The Golgotha Dancers
By MANLY WADE WELLMAN
[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Weird Tales October1937. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.copyright on this publication was renewed.]
I had come to the Art Museum to see the special show of Goya prints, butthat particular gallery was so crowded that I could hardly get in, muchless see or savor anything; wherefore I walked out again. I wanderedthrough the other wings with their rows and rows of oils, their Greekand Roman sculptures, their stern ranks of medieval armors, theirOriental porcelains, their Egyptian gods. At length, by chance and notby design, I came to the head of a certain rear stairway. Other habituésof the museum will know the one I mean when I remind them that ArnoldBöcklin's The Isle of the Dead hangs on the wall of the landing.
I started down, relishing in advance the impression Böcklin's picturewould make with its high brown rocks and black poplars, its midnight skyand gloomy film of sea, its single white figure erect in the bow of thebeach-nosing skiff. But, as I descended, I saw that The Isle of theDead was not in its accustomed position on the wall. In that space,arresting even in the bad light and from the up-angle of the stairs,hung a gilt-framed painting I had never seen or heard of in all mymuseum-haunting years.
I gazed at it, one will imagine, all the way down to the landing. Then Ihad a close, searching look, and a final appraising stare from the lipof the landing above the lower half of the flight. So far as I canlearn—and I have been diligent in my research—the thing is unknowneven to the best-informed of art experts. Perhaps it is as well that Idescribe it in detail.
It seemed to represent action upon a small plateau or table rock, draband bare, with a twilight sky deepening into a starless evening. Thissetting, restrainedly worked up in blue-grays and blue-blacks, was notthe first thing to catch the eye, however. The front of the picture wasfilled with lively dancing creatures, as pink, plump and naked ascherubs and as patently evil as the meditations of Satan in his rareidle moments.
I counted those dancers. There were twelve of them, ranged in ahalf-circle, and they were cavorting in evident glee around a centralobject—a prone cross, which appeared to be made of two stout logs withsome of the bark still upon them. To this cross a pair of the pinkthings—that makes fourteen—kneeling and swinging blocky-lookinghammers or mauls, spiked a human figure.
I say human when I speak of that figure, and I withhold the word indescribing the dancers and their hammer-wielding fellows. There is areason. The supine victim on the cross was a beautifully representedmale body, as clear and anatomically correct as an illustration in asurgical textbook. The head was writhed around, as if in pain, and Icould not see the face or its expression; but in the tortured tensenessof the muscles, in the slaty white sheen of the skin with jagged streaksof vivid gore upon it, agonized nature was plain and doubly plain. Icould almost see the painted limbs writhe against the transfixing nails.
By the same token, the dancers and hammerers were so dynamically done asto seem half in motion before my eyes. So much for the sound skill ofthe painter. Yet, where the crucified prisoner was all clarity, theseothers were all fog. No lines, no angles, no muscles—their featurescould not be seen or sensed. I was