The Nightmare Had Triplets (53 page)

    So was it that the illustrious wanderer reclined at his ease in the palace of Queen Elissa; and he looked affably, with strange dark never-blinking eyes, toward his hostess, who, since her escape from the assassins of Pygmalion, was now more generally called Dido, or “the fugitive.” She was particularly handsome, this afternoon, in a saffron-colored robe adorned with a pattern of acanthus leaves worked in seed pearls and golden thread.

    Well, and her guests must consent to take pot luck, the Queen had said, in apologizing for the simplicity of their meal.

    “Hunger is a fine sauce,” replied Iarbus.

    “The presence of Queen Elissa, in itself,” returned Smire, “is a feast for any person blessed with fair eyesight.”

    —Which simply showed you, so the Queen reflected, the difference between one man and another.

    Then was brought to them, upon a platter of purple glass, the hors d’oeuvre, in the form of artichokes and fried snails and baked oysters, and of small goyan fish tricked out with artificial fins and tails which were made of silver filigree. These dainties Elissa and Iarbus ate with tiny gold forks, in the while that Smire talked about the snail’s partiality for calcareous soils; sketched lightly the bisexual life of the oyster; and related a neat anecdote about a mermaid whom Smire had known personally, near Ascalon.

    On a silver tray were brought Sicilian gourds, the eggs of peahens, and a compote of goose livers. Smire was now speaking of pâté-de-foie-gras, debating whether the honor of its invention should more properly be
ascribed to Marcus Seius or to Scipio Metellus. Smire explained why the peahen was permitted to lay
eggs
only at night; and he enumerated the seventeen remedies—for jaundice, erysipelas, loose teeth, and yet other maladies—which the physicians of Babylon derived from gourds.

    Afterward, when the butler poured out for them large gobletfuls of new Massic wine blended with honey, the butler thus averted the eloquence of Smire into touching briefly upon apiculture, the many uses of beeswax, and the amours of the drone; but from these topics Smire went on, through a natural transition, into talking about ornithology, now that, on a golden platter embossed with the story of Deucalion, were served to them cock pheasants cooked in complete plumage, with their wings upraised above a circle of more modestly befeathered larks and thrushes and nightingales. Smire was peculiarly instructive as to the bee martin, the osprey and the ostrich,—the bearing and general appearance of which last-named bird, as he mentioned, having always reminded him of a Colonial Dame.

    The roasted song-birds upon the table were stuffed with figs; but the bodies of the cock pheasants were filled with young peas and truffles. Well, and these truffles unavoidably deflected the speaking of Smire toward the pigs of Perigord and of Vaucluse, that were trained to hunt truffles; from which pigs, after citing yet other instances of remarkable sagacity in the animal kingdom, he passed on by way of zoology toward evolution, and he spoke graciously of Lamarck, Cuvier, Darwin, Buffon and Mendel.

    “I never heard of these people,” growled Iarbus.

    “Dear sir,” said Smire, “I congratulate you upon that strength of intellect which declines to dabble with books.”

    “Now I,” says Queen Elissa, with the painstaking broad-mindedness of one who holds a public office, “I rather like a good book when I can get the time for it.”

    “The intelligent person,” returned Smire, “has never any time to waste upon books.”

    He proceeded thereupon to denounce books, with a vast energy, saying, “Do not ever read anything!”—an hortation which he supported with thirty-five learned excerpts from the best authors, and which he adorned with an opulence of apt anecdote.

    In the while that Smire was talking thus handsomely, the butler had uncorked a very ancient amphora sealed with gypsum. He poured the Falerian wine, through a cooled with snow, into a mixing vessel; and he added three parts of water. The butler then filled for them fresh goblets, of crimson glass, which were thought to enhance the flavor of this wine. Into the goblet served to Iarbus had been poured a strong sirup of poppy leaves, by the Queen’s orders.

    Three slaves removed the garland of violets from Smire’s head, and replaced it with a wreath of ivy. The discourse of Smire was in this way turned toward horticulture, while the purple cushions about him were being changed for red cushions filled with jasmine and rose-petals. So he told how the navel seedless orange originated at Bahia, in Brazil, and was introduced into the United States in 1870; he named the flowers and shrubs which are mentioned by Shakespeare; and he explained the various uses of the soy-bean in making enamel and core oil and shock absorbers for automobiles. He unloosed, in brief, a polite flood of instructiveness under the downpour of which Iarbus snorted; but Sidonian Elissa beamed fond approval.

    Before the Queen and her two guests was spread the dessert, in the form of sugared cherries and figs and dates, and of a sweet-smelling paste made of peaches and honeycomb, which was modelled in the shape of twenty-four small animals, all different. Through an admiration of this sculpture (after dismissing the vague claims of Daedalus) was Smire led into a few judicious remarks about Dipoenus and Scyllis of Crete, as the first known practitioners of sculpture; from which theme, Smire went on, after an excursus as to Longinus and Lessing and the impressionistic school of criticism, to consider the fine arts generally. And in handling this theme Smire, of course, was at his superb best.

    He afforded, in short, to his companions at table a display of
savoir faire,
of erudition, of elegance, and of virtual omniscience, before which Iarbus went restively to sleep and the Queen reclined upon her gold-and-ivory couch in an attitude of frank adoration.

    “But you have eaten nothing,” says Elissa. “You have not tasted your wine.”

    Smire tells her, with an heroic sigh: “That is as it should be, dear lady. He that is the shared prey of new-born love and of age-old misfortune may not guzzle, nor may he swill either, without painfully violating all rules of decorum.”

    “Yet can it be,” asked the Queen, assuming just that look which she would have worn if she were blushing, “that you would have me think you believe in love at first sight?”

    “I am a practising poet nowadays, madame, a meek devotee
of Apollo. So is it needful for me to obey the rule
of my profession.”

    “And in fact,” the Queen assented, “you poets do affect to believe in love at first sight.”

    “No, dear Elissa, that was not quite my meaning. I meant that, inasmuch as I am a poet, I cannot well speak of love, or of any other topic, until I have first told you all about myself.”

    The Queen, sighing slightly, thereupon adjusted the pillows about her head so that she might repose more comfortably, if the need arose, for a prolonged season. She said,—

    “Continue.”

    Iarbus snored.

    Smire cleared his throat. He tucked snugly under him the crimson pillows, he lighted a cigarette, he inhaled, he meditated, and he stayed silent for well-nigh five entire seconds before sublime Smire began talking yet again.

    They say in Branlon that since plain courtesy forbid him, as a polite person, to humiliate his hearers with any hint of their being merely the creations of Smire’s exuberant fancy, the illustrious wanderer could but begin at, approximately, the beginning of the dream in which Elissa and Iarbus existed. He owed them that, in mere fairness to the superb tact and the unblemished courtesy which had made of Smire an arbiter in royal courts, a hero in bedrooms, and a revered leader in the senate chamber.
Noblesse oblige,
they remark in Branlon, in their quaint rustic way.

    At all events, Smire did not say anything about his flesh-and-blood life as a writer of fiction upon remote the wanderer’s narrative Earth, before he left Earth in a dream. Instead, he now spoke sonorously of his inter-mythic travels, saying:

    Unutterable woes, O Queen, you urge me to renew, by speaking of ancient sorrows wherein I was a preeminent actor. Yet since you are desirous of hearing my misfortunes, though my soul shudders at the remembrance of them, and shrinks back with grief, yet will I begin. I shall, however, at this point dismiss the rigid restrictions of a strictly classical style.

    Once, when I first reached this planet, riding upon a flash of lightning in the society of a large red-colored devil, then I, who am now Smire, I then wore a name more tremendous. It was honored everywhere. To-day that superb epithet is recalled idly, at wide intervals, by a few students of comparative religion. They alone speak now and again as to the faded splendors of Smirt. Yet in the brave hour of his prime this Smirt was a supreme god ruling over his own paradise in Amit, a master of all other gods. To-day the Kronids strut about Heaven. With a fortitude upon which it would perhaps be immodest to dwell, I do not complain of this highhanded usurpation.

    To-day Zeus has his small hour of being reverenced. His flimsy chryselephantine temples disfigure this planet everywhere. Yet very long ago it was to Smirt, and to no other overlord, that the All-Highest gave—in addition to a charmed pocket-piece which yet supplies me with cigarettes and matches—this same planet. The lands beyond common-sense were then brought into existence, when the Seven Stewards of Heaven builded these lands under the sway of my genius, after their rather slender talents had been warmed cosily by the fire of my inspiration. I mean brown Arathron, the All-Father, the divine sire of my other shining attendants. I mean, likewise, his sons, great Hagith and great Och and great Phaleg, and pale Ophiel, and huge golden-colored Bethor. And I mean Phul also, that heavenly hermaphrodite, about whose claims to be ranked as a son the judicious may prefer not to speak. All these served Smirt very reverently during the brave hour of his prime; and, within limits, Smirt was omnipotent.

    Do you not be affrighted by the tidings that in me you behold the most venerable and august of those divine creatures with whom Moera has enriched mythology! Once I was Smirt, the supreme being, a master of these seven gods and of all other gods. To-day I am Smire; for what is a god’s power against the will of a the wanderer’s narrative comely woman? It was the will of a woman that I should leave heaven. As that Zeus whom you now worship—with such strange lack of taste as I shall refrain from arraigning in any least commentary—as this obscene upstart has at odd times been turned by the will of a woman into a crow, a bull, a bear, a swan, a gold shower, a bonfire, and into yet other shapes, so did the will of a woman transform sublime Smirt into a shopkeeper.

    Well, and after that degrading of Smirt’s splendor, my adored Arachne (whom etymologists called the Spider Woman) betrayed me in a statutory sense also, of course. Moreover, she attempted my murder, with a design of dining upon me afterward. But let us not speak of that. “Woman is changeable,” I have heard remarked in a tenor voice; and it is the first principle of music that the sentiments of a tenor are always impeccable. Besides, it was the fixed custom of the Spider Woman to eat all her husbands. I violated that custom, through escaping; and thus left both heaven and her.

    So through the will of a woman did I become a demi-god. I was not Smirt any longer; I had become Smith. I ruled now more modestly, in quiet woodland places, as Lord of the Forest of Branlon. And I became wholly grateful to the Arachne who had degraded me into this obscure way of existence. As the God of Branlon I was well content in my little sylvan kingdom, because I had fashioned these charmed woodlands so as to suit my own tastes, to tickle my own foibles. The responsibilities of being a supreme god were well done with, now that I obeyed only my own preferences, creating Branlon with the loving care of an artist, making of magic Branlon a perfected work of art in the baroque style, undisfigured by moderation, and unmarred with probability, and free from all sorts of reticence.

    In Branlon there were for this reason a great many women. Most of them married me at one time or another. Wives are a sub-division of fauna in which I have always specialized, if not with enthusiasm at least with the polite gusto of a connoisseur. Through that hobby had I acquired, in the course of nature my four stalwart sons, of whom I made princes in Branlon. But Tana I made queen over all Branlon, sharing with her my small kingdom lovingly.

    Forgive at this point my display of emotion! My heart hungers, my voice throbs with these great tremolos, whensoever I speak of Tana. That dear, pale, dark-haired sorceress had not anywhere in this improbable the wanderer’s narrative planet
her like for comeliness nor for the submissive ardors of her way in a bedroom. In brief, I did not detest Tana. She made of my living in Branlon a wonder and a high-hearted peacefulness. But Time envied the contentment of Smith in magic Branlon, so it is said.

    If such was indeed the case, let us not blame Time unduly. I had debarred Time from entering my enchanted forest. Youth reigned in Branlon untroubled. Daily I created, in my own small kingdom, that beauty which derided Time. For absurd loyalties my forest had made a haven; my forest fed magnanimity; my forest revived the hurt day-dreams of youth. All that, in brief, which Time debases in the quaint mixture we have termed human nature my forest exalted.

    Dreamers came to my forest during the hours of their sleeping. They got out of my forest an illogic and a fine tipsifying which made the rat-like gnawings of Time appear trivial. So did Branlon become the resort of many dreamers during the hours of their sleeping.

    Through the green aisles of Branlon, bound on improbable questings, fared the glad dreamers singly, each from a far-away planet, praising 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 dreams they were 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.