The Three Impostors; or, The Transmutations

by Arthur Machen

  STRANGE OCCURRENCE IN CLERKENWELL.

  Mr. Dyson had inhabited for some years a couple of rooms in a moderatelyquiet street in Bloomsbury, where, as he somewhat pompously expressedit, he held his finger on the pulse of life without being deafened withthe thousand rumors of the main arteries of London. It was to him asource of peculiar, if esoteric gratification, that from the adjacentcorner of Tottenham Court Road a hundred lines of omnibuses went to thefour quarters of the town; he would dilate on the facilities forvisiting Dalston, and dwell on the admirable line that knew extremestEaling and the streets beyond Whitechapel. His rooms, which had beenoriginally "furnished apartments," he had gradually purged of their morepeccant parts; and though one would not find here the glowing splendorsof his old chambers in the street off the Strand, there was something ofsevere grace about the appointments which did credit to his taste. Therugs were old, and of the true faded beauty; the etchings, nearly all ofthem proofs printed by the artist, made a good show with broad whitemargins and black frames, and there was no spurious black oak. Indeed,there was but little furniture of any kind: a plain and honest table,square and sturdy, stood in one corner; a seventeenth century settlefronted the hearth; and two wooden elbow-chairs, and a bookshelf of theEmpire made up the equipment, with an exception worthy of note. ForDyson cared for none of these things. His place was at his own bureau, aquaint old piece of lacquered-work at which he would sit for hour afterhour, with his back to the room, engaged in the desperate pursuit ofliterature, or, as he termed his profession, the chase of the phrase.The neat array of pigeon-holes and drawers teemed and overflowed withmanuscript and note-books, the experiments and efforts of many years;and the inner well, a vast and cavernous receptacle, was stuffed withaccumulated ideas. Dyson was a craftsman who gloved all the detail andthe technique of his work intensely; and if, as has been hinted, hedeluded himself a little with the name of artist, yet his amusementswere eminently harmless, and, so far as can be ascertained, he (or thepublishers) had chosen the good part of not tiring the world withprinted matter.

  Here, then, Dyson would shut himself up with his fancies, experimentingwith words, and striving, as his friend the recluse of Bayswater strove,with the almost invincible problem of style, but always with a fineconfidence, extremely different from the chronic depression of therealist. He had been almost continuously at work on some scheme thatstruck him as well-nigh magical in its possibilities since the night ofhis adventure with the ingenious tenant of the first floor in AbingdonGrove; and as he laid down the pen with a glow of triumph, he reflectedthat he had not viewed, the streets for five days in succession. Withall the enthusiasm of his accomplished labor still working in his brain,he put away his papers, and went out, pacing the pavement at first inthat rare mood of exultation which finds in every stone upon the way thepossibilities of a masterpiece. It was growing late, and the autumnevening was drawing to a close amidst veils of haze and mist, and in thestilled air the voices, and the roaring traffic, and incessant feetseemed, to Dyson like the noise upon the stage when all the house issilent. In the square, the leaves rippled down as quick as summer rain,and the street beyond was beginning to flare with the lights in thebutcher's shops and the vivid illumination of the green-grocer. It was aSaturday night, and the swarming populations of the slums were turningout in force; the battered women in rusty black had begun to paw thelumps of cagmag, and others gloated over unwholesome cabbages, and therewas a brisk demand for four-ale. Dyson passed through these night-fireswith some relief; he loved to meditate, but his thoughts were not as DeQuincey's after his dose; he cared not two straws whether onions weredear or cheap, and would not have exulted if meat had fallen to twopencea pound. Absorbed in the wilderness of the tale he had been writing,weighing nicely the points of plot and construction, relishing therecollection of this and that happy phrase, and dreading failure hereand there, he left the rush and the whistle of the gas-flares behindhim, and began to touch upon pavements more deserted.

  He had turned, without taking note, to the northward, and was passingthrough an ancient fallen street, where now notices of floors andoffices to let hung out, but still about it there was the grace and thestiffness of the Age of Wigs; a broad roadway, a broad pavement, and oneach side a grave line of houses with long and narrow windows flush withthe walls, all of mellowed brick-work. Dyson walked with quick steps, ashe resolved that short work must be made of a certain episode; but hewas in that happy humor of invention, and another chapter rose in theinner chamber of his brain, and he dwelt on the circumstances he was towrite down with curious pleasure. It was charming to have the quietstreets to walk in, and in his thought he made a whole district thecabinet of his studies, and vowed he would come again. Heedless of hiscourse, he struck off to the east again, and soon found himself involvedin a squalid network of gray two-storied houses, and then in the wastevoid and elements of brick-work, the passages and unmade roads behindgreat factory walls, encumbered with the refuse of the neighborhood,forlorn, ill-lighted, and desperate. A brief turn, and there rose beforehim the unexpected, a hill suddenly lifted from the level ground, itssteep ascent marked by the lighted lamps, and eager as an explorer Dysonfound his way to the place, wondering where his crooked paths hadbrought him. Here all was again decorous, but hideous in the extreme.The builder, some one lost in the deep gloom of the early 'twenties, hadconceived the idea of twin villas in gray brick, shaped in a manner torecall the outlines of the Parthenon, each with its classic formbroadly marked with raised bands of stucco. The name of the street wasall strange, and for a further surprise, the top of the hill was crownedwith an irregular plot of grass and fading trees, called a square, andhere again the Parthenon-motive had persisted. Beyond the streets werecurious, wild in their irregularities, here a row of sordid, dingydwellings, dirty and disreputable in appearance, and there, withoutwarning, stood a house genteel and prim with wire blinds and brazenknocker, as clean and trim as if it had been the doctor's house in somebenighted little country town. These surprises and discoveries began toexhaust Dyson, and he hailed with delight the blazing windows of apublic-house, and went in with the intention of testing the beverageprovided for the dwellers in this region, as remote as Libya andPamphylia and the parts about Mesopotamia. The babble of voices fromwithin warned him that he was about to assist at the true parliament ofthe London workman, and he looked about him for that more retiredentrance called private. When he had settled himself on an exiguousbench, and had ordered some beer, he began to listen to the janglingtalk in the public bar beyond; it was a senseless argument, alternatelyfurious and maudlin, with appeals to Bill and Tom, and mediaevalsurvivals of speech, words that Chaucer wrote belched out with zeal andrelish, and the din of pots jerked down and coppers rapped smartly onthe zinc counter made a thorough bass for it all. Dyson was calmlysmoking his pipe between the sips of beer, when an indefinite lookingfigure slid rather than walked into the compartment. The man startedviolently when he saw Dyson placidly sitting in the corner, and glancedkeenly about him. He seemed to be on wires, controlled by some electricmachine, for he almost bolted out of the door when the barman asked withwhat he could serve him, and his hand shivered as he took the glass.Dyson inspected him with a little curiosity; he was muffled up almost tothe lips, and a soft felt hat was drawn down over his eyes; he looked asif he shrank from every glance, and a more raucous voice suddenlyuplifted in the public bar seemed to find in him a sympathy that madehim shake and quiver like a jelly. It was pitiable to see any one sothrilled with nervousness, and Dyson was about to address some trivialremark of casual inquiry to the man, when another person came into thecompartment, and, laying a hand on his arm, muttered something in anundertone, and vanished as he came. But Dyson had recognized him as thesmooth-tongued and smooth-shaven Burton, who had displayed so sumptuousa gift in lying; and yet he thought little of it, for his whole facultyof observation was absorbed in the lamentable and yet grotesquespectacle before him. At the first touch of the hand on his arm, theunfortunate man had wheeled rou
nd as if spun on a pivot, and shrank backwith a low, piteous cry, as if some dumb beast were caught in the toils.The blood fled away from the wretch's face, and the skin became gray asif a shadow of death had passed in the air and fallen on it, and Dysoncaught a choking whisper--

  "Mr. Davies! For God's sake, have pity on me, Mr. Davies. On my oath, Isay--" and his voice sank to silence as he heard the message, and strovein vain to bite his lip; and summon up to his aid some tinge of manhood.He stood there a moment, wavering as the leaves of an aspen, and then hewas gone out into the street, as Dyson thought silently, with his doomupon his head. He had not been gone a minute when it suddenly flashedinto Dyson's mind that he knew the man; it was undoubtedly the young manwith spectacles for whom so many ingenious persons were searching; thespectacles indeed were missing, but the pale face, the dark whiskers,and the timid glances were enough to identify him, Dyson saw at oncethat by a succession of hazards he had unawares hit upon the scent ofsome desperate conspiracy, wavering as the track of a loathsome snake inand out of the highways and byways of the London cosmos; the truth wasinstantly pictured before him, and he divined that all unconscious andunheeding he had been privileged to see the shadows of hidden forms,chasing and hurrying, and grasping and vanishing across the brightcurtain of common life, soundless and silent, or only babbling fablesand pretences. For him in an instant the jargoning of voices, the garishsplendor, and all the vulgar tumult of the public-house became part ofmagic; for here before his eyes a scene in this grim mystery play hadbeen enacted, and he had seen human flesh grow gray with a palsy offear; the very hell of cowardice and terror had gaped wide within anarm's breadth. In the midst of these reflections, the barman came up andstared at him as if to hint that he had exhausted his right to take hisease, and Dyson bought another lease of the seat by an order for morebeer. As he pondered the brief glimpse of tragedy, he recollected thatwith his first start of haunted fear the young man with whiskers haddrawn his hand swiftly from his great coat pocket, and that he had heardsomething fall to the ground; and pretending to have dropped his pipe,Dyson began to grope in the corner, searching with his fingers. Hetouched some thing, and drew it gently to him, and with one briefglance, as he put it quietly in his pocket, he saw it was a littleold-fashioned note book, bound in faded green morocco.

  He drank down his beer at a gulp, and left the place, overjoyed at hisfortunate discovery, and busy with conjecture as to the possibleimportance of the find. By turns he dreaded to find perhaps mere blankleaves, or the labored follies of a betting-book, but the faded moroccocover seemed to promise better things, and hint at mysteries. He pilotedhimself with no little difficulty out of the sour and squalid quarter hehad entered with a light heart, and emerging at Gray's Inn Road, struckoff down Guilford Street, and hastened home, only anxious for a lightedcandle and solitude.

  Dyson sat down at his bureau, and placed the little book before him; itwas an effort to open the leaves and dare disappointment. But indesperation at last he laid his finger between the pages at haphazard,and rejoiced to see a compact range of writing with a margin, and as itchanced, three words caught his glance, and stood out apart from themass. Dyson read:

  THE GOLD TIBERIUS,

  and his face flushed with fortune and the lust of the hunter.

  He turned at once to the first leaf of the pocket-book, and proceeded toread with rapt interest the