1,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Arthur Machen: 30+ Horror Classics, Supernatural Mysteries & Fantasy Books," readers are invited to explore a compendium of Machen's seminal works that straddle the boundaries of horror and fantasy. Machen's distinctive literary style is characterized by lush, evocative prose and a deep sense of the mystical and supernatural, capturing the ambiguous relationship between mankind and the unknown. His stories often reflect the anxieties of late Victorian society, immersing the reader in a world where the fantastical intertwines with the ordinary, challenging perceptions of reality and illuminating the dark recesses of the human psyche. Arthur Machen, a Welsh author born in 1863, is considered a pioneer of the horror genre, significantly influencing later writers such as H.P. Lovecraft. His own experiences'—growing up near the haunting landscapes of rural Wales and experiencing the tension between the spiritual and material worlds'—greatly informed his writings. Machen's unwavering belief in the existence of supernatural forces drove his ambition to depict a world where the extraordinary could emerge from the ordinary, making his works resonate with readers seeking deeper truths. This anthology is a must-read for fans of horror and fantasy literature, offering a comprehensive overview of Machen's influential oeuvre. It not only revitalizes classics but also serves as an essential resource for those keen on understanding the evolution of supernatural fiction. Engaging with Machen's works will enrich your appreciation of the genre and inspire a profound reflection on the mysteries that lie beyond the veil of everyday life. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
Ähnliche
Arthur Machen: 30+ Horror Classics, Supernatural Mysteries & Fantasy Books
Table of Contents
Introduction
This collection assembles more than thirty works by Arthur Machen, presenting a panoramic view of his achievement across four decades. From the fin de siecle emergence of his strange tales to later meditations written amid and after war, the volume gathers major novels, signature novellas, and a rich array of shorter pieces alongside nonfiction and contemporaneous criticism. The purpose is twofold: to offer readers a coherent map of Machen’s creative range, and to situate the celebrated horrors within the broader pattern of his thought. Read consecutively or sampled at leisure, these texts reveal a sustained vision of the uncanny in ordinary life.
The contents span multiple forms. Four major novels appear here: The Three Impostors (1895), The Hill of Dreams (1907), The Terror: A Mystery (1917), and The Secret Glory (1922). Short stories and novellas include The Great God Pan (1894), The Inmost Light (1894), The White People (1904), and A Fragment of Life (1905), together with occult investigations such as The Shining Pyramid (1895) and The Red Hand (1895). The wartime sequence The Angels of Mons: The Bowmen and Other Legends of the War (1915) is represented with its component pieces. Essays, a full-length translation, an autobiography, and a critical study complete the set.
Unified by atmosphere and suggestion, these works explore hidden orders pressing upon the everyday. Machen’s hallmarks include framed narratives, stories within stories, and a careful accumulation of detail that keeps terror at the edge of sight. The familiar street or parlour opens onto unknown regions; myth and ritual glimmer beneath modern surfaces; ecstasy and transgression test the limits of perception. Throughout, he balances dread with wonder, maintaining ambiguity rather than explanation. The result is a literature of thresholds, where the mundane is pierced by the extraordinary and the reader is invited to feel the pressure of realities that can scarcely be spoken.
The novels demonstrate this method on a broader canvas. The Three Impostors interlaces embedded tales within a clandestine pursuit through a modern city, playing with masks, coincidence, and rumor. The Hill of Dreams presents a visionary artist’s inward struggle, rendering the peril and allure of imagination with unusual intensity. The Terror: A Mystery reflects a nation unsettled by war through a series of baffling occurrences that resist easy resolution. The Secret Glory traces spiritual yearning against the constraints of worldly institutions. Taken together, these narratives stage the conflict between the seen and the unseen, testing how far experience can be transformed.
The shorter fictions show Machen’s variety within a disciplined set of concerns. The Great God Pan and The Inmost Light evoke modern unease through experiments that suggest the cost of trespass. The White People unfolds as an intimate testament to forbidden knowledge, while A Fragment of Life discovers transcendence in domestic routine. Occult-detective pieces like The Shining Pyramid and The Red Hand juxtapose folklore, artifact, and urban mystery. Later tales such as The Cosy Room (1929), Opening the Door (1931), and the 1936 group Change, The Children of the Pool, The Bright Boy, and The Tree of Life exhibit a spare, late style attentive to eerie aftermaths.
Nonfiction and parallel work provide context and contrast. Hieroglyphics (1902), Dog and Duck (1924), and Dreads and Dolls (1926) articulate Machen’s critical ideals, treating literature as an art of rare intensity rather than program. The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt, 1725-1798 (1894), translated by Machen, reveals his linguistic poise and historical sympathy. Far Off Things (1922) offers an autobiographical vantage on the formation of his imagination. Vincent Starrett’s Arthur Machen: A Novelist of Ecstasy and Sin (1918), with two uncollected poems by Machen, preserves an early appraisal from a perceptive contemporary, illuminating reception during a key moment in his career.
As a whole, the volume invites readers to trace continuities across modes: how the detective thread sharpens the weird, how memoir clarifies motive, how criticism names the very effects the fiction achieves. Machen’s enduring significance lies in his ability to suggest immensities through small, exact touches, allowing horror, sanctity, and beauty to coexist in uneasy proximity. The wartime legends, the urban labyrinths, and the rural mysteries each model a way of encountering rumor and revelation. By assembling novels, tales, essays, translation, and critical response, this book provides a single, expansive pathway into an oeuvre that remains vital for its resonance and restraint.
Historical Context
Arthur Machen (1863–1947) was born in Caerleon, Monmouthshire, a village layered over the Roman fortress of Isca Augusta. The palpable coexistence of Roman remains, medieval churches, and Welsh legend impressed on him a sense of occulted continuities that recurs across his fiction and essays. The Celtic Revival of the late nineteenth century, associated with figures like W. B. Yeats and Lady Charlotte Guest’s Mabinogion (1838–49), provided a cultural backdrop for Machen’s lifelong return to British mythic strata. Educated partly at Hereford Cathedral School and steeped in antiquarian reading, he fashioned stories in which Welsh topography—Gwent, Usk, and the Black Mountains—becomes a threshold, informing later works set in London no less than those that return explicitly to Wales.
Arriving in London in the 1880s, Machen entered a metropolis convulsed by fin-de-siècle anxieties: the Whitechapel murders of 1888, the spread of evolutionary and neurological doctrines, and debates over “degeneration” sharpened by Max Nordau’s 1892 polemic. The Bodley Head under John Lane published his early shockers in 1894–95, placing him near the Decadent and Symbolist orbit of Aubrey Beardsley and The Yellow Book. In this climate, medical laboratories, private clubs, and shabby boarding houses became stages for moral and biological transgression, a matrix that nourished The Great God Pan (1894), The Inmost Light (1894), and the episodic London mosaic of The Three Impostors (1895). Reviewers’ charges of obscenity and pathology only underscored contemporary fears that science might unearth older, darker strata.
Concurrently, an occult revival gathered force. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded in London in 1887, attracted W. B. Yeats, S. L. MacGregor Mathers, and later Aleister Crowley; Machen himself joined a Waite-led branch around 1899. His affinity, however, ran as much to Anglo‑Catholic sacramentalism as to ritual magic, a blend felt in the visionary innocence of The White People (1904) and the Grail‑haunted textures of The Secret Glory (1922) and The Holy Things (1924). Folklore scholarship (the Folklore Society, founded 1878) and antiquarian fieldwork supplied methods and atmosphere, while Machen’s distrust of spiritualism’s séance-room theatrics aligned him against popular ghost‑milling even as he pursued the numinous as an intrusion of grace within, and against, modern materialism.
The turn of the century brought hardship and apprenticeship. After his first wife, Amelia (Amy) Hogg, died in 1899, Machen spent years on the provincial stage and in hackwork before remarrying in 1903 to Dorothie Purefoy Hudleston. The London of 1900–1910—expanding suburbs, electric trams, and clerical offices—fed the drab realities against which his protagonists seek metamorphosis in A Fragment of Life (1905) and the semi‑autobiographical The Hill of Dreams (1907). Periodical culture structured his craft: serial publication, feuilletons, and newspaper columns trained him in framed tales and hearsay testimonies that thread through The Islington Mystery (1927) and other urban pieces, where gossip, police reports, and medical notes become instruments of both skepticism and revelation.
The First World War transformed his public profile. Employed by the London Evening News from 1910, Machen published The Bowmen on 29 September 1914, a short fiction set after the Battle of Mons in August. Readers misread it as reportage, and the “Angels of Mons” legend was born, compelling Machen to gather The Angels of Mons: The Bowmen and Other Legends of the War (1915). The episode illuminated the power of rumor and the permeability of wartime morale to myth. It also frames contemporaneous fictions such as The Great Return (1915), Out of the Earth (1915), and The Terror: A Mystery (1917), which explore the home front’s dread, censorship shadows, and the uncanny mobilization of an entire society.
After 1918, the interwar years positioned Machen as a veteran of the 1890s now conversing with modernist desolation. The Secret Glory (1922) refracts public‑school England through Grail mythology, while Far Off Things (1922) recalls Caerleon and London origins. His essays—Hieroglyphics (1902), Dog and Duck (1924), and Dreads and Dolls (1926)—argue for “ecstasy” as literature’s criterion, shaping how readers approached later single‑volume tales and journalism such as Munitions of War (1926). Critical advocacy from the United States, notably Vincent Starrett’s Arthur Machen: A Novelist of Ecstasy and Sin (1918), and later H. P. Lovecraft’s Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927), integrated Machen into an emergent transatlantic canon of the weird, alongside James, Dunsany, and Blackwood.
The 1920s and 1930s saw Machen living in Buckinghamshire, associated with Amersham and the Chilterns, while London continued to supply scenes of bureaucracy, pubs, and byways. Economic slump and cultural nostalgia nurtured late collections—Opening the Door (1931); The Cosy Room (1929); and, with renewed vigor in 1936, The Children of the Pool, The Bright Boy, The Tree of Life, and Change—in which ordinary streets conceal archaic presences. Between urban planning and antiquarian rediscovery, he mapped a nation modernizing unevenly. The Turanians (1924) and shorter pieces also register contemporary ethnological and pseudo‑scientific vocabularies, refracting them skeptically into fables where classifications wobble and ancestral memories disturb the language of progress.
Throughout, Machen’s technique entwined layered testimony, rumor, and withheld revelation, an approach nourished by newspapers, police courts, and clubland talk. His early translation of The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt, 1725–1798 (1894) schooled him in eighteenth‑century libertine masks and narrative digressions, while Hieroglyphics supplied a manifesto for the “ecstasy” animating both terror and beatitude. Novels like The Three Impostors, The Hill of Dreams, and The Secret Glory, together with war‑era and late tales, belong to a continuum where Roman roads, Celtic relics, and metropolitan sprawl intersect. Machen died in 1947 in Buckinghamshire, but his methods and motifs seeded later weird fiction, ensuring the persistence of his haunted Britain across decades and genres.
Synopsis (Selection)
The Three Impostors (1895)
Interlinked tales follow three deceivers weaving lies across London as they hunt a fugitive, drawing two acquaintances into a net of murder, conspiracy, and occult rumor.
The Hill of Dreams (1907)
A gifted youth in rural Wales and later London is consumed by visionary ecstasy and isolation, blurring art and reality in a slow, dreamlike descent.
The Terror: A Mystery (1917)
During WWI, a countryside is shaken by inexplicable deaths; a journalist gathers scattered evidence that points to a chilling, unconventional cause.
The Secret Glory (1922)
A rebellious schoolboy turned weary clerk is drawn into a clandestine quest for the Holy Grail, confronting the clash between hidden sanctity and modern life.
The Great God Pan (1894)
A reckless experiment momentarily lifts the veil of the unseen, and years later a chain of scandals and suicides reveals the lingering trace of an indefinable horror.
The Inmost Light (1894)
Two friends probe a scientist’s forbidden experiment involving a luminous jewel and his missing wife, uncovering a transgression against the soul itself.
The White People (1904)
A philosophical dialogue frames a girl’s secret notebook of wanderings and rites, hinting that innocence may lead into a perilous, hidden world.
A Fragment of Life (1905)
A London clerk’s drab existence subtly yields to memories and signs of a lost, enchanted heritage that beckons him away from the everyday.
Dyson Stories: The Shining Pyramid (1895) and The Red Hand (1895)
Amateur sleuth Dyson confronts cryptic symbols, ancient survivals, and grotesque crimes, blending detection with folkloric terror and archaeological enigmas.
The Angels of Mons: The Bowmen and Other Legends of the War (1915)
A cycle of wartime tales—beginning with spectral archers aiding soldiers—explores how rumor and the supernatural shape morale and myth on the Western Front.
The Great Return (1915)
Reports from a remote Welsh coast suggest a sacred visitation and the renewed presence of the Grail, glimpsed through quiet marvels and transformations.
Later Short Stories (1930s): Change; The Children of the Pool; The Bright Boy; The Tree of Life; Opening the Door
Brief tales in which ordinary streets, chance meetings, and childhood memories become thresholds to the numinous, with uncanny transformations and beneficent mysteries at the margins of daily life.
Early Short Stories (1890s–1908): Psychology; The Ceremony; The Rose Garden
Concise contes that stage misdirection, ritual intrusions, and the persistence of antiquity within modern settings, favoring suggestion over explicit revelation.
Middle-Period Stories (1915–1929): The Happy Children; The Cosy Room; Munitions of War; A New Christmas Carol; The Islington Mystery; Out of the Earth; The Marriage of Panurge; The Holy Things; The Turanians
A varied group ranging from gentle supernatural vignettes and crime sketches to wartime fables and whimsical, quasi-essayistic fantasies about sanctity, tradition, and everyday wonder.
Hieroglyphics (1902)
An aesthetic treatise arguing that the essence of great literature is an experience of ‘ecstasy’—a transport beyond ordinary life—illustrated through readings of romance and the weird.
Dog and Duck (1924)
Essays blending topography, reminiscence, and literary reflection, championing enchantment and the marvelous against modern banalities.
Dreads and Dolls (1926)
Essays and sketches on fear, childhood objects, folklore, and popular culture, tracing how the uncanny inhabits seemingly trivial things and tales.
The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt, 1725–1798 (1894) — Translation
Machen’s English rendering of Casanova’s expansive autobiography, presenting the adventurer’s amorous exploits, travels, and candid self-portrait.
Far Off Things (1922)
Memoir of Machen’s youth in Wales and early London years, recounting the people, places, and books that shaped his imagination and career.
Arthur Machen: A Novelist of Ecstasy and Sin (Vincent Starrett, 1918)
An early critical study assessing Machen’s themes, style, and influence, accompanied by two previously uncollected poems by Machen.
Arthur Machen: 30+ Horror Classics, Supernatural Mysteries & Fantasy Books
Novels
The Three Impostors(1895)
Table of Contents
Prologue
"And Mr. Joseph Walters is going to stay the night?" said the smooth clean-shaven man to his companion, an individual not of the most charming appearance, who had chosen to make his ginger-colored mustache merge into a pair of short chin-whiskers.
The two stood at the hall door, grinning evilly at each other; and presently a girl ran quickly down, the stairs, and joined them. She was quite young, with a quaint and piquant rather than a beautiful face, and her eyes were of a shining hazel. She held a neat paper parcel in one hand, and laughed with her friends.
"Leave the door open," said the smooth man to the other, as they were going out. "Yes, by——," he went on with an ugly oath. "We'll leave the front door on the jar. He may like to see company, you know."
The other man looked doubtfully about him. "Is it quite prudent do you think, Davies?" he said, pausing with his hand on the mouldering knocker. "I don't think Lipsius would like it. What do you say, Helen?"
"I agree with Davies. Davies is an artist, and you are commonplace, Richmond, and a bit of a coward. Let the door stand open, of course. But what a pity Lipsius had to go away! He would have enjoyed himself."
"Yes," replied the smooth Mr. Davies, "that summons to the west was very hard on the doctor."
The three passed out, leaving the hall door, cracked and riven with frost and wet, half open, and they stood silent for a moment under the ruinous shelter of the porch.
"Well," said the girl, "it is done at last. I shall hurry no more on the track of the young man with spectacles."
"We owe a great deal to you," said Mr. Davies politely; "the doctor said so before he left. But have we not all three some farewells to make? I, for my part, propose to say good-by, here, before this picturesque but mouldy residence, to my friend Mr. Burton, dealer in the antique and curious," and the man lifted his hat with an exaggerated bow.
"And I," said Richmond, "bid adieu to Mr. Wilkins, the private secretary, whose company has, I confess, become a little tedious."
"Farewell to Miss Lally, and to Miss Leicester also," said the girl, making as she spoke a delicious courtesy. "Farewell to all occult adventure; the farce is played."
Mr. Davies and the lady seemed full of grim enjoyment, but Richmond tugged at his whiskers nervously.
"I feel a bit shaken up," he said. "I've seen rougher things in the States, but that crying noise he made gave me a sickish feeling. And then the smell—But my stomach was never very strong."
The three friends moved away from the door, and began to walk slowly up and down what had been a gravel path, but now lay green and pulpy with damp mosses. It was a fine autumn evening, and a faint sunlight shone on the yellow walls of the old deserted house, and showed the patches of gangrenous decay, and all the stains, the black drift of rain from the broken pipes, the scabrous blots where the bare bricks were exposed, the green weeping of a gaunt laburnum that stood beside the porch, and ragged marks near the ground where the reeking clay was gaining on the worn foundations. It was a queer rambling old place, the centre perhaps two hundred years old, with dormer windows sloping from the tiled roof, and on each side there were Georgian wings; bow windows had been carried up to the first floor, and two dome-like cupolas that had once been painted a bright green were now gray and neutral. Broken urns lay upon the path, and a heavy mist seemed to rise from the unctuous clay; the neglected shrubberies, grown all tangled and unshapen, smelt dank and evil, and there was an atmosphere all about the deserted mansion that proposed thoughts of an opened grave. The three friends looked dismally at the rough grasses and the nettles that grew thick over lawn and flower-beds; and at the sad water-pool in the midst of the weeds. There, above green and oily scum instead of lilies, stood a rusting Triton on the rocks, sounding a dirge through a shattered horn; and beyond, beyond the sunk fence and the far meadows; the sun slid down and shone red through the bars of the elm trees.
Richmond shivered and stamped his foot. "We had better be going soon," he said; "there is nothing else to be done here."
"No," said Davies, "it is finished at last. I thought for some time we should never get hold of the gentleman with the spectacles. He was a clever fellow, but, Lord! he broke up badly at last. I can tell you he looked white at me when I touched him on the arm in the bar. But where could he have hidden the thing? We can all swear it was not on him."
The girl laughed, and they turned away, when Richmond gave a violent start. "Ah!" he cried, turning to the girl, "what have you got there? Look, Davies, look! it's all oozing and dripping."
The young woman glanced down at the little parcel she was carrying, and partially unfolded the paper.
"Yes, look both of you," she said; "it's my own idea. Don't you think it will do nicely for the doctor's museum? It comes from the right hand, the hand that took the gold Tiberius."
Mr. Davies nodded with a good deal of approbation, and Richmond lifted his ugly high-crowned bowler, and wiped his forehead with a dingy handkerchief.
"I'm going," he said; "you two can stay if you like."
The three went round by the stable path, past the withered wilderness of the old kitchen garden, and struck off by a hedge at the back, making for a particular point in the road. About five minutes later two gentlemen, whom idleness had led to explore these forgotten outskirts of London, came sauntering up the shadowy carriage drive. They had spied the deserted house from the road, and as they observed all the heavy desolation of the place they began to moralize in the great style, with considerable debts to Jeremy Taylor.
"Look, Dyson," said the one as they drew nearer, "look at those upper windows; the sun is setting, and though the panes are dusty, yet
"The grimy sash an oriel burns."
"Phillipps," replied the elder and (it must be said) the more pompous of the two, "I yield to fantasy, I cannot withstand the influence of the grotesque. Here, where all is falling into dimness and dissolution, and we walk in cedarn gloom, and the very air of heaven goes mouldering to the lungs, I cannot remain commonplace. I look at that deep glow on the panes, and the house lies all enchanted; that very room, I tell you, is within all blood and fire."
Adventure of the Gold Tiberius.
The acquaintance between Mr. Dyson and Mr. Charles Phillipps arose from one of those myriad chances which are every day doing their work in the streets of London. Mr. Dyson was a man of letters, and an unhappy instance of talents misapplied. With gifts that might have placed him in the flower of his youth among the most favored of Bentley's favorite novelists, he had chosen to be perverse; he was, it is true, familiar with scholastic logic, but he knew nothing of the logic of life, and he flattered himself with the title of artist, when he was in fact but an idle and curious spectator of other men's endeavors. Amongst many delusions, he cherished one most fondly, that he was a strenuous worker; and it was with a gesture of supreme weariness that he would enter his favorite resort, a small tobacco shop in Great Queen Street, and proclaim to any one who cared to listen that he had seen the rising and setting of two successive suns. The proprietor of the shop, a middle-aged man of singular civility, tolerated Dyson partly out of good nature, and partly because he was a regular customer; he was allowed to sit on an empty cask, and to express his sentiments on literary and artistic matters till he was tired or the time for closing came; and if no fresh customers were attracted, it is believed that none were turned away by his eloquence. Dyson, was addicted to wild experiments in tobacco; he never wearied of trying new combinations, and one evening he had just entered the shop and given utterance to his last preposterous formula, when a young fellow, of about his own age, who had come in a moment later, asked the shopman to duplicate the order on his account, smiling politely, as he spoke, to Mr. Dyson's address. Dyson felt profoundly flattered, and after a few phrases the two entered into conversation, and in an hour's time the tobacconist saw the new friends sitting side by side on a couple of casks, deep in talk.
"My dear sir," said Dyson, "I will give you the task of the literary man in a phrase. He has got to do simply this: to invent a wonderful story, and to tell it in a wonderful manner."
"I will grant you that," said Mr. Phillipps, "but you will allow me to insist that in the hands of the true artist in words all stories are marvellous, and every circumstance has its peculiar wonder. The matter is of little consequence, the manner is everything. Indeed, the highest skill is shown in taking matter apparently commonplace and transmuting it by the high alchemy of style into the pure gold of art."
"That is indeed a proof of great skill, but it is great skill exerted foolishly, or at least unadvisedly. It is as if a great violinist were to show us what marvellous harmonies he could draw from a child's banjo."
"No, no, you are really wrong. I see you take a radically mistaken view of life. But we must thresh this out. Come to my rooms; I live not far from here."
It was thus that Mr. Dyson became the associate of Mr. Charles Phillipps, who lived in a quiet square not far from Holborn. Thenceforth they haunted each other's rooms at intervals, sometimes regular, and occasionally the reverse, and made appointments to meet at the shop in Queen Street, where their talk robbed the tobacconist's profit of half its charm. There was a constant jarring of literary formulas, Dyson exalting the claims of the pure imagination, while Phillipps, who was a student of physical science and something of an ethnologist, insisted that all literature ought to have a scientific basis. By the mistaken benevolence of deceased relatives both young men were placed out of reach of hunger, and so, meditating high achievements, idled their time pleasantly away, and revelled in the careless joys of a Bohemianism devoid of the sharp seasoning of adversity.
One night in June Mr. Phillipps was sitting in his room in the calm retirement of Red Lion Square. He had opened the window, and was smoking placidly, while he watched the movement of life below. The sky was clear, and the afterglow of sunset had lingered long about it; and the flushing twilight of a summer evening, vying with the gas-lamps in the square, had fashioned a chiaroscuro that had in it something unearthly; and the children, racing to and fro upon the pavement, the lounging idlers by the public, and the casual passers-by rather flickered, and hovered in the play of lights than stood out substantial things. By degrees in the houses opposite one window after another leaped out a square of light, now and again a figure would shape itself against a blind and vanish, and to all this semi-theatrical magic the runs and flourishes of brave Italian opera played a little distance off on a piano-organ seemed an appropriate accompaniment, while the deep-muttered bass of the traffic of Holborn never ceased. Phillipps enjoyed the scene and its effects; the light in the sky faded and turned to darkness, and the square gradually grew silent, and still he sat dreaming at the window, till the sharp peal of the house bell roused him, and looking at his watch he found that it was past ten o'clock. There was a knock at the door, and his friend Mr. Dyson entered, and, according to his custom, sat down in an armchair and began to smoke in silence.
"You know, Phillipps," he said at length, "that I have always battled for the marvellous. I remember your maintaining in that chair that one has no business to make use of the wonderful, the improbable, the odd coincidence in literature, and you took the ground that it was wrong to do so, because, as a matter of fact, the wonderful and the improbable don't happen, and men's lives are not really shaped by odd coincidence. Now, mind you, if that were so, I would not grant your conclusion, because I think the "criticism-of-life" theory is all nonsense; but I deny your premise. A most singular thing has happened to me to-night."
"Really, Dyson, I am very glad to hear it. Of course I oppose your argument, whatever it may be; but if you would be good enough to tell me of your adventure I should be delighted."
"Well, it came about like this. I have had a very hard day's work; indeed, I have scarcely moved from my old bureau since seven o'clock last night. I wanted to work out that idea we discussed last Tuesday, you know, the notion of the fetish-worshipper."
"Yes, I remember. Have you been able to do anything with it?"
"Yes; it came out better than I expected; but there were great difficulties, the usual agony between the conception and the execution. Anyhow I got it done at about seven o'clock to-night, and I thought I should like a little of the fresh air. I went out and wandered rather aimlessly about the streets; my head was full of my tale, and I didn't much notice where I was going. I got into those quiet places to the north of Oxford Street as you go west, the genteel residential neighborhood of stucco and prosperity. I turned east again without knowing it, and it was quite dark when I passed along a sombre little by-street, ill lighted and empty. I did not know at the time in the least where I was, but I found out afterwards that it was not very far from Tottenham Court Road. I strolled idly along, enjoying the stillness; on one side there seemed to be the back premises of some great shop; tier after tier of dusty windows lifted up into the night, with gibbet-like contrivances for raising heavy goods, and below large doors, fast closed and bolted, all dark and desolate. Then there came a huge pantechnicon warehouse; and over the way a grim blank wall, as forbidding as the wall of a jail, and then the headquarters of some volunteer regiment, and afterwards a passage leading to a court where wagons were standing to be hired. It was, one might almost say, a street devoid of inhabitants, and scarce a window showed the glimmer of a light. I was wondering at the strange peace and dimness there, where it must be close to some roaring main artery of London life, when suddenly I heard the noise of dashing feet tearing along the pavement at full speed, and from a narrow passage, a mews or something of that kind, a man was discharged as from a catapult under my very nose and rushed past me, flinging something from him as he ran. He was gone and down another street in an instant, almost before I knew what had happened, but I didn't much bother about him, I was watching something else. I told you he had thrown something away; well, I watched what seemed a line of flame flash through the air and fly quivering over the pavement, and in spite of myself I could not help tearing after it. The impetus lessened, and I saw something like a bright half-penny roll slower and slower, and then deflect towards the gutter, hover for a moment on the edge, and dance down into a drain. I believe I cried out in positive despair, though I hadn't the least notion what I was hunting; and then to my joy I saw that, instead of dropping into the sewer, it had fallen flat across two bars. I stooped down and picked it up and whipped it into my pocket, and I was just about to walk on when I heard again that sound of dashing footsteps. I don't know why I did it, but as a matter of fact I dived down into the mews, or whatever it was, and stood as much in the shadow as possible. A man went by with a rush a few paces from where I was standing, and I felt uncommonly pleased that I was in hiding. I couldn't make out much feature, but I saw his eyes gleaming and his teeth showing, and he had an ugly-looking knife in one hand, and I thought things would be very unpleasant for gentleman number one if the second robber, or robbed, or what you like, caught him up. I can tell you, Phillipps, a fox hunt is exciting enough, when the horn blows clear on a winter morning, and the hounds give tongue, and the red-coats charge away, but it's nothing to a man hunt, and that's what I had a slight glimpse of to-night. There was murder in the fellow's eyes as he went by, and I don't think there was much more than fifty seconds between the two. I only hope it was enough."
Dyson leant back in his armchair and relit his pipe, and puffed thoughtfully. Phillipps began to walk up and down the room, musing over the story of violent death fleeting in chase along the pavement, the knife shining in the lamplight, the fury of the pursuer, and the terror of the pursued.
"Well," he said at last, "and what was it, after all, that you rescued from the gutter?"
Dyson jumped up, evidently quite startled. "I really haven't a notion. I didn't think of looking. But we shall see."
He fumbled in his waistcoat pocket and drew out a small and shining object, and laid it on the table. It glowed there beneath the lamp with the radiant glory of rare old gold; and the image and the letters stood out in high relief, clear and sharp, as if it had but left the mint a month before. The two men bent over it, and Phillipps took it up and examined it closely.
"Imp. Tiberius Cæsar Augustus," he read the legend, and then, looking at the reverse of the coin, he stared in amazement, and at last turned to Dyson with a look of exultation.
"Do you know what you have found?" he said.
"Apparently a gold coin of some antiquity," said Dyson, coolly.
"Quite so, a gold Tiberius. No, that is wrong. You have found the gold Tiberius. Look at the reverse."
Dyson looked and saw the coin was stamped with the figure of a faun standing amidst reeds and flowing water. The features, minute as they were, stood out in delicate outline; it was a face lovely and yet terrible, and Dyson thought of the well-known passage of the lad's playmate, gradually growing with his growth and increasing with his stature, till the air was filled with the rank fume of the goat.
"Yes," he said, "it is a curious coin. Do you know it?"
"I know about it. It is one of the comparatively few historical objects in existence; it is all storied like those jewels we have read of. A whole cycle of legend has gathered round the thing; the tale goes that it formed part of an issue struck by Tiberius to commemorate an infamous excess. You see the legend on the reverse: 'Victoria.' It is said that by an extraordinary accident the whole issue was thrown into the melting pot, and that only this one coin escaped. It glints through history and legend, appearing and disappearing, with intervals of a hundred years in time and continents in place. It was discovered by an Italian humanist, and lost and rediscovered. It has not been heard of since 1727, when Sir Joshua Byrde, a Turkey merchant, brought it home from Aleppo, and vanished with it a month after he had shown it to the virtuosi, no man knew or knows where. And here it is!"
"Put it into your pocket, Dyson," he said, after a pause. "I would not let any one have a glimpse of the thing, if I were you. I would not talk about it. Did either of the men you saw see you?"
"Well, I think not. I don't think the first man, the man who was vomited out of the dark passage, saw anything at all; and I am sure that the second could not have seen me."
"And you didn't really see them. You couldn't recognize either the one or the other if you met him in the street to-morrow?"
"No, I don't think I could. The street, as I said, was dimly lighted, and they ran like mad-men."
The two men sat silent for some time, each weaving his own fancies of the story; but lust of the marvellous was slowly overpowering Dyson's more sober thoughts.
"It is all more strange than I fancied," he said at last. "It was queer enough what I saw; a man is sauntering along a quiet, sober, every-day London street, a street of gray houses and blank walls, and there, for a moment, a veil seems drawn aside, and the very fume of the pit steams up through the flagstones, the ground glows, red hot, beneath his feet, and he seems to hear the hiss of the infernal caldron. A man flying in mad terror for his life, and furious hate pressing hot on his steps with knife drawn ready; here indeed is horror. But what is all that to what you have told me? I tell you, Phillipps, I see the plot thicken, our steps will henceforth be dogged with mystery, and the most ordinary incidents will teem with significance. You may stand out against it, and shut your eyes, but they will be forced open; mark my words, you will have to yield to the inevitable. A clue, tangled if you like, has been placed by chance in our hands; it will be our business to follow it up. As for the guilty person or persons in this strange case, they will be unable to escape us, our nets will be spread far and wide over this great city, and suddenly, in the streets and places of public resort, we shall in some way or other be made aware that we are in touch with the unknown criminal. Indeed, I almost fancy I see him slowly approaching this quiet square of yours; he is loitering at street corners, wandering, apparently without aim, down far-reaching thoroughfares, but all the while coming nearer and nearer, drawn by an irresistible magnetism, as ships were drawn to the Loadstone Rock in the Eastern tale."
"I certainly think," replied Phillipps, "that, if you pull out that coin and flourish it under people's noses as you are doing at the present moment, you will very probably find yourself in touch with the criminal, or a criminal. You will undoubtedly be robbed with violence. Otherwise, I see no reason why either of us should be troubled. No one saw you secure the coin, and no one knows you have it. I, for my part, shall sleep peacefully, and go about my business with a sense of security and a firm dependence on the natural order of things. The events of the evening, the adventure in the street, have been odd, I grant you, but I resolutely decline to have any more to do with the matter, and, if necessary, I shall consult the police. I will not be enslaved by a gold Tiberius, even though it swims into my ken in a manner which is somewhat melodramatic."
"And I for my part," said Dyson, "go forth like a knight-errant in search of adventure. Not that I shall need to seek; rather adventure will seek me; I shall be like a spider in the midst of his web, responsive to every movement, and ever on the alert."
Shortly afterwards Dyson took his leave, and Mr. Phillipps spent the rest of the night in examining some flint arrow-heads which he had purchased. He had every reason to believe that they were the work of a modern and not a palæolithic man, still he was far from gratified when a close scrutiny showed him that his suspicions were well founded. In his anger at the turpitude which would impose on an ethnologist, he completely forgot Dyson and the gold Tiberius; and when he went to bed at first sunlight, the whole tale had faded utterly from his thoughts.
The Encounter of the Pavement.
Mr. Dyson, walking leisurely along Oxford. Street, and staring with bland inquiry at whatever caught his attention, enjoyed in all its rare flavors the sensation that he was really very hard at work. His observation of mankind, the traffic, and the shop-windows tickled his faculties with an exquisite bouquet; he looked serious, as one looks on whom charges of weight and moment are laid, and he was attentive in his glances to right and left, for fear lest he should miss some circumstance of more acute significance. He had narrowly escaped being run over at a crossing by a charging van, for he hated to hurry his steps, and indeed the afternoon was warm; and he had just halted by a place of popular refreshment, when the astounding gestures of a well dressed individual on the opposite pavement held him enchanted and gasping like a fish. A treble line of hansoms, carriages, vans, cabs, and omnibuses, was tearing east and west, and not the most daring adventurer of the crossings would have cared to try his fortune; but the person who had attracted Dyson's attention seemed to rage on the very edge of the pavement, now and then darting forward at the hazard of instant death, and at each repulse absolutely dancing with excitement, to the rich amusement of the passers-by. At last, a gap that would, have tried the courage of a street-boy appeared between the serried lines of vehicles, and the man rushed across in a frenzy, and escaping by a hair's breadth pounced upon Dyson as a tiger pounces on her prey. "I saw you looking about you," he said, sputtering out his words in his intense eagerness; "would you mind telling me this? Was the man who came out of the Aerated Bread Shop and jumped, into the hansom three minutes ago a youngish looking man with dark whiskers and spectacles? Can't you speak, man? For Heaven's sake can't you speak? Answer me; it's a matter of life and death."
The words bubbled and boiled out of the man's mouth in the fury of his emotion, his face went from red to white, and the beads of sweat stood out on his forehead, and he stamped his feet as he spoke and tore with his hand at his coat, as if something swelled and choked him, stopping the passage of his breath.
"My dear sir," said Dyson, "I always like to be accurate. Your observation was perfectly correct. As you say, a youngish man, a man, I should say, of somewhat timid bearing, ran rapidly out of the shop here, and bounced into a hansom that must have been waiting for him, as it went eastwards at once. Your friend also wore spectacles, as you say. Perhaps you would like me to call a hansom for you to follow the gentleman?"
"No, thank you; it would be waste of time." The man gulped down something which appeared to rise in his throat, and Dyson was alarmed to see him shaking with hysterical laughter, and he clung hard to a lamp-post and swayed and staggered like a ship in a heavy gale.
"How shall I face the doctor?" he murmured to himself. "It is too hard to fail at the last moment." Then he seemed to recollect himself, and stood straight again, and looked quietly at Dyson. I owe you an apology for my violence, he said at last. "Many men would not be so patient as you have been. Would you mind adding to your kindness by walking with me a little way? I feel a little sick; I think it's the sun."
Dyson nodded assent, and devoted himself to a quiet scrutiny of this strange personage as they moved on together. The man was dressed in quiet taste, and the most scrupulous observer could find nothing amiss with the fashion or make of his clothes, yet, from his hat to his boots, everything seemed inappropriate. His silk hat, Dyson thought, should have been a high bowler of odious pattern worn with a baggy morning-coat, and an instinct told him that the fellow did not commonly carry a clean pocket-handkerchief. The face was not of the most agreeable pattern, and was in no way improved by a pair of bulbous chin-whiskers of a ginger hue, into which mustaches of light color merged imperceptibly. Yet in spite of these signals hung out by nature, Dyson felt that the individual beside him was something more than compact of vulgarity. He was struggling with himself, holding his feelings in check, but now and again passion would mount black to his face, and it was evidently by a supreme effort that he kept himself from raging like a madman. Dyson found something curious and a little terrible in the spectacle of an occult emotion thus striving for the mastery, and threatening to break out at every instant with violence, and they had gone some distance before the person whom he had met by so odd a hazard was able to speak quietly.
"You are really very good," he said. "I apologize again; my rudeness was really most unjustifiable. I feel my conduct demands an explanation, and I shall be happy to give it you. Do you happen to know of any place near here where one could sit down? I should really be very glad."
"My dear sir," said Dyson, solemnly, "the only café in London is close by. Pray do not consider yourself as bound to offer me any explanation, but at the same time I should be most happy to listen to you. Let us turn down here."
They walked down a sober street and turned into what seemed a narrow passage past an iron-barred gate thrown back. The passage was paved with flagstones, and decorated with handsome shrubs in pots on either side, and the shadow of the high walls made a coolness which was very agreeable after the hot breath of the sunny street. Presently the passage opened out into a tiny square, a charming place, a morsel of France transplanted into the heart of London. High walls rose on either side, covered with glossy creepers, flower-beds beneath were gay with nasturtiums, geraniums, and marigolds, and odorous with mignonette, and in the centre of the square a fountain hidden by greenery sent a cool shower continually plashing into the basin beneath, and the very noise made this retreat delightful. Chairs and tables were disposed at convenient intervals, and at the other end of the court broad doors had been thrown back; beyond was a long, dark room, and the turmoil of traffic had become a distant murmur. Within the room one or two men were sitting at the tables, writing and sipping, but the courtyard was empty.
"You see, we shall be quiet," said Dyson. "Pray sit down here, Mr.—?"
"Wilkins. My name is Henry Wilkins."
"Sit here, Mr. Wilkins. I think you will find that a comfortable seat. I suppose you have not been here before? This is the quiet time; the place will be like a hive at six o'clock, and the chairs and tables will overflow into that little alley there."
A waiter came in response to the bell; and after Dyson had politely inquired after the health of M. Annibault, the proprietor, he ordered a bottle of the wine of Champigny.
"The wine of Champigny," he observed to Mr. Wilkins, who was evidently a good deal composed by the influence of the place, "is a Tourainian wine of great merit. Ah, here it is; let me fill your glass. How do you find it?"
"Indeed," said Mr. Wilkins, "I should have pronounced it a fine Burgundy. The bouquet is very exquisite. I am fortunate in lighting upon such a good Samaritan as yourself. I wonder you did not think me mad. But if you knew the terrors that assailed me, I am sure you would no longer be surprised at conduct which was certainly most unjustifiable."
He sipped his wine, and leant back in his chair, relishing the drip and trickle of the fountain, and the cool greenness that hedged in this little port of refuge.
"Yes," he said at last, "that is indeed an admirable wine. Thank you; you will allow me to offer you another bottle?"
The waiter was summoned, and descended through a trap-door in the floor of the dark apartment, and brought up the wine. Mr. Wilkins lit a cigarette, and Dyson pulled out his pipe.
"Now," said Mr. Wilkins, "I promised to give you an explanation of my strange behavior. It is rather a long story, but I see, sir, that you are no mere cold observer of the ebb and flow of life. You take, I think, a warm and an intelligent interest in the chances of your fellow-creatures, and I believe you will find what I have to tell not devoid of interest."
Mr. Dyson signified his assent to these propositions, and though he thought Mr. Wilkins's diction a little pompous, prepared to interest himself in his tale. The other, who had so raged with passion half an hour before, was now perfectly cool, and when he had smoked out his cigarette, he began in an even voice to relate the
Novel of the Dark Valley.
I am the son of a poor but learned clergyman in the West of England,—but I am forgetting, these details are not of special interest. I will briefly state, then, that my father, who was, as I have said, a learned man, had never learnt the specious arts by which the great are flattered, and would never condescend to the despicable pursuit of self-advertisement. Though his fondness for ancient ceremonies and quaint customs, combined with a kindness of heart that was unequalled and a primitive and fervent piety, endeared him to his moor-land parishioners, such were not the steps by which clergy then rose in the Church, and at sixty my father was still incumbent of the little benefice he had accepted in his thirtieth year. The income of the living was barely sufficient to support life in the decencies which are expected of the Anglican parson; and when my father died a few years ago, I, his only child, found myself thrown upon the world with a slender capital of less than a hundred pounds, and all the problem of existence before me. I felt that there was nothing for me to do in the country, and as usually happens in such eases, London drew me like a magnet. One day in August, in the early morning, while the dew still glittered on the turf, and on the high green banks of the lane, a neighbor drove me to the railway station, and I bade good-bye to the land of the broad moors and unearthly battlements of the wild tors. It was six o'clock as we neared London; the faint sickly fume of the brickfields about Acton came in puffs through the open window, and a mist was rising from the ground. Presently the brief view of successive streets, prim and uniform, struck me with a sense of monotony; the hot air seemed to grow hotter; and when we had rolled beneath the dismal and squalid houses, whose dirty and neglected back yards border the line near Paddington, I felt as if I should be stifled in this fainting breath of London. I got a hansom and drove off, and every street increased my gloom; gray houses with blinds drawn down, whole thoroughfares almost desolate, and the foot-passengers who seemed to stagger wearily along rather than walk, all made me feel a sinking at heart. I put up for the night at a small hotel in a street leading from the Strand, where my father had stayed on his few brief visits to town; and when I went out after dinner, the real gayety and bustle of the Strand and Fleet Street could cheer me but little, for in all this great city there was no single human being whom I could claim even as an acquaintance. I will not weary you with the history of the next year, for the adventures of a man who sinks are too trite to be worth recalling. My money did not last me long; I found that I must be neatly dressed, or no one to whom I applied would so much as listen to me; and I must live in a street of decent reputation if I wished to be treated with common civility. I applied for various posts, for which, as I now see, I was completely devoid of qualification; I tried to become a clerk without having the smallest notion of business habits, and I found, to my cost, that a general knowledge of literature and an execrable style of penmanship are far from being looked upon with favor in commercial circles. I had read one of the most charming of the works of a famous novelist of the present day, and I frequented the Fleet Street taverns in the hope of making literary friends, and so getting the introductions which I understood were indispensable in the career of letters. I was disappointed; I once or twice ventured to address gentlemen who were sitting in adjoining boxes, and I was answered, politely indeed, but in a manner that told me my advances were unusual. Pound by pound, my small resources melted; I could no longer think of appearances; I migrated to a shy quarter, and my meals became mere observances. I went out at one and returned to my room at two, but nothing but a milk-cake had occurred in the interval. In short, I became acquainted with misfortune; and as I sat amidst slush and ice on a seat in Hyde Park, munching a piece of bread, I realized the bitterness of poverty, and the feelings of a gentleman reduced to something far below the condition of a vagrant. In spite of all discouragement I did not desist in my efforts to earn a living. I consulted advertisement columns, I kept my eyes open for a chance, I looked in at the windows of stationers' shops, but all in vain. One evening I was sitting in a Free Library, and I saw an advertisement in one of the papers. It was something like this: "Wanted, by a gentleman a person of literary taste and abilities as secretary and amanuensis. Must not object to travel." Of course I knew that such an advertisement would have answers by the hundred, and I thought my own chances of securing the post extremely small; however, I applied at the address given, and wrote to Mr. Smith, who was staying at a large hotel at the West End. I must confess that my heart gave a jump when I received a note a couple of days later, asking me to call at the Cosmopole at my earliest convenience. I do not know, sir, what your experiences of life may have been, and so I cannot tell whether you have known such moments. A slight sickness, my heart beating rather more rapidly than usual, a choking in the throat, and a difficulty of utterance; such were my sensations as I walked to the Cosmopole. I had to mention the name twice before the hall porter could understand me, and as I went upstairs my hands were wet. I was a good deal struck by Mr. Smith's appearance; he looked younger than I did, and there was something mild and hesitating about his expression. He was reading when I came in, and he looked up when I gave my name. "My dear sir," he said, "I am really delighted to see you. I have read very carefully the letter you were good enough to send me. Am I to understand that this document is in your own handwriting?" He showed me the letter I had written, and I told him I was not so fortunate as to be able to keep a secretary myself. "Then, sir," he went on, "the post I advertised is at your service. You have no objection to travel, I presume?" As you may imagine, I closed pretty eagerly with the offer he made, and thus I entered the service of Mr. Smith. For the first few weeks I had no special duties; I had received a quarter's salary, and a handsome allowance was made me in lieu of board and lodging. One morning, however, when I called at the hotel according to instructions, my master informed me that I must hold myself in readiness for a sea-voyage, and, to spare unnecessary detail, in the course of a fortnight we had landed at New York. Mr. Smith told me that he was engaged on a work of a special nature, in the compilation of which some peculiar researches had to be made; in short, I was given to understand that we were to travel to the far West.
