The House of Souls

by Arthur Machen

  Produced by Suzanne Shell, Stephen Blundell and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net

  The House of Souls

  By Arthur Machen

  _Short Story Index Reprint Series_

  AYER COMPANY PUBLISHERS, INC. NORTH STRATFORD, NH 03590

  First Published 1922

  Reprint Edition, 1999 AYER Company Publishers, Inc. Lower Mill Road North Stratford, NH 03590

  INTERNATIONAL STANDARD BOOK NUMBER: 0-8369-3806-2

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 72-152947

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  Transcriber's Note:

  Minor typographical errors have been corrected without note. The oe ligature is shown as [oe].

  Contents

  A Fragment of Life 1

  The White People 111

  The Great God Pan 167

  The Inmost Light 245

  Introduction

  _It was somewhere, I think, towards the autumn of the year 1889 that thethought occurred to me that I might perhaps try to write a little in themodern way. For, hitherto, I had been, as it were, wearing costume inliterature. The rich, figured English of the earlier part of theseventeenth century had always had a peculiar attraction for me. Iaccustomed myself to write in it, to think in it; I kept a diary in thatmanner, and half-unconsciously dressed up my every day thoughts andcommon experiences in the habit of the Cavalier or of the CarolineDivine. Thus, when in 1884 I got a commission to translate theHeptameron, I wrote quite naturally in the language of my favouriteperiod, and, as some critics declare, made my English version somewhatmore antique and stiff than the original. And so "The Anatomy ofTobacco" was an exercise in the antique of a different kind; and "TheChronicle of Clemendy" was a volume of tales that tried their hardest tobe mediaeval; and the translation of the "Moyen de Parvenir" was still athing in the ancient mode._

  _It seemed, in fine, to be settled that in literature I was to be ahanger on of the past ages; and I don't quite know how I managed to getaway from them. I had finished translating "Casanova"--more modern, butnot thoroughly up to date--and I had nothing particular on hand, and,somehow or other, it struck me that I might try a little writing for thepapers. I began with a "turnover" as it was called, for the old vanishedGlobe, a harmless little article on old English proverbs; and I shallnever forget my pride and delight when one day, being at Dover, with afresh autumn wind blowing from the sea, I bought a chance copy of thepaper and saw my essay on the front page. Naturally, I was encouraged topersevere, and I wrote more turnovers for the Globe and then tried theSt. James's Gazette and found that they paid two pounds instead of theguinea of the Globe, and again, naturally enough, devoted most of myattention to the St. James's Gazette. From the essay or literary paper,I somehow got into the habit of the short story, and did a good many ofthese, still for the St. James's, till in the autumn of 1890, I wrote atale called "The Double Return." Well, Oscar Wilde asked: "Are you theauthor of that story that fluttered the dovecotes? I thought it was verygood." But: it did flutter the dovecotes, and the St. James's Gazetteand I parted._

  _But I still wrote short stories, now chiefly for what were called"society" papers, which have become extinct. And one of these appearedin a paper, the name of which I have long forgotten. I had called thetale "Resurrectio Mortuorum," and the editor had very sensibly renderedthe title into "The Resurrection of the Dead."_

  _I do not clearly remember how the story began. I am inclined to thinksomething in this way:_

  _"Old Mr. Llewellyn, the Welsh antiquary, threw his copy of the morningpaper on the floor and banged the breakfast-table, exclaiming: 'GoodGod! Here's the last of the Caradocs of the Garth, has been married ina Baptist Chapel by a dissenting preacher; somewhere in Peckham.'" Or,did I take up the tale a few years after this happy event and shew theperfectly cheerful contented young commercial clerk running somewhat toofast to catch the bus one morning, and feeling dazed all day long overthe office work, and going home in a sort of dimness, and then at hisvery doorstep, recovering as it were, his ancestral consciousness. Ithink it was the sight of his wife and the tones of her voice thatsuddenly announced to him with the sound of a trumpet that he hadnothing to do with this woman with the Cockney accent, or the pastor whowas coming to supper, or the red brick villa, or Peckham or the City ofLondon. Though the old place on the banks of the Usk had been sold fiftyyears before, still, he was Caradoc of the Garth. I forget how I endedthe story: but here was one of the sources of "A Fragment of Life."_

  _And somehow, though the tale was written and printed and paid for; itstayed with me as a tale half told in the years from 1890 to 1899. I wasin love with the notion: this contrast between the raw London suburb andits mean limited life and its daily journeys to the City; its utterbanality and lack of significance; between all this and the old, greymullioned house under the forest near the river, the armorial bearingson the Jacobean porch, and noble old traditions: all this captivated meand I thought of my mistold tale at intervals, while I was writing "TheGreat God Pan," "The Red Hand," "The Three Impostors," "The Hill ofDreams," "The White People," and "Hieroglyphics." It was at the back ofmy head, I suppose, all the time, and at last in '99 I began to writeit all over again from a somewhat different standpoint._

  _The fact was that one grey Sunday afternoon in the March of that year,I went for a long walk with a friend. I was living in Gray's Inn inthose days, and we stravaged up Gray's Inn Road on one of those queer,unscientific explorations of the odd corners of London in which I havealways delighted. I don't think that there was any definite scheme laiddown; but we resisted manifold temptations. For on the right of Gray'sInn Road is one of the oddest quarters of London--to those, that is,with the unsealed eyes. Here are streets of 1800-1820 that go down intoa valley--Flora in "Little Dorrit" lived in one of them--and thencrossing King's Cross Road climb very steeply up to heights which alwayssuggest to me that I am in the hinder and poorer quarter of some bigseaside place, and that there is a fine view of the sea from the atticwindows. This place was once called Spa Fields, and has very properly anold meeting house of the Countess of Huntingdon's Connection as one ofits attractions. It is one of the parts of London which would attract meif I wished to hide; not to escape arrest, perhaps, but rather to escapethe possibility of ever meeting anybody who had ever seen me before._

  _But: my friend and I resisted it all. We strolled along to the partingof many ways at King's Cross Station, and struck boldly up Pentonville.Again: on our left was Barnsbury, which is like Africa. In Barnsburysemper aliquid novi, but our course was laid for us by some occultinfluence, and we came to Islington and chose the right hand side of theway. So far, we were tolerably in the region of the known, since everyyear there is the great Cattle Show at Islington, and many men go there.But, trending to the right, we got into Canonbury, of which there areonly Travellers' Tales. Now and then, perhaps, as one sits about thewinter fire, while the storm howls without and the snow falls fast, thesilent man in the corner has told how he had a great aunt who lived inCanonbury in 1860; so in the fourteenth century you might meet men whohad talked with those who had been in Cathay and had seen the splendoursof the Grand Cham. Such is Canonbury; I hardly dare speak of its dimsquares, of the deep, leafy back-gardens behind the houses, running downinto obscure alleyways with discreet, mysterious postern doors: as Isay, "Travellers' Tales"; things not much credited._

  _But, he who adventures in London has a foretaste of infinity. There isa region beyond Ultima Thule. I know not how it was, but on this famousSunday afternoon, my friend and I, passing through Canonbury came intosomething called the Balls Pond Road--Mr. Perch, the messenger of Dombey& Son, l
ived somewhere in this region--and so I think by Dalston downinto Hackney where caravans, or trams, or, as I think you say inAmerica, trolley cars set out at stated intervals to the limits of thewestern world._

  _But in the course of that walk which had become an exploration of theunknown, I had seen two common things which had made a profoundimpression upon me. One of these things was a street, the other a smallfamily party. The street was somewhere in that vague, uncharted, BallsPond-Dalston region. It was a long street and a grey street. Each housewas exactly like every other house. Each house had a basement, the sortof story which house-agents have grown to call of late a "lower groundfloor." The front windows of these basements were half above the patchof black, soot-smeared soil and coarse grass that named itself a garden,and so, passing along at the hour of four o'clock or four-thirty, Icould see that in everyone of these "breakfast rooms"--their technicalname--the tea tray and the tea cups were set out in readiness. Ireceived from this trivial and natural circumstance an impression of adull life, laid out in dreadful lines of patterned uniformity, of a lifewithout adventure of body or soul._

  _Then, the family party. It got into the tram down Hackney way. Therewere father, mother and baby; and I should think that they came from asmall shop, probably from a small draper's shop. The parents were youngpeople of twenty-five to thirty-five. He wore a black shiny frockcoat--an "Albert" in America?--a high hat, little side whiskers and darkmoustache and a look of amiable vacuity. His wife was oddly bedizened inblack satin, with a wide spreading hat, not ill-looking, simplyunmeaning. I fancy that she had at times, not too often, "a temper ofher own." And the very small baby sat upon her knee. The party wasprobably going forth to spend the Sunday evening with relations orfriends._

  _And yet, I said to myself, these two have partaken together of thegreat mystery, of the great sacrament of nature, of the source of allthat is magical in the wide world. But have they discerned themysteries? Do they know that they have been in that place which iscalled Syon and Jerusalem?--I am quoting from an old book and a strangebook._

  _It was thus that, remembering the old story of the "Resurrection of theDead," I was furnished with the source of "A Fragment of Life." I waswriting "Hieroglyphics" at the time, having just finished "The WhitePeople"; or rather, having just decided that what now appears in printunder that heading was all that would ever be written, that the GreatRomance that should have been written--in manifestation of theidea--would never be written at all. And so, when Hieroglyphics wasfinished, somewhere about May 1899, I set about "A Fragment of Life" andwrote the first chapter with the greatest relish and the utmost ease.And then my own life was dashed into fragments. I ceased to write. Itravelled. I saw Syon and Bagdad and other strange places--see "ThingsNear and Far" for an explanation of this obscure passage--and foundmyself in the lighted world of floats and battens, entering L. U. E.,crossing R and exiting R 3; and doing all sorts of queer things._

  _But still, in spite of all these shocks and changes, the "notion" wouldnot leave me. I went at it again, I suppose in 1904; consumed with abitter determination to finish what I had begun. Everything now hadbecome difficult. I tried this way and that way and the other way. Theyall failed and I broke down on every one of them; and I tried and triedagain. At last I cobbled up some sort of an end, an utterly bad one, asI realized as I wrote every single line and word of it, and the storyappeared, in 1904 or 1905, in Horlick's Magazine under the editorship ofmy old and dear friend, A. E. Waite._

  _Still; I was not satisfied. That end was intolerable and I knew it.Again, I sat down to the work, night after night I wrestled with it. AndI remember an odd circumstance which may or may not be of somephysiological interest. I was then living in a circumscribed "upperpart" of a house in Cosway Street, Marylebone Road. That I mightstruggle by myself, I wrote in the little kitchen; and night after nightas I fought grimly, savagely, all but hopelessly for some fit close for"A Fragment of Life," I was astonished and almost alarmed to find thatmy feet developed a sensation of most deadly cold. The room was notcold; I had lit the oven burners of the little gas cooking stove. I wasnot cold; but my feet were chilled in a quite extraordinary manner, asif they had been packed in ice. At last I took off my slippers with aview of poking my toes into the oven of the stove, and feeling my feetwith my hand, I perceived that, in fact, they were not cold at all! Butthe sensation remained; there, I suppose, you have an odd case of atransference of something that was happening in the brain to theextremities. My feet were quite warm to the palm of my hand, but to mysense they were frozen. But what a testimony to the fitness of theAmerican idiom, "cold feet," as signifying a depressed and despondingmood! But, somehow or other, the tale was finished and the "notion" wasat last out of my head. I have gone into all this detail about "AFragment of Life" because I have been assured in many quarters that itis the best thing that I have ever done, and students of the crookedways of literature may be interested to hear of the abominable laboursof doing it._

  _"The White People" belongs to the same year as the first chapter of "AFragment of Life," 1899, which was also the year of "Hieroglyphics." Thefact was I was in high literary spirits, just then. I had been harassedand worried for a whole year in the office of Literature, a weekly paperpublished by The Times, and getting free again, I felt like a prisonerreleased from chains; ready to dance in letters to any extent. ForthwithI thought of "A Great Romance," a highly elaborate and elaborated pieceof work, full of the strangest and rarest things. I have forgotten howit was that this design broke down; but I found by experiment that thegreat romance was to go on that brave shelf of the unwritten books, theshelf where all the splendid books are to be found in their goldenbindings. "The White People" is a small piece of salvage from the wreck.Oddly enough, as is insinuated in the Prologue, the mainspring of thestory is to be sought in a medical textbook. In the Prologue referenceis made to a review article by Dr. Coryn. But I have since found outthat Dr. Coryn was merely quoting from a scientific treatise that caseof the lady whose fingers became violently inflamed because she saw aheavy window sash descend on the fingers of her child. With thisinstance, of course, are to be considered all cases of stigmata, bothancient and modern: and then the question is obvious enough: what limitscan we place to the powers of the imagination? Has not the imaginationthe potentiality at least of performing any miracle, however marvelous,however incredible, according to our ordinary standards? As to thedecoration of the story, that is a mingling which I venture to thinksomewhat ingenious of odds and ends of folk lore and witch lore withpure inventions of my own. Some years later I was amused to receive aletter from a gentleman who was, if I remember, a schoolmaster somewherein Malaya. This gentleman, an earnest student of folklore, was writingan article on some singular things he had observed amongst the Malayans,and chiefly a kind of were-wolf state into which some of them were ableto conjure themselves. He had found, as he said, startling resemblancesbetween the magic ritual of Malaya and some of the ceremonies andpractices hinted at in "The White People." He presumed that all this wasnot fancy but fact; that is that I was describing practices actually inuse among superstitious people on the Welsh border; he was going toquote from me in the article for the Journal of the Folk Lore Society,or whatever it was called, and he just wanted to let me know. I wrote ina hurry to the folklore journal to bid them beware: for the instancesselected by the student were all fictions of my own brain!_

  _"The Great God Pan" and "The Inmost Light" are tales of an earlierdate, going back to 1890, '91, '92. I have written a good deal aboutthem in "Far Off Things," and in a preface to an edition of "The GreatGod Pan," published by Messrs. Simpkin, Marshall in 1916, I havedescribed at length the origins of the book. But I must quote anew someextracts from the reviews which welcomed "The Great God Pan" to myextraordinary entertainment, hilarity and refreshment. Here are a few ofthe best:_

  _"It is not Mr. Machen's fault but his misfortune, that one shakes withlaughter rather than with dread over the contemplation of hispsychological bogey."--Obse
rver._

  _"His horror, we regret to say, leaves us quite cold ... and our fleshobstinately refuses to creep."--Chronicle._

  _"His bogies don't scare."--Sketch._

  _"We are afraid he only succeeds in being ridiculous."--ManchesterGuardian._

  _"Gruesome, ghastly and dull."--Lady's Pictorial._

  _"Incoherent nightmare of sex ... which would soon lead to insanity ifunrestrained ... innocuous from its absurdity."--Westminster Gazette._

  _And so on, and so on. Several papers, I remember, declared that "TheGreat God Pan" was simply a stupid and incompetent rehash of Huysmans'"La-Bas" and "A Rebours." I had not read these books so I got them both.Thereon, I perceived that my critics had not read them either._