A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W X Z

The King In Yellow

R >> Robert W. Chambers >> The King In Yellow




One April afternoon, I lay dreaming in the smoking-room, just as I had
lain two years before, and mechanically I looked among the tawny Eastern
rugs for the wolf-skin. At last I distinguished the pointed ears and flat
cruel head, and I thought of my dream where I saw Geneviève lying beside
it. The helmets still hung against the threadbare tapestry, among them
the old Spanish morion which I remembered Geneviève had once put on when
we were amusing ourselves with the ancient bits of mail. I turned my eyes
to the spinet; every yellow key seemed eloquent of her caressing hand,
and I rose, drawn by the strength of my life's passion to the sealed door
of the marble room. The heavy doors swung inward under my trembling
hands. Sunlight poured through the window, tipping with gold the wings of
Cupid, and lingered like a nimbus over the brows of the Madonna. Her
tender face bent in compassion over a marble form so exquisitely pure
that I knelt and signed myself. Geneviève lay in the shadow under the
Madonna, and yet, through her white arms, I saw the pale azure vein, and
beneath her softly clasped hands the folds of her dress were tinged with
rose, as if from some faint warm light within her breast.

Bending, with a breaking heart, I touched the marble drapery with my
lips, then crept back into the silent house.

A maid came and brought me a letter, and I sat down in the little
conservatory to read it; but as I was about to break the seal, seeing the
girl lingering, I asked her what she wanted.

She stammered something about a white rabbit that had been caught in the
house, and asked what should be done with it I told her to let it loose
in the walled garden behind the house, and opened my letter. It was from
Jack, but so incoherent that I thought he must have lost his reason. It
was nothing but a series of prayers to me not to leave the house until he
could get back; he could not tell me why, there were the dreams, he
said--he could explain nothing, but he was sure that I must not leave the
house in the Rue Sainte-Cécile.

As I finished reading I raised my eyes and saw the same maid-servant
standing in the doorway holding a glass dish in which two gold-fish were
swimming: "Put them back into the tank and tell me what you mean by
interrupting me," I said.

With a half-suppressed whimper she emptied water and fish into an
aquarium at the end of the conservatory, and turning to me asked my
permission to leave my service. She said people were playing tricks on
her, evidently with a design of getting her into trouble; the marble
rabbit had been stolen and a live one had been brought into the house;
the two beautiful marble fish were gone, and she had just found those
common live things flopping on the dining-room floor. I reassured her and
sent her away, saying I would look about myself. I went into the studio;
there was nothing there but my canvases and some casts, except the marble
of the Easter lily. I saw it on a table across the room. 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 hall-way 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
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 fete-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 side-walk. 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.

Copyright (c) 2007. famouswriterz.com. All rights reserved.