The White People And Other Weird Stories

by Arthur Machen

  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

  “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

  “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

  “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 general
ly 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.

  15 “But trailing clouds of glory do we come / From God, who is our home.” William Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” (1807), ll. 64–65.

  16 In Thomas Hardy’s novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), John Durbeyfield, Tess’s father, is an alcoholic carter who puts on airs when he learns that he is descended from a noble family, the d’Urbervilles.

  17 Teilo Sant, or St. Teilo (d. 604), leader of a monastic school in Llandaff, Wales, purportedly visited Palestine in the year 518, but this account is now discredited.

  18 Sir William Crookes (1832–1919), British chemist and physicist, became interested in spiritualism in the 1870s, joining the Society for Psychical Research and concluding that not every instance of spiritualistic phenomena could be accounted for naturalistically. Sir Oliver Lodge (1851–1940) was a British physicist whose reputation later suffered as a result of his credulous belief in spiritualism and telepathy.

  19 Henry Hallam (1777–1859) was a British historian and the author of The View of the State of Europe During the Middle Ages (1818). The passage to which Machen alludes appears in the chapter “On the State of Society in Europe During the Middle Ages.”

  20 Machen alludes to various Gothic structures found in the cities of Cologne (Köln), Germany; Colne, Lancashire; Arles, France; and Abingdon, Oxfordshire.

  21 The Llantrisant parish church was dedicated in 1096; it was rebuilt in 1246 in the Norman style, and a tower was added in the fifteenth century. No doubt to Machen’s horror, the interior was “restored” in 1874 by John Prichard.

  22 “My God, and Is Thy Table Spread,” words by Philip Doddridge (1755), music by C. P. E. Bach, arranged by Edward Miller (1790).

  23 Mescal button consists of the fresh or dried tubercules of peyote, a hallucinogen.

  24 Tynewydd is a village in Glamorgan, about fifteen miles north of Llantrisant.

  25 The Tregaron Healing Cup, or the Nant Eos Healing Cup (referring to Nant Eos or Nanteos, a mansion near Aberystwyth, in westcentral Wales), was a wooden chalice, purportedly constructed from a piece of the cross on which Jesus was crucified, brought to England in the late twelfth century by John Stedman.

  26 From the hymn “The Blood of Sprinkling, Which Speaketh,” by John Wesley (1703–1791), the founder of Methodism.

  27 Greek for “holy, holy, holy.”

  28 A fusion of Welsh and Latin. “Sacred is the Father, sacred is the Son, sacred is the Holy Spirit. Holy, holy, holy, blessed Holy Trinity. Holy Lord God of Sabaoth, the Lord God.”

  29 Evidently an error for Manafon, a village in the county of Montgomeryshire in east-central Wales.

  30 Anatole France (1844–1924), a leading French novelist, wrote skeptically of Joan of Arc’s visions in Vie de Jeanne d’Arc (1908). Andrew Lang (see n. 4 above) replied with a competing biography, The Maid of France (1908).

  31 Idylls of the King (1856–85), a celebrated epic poem about King Arthur by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892).

  32 The reference is to a passage in De Antiquitate Glastoniensis Ecclesiae [On the Antiquities of the Glastonbury Church] by William of Malmesbury (1080?–1143?). In section 30 of that work, there is a reference to the Sapphirus altar as a gift from the Patriarch of Jerusalem. The passage is generally believed to be a later interpolation. See John Scott, An Early History of Glastonbury (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 1981), 82.

  OUT OF THE EARTH

  “Out of the Earth” was first published in T. P.’s Weekly (November 27, 1915) and collected in The Shining Pyramid (London: Martin Secker, 1925). Written in the repertorial style common to Machen’s later tales, it is one of his final contributions to the “Little People mythology.” At the outset Machen, apparently in his own voice, uses the controversy surrounding “The Bowmen” as a springboard for his examination of weird events in Wales.

  1 [Edward] Harold Begbie (1871–1929), a British journalist and religious writer, wrote about the “Angels of Mons” controversy in the pamphlet On the Side of the Angels (1915).

  2 The Serjeants’ Inn was one of two inns for Serjeants-at-law (an order of barristers in England): the one in Fleet Street dates to 1443; the other, in Chancery Lane, dates to 1416. Both buildings were destroyed during the German bombing in 1941.

  3 Manavon is a variant spelling of the Welsh village of Manafon (see n. 29 to “The Great Return”).

  4 Tremaen (“place of the stone”) is a common Welsh place-name, reminiscent of Caermaen (“citadel of the stone”), Machen’s name for his birthplace, Caerleon-on-Usk.

  5 Pierrot is a character in the Commedia dell’arte, generally depicted as a sad clown.

  6 Avalon (from the Welsh afal, apple) is a mythical island associated with the legend of King Arthur: it was where his sword, Excalibur, was forged, and where he would return to recover from his wounds after the Battle of Camlann.

  7 Castell Coch is a Gothic Revival church built in 1871–91 by John Crichton-Stuart, 3rd Marquess of Bute, and William Burges on the site of a thirteenth-century castle just north of Cardiff.

  8 The Welsh Anglican Church, officially known as the Church in Wales, was
formally disestablished in 1920, five years after the first publication of this story.

  THE TERROR

  The Terror was serialized in the London Evening News (October 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 30, 31, 1916) as “The Great Terror” and later published in book form as The Terror: A Fantasy (London: Duckworth, 1917). A radically abridged version, bringing the text down to about 25,000 words, was published as “The Coming of the Terror,” Century Magazine (October 1917). Machen was not consulted on this abridgment, but he later remarked that it was skillfully done. Perhaps the acme of Machen’s attempts to convey terror by posing as a sober reporter of “facts” (a technique enhanced by the appearance of the story in a newspaper, by his clever mingling of real and fictitious locales, and by his using the trauma of the world war as a vivid backdrop), The Terror is possibly the most notable example of the supernatural trope of animals hostile to or revolting against human beings. As such, it probably inspired such later tales as Philip Macdonald’s short story “Our Feathered Friends” (1931) and Daphne du Maurier’s novella “The Birds” (1952).

  1 Namur, a city in Belgium, fell to the Germans after three days of fighting in August 1914.

  2 The Germans were prevented from entering Paris by the British victory at the First Battle of the Marne (September 5–12, 1914).

  3 Alexander von Kluck (1846–1934) was a German general who commanded the German First Army at the outbreak of World War I. His army fought the British at Mons (August 23–24, 1914), among other places. Following his retreat after the First Battle of the Marne, he stationed his forces behind the river Aisne, remaining there for several years.

  4 The Battle of Neuve Chapelle (March 10–13, 1915), in the northern province of Artois, was a British victory, but the army’s failure to exploit the victory was a significant factor in the fall of the H. H. Asquith government. The Battle of Loos (September 25–October 14, 1915), in the far north of France, resulted in a standoff and immense casualties on both sides.