The King in Yellow
ruin your brushes! You have been three weeks on that study, and now
look! What’s the good of ripping the canvas? What creatures artists
are!”
I felt about as much ashamed as I usually did after such an outbreak,
and I turned the ruined canvas to the wall. Tessie helped me clean my
brushes, and then danced away to dress. From the screen she regaled me
with bits of advice concerning whole or partial loss of temper, until,
thinking, perhaps, I had been tormented sufficiently, she came out to
implore me to button her waist where she could not reach it on the
shoulder.
“Everything went wrong from the time you came back from the window and
talked about that horrid-looking man you saw in the churchyard,” she
announced.
“Yes, he probably bewitched the picture,” I said, yawning. I looked at
my watch.
“It’s after six, I know,” said Tessie, adjusting her hat before the
mirror.
“Yes,” I replied, “I didn’t mean to keep you so long.” I leaned out
of the window but recoiled with disgust, for the young man with the
pasty face stood below in the churchyard. Tessie saw my gesture of
disapproval and leaned from the window.
“Is that the man you don’t like?” she whispered.
I nodded.
“I can’t see his face, but he does look fat and soft. Someway or
other,” she continued, turning to look at me, “he reminds me of a
dream,—an awful dream I once had. Or,” she mused, looking down at her
shapely shoes, “was it a dream after all?”
“How should I know?” I smiled.
Tessie smiled in reply.
“You were in it,” she said, “so perhaps you might know something about
it.”
“Tessie! Tessie!” I protested, “don’t you dare flatter by saying that
you dream about me!”
“But I did,” she insisted; “shall I tell you about it?”
“Go ahead,” I replied, lighting a cigarette.
Tessie leaned back on the open window-sill and began very seriously.
“One night last winter I was lying in bed thinking about nothing at all
in particular. I had been posing for you and I was tired out, yet it
seemed impossible for me to sleep. I heard the bells in the city ring
ten, eleven, and midnight. I must have fallen asleep about midnight
because I don’t remember hearing the bells after that. It seemed to
me that I had scarcely closed my eyes when I dreamed that something
impelled me to go to the window. I rose, and raising the sash leaned
out. Twenty-fifth Street was deserted as far as I could see. I began to
be afraid; everything outside seemed so—so black and uncomfortable.
Then the sound of wheels in the distance came to my ears, and it seemed
to me as though that was what I must wait for. Very slowly the wheels
approached, and, finally, I could make out a vehicle moving along the
street. It came nearer and nearer, and when it passed beneath my window
I saw it was a hearse. Then, as I trembled with fear, the driver turned
and looked straight at me. When I awoke I was standing by the open
window shivering with cold, but the black-plumed hearse and the driver
were gone. I dreamed this dream again in March last, and again awoke
beside the open window. Last night the dream came again. You remember
how it was raining; when I awoke, standing at the open window, my
night-dress was soaked.”
“But where did I come into the dream?” I asked.
“You—you were in the coffin; but you were not dead.”
“In the coffin?”
“Yes.”
“How did you know? Could you see me?”
“No; I only knew you were there.”
“Had you been eating Welsh rarebits, or lobster salad?” I began,
laughing, but the girl interrupted me with a frightened cry.
“Hello! What’s up?” I said, as she shrank into the embrasure by the
window.
“The—the man below in the churchyard;—he drove the hearse.”
“Nonsense,” I said, but Tessie’s eyes were wide with terror. I went to
the window and looked out. The man was gone. “Come, Tessie,” I urged,
“don’t be foolish. You have posed too long; you are nervous.”
“Do you think I could forget that face?” she murmured. “Three times I
saw the hearse pass below my window, and every time the driver turned
and looked up at me. Oh, his face was so white and—and soft? It looked
dead—it looked as if it had been dead a long time.”
I induced the girl to sit down and swallow a glass of Marsala. Then I
sat down beside her, and tried to give her some advice.
“Look here, Tessie,” I said, “you go to the country for a week or two,
and you’ll have no more dreams about hearses. You pose all day, and
when night comes your nerves are upset. You can’t keep this up. Then
again, instead of going to bed when your day’s work is done, you run
off to picnics at Sulzer’s Park, or go to the Eldorado or Coney Island,
and when you come down here next morning you are fagged out. There was
no real hearse. There was a soft-shell crab dream.”
She smiled faintly.
“What about the man in the churchyard?”
“Oh, he’s only an ordinary unhealthy, everyday creature.”
“As true as my name is Tessie Reardon, I swear to you, Mr. Scott, that
the face of the man below in the churchyard is the face of the man who
drove the hearse!”
“What of it?” I said. “It’s an honest trade.”
“Then you think I _did_ see the hearse?”
“Oh,” I said diplomatically, “if you really did, it might not be
unlikely that the man below drove it. There is nothing in that.”
Tessie rose, unrolled her scented handkerchief, and taking a bit of gum
from a knot in the hem, placed it in her mouth. Then drawing on her
gloves she offered me her hand, with a frank, “Good-night, Mr. Scott,”
and walked out.
II
The next morning, Thomas, the bell-boy, brought me the _Herald_ and a
bit of news. The church next door had been sold. I thanked Heaven for
it, not that being a Catholic I had any repugnance for the congregation
next door, but because my nerves were shattered by a blatant exhorter,
whose every word echoed through the aisle of the church as if it had
been my own rooms, and who insisted on his r’s with a nasal persistence
which revolted my every instinct. Then, too, there was a fiend in human
shape, an organist, who reeled off some of the grand old hymns with an
interpretation of his own, and I longed for the blood of a creature
who could play the doxology with an amendment of minor chords which
one hears only in a quartet of very young undergraduates. I believe
the minister was a good man, but when he bellowed: “And the Lorrrrd
said unto Moses, the Lorrrd is a man of war; the Lorrrd is his name. My
wrath shall wax hot and I will kill you with the sworrrrd!” I wondered
how many centuries of purgatory it would take to atone for such a sin.
“Who bought the property?” I asked Thomas.
“Nobody that I knows, sir. They do say the gent wot owns this ’ere
’Amilton flats was lookin’ at it. ’E might be a bildin’ more studios.”
I walked to the window. The young man with the unhealthy face stood by
the churchyard gate, and at the mere sight of him the same overwhelming
repugnance took possession of me.
“By the way, Thomas,” I said, “who is that fellow down there?”
Thomas sniffed. “That there worm, sir? ’Es night-watchman of the
church, sir. ’E maikes me tired a-sittin’ out all night on them steps
and lookin’ at you insultin’ like. I’d a punched ’is ’ed, sir—beg
pardon, sir—”
“Go on, Thomas.”
“One night a comin’ ’ome with ’Arry, the other English boy, I sees ’im
a sittin’ there on them steps. We ’ad Molly and Jen with us, sir, the
two girls on the tray service, an’ ’e looks so insultin’ at us that
I up and sez: ‘Wat you looking hat, you fat slug?’—beg pardon, sir,
but that’s ’ow I sez, sir. Then ’e don’t say nothin’ and I sez: ‘Come
out and I’ll punch that puddin’ ’ed.’ Then I hopens the gate an’ goes
in, but ’e don’t say nothin’, only looks insultin’ like. Then I ’its
’im one, but, ugh! ’is ’ed was that cold and mushy it ud sicken you to
touch ’im.”
“What did he do then?” I asked curiously.
“’Im? Nawthin’.”
“And you, Thomas?”
The young fellow flushed with embarrassment and smiled uneasily.
“Mr. Scott, sir, I ain’t no coward, an’ I can’t make it out at all why
I run. I was in the 5th Lawncers, sir, bugler at Tel-el-Kebir, an’ was
shot by the wells.”
“You don’t mean to say you ran away?”
“Yes, sir; I run.”
“Why?”
“That’s just what I want to know, sir. I grabbed Molly an’ run, an’ the
rest was as frightened as I.”
“But what were they frightened at?”
Thomas refused to answer for a while, but now my curiosity was aroused
about the repulsive young man below and I pressed him. Three years’
sojourn in America had not only modified Thomas’ cockney dialect but
had given him the American’s fear of ridicule.
“You won’t believe me, Mr. Scott, sir?”
“Yes, I will.”
“You will lawf at me, sir?”
“Nonsense!”
He hesitated. “Well, sir, it’s Gawd’s truth that when I ’it ’im ’e
grabbed me wrists, sir, and when I twisted ’is soft, mushy fist one of
’is fingers come off in me ’and.”
The utter loathing and horror of Thomas’ face must have been reflected
in my own, for he added:
“It’s orful, an’ now when I see ’im I just go away. ’E maikes me hill.”
When Thomas had gone I went to the window. The man stood beside the
church-railing with both hands on the gate, but I hastily retreated
to my easel again, sickened and horrified, for I saw that the middle
finger of his right hand was missing.
At nine o’clock Tessie appeared and vanished behind the screen with a
merry “Good morning, Mr. Scott.” When she had reappeared and taken her
pose upon the model-stand I started a new canvas, much to her delight.
She remained silent as long as I was on the drawing, but as soon as the
scrape of the charcoal ceased and I took up my fixative she began to
chatter.
“Oh, I had such a lovely time last night. We went to Tony Pastor’s.”
“Who are ‘we’?” I demanded.
“Oh, Maggie, you know, Mr. Whyte’s model, and Pinkie McCormick—we call
her Pinkie because she’s got that beautiful red hair you artists like
so much—and Lizzie Burke.”
I sent a shower of spray from the fixative over the canvas, and said:
“Well, go on.”
“We saw Kelly and Baby Barnes the skirt-dancer and—and all the rest. I
made a mash.”
“Then you have gone back on me, Tessie?”
She laughed and shook her head.
“He’s Lizzie Burke’s brother, Ed. He’s a perfect gen’l’man.”
I felt constrained to give her some parental advice concerning mashing,
which she took with a bright smile.
“Oh, I can take care of a strange mash,” she said, examining her
chewing gum, “but Ed is different. Lizzie is my best friend.”
Then she related how Ed had come back from the stocking mill in
Lowell, Massachusetts, to find her and Lizzie grown up, and what
an accomplished young man he was, and how he thought nothing of
squandering half-a-dollar for ice-cream and oysters to celebrate his
entry as clerk into the woollen department of Macy’s. Before she
finished I began to paint, and she resumed the pose, smiling and
chattering like a sparrow. By noon I had the study fairly well rubbed
in and Tessie came to look at it.
“That’s better,” she said.
I thought so too, and ate my lunch with a satisfied feeling that all
was going well. Tessie spread her lunch on a drawing table opposite me
and we drank our claret from the same bottle and lighted our cigarettes
from the same match. I was very much attached to Tessie. I had watched
her shoot up into a slender but exquisitely formed woman from a frail,
awkward child. She had posed for me during the last three years, and
among all my models she was my favourite. It would have troubled me
very much indeed had she become “tough” or “fly,” as the phrase goes,
but I never noticed any deterioration of her manner, and felt at heart
that she was all right. She and I never discussed morals at all, and
I had no intention of doing so, partly because I had none myself, and