Broken Necks/The Yellow Goat
The grave, melodious shout of rain filled the night. The streets had become like dark and attenuated pools. The rain falling illuminated the hidden faces of the buildings and the air was silvered with whirling lines. Through the sparkle and fume of the rain-colored night the lights of the café signs burned like golden-lettered banners flung stiffly into the storm. About these lights floated patches of yellow mist, through which the rain swarmed in flurries of little gleaming moths. There were also the lights of the doors and windows beneath the burning signs. They, too, exhaled oblongs of yellow steam upon the darkness. The remainder of the street was lost in a wilderness of rain that bubbled and raced over its stone in an endless and bewildering detonation.
I had been in this street before and I knew it for a street of little grimy-fronted cafés and vicious haunts—crude and rococo gathering places for niggers, prostitutes and louts. But now as I walked with my shoes spurting water and the rain hanging from my clothes, there was about this street a curious unfamiliarity. The fuming, motionless rain filled the air with a mysterious presence. Beneath my feet ran the silver-tipped pool of the flooded pavement. Gleaming in its rain-splintered depths swam the reflections of the burning lamps overhead. These, as I walked, were the yellow script of another and wraith-like world staring up at me out of nowhere. The rest was darkness.
I hurried on as the sound of thunder crawled out of the sky. A vein of lightning opened the night and in the sudden blue pallor the street and its buildings etched themselves on the vanishing light —a monstrous and phosphorescent world. The rain flung itself for an instant in great opalescent sheets out of the lighted spaces. I caught a glimpse of a figure in the distance, hunched and stationary. The darkness and the desolate whirl of the rain resumed and I walked on, staring as after something vanished. A wind now entered the street, outlining itself in the wild undulations of the rain on the pavements. Clandestine notions held rendezvous in my thought as I pressed forward against the storm. Decidedly the street had an unfamiliar air and was full of dishevelled rain ghosts. The best of philosophers become wet in the rain. The roar of the flooded night, the leap and hollow blaze of the lightning, the sudden inanimate burst of pale violet outline in the chaotic dark, were things which seemingly isolated me from the normal contemplations which are my habit. I began to fancy myself, in this dilapidated, storm-ridden street, as some tiny wanderer through a strange and torturous world.
The little windows that trickled their yellow lights toward me seemed the glowing pasteboards of some forgotten illusion. What with the stumble of thunder in the dark and the tenacious lash of the rain, a burn had come into my body. I was moving prosaically enough toward the house of a friend. He had offered for my inspection several manuscripts purchased that day and scrawled with diverting cryptograms. In a pocket, tucked dry and safe out of the wet, I was carrying the work of a profound Englishman who had devoted his life to the unraveling of cryptograms. But now the churning of the wind and rain, the noise and the phosphorescent gulfs of light into which I was continually plunging, had brought me an intoxication in which manuscripts and friends and cryptograms seemed miserable things. I drew in with gulps the quickening odor of the storm—the spice of water-laden winds. I had felt at first a proper regard for my clothes, an ethical emotion which had gradually given way to relish of the storm. This in turn, as I moved on leaning against the wind and the pliant walls of water, was succeeded by an elation groundless and insane. The little adjectives I had been arranging for my lonely delight were seized by an incoherence. I began to ponder upon violent abstractions, and the thought of the routine ways of life became to me unbearable. The innumerable little meditations with which I usually beguile my solitary journeys offended this new reach of my spirit. I went plunging on, soaked and disheveled, curbing a desire to shout and dash about.
Moving thus through the storm, my thought became full of the tremblings of a dancer stiffened by the beat of furious music. What were not possible? Strange, irrational expectations left me smiling faintly. But the wild dance of the wind, the halloo of the night and the vast burst of water about me urged me on despite this snobbery with which all good logicians regard their emotions. How gladly we surrender our treasured philosophies at the first touch of ecstasy. Where and of what avail were the intrigues of reason in the hammering of a night like this—a night for poets and mystics, true fellows of all storms. What strange altar fires were those engulfing flickers of dead moonlight? A racket of what gods were those bounding sounds? Thus my thought continued to spurn the little tracts of reason and circle in the profound and mystic abstraction of the wanderer in storms.
The night was growing wilder. My eyes straining toward unimagined things bored into the vapors and steam of the rain. Whereon a blinding gust of light brought me shuddering to a halt. The thunder filled the night suddenly with an amazing tumult, a horror of sound, and I remained stiff and staring as in a dream at a face that floated in a piercing light. I stood as one suspended in the rushing of winds. The world, but for this face which confronted me, had vanished. I saw it to be the face of a woman contorted into a stark and indescribable grimace of rapture. Its eyes gleamed like black and lavender tips of flame. Its teeth stood out white and skull-like against the red of an opened mouth. I was aware of a sound of laughter that seemed to come floating out of the roaring spaces about me.
A silence and darkness seized the world. I stood listening to the melodious detonations of the rain and the harmless sweep, of the wind. Over my head burned a café sign, and J was gazing into a washed and emptied panel of glass. Within I saw figures jerking about in a dance and an orchestra of niggers playing. The yellow script overhead proclaimed me in the presence of the Yellow Goat.
In the home of my friend it was quiet and cheerful. Outside the rain chattered in the darkness and the alto of the wind arose in long organ notes from the houses. We sat and smoked and exchanged elaborate phrases. But my eyes had evidently been affected by the lightning. When I closed them they still revealed to me the instant of piercing light and the face floating under the sign of the Yellow Goat. Seen thus in memory, there was an irritating familiarity about its features. I had not intended to, but I found myself after several moments telling my friend of the incident. I spoke with a great show of incorruptible logic of the thing, pointing out that what I had seen had been undoubtedly the face of an uncommonly beautiful prostitute surprised in a yawn by the gulp of lightning. But my friend is a creature given to making vast and melodramatic riddles out of such phenomena, and he differed from me.
"Stuff and nonsense," I finally interrupted him. ' "If you’ll stop, quoting the Cabala and cease your chattering about Sabbats and witches, I’ll discuss the thing with you as befits two civilized men." '
He stared with a faint smile at his shelves of books that, like erratic and colored teeth, stood out from the wall.
I resumed: "There was the face of a dancer whom I watched one evening on the stage. I remember now a curious gleam in her eyes and recall how I tried vainly to fit an emotion to such a gleam. There was the face of a hatless boy running through the streets one sunny morning who bumped into me and dashed on without begging my pardon. There was the face of a man I listened to once as he played the violin, and I remember, too, the face of a woman that I hesitated to kiss. Now the face I saw in the lightning reminded me of all these faces. There is often something curious. These faces I now remember possessed an identical contortion, an identical arrangement of features and somehow an expression identical to the one I have just told you of. Stark and inhuman. A furious and repulsive loveliness. It was gone in an instant. But I saw it so vividly that I see it now when I close my eyes . . . an insufferable gesture thrust out of the lightning. The faces of which I am reminded were not so definite. But they had the same light about them."
"I know the light you mean," said my friend. "I’ve noted it myself. If you watch closely you will catch an instant of it now and then shining through the grimace of a dancer or of a man laughing, or, as you say, playing the violin.” He paused and his face became full of a curious sincerity. "Or of a woman in passion. Yes, I know what you mean. Dark and violent legends have been written about this light, for it has always been in the world and yet seemingly not of it. In demonology. . ."
Again I offered an interruption. "Let us not talk of demonology. Inasmuch as a demon is unimaginable, any adjectives we may arrange concerning it will be crude and futile. What I saw in the face in the storm I’ve seen before, and in places without storm. I’ve put it down as a maniacal gleam, the indication of a fugitive disorder of the brain. I’ve noticed vaguely that the expression is somehow connected with people in moments of inspiration. I recall a young poet I knew. His stare at times became like a wild laugh out of which mirth has passed and which has become full of something else. This phrase vastly exaggerated would describe the expression of the features I looked at tonight . . ."
I left my friend with the emotion of a man who has offended his own intelligence. This babbling over the face of a prostitute passed in the rain appealed to me as the vaporings of a weakened brain. Yet it pursued me. I found myself excitedly searching in the faces of the little half-dead who swarmed the streets, who rode in ears, who sat in restaurants. There were impressions I could not shake off by assuring myself of an innate idiocy. And therefore three nights later I jammed a cap over my ears and with the collar of my mackintosh properly raised I launched myself into another night lashed with wind and rain in quest of the Yellow Goat.
I was curiously nervous as I turned into the street of the grimy-fronted cafés—the golden-lettered street signs adrift in the storm, the vast wash of water illuminating the dark with its fugitive glint, the boiling pavements and the odor of wet winds. I pressed on, hoping for the lightning and the thunder. For, I assured myself, the quest demanded a certain footlighting to be real, and off-stage noises. But the darkness, swollen with rain and wind, remained unrelieved and thus the morbid sanity of my true philosophical nature arose in my thought to confuse me and to prepare me for disillusions. I would find no such face. In fact, the face did not exist. It had been the trick of lightning and jumbled nerves. And those other faces which I so obligingly remembered—auxiliary hallucinations, all of them. In any event, promenading on a night like this savored of idiocy, face or no face. The quest of mysteries indeed! The urge of spiritual hungers, to be sure! Behold a sol- emn ass walking, as was his privilege, through a pneumonia-breeding deluge . .
The wind bayed through the streets and the rain enveloped me in its monotonous rush. Staring ahead I saw gleaming in a little floating oasis of bright mist the sign of the Yellow Goat. There was magic in the sign. The promptings of sanity fled my thought and an exultation tangled my legs. After all, there were destinations in the city. There were the veils of Isis still, and the piles of stone that little hands reared had not lost their cunning to conceal unimaginative mysteries. I paused before the entrance of the Yellow Goat as the streaming door swung open and two figures darted out. They were by me and gone in an instant, and, as if in pursuit of them, rushed a rollicking lurch of sound. Into the night floated a strain of music and the laugh of a woman.
I entered the Yellow Goat and the night vanished behind me. I was suddenly in a strange world of lights and shouts and odors. Dancing bodies spun and jerked among the tables. Faces bounced amid layers of tobacco smoke that lay in undulent lavender sheets above the floor. Through streaks of color and movement came the bray of music—a melody leaping between the smash of trombones and the bursting staccato of drums. Five niggers with faces satin black were swaying over silver instruments and shouting as they played. Among the round-topped table the revels and contortions of the dancers threatened to annihilate all furniture. A waiter passed in front of me balancing a black tray laden with colored glasses. At the tables sat men and women with faces that seemed somehow out of focus, niggers, prostitutes, louts. The slant of red mouths opened with laughter, the movement of eyes and hands and white throats of women—these I saw as fragments through a mist. I moved through the room toward a table that seemed to me empty. The reek of wine and steaming clothes, the sting of perspiring perfumes, the bedroom odors of women’s bodies dizzied me as I dropped into a chair at this table.
Opposite me sat a woman with a face cut out of searlet, white and lavender cardboards. Her head was thrown back in a grimace of violent laughter. The red flesh of her opened mouth and throat stared at me behind the roll of sound that issued. I was conscious for the moment of being embraced by soft arms, and I felt the hot and opened mouth pressing almost on my face. About me men were banging glasses on the table and women were screaming laughter. To the music of the five shouting niggers couples were making feverish gestures with their bodies against the roar and haze of the room. The faces of drunken niggers, prostitutes and louts hung in the odor and smoke. I sat silent like some bewildered and forbidding stranger, wondering how this woman had appeared so abruptly opposite me. I was in these first moments walking again through the storm and beholding in a gulp of lightning the strange features of a woman behind the door of the Yellow Goat.
The music of the five niggers stopped and a sudden emptiness flooded the room. The confusion became a matter of men’s and women’s voices and scurrying waiters. The woman opposite me alone remained unchanged. She was gazing at me with eyes in whose swarthy depths moved tiny streaks of scarlet that were like wavering flame tips. Beneath her eyes her skin was darkened as if by bruises. A peculiarly sultry light glowed over their heavy discolorations. Her mouth had shut and her cheeks were without curves, following the corpse-like lines of her skull. They were paper white, but again I noted in them the curious sultry glow of her smeared and heavy eyes. Her lips were like the streaks of vermilion lacquer painted on an idol’s face. She had thrust two bared arms across the table top and was leaning forward. She was regarding me with a smile.
To this extent am I able to describe her. The face of a malignant pierrette or a diabolic clown, stark and illumined as under some strong lavender ray; the gleaming and putrescent eyes haloed in a gelatinous mist, full of reptilian sorcery. These are simple things to recount. But these were merely the mask for a bewildering thing which held me silent in a strange inertia. This thing hovered between us like a third person. It was an animation creating waves in the air that were neither of light nor of sound. My thought grew dim and, during these moments that I sat returning her smile, an almost unbearable lust cried in my blood.
We arose and walked arm and arm out of the Yellow Goat into the night and rain. I was aware of faces turned toward me as we passed among the tables but they seemed the fragments of a foreign world. In the rain her body breathed against me, warming me with its hot flesh. My thought became like an echo forever escaping me. The woman tugged at my arm.
"Run, run,” she cried. She threw her head back and filled the night with her laugh. We ran.
We came breathless up a flight of stairs into a room lighted with a gas jet. The heavy sulphurous scent of tuberoses stuffed the place but I could make out no flowers. I stood against the door we had entered. The woman’s clothes had fallen from her as if blown from her body by a strong wind. Nude but for the black silken stockings she had not removed she turned toward me. Her white skin glistened with moisture and was covered in places with the faint colors of stained glass. She began to dance and throw her arms about and her mouth opened in a laugh. The room became saturated with her. She swept by me plunging about in her dance, posturing and shouting. The gleam of her eyes buried itself in my brain and left me crazed with desire for her.
It was this gleam and the rapturous grimacing of her face that awakened my thought. I recalled as from a distance that I had come in quest of something. This thing I saw now in her face as she tumbled about the malodorous room. It expressed torture. I had seen this light that burned from her, this curious contortion of features in the faces of the city, now for an instant in the inspiration of a dancer, now in the midst of a violin’s wonder, now in the joy of a woman laughing. I had never seen it as I saw it now, but always as a fugitive and lunatic light that fixed itself upon the air, after it had vanished from the eyes of men and women. Here was this light in a nudity more intimate than the shine and odor of her body’s flesh.
She had ceased her dancing and thrown herself upon the grimy rumpled surface of a bed. Her laughter also had ceased. She lay with her arms extended toward me, her nakedness moving faintly like some thick white and undulant reptile. I saw that her eyes were closed but that there was nevertheless about her the stare of a terrible vision. A moan began to come from her and her fingers like claws scratched at the air. Her moving and the odors arising from her grew unendurable. I opened the door softly and ran. Pursuing me came the sound of laughter, rising in a howl.
Outside it still rained. The wind no longer blew. I hurried away and my thought so long tangled in emotion began to unwind itself.
"She is a disease," I murmured to myself, "Her flesh is insane. She is the secret of ecstasy and of gods and of all things that are beautiful."
About my feet the whirling lines of the rain burst upon the pavement forming innumerable little v’s. In the proper course of time I would fashion adjectives out of the thing the woman of the Yellow Goat had revealed to me and thus perhaps add to the progress of my race. But now there drifted before me a white-torsoed phantom and in my nose there remained the hot smell of a decay.