The Greatest Works of Arthur Machen - Ultimate Horror & Dark Fantasy Collection E-Book
ARTHUR MACHEN
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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The Greatest Works of Arthur Machen - Ultimate Horror & Dark Fantasy Collection," readers are invited into a meticulously curated anthology that captures the essence of Machen's masterful storytelling. Renowned for his unique blend of gothic horror and mystical themes, Machen employs rich, evocative language that immerses readers in a world suffused with both dread and wonder. This collection not only highlights his pivotal influence on the development of weird fiction but also showcases his ability to evoke a profound sense of the numinous, drawing upon ancient folklore and the supernatural while critiquing modernity's disconnection from the profound mysteries of existence. Arthur Machen, a Welsh author born in 1863, was profoundly inspired by his own experiences with spirituality, mythology, and the esoteric. His writings often reflect his fascination with the intersection of the ordinary and the transcendent, stemming from his belief in the unseen forces that shape human experiences. Machen's lifelong engagement with religious themes and the supernatural, coupled with his keen historical awareness, profoundly shapes the narratives found within this collection. For readers who appreciate atmospheric prose, intricate character studies, and a haunting exploration of the human psyche, this collection is an essential addition to any library. Machen's works challenge the boundaries of reality, inviting a re-examination of the terrors and beauties hidden within our world, making it a must-read for enthusiasts of horror and dark fantasy. 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.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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The Greatest Works of Arthur Machen - Ultimate Horror & Dark Fantasy Collection
Table of Contents
Introduction
This collection assembles a focused core of Arthur Machen’s most influential fiction, presenting a panoramic introduction to his achievement in horror and dark fantasy. Rather than attempting an exhaustive “complete works,” it gathers major novels, novellas, and stories that shaped his reputation from the fin de siècle through the early twentieth century. The purpose is twofold: to offer new readers a coherent gateway into Machen’s distinctive vision, and to place, in one volume, the key texts that display his range—from London’s labyrinths to Welsh borderlands, from occult experiment to visionary reverie. Read together, these works reveal an artist refining one sustained imagination across changing times.
The contents span multiple forms central to Machen’s art. Long works such as The Hill of Dreams, The Terror, and The Secret Glory sit alongside the episodic, interlinked structure of The Three Impostors. Foundational novellas—including The Great God Pan, The White People, The Inmost Light, and The Great Return—demonstrate his mastery of concentrated, suggestive terror. Shorter pieces—The Shining Pyramid, The Red Hand, The Bowmen, The Children of the Pool, The Bright Boy, The Happy Children, and Out of the Earth—show his craft at compressed mystery and folkloric unease. Across these modes, the collection represents Machen’s central terrain: the weird tale, supernatural horror, and visionary fiction.
What unifies these works is Machen’s conviction that the familiar world conceals an overwhelming, often perilous reality. His prose is richly patterned and musical, preferring implication to disclosure, atmosphere to explanation. He weds urban and rural settings to archaic survivals, sacramental longings, and the shock of the unknown. Found manuscripts, embedded narratives, and investigations that lead to disquiet rather than resolution are recurrent devices. Scientific transgression, rumor, relic, and rite illuminate a boundary where ecstasy shades into dread. This marriage of stylistic enchantment and metaphysical unease explains why the stories continue to matter: they enlarge horror into a vision of the world’s hidden depths.
The earlier phase represented here—epitomized by The Three Impostors, The Great God Pan, The Inmost Light, The Shining Pyramid, and The Red Hand—shows Machen fusing decadent-era anxieties with the momentum of mystery fiction. London’s streets and rooms become chambers of initiation; chance encounters reveal networks of secrecy; investigations expose vestiges of immemorial practices. The suggestion of something older than the city itself presses through fragments, rumors, and artefacts. These works refine a distinctive method: horror delivered obliquely, the narrative advancing through testimony and coincidence, climaxing less in revelation than in a vertiginous sense that the ordinary has already been infiltrated by the extraordinary.
Alongside the uncanny, Machen pursued a visionary realism in The Hill of Dreams and The Secret Glory. The former traces an artist’s inward ascent and peril, where imagination magnifies landscape, memory, and desire into states bordering on the mythic. The latter follows a young man confronting the claims of a hidden sanctity against the demands of worldly institutions. In both, the mundane is haunted by a radiance that can exalt or destroy. These novels are crucial to understanding Machen’s art: they show that his horror grows from a larger metaphysical appetite, a yearning for the real that finds both heaven and abyss beneath appearances.
The wartime and postwar pieces reveal his responsiveness to a changed world. The Bowmen, written during the First World War, offered a short, suggestive vision whose premise entered popular lore. The Great Return translates sacred visitation into the language of a remote Welsh community. The Terror sets an atmosphere of pervasive dread against the unsettled backdrop of conflict at home. Out of the Earth channels rural fear into a tale of inexplicable disturbance. In these works, Machen’s method remains constant: the numinous breaks in not with spectacle but with rumor, mood, and the slow accumulation of details that make the world feel newly precarious.
The later shorter fiction, including The Children of the Pool, The Bright Boy, and The Happy Children, returns to themes of innocence, wonder, and the thinness of the everyday veil. Children, pools, lights, and songs become thresholds to something older and other. The tone can be tender or mischievous, yet the undercurrent remains serious: beauty and terror are intimates. Taken together, the selections trace a consistent vision over decades. They show why Machen stands as a defining figure of the weird: not for monsters or shocks alone, but for the sense that language, landscape, and memory might at any moment open onto the immeasurable.
Historical Context
Arthur Machen (1863–1947), born at Caerleon in Monmouthshire, wrote across the long arc from the 1890s fin-de-siècle to the interwar years. The works gathered here—novellas like The Great God Pan (1894), The Three Impostors (1895), and The Inmost Light (1894); romances such as The Shining Pyramid and The Red Hand (both 1895); the visionary semi-autobiographical The Hill of Dreams (1907); wartime and postwar pieces including The Bowmen (1914), The Great Return (1915), Out of the Earth (1915), and The Terror (1917); and mature fictions from The Children of the Pool (1936), among them The Bright Boy—trace shared preoccupations. Educated at Hereford Cathedral School and long resident in London, he worked as translator and journalist while devoted to mystery and the Welsh landscape.
His early career emerged within the London decadent movement. After Oscar Wilde’s trials in 1895, publishers like John Lane at the Bodley Head and magazines such as The Savoy (edited by Arthur Symons with art by Aubrey Beardsley) fostered a culture of exquisite transgression under public suspicion. Machen’s urban phantasmagorias belong to this climate. The Great God Pan’s notoriety and The Three Impostors’ episodic shocks reflect an age anxious about “degeneration.” The White People (composed 1899; first published 1904 and collected in The House of Souls, 1906) shows the same symbolist suggestiveness. The censorious atmosphere encouraged Machen’s preference for obliquity: rumors, nested narratives, and elusive, often anonymous, storytellers moving through Soho and Holborn.
Fin-de-siècle science supplied countercurrents that Machen continually exploited. Post-Darwinian debates about heredity and atavism, popularized by Max Nordau’s Degeneration (1892), mingled with emergent neurology and psychiatry, while Jean-Martin Charcot’s Paris demonstrations of hysteria and hypnotism enthralled London’s press. The Society for Psychical Research, founded in 1882 by figures including Edmund Gurney and F. W. H. Myers, pursued apparitions and trance with quasi-scientific rigor. Machen sets physicians, chemists, and investigators beside occultists, probing the limits of materialism. A rapidly expanding pharmacopoeia—chloral, cocaine, patent nostrums sold under loose regulation—provided a modern vocabulary for metamorphosis, imposture, and abruption, themes that traverse his London tales and later rural visions alike.
Equally formative were Welsh tradition and antiquarian discovery. Caerleon, a Roman legionary base (Isca Augusta) overlooking the Usk, surrounded Machen with tumuli, standing stones, and Arthurian rumor; the Grail’s British wanderings had firm imaginative purchase in Monmouthshire and Glamorgan. The late-Victorian Celtic Revival, associated with W. B. Yeats and folklore collectors, joined contemporary archaeology—from General Pitt-Rivers’s typologies to the widely publicized restoration at Stonehenge in 1901—in restoring prehistoric Britain to cultural prominence. This fusion of piety and prehistory underwrites his recurrences of rural rites, shepherd roads, and secret hills, where Roman remains and Bronze Age traces coexist with parish churches, forging a perilous yet continuous sacramental landscape across multiple works.
London itself, rapidly transformed between 1880 and 1914 by slum clearance, rail expansion, and electric light, became Machen’s labyrinth. The era’s New Journalism, shaped by W. T. Stead and evening papers, prized brisk, sensational narrative, encouraging episodic forms and cliffhangers. Urban anxieties—magnified by the Whitechapel murders of 1888, immigration debates, and a visible bohemia in Soho—created a readership attuned to secrecy and pursuit. Machen’s recurring investigators and flâneurs inhabit precise topographies—Holborn bars, Tottenham Court Road, Gray’s Inn—that anchor marvels in mapped streets. Newspaper serialization and cheap reprints made circulating rumors, forged documents, and overlapping testimonies feel like the natural idiom of the city’s modern myth-making.
The First World War altered both subjects and audience. By 1910 Machen had joined the London Evening News; The Bowmen appeared there on 29 September 1914 and inadvertently launched the “Angels of Mons.” Wartime censorship under the Defence of the Realm Act (1914), Zeppelin raids from 1915, and the strain of casualty lists fostered a climate where rumor, miracle, and dread intermingled. Works from 1915 to 1917—including The Great Return, Out of the Earth, and The Terror—register home-front disquiet, provincial religiosity, and anxieties about an invaded ecology. Total war unsettled boundaries between the natural and the supernatural, allowing Machen to recast earlier obsessions in a landscape of national crisis.
The interwar period brought spiritual inquiry and later recognition. The Secret Glory, issued in 1922 after long gestation, belongs to a Britain of memorials and renewed sacramental hunger, alongside shorter fictions such as The Happy Children from the early 1920s. Reprints kept earlier work in circulation—The House of Souls (1906) and later selections—while younger writers acknowledged kinship: H. P. Lovecraft in Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927), M. R. James with his annual ghost tales, and Algernon Blackwood on radio. Economic uncertainty and suburban routines of the 1930s frame the quieter dislocations of The Children of the Pool (Hutchinson, 1936), which includes The Bright Boy, situating Machen’s uncanny within domestic, modern settings.
Throughout, Machen’s art mediates between sacrament and shock, a late-Victorian Anglo‑Catholic sensibility meeting a modern appetite for secular wonder. His preferred devices—frame narratives, interleaved testimonies, lost diaries, abrupt revelations—mirror a culture negotiating expertise: priest, doctor, reporter, and antiquary speak in turn. From the 1890s revels of The Great God Pan and The Three Impostors to wartime parables like The Bowmen and late elegiac pieces from 1936, the oeuvre stages collisions of myth and metropolis, Wales and London, science and rite. In that historical crucible, Machen fashioned a durable British weirdness whose resonances extend through later horror and dark fantasy, linking all the works in this collection to a shared cultural matrix.
Synopsis (Selection)
The Three Impostors
In fin-de-siècle London, a secret society orchestrates an elaborate hunt for a missing man, ensnaring two amateur scholars in a series of bizarre, nested tales. The interlocking episodes hint at occult transgressions and a lethal deception closing in.
The Hill of Dreams
A solitary young writer in Wales and London is consumed by visionary experiences linked to an ancient Roman site. His pursuit of beauty and art blurs reality and imagination, with increasingly perilous consequences.
The Terror
During the First World War, a wave of inexplicable deaths unsettles a rural community as rumors, panic, and fragmentary clues accumulate. An inquiry gropes toward a natural yet uncanny cause that reflects the era’s pervasive dread.
The Secret Glory
Ambrose Meyrick rebels against a brutal public-school regimen and later falls under the spell of mystical ideals. His path leads toward a clandestine quest for the Grail that challenges the values of modern society.
The White People
Framed by a philosophical dialogue on the nature of evil, a girl’s secret notebook recounts her initiation into strange rites in the hills and woods. The narrative suggests an unseen world whose innocence and horror are indistinguishable.
The Great God Pan
A scientist’s attempt to pierce the veil of reality unleashes a malign influence that quietly devastates lives across London. The investigation that follows traces a pattern of seduction, madness, and forbidden knowledge.
The Inmost Light
An eminent physician conducts an experiment to separate the essence of the human self, with catastrophic effects on his wife and household. The aftermath points to a dreadful success that cannot be undone.
The Shining Pyramid
Cryptic symbols and nocturnal lights in a remote valley draw an amateur sleuth into evidence of a hidden, ancient presence. Local folklore and physical clues converge on a peril that lurks just beyond sight.
The Red Hand
A grotesque handprint and a murdered man set off an inquiry into relics of prehistory lying beneath modern London. The case uncovers hints of survival and ritual in the city’s depths.
The Great Return
Strange occurrences in a Welsh coastal village hint that a sacred mystery has come back among the people. Quiet marvels and renewed faith stir the community without fully revealing their source.
The Bowmen
On a desperate battlefield, a soldier’s invocation of St. George seems to summon spectral archers to the aid of the British lines. The brief tale seeds a legend about supernatural intervention in war.
The Children of the Pool
A man recounts encounters with alluring, otherworldly beings at a desolate pool on the city’s edge. The meetings promise enchantment yet drain vitality, suggesting a perilous seduction.
The Bright Boy
An astonishingly gifted child brings luck and success to those around him, even as his presence feels subtly wrong. The narrator gradually suspects a prodigy beyond human measure.
The Happy Children
Mysterious chalk drawings and laughter suggest unseen playmates haunting a suburban house. The gentle manifestations point to an abiding, incorporeal childhood rather than a common ghost.
Out of the Earth
After an oppressive heatwave, sinister small beings seem to emerge from the ground and prey on isolated travelers. Rumor, tracks, and disappearances hint at an intrusion from an older stratum of life.
The Greatest Works of Arthur Machen - Ultimate Horror & Dark Fantasy Collection
The Three Impostors
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.[1q] 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.
