The Nightmare Had Triplets (46 page)

    —Whereupon the young lady began a funeral dirge; and Little Smirt pulled an uncommonly long face.

    “These mortuary sentiments,” he remarked, “while judicious and improving to the mind, and for all that they are expressed with a suitable amount of gloom, cannot reasonably accord with the quite other sentiments of any fortunate male person to whom it has been granted to gaze upon the unparalleled charms Bel-Imperia.”

    She replied, modestly, “The elephant of your approval, Little Smirt, has seated itself, with misguided condescension, upon the tadpole of my merit.”

    “I would not deny,” Little Smirt continued, “that from virtually prehistoric times the elegy has been familiar and generally popular form of art. Indeed two very fine examples of the elegy may be encountered as early as in the nineteenth and the twenty-four books of the
Iliad.
I allude, of course, to the lament of Briseis for Patroclus and of Andromache for Hector. But evening draws on, with Mama apt to return at any moment; and so, without going into the possibly non-Homeric origin of this poem, I remark merely that an elegy is not exhilarating.”

    Bel-Imperia smiled sadly; and she began a love song. Little Smirt applauded that liberally.

    “For it is thus that I love you, Bel-Imperia,” said Little Smirt, “with the large difference that your song does not express one tenth—or, indeed, any fraction, or jot, or gleam, or even a light shadow—of my unrestrained adoration, which will outlive all time.”

    “Time passes at a variety of paces; but always he approaches a grave-yard,” declared the singing-girl. “On this day, which is set for my funeral, it appears unbecoming for the inconsiderable brain of Bel-Imperia to extend any hospitality to thoughts of love.”

    “Bluntness,” replied Little Smirt, “was ever the herald of sincere passion. You speak nonsense, Bel-Imperia. This is not the day of your funeral but of your wedding: for here at hand are all matters demanded by the local custom of Chang-Chu for our immediate marriage.”

    “Well,” said the singing-girl, “but an accomplished tall scholar like you, Little Smirt, must go his own willful way though the dead bar it.”

    Thereafter they exchanged the two apples of peace, they tasted the sons-and-grandsons cakes, they shared the nuptial cup of rice wine, they ate together the bread of long life: and Little Smirt (who had inherited from his divine father a fine talent for instructing his hearers) spoke captivatingly, for about five minutes, as to the wedding customs of various lands. When these ceremonies had been performed, Bel-Imperia arose; and she began to sing a tender and gracious melody, which was called, so the girl said, “The Dark Road to Branlon.”

    “My wife,” said Little Smirt, “that is a strange sweet song, and a new song, too, I am thinking, for the words of it are not known to me.”

    She replied: “My husband, many words are the frailty of women. So let us now dismiss my ignoble song, as of no least practical importance to anybody, because the fact has been justly noted by philosophers that music cannot even cure a toothache.”

    “Well, I would not pretend,” Little Smirt said, “to have made any really thorough study of music, inasmuch as my mastery of several instruments, including the dulcimer, the trombone, the shawm, and the piccolo, remains as yet theoretic—”

    “I am sure, my husband,” she again interrupted him, respectfully, “that, since you are a master of all noteworthy arts, the contemptible instruments which you name cannot rationally have deserved your valuable attention. And I never did like the piccolo either.”

    “My wife,” he exhorted her, “let us not indulge in unscholarly overstatement! Three or four things are unknown to me with absolute certainty, and perhaps a full dozen.”

    “Now you are being over-modest, my husband; and I cannot believe the garnered fruit of your studies to be thus speckled.”

    “In fact, now that we discuss music, it does occur to me,” Little Smirt admitted, “that horns and trumpets were invented by the Etrurians. I consider it remarkable that the first organ is said to have been made by a barber. I believe that the earliest flutes of which we have record were manufactured, variously, from the wood of the lotus-tree and the leg-bone of a kid. To the other side, I do not just at present recall the origin of the lyre, of the triangle, of the harp, or even of the barbitos, which is mentioned favorably by both Anacreon and Sappho.”

    “My husband, I accept with due gratitude all these savory crumbs from the high table of your omniscience, where eloquence feasts uninterruptedly with learning.”

    “But,” Little Smirt continued, “as a practising poet, I do, quite naturally, know by heart all the world’s better-thought-of songs, from its earlier epics, bucolics and idyls, down to the current madrigals, sestinas and epithalamiums. Yet your fine song, my wife, I do not know at all. And I deduce it must be a brand-new song.”

    “My husband,” replied Bel-Imperia, “it is an old song, as ancient as human grief, and as far out of fashion nowadays as are the naïve magics of April or the neat turn of an epigram. For that reason I will write out the words of this song, here upon the august walls of your revered and infernally accomplished mother; so that at leisure your acute mind may trifle with such debased futilities as the offensive Bel-Imperia has but lately rendered with the voice of a rain-crow.”

    Then, using a red crayon, beautiful Bel-Imperia wrote upon the wall the words which she had just sung. Little Smirt read them slowly and perplexedly, for these words seemed now without any meaning. He turned, to say as much, as well as to protest against the unjust simile of a rain-crow; and he perceived that his wife had vanished.

    “That is a fine trick to be playing upon an impatient bridegroom,” said Little Smirt, merrily, as he looked first behind all the screens and then under the divans.

    “For what reason, O my son and most undignified of all fools,” demanded Madam Tana, who entered at this moment—attended by her servant Klinck, who came hopping ponderously behind her, carrying a market basket,—“for what reason, O heavenly afflicted creature, are you lying down upon my rugs peeping under my divans? and what do you mean by this silly talk about the impatience of a bridegroom?”

    “All men, Mama,” Little Smirt replied to her, dusting his knees, “are bidden to seek heaven: but, as goes your second question, I shall spare your blushes by not answering it.”

    “You need not,” declared Madam Tana; “inasmuch as my senses have well served me, both in my highhearted youth and in my austere old age. Yet when, O my son and most unhappily misguided of idiots, did you become a bridegroom?”

    “It was but a moment since, Mama, or it might have been five minutes ago, that I married Bel-Imperia, the fair singing-girl.”

    The old wise-woman looked at him very gravely. Her shrivelled underlip quivered; yet when she spoke, it was with her usual harshness.

    “Bel-Imperia died the day before yesterday,” said Madam Tana. “Her burial tablets have been erected; her not in the least remarkable body has been put under ground; and all probable needs of this hussy beyond the tomb have been duly provided for and burned, in the form of a paper coach, six paper chairs, a box of cosmetics and of rubber goods, a paper bed large enough to accommodate two persons, and a neat fortune in counterfeit paper money. I know this, because I have but newly returned from her funeral. So do you explain to me, O my son, just what has happened.”

    Little Smirt, in a state of some natural confusion, told of how Bel-Imperia had visited him; and Madam Tana’s scarlet-colored servant—for red was the hue of Klinck everywhere—croaked out an assent as to this having been no dream but a true happening.

    “That the girl was not mortal seemed plain to anybody,” said Klinck, “inasmuch as at her finger-tips she had bright shining claws, and her body cast no shadow. I noted these facts, but considered them none of my business. And besides, Madam Tana has had many such improbable visitors since she deserted sublime Smirt to follow after the white rabbit that lives in the moon. I have learned to serve all such visitors without comment.”

    “Then do you continue to do so,” said Madam Tana, striking him: but to Little Smirt she said, gently,—

    “O my unfortunate son, do you likewise continue.”

    Little Smirt obeyed her, giving a complete account of his wedding; and the old woman listened, nodding her wise gray head.

    “You appear honorably to have married a dead person,” she said, at last. “This is serious, O my son; and from all points of view you would have done far better to have indulged illegally that disgraceful appetite for immodest young females which I have so constantly caught you attempting to satisfy.”

    “Oh, but, Mama,” Little Smirt protested, “a sound knowledge of anatomy is needful to all scholars.”

    “—For whether this dead trollop,” Madam Tana went on, “will be re-born as a bird or an animal or a human being, and whether male or female, depends upon the meritorious actions of her last life. I imagine that most singing-girls evolve into some lower order of vermin. But in any case, the spirit of Bel-Imperia will keep its power over your spirit.”

    “I desire that, Mama, for my hand and my heart likewise have been given to Bel-Imperia, and I cannot live without her.”

    “I spoke in very much this way, my son, in the days of my youthfulness, when a white rabbit ended the love between me and that good-for-nothing father of yours. But time cured me.”

    After that, Madam Tana stood for a while with her gray head tilted backward, peering as if in perplexed disapproval at the strange red writing upon her wall, of which Little Smirt could make nothing; and her withered lips moved silently. She was puzzling out, you perceived, some meaning, after all; and she sighed over it.

    Then the wise-woman burned incense in a brass tray until the tray was filled with ashes. She smoothed flat these ashes. She held up the still-smoking brass tray above her head, with both hands, and she cried out the Thief Charm, saying:

    “Aragoni Parandamo Eptalicon Lamboured! Be it shown what power has stolen the soul of my son!”

    Afterward Madam Tana lowered the tray; and Little Smirt saw that upon the ashes was now an imprint.

    “It is like the hoof of a goat.” said Little Smirt.

    “Yes,” said Madam Tana, “for this is Urc Tabaron’s signature. This involves the Lord of the Forest. So it seems you have married yourself into the entourage of a sort of god, or, at any rate, of a local deity. You might have done worse, when one considers matters calmly—and allows for your hard-headed imbecility,—inasmuch as that worthless father of yours was a very great god, and you cannot well help taking after him. In any event, everything is plain now; and you must seek for your Bel-Imperia in Branlon.”

    “By what road, Mama, shall I come to Branlon?”

    “I will find you a guide,” said the old woman.

    Madam Tana returned by-and-by, bearing in her right hand her left hand, which, as Little Smirt saw with astonishment, had been chopped off her wrist. Now it was a peculiarity of the hands of Madam Tana that she had been born without any little finger upon either hand.

    She spoke sullenly to Little Smirt, saying: “This hand will be your guide. Do you lay it in your breast. Then when my hand presses upon your right side, do you turn to the left; but when the cold fingers of my hand clutch at your shallow and worthless heart, do you turn to the right; and so will you come to Branlon across this world and across half the lands beyond common-sense.”

    Little Smirt said, “But why have you thus mutilated yourself, Mama, in order to serve my desire?”

    She replied, with venom: “In order, O tall blockhead and most addlepated of all fine-looking imbeciles, that your desire might be served. There was not any other way.”

    Well, and at that, Little Smirt embraced her, weeping copiously.

    “There is no love,” he remarked, “in any way comparable in its unreason to the love which a mother cherishes for her son.”

    She pushed him away from her, saying, “Nonsense, you great clodhopper!”

    “Yet every mother,” Little Smirt continued, “first encounters her son in childbed as the direct provoker of sufferings which are reputed to be considerable; she needs perform for the brat throughout his childhood all those uncaptivating if sanitary tasks which are necessitated by the unreticence of the young; and her reward is that, should she by-and-by make of him a mammal at all suited to polite circles, it is in the home of some other woman that the jackanapes will be displaying the sparse virtues so painfully and so laboriously taught him by his dear mother. He is for her, in short, a source of anguish, of hard work, of dirt, of anxiety, and of ingratitude; and she requites him with love. It is a phenomenon I do not at all understand.”

    “There are many things which you do not understand, you gross long-legged dunce,” declared Madam Tana, “and among these I would include your own incessant talking.”

    “Yes, Mama,” replied Little Smirt, meekly, “even though, with care, I do now and then catch the general drift of it. Anyhow, I was going on to remark that, just as of all sons I am perhaps the most unworthy, so among mothers are you beyond doubt the best.”

    “Well—” she said, speaking almost gently.

    “Nor do I exclude,” Little Smirt continued, “the most pre-eminent of the world’s mothers. Indeed, when I consider Niobe, and Nature, and Eve, and Rachel, and Necessity, and Cornelia (who was the mother of the Gracchi, Mama), and the old woman who lived in a shoe, and that very famous she-wolf who suckled Romulus and Remus—why, then, Mama, I feel wholly certain that by rights you belong somewhere in this noble category.”