The Nightmare Had Triplets (22 page)

    “In addition,” they concluded, “to the
Bacchae
of Euripides, two numbers of the
Atlantic Monthly,
George Eliot’s
Scenes from Clerical Life,
and Hornblower & Weeks’
Financial Glossary.
But in no one of these books have we found the legend of Arachne.”

    “Then what next, gentlemen,” said Smirt, affably, “can the unparalleled powers of your erudition suggest?”

    They replied: “It has been suggested by Charles Kingsley, in his
Glaucus,
that a desultory small treatise cannot well end more usefully than in recommending a few volumes on Natural History, fit for the use of young people. We do not demand that this list shall contain all the best books, but simply the best of which the compiler knows; for Christmas seals were first introduced into this country from Denmark in 1907, and, since 1917, have been distributed every year by the National Tuberculosis Association.”

    This was a verdict over which Smirt meditated for a good while, before remarking:

    “Your statements, gentlemen, appear quite truthful, in so far as they go. They would be most helpful, no doubt, if only I happened to be a desultory small treatise. But as a mere master of gods, I must ask just what do you mean?”

    They took snuff again. Then they replied patiently:

    “We mean that the Goodwood Races begin on the last Tuesday in July, and last four days. They are held in England, in a private park belonging to the Duke of Richmond, and are very select affairs. In removing stains caused by fruit or fruit juices use boiling water, and then bleach if necessary. The Athenians, however, began the year in June, the Macedonians in September.”

    After that, these learned men vanished, like candles which have been blown out, as they went back into Smirt’s brain. Thus was his erudition restored to him; and thus was he relieved from listening to it himself. And Wise Aldemis now set about a black magic, about the unholy magic of the Cat and the Abtu Fish.

    Yet nothing came of this magic, in so far as Smirt could perceive. As he looked about him inquiringly; all seemed as it had been. Smirt wondered then, in half shocked surprise, if the gray woman had failed in her thaumaturgy. He looked at her next; and found that this third magic was a specially perturbing magic, inasmuch as it had changed Aldemis into the one person whom easy-going and urbane Smirt disliked.

    So now Smirt faced Mrs. Murgatroyd, whom alone of all the public at large he found to be wholly detestable, and the fat painted creature said to him at once,—

    “I think your books are perfectly wonderful.”

    “It is you who are wonderful, Mrs. Murgatroyd,” he replied, a little shaken; for Wise Aldemis had evoked, at last, the one magic which could always upset Smirt, with its never failing bitterness, and which caused him to forget every other living woman.

    Now Mrs. Murgatroyd replied, tittering: “Get along with you, Smirt! For I reckon you say that to most every girl you start a-flirting with.”

    And Smirt cried out, “For urbanity’s sake, woman, do you stop your giggling and your leering at me!”

    “La, but did anybody ever hear the like of you, Smirt! and that is a nice way indeed for you to be talking to a lady.”

    “I cannot help it, Mrs. Murgatroyd. I cannot endure the sight of you, Mrs. Murgatroyd, as a fat walloping old wench. I find unbearable the pink and fussified clothes that are now twenty years too young for you, Mrs. Murgatroyd. And I do not like your lipstick, Mrs. Murgatroyd—no, nor your plucked eyebrows either.”

    “My, but just listen at the man!” she remarked equably.

    Indeed Smirt rather wondered at himself. There was far too much of this woman, he reflected: yet even nowadays she stayed not unhandsome, in her own excessive way; and in all the many pounds of her, as Smirt knew, there was not one half-ounce of malevolence toward anybody. There never had been.

    Nevertheless, Smirt found that his talking went on in a most embarrassing vein of candor. For Smirt was now saying:

    “And when you walk, Mrs. Murgatroyd—only, you do not walk, you mince and you totter, like a drunk woman, in shoes that are far too tight for you—then you shake and you wobble and you wriggle in all remote sections. You are like a perambulating pink jelly. There is no cow but would be ashamed of such udders. And as for the waggle of your big broad backside, I never did see anything like it.”

    “Of course I am a-getting on in life, Smirt,” she agreed placidly. “And you used to could bear the sight of me pretty well, both in and out of my clothes, when the two of us was young.”

    “That is why I said you were wonderful, Mrs. Murgatroyd. But for you—as you put it—‘both in and out of your clothes,’ there would perhaps have been no books, no Smirt. For it was through you, my dear Jessica, ‘when the two of us was young,’ that I learned the meaning of two very common words—of love and of happiness. And afterward I learned the meaning of such words as perfidy and anguish, and of hatred also, Mrs. Murgatroyd. It was a long while before I found out how few people do really know what these words mean.”

    The gross woman looked at him with placid blue eyes which stayed friendly.

    “Such goings-on,” she commented, “over that boy and girl nonsense! But we did have a real good time, Smirt; and I liked you a lot better than I ever let on to Murgatroyd.”

    “But you, Mrs. Murgatroyd, you never knew the meaning of any one of these words. You do not know anything. You have no mind, no heart, no real desires, no syntax—and no decency either, Mrs. Murgatroyd, for in that event you would keep out of my dreams. But you never have kept out of my dreams, no, not in all these years.”

    Then Smirt began to laugh; and he said:

    “In brief, ‘when the two of us was young,” I loved you entirely; and you liked me, more or less, for a while; and after that while, you very sensibly married Mr. Murgatroyd. You treated me abominably, Mrs. Murgatroyd; and for every bit of your infamous behavior my gratitude is unbounded.”

    “You certainly are a case,” she remarked, “if ever there was one.”

    “And I still find you rather incredible, Mrs. Murgatroyd. For you are not merely disgusting to look at. You are far more: you are a compendium of everything I abhor. There is absolutely no standing you. When you babble to me about my perfectly wonderful books, and about how proud you are to have known me before I became famous, and about how you tell simply everybody about me, you incite me to murder. To begin with, I doubt if you ever toiled through one of my books; and if you did, I am quite sure you could make neither head nor tail of my wit and fancy and erudition. There is not under your henna hair-dye the required intelligence.”

    “You really are,” Mrs. Murgatroyd re-a beamingly, “a case, with that swelled head of yours. Not but what I like a good book when I got the time for it.”

    And from her left ear she brushed back her so frankly dyed hair, with the exact gesture of that girl whom Smirt was not able to forget.

    “You display upon all occasions,” Smirt continued, “the imagination, the ready tact, and the vivacity also, of a York river oyster. Ah, but what a delight it is to say to you in a dream the things that no Southern gentleman can say during his waking hours! And you were always like that, I know—but how well I know it, after meditating upon the astounding fact for years!—you were always like that inside, even when in your youth you had a superficial prettiness. I daresay you were not even especially pretty. And yet, yet, I found in you all beauty, all perfection, all happiness. I found in you a magic and a poison.”

    Smirt broke off talking. He had strayed, he felt, some little distance from the neat ways of urbanity. So Smirt shrugged. Afterward Smirt said:

    “All that I found in you went into my books. And every man who read them has recognized in my young folly, and in my urbane derision of it, a part of himself. My books are you, you, all you! and you have not the wit to perceive it. That which you created, you cannot understand. Oh, and you created me also, teaching me to regard the ludicrousness of myself even more fondly than I did that of other persons—and yet teaching me always to remember you with a grim tenderness. For you were very useful: I
concede that. It is necessary that all poets should love Mrs. Murgatroyd—
Lesbia nostra, illa Lesbia,
the divine romance which turns of a sudden into a gorilla grin of irony.”

    “La, but how you do talk,” remarked Mrs. Murgatroyd. “Quite as fine as the letters you used to writ me—and as I often think, if they are not as good: a circus, Smirt!”

    She did not laugh exactly. But her amusement came almost apoplectic.

    “You have kept my letters!” said Smirt, shuddering. “That only was needed. Some day your heirs and assigns will be publishing them, of course, with doubt a portrait of you, pretty much as you now for the frontispiece. Yes, that only was needed—my insane rhapsodies in conjunction with your portrait. However, I can think offhand of very few women who are not planning to publish my letters. One volume more or less will not matter. And I desire only to make the fact plain to posterity that I did not correspond until I had copulated.”

    After that, Smirt gallantly lifted to Smirt’s Mrs. Murgatroyd’s plump and small and really, he observed with surprise, quite pretty hand.

    “It has been an immense comfort to say to you in this dream, dear Jessica, the things which I could not say when awake. And for the rest, I am deeply grateful, alike for your kindness and for your charity—in not marrying me, I mean,—and for your turning out to be such a wholly unattractive person afterward. Your memory has been to me an unfailing inkwell. All my heart praises that loveliness which was yours in the eyes of a boy very long ago. I praise likewise your perfidy. I praise above all the inane grossness which you now flaunt in middle life. For these three things have combined handsomely, O far too big and too wobbly and too crudely renovated source of my genius, these things have combined to make me Smirt, Smirt whom the public at large pursue, Smirt whom the gods also revere and imitate.”

    Thus he boasted; and in the while he was speaking a clock struck thirteen.

    “Alas and alack!” said Smirt, forebodingly, “but this is no doubt the appointed hour. And I, of all persons, have incited it. For I have forgotten to be urbane, I have been betrayed into
hubris.
”

    “
Whensoever the Khirghiz pass by Musta-ghata, loftiest of the Pamirs, they fall upon their knees in prayer, for upon the summit of this mountain stands the unapproachable bright city of Janaidar, built in a gulden age, and still visible from afar. In Venezuela also Humboldt observed a mountain to be strangely luminous at night, and attributed this phenomenon to the burning of hydrogen gases.
”

    In the eternal city of Amit a small onyx clock (which was left over from Tana’s cave, Smirt now remembered) had just finished striking thirteen: and before Smirt stood a hooded company of seven huge persons, all robed in ash-colored gray and made ready for travel. Their leader put by his hood; and Smirt saw that this was Arathron.

    Brown Arathron said: “So very soon has come the appointed hour. The liquor of the gods is almost gone, there is scarcely a drink left, only a few drops remain to us of the dark beer of Sekmet. My splendors fall away from me as the bright leaves drop pensively from a maple-tree in autumn. There is in my thoughts a smell of winter. I have lived my last hour as a Steward of Heaven. In a little while, I must be leaving forever the city of Amit, wherein all things were perfect, where each day and hour held some form of delight, and everything seemed builded for
my pleasure. I had not known until to-day how beautiful is Amit. It is strange yet to be beholding Amit, wherein I have gone about always light-hearted, a god among gods.”

    Then Phul, that huge hermaphrodite who was colored like silver, said:

    “The horror of it troubles me, to look upon mortal tax-payers, and to know that is what each fallen must become. The strivings and the small doings of this planet’s people are taxed very heavily by time and by common-sense. I tread, as boldly as may be, down a cold gray path, to live as a tax-payer. I shall not look back. It may be that by-and-by, when I become an applauded person, perhaps a great statesman or a famous minister of the gospel, some ghost of Amit may rise to plague me and to draw from me a sigh. I shall shrug then. My thoughts will return to the higher brackets of common-sense, and to time’s surtaxes, and to my allowed deductions in the way of lying and of humbug. I shall again forget Amit, wherein I went about always light-hearted, a god among gods.”

    And ruddy Phaleg said: “Time and common-sense have entrapped me. They take a huge toll of my dreams and of my hopes, and of my courage also, now that I must live as a tax-payer. I have wandered about Amit without any plan. The ghosts of many divine beings went with me. I remembered them all, the gods that were here before me, the gods that are now departing, not ever to return. Our lives narrow down to being well-thought-of. Our glory will never revive. Our strength dwindles, like a little fire under the sun of September, now that befalls the appointed hour. No one of us shall ever live again as a god lives, without paying any taxes to time or to common-sense. We return no more to Amit, wherein each one of us has gone about always light-hearted, a god among gods.”

    “Oh, but come now,” said Smirt, “this is most distressing! Each of us must abide his appointed hour: I concede that. I do not mean to upset any of these cosmic arrangements. Still, I did not intend to incite the appointed hour by forgetting, for just a moment, my urbanity. And I really do think that in this instance All-Highest & Company might have deferred—a little more tactfully, let us say—the stroke of doom. For you and I, my friends, have but very lately put the planet on a properly romantic basis: it was an experiment noble in purpose, an experiment which, I make bold to say, might well have been permitted to work out to its own logical conclusions. Oh, I do not criticize this sudden, this somewhat high-handed, and indeed this virtually idiotic interference with my personal plans. But I do ask, Was it tactful?”