The Nightmare Had Triplets by Branch Cabell Page B

SMIRT’S GRAVE
     
        It surprised Smirt, thus to be standing at his own grave. Yet the range of his first disquiet was soon checked by the discovery that he and his wife had self-evidently been buried in this place a great while ago. It followed that for him to be upset, at this late date, by the deaths of these people would be out of all reason. Why, but he and Jane, to judge by these very old-looking tombstones, and by the gray spider webs which were about each grave, must have lain here undisturbed for several hundred years. As a close student of human nature, Smirt knew that no human grief can outwear a century. He inferred, as a sound logician, that the emotion of which he was now conscious could not be grief.
        “And besides,” he reflected, “it is likely that Smirt has a great many graves. The blonde princess knew me in what I can but assume to be an earlier incarnation. I have no doubt lived in many such incarnations. In fact, I can now perceive, dimly, that ever since time began—or at all events, ever since urbanity first came into being—the Peripatetic Episcopalian has followed, upon his discreet path midway between piety and atheism, after that beauty which does not exist; he has hungered in all eras for the impossible, irrespective of any moral ambition; and continually his own self-sufficiency has slain him. In every land lies the grave of Smirt, who could not ever be content with the half-handed and humorless doings of All-Highest & Company, Ergo, I cannot display any special emotion over any special one of my multitudinous graves without exhibiting undue favoritism.”
        Smirt looked up toward heaven, pensively. He directed thither an urbane smile; and Smirt said:
        “The dull-mindedness of Your futile and charming world, All-Highest, has yet again disposed of me, unavailingly. For I still survive, You may note. And from my most recent graveside I remark that when You gave man reason, he did but cease to believe in You: there was no great hurt done, either way. But You granted him imagination also. You permitted him to create in his dreams another world than Your world. He became then Your critic, for it was apparent to him that his inventions went beyond Your inventions.”
        Smirt waved a protesting hand to forestall any divine reply. “In all humbleness, sir, I admit that my notions may be wrong: but I cannot believe they are wrong. A thunderbolt would not, I can assure You, convince me, and any such display of brute force would but lay You open to the charge of peevishness. Besides that, I really do think quite favorably of Your inventions, so far as they go. I have delighted in Your world: for its beauty, its curiousness, and its unintentional humor, I give all thanks. But my heart I have given to the world which I create in my dreams.”
        He looked down, toward the grave of his wife. “And to you also, my dearest, my heart was given.”
        After that, Smirt said: “You should be a proud woman, Jane, that after I do not know how many years your husband is lamenting you. You have been dead now for a great while. It was not this afternoon that you went out to play contract bridge with the Ralston girls. It was in a faraway time you left me, for your tombstone is very old. I regret that faraway time.”
        Smirt said: “And I have but one complainment to make against you, or it may be four complainments. You could not let a fire alone: you must forever be poking at it, and you needed to be pulling it about, until there was no fire, but only the remnants of a fire. And when my shirts and my underclothes came back from the laundry you would not put them at the bottom of the pile, so that I could wear my shirts and my underclothes in a regular rotation. And besides that, you would not put your own shoes down in a sensible way, either, after you took them off: you put always the left shoe on the right side, and the right shoe on the left, so