




HE

By H. P. Lovecraft


[Illustration: “The old man clawed and spat at me through the moldy
air, and barked things in his throat as he swayed with the yellow
curtain he clutched.”]


I saw him on a sleepless night when I was walking desperately to save
my soul and my vision. My coming to New York had been a mistake; for
whereas I had looked for poignant wonder and inspiration in the
teeming labyrinths of ancient streets that twist endlessly from
forgotten courts and squares and waterfronts to courts and squares and
waterfronts equally forgotten, and in the Cyclopean modern towers and
pinnacles that rise blackly Babylonian under waning moons, I had found
instead only a sense of horror and oppression which threatened to
master, paralyze, and annihilate me. The disillusion had been gradual. Coming for the first time upon the
town, I had seen it in the sunset from a bridge, majestic above its
waters, its incredible peaks and pyramids rising flowerlike and
delicate from pools of violet mist to play with the flaming golden
clouds and the first stars of evening. Then it had lighted up window
by window above the shimmering tides where lanterns nodded and glided
and deep horns bayed weird harmonies, and had itself become a starry
firmament of dream, redolent of faery music, and one with the marvels
of Carcassonne and Samarcand and El Dorado and all glorious and
half-fabulous cities. Shortly afterward I was taken through those
antique ways so dear to my fancy--narrow, curving alleys and passages
where rows of red Georgian brick blinked with small-paned dormers
above pillared doorways that had looked on gilded sedans and paneled
coaches--and in the first flush of realization of these long-wished
things I thought I had indeed achieved such treasures as would make me
in time a poet. But success and happiness were not to be. Garish daylight showed only
squalor and alienage and the noxious elephantiasis of climbing,
spreading stone where the moon had hinted of loveliness and elder
magic; and the throngs of people that seethed through the flumelike
streets were squat, swarthy strangers with hardened faces and narrow
eyes, shrewd strangers without dreams and without kinship to the
scenes about them, who could never mean aught to a blue-eyed man of
the old folk, with the love of fair green lanes and white New England
village steeples in his heart. So instead of the poems I had hoped for, there came only a shuddering
blankness and ineffable loneliness; and I saw at last a fearful truth
which no one had ever dared to breathe before--the unwhisperable
secret of secrets--the fact that this city of stone and stridor is not
a sentient perpetuation of Old New York as London is of Old London and
Paris of Old Paris, but that it is in fact quite dead, its sprawling
body imperfectly embalmed and infested with queer animate things which
have nothing to do with it as it was in life. Upon making this
discovery I ceased to sleep comfortably; though something of resigned
tranquillity came back as I gradually formed the habit of keeping off
the streets by day and venturing abroad only at night, when darkness
calls forth what little of the past still hovers wraithlike about, and
old white doorways remember the stalwart forms that once passed
through them. With this mode of relief I even wrote a few poems, and
still refrained from going home to my people lest I seem to crawl back
ignobly in defeat. Then, on a sleepless night’s walk, I met the man. It was in a
grotesque hidden courtyard of the Greenwich section, for there in my
ignorance I had settled, having heard of the place as the natural home
of poets and artists. The archaic lanes and houses and unexpected bits
of square and court had indeed delighted me, and when I found the
poets and artists to be loud-voiced pretenders whose quaintness is
tinsel and whose lives are a denial of all that pure beauty which is
poetry and art, I stayed on for love of these venerable things. I
fancied them as they were in their prime, when Greenwich was a placid
village not yet engulfed by the town; and in the hours before dawn,
when all the revellers had slunk away, I used to wander alone among
their cryptical windings and brood upon the curious arcana which
generations must have deposited there. This kept my soul alive, and
gave me a few of those dreams and visions for which the poet far
within me cried out. The man came upon me at about 2 one cloudy August morning, as I was
threading a series of detached courtyards; now accessible only through
the unlighted hallways of intervening buildings, but once forming
parts of a continuous network of picturesque alleys. I had heard of
them by vague rumor, and realized that they could not be upon any map
of today; but the fact that they were forgotten only endeared them to
me, so that I had sought them with twice my usual eagerness. Now that
I had found them, my eagerness was again redoubled; for something in
their arrangement dimly hinted that they might be only a few of many
such, with dark, dumb counterparts wedged obscurely betwixt high blank
walls and deserted rear tenements, or lurking lamplessly behind
archways, unbetrayed by hordes of the foreign-speaking or guarded by
furtive and uncommunicative artists whose practises do not invite
publicity or the light of day. He spoke to me without invitation, noting my mood and glances as I
studied certain knockered doorways above iron-railed steps, the pallid
glow of traceried transoms feebly lighting my face. His own face was
in shadow, and he wore a wide-brimmed hat which somehow blended
perfectly with the out-of-date cloak he affected; but I was subtly
disquieted even before he addressed me. His form was very slight, thin
almost to cadaverousness; and his voice proved phenomenally soft and
hollow, though not particularly deep. He had, he said, noticed me
several times at my wanderings; and inferred that I resembled him in
loving the vestiges of former years. Would I not like the guidance of
one long practised in these explorations, and possessed of local
information profoundly deeper than any which an obvious newcomer could
possibly have gained? As he spoke, I caught a glimpse of his face in the yellow beam from a
solitary attic window. It was a noble, even a handsome, elderly
countenance; and bore the marks of a lineage and refinement unusual
for the age and place. Yet some quality about it disturbed me almost
as much as its features pleased me--perhaps it was too white, or too
expressionless, or too much out of keeping with the locality, to make
me feel easy or comfortable. Nevertheless I followed him; for in those
dreary days my quest for antique beauty and mystery was all that I had
to keep my soul alive, and I reckoned it a rare favor of Fate to fall
in with one whose kindred seekings seemed to have penetrated so much
farther than mine.