The Nightmare Had Triplets (11 page)

    It was a relief to have escaped from the public at large, into this pleasant upland. The pathway led by a cave; and at the cave’s mouth, which was overgrown everywhere with the intermingled dark green and the light green of ivy, sat this woman, beside a fire of juniper wood. In her hand was a large fork, like a trident, with which she was toasting crescent-shaped cakes over this fire.

    She looked up at Smirt. She smiled upon Smirt in the while that she asked his business in these parts.

    “In all parts and at all times,” he replied, “my business is of an odd nature. It is my business to crimp and to pressgang and to kidnap words. I marshal them upon paper. I then drill these words in a not ever ending full-dress parade.”

    “The fine books of Smirt,” the young woman responded, still smilingly, “are noted in rumor, and they keep everywhere a famousness.”

    “So, you know me, Tana! or at least you know me by reputation. Come now, but that is gratifying; it is peculiarly gratifying, now that my grave is well covered over with spider webs, to find that Smirt is still known.”

    “I know you, Smirt, because I am served by the powers of the moon and by all else which is unstable and false and feeble. Since time began I have known you and your like, Smirt, and until time ends for you, frail Smirt, your thinking will not ever be unswayed by me.”

    “That is as it should be, Tana. You remain always in my thoughts because it is the business of every artist to contemplate the beautiful. That fact has already arrested my steps in this place. That fact has caused me steadfastly to remember that there was once a princess—a princess who, I now perceive, is also a good cook, for those cakes have a delicious appearance.”

    “These cakes,” she told him, “are made of meal, of red wine, of salt, and of honey. Yet it is not truly these four things which I bake, and then toast, over this fire. I toast the blood and the body and the soul of the moon, so that the moon may have neither rest nor peace, and must suffer unendingly, until the moon grants me what I desire.”

    “In fact, Tana, when one deals with any of these heavenly bodies, and especially with the moon, it is necessary to take a high hand and to stand up for one’s rights jealously. Otherwise, there is no telling.”

    “That is true, Smirt—”

    “—For one must bear in mind, my dear Tana, that the moon has an apogee.”

    “You astound me, Smirt—”

    “The moon has also a perigee, a synodical period, and a mean daily motion. These are not matters to be trifled with, I submit. A prudent person will be circumspect in dealing with such endowments.”

    “That which you say seems wholly plausible, Smirt: and yet,” the girl added, a little bewildered, “yet when I think about it, somehow, I do not believe it means anything.”

    “Why should it?” Smirt asked, reasonably.

    “Because—why, because most persons do mean something when they talk.”

    “I cannot fully grant that statement—no, not as an axiom, Tana. And in any case, I am Smirt. I do not have anything to do with most persons. To the contrary, I am exclusive. I pick and choose my associates. For that reason, if for no other reason, you should regard it as a great compliment that Smirt has stopped here to chat with you.”

    Tana looked at him as if thoughtfully, for the space of two heartbeats; and then said,—

    “Yet it might be better for you, Smirt, to go forward yonder, where the path forks to the right hand.”

    “And to what, pray, can that path conduct me, that I should be leaving Tana for the sake of it?”

    “It will lead you, Smirt, to a small snug home, and to a tidy shop with a fair line of business, and to a woman; and all three of these will be yours for the asking.”

    But Smirt laughed aloud at these inducements. And Smirt said:

    “What are such matters, Tana, to an artist who is reasonably sophisticated? Should I be leaving incarnate beauty for sordidly bourgeois delights? And whither, sweetheart, does that other path conduct one, where the path forks to the left hand?”

    “That of course is a sinister path. And so, Smirt, that is a very little travelled path. For it turns away from use and wont and from human contentment, and from all other traps of the Spider Woman, entering into the fabulous city of Amit.”

    “Ah, ahl But it is in that place,” said Smirt, drawing, with his habitual readiness, upon the vast stores of Smirt’s erudition, “that the Stewards of Heaven reside.”

    “Yes, Smirt,—yet only for their allotted season.”

    “Well, but, Tana, it is needful there should be gods and gods, and then still other gods. It is good for mythology. And yet none of them—do you know?—none seems to be very intelligent. For I have weighed the cosmic methods of All-Highest & Company, I must tell you; and while I still hope to correct these methods, I am not optimistic. Moreover, I have seen the public at large, who mutter and bluster upon this mountain top; and on the whole, Tana, I have seen enough of the public at large.”

    Now the girl raised her hand in protest. Smirt saw that the little finger was missing, or, rather, that upon neither of Tana’s hands had there ever been any little finger.

    “Let us not speak of the public at large,” said Tana, hastily. “Let us leave them in their high station unmolested even by our thinking, since none may dethrone them. Let us honor, instead, the moon and get our profit of moonshine.”

    “But,” Smirt replied, doubtfully, “I was not looking for profit. I was looking for a legend.”

    “I have many legends, Smirt.”

    “Then let us have three of them.”

    The beautiful girl arose, putting aside her trident. She entered the cave, crying out—

    “Dr. Chronos, here is a patient for you!”

    Now when Tana had entered her cave, she went to the black mantelpiece, and she tilted sidewise the black onyx clock (which must have been left over from the second anecdote that I related to Company, Smirt reflected), and in this way she stopped its ticking.

    Smirt, following her with a quickness which appeared permissible in a widower of so many centuries’ standing, saw before him a couch covered with robes of sable and ermine. The walls of the cave were hidden by silvery-colored hangings embroidered with black stars and black suns and black comets. Upon a seven-cornered table were set forth five kinds of fruit and black wine in three silver flagons. In this cave was a great quietness.

    Then Tana said no. And there was not any moving her, Smirt found. She very resolutely continued to say no.

    “No, for it is incredible!” said Tana. “It frightens me, you impudent huge monster!”

    Afterward Tana said: “No, Smirt, but I could not possibly endure it! So do be still!”

    Tana likewise said, in half stifled distress: “No, my friend, I repeat, no! No! … Ah! … Ouh! … Whew! … Aïé!”

    And besides that, Tana said, almost inaudibly: “No, sweetheart, but you go too far! Fie, sweetheart, stop, stop! ah, but do not stop! Oho, sweetheart, but you will be the death of me, sweetheart!”

    You heard also, in this quiet cave, a gentle bellowing noise, such as might have been uttered by an unusually refined bull.

    “So now, you obstreperous and shameless Smirt, do you sit down beside me, at my feet, like a pacified good child,” said Tana, after she had thus denied Smirt, for the third time, copiously. “And let us both rest a little in the while that I speak of my legends.” She spoke then, without any haste, stroking the dark curls of his hair with formal gestures. Now the words of Tana resembled the humming of bees, they were like the sedate noise of a top turning round and round and round, ceaselessly. And they may well have been magic words, for it seemed to Smirt that this sound was the sound of a spinning-wheel upon which all the thread of his life was spun. It seemed to him that long years passed by, and went away from him forever, in the drone of this peace-giving noise and under the fond touch of those peace-giving deformed hands. Yet all the while the clock told him that the time did not change.

    So was it that for one bewildering instant Smirt got his profit of moonshine. For it seemed to him during this instant that the magic of Tana conferred on him four powers. It seemed to him that he at last understood the voice of the wind, and knew how to change water into wine, how to tame wild beasts, and how to cure all diseases except curiosity. And it seemed to him also that he went into dark places where the Old Believers, men and women and small children alike, supped together naked, eating peculiar foods which Smirt did not touch, and afterward they danced their peculiar dances, and sang and made music, and then made love, all in complete darkness, so that no one of them knew the other. Yet the black onyx clock upon Tana’s black mantelpiece told Smirt that the time remained twelve minutes after six, just as though it were all happening upon the front page of the
Herald Tribune.

    Smirt was well content with this manner of magic. He knew, nevertheless, that he still sat at the feet of Tana. He knew that all these matters were but a momentary illusion put upon him by the moon’s power; and he wondered whether it was done with the perigee or the apogee, now that the moon’s ancient magic had shown Smirt how to cure all diseases except curiosity.

    So he shrugged. He arose from the floor of the cave gracefully; and, as became a sound logician, he started the black clock again.

    Then Tana cried out, clasping together her three-fingered hands,—

    “The wrong doctor has come for me!”

    “My dear,” said Smirt, “this is no medical man, but only a white rabbit, who, for all I know, has popped out of the pages of Lewis Carroll.”

    “No, Smirt, for it is the rabbit which lives at the foot of the cassia-tree, of the moon’s own tree, forever pounding together those drugs which make the elixir of eternal life,” replied the voice of Tana.

    But Tana herself was no longer there. Instead, at the side of the white rabbit, a gray cat was scampering across the fields of this pleasant upland.

    The black dog pursued neither of them. This black dog had a white muzzle and four white feet. He sat in Tana’s deserted cave, looking up, with a complacence vaguely sinister, at the black mantelpiece, where a black onyx clock ticked relentlessly.

    He looked then at Smirt. “We are now entering,” said the black dog, “the city of Amit, the home of the Stewards of Heaven. And much good may it do you!”

    For it may be,” the black dog continued, “that in Amit Smirt will at last find his suitable audience to be composed of these divine beings who control an entire planet. It may be that this supernal audience will content Smirt.”

    “Black dog,” said Smirt, “I was well enough content until you began to talk to me from the radiator in my writing room. For it was your talking, black dog, which first involved me in this nomadic sort of dreaming. It was your talking which has evicted me from the snug home wherein, I do not know how many centuries ago, I was comfortable enough with my wife and children and a steady income, and which has led me to wander about in unfamiliar places beyond my grave.”

    “Self preservation, Smirt,” replied the black dog, “is the first law of nature.”

    “You put it trenchantly, black dog. You have a gift for the striking, the novel phrase; and that is a fine gift.”

    “Bah!” said the black dog. “To begin with, I had to stand always on your radiator.”

    “In fact, I can imagine that to stand on a radiator, day in and day out, as your life’s work, might pall after a while, even though I have never tried it myself.”

    “In the second place, Smirt, you continually filled me with bits of string.”

    “That does sound indigestible, I admit. And yet, even so, black dog—”

    “But what is far worse, Smirt, I had to look at you all the time.”

    “Oh, come, but really now, black dog, I look at myself every day when I am shaving, and I cannot say I feel much the worse for it.”

    “The lather hides a great deal, Smirt. But nothing, nothing,” said the black dog, with somewhat shaken composure, “can ever hide that smug self-conceit which you call your urbanity. And I had to watch that urbanity in action, every day, and all day. It was too much for any small wooden dog to endure; I began to feel that at any instant I might go mad and fly into splinters.”

    Smirt nodded, in sympathetic and complete understanding.

    “Yes, yes,” said Smirt, “it is true that urbanity does affect some people in that way. I have noticed it.”

    “So I did, Smirt, I did, in sheer desperation, point out that you lacked a suitable audience. Just as you put bits of string in me, Smirt, so did I put in you dissatisfaction; and exactly as you toasted me with your radiator, so did I grill you with the thought that two or three living persons were not talking about Smirt at that very moment.”

    “I see,” said Smirt amiably; “you wanted to get rid of me.”

    “Your perceptiveness, Smirt, is astounding.”

    But Smirt waved aside this compliment, with his usual modesty. Smirt said:

    “Oh, no, it is a mere matter of experience. I have noted that desire in yet other quarters. And I have encountered it not only in book reviews written by enviably young persons, black dog, but in grave magazine articles, and in books too, by people well advanced in senility. This getting rid of me is quite a national movement, which has at many times assumed the fervor of a crusade. Some day I must show you my press clippings. They will interest you. They will, as it were, buck you up. Oh, yes, beyond doubt they will, for a great number of these press clippings bear directly upon that same smug self-conceit about which you were just talking.”