The White People and Other Weird Stories (60 page)

9
In Greek mythology, “Alala!” was the war-god Ares's battle cry.

10
Tales of the Genii
(1764) is a series of pseudo-Persian tales, written in imitation of the
Arabian Nights
by James Ridley (1736–1765).

11
The final line of the Doxology.

12
An
aumbry
was, in medieval times, a cupboard or cabinet, usually in a church and used to store chalices and other objects.

13
Troy Town was a game played by Welsh shepherds in which mazelike paths were cut into the turf in imitation of certain aspects of the Trojan War and also the Labyrinth (the Cretan maze in which the Minotaur was housed).

This short novel was begun in 1899; it is not clear when it was completed. An early version of it was serialized in
Horlick's Magazine
(February, March, April, and May 1904), and the final version appeared in
The House of Souls
(London: Grant Richards, 1906; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1922). It was separately published as
A Fragment of Life
(London: Martin Secker, 1928), but has otherwise not been reprinted aside from its appearance in reprints of
The House of Souls.
Because its supernatural or fantastic element is so attenuated, it was not included in
Tales of Horror and the Supernatural
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948). In its depiction of Edward Darnell's return to Wales after many years as a clerk in London, it anticipates Machen's own migration to the small town of Amersham, Buckinghamshire, after nearly forty years in London.

1
A hair-trunk is a large trunk, usually for storing clothes or other objects, with a hair covering.

2
In this context, “kitcat” indicates the size of a portrait—not quite half-length, but showing the hands.

3
Machen's knowledge of tobaccos was exhibited in the early work of ponderous pseudo-scholarship,
The Anatomy of Tobacco
(1884).

4
French for “to stroll.”

5
A seaside town on the north coast of Essex.

6
An exhibition of new technological devices was first held in Paris in 1798. Machen is probably referring to the large exhibition of 1878 or to that of 1889 (where the Eiffel Tower was unveiled) or 1900.

7
City Temple is a Nonconformist church. The church dates to 1640; the current building was built on Holborn Viaduct in London in 1874.

8
A long four-wheeled carriage, open or curtained at the sides.

9
Exodus 20:12.

10
Cf. Machen's later essay “Strange Roads” (
Out and Away,
December 1919), a poignant account of his walks in the rural countryside.

11
I.e., a female employee of the ABC (Aerated Bread Company) chain of tea shops.

12
A reference to the
Transactions of the Hertfordshire Natural History Society and Field Club
(1879f.), loosely referred to as the
Hertfordshire Naturalist.

13
“To him that waits all things reveal themselves, provided that he has the courage not to deny, in the darkness, what he has seen in the light.” The statement is by Coventry Patmore (1823–1896), British poet and theologian, and is found in his collection of aphorisms,
The Rod, the Root and the Flower
(1895).

14
“And apples not her own.” Virgil,
Georgics
2.82. In Virgil the expression relates to the grafting of one plant on to another, with the result that the original plant, to its delight, bears “alien” fruit.

15
Greek for “practice” or “training.” In Christian thought, the concept refers to spiritual exercises, specifically those pertaining to self-denial.

16
Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909), Italian psychologist and criminologist who, in such works as
L'Uomo delinquente
(1876; The Criminal Man), propounded a now discredited theory that certain people were born criminals and could be detected by physiological and other features.

17
“Only incredible things must be believed.” An adaptation of the axiom by the early Christian thinker Tertullian (160?–240 C.E.):
Certum est, quia impossibile est
(“It is certain because it is impossible”:
De Carne Christi
5), oftentimes rendered
Credo quia impossibile
[or
incredibile
]
est
(“I believe because it is impossible [or incredible]”).

18
“The sacred fountain must not be turned over to common use.”

19
“The Land of Iolo.”

20
Literally, “the wood of the wise.”

21
Lilith, originally a Mesopotamian female demon, was conceived in the biblical apocrypha as the first wife of Adam, hence a kind of witch figure. Samael, in Judaic lore, is the Angel of Death.

22
“The breaths of the infernal [creatures].”

23
A phrase from Psalms 113:1 (Vulgate) = 114.1 in the King James Version (“When Israel went out of Egypt . . .”).

24
“Now I know for certain that all legends, all histories, all fables, every Scripture is telling a story about ME.”

“The Bowmen” first appeared in the London
Evening News
(September 29, 1914), and was collected in
The Angels of Mons: The Bowmen and Other Legends of the War
(London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co., 1915), a slim volume of Machen's war tales and sketches that was meant to capitalize on the notoriety of “The Bowmen.” The story's setting in time and place is quite vague, but it appears to deal with the very early stages of World War I. By late August 1914, the French and British forces were forced to retreat precipitously toward Paris in the wake of the advance of the German army; but in the First Battle of the Marne (September 5–12), tactical errors by the Germans allowed the Allies to hold their ground and force a German retreat, thereby robbing the Germans of a quick victory. In his long introduction to
The Angels of Mons,
Machen suggests that the tale was inspired by the Battle of Mons (August 23–24, 1914), the first battle in which the British fought the Germans, during which the British were forced to retreat; Machen also recounts the manner in which his story was accepted as a true account in spite of his repeated statements to the contrary, as various parties believed that the story dealt with “angels” (not ghostly archers, as in the story) coming to the rescue of British troops. Accordingly, the “legend” of the “angels of Mons” was born.

1
The Battle of Sedan (September 1, 1870), during the Franco-Prussian War, was a disaster for the French, resulting in the capture of the Emperor Napoleon III and significant losses to the French army that made ultimate defeat inevitable.

2
“It's a Long Way to Tipperary” (1912) was a music-hall song composed by Jack Judge and Harry Williams. Machen has devised an alternate final line that rhymes with the actual final line of the chorus: “But my heart's right there.”

3
Evidently a reference to the so-called Siege of Sidney Street, occurring on January 2, 1911, in a street in the Stepney district of London. A criminal gang was besieged by two hundred policemen for six hours; two of the gang members were killed by a fire that eventually consumed the building.

4
The battle of Agincourt, occurring on October 25, 1415, in northern France, constituted one of the greatest victories of England over France, chiefly as a result of the longbow.

“The Soldiers' Rest” was first published in the London
Evening News
(October 20, 1914) and reprinted in
The Angels of Mons: The Bowmen and Other Legends of the War
(London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co., 1915). Like “The Bowmen,” it fuses war, religion, and supernaturalism in a somewhat sentimental portrayal of the fate of wounded British soldiers in the early stages of World War I.

1
Wells is a city in Somerset, in southwestern England, and the site of Wells Cathedral, a magnificent Gothic cathedral built between 1175 and 1490 and featuring about three hundred statues carved into its west front.

2
The soldier does not refer to the two Battles of Cambrai (November 20–December 3, 1917; October 8–10, 1918), which took place years after the story was published. Cambrai is near the border between France and Belgium, and it was near the scene of some of the initial battles between the German Army and the British Expeditionary Force in late August 1914.

3
Boshes
is an adaptation of the British slang term
Boches,
an insulting reference to German soldiers (derived from the French
caboche,
cabbage or blockhead).

4
Psalm 115:15 (Vulgate) (“sanctorum” for “innocentium”). In the King James Version (Psalms 116:15), the line is rendered: “Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints.”

5
Sir Walter Scott,
The Lay of the Last Minstrel
(1805), Canto II, lines 124–26. The lines are found represented in a stained glass window in Melrose Abbey, a Gothic abbey in Melrose, Scotland, founded in 1136.

“The Great Return” was serialized in the London
Evening News
(October 21, 25, 28, November 3, 5, 10, 16, 1915) and published as a separate booklet (London: Faith Press, 1915). It is one of Machen's most searching treatments of the legend of the Holy Grail, a subject that fascinated him throughout his life. The Holy Grail, usually conceived to be a dish or cup purportedly used by Jesus at the Last Supper and thereby possessing miraculous powers, later became blended with the Arthurian cycle, another subject of great interest to Machen. For one of Machen's many writings on the subject, see “The Secret of the Sangraal,” an essay written in 1907 and published in
The Shining Pyramid
(London: Martin Secker, 1925). It is now available in
The Secret of the Sangraal
(Horam, UK: Tartarus Press, 1995).

1
“Tashai Lama” is an alternate name for the Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lamas were a line of Buddhist spiritual leaders who were the nominal heads of the Tibetan government from 1578 to the 1950s. A British expedition commanded by Colonel Francis Younghusband invaded Tibet in 1904. In 1910 the Chinese invaded, forcing the Dalai Lama to take refuge in British India. He returned in 1912.

2
Paul Julius Reuter (1816–1899), a German entrepreneur who became a naturalized British subject in 1857, established a news agency in 1850, using a combination of telegraphy and homing pigeons. The agency was formally named Reuters in 1851.

3
The phrase “Lords of Life and Death,” referring generally to the unseen hand of fate, occurs frequently in the work of British writer Rudyard Kipling (1865–1933). See “‘The Finest Story in the World'” (1891): “The Lords of Life and Death would never allow Charlie Mears to speak with full knowledge of his pasts . . . The Lords of Life and Death were as cunning as Grish Chunder had hinted.”
Best Short Stories
(Ware, UK: Wordsworth, 1997), 89.

4
Scottish writer Andrew Lang (1844–1912), although he served as a president of the Society for Psychical Research in 1911, wrote skeptically about myth and religion in such volumes as
Myth, Ritual and Religion
(1887) and
Magic and Religion
(1901). In the article “The Poltergeist, Historically Considered,”
Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research
45 (February 1903): 305–26, Lang dismissed most accounts of poltergeists as delusions or fabrications.

5
There are several Llantrisants (the name means “church of the three saints”) in Wales, but the one Machen is probably referring to is a town in the county of Glamorganshire (now Mid Glamorgan) in southern Wales. Although Arfonshire is an archaic designation of the northwestern county of Caernarfornshire or Carnarvonshire, Machen is probably using the term as a generic archaic term for a Welsh county.

6
In Greco-Roman rhetoric,
tmesis
(a cutting) refers to a single word that has been cut in two with a word or phrase intervening. English slang uses the figure in such a term as “Ri-goddamn-diculous.”

7
Sarnau is a town in the county of Cardigan, near Cardigan Bay, in southeastern Wales.

8
The Evangelical Movement was a movement within the Church of England, emerging in the late eighteenth century and persisting through much of the nineteenth, that sought to restore the church, and the nation, to moral uprightness, with a strong emphasis on social welfare.

9
“Eyebright” is the popular name for the plant
Euphrasia officinalis,
commonly thought to be a remedy for weak eyes.

10
Lundy is the largest island in the Bristol Channel, the body of water that lies off the southern coast of Wales and off the northern coast of Devon.

11
Ogham is an alphabet, current in the fifth and sixth centuries, customarily used to write in the Old Irish or Brythonic language. Most of the surviving inscriptions in Ogham are in Ireland or western Britain, including south Wales.

12
Machen had, from his perspective as an Anglo-Catholic, written harshly about orthodox Protestantism. See “Sancho Panza in Geneva,”
Academy
72 (June 8, 1907): 559–60: “The real truth is that Protestantism is a revolt against Christianity.” The treatise
Dr. Stiggins: His Views and Principles
(1906) is a satire on a dogmatic Protestant clergyman.

13
Penvro is an archaic term for Pembroke, the county town of Pembrokeshire, in the far western tip of Wales.

14
Twyn (more properly Tywyn) is a seaside resort on the western coast of Wales, in the province of Gwynedd and facing Cardigan Bay. Kemeys is a region near Usk in Monmouthshire.