University of Virginia Library

III

Three o'clock went into four. The room paled, the
dark outside was shot through with damp and chill,
and Wessel, cupping his brain in his hands, bent low over
his table, tracing through the pattern of knights and
fairies and the harrowing distresses of many girls.
There were dragons chortling along the narrow street
outside; when the sleepy armorer's boy began his work
at half-past five the heavy clink and chank of plate and
linked mail swelled to the echo of a marching cavalcade.

A fog shut down at the first flare of dawn, and the room
was grayish yellow at six when Wessel tiptoed to his
cupboard bedchamber and pulled open the door. His
guest turned on him a face pale as parchment in which
two distraught eyes burned like great red letters. He
had drawn a chair close to Wessel's prie-dieu which he
was using as a desk; and on it was an amazing stack of

closely written pages. With a long sigh Wessel withdrew
and returned to his siren, calling himself fool for
not claiming his bed here at dawn.

The clump of boots outside, the croaking of old beldames
from attic to attic, the dull murmur of morning,
unnerved him, and, dozing, he slumped in his chair, his
brain, overladen with sound and color, working intolerably
over the imagery that stacked it. In this restless
dream of his he was one of a thousand groaning bodies
crushed near the sun, a helpless bridge for the strong-eyed
Apollo. The dream tore at him, scraped along
his mind like a ragged knife. When a hot hand touched
his shoulder, he awoke with what was nearly a scream
to find the fog thick in the room and his guest, a gray
ghost of misty stuff, beside him with a pile of paper in
his hand.

"It should be a most intriguing tale, I believe, though
it requires some going over. May I ask you to lock it
away, and in God's name let me sleep?"

He waited for no answer, but thrust the pile at Wessel,
and literally poured himself like stuff from a suddenly
inverted bottle upon a couch in the corner; slept, with
his breathing regular, but his brow wrinkled in a curious
and somewhat uncanny manner.

Wessel yawned sleepily and, glancing at the scrawled,
uncertain first page, he began reading aloud very softly: