*       *       *       *       *

It was not until I had paid off my taxi and lugged the unwieldy
parallelogram of canvas and wood upstairs to my bachelor apartment that
I bothered to wonder if it might be valuable. I never did find out, but
from the first I was deeply impressed. Hung over my own fireplace, it looked as large and living as a scene
glimpsed through a window or, perhaps, on a stage in a theater. The
capering pink bodies caught new lights from my lamp, lights that glossed
and intensified their shape and color but did not reveal any new
details. I pored once more over the cryptic legend: _I sold my soul that
I might paint a living picture._

A living picture--was it that? I could not answer. For all my honest
delight in such things, I cannot be called expert or even knowing as
regards art. Did I even like the Golgotha painting? I could not be sure
of that, either. And the rest of the inscription, about selling a soul;
I was considerably intrigued by that, and let my thoughts ramble on the
subject of Satanist complexes and the vagaries of half-crazy painters. As I read, that evening, I glanced up again and again at my new
possession. Sometimes it seemed ridiculous, sometimes sinister. Shortly
after midnight I rose, gazed once more, and then turned out the parlor
lamp. For a moment, or so it seemed, I could see those dancers, so many
dim-pink silhouettes in the sudden darkness. I went to the kitchen for a
bit of whisky and water, and thence to my bedroom. I had dreams. In them I was a boy again, and my mother and sister were
leaving the house to go to a theater where--think of it!--Richard
Mansfield would play _Beau Brummell_. I, the youngest, was told to stay
at home and mind the troublesome furnace. I wept copiously in my
disappointed loneliness, and then Mansfield himself stalked in, in full
Brummell regalia. He laughed goldenly and stretched out his hand in warm
greeting. I, the lad of my dreams, put out my own hand, then was
frightened when he would not loosen his grasp. I tugged, and he laughed
again. The gold of his laughter turned suddenly hard, cold. I tugged
with all my strength, and woke. *       *       *       *       *

Something held me tight by the wrist. *       *       *       *       *

In my first half-moment of wakefulness I was aware that the room was
filled with the pink dancers of the picture, in nimble, fierce-happy
motion. They were man-size, too, or nearly so, visible in the dark with
the dim radiance of fox-fire. On the small scale of the painting they
had seemed no more than babyishly plump; now they were gross, like huge
erect toads. And, as I awakened fully, they were closing in, a menacing
ring of them, around my bed. One stood at my right side, and its grip,
clumsy and rubbery-hard like that of a monkey, was closed upon my arm. *       *       *       *       *

I saw and sensed all this, as I say, in a single moment. With the
sensing came the realization of peril, so great that I did not stop to
wonder at the uncanniness of my visitors. I tried frantically to jerk
loose. For the moment I did not succeed and as I thrashed about,
throwing my body nearly across the bed, a second dancer dashed in from
the left. It seized and clamped my other arm. I felt, rather than heard,
a wave of soft, wordless merriment from them all. My heart and sinews
seemed to fail, and briefly I lay still in a daze of horror, pinned down
crucifix-fashion between my two captors. Was that a _hammer_ raised above me as I sprawled? There rushed and swelled into me the sudden startled strength that
sometimes favors the desperate. I screamed like any wild thing caught in
a trap, rolled somehow out of bed and to my feet. One of the beings I
shook off and the other I dashed against the bureau. Freed, I made for
the bedroom door and the front of the apartment, stumbling and
staggering on fear-weakened legs. One of the dim-shining pink things barred my way at the very threshold,
and the others were closing in behind, as if for a sudden rush. I flung
my right fist with all my strength and weight. The being bobbed back
unresistingly before my smash, like a rubber toy floating through water. I plunged past, reached the entry and fumbled for the knob of the outer
door. They were all about me then, their rubbery palms fumbling at my
shoulders, my elbows, my pajama jacket. They would have dragged me down
before I could negotiate the lock. A racking shudder possessed me and
seemed to flick them clear. Then I stumbled against a stand, and purely
by good luck my hand fell upon a bamboo walking-stick. I yelled again,
in truly hysterical fierceness, and laid about me as with a whip. My
blows did little or no damage to those unearthly assailants, but they
shrank back, teetering and dancing, to a safe distance. Again I had the
sense that they were laughing, mocking. For the moment I had beaten them
off, but they were sure of me in the end. Just then my groping free hand
pressed a switch. The entry sprang into light. On the instant they were not there. *       *       *       *       *

Somebody was knocking outside, and with trembling fingers I turned the
knob of the door. In came a tall, slender girl with a blue lounging-robe
caught hurriedly around her. Her bright hair was disordered as though
she had just sprung from her bed. "Is someone sick?" she asked in a breathless voice. "I live down the
hall--I heard cries." Her round blue eyes were studying my face, which
must have been ghastly pale. "You see, I'm a trained nurse, and
perhaps----"

"Thank God you did come!" I broke in, unceremoniously but honestly, and
went before her to turn on every lamp in the parlor. It was she who, without guidance, searched out my whisky and siphon and
mixed for me a highball of grateful strength. My teeth rang nervously on
the edge of the glass as I gulped it down. After that I got my own
robe--a becoming one, with satin facings--and sat with her on the divan
to tell of my adventure. When I had finished, she gazed long at the
painting of the dancers, then back at me. Her eyes, like two chips of
the April sky, were full of concern and she held her rosy lower lip
between her teeth. I thought that she was wonderfully pretty. "What a perfectly terrible nightmare!" she said. "It was no nightmare," I protested. She smiled and argued the point, telling me all manner of comforting
things about mental associations and their reflections in vivid dreams. To clinch her point she turned to the painting. "This line about a 'living picture' is the peg on which your slumbering
mind hung the whole fabric," she suggested, her slender fingertip
touching the painted scribble. "Your very literal subconscious self
didn't understand that the artist meant his picture would live only
figuratively." "Are you sure that's what the artist meant?" I asked, but finally I let
her convince me. One can imagine how badly I wanted to be convinced. She mixed me another highball, and a short one for herself.