The Nightmare Had Triplets (50 page)

    Little Smirt trembled, now that at long last he beheld the all-powerful Mr. Smith. But Little Smirt, in his despair, as he laid down the two hunting spears, replied boldly enough:

    “I will tell you all, Lord of the Forest. And if, after hearing my misadventures, you desire to punish me with lightnings, or with an earthquake, or with any other symptom of divine irritation, for the deceits which I and my dear Mama have put upon my beloved wife and upon the pure-minded immortals of Branlon, then I shall not cry out. For between us, we have well earned it.”

    Thereafter Little Smirt told his story, relating everything just as it had happened. And Mr. Smith—after an uncharacteristic season of taciturnity, during which he had listened with close attention to Little Smirt—began by-and-by to smile, with a most reassuring benevolence.

    “Come now,” he remarked, “but after all, you are not, at heart, the depressingly virtuous young gentleman about whom Bel-Imperia, and in fact entire Branlon, has been telling me.”

    “Alas, Lord of the Forest, it is true that I have behaved with uncompromising rectitude from my youth up; and I have painstakingly preserved my fidelity as a married man: yet I was bullied into the practice of all these virtues by my resistless mother. It follows that the moral credit is hers, whereas I have got only the inconvenience.”

    Now the bright eyes of Mr. Smith kept on looking reflectively at this tall, badly frightened, half-blubbering, and yet resolute Little Smirt; and in the pleased heart of Mr. Smith moved some compassion and a grave envy, because of the quaint ways of young people.

    “You have loyalty,” Mr. Smith pointed out. “You have given up, of your own will, your wife, whom you love, and the delights of your life here in this most magnificently designed forest—which I cannot doubt you appreciate,—in order to serve Madam Tana’s welfare in the uninviting atmosphere of a jail. Now, as a sound logician, my dear boy, I have not ever been able to convince myself, upon the ignoble low grounds of reason, that any man or woman was a creature sufficiently admirable to merit the sacrifice of another person’s comfort: yet, in spite of logic, I do now and then give way to my loyal memories of your all-wonderful mother. Moreover, Little Smirt, you have a sense of the
mot juste,
for you describe your mother as ‘resistless’. Yes, that is a pair of superb virtues: and I rejoice we should share them in common.”

    “Why, but, Lord of the Forest, can it be you were once acquainted with my dear Mama?”

    “I was not ever acquainted with anybody, Little Smirt. I move in a mist of dreams which shuts out the truth about other persons. So let us phrase it, Little Smirt, that I dreamed about Madam Tana somewhat ardently during the year preceding your birth.”

    “In that event, sir, you may well have been privileged to know also my father, the sublime Smirt, because it was at this exact time that they used to misconduct themselves in a cave.”

    “As to the immense value of that privilege, Little Smirt, it does not become me to speak,” Mr. Smith answered, with his accustomed modesty. “You can but ask your mother about it: and I would advise you to believe in the truthfulness of her reply just as far as you may consider that course advisable.”

    “My mother, sir,” Little Smirt reminded the Lord of the Forest, “has the blunt candors of any man’s wife when it comes to discussing her spouse, my sublime father: and besides that, she is a great distance away, in addition to being in prison.”

    “To the contrary, Little Smirt,” replied Mr. Smith, quite as placidly as if he were talking good sense, “I have made use of the fifth magic which I got through Urc Tabaron’s rather foolish superstition that there is luck in odd numbers, as well as of the Water of Airdra which I got through Elair’s pig-headed devotion to his ugly gray little wife. It is a familiar fact, my dear boy, that superstition and pig-headedness may very often result in prosperity, for other people; and in this case, you and I would appear to be the beneficiaries.”

    “Why, but, yes, of course, Lord of the Forest,” said Little Smirt, who was all bewilderment, “I know beyond any doubt you are right; only I do not know, sir, just what you are talking about.”

    “I am talking about the delightful circumstance, Little Smirt,” replied Mr. Smith, with a continuing exhibition of divine urbanity, “that behind you now stands your mother, precisely as she was when you and I first knew her.”

    Turning about sharply, Little Smirt thus faced a tall dark girl who was dressed in long robes of black and silver; he found her the most beautiful and the most dear of women whom he had ever seen: and his heart leapt with fond pride. He was actually taking credit to himself, he reflected confusedly, for having such a superb and all-wonderful mother. This was his sole thought in the moment that he embraced his adorable, brand-new Mama; and he began to blubber like a whipped baby.

    The young prig had loved her very much—or, at all events, to an appreciably less selfish degree than he was capable of loving anybody else—when his Mama was unlovely and old, and when she had been involved undesirably in her homeopathic treatment of human wickedness: but to have his mother thus youthful, and so highly agreeable to look at, and restored to the at least relative innocence of a girl of twenty, appeared to Little Smirt a large deal more satisfactory. So, for no reason at all, Little Smirt began to cry; and he continued to cry copiously, as he embraced the young Tana who had borne him.

    “Ah, but what a mama you are, Mama, for a scholar of my age, of my discretion and my gravity!” he remarked, dancing happily about her, in circles. “How nice it is that your hands are all right again! And what lovely clothes you are wearing, Mama!” Little Smirt added, looking down at the long silvery-colored robes, which were embroidered everywhere with black stars and black suns and black comets.

    Then he hugged her again, saying, with a huge sob, “Yellow would have been so unbecoming to you, Mama!”

    She replied: “Get along with you! and where is your handkerchief, and your self-control too, you abominable young windbag!”

    But Tana did not speak at all harshly. Tana was quite happy, because, being his mother, she was no more reasonable about Little Smirt than he was about her.

    “Well, and I too believe,” declared Mr. Smith, “that I have wisely invested the fifth magic of Urc Tabaron. For I also, I am moved by emotions of the most exalted kind. I am conscious of an insane elation: I feel in me an irrational proud stirring of the blood. Yes”—Mr. Smith continued, with a surprising condescension, which displayed all the warm graces of affability without cooling in any way the respect due to his dignity,—“yes, it is quite as though I were indeed hearing that fanfare of trumpets such as ordinarily greets the return of a queen to her loyal kingdom.”

    Young Tana regarded this smiling and urbane Mr. Smith levelly, without any least smiling.

    “What does this nonsense about trumpets mean, you who are nowadays called Lord of the Forest? Yes, and what other windy nonsense, Smirt, have you been talking to the poor boy who takes after you only too well in his own weakness for talking nonsense?”

    “Ah! oh! aha!” cried out Little Smirt, when he had heard this astonishing speech; “but do you imply, Mama, that Mr. Smith here is the sublime Smirt whom you met in a cave in the days of your first youthfulness? and that the Lord of the Forest is my own revered father? Well, but this is indeed a most remarkable and delightful coincidence. It dismisses from our consideration lightnings and earthquakes and all similar cataclysms, as repartees unsuited to a quiet family gathering. My sentiments are appropriate to the occasion; and I entreat your paternal blessing, sir,” he added, kneeling.

    “You have it, my son,” replied Mr. Smith—with a becoming blending of majesty, of emotion, and of his not-ever-failing modesty,—“for whatever my blessing may be worth.”

    “—And between ourselves, sir,” Little Smirt continued, resurgent, “is it not noteworthy how everything which Mama does should invariably turn out to have been for the best? For you will observe that even her immoral conduct in succumbing to your improper advances—in that cave—has resulted, at long last, in true happiness for everybody concerned. Had she behaved properly, we three must necessarily have missed this ecstatic moment. I, for that matter, would not ever have existed, to be a fond comfort to your declining years. These are facts which in the mind of a scholar must give rise to a number of not uninteresting speculations—”

    “Yes,” said Mr. Smith; “yes, to be sure. Your mother and I quite agree with you, Little Smirt, that your mother is in every respect a remarkable woman. Well, and inasmuch as we quite agree with
you,
there is not any need to develop your thesis. Instead, my dear boy, you had best be off to your as yet heartbroken wife, who, I am certain, must be missing you a great deal at this very instant. But your mother and I, at this precise instant, would not miss you the least bit, Little Smirt—now that all ends happily, to everybody’s contentment, in accord with the old laws of faery, which are so much more venerable, and which are more lovely also, than are any human laws.”

    Little Smirt took the hint; and he took likewise the two spears which belonged to Bel-Imperia. He then ran through Branlon, in order to give back to his wife her sharp-pointed spears intrepidly.

    
“American investments in these countries Dec. 31, 1934, aggregated over $404,000,000, according to the Department of Commerce, of which direct business investments (in about 100 firms largely in Garian and Arleoth) were $62,000,000; investments in Rorn corporations, $139,000,000; in Ecben Government securities, $161,000,000; in personal property (mare’s-nests, borrowed plumes, Spanish castles, fiddlesticks, Hibernian bulls, ingannations, etc.),$1.37; and in municipal securities (Sorram, Achren, Druim, etc.), $42,000,000.”

    I may now live in contentment,” said Mr. Smith. “The desired work is done, the more thanks to Urc Tabaron’s magic. To the south of Branlon, Volmar is getting on well enough as a blacksmith, at all seasons when he is sober enough to distinguish between his anvil and his bellows. Northward, Elair’s farming prospers at every season. Clitandre is building up a conservative but sound trade in peculation to the west of Branlon. As for Little Smirt, I suppose that, in his red and yellow hunting lodge between the east part of the forest and the ocean, he had best stick to writing—with your assistance, my darling—his most edifying poetry, inasmuch as the lad seems to be fit for nothing better than authorship.”

    “But—” Tana at once replied, very properly, to the implied and the uncalled-for and the over-presumptuous criticism of that son whom she had never permitted anybody else than herself to criticize.

    In consequence, she now spoke with a chilled indignation which at the same time managed to be a complete summary of Mr. Smith’s failings, and to regret his envy of his superiors, and to dismiss his judgment as being not worth bothering about, all in the one monosyllable.

    “Nevertheless, my dove,” Mr. Smith answered, benignantly, “let us not argue the matter. For I am, in point of fact, very well content, now that the sons of an old dream have returned to me. They have come severally as a drunkard and as a fool, as a thief and as a fraud. I can find among them no Roland, no greathearted paladin. There is no son of Smirt who at all resembles the son of Charlemagne. Yet do my sons content me: and so—with an heroic resignation to circumstances and with a fortitude upon which it would perhaps be immodest to dwell—I do not complain.”

    “But my Little Smirt,” Tana pointed out, very patiently, as one who explains matters to the more feeble-minded, “is neither a drunkard nor a fool nor a thief.”

    “Nor has anyone, my pet, ever imagined, I am certain, any such canard about that most admirably conducted young scholar,” replied Mr. Smith. “And for that reason did I make bold to hint at a fourth sort of foible.”

    “But—” said Tana.

    “Oh, beyond question,” said Mr. Smith; “yes, to be sure, I was wrong. Yes, you are quite right; and I agree with you thoroughly, my love. I have always found it most safe to agree with that tone of voice when it was feminine.”

    “Nevertheless, Smirt, if I have taught my son, and in fact if I have forced my son, to restrain his paternal instincts, yet it was for the boy’s own good, let me tell you, as well as for the improvement of his character in general.”

    “There spoke the devoted wife and the fond mother, with the same recriminatory voice,” observed Mr. Smith. “But I am not Smirt any longer. That dream has vanished. There remain of it only the four children of my dream; and although no one of them appears to me immaculate, yet the artist well knows that the children of no dream are ever quite that which he had hoped for.”

    She regarded him sombrely, and even with an odd sort of compassion, saying,—

    “And so these three long-legged ruffians and my bright, properly behaved, well-educated Little Smirt are to be the lean recompense of your dreaming—of your not as yet ended dreaming, poor Lord of the Forest?”

    “You misinterpret me, Tana: and it is always a mistake to interrupt an artist when he is artistically leading up to a climax. No: I was about to say that, through the ever-blessed fifth magic of Urc Tabaron, you also remain.”

    “Well, and what follows?” asked Tana.

    She had mingled, provisionally, the voice of a pleased woman with the voice of a mother who remembered the way in which a mere demi-god had been talking about her son.

    “It follows,” he replied, smiling, “that you expose my weakness, body and bone. I have weaknesses: let it be admitted. I have also some skill—for that too let us grant, in the high cause of veracity—at the marshalling of well recruited words. So upon holiday occasions these words troop willingly enough at my bidding, to express the ironic or the learned or the derisory. By turns they become glamorous or carping or gaily frivolous. They shift from the tinselled into the naïve or the nostalgic, as I command. They are well-bred, or they are resignedly pessimistic, or perhaps they advance with some rather ugly allusive sniggerings, or it may be they sparkle with engagingly phrased outbursts of beauty, just as the whim takes me. In brief, they express all those qualities which adorn the familiar word-play of Mr. Smith. The affair is harmless, a mere dress parade. Ah, but, my dearest, but when I would lead my fine words into a grapple with sincerity, then they waver. They retreat with a zeal unexampled in the annals of warfare. They abandon me; and I am left without support, upon an uncongenial field of battle, fidgeting before the unamused face of sincerity. I am left gulping and wordless.