CARTOON

(From The Nation, 1916.)

. . . I cannot describe the street I turned into, then, like no street I have ever been in; so long, so narrow, so regular, yet somehow so unsubstantial; one had continually a feeling that, walking at the gray houses on either side, one would pass through them. I must have gone miles down it without meeting even the shadow of a human being; till, just as it was growing dusk, I saw a young man come silently out, as I suppose, from a door, though none was opened. I can depict neither his dress nor figure; like the street he looked unsubstantial, and the expression on his shadowy face haunted me, it was so like that of a starving man before whom one has set a meal, then snatched it away. And now, in the deepening dusk, out of every house, young men like him were starting forth in the same mysterious manner, all with that hungry look on their almost invisible faces.

Peering at one of them, I said:

“What is it—whom do you want?”

But he gave me no answer. It was too dark now to see any face; and I had only the feeling of passing between presences as I went along, without getting to any turning out of that endless street. Presently, in desperation, I doubled in my tracks.

A lamplighter must have been following me, for every lamp was lighted, giving a faint flickering greenish glare, as might lumps of phosphorescent matter hung out in the dark. The hungry, phantom-like young men had all vanished, and I was wondering where they could have gone, when I saw—some distance ahead—a sort of grayish whirlpool stretching across the street, under one of those flickering marsh-light looking lamps. A noise was coming from that swirl, which seemed to be raised above the ground—a ghostly swishing, as of feet among dry leaves, broken by the gruntings of some deep sense gratified. I went on till I could see that it was formed of human figures slowly whirling round the lamp. And suddenly I stood still in horror. Every other figure was a skeleton, and between danced a young girl in white—the whole swirling ring was formed alternately of skeletons and gray-white girls. Creeping a little nearer still, I could tell that these skeletons were the young men I had seen starting out of the houses as I passed, having the same look of awful hunger on their faces. And the girls who danced between them had a wan, wistful beauty, turning their eyes to their partners whose bony hands grasped theirs, as though begging them to return to the flesh. Not one noticed me, so deeply were they all absorbed in their mystic revel. And then I saw what it was they were dancing round. Above their heads, below the greenish lamp, a dark thing was dangling. It swung and turned there, never still, like a joint of meat roasting before a fire—the clothed body of an elderly man. The greenish lamp-light glinted on his gray hair, and on his features, every time the face came athwart the light. He swung slowly from right to left, and the dancers whirled from left to right, always meeting that revolving face, as though to enjoy the sight of it. What did it mean—these sad shapes rustling round the obscene thing suspended there! What strange and awful rite was I watching by the lamp’s ghostly phosphorescence? More haunting even than those hungry skeletons and wan gray girls, more haunting and gruesome, was that dead face up there with the impress still on it of bloated life; how it gripped and horrified me, with its pale, fishy eyes, and its neck thick-rolled with flabby flesh, turning and turning on its invisible spit, to the sound of that weird swishing of dead leaves, and those grunting sighs! Who was it they had caught and swung up there, like some dead crow, to sway in the winds? This gibbeted figure, which yet had a look of cold and fattened power—what awful crime towards these skeleton youths and bereaved gray-wan maidens could it be expiating?

Then with a shudder I seemed to recognize that grisly thing—suddenly I knew: I was watching the execution of the Past! There it swung! Gibbeted by the Future, whom, through its manifold lusts it had done to death! And seized with panic I ran forward through the fabric of my dream, that swayed and rustled to left and right of me. . . .