BOOK: Arthur Machen, "The House of Souls"

Arthur Machen: The House of Souls. London: E. Grant Richards, 1906. xvi + 515 pp.

I had heard of Machen before, as a pioneering horror writer and an influence upon H. P. Lovecraft and the like, but had never read anything by him except for a hasty reading of The Great God Pan a number of years ago. The present volume, which collects several stories of varying length that he had published during the 1890s, and one or two new ones, seemed like a useful introduction to his work, so I decided to read it.

The book begins with Machen's introduction with many delightful if bitterly sarcastic remarks about the English spirit of Puritanism and its insistence that literature must be realistic and useful for moral instruction: “English fiction must justify itself either as containing useful doctrine and information, or as a manifest transcript of life as it is known to the average reader” (p. viii) — by contrast, “in Paris it is agreed that imagination and fantasy are to work as they will and as they can, and are to be judged by their own laws” (p. vi). He concludes by pretending that conventional moral lessons can be extracted from his tales as well, but also admits more honestly that his real aim was to hint at “a belief in a world that is not that of ordinary, everyday experience, that in a measure transcends the experience of Bethel and the Bank” (p. xii). [Bethel, I guess, probably stands for conventional religion here.]

(Note: major spoiler warnings apply throughout the rest of this post.)

A Fragment of Life

Edward and Mary Darrell are a middle-class couple; he has a job in the City, they rent a house in the suburbs and employ a maid, and they treat each other nice and are happy together. They are admirably careful in spending their money, and we learn a good deal more than I cared to know about their plans to buy new furniture for a spare room in their house (pp. 5, 10–15, 18–21) or a new cooking-range for their kitchen (pp. 29–34), but I guess these things are there to provide a more striking contrast with what comes later.

Edward in particular has always had a mystical side as well, a vague sense that the tangible world we are used to is not quite real, but more like a dream that we may, with some effort, wake up from. In his younger years he had made a walking tour of “London and its environs”, which in his account becomes an area of wonder and mystery (pp. 48–56): “I found the Strange Road. I saw it branching off from the dusty high road, and it looked so green that I turned aside into it, and soon I felt as if I had really come into a new country.” (P. 53.)

There's an interesting chapter involving Mary's aunt, whose husband has been behaving very strangely, their walks through the woods have been followed by queer whistling sounds, he was seen talking to a strange red-headed boy and spending long hours away from home (pp. 59–68). Was he having an affair with an actress, and the boy was merely that woman in disguise, as the aunt says? Or has he too been communing with some mystical and supernatural forces? Or is the aunt simply going insane, which is the explanation eventually given by her husband (p. 89)?

Edward takes an increasing interest in old papers left behind by his late father, and even begins learning Latin for that purpose, and he talks about moving to their old family farm somewhere in the depths of Wales once his grand-uncle, its current owner, dies (p. 97). It seems that his Welsh ancestors have long been involved in mysticism, and Edward himself as a child had once seen a little of their ceremonies when visiting them with his uncle (pp. 103–107). Now, with the aid of his family papers, Edward applies himself to finally crossing the boundary that separates the everyday material world from the real mystical world behind it. “So day by day the world became more magical; day by day the work of separation was being performed, the gross accidents were being refined away.” (P. 100.) The story ends on a hopeful note, with Edward reporting: “I awoke from a dream of a London suburb, of daily labour, of weary, useless little things; and as my eyes were opened I saw that I was in an ancient wood” etc. (p. 109).

I really enjoyed this story and it seems to be a splendid introduction to Machen and his particular brand of mysticism. He is careful never to define things too clearly, and the mystical world that Edward and his Welsh ancestors are working towards does not seem to have much to do with the conventional christian ideas of the afterlife; it is more like partly faerie and partly magic, and it is not trivially happy and blissful but has its dangers as well, which are only hinted at (p. 101).

I always liked those who spit into the face of reality, as it deserves little else but to be spat upon, and I was glad to see that Machen delights in putting our material world down in extraordinarily blunt terms, which were perhaps meant to shock some of his more conventional readers: Edward comes to “a firm belief that the whole fabric of life in which he moved was sunken, past all thinking, in the grossest absurdity; that he and his friends and acquaintances and fellow-workers were interested in matters in which men were never meant to be interested, were pursuing aims which they were never meant to pursue [. . .] Life, it seemed to him, was a great search for—he knew not what” (p. 84). “Again and again the spirit of nonsense that had been implanted in him as in his fellows assured him that the true world was the visible and tangible world [. . .] But in spite of these arguments, in spite of their acceptance by all who were about him, he had the grace to perceive the utter falsity and absurdity of the whole position. [. . .] Darnell knew by experience that man is made a mystery for mysteries and visions, for the realization in his consciousness of ineffable bliss, for a great joy that transmutes the whole world, for a joy that surpasses all joys and overcomes all sorrows.” (Pp. 85–6.)

One thing that surprised me a bit is that Machen spends a good deal of space introducing side-characters that don't end up going anywhere or having anything to do with the main story: glimpses of the more or less odd neighbours of the Darnells' (pp. 25–6), and the story of the maid's boyfriend and the atrocious behaviour of his mother (pp. 36–44). Not that I object to episodes in a long story, but this story isn't really *that* long and I think that even episodes should still have *something* to do with the main story.

The White People

In the prologue, a man named Cotgrave is introduced by a friend to a strange mystic and recluse named Ambrose and listens to his interesting but highly idiosyncratic ideas of sin and sinners. In his view, your average everyday thief or murderer aren't sinners in the proper sense of the word; it is true that they are a nuisance to us, they violate our social rules, and we are right to persecute them, but true sin requires a certain positive commitment to evil which such everyday criminals lack. True sinners are even more rare than true saints; “holiness [. . .] is an effort to recover the ecstasy that was before the Fall. But sin is an effort to gain the ecstasy and the knowledge that pertain alone to angels, and in making this effort man becomes a demon. I told you that the mere murderer is not therefore a sinner; that is true, but the sinner is sometimes a murderer. Gilles de Raiz is an instance.” (P. 117.)

This was fascinating, but I have no idea how it's connected to the rest of the story. The bulk of the story consists of the text of the “green book”, a manuscript which Ambrose gave to Cotgrave to read, as giving an example of sin (in Ambrose's sense) in the modern time (p. 122). This green book I found almost completely unreadable. It is written by a teenage girl in a strange, almost stream-of-consciousness style, and in my opinion her greatest sin is against paragraph breaks; Gilles de Raiz may have murdered children for sport, but I don't know that he ever sank so low as to write a paragraph extending over twenty-seven pages (pp. 127–54). What also bothered me was that I had no idea if Machen had really thought everything through and if the things we see in the green book all have a carefully concealed symbolical meaning, or is he just making up a string of random nonsense as he goes along, rubbing his hands gleefully as he gets us readers to swallow it (my bet is on the latter). The whole thing reminded me a little of some of Lovecraft's dream-stories, which are easily my least favourite part of his work.

The author of the green book, as a little girl, was introduced by her nurse to a sort of fairy-world inhabited by mysterious “white people” (p. 126). Later we follow the girl on a long walk through a strange forest landscape, where one damn random thing follows another; there's dancing amongst rocks, climbing through thickets and passages, drinking of spring-water with dubious side-effects, and so on (pp. 130–3). There's the tale of another girl who had apparently visited the fairy realm by way of a hollow pit; she came back wearing all sorts of finery, and even got married to the king's son, but was soon taken away (back to the fairy world?) by a mysteious “black man” (pp. 134–6). Our narrator is determined not to repeat her mistakes, and returns home without bringing anything from the fairy realm (p. 137).

She remembers another of her nurse's tales, about a young man who, while out hunting, was lured into the fairy realm by a mysterious white stag, dallied a little with the queen of the fairies, but was then returned back to the real world fairly unharmed (pp. 140–2).

The nurse clearly had access to a deep and ancient tradition of fairy-related lore, rituals, tales and the like, passed down from her great-grandmother in whose time the cult had still been going strong. We see a story of one of their festivals, with dancing and drinking magical wine and singing in an “old, old language that nobody knows now” (p. 144), and making and worshipping mysterious clay figurines (pp. 145–7), which the nurse also teaches the girl to do. Later she also teaches her various other magical rituals and practices, often in the guise of games (p. 154, 157). [One of these is a very close parallel to Haitian zombification: “you could take a person out of himself [. . .] and his body went walking about quite empty, without any sense in it”.]

There's a charming tale of a young noblewoman whose real identity was actually the queen of the fairies; being pressured (in her human form) to choose among several suitors, she eventually made clay dolls of them and killed them, voodoo-style; but she was found out and burnt as a witch (pp. 148–53).

A few years later, the nurse now having disappeared, the girl wonders what if anything of all this was true; and she manages to retrace their old footsteps and re-enter the fairy realm (p. 158‐61). The manuscript ends abruptly, but by the end she is able to have regular communication with “nymphs”, which seem to come in two varieties, light and dark (p. 162).

There is a short epilogue where Ambrose explains that much of the obscurity of the manuscript is clearly deliberate, similar to what you see in alchemical literature (p. 164). The girl has been found dead, having poisoned herself next to a mysterious ancient idol (p. 165–6). There is a hint here that the fairy cult was a survival from prehistoric times.

This was in a way an interesting story, but a little too random for my taste, and the “green book” was very painful to read.

The Great God Pan

The story opens with a slighty too well-worn bit of mad science. Dr. Raymond believes that our tangible world is just an illusion and that a real, mystical world is hiding somewhere behind it, and that a person's mind can come into contact with this real world if certain connections in the brain are severed (pp. 170–3). Apparently the ancients described such a contact with the ‘real’ world as “seeing the god Pan”. Raymond performs this operation on a young girl, Mary (who has technically volunteered for it, but the doctor has “rescued [her] from the gutter” (p. 173) so we may wonder how free her choice in the matter actually is), but she merely goes insane from it — perhaps, as Dr. Raymond seems to think, because her soul, having seen the real spirit-world, now can't stand being trapped in the body any more.

Years later, Mr. Clarke (a friend of Raymond's who had witnessed the operation and who possesses a sharp sense for both practical and mystical matters; p. 207), hears from a friend named Dr. Phillips a curious story of a mysterious young woman, Helen V., who was in the habit of spending whole days in a forest and quite possibly cavorting with some sort of satyr-like monster (pp. 184–5), the sight of which drove one or two other children mad before she finally disappeared without a trace.

Next we hear of a man named Charles Herbert, formerly a prosperous squire who got married to a mysterious woman named Helen Vaughan; she “corrupted my soul [. . .] In a year, Villiers, I was a ruined man, in body and soul” (p. 192). She also convinced him to sell his land and then disappeared with the money, leaving him a beggar. His friend Villiers, who has encountered him in this sorry condition, later finds out more details from another acquaintance, Austin: the Herberts had had a house in a shady part of the town and at one point a gentleman had been found dead in front of it, apparently of fright (p. 196).

Villiers later visits that house, now empty, and feels an inexplicable sense of dread himself while there (pp. 201–3). In it he finds some old papers, including a sketch of the mysterious Mrs. Herbert; he discusses the matter with Clarke, who is shocked at the similarity between Mrs. Herbert and poor Mary from that mad-science operation years before (p. 205).

Villiers gets a couple more pieces of the puzzle from Austin. He hears about Mrs. Beaumont, a mysterious rich woman who has recently moved to London, apparently from South America, and quickly became popular in high society. Austin also shows Villiers a collection of drawings by Meyrick, an artist friend of his who has recently died in Argentina. The drawings are mostly monsters — satrys and fauns — but on the last page, you will not be surprised, is a portrait that Villiers immediately recognizes as that of Mrs. Herbert (p. 213).

In the next few weeks, London is shaken by a series of suicides of several gentlemen without any very obvious motive. Austin, discussing the subject with Villiers, mentions that one of the victims was a friend of his, Lord Argentine, who had dined at Mrs. Beaumont's the night before his suicide (p. 219). A little later another man also commits suicide after a visit to Mrs. Beaumont's — Villiers, by sheer chance, saw him as he came out of her house in the middle of the night: “I knew I had looked into the eyes of a lost soul” (p. 224).

Villiers, making some inquiries in a shady part of the town, hears of an unusually infamous young woman calling herself Miss Raymond who had lived there a few years before, and recently returned; seeing her in a window, he easily recognizes her as Mrs. Herbert from the drawing. And then following her discreetely as she leaves the house, he eventually discovers that she is none other than Mrs. Beaumont as well (p. 229–30). He also manages to obtain “an account of the entertainment Mrs. Beaumont provided for her choicer guests” (p. 231) from one of the latter, who has not committed suicide — not yet, at any rate.

Austin, meanwhile, provides one more piece of the puzzle, though it is scarcely necessary at this point: having written to a doctor in Buenos Aires, he has learnt that Meyrick the artist had died of nervous shock and that his only acquaintance there was a woman of doubtful reputation named Mrs. Vaughan (p. 235).

The story ends with a few fragments of communication between the protagonists, which provide for a rather more vague conclusion than I would have liked. Apparently Villiers and Clarke confronted Mrs. Beaumont and got her to hang herself, threatening to call the police otherwise. She, alias Helen Vaughan or Mrs. Herbert, was, at any rate, the daughter of poor Mary that Dr. Raymond had operated on, born nine months after the operation (Mary died soon afterwards). Being the daughter of the god Pan, she could transform into monstrous shapes, “from woman to man, from man to beast, and from beast to worse than beast” (p. 242), and also summon satyr-like companions to play with, and it was displays like these that drove her guests and acquaintances to madness or suicide.

*

This is probably one of Machen's best-known stories, and the only one I had read before. I like the way it reveals things to us little by little, as we switch between the perspectives of several different characters who independently come into contact with the mystery and only gradually manage to put the pieces of information together.

That being said, there were also a few things I didn't like about this story. One thing is that Dr. Raymond's contribution to mad science strikes me as a little too cliched, as I already said above; but perhaps it wasn't quite as cliched more than a hundred years ago, when Machen wrote this story.

Another thing is that the connections between the pieces of the puzzle are a little too obvious at times; sure, in principle there must be many women named Helen V. in a country the size of Britain, but when you hear about Helen V. in one chapter (p. 181) and of Helen Vaughan in the next chapter (pp. 192–3) of the same story, they are obviously the same person. Similarly, we hear about Mrs. Beaumont coming from South America; almost in the same breath we hear about her new favourite (and soon to be victim), Lord *Argentine* (p. 210; surely an implausible name for a British nobleman); and shortly afterwards we hear about Meyrick's mysterious death in Buenos Ayres (p. 212). It's all a little bit too on the nose. And the idea that one of Mrs. Beaumont's victims was seen just as he was coming out of her house in the middle of the night before his suicide, by Villiers who had not been deliberately stalking Mrs. Beaumont's house at the time — is a good deal too improbable for my taste. It smells of cheap deus ex machina.

The connection to Pan also struck me as a little far-fetched. Sure, let's grant for the moment that our material world is but an illusion and that there is a real mystical world behind it (this seems to be a recurring idea with Machen, we've seen it before in this book and will probably see it again later); but why would the ancients describe contact with this world as “seeing the god Pan”? Why not, I don't know, Zeus, who was surely a much more important god? You will say that ‘Pan’ can also mean ‘everything’, which surely makes him a very appropriate god for contacts with the ‘real’ (mystical) world; but in that case, why would you connect this kind of Pan with the goatlike woodland creature that we usually imagine him as? If you are in direct contact with the real world, surely you could summon a unicorn, a butterfly or a pink elephant just as well as a satyr or faun — so why do all of Helen's transformations or summonings involve satyrs and never any other creature? Machen does not give us any clear explanation of this, beyond some handwaving about Pan being a symbol because the “secret forces which lie at the heart of all things [. . .] cannot be imagined except under a veil and a symbol” (pp. 231–2).

Another thing I disliked a little is the vagueness of the last chapter. Is Dr. Matheson's statement (pp. 235–7) the same manuscript that Villiers has referred to on p. 230? What exactly happened to Rachel on one of those day-long trips deep into the woods with Helen — did Helen transform into a satyr and mate with her or something (p. 237, 240–1)? And how exactly did this cause Rachel's death later? (If we're going to have furry pr0n, we at least want all the nasty details! :P)

And I can't help wondering if the mad-science bit at the start makes the story weaker rather than stronger. It's easy enough to accept the premiss that cutting a few connections in the brain might allow one's mind to experience something odd — fine, perhaps to experience the real spirit-world behind our illusive material world. Fair enough. But how on earth will severing a few neurons in the brain help poor Mary get pregnant with the Great God Pan and give birth to a child with a paranormal ability to shapeshift? (Thank god for the shapeshifting ability or we'd have to wonder if Dr. Raymond ‘operated’ on something else besides Mary's brain :]) It would have been better to provide no material explanation at all than to provide such an obviously inadequate one as “a slight lesion in the grey matter” (p. 171). All we get is Raymond's vague non-explanations about how the operation “broke open the door of the house of life”, with the possibility that “there may enter in that for which we have no name” (p. 242).

*

I don't know if I was mistaken in approaching this as a horror story; I know that Machen was an influence upon Lovecraft and his tales of cosmic horror, and The Great God Pan specifically is often mentioned as a story that influenced Lovecraft's The Dunwich Horror. But as a horror story, The Great God Pan didn't strike me as all that horrifying. Machen goes to great lengths trying to prepare us for something really horrible, putting the pieces together little by little, beating about the bush for ages, but in the end when the facts are revealed, the whole thing feels a little anticlimactic.

I never really saw why Helen and her contacts with the real world are supposed to be *quite* so terrifying. She never seems to really harm anyone in any obvious way; we just have vague reports of how she supposedly corrupts people. They are shocked to see her transform into a satyr, but it's not like she ever transformed into a dinosaur and bit off their heads. Nor does she transform into some sort of Lovecraftian abomination and threaten to destroy mankind. (Besides, if she were *really* powerful and/or dangerous, she wouldn't have allowed Clarke and Villiers to talk her into committing suicide.)

Frankly, the only clearly bad thing we see her do in this story is when she runs away with her husband's money — and this bit struck me as being poorly motivated. She seemed to be living happily and prosperously enough as his wife, so why did she need to rob him and run away? And moreover, with her ability to transform, you would imagine she could easily rob a bank (which I consider a victimless crime) or something like that.

The Inmost Light

This story has a few characteristics in common with the previous one, but it is much shorter. Dyson dabbles at being a writer, but in truth spends most of his time studying “the physiology of London” (p. 249), i.e. walking about the city and imagining it to be full of wonder and mystery. He tells his friend Salisbury about the strange Dr. Black, who used to live with his wife in an out-of-the-way suburb, but she gradually dropped out of sight and died a few months later. The authorities ordered an autopsy, where her brain was found to be in a very odd state, but the death was ruled a natural one. Dyson was interested in the matter because he had seen the woman in a window once and found the sight indescribably disturbing.

Salisbury, later the same evening, wanders into an unfamiliar part of the town and witnesses a quarrel between a woman and an old man; she throws away a crumpled piece of paper, which Salisbury picks up. It mentions a street name and a nonsense-rhyme (p. 263).

A week later, Salisbury visits Dyson, who tells him more about his investigation into the case of Mrs. Black. One of the doctors who had performed the autopsy on her told Dyson that her brain seemed to be not a human brain but that of a devil (p. 268). By coincidence, Dyson also came across Dr. Black, who seemed to have aged greatly in a short time and was now living in great poverty in a poor part of the town; he professed a keen interest in mystical or occult subjects. A couple months later Dr. Black died suddenly, believing he had just been robbed of something immensely valuable.

Salisbury shows Dyson the piece of paper with the nonsense rhyme, and Dyson agrees to look into it. He realizes that a part of the message is an address of a shop and, once there, he uses the nonsense rhyme as a pass-phrase, acting as if he knew what it was all about; he succeesfully bullies the shopkeeper into handing over a parcel which he had evidently been keeping with instructions to give it to someone who knew the pass-phrase.

The parcel proves to contain an unusually large and lustrous opal-like gem, as well as a diary of Dr. Black. Thanks to his occult studies, he had been able “to bridge over the gulf between the world of consciousness and the world of matter” (p. 284), and couldn't resist going so far as to draw what was presumably the soul of some sort of devil or demon from that other world into ours; but to make space for it, he had to transfer the soul of his wife from her body into the opal-like gem — that's why the gem was so lustrous, and why he had to kill his wife, whose body was of course inhabited by the soul of a devil by then. The most bizarre detail about this story is that he had supposedly managed to persuade his wife to agree to this insane experiment, though with great reluctance and much crying (p. 285).

*

My complaints about this story are similar as those about The Great God Pan. The reveal at the end is rather too sudden, the doctor's diary explains everything a little too quickly and too directly; I felt a bit let down by that. The idea that his wife agreed to the experiment is even more ridiculous than where Mary agreed to Dr. Raymond's experiment in The Great God Pan. The idea that you can summon a demonic soul from the other world into this one, but to make space for it you have to draw some human's soul out of his or her body (p. 284), also struck me as a bit too arbitrary. If he could transfer his wife's soul into a gem, why couldn't he draw the devil's soul into that gem instead, and leave his wife alone?! Moreover, once the devil's soul was in his wife's body, why should this have caused a physical change in her brain, such as was described by the doctor who autopsied her? Moreover, what exactly could there be about the physical structure of her brain that could give that doctor the idea that it was “the brain of a devil” (p. 269)?

And we have again the implausible coincidence where Salisbury happened to come across that quarrelling couple and picked up that piece of paper and gave it to Dyson so the latter could solve the puzzle. This sort of coincidence strains the reader's ability to suspend his disbelief. It's easier to imagine that an occultist can draw a devil's soul from the spirit-world than that such a coincidence as Salisbury's finding that piece of paper is likely to occur.

Moreover, there's too much that we don't find out: how exactly was Dr. Black robbed of the box containing his diary and the gem with his wife's soul? Who robbed him and why? Why was the box then deposited in that shop? Who was the “Mr. Davies” that was supposed to come pick it up (p. 280)? Who was the mysterious Q. mentioned in the message (p. 263) and why did he have to travel to Paris? What was the role of the woman who threw away the message, and of the man Sam she was quarrelling with (p. 261)? By the time the story ends, you can't help feeling that the mystery has been barely half solved. Sure, you can imagine all sorts of scenarios that might explain things, but that should be the writer's job, not the reader's.

The Three Impostors

This story has much in common with the others in this book, but it is by far the longest and the most ambitious. Again we have a mystery involving unexplained and vaguely diabolical forces from some world beyond our material one; again we have references to fauns and fairies and vaguely menacing goings-on in remote Welsh forests; again we have a few cheaply garish and all too material horror effects thrown in (pp. 433, 472), which feel curiously at odds with Machen's otherwise predominant style of creepiness based largely on vague allusions to supposedly fearsome supernatural things; and again we have several protagonists who gradually piece together the various parts of the puzzle, except that this time there is more of everything and it is more intricate than in the other, shorter stories in this book. In fact the individual sections of The Three Impostors have titles of their own, and you end up with stories nested two or sometimes three levels deep in a manner reminiscent of the Arabian Nights. I quite enjoyed this particular aspect of the story, though at the same time I did occasionally find it hard to keep track of everything, and if I'm going to write a detailed plot summary below it is going to be as much to clear things up for myself as for the benefit of any (most likely nonexistent) readers of this blog.

*

The story starts with a prologue which is deliberately unclear, but it will become clear later as you read more of the story. We see three people leaving a house; the author, very considerately, gives us descriptions by which we will be able to recognize them when we encounter them again later in the book: Helen has a “piquant” face, Davies is smooth-shaven, and Richmond has a ginger moustache merging into chin-whiskers (p. 289). They are apparently leaving behind one Joseph Walters, and make several references to a man with spectacles who we may guess is the same person. They didn't get the “gold Tiberius” that they wanted from him, but they do have something that may well be the poor man's finger (p. 202). They also make reference to several other names, evidently aliases under which these three impostors have recently operated: Mr. Burton, Mr. Wilkins, Miss Lally and Miss Leicester (p. 290); we will encounter them all again later, and I will indicate references to them by a ‘(!)’ mark. And lastly, they mention a Dr. Lipsius who is not present himself but seems to be the one who sent them (the finger, or whatever it is, is for his “museum”, p. 202).

As they leave the scene, two other men, Dyson and Phillipps, approach the abandoned house, and the story moves a few months back in time when their acquaintance began. They are both something of dilettante writers (Machen must have despised the type, judging by how he describes them here); Dyson is more interested in mystery while Phillipps is a thorough materialist and has written on scientific topics (p. 295). One night in a dim and remote alley, Dyson saw a man drop a small parcel while running from a knife-wielding pursuer; Dyson picked it up unobserved and found it to contain a gold coin bearing the image of Tiberius, the Roman emperor; a rare and practically legendary coin (pp. 298–300).

*

Some time later, whilst taking a stroll, Dyson sees a scared-looking man with spectacles (!) practically run into a carriage, and shortly afterwards meets a man with ginger chin-wiskers (!), who introduces himself as Mr. Wilkins (!) and is apparently interested in the man with spectacles, whom he had seen from across the street (pp. 304–7).

Wilkins tells Dyson about a curious adventure he had had some time before. He had got a job as secretary to a hesitant-looking (!) gentleman named Mr. Smith (p. 312; how could such a generic name be anything other than fake!) and accompanied him on a journey to the United States (p. 312). They lived for some time in a cabin in a very remote area of the Rocky Mountains; Wilkins had no real work to do and no clear idea what Smith was doing, but the inhabitants of the area were clearly intensely hostile to both of them (p. 320). Smith seems to be leading some sort of cult or gang, and he shouts “blood for gold” as his acolytes throw gold coins on a scale (p. 323). Rumours of kidnappings and disappearances are rife, and eventually the locals form a mob and lynch most of Smith's gang. They nearly lynch Wilkins too, thinking he is Smith; but the the real Jack Smith is nowhere to be found (pp. 325–7).

Upon returning to London, Wilkins found his affairs prospering unusually well, but was constantly in fear that Smith might show up and do him harm (p. 328). Apparently he recognized the man with the spectacles as Smith, and this is why he inquired of him from Dyson.

*

Meanwhile, Phillipps has a curious encounter as well. In a park he encounters a distressed young woman with a piquant (!) face (p. 333); she had been in the habit of meeting her brother there every Saturday, but then one day he showed up late, in the company of a nondescript figure whose hand was like that of a rotten corpse (p. 338); the brother said only that he could not stay, and the two walked past and soon disappeared behind a corner. The brother, incidentally, is a timid-looking man with spectacles (!) (p. 339). Phillipps tries to console her: surely the corpse-like figure was only her hallucination (p. 340).

To explain why she can no longer subscribe to such cheap rationalism, she tells him more about her previous experiences with supernatural phenomena. Her name is Miss Lally (!) and she used to work as the assistant of Professor Gregg, a prominent ethnographer. Over the years, Gregg had accumulated a series of clues that seemed to point to some deeper mystery: he has an ancient Mesopotamian seal with a 60-character inscription in an unknown script, and more recently the exact same inscription, though of an obviously recent date, had been found on a rock in Wales (p. 351); an ancient Roman geographer mentions a people worshipping a stone with such an inscription, called Ixaxar (p. 359).

Gregg moves to the Welsh countryside to investigate some local rumours and folklore there. He hires Jervase Cradock, a mentally retarded lad who is prone to mumbling to himself in some unknown language that includes the word “Ishakshar” (p. 370). Eventually Gregg disappears on an expedition into the woods that was supposed to be the culmination of his investigations; but fortunately he has left behind a manuscript explaining the matter. Apparently local beliefs about fairies who sometimes attack or kidnap people are based on something real and dangerous, some sort of primitive humanoids with a touch of the supernatural (pp. 382–5); and Jervase's biological father was one of these ‘Little People’, who had molested his (human) mother on her way through the woods (pp. 388–9). Gregg had managed to decipher the seal-inscription, whose phrases “tell how man can be reduced to the slime from which he came” or turned into a reptile (p. 392); and it seems he had used this method to put Jervase out of his misery. We are not told, however, how Gregg met his end on his expedition to meet the Little People in the forests.

*

Dyson, sitting in a bar and thinking about Wilkins's strange fear of the spectacled man, mutters something about this to himself and is overheard by a smooth-shaven (!) gentleman named Mr. Burton (!). Burton is a dealer in rare gems, and has recently tried to buy one such gem very cheaply in Italy by putting on a sort of con together with his assistant, one Robbins. They got the gem, but then Robbins disappeared with it (p. 407), and apparently Robbins matches Dyson's description of the spectacled man.

[In the first edition of The Three Impostors, there is an additional section involving Burton at this point. He begins visiting Dyson regularly, and on one occasion tells him a gruesome story about an acquaintance of his, one Mr. Mathias, who once invited Burton over and unexpectedly turned out to be a keen collector of medieval torture devices. One of these was a sort of statue-like contraption that strangled its victim; while showing his collection to Burton, Mathias accidentally presses a button on the statue and gets strangled by it. After hearing a few more stories along these lines, Dyson concludes that Burton is probably making it all up.]

*

Dyson has another odd experience some time later. On a visit to a friend named Russell (another failed writer), Dyson is approached by Miss Helen (!) (p. 430) Leicester (!), a mysterious woman with a piquant face (!) who lives in the same house (pp. 414–16). Her brother Francis had fallen ill after studying too hard for too long; Dr. Halberden, his physician, prescribed him a drug; but once he started taking it, Francis changed, staying out all night revelling in the town; and before long, we find his hand suspiciously bandaged (p. 423), in a way that we are surely meant to identify with the corpse-like hand of the figure that accompanied Miss Lally's brother on p. 338.

Miss Leicester asks Dr. Haberden to investigate; it turns out that the drug is not what he had prescribed, evidently something has been mislabelled at the pharmacist's who had mixed it; but nobody knows what exactly it is. Soon Francis shuts himself up in his room, letting nobody enter, and his sister sees a creepy faceless figure at his window. Of course it is him; in a few more days, he dissolves into a “putrid mass”, bubbling and writhing in a corner of his room, with “two burning points like eyes” (p. 433). In a scene that is more funny than horrifying, Dr. Haberden puts the mass out of its misery with a few whacks of an iron bar :))

A friend of Haberden's analyzes the drug Francis had been taking and pronounces it to be the powder from which the “wine of the Sabbath” was once prepared (pp. 437–8) and given to neophytes to receive them into the ranks of devil-worshippers.

Miss Leicester tells Dyson that her relatives suspect her of having murdered her brother, and sent detectives to trail her, notably one nervous man with spectacles (!). Dyson seems to be rather fed up with bizarre mysteries, especially those involving a/the man with spectacles, and assures her he has not seen him.

*

A few days later, Dyson encounters the spectacled man in a bar; Burton shows up and leads the spectacled man away. The latter addresses him as Davies (!), not Burton, and begs for pity but doesn't actually resist him in any more vigorous way (p. 447). But before being taken away, the spectacled man drops a parcel, which Dyson later picks up (p. 448).

It proves to be a sort of autobiographical account of the unfortunate spectacled man, Joseph Walters (!). A man of reclusive and scholarly habits, he used to frequent the reading room of the British Museum, and there encountered one Dr. Lipsius, a rather Mephistophelean figure who gradually corrupted Walters and turned his interest to “the science of art and pleasure” (p. 452). Before long, Walters found himself initiated into some sort of cult or secret society, was given “the wine of the Fauns” and participated in strange rites (p. 455).

He had fun at first, but soon was given work to do. A certain Mr. Headley would be arriving to London with the gold Tiberius; Dr. Lipsius had apparently arranged for a cabman to bring Headley to the wrong address, and Walters was instructed to intercept him there and lead him to Dr. Lipsius's place (p. 455). Walters executed his commission and, visiting Lipsius next day, was shown the gold Tiberius as well as Headley's corpse, wrapped like a mummy and ready for dispatch to “a local museum” (p. 464).

Walters ran away in horror, the coin still in his hand, but he threw it away during his flight (p. 464). (This, then, is what Dyson saw on p. 298.) Ever since then, Walters has been trying to evade capture by Lipsius and his three servants, two men and a woman. He had a few close calls, most recently when he visited Russell (Dyson's friend from p. 410) and was seen by the woman, Miss Leicester; he is sure that he will soon be captured (pp. 465–6).

*

The story ends with a scene that harks back to the prologue. Dyson and Philipps are taking a stroll, talking about the gold Tiberius and wondering whether Walters can really have anything to fear. Curiosity leads them to enter an abandoned, dilapidated old house; after admiring the gloomy atmosphere for a while, they hear odd groans and smell a sickly odour. Finally they go upstairs to investigate, and find the body of the very recently expired Mr. Walters, who had been tortured horribly and left to die (pp. 471–2).

*

What are we to make of this bizarre, insanely tangled plot? The title clearly refers to Lipsius's three agents, Helen, Davies and Richmond; many of the other characters we have encountered in the story are only their aliases, and their stories we must therefore regard as false: Mr. Wilkins the private secretary is a fiction, and so is the odd cult or gang he had seen in the Rocky Mountains; Miss Lally's brother is a fiction, as is the corpse that had accompanied him; Miss Leicester's brother is also a fiction, and is quite possibly identical with the fictional corpse-like companion of Miss Lally's fictional brother (or, alternatively, both fictional brothers have been issued with monstrous companions in accordance with the process described by the fictional Dr. Chambers on p. 438); Mr. Burton is a fiction, as are his efforts to buy a valuable gem by deceit; and the tale of Professor Gregg's occult researches into the black seal and the fairy folk of Wales is also a fiction.

(But Gregg himself must be real, as Philipps knew of him and his work; but I guess that his death was then really an accident, as Philipps thought (pp. 342–3), and not a case of actually being abducted by the fairies. And speaking of Mr. Wilkins's story, he did have a newspaper clipping about the lynching (p. 329). What are we to make of that? Did he go to the trouble to have a fake newspaper page printed just to make his story more convincing? Or did he find a real newspaper story about a “gang of desperadoes” getting lynched and then adapted his fictional account to fit in with it? Either way seems like more work than it's worth.)

If we dismiss all these things as mere falsehoods put forward by the three impostors (and are thus free of the obligation to wonder how Jervase could have turned into a snail, or how Francis could have turned into a putrid mass of cells), we are then left with the following story: Dr. Lipsius is running a cult, in the course of whose activities many horrors are perpetrated. He lured the unfortunate Wilkins to join his organization and used him for some low-level dirty work, but Wilkins got cold feet and fled, whereupon Lipsius's three henchmen eventually tracked him down and tortured him to death.

This would make it merely a story of insane, gruesome criminality by a gang of fanatics with a penchant for adopting false identities and backing them up by wild tales. But this cannot be the whole story. For one thing, how was Lipsius able to predict when exactly Headley would be coming to London and which cab he would take? Indeed Wilkins himself is wondering the same things on p. 458. This would seem to suggest that there is something supernatural and diabolical about Lipsius; he is not merely a human criminal-boss-cum-cult-leader, even if perhaps his three henchmen are.

*

Besides, I can't help wondering if dismissing the impostors' tales isn't an inadequate way to deal with them. For one thing, it doesn't do anything to explain why they felt the need to tell such wild tales to begin with — how did they think this would help them track down Wilkins, or get information that would lead them to him? Wouldn't a more plausible and less insanely paranormal story have served them better?

Moreover, the wild stories they tell are in very good accordance with everything we've seen in this entire book. Sure, the tale of Gregg's research into fairies is completely insane in our real world, but in the not-quite-real world that Machen presents to us again and again in every story in the present volume, a tale like Gregg's is utterly unremarkable — after all, things like that happen all the time in this book. For all we know, Gregg may well have carried out his occult research into fairies; perhaps Helen, alias Miss Lally, had even posed as his assistant — and perhaps made sure that the fairies did get him in the end. And even if Francis was not her brother, he may very well have been some unfortunate whom Dr. Lipsius's insane cult had tricked into taking a magical drug that turned him into a putrid mass.

And even if Walters, the timid spectacled man, has never been in the Rocky Mountains leading a cultish gang of desperadoes, with Wilkins alias Richmond as his hapless secretary, such a gang may yet have existed anyway and possibly had an association with Dr. Lipsius's group — for all we know, it could have been led by Richmond himself, under the alias of Jack Smith. After all, he mentions having “seen rougher things in the States” in the prologue, when he is talking to his fellow impostors (p. 290).

And even if Burton, the antique dealer, is merely Davies's alter ego, the story of his trying to buy a gem in Italy by deceitful means could well be true. It may have been part of a wider programme by the Lipsius cult of acquiring precious items, a programme that also included Lipsius's efforts to lay his hands on the gold Tiberius. Note that Lipsius also mentions “the Hittite seal” (p. 454), which is perhaps the same we have heard of in the story of Gregg's research.

*

I enjoyed reading this story, but what I liked best were some of the individual episodes or nested stories — Burton's con in Italy, Gregg's fairy research in Wales, Francis turning into a putrid mass — these invariably drew me in and made it hard to stop reading. The story as a whole, however, has some of the same downsides that I already complained about earlier in this post about earlier stories in this book. (Plus it has the additional downside of being longer and more intricate than those earlier stories, so it's harder to keep track of everything that's going on.)

There is too much vague hinting at horrors that remain conveniently unexplained, too much random and unrelated stuff that never ends up cohering into a sensible larger whole — who or what is Lipsius, what is his group trying to accomplish, what are their connections to the gang in the Rockies, how are they connected to the subjects of Gregg's research, why are they trying to get things like the gold Tiberius, etc. etc.

And most importantly, why do Dyson and Philipps keep bumping into these people without even trying to? You would be surprised by this many random meetings of the same handful of people if it occurred in a small village, let alone in a metropolis the size of London. As I already complained before, we can suspend our disbelief about fairies and diabolical forces, but this sort of implausible coincidences really make it hard to swallow the whole thing. (Perhaps they aren't meant to be coincidences? But in that case Machen should tell us a bit more about what is causing them to keep happening and how.)

A comparison with the first edition of The Three Impostors

At the end of The House of Souls there is a note by the publisher saying that the text of The Three Impostors “has been subjected to some revision and curtailment”, so naturally I wondered what exactly was changed. It had previously appeared as a standalone book in 1895, and fortunately, archive.org has a scan of it (though unfortunately it's the American edition rather than the British one). I went though the whole text with the two versions side by side on the screen; I'll refer to the two versions as TT and HS in the remarks below.

The only nontrivial omission in HS is the chapter where Burton's friend shows him his collection of torture devices (TT 137–47). There is one reference to this section elsewhere: “Burton, who had displayed so sumptuous a gift in lying” (TT 187); which is accordingly reduced to just “Burton” in HS 447. I'm not sure why Machen thought it necessary to remove this chapter when revising the tale; it is true that nothing is really lost by removing it, but there was no harm in having it there either.

A line by Richmond in the prologue: “And then the smell— But my stomach was never very strong.” (TT 9) is omitted in HS 290. From “nasturtiums, geraniums, and marigolds” (TT 26), the geraniums are omitted in HS 306. TT 110 has “frankly, Professor Gregg,”, while HS 385 has just “frankly”. The rhetorical understatement of “you would have no repulsion in assisting the ends of justice” (TT 124) is replaced by the more straightforward “you would be glad to assist the ends of justice” (HS 397).

All other differences between the two versions are only in fairly trivial matters of punctuation, capitalization, the use of italics, quotation marks, British vs. American spelling (TT is fairly consistent about using American spellings, with the curious exception of “farm labourers” on p. 128), different preferences in the spelling of compounds (when to use a hyphen, when a space and when to merge the two parts into a single word). Sometimes one edition has a comma where the other has a semicolon, or one has two sentences where in the other they are linked with “and”, etc.

I think most (though not all*) of these revisions are improvements; on the whole, they do make the HS version better than the TT one, and get rid of some of the latter's eccentricities, such as the spelling “gayety”, or its bizarre tendency to insert a space in abbreviated verbs, such as “did n't”, “I 've”, “he 'll” (fortunately, “don't”, “can't” and “won't” are spelt normally), which I thought had died out by the early 19th century at the latest.

[*For example: TT 44 has “Desire and lust, for gold on the scales.” HS 323 omits the comma, which can mislead you into parsing it as “(desire and (lust for gold)) on the scales” instead of “(desire and lust) for (gold on the scales)” — but surely the latter is what makes sense in that context.]

TT has a more detailed table of contents, showing the second-level nested substories as well, which the table of contents in HS doesn't.

Another notable difference between the two editions is that TT has a subtitle: The Three Impostors, or The Transmutations. This struck me as intriguing because, once you see the subtitle and start paying attention, you do notice the word “transmutation” being used quite a lot in this story. Phillipps extols the writer's skill “in taking matter apparently commonplace and transmuting it by the high alchemy of style into the pure gold of art” (p. 294); and Dyson similarly refers to the writer's work as “transmuting vision into reality” (p. 413). Miss Lally, looking through the window, “saw the whole landscape transmuted before me” (p. 358). Miss Leicester refers to “the transmutation of my brother's character” (p. 420; and of course we can't help noticing that it was to be followed soon afterwards by an even more horrible transmutation of his body into a putrid mass). Prof. Gregg “read the key of the awful transmutation of the hills” (p. 391), “the phrases which tell how man can be reduced to the slime from which he came, and be forced to put on the flesh of the reptile and the snake” (p. 392). And in the decrepit 18th-century house where the story begins and ends, the gaily dancing cupids on the ceiling “seemed transmuted into other work [. . .] the dance of the Loves had become a Dance of Death” (p. 470) thanks to mould and decay.

To these examples of transmutations we could add one or two others even though the word itself is not used in connection with them. A day after the unfortunate Mr. Headley has been murdered, his flesh is already “black with the passing of centuries” (p. 464) — surely a kind of transmutation, as is the three impostors' constant putting on of fictional personas.

Incidentally, the 1895 edition was part of the Bodley Head's “Keynotes” series of contemporary fiction, decorated with designs by Aubrey Beardsley — one of the classics of fin-de-siècle British publishing. Machen's The Great God Pan had also appeared in the same series the year before.

The Red Hand

This is one of the shorter stories in this volume, and much ligher on the paranormal element than some of the others. It is also refreshingly free of garish attempts at cheap horror, and almost felt more like a detective story.

Again we meet Phillipps and Dyson, whom we have already encountered in one or two earlier pieces in this volume. Phillipps, the amateur anthropologist, shows his friend some prehistoric fish-hooks, to which Dyson trollishly suggests that they look recent and that primitive troglodytes may still survive even in the modern world (p. 476). But Dyson comes to regret his joke when later that night, while out on a stroll, they come across the corpse of a prominent physician, Sir Thomas Vivian, who has evidently been murdered with a prehistoric flint knife (p. 480)!

Another odd detail of the crime scene is a drawing of the fig sign on a nearby wall. What is even more bizarre is that this relatively innocuous gesture is described as “one of the most horrible signs connected with the theory of the evil eye” (p. 483), “now only used by Italians” (p. 484), and as “the symbol of a hideous faith” (p. 497) — all very far-fetched, but perhaps English readers circa 1900 were sufficiently unfamiliar with the sign that this could sound plausible enough for a story like this.

Dyson is intrigued by all this and tries to investigate on his own, especially to decipher the seemingly nonsensical note in a peculiar handwriting that was found on the body (p. 488). He is helped by one of those improbable coincidences that appear so often in this book: a drunken woman walks into a bar and throws something at the barman; it turns out to be a black stone tablet carved with intricate figures (including a hand showing the fig sign); Dyson happens to be present, recognizes the tablet as having a connection with the Vivian case, and buys it (p. 492).

A scrap of a label on the back of the tablet provides some further clues (p. 496), which Dyson uses to find the murderer (pp. 511–12). This is one Mr. Selby, who explains everything in the final section of the story. He had bought the black tablet many years before, but only recently managed to decipher the symbols on it (p. 504); the drunken woman that Dyson had seen is Selby's landlady, who stole the tablet planning to sell it and drink away the money (p. 508). The inscription on the tablet described the location of a “treasure house of them that dwell below” (p. 507) — evidently some sort of troglodytes that still survive in a cave in the far west of England (pp. 513–14).

Selby convinced himself that the treasure is real, and brought a flint knife as proof. He told Vivian about this, as they had been good friends in their youth, but Vivian evidently got greedy, tried to stab him, and Selby killed him (with the flint knife) in self-defense (p. 511).

*

I liked this story quite a bit; we get to see a good deal of Dyson's detective-style investigation, and much of it relies on cleverness rather than just on implausible coincidences — although some of these are still present, and are even elevated by Dyson to a “theory of improbability” (pp. 500, 512), by which he means that even if an event is unlikely to happen within a certain interval of time, it gets more and more likely the longer this interval is. Mathematically, this is of course true (under some suitable assumptions), but the probability might still be low enough that no interval of tolerable length will be sufficient (much like e.g. you could play the lottery every week for your entire life and would most likely still never hit the jackpot).

I also liked the fact that vague mysticism about a truer spiritual world behind our material world, which we saw in some of the earlier stories in this book, is not present here. The only nod to Machen's obsession with satyrs is a piece of gold jewellery that Selby has brought from the treasure house and which he describes as “the Pain of the Goat” (p. 514). And in fact there's one thing that bothers me here; prehistoric cavemen did not make elaborate ornaments from gold — metalworking would have been beyond their technological level (Selby even describes them as “a little higher than the beasts”, p. 514). So how did they come by this ornament?

Incidentally, this story also contains the passage that was later used by Lovecraft as the epigraph to his The Horror at Red Hook: “There are sacraments of evil as well as of good about us, and we live and move to my belief in an unknown world, a place where there are caves and shadows and dwellers in twilight.” (Dyson on p. 489.)

*     *     *

What to say at the end? This book was an enjoyable read; the stories in it are connected by a number of recurring elements, so they form something of a bigger whole, but at the same time they are still entirely standalone stories that you can read in moderate increments. Machen likes to weave a tangled web, and it often required a bit of (enjoyable) work to make sense of the plot in all of its complexity. I also liked the fact that they are taking place in a world that isn't exactly our real world, but one in which vaguely creepy mystical forces are present somewhere in the background and occasionally come through into the tangible world. Another nice thing is that most of the time, the stories in this book are taking place in London: Machen can put mystical forces at work in a modern, technologically advanced metropolis, not just deep in the woods of Wales. And he brings the enthusiasm of a true flaneur to his constantly recurring descriptions of his characters walking through London — something I couldn't help admiring, even though I myself don't like cities, especially not large ones.

That being said, there were also a few recurring things that I disliked in this book: too often the plot of a story relies too much on implausible coincidences, the horror relies too much on vagueness and on not explaining things to the reader, and from time to time it switches too unexpectedly from vague mystical forces to over-the-top physical horror of the putrid-mass-of-cells type. And there's only so many times I can read dark hints about satyrs, fairies and witches deep in the woods of Wales and not get angry that we're still not told anything definite about them. If he's always going to do no more than tease us like this, I'd prefer to go back to imagining Wales as a country of sheep-shagging yokels instead :)

Still, I don't want to complain too much. I don't regret reading this book, and will hopefully get around to read more by Machen at some point in the future.

Machen on the reactions to The House of Souls

In the 1923 reprint of his next book, The Hill of Dreams, Machen included a new preface explaining how he had come to write that novel, and there he also made a few very interesting remarks about the critics' reactions to the stories that constitute The House of Souls, especially The Great God Pan and The Three Impostors. Apparently people had complained that Machen “was merely a second-rate imitator of Stevenson”, and he decided to make many changes in his writing: “No more white powders, no more of the calix principis inferorum, no more hanky-panky with the Great God Pan, or the Little People or any people of that dubious sort; and—this was the hard part of it—no more of the measured, rounded Stevensonian cadence, which I had learned to use with some faculty and more facility.” (The Hill of Dreams (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1923), pp. vi–vii).

It seems, then, that his next book should be very different than The House of Souls; but I can't help feeling that he is throwing the baby out with the bathwater here. Some of the things he abjures are things that bothered me as well, e.g. the white powder given to Francis (p. 437) and too many vague references to Pan and the fairies. But his “rounded Stevensonian cadence” seems to point at the style of his writing, his sonorous sentences, which I enjoyed very much* and I think it's very unfortunate if he decided to abandon them in his later work.

[*And I see I'm not the only one who enjoyed it: John Masefield, in a review of The House of Souls, wrote that Machen's “style is at all times exquisite and lovely”, and praised his “beautiful and graceful English”.]

Well, at least I learnt one other thing from his remarks here: if his writing was deemed similar to Stevenson's, then I might enjoy Stevenson for some of the same elements that I enjoyed here in Machen's House of Souls. I don't think I've read anything by Stevenson so far, except Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; and I mostly thought of him vaguely as the author of Treasure Island and probably other adventure stories of that kind, so I wasn't expecting him to have written anything in the weird or creepy line that we see exemplified here in The House of Souls. Perhaps, then, it's time to get better acquainted with Stevenson's writing.

ToRead:

• Arthur Machen: The Hill of Dreams (1907). His next book; a novel rather than a collection of short stories.
• Nina Antonia: The Greenwood Faun (2017). I bought this novel soon after it was published, but since it is apparently influenced by Machen's The Hill of Dreams, I figured it was better to read some of Machen's works first.