American Gothic, page 82
“But it’s not enough to say they were as bad as before: they were worse. Worse by just so much as I’d learned of life in the interval; by all the damnable implications my wider experience read into them. I saw now what I hadn’t seen before: that they were eyes which had grown hideous gradually, which had built up their baseness coralwise, bit by bit, out of a series of small turpitudes slowly accumulated through the industrious years. Yes – it came to me that what made them so bad was that they’d grown bad so slowly….
“There they hung in the darkness, their swollen lids dropped across the little watery bulbs rolling loose in the orbits, and the puff of flesh making a muddy shadow underneath – and as their stare moved with my movements, there came over me a sense of their tacit complicity, of a deep hidden understanding between us that was worse than the first shock of their strangeness. Not that I understood them; but that they made it so clear that someday I should…. Yes, that was the worst part of it, decidedly; and it was the feeling that became stronger each time they came back….
“For they got into the damnable habit of coming back. They reminded me of vampires with a taste for young flesh, they seemed so to gloat over the taste of a good conscience. Every night for a month they came to claim their morsel of mine: since I’d made Gilbert happy they simply wouldn’t loosen their fangs. The coincidence almost made me hate him, poor lad, fortuitous as I felt it to be. I puzzled over it a good deal, but couldn’t find any hint of an explanation except in the chance of his association with Alice Nowell. But then the eyes had let up on me the moment I had abandoned her, so they could hardly be the emissaries of a woman scorned, even if one could have pictured poor Alice charging such spirits to avenge her. That set me thinking, and I began to wonder if they would let up on me if I abandoned Gilbert. The temptation was insidious, and I had to stiffen myself against it; but really, dear boy! he was too charming to be sacrificed to such demons. And so, after all, I never found out what they wanted….”
III
The fire crumbled, sending up a flash which threw into relief the narrator’s gnarled face under its gray-black stubble. Pressed into the hollow of the chair back, it stood out an instant like an intaglio of yellowish red-veined stone, with spots of enamel for the eyes; then the fire sank and it became once more a dim Rembrandtish blur.
Phil Frenham, sitting in a low chair on the opposite side of the hearth, one long arm propped on the table behind him, one hand supporting his thrown-back head, and his eyes fixed on his old friend’s face, had not moved since the tale began. He continued to maintain his silent immobility after Culwin had ceased to speak, and it was I who, with a vague sense of disappointment at the sudden drop of the story, finally asked: “But how long did you keep on seeing them?”
Culwin, so sunk into his chair that he seemed like a heap of his own empty clothes, stirred a little, as if in surprise at my question. He appeared to have half-forgotten what he had been telling us.
“How long? Oh, off and on all that winter. It was infernal. I never got used to them. I grew really ill.”
Frenham shifted his attitude, and as he did so his elbow struck against a small mirror in a bronze frame standing on the table behind him. He turned and changed its angle slightly; then he resumed his former attitude, his dark head thrown back on his lifted palm, his eyes intent on Culwin’s face. Something in his silent gaze embarrassed me, and as if to divert attention from it I pressed on with another question:
“And you never tried sacrificing Noyes?”
“Oh, no. The fact is I didn’t have to. He did it for me, poor boy!”
“Did it for you? How do you mean?”
“He wore me out – wore everybody out. He kept on pouring out his lamentable twaddle, and hawking it up and down the place till he became a thing of terror. I tried to wean him from writing – oh, ever so gently, you understand, by throwing him with agreeable people, giving him a chance to make himself felt, to come to a sense of what he really had to give. I’d foreseen this solution from the beginning – felt sure that, once the first ardor of authorship was quenched, he’d drop into his place as a charming parasitic thing, the kind of chronic Cherubino for whom, in old societies, there’s always a seat at table, and a shelter behind the ladies’ skirts. I saw him take his place as ‘the poet’: the poet who doesn’t write. One knows the type in every drawing room. Living in that way doesn’t cost much – I’d worked it all out in my mind, and felt sure that, with a little help, he could manage it for the next few years; and meanwhile he’d be sure to marry. I saw him married to a widow, rather older, with a good cook and a well-run house. And I actually had my eye on the widow…. Meanwhile I did everything to help the transition – lent him money to ease his conscience, introduced him to pretty women to make him forget his vows. But nothing would do him: he had but one idea in his beautiful obstinate head. He wanted the laurel and not the rose, and he kept on repeating Gautier’s axiom, and battering and filing at his limp prose till he’d spread it out over Lord knows how many hundred pages. Now and then he would send a barrelful to a publisher, and of course it would always come back.
“At first it didn’t matter – he thought he was ‘misunderstood.’ He took the attitudes of genius, and whenever an opus came home he wrote another to keep it company. Then he had a reaction of despair, and accused me of deceiving him, and Lord knows what. I got angry at that, and told him it was he who had deceived himself. He’d come to me determined to write, and I’d done my best to help him. That was the extent of my offence, and I’d done it for his cousin’s sake, not his.
“That seemed to strike home, and he didn’t answer for a minute. Then he said: ‘My time’s up and my money’s up. What do you think I’d better do?’
“ ‘I think you’d better not be an ass,’ I said.
“ ‘What do you mean by being an ass?’ he asked.
“I took a letter from my desk and held it out to him.
“ ‘I mean refusing this offer of Mrs. Ellinger’s: to be her secretary at a salary of five thousand dollars. There may be a lot more in it than that.’
“He flung out his hand with a violence that struck the letter from mine. ‘Oh, I know well enough what’s in it!’ he said, red to the roots of his hair.
“ ‘And what’s the answer, if you know?’ I asked.
“He made none at the minute, but turned away slowly to the door. There, with his hand on the threshold, he stopped to say, almost under his breath: ‘Then you really think my stuff’s no good?’
“I was tired and exasperated, and I laughed. I don’t defend my laugh – it was in wretched taste. But I must plead in extenuation that the boy was a fool, and that I’d done my best for him – I really had.
“He went out of the room, shutting the door quietly after him. That afternoon I left for Frascati, where I’d promised to spend the Sunday with some friends. I was glad to escape from Gilbert, and by the same token, as I learned that night, I had also escaped from the eyes. I dropped into the same lethargic sleep that had come to me before when I left off seeing them; and when I woke the next morning in my peaceful room above the ilexes, I felt the utter weariness and deep relief that always followed on that sleep. I put in two blessed nights at Frascati, and when I got back to my rooms in Rome I found that Gilbert had gone…. Oh, nothing tragic had happened – the episode never rose to that. He’d simply packed his manuscripts and left for America – for his family and the Wall Street desk. He left a decent enough note to tell me of his decision, and behaved altogether, in the circumstances, as little like a fool as it’s possible for a fool to behave….”
IV
Culwin paused again, and Frenham still sat motionless, the dusky contour of his young head reflected in the mirror at his back.
“And what became of Noyes afterward?” I finally asked, still disquieted by a sense of incompleteness, by the need of some connecting thread between the parallel lines of the tale.
Culwin twitched his shoulders. “Oh, nothing became of him – because he became nothing. There could be no question of ‘becoming’ about it. He vegetated in an office, I believe, and finally got a clerkship in a consulate, and married drearily in China. I saw him once in Hong Kong, years afterward. He was fat and hadn’t shaved. I was told he drank. He didn’t recognize me.
“And the eyes?” I asked, after another pause which Frenham’s continued silence made oppressive.
Culwin, stroking his chin, blinked at me meditatively through the shadows. “I never saw them after my last talk with Gilbert. Put two and two together if you can. For my part, I haven’t found the link.”
He rose, his hands in his pockets, and walked stiffly over to the table on which reviving drinks had been set out.
“You must be parched after this dry tale. Here, help yourself, my dear fellow. Here, Phil – ” He turned back to the hearth.
Frenham made no response to his host’s hospitable summons. He still sat in his low chair without moving, but as Culwin advanced toward him, their eyes met in a long look; after which the young man, turning suddenly, flung his arms across the table behind him, and dropped his face upon them.
Culwin, at the unexpected gesture, stopped short, a flush on his face.
“Phil – what the deuce? Why, have the eyes scared you? My dear boy – my dear fellow – I never had such a tribute to my literary ability, never!”
He broke into a chuckle at the thought, and halted on the hearthrug, his hands still in his pockets, gazing down at the youth’s bowed head. Then, as Frenham still made no answer, he moved a step or two nearer.
“Cheer up, my dear Phil! It’s years since I’ve seen them – apparently I’ve done nothing lately bad enough to call them out of chaos. Unless my present evocation of them has made you see them; which would be their worst stroke yet!”
His bantering appeal quivered off into an uneasy laugh, and he moved still nearer, bending over Frenham, and laying his gouty hands on the lad’s shoulders.
“Phil, my dear boy, really – what’s the matter? Why don’t you answer? Have you seen the eyes?”
Frenham’s face was still hidden, and from where I stood behind Culwin I saw the latter, as if under the rebuff of this unaccountable attitude, draw back slowly from his friend. As he did so, the light of the lamp on the table fell full on his congested face, and I caught its reflection in the mirror behind Frenham’s head.
Culwin saw the reflection also. He paused, his face level with the mirror, as if scarcely recognizing the countenance in it as his own. But as he looked his expression gradually changed, and for an appreciable space of time he and the image in the glass confronted each other with a glare of slowly gathering hate. Then Culwin let go of Frenham’s shoulders, and drew back a step….
Frenham, his face still hidden, did not stir.
Notes
THE EYES
1 From Keats’ sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.” Keats is recalling Balboa’s first sighting of the Pacific in 1513 (though he mistakenly refers to Cortez). To be “on a peak in Darien” has become proverbial for a moment of great revelation.
2 French: vertigo.
3 A favorite of the Roman emperor Hadrian, who was inconsolable when the youth died; Hadrian built a temple in his honor.
4 French: stupidity.
Robert W. Chambers (1865–1933)
Most of the fiction Chambers wrote in a long and commercially successful career was forgettable genre work. Not so the first four stories of his 1895 collection, The King in Yellow: “The Yellow Sign,” “The Repairer of Reputations,” “The Mask,” and the story reprinted here, “In the Court of the Dragon.” These interconnected tales are among the most influential stories of supernatural horror written in the late nineteenth century.
Chambers presumes an ultimate Gothic text, a play called “The King in Yellow,” referenced in each of the four stories, a text written in “words which are more precious than jewels, more soothing than heavenly music, more awful than death itself.” In this play one may read (apparently it is only to be read, not performed) of the Yellow Sign, the King in Yellow, and the lost city of Carcosa. Chambers took the name of the city from Ambrose Bierce’s story “An Inhabitant of Carcosa,” and changed “Hali” from the name of a sage to that of an ominous lake. All who read this play are ensnared and driven mad by it. Worse, reading the text opens a passage to the world of Carcosa, allowing horrors to enter our own world, including the King in Yellow himself.
Text: The King in Yellow (New York: F. Tennyson Neely, 1895). Punctuation in the two inset quotations has been regularized. Otherwise the eccentric punctuation of the original has been left unchanged.
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?1
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 toward the altar, lost none of their devout abstraction, under the pale shadow of their white headdress. 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 favorite 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.”2 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.
