61 pages • 2 hours read
Robert W. ChambersThe King in Yellow
Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 1895A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Stories 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Story 3 Summary: “In the Court of the Dragon”
The story opens with a quatrain from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, as translated by Edward FitzGerald (1859 translation, archived by Project Gutenberg), which reads:
Oh, thou who burn’st in heart for those who burn
in Hell, whose fires thyself shall feed in turn;
How long be crying—‘Mercy on them.’ God!
Why, who are thou to teach and He to learn? (45).
The unnamed first-person narrator sits in the Church of St. Barnabe, in Paris, where he listens to the priest’s sermon while the organ plays in the background. He feels the sound of the organ makes a “sinister change” that is discordant, and harsh. The sensation is so troubling that he idly wonders if some evil spirit has possessed the church. But the other churchgoers do not appear disturbed, or even to have noticed any music at all. The priest continues his sermon and asks for silence, and the narrator takes refuge in the quiet. He concludes he must be overreacting because he is tired, having stayed awake for “three nights of physical suffering and mental trouble” (46) while reading The King in Yellow.
He sees the organist leave the chapel. However, a moment later, he sees the same man leave along the same route again, though he is certain the organist could not have doubled back without him noticing. The organist looks at him as he walks past with a glare of hatred that scares him. Uncomfortable, the narrator decides to leave the church. He walks through Paris, but each place he goes he finds the organist has either followed him or walked ahead of him. Although the organist never stops to confront him, with every step the narrator feels closer to his “fate” and “destruction” (49).
Finally, the narrator decides to return home, to his apartment in a passage called the Court of the Dragon. As he reaches his gate the organist is there right behind him, walking toward him with menace. The narrator feels the shadows of the building close over him like a vault. The shadowy figure of the organist bears down on him, ready to strike with “his infernal eyes” (51).
Then, suddenly, the narrator is back in the church. The sermon has ended and the other churchgoers are leaving their seats. The narrator wonders if he had fallen asleep. He stands to leave but sees the organist in the doorway staring at him. The narrator recognizes the man as someone he had sent to “Death and the awful abode of lost souls” (52) long ago. Overhead, the organ blares, and a dazzling light fills the church, blinding him. Suddenly, the narrator sees the lake of Hali, and the towers of Carcosa looming overhead. The last thing the narrator hears is the King in Yellow whispering: “it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God!” (52).
Story 4 Summary: “The Yellow Sign”
The epigraph of this story comes from poem “XLVII” of the collection Songs of the Sea Children by Bliss Carman, and reads:
Let the red dawn surmise
what we shall do,
when this blue starlight dies
and all is through (53).
The first-person narrator, Mr. Scott, is a painter in New York City. He paints a model named Tessie in his studio when he sees the watchman of the church outside his window and is repelled by his pale, plump face that reminds him of a coffin-worm. When he returns to painting, the colors all go wrong and he destroys the painting in a temper.
Tessie looks out the window to see the watchman and says in horror that she saw the man in a dream. In her dream, she stands at her window watching a funeral procession. Although she cannot see the body, she knows in the dream that Mr. Scott is the dead man in the coffin, and the man driving the hearse is the pale watchman with a face like a coffin-worm. Mr. Scott tells her it is just a dream and she is overwrought.
However, the next day Mr. Scott talks with a bellboy of his building who says he once had an argument with the watchman. When he tried to punch the watchman, one of the watchman’s fingers simply fell off. The bellboy ran away in terror after that. Mr. Scott also admits to Tessie that he has now had a dream about the watchman. In his dream, he remembers being the body in the coffin, and seeing Tessie watching from her window, as the watchman drives the hearse. Tessie is afraid for him and admits that she loves him, although she is much younger than he is. He kisses her, even though he is Catholic and believes in the sanctity of marriage. He calls himself a man without morals. He also feels guilty because he is haunted by his lost love, Sylvia.
The next day, Mr. Scott walks down the street toward his apartments when he crosses paths with the church watchman. The watchman mutters to him: “have you found the Yellow Sign?” (65). Filled with an inexplicable rage, Mr. Scott walks away.
Back in his studio, Mr. Scott gives Tessie a gold necklace. Tessie gives him an onyx brooch with a strange symbol carved on it. When he says she should not have bought him something so expensive, she admits she did not buy it but found it on the street months ago. She had tried to find the owner but failed. The next day, Mr. Scott falls and injures his wrists, preventing him from painting. Bored, he looks for a book to read and comes across The King in Yellow, which he does not remember buying. He decides not to read it because he’d heard rumors that it drove people to extreme mental states. But Tessie teasingly takes the book from him, and they both read it.
They become consumed by “words which are clear as crystal, limpid and musical as bubbling springs, words which sparkle and glow like the poisoned diamonds of the Medicis!” (68). They realize that the symbol on the onyx brooch is the Yellow Sign, an ominous symbol from the play. Suddenly, they hear a noise approaching them, and realize in horror that the church watchman is coming for them, to take the Yellow Sign. He enters the room and tears the onyx brooch from Mr. Scott’s lapel. Tessie cries out and dies.
It is revealed that Mr. Scott is writing his account as a doctor and priest minister to him on his deathbed. The watchman’s body is a “decomposed heap on the floor” (69), and Mr. Scott is dying. There are two dead bodies already, Tessie and the watchman. Just before Mr. Scott dies he hears the doctor say of the watchman: “I have no theory, no explanation. That man must have been dead for months!” (69).
Stories 3-4 Analysis
The third and fourth stories of the collection build upon the imagery and mythos of The King in Yellow. The third story, “In the Court of the Dragon,” is brief, but powerfully continues upon the theme of Interpretations of Reality. Although the nameless narrator describes in rich detail his experience of wandering through the city as the sinister organist pursues him, it is suggested towards the end that he never left the church he sits in. As in the case of “The Repairer of Reputations,” it is unclear how much the reader can trust the narrator’s account of events. The narrator admits to reading the play, The King in Yellow, and that he is “worn out by three nights of physical suffering and mental trouble” (46). The implication is that reading the play has affected him in some way, as it did for Castaigne and, to lesser extent, Alec. The nature of his experience is ambiguous: has he dreamed of the chase through Paris or is it real? Or, perhaps, the narrator’s struggle to save himself from the demonic being who seems to claim his soul for the devil in the Faustian tradition prefigures his death, in a division of the self into the body and the spirit.
The surreal and supernatural atmosphere of the story raises more questions than answers, in particular the question of what we consider real. A thought exists if it occurs in the mind, if not physically. The experience of the narrator appears real; his fear is powerfully expressed and transmitted to the reader—modeling the theory that extreme, erratic mental or emotional states can be passed from person to person through literature. When the narrator “wakes” the horror of his dream is apparently real and the organist still pursues him into another strange hallucinatory state or realm. Whether this is the effect of fear, guilt or fatigue is left unexplained; the reader must seek to make their own sense of these apparent impossibilities.
The epigraph of “In the Court of the Dragon” comes from Edward FitzGerald’s 1859 translations of the Rubaiyat attributed to Persian poet Omar Khayyam (1048-1131). Fitzgerald’s translation was extremely popular and the Rubaiyat had become a cult work by the time of the fin de siècle, expressing themes of exoticism, sensuality, and metaphysics. FitzGerald had placed this verse in his Introduction, excluding it from the body of the poem, as it was a documented addition to the original manuscript by a medieval scribe who claimed that it came to him in a “Dream, in which Omar’s mother asked about his future fate” (The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, 1859). Chambers’s choice of this verse therefore gestures to the dream-like quality of the narrator’s experience in his story. The religious connotations of the epigraph, including images of hellfire and someone asking for God’s mercy, prefigures the religious underpinnings of the story. As with several other characters in the collection, this narrator is Catholic and attending Mass as his hallucinatory vision assails him. Troublingly, his faith does not protect him from the darkness of his experience: the church of “The Court of the Dragon” is the location of terror not sanctuary. The narrators confesses to a terrible sin—probably murder—raising the overarching theme of Decadence and Moral Decay, in which straying from the faith brings about destruction.
The theme of moral decay and decadence also pervades the fourth story, “The Yellow Sign,” against a context of Catholicism. The narrator, Mr. Scott, reflects on the sounds of church bells and the images evoked by hearing the “Mass of Saint Cecile” (53). The figure of terror in this story is, furthermore, the night watchman of the church next door to Mr. Scott’s apartment building. Mr. Scott is, himself, Catholic. He reflects at length about his Catholic sensibilities, saying: “When I listen to high mass, when I sign myself, I feel that everything, including myself, is more cheerful, and when I confess, it does me good” (60). At the same time, he admits to being “no good,” a man without morals, who engages in an affair with his young model, Tessie, outside of marriage, despite believing in the sanctity of marriage. In other words, he is a hypocrite. The arrival of the horrifying church watchman—with his face like a grave-worm, walking directly from the church—seems an agent of death, claiming Mr. Scott for the transgressions he has committed. He is guilty of an extramarital relationship with Tessie and may also be guilty of something related to a woman named Sylvia who is either missing or dead, and a vague mystery from his past that “lay hidden if not lost in the Breton forests” (63). In any case, the implication is that he has not lived up to his professed Catholic faith and is therefore being punished. It is fitting that the story should end with the revelation that the story is his deathbed confession, while a priest stands over him. The doctor is unable to save Mr. Scott’s life and the story suggests that the priest may be equally unable to save his soul.
“The Yellow Sign” also continues the horror elements of the previous stories and the motif of The King in Yellow. In his critical essay, “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” H.P. Lovecraft calls this story “the most powerful of its [the book’s] tales.” Just as with earlier characters, both Mr. Scott and Tessie give in to the compulsion to read the play. In addition, Tessie’s seemingly-harmless gift to Mr. Scott—a black onyx brooch with a strange symbol on it—turns out to be the mysterious “yellow sign” that the watchman is in search of. Possessing this yellow sign is the climactic event which seals Mr. Scott’s fate. Several pieces of foreshadowing warn of this outcome. Tessie’s dreams of Mr. Scott’s dead body lying in a coffin and being carted away in a hearse driven by the horrifying specter of the watchman hints at his inevitable death. Additionally, the watchman stops Mr. Scott to demand if he has found the yellow sign, the night before Tessie gives it to him, hinting at the instrument of his doom. Again, horror and hallucination is passed from person to person, as Tessie is the source of Mr. Scott’s exposure to the watchman and The Yellow King. In this, she follows the literary Eve tradition, as a woman who originates sinfulness.
