The Nightmare Had Triplets (52 page)

    Now this is a baseless, very foolish superstition, say the local scientists of Sorram and Arleoth and yet other fabulous cities; whereafter they explain it away scientifically. The better-thought-of wizards, the worldly-wise fairy godmothers, the leading prelates, and the chief spectres of the lands beyond common-sense, each for the honor of his craft, scoff scornfully at the notion of any such alien magic as the magic of flesh-and-blood countries. The professorial collect such notions as folk-lore. But in the enchanted forest of Branlon (which divides Rorn from Ecben) this ancient belief keeps its strength without any special loss under time’s nibbling. Fauns hereabouts say they have talked with such dreamers; the Niagriusar, who live situated favorably for observance, in the tree-tops, declare they have peeped down at such outlandish creatures going about Branlon in open moonshine; many nymphs will smile reminiscently when these dreamers are mentioned.

    There is, in brief, a sort of sylvan mythology as to these strange human intruders who in their dreams have come from remote constellations into the forest of Branlon. But especially in Branlon do the forest spirits and the wood demons narrate their simple folktales about Smire, whom they believe to have journeyed from a planet, which they call Earth, in the Solar System.

    It is not a complete tale, this epopee of Smire. Much of it, to the most casual sort of inspection, must seem blurred and uncertain. No part of the story glitters under art’s prinking, or gleams with oil burned at midnight. At times it is tainted with a logic and a quiet reasonableness so uncongenial to the lands beyond common-sense as to bespeak a foreign origin. And a large deal of the story has been lost nowadays, entirely, irrevocably.

    For it all happened a great while ago, say the woodland people, in the first dawn of a remote, incredible time and in a more noble world than is the world of to-day’s dreaming. In the lands beyond common-sense, Troy had but lately fallen, under the will of Moera, when she indulgently permitted Zeus and her other playthings upon Olympus to burn down all-virtuous Priam’s city into ashes. Agamemnon was hardly cold in his Argive bathtub; in Ogygia, Odysseus was as yet warmed by the affection of Calypso; and just off the Agates, Aphrodite’s sedate son, Æneas, sailed tepidly toward eternal glory, as the founder of Rome’s greatness, being at this remote season about seven leagues east of Carthage.

    This Carthage was then a quite new city, they relate in Branlon; and it was at Carthage that Smire was first heard about, when the Queen of Carthage got to pitying him.

    “—For, as an unprotected young widow, I have had such a hard time of it, myself”, says the Queen of Carthage, in concluding her commiserations, “that I can sympathize with anybody who is in trouble.”

    “
Non ignara mali, miseris succurrere disco,
” replied the majestic wanderer, smiling.

    “I agree with you thoroughly, dear Smire. What does it mean?”

    “Well, to translate quite accurately, and yet to preserve the true flavor of Latin idiom—to keep, as it were, the exact nuance undimmed,—it means you have had such a hard time of it, yourself. Queen Elissa, that you can sympathize with anybody who is in trouble.”

    “Does it indeed mean that!” the Queen cries out, in her admiration. “But how much you have improved the sound of it!”

    With an unassuming modesty which delighted Elissa’s touched heart, the sublime stranger waved aside the well-merited tribute to his rhetorical powers. He said only,—

    “You should felicitate Virgil, dear lady, rather than me.”

    “But,” she objected, “but I do not know anybody who is called Virgil.”

    “That is perhaps unavoidable,” says Smire. “The Virgil about whom I am talking will not be born for some little while—”

    Smire paused. He lighted a cigarette. He appeared mildly to regret the bared teeth of a dilemma. He says then,—

    “Nevertheless, it is in this noble form, O Queen, that about eight centuries from to-day one Publius Vergilius Maro (flourishing between the years seventy and nineteen B. C.) will be putting your remark into an hexameter which will live on forever in every selection of handy quotations.”

    “How wonderful it is of you, dear Smire,” the Queen remarked, visibly yet more and more impressed, “to be foreseeing all that!”

    “My information as to polite letters—such as it may or may not be, madame—has before this morning sustained the onslaughts of admiration. Yet I deserve no special credit for possessing my own small private fund of pleasant and edifying knowledge such as is perhaps unexampled to mortal experience. No: for I am burdened willy-nilly by the lore of unborn centuries; no less than twenty-nine hundred and forty-odd years as yet to come (according to the approved calendar of my religious faith) have laden my mind with the heaped trash of their misinformation; and I regard the lands beyond common-sense with eyes which have looked undazzled upon flesh-and-blood democracies.”

    Indeed, as he gazed thoughtfully down at her, the Queen recalled, with some wonderment, that the dark and strangely shining eyes of Smire did not ever blink or shift in the manner of normal persons, but retained always a steady gazing. He said, pensively:

    “How is it possible, madame, for me to convince you that you are an implausible golden-robed figure in a dream which I am sleeping through some twenty centuries after the Redeemer of my sins has gone about His ambitious task? To arouse any such conviction is a feat some way beyond the not inconsiderable eloquence with which the charitable have been so kindly as to credit me. To attempt any such persuading would be plain
hubris.
”

    “But I do not know anybody who is called Hubris, either, dear Smire.”

    “Come, come, madame, now let us distinguish!” he replies, affably. “
Hubris
is not a person.
Hubris
is a too fond opinion of one’s own abilities.
Hubris
is an injudicious amount of self-conceit and of self-complacency.
Hubris,
in brief, is that danger-breeding vice which I avoid in particular, on account of the keen intelligence with which I was gifted at birth, through no special merit of my own.”

    “You are modest, dear Smire; and in a man that is always delightful.”

    “So I shall now avoid
hubris,
” he continued, “by not attempting to argue with you, Elissa, as to whether or not you exist in point of fact. I elect to accept you, dear lady, quite tacitly. And in short I shall not say anything whatever about the odd circumstance that I appear to be sound asleep in another era. I shall not admit, even to myself, that I seem to be dreaming about you, my dear Elissa, who lived in unequalled beauty, and who perished so famously, almost three thousand years before I fell asleep.”

    “That is truly a remarkable fancy,” the Queen said. “Do you really think I am pretty? You probably say that to every woman you meet. And since I have not perished at all, I cannot very well take it seriously.”

    “You speak with unblemished logic,” he admitted. “I have learned long ago, in my long dream, how peculiarly difficult it is to convince the creations of my fancy that outside my mind they have no life whatever. So it is perhaps better to avoid these abstruse distinctions.”

    “Then let us not worry about them any more,” said the Queen, practically.

    “
Solvite corde metum, Teucri, secludite euros
” replied Smire. “Thus handsomely will your Virgil paraphrase yet another matter-of-fact comment when he comes to make up a fine epic poem about you, calling you Dido. And it is Virgil, not you, whom people will be quoting until doomsday!”

    He shrugged, philosophically, saying,—“I infer that under the transforming touch of art the most simple personal sentiments may become the prized heritage of international culture; and that through an adroit change of wording the well-gifted poet may, at his own will, make immortal the commonplace.”

    Queen Elissa answered him, appreciatively: “Yes, to be sure. You are quite right. I have often thought that, myself. And it simply shows you! But dinner is ready.”

    “The thought bothers me,” said Smire.

    “Dear Smire, there is nothing specially dreadful about dinner. Nor is there anybody to be bothering us except Iarbus. I cannot imagine what I ever saw in Iarbus—now,” the Queen added, in a voice which made out of this monosyllable an extensive love-song. “No, I really do not know what in the world I could have been thinking about when I promised to marry Iarbus.”

    “It bothers me,” Smire explained, “because I deduce that in literature it is style only which may hope to endure.”

    “Of course,” says the Queen, thoughtfully, “he does claim to be a son of Zeus. And that is something. Although, to be sure, if you can believe one half the stories you hear about Zeus, that too is no special distinction.”

    “—Because,” said Smire, “to anyone who is habitually visited by notions so superb as the very best-thought-of critics have declared my notions to be, any doubt as to the intrinsic value of my notions cannot but be depressing, inasmuch as it is a reflection upon the fine art of criticism.”

    “Not that anybody whatever,” the Queen answered, “minds Iarbus, one way or the other. He was simply, as I see it, a girlish fancy.”

    “And indeed, Elissa, for aught I know to the contrary, I may be talking quite sensibly about a great principle of aesthetics.”

    “I am sure you are, dear Smire. Besides, I am having his wine drugged so that we can be undisturbed after dinner and, in fact, until breakfast. No, I do not mean what you think I mean, you evil-minded delightful creature. I never thought of such a thing for one instant. I mean only that to have his wine drugged was the very best I could manage. To have poisoned the King of a neighboring country, as I do hope you can see clearly, might have led to foreign complications.”

    “—For as I was saying, Elissa, it may well be that the main essential of the most widely admired poetic style is an underlying triteness of thought.”

    Then the Queen said, “But you are discussing a question of diction, and the best way to put words together, when dinner is ready!”

    “—Since it enables one in the same instant,” Smire explained, “to combine admiration of the novel phraseology with the pleasure of recognizing the thought as an old friend.”

    “You put things so very clearly, my dear Smire, that I could listen to you forever and ever. Nevertheless, let us eat first; and you can talk about literature afterward.”

    “And so, madame, you prefer oysters to eloquence! you would advance soup before the sublime! Well, and I do not say you are altogether wrong. Yet you voice a code of pragmatic philosophy, Elissa, which I respect without actually endorsing.”

    “That is so very, very like you!” the Queen marvelled. “I consider you to be unparalleled, dear Smire.”

    “I did not mean to convey exactly that fact, Elissa. At the same time, since you press me, I admit that my modesty is a large deal too great for me to be disputing a verdict which has been pronounced by yet other judges whose intelligence I cannot but revere humbly.”

    “And I do hope,” the Queen said, “you understand about Iarbus. It is not as if I cared one snap of my fingers about him any longer. He was simply—now that I think of it—yes, he was simply a girlish fancy.”

    “I was but attempting to confess it is my misfortune,” Smire told her, “to be lacking in hidebound convictions of any kind, even as concerns my own talents. I toy now and then with my possible lack of supreme genius. In brief, I keep an open mind, like an inn, where all notions are received with a hospitality which is not bigoted.”

    “A trait so extraordinary is of incredible interest,” declared Queen Elissa, with the trained, quick smile of a widow, “and you must tell me all about it, at full length, after dinner. You are wholly wonderful, you atrocious, strange, clever, handsome creature.”

    “And,” Smire continued, “and—as I was attempting to confess humbly, Elissa, when you interrupted me—that is why in my time I have been called the Peripatetic Episcopalian. By the Peripatetic Episcopalian, as I should perhaps add, all extremes are found inurbane. So in faith he is thrifty; for to him any sort of quite positive conviction, about anything whatever, appears to be a luxury rather than a necessity.”

    “But, as I was attempting to suggest humbly, dear Smire,—when you interrupted me over and yet over again,—you can talk about yourself at full length after we have had dinner. I simply do not dare keep it waiting one moment longer. For you know what servants are.”

    “You have voiced the lament of all civilizations, Elissa. I quail. I sympathize. I likewise obey.”

    Thus speaking, Smire flung aside his cigarette.

    They passed then into the palace, where Iarbus, the dark King of Getulia, awaited their coming with impatience. In his jealous heart the betrothed husband of Elissa had already resolved to kill Smire in a fashion as unpleasant and as lingering as could be devised by the utmost ingenuity of evil, with the aid of the King’s heavenly father.

    Upon the altar in the banquet hall, Queen sprinkled salt, flowers and incense, with bits of parched bread and nine grains of corn, in honor of the Household Gods. Smire was to remember that pious simple offering, a great while afterward, among surroundings oddly incongruous. Meanwhile four slaves led the distinguished visitor to his appointed dining-couch, of carved ivory and embossed gold; whereafter they placed about the heroic form of Smire eight finely embroidered purple cushions. Upon his dark head they put a wreath of violets; they brought to him a gold-fringed napkin.