The King in Yellow
slender frame felt like iron inside its loose black covering. He showed
no signs of haste, nor of fatigue, nor of any human feeling. His whole
being expressed one thing: the will, and the power to work me evil.
In anguish I watched him where he went down the broad crowded Avenue,
that was all flashing with wheels and the trappings of horses and the
helmets of the Garde Republicaine.
He was soon lost to sight; then I turned and fled. Into the Bois, and
far out beyond it—I know not where I went, but after a long while as
it seemed to me, night had fallen, and I found myself sitting at a
table before a small café. I had wandered back into the Bois. It was
hours now since I had seen him. Physical fatigue and mental suffering
had left me no power to think or feel. I was tired, so tired! I longed
to hide away in my own den. I resolved to go home. But that was a long
way off.
I live in the Court of the Dragon, a narrow passage that leads from the
Rue de Rennes to the Rue du Dragon.
It is an “impasse”; traversable only for foot passengers. Over the
entrance on the Rue de Rennes is a balcony, supported by an iron
dragon. Within the court tall old houses rise on either side, and close
the ends that give on the two streets. Huge gates, swung back during
the day into the walls of the deep archways, close this court, after
midnight, and one must enter then by ringing at certain small doors on
the side. The sunken pavement collects unsavoury pools. Steep stairways
pitch down to doors that open on the court. The ground floors are
occupied by shops of second-hand dealers, and by iron workers. All day
long the place rings with the clink of hammers and the clang of metal
bars.
Unsavoury as it is below, there is cheerfulness, and comfort, and hard,
honest work above.
Five flights up are the ateliers of architects and painters, and the
hiding-places of middle-aged students like myself who want to live
alone. When I first came here to live I was young, and not alone.
I had to walk a while before any conveyance appeared, but at last, when
I had almost reached the Arc de Triomphe again, an empty cab came along
and I took it.
From the Arc to the Rue de Rennes is a drive of more than half an hour,
especially when one is conveyed by a tired cab horse that has been at
the mercy of Sunday fête-makers.
There had been time before I passed under the Dragon’s wings to meet my
enemy over and over again, but I never saw him once, and now refuge was
close at hand.
Before the wide gateway a small mob of children were playing. Our
concierge and his wife walked among them, with their black poodle,
keeping order; some couples were waltzing on the sidewalk. I returned
their greetings and hurried in.
All the inhabitants of the court had trooped out into the street. The
place was quite deserted, lighted by a few lanterns hung high up, in
which the gas burned dimly.
My apartment was at the top of a house, halfway down the court, reached
by a staircase that descended almost into the street, with only a bit
of passage-way intervening, I set my foot on the threshold of the open
door, the friendly old ruinous stairs rose before me, leading up to
rest and shelter. Looking back over my right shoulder, I saw _him,_ ten
paces off. He must have entered the court with me.
He was coming straight on, neither slowly, nor swiftly, but straight on
to me. And now he was looking at me. For the first time since our eyes
encountered across the church they met now again, and I knew that the
time had come.
Retreating backward, down the court, I faced him. I meant to escape by
the entrance on the Rue du Dragon. His eyes told me that I never should
escape.
It seemed ages while we were going, I retreating, he advancing, down
the court in perfect silence; but at last I felt the shadow of the
archway, and the next step brought me within it. I had meant to turn
here and spring through into the street. But the shadow was not that
of an archway; it was that of a vault. The great doors on the Rue du
Dragon were closed. I felt this by the blackness which surrounded me,
and at the same instant I read it in his face. How his face gleamed in
the darkness, drawing swiftly nearer! The deep vaults, the huge closed
doors, their cold iron clamps were all on his side. The thing which
he had threatened had arrived: it gathered and bore down on me from
the fathomless shadows; the point from which it would strike was his
infernal eyes. Hopeless, I set my back against the barred doors and
defied him.
* * * * *
There was a scraping of chairs on the stone floor, and a rustling as
the congregation rose. I could hear the Suisse’s staff in the south
aisle, preceding Monseigneur C—— to the sacristy.
The kneeling nuns, roused from their devout abstraction, made their
reverence and went away. The fashionable lady, my neighbour, rose also,
with graceful reserve. As she departed her glance just flitted over my
face in disapproval.
Half dead, or so it seemed to me, yet intensely alive to every trifle,
I sat among the leisurely moving crowd, then rose too and went toward
the door.
I had slept through the sermon. Had I slept through the sermon? I
looked up and saw him passing along the gallery to his place. Only
his side I saw; the thin bent arm in its black covering looked like
one of those devilish, nameless instruments which lie in the disused
torture-chambers of mediaeval castles.
But I had escaped him, though his eyes had said I should not. _Had_ I
escaped him? That which gave him the power over me came back out of
oblivion, where I had hoped to keep it. For I knew him now. Death and
the awful abode of lost souls, whither my weakness long ago had sent
him—they had changed him for every other eye, but not for mine. I
had recognized him almost from the first; I had never doubted what he
was come to do; and now I knew while my body sat safe in the cheerful
little church, he had been hunting my soul in the Court of the Dragon.
I crept to the door: the organ broke out overhead with a blare. A
dazzling light filled the church, blotting the altar from my eyes. The
people faded away, the arches, the vaulted roof vanished. I raised my
seared eyes to the fathomless glare, and I saw the black stars hanging
in the heavens: and the wet winds from the lake of Hali chilled my face.
And now, far away, over leagues of tossing cloud-waves, I saw the moon
dripping with spray; and beyond, the towers of Carcosa rose behind the
moon.
Death and the awful abode of lost souls, whither my weakness long ago
had sent him, had changed him for every other eye but mine. And now I
heard _his voice_, rising, swelling, thundering through the flaring
light, and as I fell, the radiance increasing, increasing, poured over
me in waves of flame. Then I sank into the depths, and I heard the King
in Yellow whispering to my soul: “It is a fearful thing to fall into
the hands of the living God!”
THE YELLOW SIGN
“Let the red dawn surmise
What we shall do,
When this blue starlight dies
And all is through.”
I
There are so many things which are impossible to explain! Why should
certain chords in music make me think of the brown and golden tints of
autumn foliage? Why should the Mass of Sainte Cécile bend my thoughts
wandering among caverns whose walls blaze with ragged masses of virgin
silver? What was it in the roar and turmoil of Broadway at six o’clock
that flashed before my eyes the picture of a still Breton forest
where sunlight filtered through spring foliage and Sylvia bent, half
curiously, half tenderly, over a small green lizard, murmuring: “To
think that this also is a little ward of God!”
When I first saw the watchman his back was toward me. I looked at him
indifferently until he went into the church. I paid no more attention
to him than I had to any other man who lounged through Washington
Square that morning, and when I shut my window and turned back into
my studio I had forgotten him. Late in the afternoon, the day being
warm, I raised the window again and leaned out to get a sniff of air.
A man was standing in the courtyard of the church, and I noticed him
again with as little interest as I had that morning. I looked across
the square to where the fountain was playing and then, with my mind
filled with vague impressions of trees, asphalt drives, and the moving
groups of nursemaids and holiday-makers, I started to walk back to
my easel. As I turned, my listless glance included the man below in
the churchyard. His face was toward me now, and with a perfectly
involuntary movement I bent to see it. At the same moment he raised
his head and looked at me. Instantly I thought of a coffin-worm.
Whatever it was about the man that repelled me I did not know, but the
impression of a plump white grave-worm was so intense and nauseating
that I must have shown it in my expression, for he turned his puffy
face away with a movement which made me think of a disturbed grub in a
chestnut.
I went back to my easel and motioned the model to resume her pose.
After working a while I was satisfied that I was spoiling what I had
done as rapidly as possible, and I took up a palette knife and scraped
the colour out again. The flesh tones were sallow and unhealthy, and I
did not understand how I could have painted such sickly colour into a
study which before that had glowed with healthy tones.
I looked at Tessie. She had not changed, and the clear flush of health
dyed her neck and cheeks as I frowned.
“Is it something I’ve done?” she said.
“No,—I’ve made a mess of this arm, and for the life of me I can’t see
how I came to paint such mud as that into the canvas,” I replied.
“Don’t I pose well?” she insisted.
“Of course, perfectly.”
“Then it’s not my fault?”
“No. It’s my own.”
“I am very sorry,” she said.
I told her she could rest while I applied rag and turpentine to the
plague spot on my canvas, and she went off to smoke a cigarette and
look over the illustrations in the _Courrier Français_.
I did not know whether it was something in the turpentine or a defect
in the canvas, but the more I scrubbed the more that gangrene seemed
to spread. I worked like a beaver to get it out, and yet the disease
appeared to creep from limb to limb of the study before me. Alarmed, I
strove to arrest it, but now the colour on the breast changed and the
whole figure seemed to absorb the infection as a sponge soaks up water.
Vigorously I plied palette-knife, turpentine, and scraper, thinking
all the time what a _séance_ I should hold with Duval who had sold me
the canvas; but soon I noticed that it was not the canvas which was
defective nor yet the colours of Edward. “It must be the turpentine,” I
thought angrily, “or else my eyes have become so blurred and confused
by the afternoon light that I can’t see straight.” I called Tessie, the
model. She came and leaned over my chair blowing rings of smoke into
the air.
“What _have_ you been doing to it?” she exclaimed.
“Nothing,” I growled, “it must be this turpentine!”
“What a horrible colour it is now,” she continued. “Do you think my
flesh resembles green cheese?”
“No, I don’t,” I said angrily; “did you ever know me to paint like that
before?”
“No, indeed!”
“Well, then!”
“It must be the turpentine, or something,” she admitted.
She slipped on a Japanese robe and walked to the window. I scraped and
rubbed until I was tired, and finally picked up my brushes and hurled
them through the canvas with a forcible expression, the tone alone of
which reached Tessie’s ears.
Nevertheless she promptly began: “That’s it! Swear and act silly and