The Nightmare Had Triplets (13 page)

    “It will be an excellent film,” Smirt reflected, “with no cuts by the censor. It will be the end of that queer world which the newspapers tell about—and, what is a far graver matter, it will be the temporary end of Earth’s urbane aristocracy. My lords, the tumbrils wait: and I fancy these divine drunkards about me know that as well as I do. I condone, therefore, where I cannot exculpate.”

    After that, Smirt took out of his pocket the forty reis piece which made Smirt omnipotent—within limits,—and he wished for a package of Virginian cigarettes and a box of matches. He inhaled pensively. And Smirt said:

    “Against stupidity even the gods are powerless in every handy book of quotations. I begin now to understand that saying. I begin to see that my wit and my fancy and my profundity are at loose ends in a universe which has no real need for these intellectual luxuries.”

    Now the seven Stewards of Heaven sat at ease, looking over the polished white stone ramparts of their supernal home in the city of Amit, and dealing as they saw fit with the mortal world which was in their keeping. In the while that they drank the dark beer of Sekmet, one after another did they speak the word of power which put upon human beings the needed passions and calamities and desires and weaknesses which would lead these mortals to obey the speaker’s will. And Smirt sat with brown Arathron and the six brightly colored children of Arathron observing the handiwork of the Stewards of Heaven.

    Smirt could thus see for himself a Danube economic union arranged at Paris, and Austria arrest fleeing Nazi chieftain, and Mrs. B. F. Zogbaum visiting her parents at Galax. He saw Rev. D. W. Cook resign as pastor on account of health, and old Sol on rampage, and mother of 3 slain, mate held. He saw lawyer die in crash as trolley hits truck, and turn of tide indicated by gains in trade. He saw state Solons vote bill to aid wheatgrower, and missing boy found dead in Jersey swimming pool, and he saw people buying Zip razor blades for 39 cents with this coupon, and he saw gayeties galore mark season’s height. He saw, in brief, all the sad doings of the Shining Ones as they hammered away at their realism.

    Smirt did not like it. He said as much, pointing out that all literate human beings could enjoy at will the delights of romance, if only because the books of the speaker could be borrowed from any public library; he mentioned the address of his publisher; and Smirt added that immortals also might fairly claim a due share of such pleasures.

    “There is, for example,” Smirt remarked, “the fine legend of Arachne, which I have now in hand—”

    “We have heard, often and yet over again,” said the Stewards of Heaven, “of a hackney. It is a cross between a cart horse and a race horse. But what, O illustrious Smirt, may be a rackney?”

    “Why, do you judge for yourself,” replied Smirt.

    He spoke the required word of power; and there before them all stood the appearance of that dark young girl who had directed Smirt to the All-Highest.

    Then the Shining Ones murmured uneasily. Hagith cried out:

    “Beware of the Spider Woman! This is she who devours ignobly the body and the soul also of her victims!”

    Smirt replied: “Nonsense! Do I not know a bit better than you do what I create?”

    After that, Smirt regarded this not unattractive looking dark girl, for an instant, rather fondly. It appeared permissible in a widower of so many centuries’ standing. She was very pretty, very stupid. Smirt thought of six stories into which Arachne might be fitted, but he saw too that no one of his handsome inventions suited her. The nature of this chuckle-headed naïve young creature was at odds with his habitual vein of romantic irony. She had been invented—and that was the trouble—by another creative artist, who for his own ends had made this girl a nicely colored and agreeably shaped moron.

    The further trouble was, could anybody, without prejudice, with complete urbanity, describe this happy-hearted and uncommonly pretty Arachne as a moron? She did not know, perhaps, as clearly as Smirt knew, what was the estimated population of Brazil, or the relative specific gravity of hard and soft coal, or the names of the seven stars in the Big Dipper; she might not even know anything about Keats, or about the functions of the pituitary gland, or that Edward Everett had served as the United States’ envoy to Great Britain during John Tyler’s administration: but she did know how to live serenely and honestly, in contentment with her surroundings. No dreams misled or troubled Arachne. She was, in a dreadful phrase, wholesome.

    Oh, but beyond doubt this Arachne had been invented by some botcher who belonged to a most deplorable and quite obsolete school of art. Smirt spoke sharply; and the appearance of the faintly smiling attendant girl was annihilated. Smirt’s reproduction of Arachne no longer existed.

    Smirt had not planned that destruction consciously. But an odd sense of dismay had possessed him as he regarded the girl’s innocent and stupid and so kissable face, because this chit—confound her impudence!—was just the one sort of thing he could never invent. She belonged to a more popular school of art, to an aesthetic kindergarten of sugar and fine sentiments and uncritical optimism. Yet did Smirt desire to be loved foolishly, and above all he wanted to love this young woman very foolishly, without any need to remain urbane. He wanted to share with Arachne, unbothered by the touchstones of experience and savoir faire, and untrammeled by sophistication, all that high and pure and idiotic emotion which, he dimly knew, had been a part of the legend that Smirt could neither remember nor invent. It followed that, for just one instant, the urbanity of Smirt had been flawed with petulance.

    But he carried off this error with a light laugh. “I was ill inspired,” said Smirt. “Let us destroy and forget the legend of Arachne, for I have thought of a much better story.”

    Yes, I have thought of a much better story,” Smirt said, yet again. And thereafter he raided the vast stores of his scholarship and his erudition with a high hand.

    He spoke first the required word of power; and he spoke also the required Invocation of Memory, saying, as his instant need was:

    “O clement and all-cunning sophist, world-wise apologist, and learned counsel for the defence of our foolishness! Friendly apothecary, the compounder of bland poultices, the chemist of strong healing balms, for pride’s bruises! Skilled brewer of magnanimity; unerring historian of the false; discreet mortician of the unpleasant; well-balanced acrobat, not ever to be tumbled from the trapeze of self-respect! O all-accomplished Memory! do you now give me heed and aid!”

    Then Smirt said also: “Let us two conspire together, O wayward lord of all trades, to create again that world which is governed great-heartedly, by the fancy of a child; which poets revere as their native land, hungered after throughout life-long exile; which is cherished in secret by every common-sense person bustling about shops and court rooms and office buildings; and which by no redeemed spirit in any paradise can be recalled unenviously. O all-accomplished Memory, give heed! Let our pleasant magic now revive that immortal world which, since it never was, may not ever perish!”

    And after that, with memory to abet him, Smirt made his implausible, desired world in an eye’s twinkling.

    He judged, rightly, that for a divine audience so prosaic, and virtually illiterate, there was no need to invent anything new. So out of time-tested materials he builded his mythic world, after every time-approved model borrowed from the best fairy tales. For there was once a princess, Smirt had always remembered, a princess who was more lovely than was any one of that season’s debutantes, and who was more desirable than a Pulitzer Prize; and with that knowledge firm in his mind, he found it in some sort a sentimental pleasure to create a world fit for her inhabitancy.

    So in this world there were magical seas made ready for Smirt’s faintly remembered princess to sail upon, in a fairy boat drawn by swans; and there were enchanted forests, in which she might sleep out a century undisturbed, pending the arrival of some whippersnapper third prince or another; and there was a notable abundance of castles, builded finely of gold or of silver or of copper, suitable for this princess to occupy. There were ogres, and witches, and monsters of every kind, and sorcerers of the most villanous nature, all of them peculiarly easy to kill; and at every cross-roads Smirt stationed a dwarf or a talking fox, or it might be a talking hearth broom, to advise all wayfarers as to what lay ahead in their journeying. And besides that, at fixed intervals of fifteen miles, a king and a queen held their court, setting quaint tests for the valor and the ingenuity of the adoring adventurers who wooed their daughter. She in every instance was a blonde beauty of unexampled perfection; and at each court was established both a good and a bad fairy in regular practice.

    Such was the world which Smirt created for the Stewards of Heaven, and which he now exhibited to them, after making antique looking all the contents of this world with a subduing varnish of Celtic glamour. It was a world such as the Shining Ones had not ever imagined during the sad aeons they had given over to realism. They beheld now the glories of romance, with an ever-growing enthusiasm which caused all the seven Stewards to remark Bravo! and Encore! and Author! and Speech! and to make yet other happy observations.

    The applauded one received these tributes with his accustomed ease and urbanity; yet all the while, at the bottom of his heart, Smirt was regretting that in no tinseled fairy land such as this could he hope to find the lost legend of Arachne.

    Arathron spoke, bowing his dark brow; and the ambrosial locks waved from the god’s immortal head.
(‘For my dream becomes Homeric,” Smirt reflected.)
At the feet of Arathron a large mousy-colored goat slumbered peacefully. And thus said the All-Father:

    “With no winged words may I praise you fittingly. Appreciation falters before you, O much contriving Smirt, who do not scorn the Stewards of Heaven. Each one of us you have put at ease with some kindly remark. You have been urbane to everybody. You have with unfailing tact concealed that mental superiority of which you could not but be conscious, and you have treated each Shining One as an equal.”

    Then Smirt of the many books replied to the All-Father, saying:

    “Indeed upon their own plane your children entertain me. They compose a leisure class such as I had not previously observed at close range. They live in supreme magnificence, at entire ease, with no need to labor. Yet they do labor, incessantly, and day after day, to upset and to afflict and to destroy mankind, by the hundreds, in time for tomorrow morning’s paper. They put upon men every sort of discomfort and suffering, in order to create that queer world which the newspapers tell about. To do that is vile.”

    “Yet,” Arathron interrupted, “yet do you not believe, dear master of all certainty and of all arts, that some such preliminary training in newspaper work may be of benefit to a creative artist by-and-by?”

    “I grant,” Smirt continued affably, “that the gods are above good and evil, and besides, it seems probable you are false gods who do not exist except in my dream. It is clear that non-existent persons cannot commit crimes, and that in consequence the infamies which you incite cannot exist either. Yes, logic proves that. But logic does not make it equally clear, to any sound logician, why the main interest of the Shining Ones, who upon the whole bore one another, should be invested in human beings?”

    Arathron said that he had endeavored to make of each of his children an artist whose medium was human life, and that it had seemed to him a preliminary training in newspaper work—

    But all their newspaper work, Smirt interrupted at once, was bedaubed and degraded by realism. There was in it no touch of the imaginative.

    “We perceive that, Smirt, now that you have revealed to us the glories of romance. Yet it had seemed to be our duty to keep life plausible for human beings,” replied Arathron, humbly.

    Thus he spoke. (“
Has phato: for my dream remains Homeric,
”
Smirt reflected.
) And thereafter, even as an iron cauldron is troubled when, surrounded by bright fire, it is melting down the lard of a well-fatted hog; so that at first the large pot bubbles restively, but of a sudden the goodly fat spurts upward on all sides, without any moderation: even so did the urbane patience of Smirt now boil over into candor, in the time that Smirt answered wide-browed Arathron, saying:

    “It is far more obviously your duty, my dear sir, to be attending to the conduct of your divine children. Apart from their endless blunders and their wholesale murderings, as when they cause zero weather to creep south or stir up feuds or set fire to department stores or start wars, in their endeavors to enliven the front page of tomorrow morning’s paper, they display yet another failing not uncommon among journalists, in that they all drink entirely too much. There is no one of them ever quite sober. What sober person, to begin with, would think of putting mandrakes and human blood in his beer?”

    Arathron looked downward. He stroked the head of his goat, and he wore now an air of some constraint and uneasiness. But Arathron replied only:

    “We drink the dark beer of Sekmet, Smirt, so that we may forget our divine destiny. There is but one doom for the super-eminent, whether he be a true god or a false god; and none may escape it.”

    “And what, Arathron, is that doom?”

    “It is revealed to the super-eminent alone, Smirt—”

    “Well, but, upon my word—!” said Smirt.