This description was written during the time the woman was a prisoner. The writer showed that he had a keen insight, and had he but known some of her past history he would probably have written in a much more pronounced way.
‘Madame Tailleux’ was discharged for the want of legal evidence, and Madame Tailleux soon afterwards left England and went to America, where she became ‘Miss Anna Clarkson’; and though nobody knew anything at all about her, she had no difficulty in making her way into so-called Society; but not as an associate and companion of women, who shunned and hated her as she hated them; but men followed her, as men are alleged to have followed Circe. Indeed, in some respects, the classical description of Circe with her magic and potions might apply to Isabella Ribera, with the many aliases.
In a very little while Phineas Miller fell a victim to her potent spells. Phineas was a young man, a stockbroker, and rich. The twain journeyed to Florida, from whence Phineas wrote to an intimate friend that he was strangely ill, and he believed the climate was affecting him. He looked like a corpse, he said. He was languid. He took no interest in anything. He suffered from a peculiar prostration, and found a difficulty in moving about.Yet he experienced no pain, and at times sank into a dreamy state that was pleasant. He thought, however, as soon as he left that part of the country he would be all right.
He was doomed, however, never to leave that part of the country. He went out one day with Miss Anna Clarkson, and an old negro, to shoot in the swamps. They had a boat which was in charge of the negro. That evening, Miss Clarkson returned alone. She was drenched and covered with slime and mud. There had been an accident. The boat had capsized by striking against a sunken tree. They were all thrown into the water. She managed to cling to the boat, and ultimately to right it, but her companions disappeared. The negro, she thought, was taken by a crocodile.
A search-party went out to try and recover the bodies. The negro was never found, Miller was. He presented an extraordinary appearance, and those who examined him said he had not died by drowning. This theory, however, found no favour. Men were often drowned in the swamps, which swarmed with alligators and crocodiles, huge snakes, and other repulsive things. When a man once got into the water he had no chance. It was a perfect miracle how Miss Clarkson escaped. ‘Poor thing, she must have had an awful time of it.’
It is true that crocodiles, alligators, and snakes did swarm in the swamps, and the remarkable thing was that Miller’s body was recovered. Much sympathy was shown for Miss Clarkson; Miller was duly buried and forgotten in a week.
Amongst the lady’s most pronounced sympathizers was a Mr. Lambert Lennox, an Englishman engaged in fruit-farming. He was about forty-five, a widower with two daughters and a son. It was generally agreed that he was one of the finest men in Florida. He was an athlete. He stood six feet two in his stockings. His health was perfect. It was his boast that he had never been laid up a day with illness.
Mr. Lennox had some business to transact in Jamaica, West Indies, and sailed for that island in one of the trading vessels. In the same vessel went, ‘poor’ Miss Clarkson. A month or two later Mr. Lennox, Jun., received from Mr. Lennox, Sen., a letter dated from Jamaica, in the West Indies. Amongst much other news the writer told his son that he had not been well. He had a strange aenemic appearance, felt weak and languid, had no energy, suffered from unquenchable thirst, and was constantly falling asleep suddenly, often at the most inopportune moments. He had consulted a doctor, who was of opinion that the climate of Jamaica didn’t suit him, and he advised him to get away as soon as possible. ‘I shall therefore be home in about six weeks,’ Mr. Lennox added. But in the meantime he departed for his long home. Mr. Lambert Lennox died somewhat suddenly one morning, and was buried in the evening. The doctor who had been attending him certified that he had succumbed to low fever. The next mail that went out bore the sad intelligence to his family, and people marveled much when they heard that handsome Lambert Lennox, the man with the iron constitution, had slipped away so quickly, more particularly as long residence in Florida had inured him to a hot climate and miasma.
It was found difficult to trace Miss Clarkson’s movements during the next two or three years, but there were grounds for believing that she travelled extensively, and amongst other places visited India, and in this connection there was a somewhat vague and legendary story told. At a hill station a strange and mysterious women put in an appearance. She was thought to be either a Spaniard or a Portuguese. She was known as Mademoiselle Sassetti, though why ‘Mademoiselle,’ if Spanish or Portuguese, was not explained. But that is a detail.
This mysterious lady claimed to have occult powers. She could read anyone’s future. She could perform miracles. The women kept away from her because they were afraid of her, thought there was no definite statement as to how this fear arose. But the men showed no fear, as became them, and amongst others who consulted her was a handsome, much beloved young military officer. His frequent visits to the sorceress caused a good deal of talk, as it was bound to do in an Indian hill station. Grey-bearded men shook their heads sadly, and wise and virtuous women turned up their noses and muttered mysterious interjections such as ‘Ah!’ ‘Oh!’ ‘Umph.’
One day the station was startled by a report that the young officer had been found dead in a jungle in one of the valleys. He had been bitten by a cobra, so the report said, for there was a peculiar little blue mark at the side of his neck.
If the virtuous ones didn’t actually it served him right, they thought it; and mumbled that the young officer had been dining somewhere not wisely but too well, and had mistaken the jungle for his bedroom, and gone to sleep, otherwise how did the cobra manage to bite him in the neck.
It seemed a plausible theory. Anyway it got over a difficulty, and it brought an unpleasant little scandal to a tragic and abrupt end. So the virtuous ones went about their many occupations again, and the atmosphere was purer when it was known that the sorceress had disappeared as mysteriously as she had come.
The next direct evidence we got was that under the name of Isabella Rodino the adventuress turned up in Rome, where she rented a small but expensive villa in the fashionable Via Porta Pia. Everyone who knows Rome knows how exclusive society is, but while Isabella Rodino made no attempt to be received by Roman society she attracted to her villa some of the male representatives of the best families in the city. Amongst these gentlemen was the scion of one of the oldest Roman houses.
Now it may be said boldly here, and that without any reflections, that the young gentleman of Rome, as of most other continental cities, are allowed a good deal more latitude than would be accorded to the same class in, say, cold-blooded, unromantic, prosaic, and commonplace London, whose soot and grime, somehow, seem to grind their way into people’s brains and hearts. Anyway the young gentleman referred to, whose baptismal name was Basta, did not at first provoke any very severe criticism, but he was destined ultimately to give the Romans a sensation to talk about for the proverbial nine days, for one Sunday morning a humble fisherman, having some business on the Tiber, fished out of that classic river the stark body of the scion. Over Rome flew the news, and those who loved him, and looked to him to uphold the honour and dignity of his family, were horror stricken.
Now, it’s a very curious thing that his distracted relatives firmly believed that the young prodigal had in a moment of remorse, after a night’s debauch, flung himself into eternity via the Tiber, and so mighty was their pride that they used their wealth, their influence, and their power to stifle inquiry, and caused a report to be circulated that Basta had met his end through accident. It is not less curious that the family doctor who examined the body was of opinion that there was something mysterious about the lad’s death, for he certainly had not died by drowning, and on one side of the neck was a peculiar little bluish puncture. But as the family persisted in their view, the doctor, not wishing to lose their influential patronage, observed a discreet silence.
A week later, however, an agen
t of the police called on Isabella Rodino, and did something more than hint that it was desirable that within twenty-four hours she should leave Rome as quietly and unobtrusively as possible. The result of this functionary’s call was Isabella Rodino journeyed to Florence by that night’s mail train. It was known that she only sojourned two days in the fair city on the Arno.
After that there is another hiatus of something like two years in her known career, and it is not easy to fill up. And this brings us to that fatal night in Wiesbaden, when ill-starred Jack Redcar met the enchantress on the hotel stairs. From that point to the moment when, her role being finished, she disappeared for ever from the ken of men, the reader of the story can fill in for himself. She played out her last act under the name of Annette. In selecting her many names she seemed actuated by a fine sense of poetic euphony, and in selecting her victims she was guided by a ‘damnable’ discrimination.
‘Annette,’ as we will now call her, was a human riddle, and she illustrates for the millionth time the trite adage that ‘Truth is stranger than Fiction,’ besides which she presents the world with an object lesson in the study of the occult.
Hugh McCrae: The Vampire (1901)
Hugh Raymond McCrae (1876-1958) was the son of Australian poet George Gordon McRae. He was educated at Hawthorn Grammar School and grew up in his father’s literary circles, which he described in My Father and My Father’s Friends (1935).
McCrae, who belonged to an artists’ club called “The Prehistoric Order of Cannibals,” lived a Bohemian existence. He wrote “The Vampire” under the pseudonym “W. W. Lamble” for the November 1901 edition of The Bulletin, which had published his first poem in 1896.
How well I remember my first love,—with her stuffed busks and her stuffed hair! We did not meet in the summer, nor in the green grass near running water, but in winter, under the pale glare of gas, in the wet street and among people.
She was complexionless, her face so bleached that her black eyes and red lips positively glared; yet she had a silky fascination for me. And her smooth, evil hands brought not only flesh into contact, but mind.
She said she was hungry. I had just drawn my month’s earnings, and we went arm-in-arm to a little green-curtained restaurant. It was sufficiently evil-looking, the gas low, and the solitary waiter unobstreperous.
I was drunk. The fumes of the cheap Burgundy started an orchestra in my ears, and swelled the veins of my brain. The wind lifted the blind and blew my cigarettes in a whirring covey off the table. I stooped to pick them up, but the blood-strings in my throat stood out, and the room darkened to my eyes. The waiter noiselessly came to my assistance, replacing them on a plate and retaining a few slyly up his sleeve. But I said nothing, only looking at Marguerite and her long, folded fingers.
She ordered some oysters and, when they had come, I watched her squeeze a lemon-quarter into the shells and over the firm fish.
I seemed to be in a garden with Marguerite. The garden was full of lilies—tall, white lilies without a speck or mark; and everywhere amongst them were blue flies, trumpeting a buzzing with pleasure. Here and there a rich bee, with powdered legs, swayed on a flower, like a jewel in snow. The air was warm and soft as down, while the rounded sound of bubbling water poppled in the moss, between the bars of lily-stalks. A delicious sweetness of earth and honey mounted to my brain. I watched a butterfly, winged in old-gold and grey, as he flickered on a red tile under the steady shadow of a fern.
Gradually I grew aware of the subtle electrical hand upon my wrist—then of the eyes that made my mind hers, nay, my very soul. The small, piercing eyes, whose pupils diminished and enlarged, and enlarged and diminished, like the flame of a dying lamp. And every time the pupils diminished, they seemed to me two miser hands that gripped my brain and squeezed myself from me, like a water from cloth, opening only to grip again.
But the woman, in the body, was tall, and breasted like a young girl; her back was straight as an arrow, and her neck reared white as a rock-wave carrying the magnificent head on its summit. She had a broad brow, but somewhat slanting; a long, slight nose, an eagerly insolent mouth, and the eyes I have spoken of. Her hair, where it was loose, shimmered and shook as though over a heat-mist.
Presently she lifted her hands from my wrists, and I felt her fingers thrill through my temples, as she drew me towards her and kissed me on the lips. A song seemed to set up in the garden, and the lilies shot up like stars, swayed in the sky, meeting in an arch, and crossed in stormy rushes over our heads. The noise of the water rose clamorously, and a flight of coloured birds brushed my shoulder. A soft sensation went over the whole of my skin, like the dropping of a delicate veil.
And still she drew me closer.
I tried to resist, but, as in a nightmare, my arms remained limp and paralysed. Neither could I cry out. All at once, in the midst of a million kisses, she drew back her head, and, with a gasping laugh, pushed her red lips at my throat and bit me deep, even to blood.
In vain I beat her about the face, and plucked at her cheeks. She hung like a dog. With horrible little laughs and gurgles she greeted my impotent rage.
I put both hands to her forehead, and made to thrust her from me; but again my muscles failed. And she bit deeper.
Then the lilies withered down from the skies and lay stained and yellow on the earth. The butterfly lost its old-gold, and its wings and whole form broadened into a bat’s. The soft ripple of the water changed to the purring of a flame, and bale fires leapt from every corner.
Still the woman tore at my throat.
My breath shortened, and I felt as though my skull were contracting and injuring my brain. Spasm after spasm shot through my head. Goaded to madness, I hurled my tormenter away, and as she returned to me, bloody-mouthed, I saw that she too had changed. Her eyes had sunk, her teeth were old and wasted to an appearance of cloves; her nose seemed flattened, and her hair thin. Her face was almost simian.
My strength failed me, and I staggered on my feet. “Marguerite,” I cried. “Woman! Devil! Vampire!”
And I fell clean to the ground, like a tree in a storm.
A great coldness rushed upon me, and an icy breath fanned my forehead. I could feel a pair of hands beneath my arm-pits. I was smothering. There was a bandage round my mouth.
I opened my eyes. There were stars—thousands of them—blinking and blinking, but below, turbid and swollen, lay the river without a light for miles.
The hands withdrew suddenly; and a man darted from me, fleeing up the steep stoned bank. It was the waiter of the restaurant. The bandage dropped off my jaw, and I could now understand the sweet scent of my garden dream.
My pockets were empty as the day when my clothes were made; that was a foregone conclusion.
Marguerite never again crossed my path. Yet I know that green-curtained restaurant, and some day I shall see her standing in the doorway. If she beckons, I must go to her.
Because I dare not refuse.
Phil Robinson: Medusa (1902)
Philip Stewart Robinson (1847-1902), who was born in Chunar, India, pioneered Anglo-Indian studies. He was a journalist by trade who was best-known for his books about natural history. His most popular works include In My Indian Garden (1878), Tigers at Large (1884) and The Valley of the Teetotum Tree (1886).
In addition to the following vampire tale, he wrote two pseudo-vampire stories: “The Man-Eating Tree” appeared in his collection, Under the Punkah (1881), while “The Last of the Vampires” debuted in the Contemporary Review (March 1893) and was reprinted in 1889, along with “Medusa.”
“Medusa” debuted in Tales by Three Brothers (London: Ibister & Co., Ltd., 1889) which contains stories by Philip and his brothers Edward Kay Robinson and [Sir] Harry Perry Robinson, K.B.E. None of the fables are attributed to specific authors, but it is assumed that Philip wrote the following story.
It was on the 17th of June that the world read in its morning paper that James Westerby had died suddenly in his office at Whitehall on the p
receding day. The world may still, if its memory be jogged a little, be able to remember that the cause of death was said to have been heart disease, the crisis having been accelerated by overwork. As to the sadness of the event, the newspapers of all political shades agreed.
James Westerby would have been a prominent man, even if he had not been an Under Secretary and one of the pleasantest speakers in the House of Commons. He was of the Westerbys of Oxfordshire, the last, I fear, of a fine old line. “Hotspur” Westerby, of revolutionary fame, was one of his ancestors, and the Under Secretary prided himself not a little on his resemblance to the old hero, whom Cromwell hated so cordially. His father’s place is secure in the world of letters. James Westerby promised to be worthy of his blood. Still young (he died when he was thirty-nine), he had borne himself admirably in public position; and when he died there were not wanting some who spoke of his loss as a national calamity.
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