The Nightmare Had Triplets (74 page)

    No man lives in the external truth, among salts and acids, among buying and selling, nor amid any doings outside his own skull; and so, to look at any man with mere rationality is but to court deception; it is as though you would measure strong, sound wine with a yardstick, or great gems with a thermometer: for in the warm, phantasmagoric chamber of his brain lives every man vaingloriously, among the painted walls and the storied windows. In that snug sanctuary he knows well enough, he knows indissuadably, that Branlon and no other goal remains his appointed haven; that his traffic with sties and with pastures is but a troubled nightmare through which he struggles half drugged; and that the true wakening is in Branlon, during the time of his body’s sleeping, when the desire of his heart is fulfilled, and when all his aspirations find a complete employment.”

    Thus spoke sublime Smire; and having ceased his relation, rested. But the nine spectres did not rest. Instead, they now conveyed to him, with a most feverish animation, the extent of their shared agreement with his opinions, through remarking, one by one:

    “Aha!”

    “Tush!”

    “Fie!”

    “But, oh, dear me!”

    “Bosh!”

    “Ahem!”

    “Alas!”

    “Stuff and nonsense!”

    —Whereafter the nine spectres all screeched together, with thin laughter, saying,—

    “Now, but this absurd out-of-date creature is telling us, yet again, that the dream is better than the reality!”

    He said then: “To the contrary, I am telling you that for humankind the dream is the one true reality.”

    “Pshaw!”

    It was in the fashion which has just been recorded that sublime Smire discoursed with his lean deriders, on the gray beaches of Acheron, without honoring these lost shrivelled souls with much serious attention. It seemed to Smire far more important than was their yapping or their dull growling that, upon the ferry boat, the tall ferryman sat waiting; and did not wait quite alone, because a black dog, which had a white tail and four white paws, could be seen lying asleep at the black-sandaled feet of this ferryman, without either yapping or growling, as yet.

    Smire over-well remembered that dog, which had once infested his dreaming with discordantly truthful and matter-of-fact observations. As befitted a convinced romanticist, Smire did not like that dog.

    So it was very affably, and without any least trace of discomposure, and without once glancing dog-ward, that Smire had to be saying:

    “Let us weigh anchor, dark ferryman. Here you waste time. It is in vain that you wait for any other passengers from this special nook in the lands beyond common-sense. The people of Rorn and of Ecben, and the dear sylvan dwellers in Branlon, one and all, have a prettiness which makes them immortal. They will not ever enter your gray boat.”

    The veiled tall figure moved gauntly in the great fog which was everywhere.

    “Oho, and if it pleases you still to think any such nonsense, Smire, there is no hurt done to anybody else, so far as I know.”

    “And do you deny it, dark ferryman?”

    “How should I—I, of all persons, Smire—need to be arguing about immortality? It is a human notion with which Charon at least has not any concern.”

    Smire answers him, with some sternness,—“Come now, Charon, but let us not speak over lightly about human notions, no matter how fantastical; because, as I have just finished explaining, they are the cordials from which all men living get the strength to go on living.”

    And Charon grumbles: “Human beings, Smire, and everything that pertains to them, are sad nuisances, by my way of thinking, Yes, and not only sad, but out-and-out gloomy nuisances, if you ask me. They have not—that is their main trouble—not any sense of fun.”

    Well, and thereafter Smire regarded the dark ferryman with a sudden welling up of compassion in the kind heart of Smire. For of a sudden Smire understood. He understood that the existence of the old toiling deity who conveyed immediately after death all dead persons to the reward earned by their manner of living—useful, nay, and even indispensable as might be his appointed taskwork—could not but, in the long run of incalculable centuries, foster an atmosphere of gloom, and by-and-by a strain of some active, some ineluctable misanthropy, inasmuch as Charon was allowed no least privacy or leisure, on account of the inconsiderate fashion in which somebody or another died at every moment, without pausing to consider the strain put upon Charon, who must instantly meet and afford transportation to every deceased mortal being, with the additional disadvantage that, after having been thus condemned to the dreadful fate of meeting absolutely everybody, he was compelled likewise to encounter all persons in such circumstances as were but too apt to display human nature in its less cheery aspects—thereby misleading the overworked, and for that reason the pessimistic, vague creature, as he had just stated, into an inference that mankind had no innate sense of fun,—because the old ferryman’s clients, coming, as they did, directly from a more or less nerve-racking endurance of the agonies of dissolution, or at best from the tedium of a lingering decease under proper medical attention, could not possibly embark as a merry crew, even apart from their natural, but their undeniably selfish, mental pre-occupation with the eternal doom, whether beatified or torrid, which now awaited them after the boat’s landing, and which thus would cause all the defunct patrons of Charon, between their recent, hardly past discomforts
in articulo mortis
and the potential terrors of the immediate future, to become, during their use of his ferry boat, taciturn, and distrait, and backward to enter, with any real zest, into the amenities of polite discourse, and in general to behave inurbanely, inasmuch as, even though they might not feel disposed to talk, or to listen with true attention either, not just then, until matters were rather more settled, they displayed tactlessness when they did not let urbanity, like the recruiting virtue it was, draft into this regiment of post-mortem reflections the fact that poor Charon, doomed to maintain single-handed his day-and-night service for humankind at large, could not ever meet anybody except his glum passengers, who (having voted for the lax and ungainly and frowsy, but, above all, the maladroit, otiosity of a
monologue intérieure,
at an instant when mere politeness required of them the clean-cut and sprightly charms of direct discourse) were thus bringing it about, through their inurbanity, through plain sheer selfishness, that the old ferryman, forever and immutably, was denied the bland pleasures of conversation, and had not ever any proper or appreciative audience.

    Such was the reflection which flashed briefly across the mind of Smire, causing him to shudder,—and to grieve also, because there was nothing whatever which Smire could do about it.

    He sighed. But he said only:

    “No, not until this instant has ataraxia fared hither. So this ought to be in your luckless existence, O my poor Charon, a red-letter instant, now that Smire has entered your gray boat arm in arm, as it were, with urbanity.”

    “To me,” said the dim ferryman, as he reached stiffly toward his black oar, “it is much like any other instant, except that never until this instant have I carried back any passenger to the world of flesh and blood.”

    “But, naturally,” Smire answered, with a shrug, “I would be the first here, as in yet other places.”

    So the ferry boat starts; and Smire stands alone at its prow, disposing of his cigarette meditatively.

    The broad river seemed familiar. There was no telling, not even by the extensive erudition of Smire, what shores lay ahead. It was certain only that he must disembark upon prosaic strands as a low-fallen god whose dominion was lost forever. He had lost also, now that he thought of it, that dear woman whose hands were deformed, somehow, and whose name he could not recollect, not just at this instant, because of the be-drugging mists adrift everywhither about the river Lethe, which they were now crossing, in a direction not ever travelled before by any human being. Yes; for Smire was returning whence no other man had contrived to return. Well, but all things were still possible, it might be, to sublime Smire.

    “Nevertheless—” said the black dog.

    And it rather startled you, to find him lying there at your feet, with a sardonic and cold eye cocked you-ward. But Smire merely shrugged, saying affably:

    “You are right, as always, my old acquaintance, from your own special angle of vision. Nevertheless—as you were, no doubt, going on to point out—this broad stream is not Lethe.”

    “And what do you know about this river?” says the black dog, scornfully.

    “I know that I smell the ocean,” Smire replied, “and that I taste faintly its salt on my lips. I infer we have left dreamland, wherein I could taste or smell nothing. I know moreover that this river has its source in the Alleghanies; and that after cutting through the Blue Ridge mountains, in a gorge noted for its beauty, at an elevation of about 245 ft., it broadens into a superb tidal estuary from 2 to 7 m. wide.”

    “Bah!” said the black dog.

    “Bow-wow!” Smire corrected him, gently; and Smire continued:

    “I know that this river is important to commerce. The shipments over this river during the past year have been valued at $54,942,309, the principal commodities involved being naval ordnance and supplies, gasoline and kerosene, sand and gravel and other building materials.”

    “Now, but were they indeed?” says the black dog.

    And he was a bit impressed, in spite of himself (as you saw), by this wealth of solid and useful and accurate information such as no person anywhere was able to dismiss as romantic balderdash.

    “Yes,” replied Smire, with conviction: “yes, that was the report of the Department of Commerce, as founded in 1913. William C. Redfield, of New York was our first Secretary of Commerce; and the salaries of this Department fluctuate under the Classification Act. Of every one of these facts, black dog, I am informed, somehow, through my not unnoteworthy erudition, now that I am going back into the strange world which the text-books and the informative magazines, and above all the newspapers of humankind, tell about in their commensurately strange language.”

    “Zero Weather,” remarked the black dog, with the air of one who was reading invisible head lines from an imperceptible newspaper, “Creeps South. Four Lives Claimed in Feud War, Five Wounded. Bishop Raps Modern Tendencies. Congress Meets in Heated Session.”

    Smire shrugged, saying: “And of these matters, black dog, I would be the last to deny the grave magnitude. I submit to the local by-law that the contemporaneous happening, the material accident, supremely and only, is of importance. Yet at heart I know it is far more important that There Was Once a Princess. In her deformed hands lay my happiness. I have forgotten her name, somehow. But I know that, at long last, she will again become apparent, at her own good hour, at her own will. For she is a dream princess; and in human life the dream is both better and more powerful than is the reality.”

    “That,” said the black dog, “is bosh. It is unsophisticated. It is almost optimism.”

    “Nevertheless,” replied Smire, “There Was Once a Princess. She still lives, as it were, just around the corner of my consciousness. And thence—thence, you absurd, you merely rational beast,—thence, by-and-by, she will be coming back to me. Meanwhile all beauty speaks of the yet superior beauty of my princess; the west wind has a rumor of her; the pallid moon remembers my princess with envy; and every pleasure which one gets out of living is, in some way, a parable, and a promise also, of the return of my dream princess, at her own good hour.”

    “You become sadly repetitious, Smire; for you spoke just this nonsense when I first talked with you.”

    “Well, and if I repeat it nowadays, black dog, that is merely because my long journeying has established the fact that, even from the first, I was right.”

    “It establishes, instead, Smire, the facts that you have learned nothing whatever during your long journeying; and that you still incline to talk in a loose and top-lofty fashion such as does not befit an urbane god.”

    “Hah, but,” said Smire, “I am not any longer a god, not even a demi-god, now that I must go back into human living contentedly—or at any rate, contentedly enough.”

    “Moreover,” jeered the black dog, “you return willy-nilly to a place where you do not matter. What matters in this place is that Worried Mother Slays Son & Self. County Sheriff Acquitted in Dry Law Case. Banker Flayed Under Second Day’s Grilling. Noted Painter Predicts End of Marriage Tie. On Saturdays Only You Can Get 10 Zip Razor Blades for
.39
With This Coupon.”

    It was then that Smire dropped his finished-with cigarette overboard, saying, with extreme composure,—

    “But I do matter, black dog, because in the time that I have been a trinity I have made mirth and wonder and loveliness. And in Poictesme and in Branlon also my makings endure.”

    “Who cares about your frail tinsel makings?” asked the black dog; “and what is the final worth of them?”

    The man said, in all humbleness, “I at least care for them, black dog; and me they have diverted a great deal, in the brightly colored, snug sanctuary of my brain, where I live alone.”

    “Hoh, but,” said the black dog, triumphantly, “but who are you?”

    “Who, indeed?” says Smire. “Now that is a question of grave interest, I admit. Yet so soon as I have put foot to the solid earth ahead of us, that earth of which I remain as yet a dissevered particle, an aberrant blown dust grain, then the answer to this question will come back to me. I shall then know whether I be Smire or Smith or Smirt, or perhaps Smike, or it may be some yet other person.”