I can show you houses that have stood two centuries and a half and more; houses that have witnessed what would make a modern house crumble into powder. What do moderns know of life and the forces behind it? You call the Salem witchcraft a delusion, but I"ll wager my four-times-great-grandmother could have told you things. They hanged her on Gallows Hill, with Cotton Mather looking sanctimoniously on. Mather, d.a.m.n him, was afraid somebody might succeed in kicking free of this accursed cage of monotony - I wish someone had laid a spell on him or sucked his blood in the night!
"I can show you a house he lived in, and I can show you another one he was afraid to enter in spite of all his fine bold talk. He knew things he didn"t dare put into that stupid Magnalia or that puerile Wonders of the Invisible World. Look here, do you know the whole North End once had a set of tunnels that kept certain people in touch with each other"s houses, and the burying ground, and the sea? Let them prosecute and persecute above ground - things went on every day that they couldn"t reach, and voices laughed at night that they couldn"t place!
"Why, man, out of ten surviving houses built before 1700 and not moved since I"ll wager that in eight I can show you something queer in the cellar. There"s hardly a month that you don"t read of workmen finding bricked-up arches and wells leading nowhere in this or that old place as it comes down - you could see one near Henchman Street from the elevated last year. There were witches and what their spells summoned; pirates and what they brought in from the sea; smugglers; privateers - and I tell you, people knew how to live, and how to enlarge the bounds of life, in the old time! This wasn"t the only world a bold and wise man could know - faugh! And to think of today in contrast, with such pale-pink brains that even a club of supposed artists gets shudders and convulsions if a picture goes beyond the feelings of a Beacon Street tea-table!
"The only saving grace of the present is that it"s too d.a.m.ned stupid to question the past very closely. What do maps and records and guide-books really tell of the North End? Bah! At a guess I"ll guarantee to lead you to thirty or forty alleys and networks of alleys north of Prince Street that aren"t suspected by ten living beings outside of the foreigners that swarm them. And what do those Dagoes know of their meaning? No, Thurber, these ancient places are dreaming gorgeously and over-flowing with wonder and terror and escapes from the commonplace, and yet there"s not a living soul to understand or profit by them.
Or rather, there"s only one living soul - for I haven"t been digging around in the past for nothing !
"See here, you"re interested in this sort of thing. What if I told you that I"ve got another studio up there, where I can catch the night-spirit of antique horror and paint things that I couldn"t even think of in Newbury Street?
Naturally I don"t tell those cursed old maids at the club - with Reid, d.a.m.n him, whispering even as it is that I"m a sort of monster bound down the toboggan of reverse evolution. Yes, Thurber, I decided long ago that one must paint terror as well as beauty from life, so I did some exploring in places where I had reason to know terror lives.
"I"ve got a place that I don"t believe three living Nordic men besides myself have ever seen. It isn"t so very far from the elevated as distance goes, but it"s centuries away as the soul goes. I took it because of the queer old brick well in the cellar - one of the sort I told you about. The shack"s almost tumbling down so that n.o.body else would live there, and I"d hate to tell you how little I pay for it. The windows are boarded up, but I like that all the better, since I don"t want daylight for what I do. I paint in the cellar, where the inspiration is thickest, but I"ve other rooms furnished on the ground floor. A Sicilian owns it, and I"ve hired it under the name of Peters.
"Now, if you"re game, I"ll take you there tonight. I think you"d enjoy the pictures, for, as I said, I"ve let myself go a bit there. It"s no vast tour - I sometimes do it on foot, for I don"t want to attract attention with a taxi in such a place. We can take the shuttle at the South Station for Battery Street, and after that the wall isn"t much."
Well, Eliot, there wasn"t much for me to do after that harangue but to keep myself from running instead of walking for the first vacant cab we could sight.
We changed to the elevated at the South Station, and at about twelve o"clock had climbed down the steps at Battery Street and struck along the old waterfront past Const.i.tution Wharf. I didn"t keep track of the cross streets, and can"t tell you yet which it was we turned up, but I know it wasn"t Greenough Lane.
When we did turn, it was to climb through the deserted length of the oldest and dirtiest alley I ever saw in my life, with crumbling-looking gables, broken small-paned windows, and archaic chimneys that stood out half-disintegrated against the moonlit sky. I don"t believe there were three houses in sight that hadn"t been standing in Cotton Mather"s time - certainly I glimpsed at least two with an overhang, and once I thought I saw a peaked roof-line of the almost forgotten pre-gambrel type, though antiquarians tell us there are none left in Boston.
From that alley, which had a dim light, we turned to the left into an equally silent and still narrower alley with no light at all: and in a minute made what I think was an obtuse-angled bend towards the right in the dark. Not long after this Pickman produced a flashlight and revealed an antediluvian ten-panelled door that looked d.a.m.nably worm-eaten. Unlocking it, he ushered me into a barren hallway with what was once splendid dark-oak panelling - simple, of course, but thrillingly suggestive of the times of Andros and Phipps and the Witchcraft.
Then he took me through a door on the left, lighted an oil lamp, and told me to make myself at home.
Now, Eliot, I"m what the man in the street would call fairly "hard-boiled," but I"ll confess that what I saw on the walls of that room gave me a bad turn. They were his pictures, you know - the ones he couldn"t paint or even show in Newbury Street - and he was right when he said he had "let himself go." Here - have another drink - I need one anyhow!
There"s no use in my trying to tell you what they were like, because the awful, the blasphemous horror, and the unbelievable loathsomeness and moral foetor came from simple touches quite beyond the power of words to cla.s.sify. There was none of the exotic technique you see in Sidney Sime, none of the trans-Saturnian landscapes and lunar fungi that Clark Ashton Smith uses to freeze the blood. The backgrounds were mostly old churchyards, deep woods, cliffs by the sea, brick tunnels, ancient panelled rooms, or simple vaults of masonry. Copp"s Hill Burying Ground, which could not be many blocks away from this very house, was a favourite scene.
The madness and monstrosity lay in the figures in the foreground - for Pickman"s morbid art was pre-eminently one of daemoniac portraiture. These figures were seldom completely human, but often approached humanity in varying degree. Most of the bodies, while roughly bipedal, had a forward slumping, and a vaguely canine cast. The texture of the majority was a kind of unpleasant rubberiness.
Ugh! I can see them now! Their occupations - well, don"t ask me to be too precise. They were usually feeding - I won"t say on what. They were sometimes shown in groups in cemeteries or underground pa.s.sages, and often appeared to be in battle over their prey - or rather, their treasure-trove. And what d.a.m.nable expressiveness Pickman sometimes gave the sightless faces of this charnel booty!
Occasionally the things were shown leaping through open windows at night, or squatting on the chests of sleepers, worrying at their throats. One canvas showed a ring of them baying about a hanged witch on Gallows Hill, whose dead face held a close kinship to theirs.
But don"t get the idea that it was all this hideous business of theme and setting which struck me faint. I"m not a three-year-old kid, and I"d seen much like this before. It was the faces, Eliot, those accursed faces, that leered and slavered out of the canvas with the very breath of life! By G.o.d, man, I verily believe they were alive! That nauseous wizard had waked the fires of h.e.l.l in pigment, and his brush had been a nightmare-sp.a.w.ning wand. Give me that decanter, Eliot!
There was one thing called "The Lesson" - Heaven pity me, that I ever saw it!
Listen - can you fancy a squatting circle of nameless dog-like things in a churchyard teaching a small child how to feed like themselves? The price of a changeling, I suppose - you know the old myth about how the weird people leave their sp.a.w.n in cradles in exchange for the human babes they steal. Pickman was showing what happens to those stolen babes - how they grow up - and then I began to see a hideous relationship in the faces of the human and non-human figures.
He was, in all his gradations of morbidity between the frankly non-human and the degradedly human, establishing a sardonic linkage and evolution. The dog-things were developed from mortals!
And no sooner had I wondered what he made of their own young as left with mankind in the form of changelings, than my eye caught a picture embodying that very thought. It was that of an ancient Puritan interior - a heavily beamed room with lattice windows, a settle, and clumsy seventeenth-century furniture, with the family sitting about while the father read from the Scriptures. Every face but one showed n.o.bility and reverence, but that one reflected the mockery of the pit. It was that of a young man in years, and no doubt belonged to a supposed son of that pious father, but in essence it was the kin of the unclean things.
It was their changeling - and in a spirit of supreme irony Pickman had given the features a very perceptible resemblance to his own.
By this time Pickman had lighted a lamp in an adjoining room and was politely holding open the door for me; asking me if I would care to see his "modern studies." I hadn"t been able to give him much of my opinions - I was too speechless with fright and loathing - but I think he fully understood and felt highly complimented. And now I want to a.s.sure you again, Eliot, that I"m no mollycoddle to scream at anything which shows a bit of departure from the usual.
I"m middle-aged and decently sophisticated, and I guess you saw enough of me in France to know I"m not easily knocked out. Remember, too, that I"d just about recovered my wind and gotten used to those frightful pictures which turned colonial New England into a kind of annexe of h.e.l.l. Well, in spite of all this, that next room forced a real scream out of me, and I had to clutch at the doorway to keep from keeling over. The other chamber had shown a pack of ghouls and witches over-running the world of our forefathers, but this one brought the horror right into our own daily life!
Gad, how that man could paint! There was a study called "Subway Accident," in which a flock of the vile things were clambering up from some unknown catacomb through a crack in the floor of the Boylston Street subway and attacking a crowd of people on the platform. Another showed a dance on Copp"s Hill among the tombs with the background of today. Then there were any number of cellar views, with monsters creeping in through holes and rifts in the masonry and grinning as they squatted behind barrels or furnaces and waited for their first victim to descend the stairs.
One disgusting canvas seemed to depict a vast cross-section of Beacon Hill, with ant-like armies of the mephitic monsters squeezing themselves through burrows that honeycombed the ground. Dances in the modern cemeteries were freely pictured, and another conception somehow shocked me more than all the rest - a sense in an unknown vault, where scores of the beasts crowded about one who hod a well-known Boston guidebook and was evidently reading aloud. All were pointing to a certain pa.s.sage, and every face seemed so distorted with epileptic and reverberant laughter that I almost thought I heard the fiendish echoes. The t.i.tle of the picture was, "Holmes, Lowell and Longfellow Lie Buried in Mount Auburn."
As I gradually steadied myself and got readjusted to this second room of deviltry and morbidity, I began to a.n.a.lyse some of the points in my sickening loathing. In the first place, I said to myself, these things repelled because of the utter inhumanity and callous crudity they showed in Pickman. The fellow must be a relentless enemy of all mankind to take such glee in the torture of brain and flesh and the degradation of the mortal tenement. In the second place, they terrified because of their very greatness. Their art was the art that convinced - when we saw the pictures we saw the daemons themselves and were afraid of them. And the queer part was, that Pickman got none of his power from the use of selectiveness or bizarrerie. Nothing was blurred, distorted, or conventionalized; outlines were sharp and lifelike, and details were almost painfully defined. And the faces!
It was not any mere artist"s interpretation that we saw; it was pandemonium itself, crystal clear in stark objectivity. That was it, by Heaven! The man was not a fantaisiste or romanticist at all - he did not even try to give us the churning, prismatic ephemera of dreams, but coldly and sardonically reflected some stable, mechanistic, and well--established horror - world which he saw fully, brilliantly, squarely, and unfalteringly. G.o.d knows what that world can have been, or where he ever glimpsed the blasphemous shapes that loped and trotted and crawled through it; but whatever the baffling source of his images, one thing was plain. Pickman was in every sense - in conception and in execution - a thorough, painstaking, and almost scientific realist.
My host was now leading the way down the cellar to his actual studio, and I braced myself for some h.e.l.lish efforts among the unfinished canvases. As we reached the bottom of the damp stairs he fumed his flash-light to a comer of the large open s.p.a.ce at hand, revealing the circular brick curb of what was evidently a great well in the earthen floor. We walked nearer, and I saw that it must be five feet across, with walls a good foot thick and some six inches above the ground level - solid work of the seventeenth century, or I was much mistaken. That, Pickman said, was the kind of thing he had been talking about - an aperture of the network of tunnels that used to undermine the hill. I noticed idly that it did not seem to be bricked up, and that a heavy disc of wood formed the apparent cover. Thinking of the things this well must have been connected with if Pickman"s wild hints had not been mere rhetoric, I shivered slightly; then turned to follow him up a step and through a narrow door into a room of fair size, provided with a wooden floor and furnished as a studio. An acetylene gas outfit gave the light necessary for work.
The unfinished pictures on easels or propped against the walls were as ghastly as the finished ones upstairs, and showed the painstaking methods of the artist.
Scenes were blocked out with extreme care, and pencilled guide lines told of the minute exact.i.tude which Pickman used in getting the right perspective and proportions. The man was great - I say it even now, knowing as much as I do. A large camera on a table excited my notice, and Pickman told me that he used it in taking scenes for backgrounds, so that he might paint them from photographs in the studio instead of carting his oufit around the town for this or that view. He thought a photograph quite as good as an actual scene or model for sustained work, and declared he employed them regularly.
There was something very disturbing about the nauseous sketches and half-finished monstrosities that leered round from every side of the room, and when Pickman suddenly unveiled a huge canvas on the side away from the light I could not for my life keep back a loud scream - the second I had emitted that night. It echoed and echoed through the dim vaultings of that ancient and nitrous cellar, and I had to choke back a flood of reaction that threatened to burst out as hysterical laughter. Merciful Creator! Eliot, but I don"t know how much was real and how much was feverish fancy. It doesn"t seem to me that earth can hold a dream like that!
It was a colossal and nameless blasphemy with glaring red eyes, and it held in bony claws a thing that had been a man, gnawing at the head as a child nibbles at a stick of candy. Its position was a kind of crouch, and as one looked one felt that at any moment it might drop its present prey and seek a juicier morsel. But d.a.m.n it all, it wasn"t even the fiendish subject that made it such an immortal fountain - head of all panic - not that, nor the dog face with its pointed ears, bloodshot eyes, flat nose, and drooling lips. It wasn"t the scaly claws nor the mould-caked body nor the half-hooved feet - none of these, though any one of them might well have driven an excitable man to madness.
It was the technique, Eliot - the cursed, the impious, the unnatural technique!
As I am a living being, I never elsewhere saw the actual breath of life so fused into a canvas. The monster was there - it glared and gnawed and gnawed and glared - and I knew that only a suspen-sion of Nature"s laws could ever let a man paint a thing like that without a model - without some glimpse of the nether world which no mortal unsold to the Fiend has ever had.
Pinned with a thumb-tack to a vacant part of the canvas was a piece of paper now badly curled up - probably, I thought, a photograph from which Pickman meant to paint a background as hideous as the night-mare it was to enhance. I reached out to uncurl and look at it, when suddenly I saw Pickman start as if shot. He had been listening with peculiar intensity ever since my shocked scream had waked unaccus-tomed echoes in the dark cellar, and now he seemed struck with a fright which, though not comparable to my own, had in it more of the physical than of the spiritual. He drew a revolver and motioned me to silence, then stepped out into the main cellar and closed the door behind him.
I think I was paralysed for an instant. Imitating Pickman"s listening, I fancied I heard a faint scurrying sound somewhere, and a series of squeals or beats in a direction I couldn"t determine. I thought of huge rats and shuddered. Then there came a subdued sort of clatter which somehow set me all in gooseflesh - a furtive, groping kind of clatter, though I can"t attempt to convey what I mean in words. It was like heavy wood falling on stone or brick - wood on brick - what did that make me think of?
It came again, and louder. There was a vibration as if the wood had fallen farther than it had fallen before. After that followed a sharp grating noise, a shouted gibberish from Pickman, and the deafening dis-charge of all six chambers of a revolver, fired spectacularly as a lion--tamer might fire in the air for effect. A m.u.f.fled squeal or squawk, and a thud. Then more wood and brick grating, a pause, and the opening of the door - at which I"ll confess I started violently. Pickman reappeared with his smoking weapon, cursing the bloated rats that infested the ancient well.
"The deuce knows what they eat, Thurber," he grinned, "for those archaic tunnels touched graveyard and witch-den and sea-coast. But whatever it is, they must have run short, for they were devilish anxious to get out. Your yelling stirred them up, I fancy. Better be cautious in these old places- our rodent friends are the one drawback, though I sometimes think they"re a positive a.s.set by way of atmosphere and colour."
Well, Eliot, that was the end of the night"s adventure. Pickman had promised to show me the place, and Heaven knows he had done it. He led me out of that tangle of alleys in another direction, it seems, for when we sighted a lamp-post we were in a half-familiar street with monotonous rows of mingled tenement blocks and old houses. Charter Street, it turned out to be, but I was too fl.u.s.tered to notice just where we hit it. We were too late for the elevated, and walked back downtown through Hanover Street. I remember that wall:. We switched from Tremont up Beacon, and Pickman left me at the corner of Joy, where I turned off. I never spoke to him again.
Why did I drop hirn? Don"t be impatient. Wait till I ring for coffee. We"ve had enough of the other stuff, but I for one need something. No -it wasn"t the paintings I saw in that place; though I"ll swear they were enough to get him ostracised in nine-tenths of the homes and clubs of Boston, and I guess you won"t wonder now why I have to steer clear of subways and cellars. It was - something I found in my coat the next morning. You know, the curled-up paper tacked to the frightful canvas in the cellar; the thing I thought was a photograph of some scene he meant to use as a background for that monster. That last scare had come while I was reaching to uncurl it, and it seems I had vacantly crumpled it into my pocket. But here"s the coffee - take it black, Eliot, if you"re wise.
Yes, that paper was the reason I dropped Pickman; Richard Upton Pickman, the greatest artist I have ever known - and the foulest being that ever leaped the bounds of life into the pits of myth and madness. Eliot - old Reid was right. He wasn"t strictly human. Either he was born in strange shadow, or he"d found a way to unlock the forbidden gate. It"s all the same now, for he"s gone - back into the fabulous darkness he loved to haunt. Here, let"s have the chandelier going.
Don"t ask me to explain or even conjecture about what I burned. Don"t ask me, either, what lay behind that mole-like scrambling Pickman was so keen to pa.s.s off as rats. There are secrets, you know, which might have come down from old Salem times, and Cotton Mather tells even stranger things. You know how d.a.m.ned lifelike Pickman"s paintings were - how we all wondered where he got those faces.
Well - that paper wasn"t a photograph of any background, after all. What it showed was simply the monstrous being he was painting on that awful canvas. It was the model he was using - and its background was merely the wall of the cellar studio in minute detail. But by G.o.d, Eliot, it was a photograph from life!
Poetry and the G.o.ds
By H.P. Lovecraft and Anna Helen Crofts
Written 1920 Published September 1920 in The United Amateur, Vol. 20, No. 1, p. 1-4.
A damp gloomy evening in April it was, just after the close of the Great War, when Marcia found herself alone with strange thoughts and wishes, unheard-of yearnings which floated out of the s.p.a.cious twentieth-century drawing room, up the deeps of the air, and eastward to olive groves in distant Arcady which she had seen only in her dreams. She had entered the room in abstraction, turned off the glaring chandeliers, and now reclined on a soft divan by a solitary lamp which shed over the reading table a green glow as soothing as moonlight when it issued through the foliage about an antique shrine.
Attired simply, in a low-cut black evening dress, she appeared outwardly a typical product of modern civilization; but tonight she felt the immeasurable gulf that separated her soul from all her prosaic surroundings. Was it because of the strange home in which she lived, that abode of coldness where relations were always strained and the inmates scarcely more than strangers? Was it that, or was it some greater and less explicable misplacement in time and s.p.a.ce, whereby she had been born too late, too early, or too far away from the haunts of her spirit ever to harmonize with the unbeautiful things of contemporary reality? To dispel the mood which was engulfing her more and more deeply each moment, she took a magazine from the table and searched for some healing bit of poetry. Poetry had always relieved her troubled mind better than anything else, though many things in the poetry she had seen detracted from the influence. Over parts of even the sublimest verses hung a chill vapor of sterile ugliness and restraint, like dust on a window-pane through which one views a magnificent sunset.
Listlessly turning the magazine"s pages, as if searching for an elusive treasure, she suddenly came upon something which dispelled her languor. An observer could have read her thoughts and told that she had discovered some image or dream which brought her nearer to her unattained goal than any image or dream she had seen before. It was only a bit of vers libre, that pitiful compromise of the poet who overleaps prose yet falls short of the divine melody of numbers; but it had in it all the unstudied music of a bard who lives and feels, who gropes ecstatically for unveiled beauty. Devoid of regularity, it yet had the harmony of winged, spontaneous words, a harmony missing from the formal, convention-bound verse she had known. As she read on, her surroundings gradually faded, and soon there lay about her only the mists of dream, the purple, star-strewn mists beyond time, where only G.o.ds and dreamers walk.
Moon over j.a.pan, White b.u.t.terfly moon!
Where the heavy-lidded Buddhas dream To the sound of the cuckoo"s call... The white wings of moon b.u.t.terflies Flicker down the streets of the city, Blushing into silence the useless wicks of sound-lanterns in the hands of girls Moon over the tropics, A white-curved bud Opening its petals slowly in the warmth of heaven...
The air is full of odours And languorous warm sounds...
A flute drones its insect music to the night Below the curving moon-petal of the heavens.
Moon over China, Weary moon on the river of the sky, The stir of light in the willows is like the flashing of a thousand silver minnows Through dark shoals; The tiles on graves and rotting temples flash like ripples, The sky is flecked with clouds like the scales of a dragon.
Amid the mists of dream the reader cried to the rhythmical stars, of her delight at the coming of a new age of song, a rebirth of Pan. Half closing her eyes, she repeated words whose melody lay hidden like crystals at the bottom of a stream before dawn, hidden but to gleam effulgently at the birth of day.
Moon over j.a.pan, White b.u.t.terfly moon!
Moon over the tropics, A white curved bud Opening its petals slowly in the warmth of heaven.
The air is full of odours And languorous warm sounds...
Moon over China, Weary moon on the river of the sky...
Out of the mists gleamed G.o.dlike the torm ot a youth, in winged helmet and sandals, caduceus-bearing, and of a beauty like to nothing on earth. Before the face of the sleeper he thrice waved the rod which Apollo had given him in trade for the nine-corded sh.e.l.l of melody, and upon her brow he placed a wreath of myrtle and roses. Then, adoring, Hermes spoke: "0 Nymph more fair than the golden-haired sisters of Cyene or the sky-inhabiting Atlantides, beloved of Aphrodite and blessed of Pallas, thou hast indeed discovered the secret of the G.o.ds, which lieth in beauty and song. 0 Prophetess more lovely than the Sybil of c.u.mae when Apollo first knew her, thou has truly spoken of the new age, for even now on Maenalus, Pan sighs and stretches in his sleep, wishful to wake and behold about him the little rose-crowned fauns and the antique Satyrs. In thy yearning hast thou divined what no mortal, saving only a few whom the world rejects, remembereth: that the G.o.ds were never dead, but only sleeping the sleep and dreaming the dreams of G.o.ds in lotos-filled Hesperian gardens beyond the golden sunset. And now draweth nigh the time of their awakening, when coldness and ugliness shall perish, and Zeus sit once more on Olympus. Already the sea about Paphos trembleth into a foam which only ancient skies have looked on before, and at night on Helicon the shepherds hear strange murmurings and half-remembered notes. Woods and fields are tremulous at twilight with the shimmering of white saltant forms, and immemorial Ocean yields up curious sights beneath thin moons. The G.o.ds are patient, and have slept long, but neither man nor giant shall defy the G.o.ds forever. In Tartarus the t.i.tans writhe and beneath the fiery Aetna groan the children of Ura.n.u.s and Gaea. The day now dawns when man must answer for centuries of denial, but in sleeping the G.o.ds have grown kind and will not hurl him to the gulf made for deniers of G.o.ds.
Instead will their vengeance smite the darkness, fallacy and ugliness which have turned the mind of man; and under the sway of bearded Saturnus shall mortals, once more sacrificing unto him, dwell in beauty and delight. This night shalt thou know the favour of the G.o.ds, and behold on Parna.s.sus those dreams which the G.o.ds have through ages sent to earth to show that they are not dead. For poets are the dreams of G.o.ds, and in each and every age someone hath sung unknowingly the message and the promise from the lotosgardens beyond the sunset."
Then in his arms Hermes bore the dreaming maiden through the skies. Gentle breezes from the tower of Aiolas wafted them high above warm, scented seas, till suddenly they came upon Zeus, holding court upon double-headed Parna.s.sus, his golden throne flanked by Apollo and the Muses on the right hand, and by ivy-wreathed Dionysus and pleasure-flushed Bacchae on the left hand. So much of splendour Marcia had never seen before, either awake or in dreams, but its radiance did her no injury, as would have the radiance of lofty Olympus; for in this lesser court the Father of G.o.ds had tempered his glories for the sight of mortals. Before the laurel-draped mouth of the Corycian cave sat in a row six n.o.ble forms with the aspect of mortals, but the countenances of G.o.ds. These the dreamer recognized from images of them which she had beheld, and she knew that they were none else than the divine Maeonides, the avernian Dante, the more than mortal Shakespeare, the chaos-exploring Milton, the cosmic Goethe and the musalan Keats. These were those messengers whom the G.o.ds had sent to tell men that Pan had pa.s.sed not away, but only slept; for it is in poetry that G.o.ds speak to men. Then spake the Thunderer: "0 Daughter-for, being one of my endless line, thou art indeed my daughter-behold upon ivory thrones of honour the august messengers G.o.ds have sent down that in the words and writing of men there may be still some traces of divine beauty. Other bards have men justly crowned with enduring laurels, but these hath Apollo crowned, and these have I set in places apart, as mortals who have spoken the language of the G.o.ds. Long have we dreamed in lotosgardens beyond the West, and spoken only through our dreams; but the time approaches when our voices shall not be silent. It is a time of awakening and change. Once more hath Phaeton ridden low, searing the fields and drying the streams. In Gaul lone nymphs with disordered hair weep beside fountains that are no more, and pine over rivers turned red with the blood of mortals. Ares and his train have gone forth with the madness of G.o.ds and have returned Deimos and Phobos glutted with unnatural delight. Tellus moons with grief, and the faces of men are as the faces of Erinyes, even as when Astraea fled to the skies, and the waves of our bidding encompa.s.sed all the land saving this high peak alone. Amidst this chaos, prepared to herald his coming yet to conceal his arrival, even now toileth our latest born messenger, in whose dreams are all the images which other messengers have dreamed before him. He it is that we have chosen to blend into one glorious whole all the beauty that the world hath known before, and to write words wherein shall echo all the wisdom and the loveliness of the past. He it is who shall proclaim our return and sing of the days to come when Fauns and Dryads shall haunt their accustomed groves in beauty. Guided was our choice by those who now sit before the Corycian grotto on thrones of ivory, and in whose songs thou shalt hear notes of sublimity by which years hence thou shalt know the greater messenger when he cometh. Attend their voices as one by one they sing to thee here. Each note shall thou hear again in the poetry which is to come, the poetry which shall bring peace and pleasure to thy soul, though search for it through bleak years thou must. Attend with diligence, for each chord that vibrates away into hiding shall appear again to thee after thou hast returned to earth, as Alpheus, sinking his waters into the soul of h.e.l.las, appears as the crystal arethusa in remote Sicilia."
Then arose Homeros, the ancient among bards, who took his lyre and chanted his hymn to Aphrodite. No word of Greek did Marcia know, yet did the message not fall vainly upon her ears, for in the cryptic rhythm was that which spake to all mortals and G.o.ds, and needed no interpreter.
So too the songs of Dante and Goethe, whose unknown words dave the ether with melodies easy to ready and adore. But at last remembered accents resounded before the listener. It was the Swan of Avon, once a G.o.d among men, and still a G.o.d among G.o.ds: Write, write, that from the b.l.o.o.d.y course of war, My dearest master, your dear son, may hie; Bless him at home in peace, whilst I from far, His name with zealous fervour sanctify.
Accents still more familiar arose as Milton, blind no more, declaimed immortal harmony: Or let thy lamp at midnight hour Be seen in some high lonely tower, Where I might oft out.w.a.tch the Bear With thrice-great Hermes, or unsphere The spirit of Plato, to unfold What worlds or what vast regions hold The immortal mind, that hath forsook Her mansion in this fleshy nook.
Sometime let gorgeous tragedy In sceptered pall come sweeping by, Presenting Thebes, or Pelop"s line, Or the tale of Troy divine.
Last of all came the young voice of Keats, closest of all the messengers to the beauteous faun-folk: Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter, therefore, yet sweep pipes, play on...
When old age shall this generation waste, Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say"st "Beauty is truth -- truth beauty" -- that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
As the singer ceased, there came a sound in the wind blowing from far Egypt, where at night Aurora mourns by the Nile for her slain Memnon. To the feet of the Thunderer flew the rosy-fingered G.o.ddess and, kneeling, cried, "Master, it is time I unlocked the Gates of the East." And Phoebus, handing his lyre to Calliope, his bride among the Muses, prepared to depart for the jewelled and column-raised Palace of the Sun, where fretted the steeds already harnessed to the golden car of Day. So Zeus descended from his caryen throne and placed his hand upon the head of Marcia, saying: "Daughter, the dawn is nigh, and it is well that thou shouldst return before the awakening of mortals to thy home. Weep not at the bleakness of thy life, for the shadow of false faiths will soon be gone and the G.o.ds shall once more walk among men. Search thou unceasingly for our messenger, for in him wilt thou find peace and comfort. By his word shall thy steps be guided to happiness, and in his dreams of beauty shall thy spirit find that which it craveth." As Zeus ceased, the young Hermes gently seized the maiden and bore her up toward the fading stars, up and westward over unseen seas.
Many years have pa.s.sed since Marcia dreamt of the G.o.ds and of their Parna.s.sus conclave. Tonight she sits in the same s.p.a.cious drawing-room, but she is not alone. Gone is the old spirit of unrest, for beside her is one whose name is luminous with celebrity: the young poet of poets at whose feet sits all the world. He is reading from a ma.n.u.script words which none has ever heard before, but which when heard will bring to men the dreams and the fancies they lost so many centuries ago, when Pan lay down to doze in Arcady, and the great G.o.ds withdrew to sleep in lotos-gardens beyond the lands of the Hesperides. In the subtle cadences and hidden melodies of the bard the spirit of the maiden had found rest at last, for there echo the divinest notes of Thracian Orpheus, notes that moved the very rocks and trees by Hebrus" banks. The singer ceases, and with eagerness asks a verdict, yet what can Marcia say but that the strain is "fit for the G.o.ds"?
And as she speaks there comes again a vision of Parna.s.sus and the far-off sound of a mighty voice saying, "By his word shall thy steps be guided to happiness, and in his dreams of beauty shall thy spirit find all that it craveth."
Polaris
By H.P. Lovecraft
1918.
Into the North Window of my chamber glows the Pole Star with uncanny light. All through the long h.e.l.lish hours of blackness it shines there. And in the autumn of the year, when the winds from the north curse and whine, and the red-leaved trees of the swamp mutter things to one another in the small hours of the morning under the horned waning moon, I sit by the cas.e.m.e.nt and watch that star.
Down from the heights reels the glittering Ca.s.siopeia as the hours wear on, while Charles" Wain lumbers up from behind the vapour-soaked swamp trees that sway in the night wind. Just before dawn Arcturus winks ruddily from above the cemetary on the low hillock, and Coma Berenices shimmers weirdly afar off in the mysterious east; but still the Pole Star leers down from the same place in the black vault, winking hideously like an insane watching eye which strives to convey some strange message, yet recalls nothing save that it once had a message to convey. Sometimes, when it is cloudy, I can sleep.
Well do I remember the night of the great Aurora, when over the swamp played the shocking corruscations of the daemon light. After the beam came clouds, and then I slept.
And it was under a horned waning moon that I saw the city for the first time.
Still and somnolent did it lie, on a strange plateau in a hollow between strange peaks. Of ghastly marble were its walls and its towers, its columns, domes, and pavements. In the marble streets were marble pillars, the upper parts of which were carven into the images of grave bearded men. The air was warm and stirred not. And overhead, scarce ten degrees from the zenith, glowed that watching Pole Star. Long did I gaze on the city, but the day came not. When the red Aldebaran, which blinked low in the sky but never set, had crawled a quarter of the way around the horizon, I saw light and motion in the houses and the streets. Forms strangely robed, but at once n.o.ble and familiar, walked abroad and under the horned waning moon men talked wisdom in a tongue which I understood, though it was unlike any language which I had ever known. And when the red Aldebaran had crawled more than half-way around the horizon, there were again darkness and silence.
When I awaked, I was not as I had been. Upon my memory was graven the vision of the city, and within my soul had arisen another and vaguer recollection, of whose nature I was not then certain. Thereafter, on the cloudy nights when I could not sleep, I saw the city often; sometimes under the hot, yellow rays of a sun which did not set, but which wheeled low in the horizon. And on the clear nights the Pole Star leered as never before.
Gradually I came to wonder what might be my place in that city on the strange plateau betwixt strange peaks. At first content to view the scene as an all-observant uncorporeal presence, I now desired to define my relation to it, and to speak my mind amongst the grave men who conversed each day in the public squares. I said to myself, "This is no dream, for by what means can I prove the greater reality of that other life in the house of stone and brick south of the sinister swamp and the cemetery on the low hillock, where the Pole Star peeps into my north window each night?"
One night as I listened to the discourses in the large square containing many statues, I felt a change; and perceived that I had at last a bodily form. Nor was I a stranger in the streets of Olathoe, which lies on the plateau of Sarkia, betwixt the peaks of Noton and Kadiphonek. It was my friend Alos who spoke, and his speech was one that pleased my soul, for it was the speech of a true man and patriot. That night had the news come of Daikos" fall, and of the advance of the Inutos; squat, h.e.l.lish yellow fiends who five years ago had appeared out of the unknown west to ravage the confines of our kingdom, and to besiege many of our towns. Having taken the fortified places at the foot of the mountains, their way now lay open to the plateau, unless every citizen could resist with the strength of ten men. For the squat creatures were mighty in the arts of war, and knew not the scruples of honour which held back our tall, grey-eyed men of Lomar from ruthless conquest.
Alos, my friend, was commander of all the forces on the plateau, and in him lay the last hope of our country. On this occasion he spoke of the perils to be faced and exhorted the men of Olathoe, bravest of the Lomarians, to sustain the traditions of their ancestors, who when forced to move southward from Zobna before the advance of the great ice sheet (even as our descendents must some day flee from the land of Lomar) valiently and victoriously swept aside the hairly, long-armed, cannibal Gnophkehs that stood in their way. To me Alos denied the warriors part, for I was feeble and given to strange faintings when subjected to stress and hardships. But my eyes were the keenest in the city, despite the long hours I gave each day to the study of the Pnakotic ma.n.u.scripts and the wisdom of the Zobnarian Fathers; so my friend, desiring not to doom me to inaction, rewarded me with that duty which was second to nothing in importance. To the watchtower of Thapnen he sent me, there to serve as the eyes of our army. Should the Inutos attempt to gain the citadel by the narrow pa.s.s behind the peak Noton and thereby surprise the garrison, I was to give the signal of fire which would warn the waiting soldiers and save the town from immediate disaster.
Alone I mounted the tower, for every man of stout body was needed in the pa.s.ses below. My brain was sore dazed with excitement and fatigue, for I had not slept in many days; yet was my purpose firm, for I loved my native land of Lomar, and the marble city Olathoe that lies betwixt the peaks Noton and Kadiphonek.