The Nightmare Had Triplets (63 page)

    “Let us rest here, Arachne, for an instant, under this hawthorn-bush. For here would I tell you my meaning. Here would I display great and lively proofs of my deep desire to serve you who are the dear beautiful wife of Smirt.”

    “But the place is lonely,” she returned, with sedate propriety, “and I do not know what liberties you might be attempting.”

    He said: “It is not permitted me to call any gentlewoman a liar, Arachne. Yet I think that you do know quite well.”

    “You insult my helplessness, you rude impudent lewd vagabond, now that I am sitting down, so far from any protection, in this soft pile of dead leaves; and it is shameful for you to mistreat a count’s wife in this way, now I have rolled up my fine cloak of ermine like a pillow.”

    He replied, with a moodiness which, at this special instant, the Countess thought strange:

    “It was Smirt who mistreated you, Arachne, by giving you his heart’s love and his fond faith. But I treat you more fairly, giving you comprehension.”

    Well, and at that, she laughed softly, saying,—

    “In fact, O most shameless and hugely gifted of men, my dear husband does not understand me.”

    Smire said then: “Hah, madame, but I understand you quite thoroughly. I understand both of us. I am a time-dusted rogue, a shopworn braggart, naked of faithfulness toward anybody. And you, Arachne, are a sly strumpet, a trull, a baggage, a cheating drab, a fair she-goat in rut, for whose love’s sake Smirt lost heaven. So you perceive that we couple nicely. We were well meant for each other’s contentment, you punk, you swindling fine jade, you slim itching harlot!”

    She replied, fondly, “You are not very polite.”

    So was it that the old story started all over again in the spring woods, under a hawthorn-bush, upon a soft pile of dead leaves.

    “And what is your calling, O my wonderful lover?” Arachne asked, by-and-by.

    “I am called Smire; and by profession, madame—or so at least says the lower right hand corner of all my visiting cards—I am a poet.”

    “Then, O incredible and so hugely gifted Smire, you must come with me to high Brunbelois, to make for me songs by daylight, and yet other diversions afterward, and in general to console my sad life at the court of my dear husband.”

    “In fact, madame, I imagine that, as you mentioned a while since, your husband does not understand you.”

    “Ah, but not in the least!” says she. “For poor Smirt was once a supreme god; and the gods do not understand women.”

    “Nor can the devils, either, I believe,” replied Smire. “Hah, very certainly, no male creature of any description understands women; and that is a good thing for everybody concerned.”

    Then he added, “Yes; I have heard that this Smirt was a god; and I have heard too of his fine doings in Amit.”

    “Oh, that!” she says, shrugging. “Now but really you have no least vague conception, O well-beloved Smire, what a quite dreadful time I had in making my dear husband give up his sublime notions and start a well-paying shop. However, it was just then that the styles changed in mythology, by the commands of Moera; and Smirt in this way went out of capital letters to become Count Smirt of Poictesme.”

    “I see.” replied Smire. “Yet the way I heard the story, was that, after his betrayal by some woman or another, this great Smirt became, under a name which at present escapes my recollection, a mere wanderer travelling everywhither in search of a kingdom which was not called Poictesme, but something quite different.”

    “That is nonsense, you may be sure,” says Arachne. “For here is the castle of Brunbelois to prove it; and inside the castle you may find poor dear Smirt himself living at his ease.”

    “Well, but let us see about that,” said Smire. “The entire affair is puzzling. But matters do fall out a bit unaccountably, now and then, in a dream.”

    Thus speaking, he followed Arachne toward the castle of Brunbelois.

    Well, and they say in Branlon that at the great pleasure house of Brunbelois (which had been remarkably changed from its primal condition, as this fortress was first erected by King Helmas the Deep-Minded) the Pope was just leaving, accompanied by his two bastards, the Duke of Gandia and the Cardinal-Bishop of Valencia. This necessitated some slight delay; and so, while the Holy Father made his adieux to the ever-smiling Count of Poictesme, Smire waited among yet other by-standers.

    In this way did he regard at leisure that Smirt who had once been a god, and then a shop-keeper; and who was now a well-to-do nobleman entertaining Heaven’s terrene representative, in the form of Rodrigo Borgia, Bishop of Rome, Servant to the Servants of God, Ruler of the World, Father of Princes and of Kings, and the Earthly Vicar of Jesus Christ Our Saviour. Well, and except for Smire’s charity there would not ever have been any Popes; his Holiness would have remained a mere nobody. Yet far more strange a thing was it for Smire to be looking directly upon the Smirt who had once been Smire; and to observe the brightly colored ease, the superbness, and the shining elegance of Smirt’s manner of living nowadays, ever since Smirt had gone out of his capital letters to become a retired capitalist.

    For this Smirt nowadays (so was Smire informed, by a huge-nosed Dominican friar) lived at all moments a life which was woven harmoniously, as it were, of color and of music and of fair forms, of gems, pictures and velvets; a life which was high-hearted and bland and golden; and which yet at bottom, the friar said, was tinged wickedly by its disregard of all excellences which were not sensuous. The court over which Smirt ruled with grace and sweetness, and with tenderness even, was not ever gross; yet its bright serenity was in some sort made diabolical (said Fra Girolamo, at any rate) through its indifference to all moral values, values which Smirt’s manner of living neither aspersed nor commended.

    In brief, neither virtue nor vice was now recognized in Poictesme. One lived pleasurably, doing that which for the instant seemed most pleasure-giving and most satisfying to delicate and courtly curiosities,—now deriving this keen, sweet thrill of the senses from a fine madrigal, now from delight in a beautifully curved woman’s body or from the more slender body of a boy; and next, it might be, from admiring the cool loveliness of a saint’s picture or from the finesse of an adroitly contrived assassination or from devout worship before a wonderfully carved crucifix. Each exercise was a form of art, a loving essay in appreciative criticism, conducted with gracious leisure, with reflective interest. Such was the current mode in Poictesme; and this mode, said Fra Girolamo, was most damnable.

    Smire did not wholly agree with the black-robed monk. But Smire lacked time, at this instant, to define his own urbane balance between aesthetics and morality, on account of the welcomes which were being given to Smire, after the three Borgias had ridden away, so resplendently, among the fanfares of gold-wrought, golden-voiced trumpets.

    For now the brightly-clad lords and the ladies also, the philologians, the humanists and the silversmiths, the poets, painters and philosophers, the suave priests, the staid merchants and the slim gay page boys—and, in short, all the hundreds of persons who attended the well-to-do Count of Poictesme—each greeted Smire, saying:

    “Hail, Smire! Over
and yet over again have we heard of you in fine myths, as the world-wandering poet without any home or equal; and you are most heartily welcome to the court of Poictesme.”

    Then of a sudden they all vanished, like a fading of colored mists; and all-powerful Smirt, the high Count of Poictesme, was talking with Smire, the illustrious wanderer, in private. And Smire, for the once, had become almost taciturn; for this seemed, they declare in Branlon, the most discomposing adventure which had ever befallen Smire in the lands beyond common-sense.

    “
It is because of the inevitable duality of Smirt and Smire (remarks Laurens) that breaks the slow-gathering storm, through laws of causation which work pitilessly under the apparently chaotic weaving of the medieval pattern; and which, after this fatal tasting of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, leave no instinct of poetic justice unsatisfied. Ellis agrees; but adds acutely that, although the sacred
Vedas
describe the cosmogonic tree under different names, yet as
Acvattha,
or
Pippala,
it was visited by two beings, prefiguring Day and Night, of whom the last-named alone partook of the tree’s fruit.
”

    The affair began quietly enough. They were now alone together, in a room made fair with cool marbles and shining silver, with enamels and finely bound manuscripts and mosaics, and with florid, bright huge majolica vases which contrasted quite handsomely with the dimmed elegance of so much Delia Robbia earthenware. The wide walls of this large and airy, well-shaded room were painted with impish Cupids and with ambiguously smiling, epicene saints; with a Triumph of Bacchus; and with a Magdalen peculiarly luscious in her undraped repentance over an amused-looking skull.

    Here was it, then, that Smirt regarded Smire considerately, with the kindliness of a great nobleman who perceives his inferior may be made useful.

    “Ah, but let us not stand upon ceremonies,” says Smirt, graciously. “You may sit down, messire.”

    “Hah!” replied Smire.

    Yet Smire availed himself of his granted privilege, still watching Smirt very warily. Smire’s stool was of citron-wood; his apparel was time-worn. But Smirt sat beneath a gold-fringed canopy, clothed in crimson and gold garments, with a broad collar of graven chalcedonies about his neck. And behind Smirt were black hangings upon which had been embroidered ten stallions worked in pale silver thread.

    Smirt continued: “You are not native to this part of the lands beyond common-sense, nor are the ways of Poictesme the ways of Branlon. Nevertheless, Poictesme—so they tell me—is pastiche; Poictesme is old hat; Poictesme is sophomoric; and moreover—so they tell me—Poictesme is pseudo this, and pseudo that, and quite probably pseudo the other. There is no class struggle in Poictesme. We need, I infer, new blood. So you, Smire, are most heartily welcome.”

    Smire answers him, without any shifting of the vagabond’s dark and steadfast and strangely shining eyes,—

    “Alas, Count, but only for a little while is it permitted me to remain in Poictesme.”

    “Yet why need you be denying my service, Smire? for I pay handsomely.”

    “None questions your munificence, sir,” said Smire; and he went on, with that not-ever-failing civility which had made him a pre-eminent figure in royal courts, in dungeons, and in mythology, saying:

    “Your open-handedness is a proverb, Count Smirt, and a fable well known to all the lands beyond common-sense. But I am a poet, a lean shiftless poet, whose heart’s home stays in another country; and it is needful for every great poet to obey the dictates of his own heart.”

    Smirt said: “I had not hitherto heard of this rule of rhetoric. Nor does it explain the heart-breaking music which great poets have made in their books.”

    “It explains, rather, the heart-breaking mess which they have made in their biographies,” Smire submitted.

    “Moreover,” said the Count, drily, “it reminds me that the Countess Arachne would not like you to be leaving us.”

    That was uncommonly awkward. Yet Smire, with a polite sigh, and with unruffled features, replied affably:

    “I would not for worlds—not for constellations, not for the entire Milky Way—be denying the wishes of any lady, if the decision rested solely with me. It is but that I serve nine ladies nowadays. I refer to the Muses, not here to mention the leader of their choir, the God of the Silver Bow. In brief, sir, I am indissuadably a poet. So I must follow my dream. It is my heritage; and I dare not betray it.”

    “Nevertheless, you have betrayed others, Smire.”

    Smire looked at Smirt, levelly, with dark steadfast narrowed eyes. Smire said,—

    “Yes; for I have betrayed you.”

    Well, and at that the Count flashed his bright pensive smile. He said,—

    “Over and yet over again you have betrayed me,—just as I, Smire, have betrayed you, so my thinking tells me, over and yet over again.”

    The stillness which followed, after he had spoken, was rather uncomfortable. Nor did it seem right to Smire that when he looked at the well-to-do Count of Poictesme he could see only, beneath a light coronet with ten rubies in it, his own face looking back at him.

    Truly, it was stouter than Smire’s face; there was in it a sort of fat contentment. Yet it was a wholly noble face, a stilled face without any emotion whatever in it except some mild curiosity. So does one look, Smire reflected, at an insect about the genus of which one is not certain. But, no, he decided; no, for one does not regard an insect with so much sadness as you perceived now in the face of Smirt.

    “Who are you?” Smire asked, by-and-by, a bit hoarsely, “who have stolen my old high name and still wear it?”

    “I am Smirt,” said the Count, without ever shifting that intent, and strange, and half-amused, and half-sorrowful gazing toward Smire. “Once I was Smirt in capital letters,—and at that time I was a master of all gods. But for a woman’s sake I gave up heaven. I became a shop-keeper, peddling small magics very profitably. So did I rise, through my strict attention to business, from being a mere grandiose god strutting windily about heaven, to be a well-to-do nobleman ruling over a snug province, with money in the bank.”

    Smire tells him: “Yet I too was once a master of gods. And at that time I was called Smirt.”