The Nightmare Had Triplets (65 page)

    “And what,” Smire asks Him, “shall I find in these corridors?”

    The benign old gentleman shook His horned head, saying, in the instant that He accepted the offering of a cigarette:

    “I cannot tell you, Smire. They are beyond Me.”

    “Yes,” said Smire, politely passing the matches before he had lighted his own cigarette; “but I had understood, sir, that You, as the All-Highest, were omniscient.”

    “And so I am, Smire, in a manner of speaking. Thanks, very much.”

    “Why, then, You must know the truth about everything, including the House of Moera.”

    “One may know a great deal about trouble,” replied the All-Highest, exhaling tranquilly, “and still prefer to keep out of it. Now for that same reason do I remain forever outside the House of Moera as its official doorkeeper. She does not permit smoking in there, by the bye. And you will have to get past the True Trinity as you best can.”

    “But who, All-Highest, or perhaps which, or it may be what, are the True Trinity?”

    “You will so soon be finding out for yourself, Smire, that it hardly seems worth while for Me to be explaining about them.”

    “Hah!” said Smire, “but I do not altogether like this. This is puzzling.”

    “So many things are,” returned the All-Highest. “I have often noticed it.”

    “Equally, sir, if You will permit me to say so, is it puzzling that You, the All-Highest, should be a personal friend of that creature called Smirt.”

    The All-Highest replied, deprecatingly: “Ah, but then he was always most democratic in his ways. Your distinguished kinsman has a heart which is generous. He is affable to everybody.”

    “I see,” Smire admitted. “So he patronizes You graciously. And indeed, if I had permitted it, he would even have patronized me. This Smirt has no fear of
hubris,
that is certain; and one shudders to think of the great downfalling which such follies must be preparing for him. However, let us not think of that. It is too harrowing. Meanwhile, I wonder”—says Smire, with his not-ever-failing
savoir faire
—“I wonder in just what circumstances You and he could have encountered each other?”

    The All-Highest fell promptly into this innocent trap. He said, stroking His white beard:

    “I shall never forget it, Smire. I was sitting here, on this very cloud, reading a book full of all sorts of free-thinking such as had convinced Me that I could not possibly exist. It had left Me quite down-hearted. Then Smirt came; and in no time at all, after paying such compliments to My Own Book, a little thing called the Bible, which you may have run across somewhere, such compliments as I really would rather not repeat, for you know how it sounds, Smire,—why, Smirt put the entire matter in a proper light. He was devastating to all free-thinkers; whereas, to the other side, in talking about Me, he was quite affable. In short, his criticisms were both just and trenchant. His frankness was most gratifying. So I gave him a charmed pocket-piece and a planet. The planet did not amount to much, of course, with so many of them spinning about, but I believe the coin was rather unusual.”

    “Yes: I remember, All-Highest. It was a forty reis coin issued in 1820 by John the Sixth, by the grace of God King of Portugal, Brazil and Algarvez: and it conferred omnipotence, within limits. I yet have the coin, You perceive: for it still provides me with cigarettes and with matches. Yes, that was just how it happened when I too was Smirt, and when there was not any duplicity about me.”

    The old gentleman did not hide His surprise.

    “But, dear Me, Smire, do you mean that you are two-faced and are not to be relied on?”

    “It is worse than that, sir; for I appear to be twins.”

    “Yet is that any special misfortune, Smire?” asked the All-Highest, rumpling His white hair. “There appear to be quite a number of twins about. I have often noticed it. Now, if you take rabbits, for instance—”

    “I decline to take rabbits, All-Highest. I had almost as soon take cold or umbrage or leave of my senses. Nevertheless, now You raise the point, I suppose that here and there may be found persons to declare that my having become twins, far from being a calamity, ought rather to be regarded as a high-minded form of altruism. For You know what women are.”

    “Do I?” said the All-Highest, a little dubiously.

    “Beyond question, sir,” replied Smire, adroitly: “for how otherwise could You have written any book with such characters in it as Eve, and Rebecca, and Rahab, and Jael, and Bathsheba, and Jezebel, and so many other splendid examples of misogyny?”

    “Ah, yes, My Book!” said the old gentleman, beaming. “Do you know, Smire, My Book is still selling quite nicely? And in fact I did hear—just between ourselves, you know—that it had been mentioned rather favorably for the Nobel prize.”

    “And indeed it is mere Scandinavian inconsistency,” Smire assured Him, “which has for so long stood between You and that well-merited honor. Your position in the world’s literature is established. Yet do they refuse to look on You as a living author, sir, in the same instant that they address prayers to You; and for one, I never heard of such nonsense.”

    “Neither did I,” said the All-Highest. “It is quite beyond Me; and in fact, I believe—But what do you believe, Smire?”

    Not off-hand, it appeared, could the Peripatetic Episcopalian answer this question. Instead, he said, judicially,—

    “Well, now, that all depends, sir.”

    “Yes, no doubt,” agreed the All-Highest, a trifle bewildered; “but just what does it depend on?”

    “It depends, of course, upon whether You mean in point of fact or in theory.”

    “Yet what is the exact difference?” said the All-Highest, more and more puzzled; “for now you are getting beyond Me.”

    “Oh, but, sir, but there is a very vast difference,” Smire answered Him. “Let us appraise, for instance, one of the characters in Your Book. Let us take, for example, my belief about Jared.”

    “He,” said the All-Highest, “was of the seventh generation of the sons of Adam. Dear Me, but how it all comes back! Yes, yes; I remember Jared perfectly.”

    “You do not,” said Smire, reprovingly. “Jared was of the sixth generation. Adam begat Seth, and Seth begat Enos; and Enos, Cainan; and Cainan, Mahalaleel; and Mahalaleel, in the first flush of patriarchal youth, at a mere sixty-five, begat Jared. You really ought to be more familiar with the Holy Scriptures, sir, in Your position.”

    “I have so little time for reading, Smire,” says the All-Highest, apologetically, “what with first one solar system and then another getting into continual disrepair nowadays. The suns are not what they used to be.”

    “That, sir, does not alter the principle of the thing. However! This Jared lived an hundred sixty and two years, and he begat Enoch; and Jared lived, after he begat Enoch, eight hundred years, and begat sons and daughters; and all the days of Jared were nine hundred sixty and two years; and he died. Now I believe that to be the complete truth about Jared, in point of fact.”

    The All-Highest nodded confirmingly.

    “Oh, but it was, Smire, I can assure you. I was quite careful about My figures.”

    “Yes, but in theory, All-Highest, I believe that at bottom the true living of Jared had not anything in particular to do with Your statistics. I believe that, being human, Jared did not live in the external truth, among his flocks, his corn, his oil and his camel’s hair tents, nor among those anonymous, and unnumbered, and perhaps a whit flippantly disposed-of, sons and daughters, but in the phantasmagoric chamber of his brain, without ever adventuring out of his own skull, wherein nonsense alone stayed his eternal companion. I believe You did not appreciate Jared when You dismissed his terrene living in that summary, sweeping and succinct fashion. No; for You omitted far too much.”

    “Now, but really this sort of—let us say, this rather literary talk—is beyond Me, Smire. What did I omit, Smire?”

    Smire replied, with a tinge of sternness almost shocking in one of his suave demeanor:

    “You omitted his dreams, All-Highest, and the absurd fancies which gave him heart to go on living for a whole nine hundred and sixty-two years in such a world as You have cobbled up, a world which does not in the least bit resemble Branlon. You omitted those dreams in which Jared refashioned Your handiwork into some sort of competence. You omitted the dreams in which his conduct was of a nature over which the urbane, I confess it, would prefer to pass lightly.”

    “Men,” said the All-Highest, fidgeting now, and throwing by the stump of His cigarette rather peevishly, “are bad enough in all conscience during their waking hours—”

    “Yes,” Smire assented; “but in his dreams, sir, this Jared was far worse. In his dreams he arraigned You unanswerably. He exposed You as the crude bungler that You are. And in his dreams he builded a world far more beautiful and a vast deal more just than You have been able to contrive.”

    “But how do you know so much about Jared?” asked the All-Highest, with a hint of sullenness.

    “I do not know, sir. I am telling You simply what I believe about Jared in theory, because I know that Jared also was human. I am telling You what I believe in theory, and with every sort of regret, sir, about every human being that has ever lived under Your mismanagement,—among the patchwork, the obscenities, the raw odds and ends, of Your uninspired makings,—and, in brief, among such botcheries as compare quite unfavorably with the fair forest of Branlon.”

    “Your Branlon, Smire,” returned the All-Highest—Who was now frowning outright, under white shaggy eyebrows—“is a mere dream.”

    “That is it, precisely, sir. And the dream is better than the reality. It is just that which I lament. I lament that You, who created the reality, should not have had a more rich vein of inventiveness. I lament that You are not a true
poietes.
Hah, but I do not at all blame You, sir, for this misfortune. I commiserate, rather. And if I speak thus frankly, in a strain not wholly adulatory, or even it may be in the irritating accents of one who speaks for Your own good, it is but, I can assure You, All-Highest”—thus Smire interpolated, kindly—“it is but because, for the true
poietes,
there can be no trifling with veracity. He must avoid veracity as though it were Paris green or an informative weekly periodical or a believer in prohibition. And in brief,”—Smire added, with decision—“Your universe is not Branlon. That alone is my criticism.”

    “Now I have heard your criticism,” said the All-Highest, in a voice which no longer pretended to be tranquil, “do you stop talking! Do you stop it at once! for this sort of talking is a good way beyond My celestial endurance.”

    “Oh, but I repeat, sir,” Smire reminded the old gentleman, consolingly, “that it is not You Whom I am blaming for the shabby and second-rate state of Your universe. No, All-Highest; for beyond doubt, as a demiurge, You and every one of the angels that served under You have done Your best. Angels could do no more. But to me—to me only among the indeserving, fate-favored
poetai,
to whom mere dunder-headed blind fortune has allotted a richer and a finer creative genius than, through no fault of Yours, adorns Heaven,—to me alone, sir, was the chance afforded to grant mankind a more splendid religion and a history more noble than You have been able to contrive for mankind. And I did not do it! I did not repair Your inefficiencies, All-Highest, not even the most striking of them. I did not change everything. So the true fault is mine; for the continued existence of Your feeble patchwork devices I am wholly to blame; and it follows, sir, that not by the breadth of one prematurely gray hair ought You to be holding Yourself answerable for the sloth of my altruism.”

    To this effect spoke the God of Branlon in a superb seizure of repentance. And the All-Highest answered him, with great earnestness:

    “Go away! Go away from Me, Smire! I cannot stand any longer the strain of this conversation. In just one more half-second your bland, babbling, pig-headed, imbecile self-conceit will have driven Me insane. What then would become of everything? So, as a particular personal favor to Me—as an act of piety, my dear fellow, and for the salvation of the universe at large,—do you please stop talking, here at all events! and go to the Devil!”

    “Hah, but, sir, what is the difference?” asked Smire, with raised eyebrows. “He is as bad as You. I mean, of course, from art’s standpoint. For truly, he bungles his iniquitous duties in a fashion wholly painful to the discerning. I, You conceive, I have been tempted by him, as, quite probably, You have not ever been tempted. So I know his methods better than You do. Well! and I was embarrassed, I blushed to the very tips of my toes, to hear anybody putting words together so maladroitly, and contriving deceits of such barbarous crudity. Now in Branlon, sir, there is no fiend, there is hardly a wood demon, whose wiles are not quite resistless.”

    Thus speaking, Smire left the abashed All-Highest.

    Now the public at large were before Smire. And the butcher wiped his hands on his white blood-spotted apron in the time he was crying out,—

    “You blaspheme handsomely.”

    “We adore blasphemy. It is sophisticated,” said the baker.

    Then the candlestick maker said, “We think that for too long a while the subtly poisoned honey of your sophistication has been denied to the hunger of our intelligence.”

    “It is not right,” said Tom, Dick and Harry, all speaking in unison, “for you to be wandering about in the lands beyond common-sense when our need of you is very great.”

    “But what, gentlemen—and you also, my dear ladies,” says Smire,—“just what is your need of me?”

    Lady Ampersand replied, “You must return to our bosoms.”