his dreams every man is a poet; and the true home of each minor poet is Branlon.”

    After that, Smire said: “Let the young poets, who have not drunk the muddied wine of conformity, come to Branlon. Let the gray poets, to whom famousness and applause have been denied, but whose hearts yet keep their youth, seek Branlon for their hearts’ comfort. So will Branlon delude all these into contentment, because the magic of Branlon is kindly. For absurd loyalties this forest has made a haven; this forest feeds magnanimity; this forest revives the hurt day-dreams of youth. Let all the young in heart repair to Branlon, because in this way, for so long a while as the slender, blended, tender magic of Branlon endures, may they believe that all life may be made noble and high-hearted.”

    And Smire said also: “But for a while may they believe this, you may say. Only in dreams, you remark jeeringly, may this be believed. It is in his pasture, or in his gross sty, it may be, that the dreamer awakens, you will reply scornfully to my rhapsodizing. Well, and it is a reply with not more than one tenth of one per cent, of truth in it. Again and yet again I say to you my parable.