* * * * *
There is a blacker dark than that of the starless night, there is a
blacker dark than that of the mountain. It is the black of this hall.
Those were a dark outside that my sense invaded. This is a dark that
is invading me, that will fill me, choke me, if I stay in it long. It
will drive out from the frail shell of my mind any light.
Black hall, you must be gone through! I press a finger underneath my
brow, against the lashes of my eye: I cannot see it. This dark is
immobile, so I must move. No gray tinges it, no stir of light. It is
packed density. It fights against my knowledge that it is but a hall
... a hall to be passed through, a hall at whose other end as at the
end I have entered, is a door.
My will saves me from the sense that this invading black is infinite.
I make my hands fumble along the walls: their path is a white tracing
that all my body joyously obeys. I fumble at a door. It opens out. And
the compressed immensity of the hall blows me into a room, blows the
door shut....
There is one window, and the black of the night pours in, gray. I face
this window at the room’s far end, and my eyes drink its grayness with
an uncanny thirst. This room seems but a bellying out of the hall. At
either side of me, blank walls. The room is long, for that single
window is far away, or it is very small.
At my side I grow aware of vibrance in the dark: a vibrance near my
shoulder, and as tall as I. I force my head to turn. My eyes see
nothing. They rush back to the small window whose gray they have drunk
so greedily. The window is gone! Was it a window, then, whose light I
have drunk with my eyes? They turn again. Fear hurries with pricking
feet over my flesh. I want to go back. The blackness of the hall would
be balm now to my eyes. For there is pillared vibrancy beside me.
Fright turns my flesh into myriad scurrying feet. I turn to bolt. The
lock in the door snaps shut.
--I am alone: I am locked into this room with that which locked me in.
The vibrance at my shoulder falls. And my eyes descry a gradual
human form picked from the blackness. It is a subtle growing, as if
individual atoms of the dark were heightened there, grew gray, grew
luminous, and made a man.
He is looking at me, as the gray of his form whitens. He is smiling at
me. He moves in the direction of the door, and I turn with him to hold
him in my eyes. He stands between myself and the door he has locked.
His smile holds me. He is all grown, now. I can see him. He is about as
tall from the ground as I. He is entirely white. Yet he has features.
He has hair, he has hands gently clasped before him. I do not know what
power, colorless and faint, sharpens his body to my sense. But even his
smile is traced upon me, and his eyes that seem to move with a slow
swinging up and down from my brow to my feet.
And still he stands between me and the door.
My fear is gone: it is all burned away in the will to pass him, to pass
the hall, to be back in the lighted room. But even fearless, how can I
go when he stands between me and the door he has locked?
“Let me pass!”
I have spoken, as my mind blanched at the thought of a word. My voice
is throaty and real. His body grows a little dim at the words, and
tremors: he has heard. The tremor steadies back into white.
His hand is beckoning me forward. His smile grows more intense, works
now in my mind like a cold acid. But all my fear is gone. I step
forward. He has not moved. I touch him.
What happens is an instantaneous act, and has no mark upon my sense. It
is I who am next to the door: it is he, stands beyond, his white form
gray and subtly undulous.
I am all act. I have passed through the bolted door. I lance the hall
like a light. I am once more in the lighted room.
* * * * *
My loved ones have grown close since I left them, smiling and saying
that I would return. They are not aware that I am back. Mildred
and Philip murmur side by side. My father has drawn a chair to the
card-table and is playing with Mr. Fayn. In the far corner sit my
mother and Doctor Stein, smiling, chatting. I stand at the door and
watch them. All six faces are within my eyes obliquely, and they do not
see me.
Now instantly, these various faces turn: see me: become one in a
shrivel of horror.
I stand still. Their variance has rotted all away. They are one....
Mildred and mother and the others ... in a rigid gaze at me, in a cold
terror rising from their sight.
“Well, it is I: only I.” Their faces do not move, they have not heard
me.
But their stark death, making them one, moves. They rise to their feet.
Mildred and Philip, faces fixed on me, retreat: Mr. Fayn and my father
move aside. They huddle together in a single group. Six various bodies
crowded close and one, in a shrivel of horror.
I go forward. My hands are forward and I am near to them. They do not
stir. With my hand I touch the cheek of Mildred. With my hand I touch
the hand of my mother. My hands go forward as through an impalpable
light! I sweep with maddened arms about their bodies: my arms,
unhindered, draw in on themselves. They stand stark huddled, their eyes
fixed upon mine: and my arms thresh through space!
Fear is full gathered in my throat. I shriek. I shriek, and thresh with
unresisted arms....
_b_
I awoke crying out.... Very warm, close-bundled, I cry as with the
toothless hollow mouth of a babe. I cry and yet there is no sound. I
stop. I am more awake. My opening eyes perceive a world that whirls in
mazing colors and threatens to break in. This delirious dance subsides.
I am quiet in my bed and the dark air lies quiet all about me. I know
my body, I know my sheets and covers, I know my room, my open window:
the city, purple and encaverned pours through the window into my room.
The room all this time has slumbered quietly while I left it, and have
come back to it. Swift fears start still from my muscles and my nerves,
like discovered stowaways of that journey whence I am back in my room.
And then I knew my Dream, and my mind was stripped of space and time as
I tried to face it.
--There is revelation in the Dream! Of that I was convinced. Let me
explore its strangely shifting realm. But my mind could not enter.
There, stript for action, it pounded at the gate, and it could not
enter. I am inside the revealing realm of my Dream. But what good is
that, since my mind cannot enter?
I lie in this agony of confusion, holding within my hand the key to the
mystery that has distraught my world: and surely my eyes are good, yet
when I strain to see, they veer, they tangent off. I cannot see what I
hold!
From this turmoil there must be release. My body is moving. I do not
know how long I have lain in bed, breaking in vain at the gate of my
Dream. Not very long, for the night is still there murmuring like a
hollow sea outside and sending in breakers at my open window. There
have been no other thoughts, no fancies at all. The Dream is palpable
and I within it, and my mind that must rejoin me, knocking, beating.
That is all.
Then, sudden I am moving! I am getting up, and calmly with the
certainty of custom I put on my clothes: I shut the house door: I am in
the street.
Faint vestige of dawn. In sparse gray filaments dawn threads through
the night: a gradual loom of light that will thicken, that will
converge, that will become a texture.... On the street, at the door as
I step out, is a man.
He is waiting for me. He is clad in black, he stands in the black
shadow of the house: all that emerges of him is his head which is round
and white.
All of his head is white: it has a plastic and smooth pallor like the
form of certain larvæ: it is a color inhuman and yet deeply fertile. He
sees me and nods his head and I feel the black-clad body stir in the
gloom of my house. I make no sign: I begin to walk. At my rear I feel
him walk apace with me. He is behind and quiet, but he is leading me
by an invisible pressure which he holds upon the nape of my neck, the
cortex of my brain.
* * * * *
The city has that flaccid impenetrance which comes before dawn. The
rush of a car, the pelt of horses’ hoofs, the stride of a man, the
flutter of a woman, quiver like darts against the night and fall away.
Night is this impenetrable hide about the city.... We are outside the
city. A ferry-boat plethorically heaves us across the River. I stand at
the forward rail, and the white head man, lost in a shadow of drays and
draymen and slowly stamping horses, holds still his palpable pressure
on my brain.
--What if I turn about?
I look at the little waves ... the night is windless ... thridding
and skipping about the hull of the boat. Their cool tips carry dawn,
between the night of the sky and the night of the black waters.
--What if I leap in?
Will the waves hold me? They will part, treacherous and careless, and
let me sink at once to the night they dance against. I know in an
acceptance weary like age, that I can not leap into the River, and that
I cannot turn about. I feel: this guiding pressure upon the cortex of
my brain, if it were in my eyes, that it might blind me.
... We are walking in a field. This field is very clear to me, as if
its rugose stretch and its barren saliences had already picked their
measure in my brain. The coarse grass is dry and gray like autumn, on
this sultry April night. As my feet press through, the grass rustles.
The earth breaks into warty mounds, grass tufted, and falls to sudden
hollows slakish with caked mud. I walk, and though I have not seen his
form save for that moment at the door of my house, I know the white
head man following at my rear, and leading, keeping pace with my feet
so that the sound of his steps is lost in mine.
The field is wide and long: no light of habitation flecks its sallow
gloom. But the rathe filaments of dawn swirl in its air with more
abundance: a gray flush lies close to its black furrows, catches in the
grass and brings to it a tremorous stir as if it was a mouth feebly in
voice. I walk. The field is wide and long. The field’s horizons lip
darkly down, making this murmurous silence of the field a shut dank
thing, and I and the white head man imprisoned in it.
He still prodding me on, prodding upon the quick of my brain: he who is
behind and who is silent....
The ground looms a little ahead. And as it rises, the dead grass ceases
underneath my feet. My feet tread sterile clay: they strike on it hard
as if the clay were frozen, and yet the air of the field is wet and
sultry.... My feet stop.
I am at the top of the little loom of the ground. Straight before me
an empty shadow. The ground cuts precipitous at my feet. It wreathes
about into a semicircle. Below me in the black lies a slakish gleam: a
sort of slime within the night: far below. And beyond that, above this
bottom of the circling pit yet lower than the crest where I stand, the
field goes on over a clutter of broken rocks and stone.