The King in Yellow
Then I strode angrily over to it. But the flower I lifted from the
table was fresh and fragile and filled the air with perfume.
Then suddenly I comprehended, and sprang through the hallway to the
marble room. The doors flew open, the sunlight streamed into my face,
and through it, in a heavenly glory, the Madonna smiled, as Geneviève
lifted her flushed face from her marble couch and opened her sleepy
eyes.
IN THE COURT OF THE DRAGON
“Oh, thou who burn’st in heart for those who burn
In Hell, whose fires thyself shall feed in turn;
How long be crying—‘Mercy on them.’ God!
Why, who art thou to teach and He to learn?”
In the Church of St. Barnabé vespers were over; the clergy left the
altar; the little choir-boys flocked across the chancel and settled
in the stalls. A Suisse in rich uniform marched down the south aisle,
sounding his staff at every fourth step on the stone pavement; behind
him came that eloquent preacher and good man, Monseigneur C——.
My chair was near the chancel rail, I now turned toward the west end of
the church. The other people between the altar and the pulpit turned
too. There was a little scraping and rustling while the congregation
seated itself again; the preacher mounted the pulpit stairs, and the
organ voluntary ceased.
I had always found the organ-playing at St. Barnabé highly interesting.
Learned and scientific it was, too much so for my small knowledge,
but expressing a vivid if cold intelligence. Moreover, it possessed
the French quality of taste: taste reigned supreme, self-controlled,
dignified and reticent.
To-day, however, from the first chord I had felt a change for the
worse, a sinister change. During vespers it had been chiefly the
chancel organ which supported the beautiful choir, but now and again,
quite wantonly as it seemed, from the west gallery where the great
organ stands, a heavy hand had struck across the church at the serene
peace of those clear voices. It was something more than harsh and
dissonant, and it betrayed no lack of skill. As it recurred again and
again, it set me thinking of what my architect’s books say about the
custom in early times to consecrate the choir as soon as it was built,
and that the nave, being finished sometimes half a century later, often
did not get any blessing at all: I wondered idly if that had been the
case at St. Barnabé, and whether something not usually supposed to be
at home in a Christian church might have entered undetected and taken
possession of the west gallery. I had read of such things happening,
too, but not in works on architecture.
Then I remembered that St. Barnabé was not much more than a hundred
years old, and smiled at the incongruous association of mediaeval
superstitions with that cheerful little piece of eighteenth-century
rococo.
But now vespers were over, and there should have followed a few quiet
chords, fit to accompany meditation, while we waited for the sermon.
Instead of that, the discord at the lower end of the church broke out
with the departure of the clergy, as if now nothing could control it.
I belong to those children of an older and simpler generation who do
not love to seek for psychological subtleties in art; and I have ever
refused to find in music anything more than melody and harmony, but I
felt that in the labyrinth of sounds now issuing from that instrument
there was something being hunted. Up and down the pedals chased him,
while the manuals blared approval. Poor devil! whoever he was, there
seemed small hope of escape!
My nervous annoyance changed to anger. Who was doing this? How dare
he play like that in the midst of divine service? I glanced at the
people near me: not one appeared to be in the least disturbed. The
placid brows of the kneeling nuns, still turned towards the altar, lost
none of their devout abstraction under the pale shadow of their white
head-dress. The fashionable lady beside me was looking expectantly at
Monseigneur C——. For all her face betrayed, the organ might have been
singing an Ave Maria.
But now, at last, the preacher had made the sign of the cross, and
commanded silence. I turned to him gladly. Thus far I had not found the
rest I had counted on when I entered St. Barnabé that afternoon.
I was worn out by three nights of physical suffering and mental
trouble: the last had been the worst, and it was an exhausted body,
and a mind benumbed and yet acutely sensitive, which I had brought to
my favourite church for healing. For I had been reading _The King in
Yellow_.
“The sun ariseth; they gather themselves together and lay them down
in their dens.” Monseigneur C—— delivered his text in a calm voice,
glancing quietly over the congregation. My eyes turned, I knew not
why, toward the lower end of the church. The organist was coming from
behind his pipes, and passing along the gallery on his way out, I saw
him disappear by a small door that leads to some stairs which descend
directly to the street. He was a slender man, and his face was as white
as his coat was black. “Good riddance!” I thought, “with your wicked
music! I hope your assistant will play the closing voluntary.”
With a feeling of relief—with a deep, calm feeling of relief, I turned
back to the mild face in the pulpit and settled myself to listen. Here,
at last, was the ease of mind I longed for.
“My children,” said the preacher, “one truth the human soul finds
hardest of all to learn: that it has nothing to fear. It can never be
made to see that nothing can really harm it.”
“Curious doctrine!” I thought, “for a Catholic priest. Let us see how
he will reconcile that with the Fathers.”
“Nothing can really harm the soul,” he went on, in, his coolest,
clearest tones, “because——”
But I never heard the rest; my eye left his face, I knew not for what
reason, and sought the lower end of the church. The same man was coming
out from behind the organ, and was passing along the gallery _the same
way_. But there had not been time for him to return, and if he had
returned, I must have seen him. I felt a faint chill, and my heart
sank; and yet, his going and coming were no affair of mine. I looked
at him: I could not look away from his black figure and his white
face. When he was exactly opposite to me, he turned and sent across
the church straight into my eyes, a look of hate, intense and deadly:
I have never seen any other like it; would to God I might never see it
again! Then he disappeared by the same door through which I had watched
him depart less than sixty seconds before.
I sat and tried to collect my thoughts. My first sensation was like
that of a very young child badly hurt, when it catches its breath
before crying out.
To suddenly find myself the object of such hatred was exquisitely
painful: and this man was an utter stranger. Why should he hate me
so?—me, whom he had never seen before? For the moment all other
sensation was merged in this one pang: even fear was subordinate to
grief, and for that moment I never doubted; but in the next I began to
reason, and a sense of the incongruous came to my aid.
As I have said, St. Barnabé is a modern church. It is small and well
lighted; one sees all over it almost at a glance. The organ gallery
gets a strong white light from a row of long windows in the clerestory,
which have not even coloured glass.
The pulpit being in the middle of the church, it followed that, when I
was turned toward it, whatever moved at the west end could not fail to
attract my eye. When the organist passed it was no wonder that I saw
him: I had simply miscalculated the interval between his first and his
second passing. He had come in that last time by the other side-door.
As for the look which had so upset me, there had been no such thing,
and I was a nervous fool.
I looked about. This was a likely place to harbour supernatural
horrors! That clear-cut, reasonable face of Monseigneur C——, his
collected manner and easy, graceful gestures, were they not just a
little discouraging to the notion of a gruesome mystery? I glanced
above his head, and almost laughed. That flyaway lady supporting
one corner of the pulpit canopy, which looked like a fringed damask
table-cloth in a high wind, at the first attempt of a basilisk to pose
up there in the organ loft, she would point her gold trumpet at him,
and puff him out of existence! I laughed to myself over this conceit,
which, at the time, I thought very amusing, and sat and chaffed myself
and everything else, from the old harpy outside the railing, who had
made me pay ten centimes for my chair, before she would let me in
(she was more like a basilisk, I told myself, than was my organist
with the anaemic complexion): from that grim old dame, to, yes, alas!
Monseigneur C—— himself. For all devoutness had fled. I had never yet
done such a thing in my life, but now I felt a desire to mock.
As for the sermon, I could not hear a word of it for the jingle in my
ears of
“The skirts of St. Paul has reached.
Having preached us those six Lent lectures,
More unctuous than ever he preached,”
keeping time to the most fantastic and irreverent thoughts.
It was no use to sit there any longer: I must get out of doors and
shake myself free from this hateful mood. I knew the rudeness I was
committing, but still I rose and left the church.
A spring sun was shining on the Rue St. Honoré, as I ran down the
church steps. On one corner stood a barrow full of yellow jonquils,
pale violets from the Riviera, dark Russian violets, and white Roman
hyacinths in a golden cloud of mimosa. The street was full of Sunday
pleasure-seekers. I swung my cane and laughed with the rest. Some one
overtook and passed me. He never turned, but there was the same deadly
malignity in his white profile that there had been in his eyes. I
watched him as long as I could see him. His lithe back expressed the
same menace; every step that carried him away from me seemed to bear
him on some errand connected with my destruction.
I was creeping along, my feet almost refusing to move. There began to
dawn in me a sense of responsibility for something long forgotten. It
began to seem as if I deserved that which he threatened: it reached a
long way back—a long, long way back. It had lain dormant all these
years: it was there, though, and presently it would rise and confront
me. But I would try to escape; and I stumbled as best I could into the
Rue de Rivoli, across the Place de la Concorde and on to the Quai. I
looked with sick eyes upon the sun, shining through the white foam of
the fountain, pouring over the backs of the dusky bronze river-gods, on
the far-away Arc, a structure of amethyst mist, on the countless vistas
of grey stems and bare branches faintly green. Then I saw him again
coming down one of the chestnut alleys of the Cours la Reine.
I left the river-side, plunged blindly across to the Champs Elysées
and turned toward the Arc. The setting sun was sending its rays along
the green sward of the Rond-point: in the full glow he sat on a bench,
children and young mothers all about him. He was nothing but a Sunday
lounger, like the others, like myself. I said the words almost aloud,
and all the while I gazed on the malignant hatred of his face. But he
was not looking at me. I crept past and dragged my leaden feet up the
Avenue. I knew that every time I met him brought him nearer to the
accomplishment of his purpose and my fate. And still I tried to save
myself.
The last rays of sunset were pouring through the great Arc. I passed
under it, and met him face to face. I had left him far down the Champs
Elysées, and yet he came in with a stream of people who were returning
from the Bois de Boulogne. He came so close that he brushed me. His