The Green Face by Gustav Meyrink Read Free Book Online

meadows,
always separated from them by a strip of water glowing red in
the setting sun, and they seemed to him like the dream vision of
a land he was destined never to set foot in.
    His unrest was calmed by the scent of water and grass, but
only to be replaced by a feeling of melancholy and desolation.
    Then, as the meadows darkened and a silvery mist rose from
the ground so that the cattle seemed to be wreathed in smoke,
he began to feel as if his skull were a prison cell and he himself
were sitting in it looking out through his eyes on a free world for
the last time.
    The twilight was thickening as he reached the first houses of
the city and the air trembled with the echoing boom of the numberless bells in their bizarrely shaped towers.

    He paid off the cabbie and set out in the direction of his
apartment, down narrow alleyways, along canals with clumsy
black barges floating on the motionless water, through a flood
of rotten apples and decaying rubbish, beneath protruding gables with the iron arms of the hoists reflected in the canal.
Outside the doors men in wide blue trousers and red smocks and
women mending nets sat gossiping on chairs they had brought
out from their houses while hordes of children played in the
streets.
    He hurried past the open doors, which exhaled a smell of fish,
sweat and poverty, and across squares with waffle-stands in the
comers, filling all the narrow alleyways with the reek of burnt
fat.
    The dreariness of the Dutch port settled over him like a peasouper: the scrubbed pavements and filthy canals, the taciturn
inhabitants, the tall, pigeon-chested buildings with their pallid
chequerboard pattern of flat sash windows, the narrow-fronted
cheese and pickled-herring shops with their smoky paraffin
lamps, and the reddish-black gable roofs.
    Fora moment he was struck by a longing to leave this gloomy
city that had turned its back on lightheartedness and return to
one of the brighter ones he had known in earlier, happier days.
Life there suddenly seemed desirable again, just as everything
that lies in the past seems better and more beautiful than the
present. But the gentle upsurge of homesickness was immediately stifled by the final memories he had come away with, bitter
memories of physical and moral decay, of irreversible decline.
    He took a short cut over an iron bridge leading to the fashionable part of the city, crossed a brightly-lit and crowded street
with shop windows full of elegant goods, and found himself a
few steps later- as if the cityhad done a lightning-quick. change
- back in a pitch-dark alley: the `Nes’, the notorious street of
pimps and prostitutes in old Amsterdam that had been torn down
years ago had reappeared in another part of the town, like a new
outbreak of some insidious disease. It was the same yet not the
same, it was less coarse, less brutal, but far more terrible.
    The dregs of Paris and London, of the cities of Belgium and Russia, fleeing in panic the revolutions that had broken out in
their own countries, had settled in these `exclusive’ establishments. As Hauberrisser walked past, silent, robot-like commissionaires in long blue coats and three-cornered hats with
brass-mounted staffs in their hands flung open the padded doors
and then closed them again with a flourish. Each time a blinding
shaft of garish light fell across the pavement, and for a second
the air was tom by the wild scream of a jazz trumpet, the crash
of cymbals or the sob of gypsy violins.

    There was a different kind of life lurking behind the red
curtains of the upper stories of the houses: the brief staccato
drumming of fingers on the windowpanes, furtive whisperings,
grunts and stifled cries - in all languages of the world and yet
immediately comprehensible; a female body in a white slip, the
head invisible in the darkness, as if it had been cut off, leaving
a torso with waving arms; and then again, empty windows,
pitch-black, silent as the tomb,