by Roger Dobson
The Impostors opens with a woman and two men leaving a house. In the opening ‘Story of the Destroying Angel’, Edward Challoner’s adventure begins when he sees an elegantly dressed young woman and two men fleeing from a Chelsea lodging house after an explosion has occurred. The young woman calling herself Asenath Fonblanque spins Challoner the sinister yarn of Mormon avengers; but this is a fantasy to disguise her involvement with Fenian conspirators. The Utah setting of this tale presumably inspired Machen to make the United States the scene of the Richmond/Wilkins narrative, the ‘Novel of the Dark Valley’. Machen’s tale has its weaknesses, but how wonderful to think that he wrote what is essentially a Western. Though feeble when compared with Helen’s stories of the Black Seal and White Powder, the tale does contain a shocking sadistic scene where half a dozen ruffians, members of Jack Smith’s Black Gulf Cañon gang, are stripped naked by a mob of vigilantes and lynched. Wilkins is doused with petroleum—by a woman—and is about to be roasted alive when he is rescued by a sheriff and his posse. Shocking stuff for Victorian readers.
The ‘Destroying Angel’ inspired Conan Doyle to set the second part of his first Sherlock Holmes adventure, A Study in Scarlet (1887), a melodrama of persecution, murder and revenge, among the Mormons of the alkali plain. That great Holmesian Vincent Starrett, in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1933), dismisses this subsidiary story as ‘reminiscent of Bret Harte at his worst’, but Holmes is absent from this part of the narrative and perhaps Starrett felt his loss. In view of how the Mormons are portrayed, one wonders how many copies of The Dynamiter and A Study in Scarlet are to be found in Salt Lake City.
Clara/Asenath and Helen/Miss Lally/Miss Leicester appear as modern day avatars of Scheherazade, able to weave fabulous fantasies seemingly on the spur of the moment. Miss Fonblanque’s name is almost ‘a fountain of blague’: ‘pretentious but empty talk, nonsense’ as the dictionary defines it. Stevenson described the book as an eccentric mixture of blague and seriousness. Black comedy, sinister romance, adventure, mystery, suspense, satire, interpolated stories: the Arabian Nights transferred to 1880s London. One can understand why The Dynamiter appealed to Machen, but he may have thought he could improve upon the framework.
In the ‘Destroying Angel’ the villain is the elderly Dr Grierson who stage manages Asenath’s escape from Utah to London after disposing of her parents in an electric chair he has invented. We can see Professor Moriarty and Dr Lipsius standing behind Grierson and an earlier villain, the unnamed President of the Suicide Club. Did the chair, years later, influence Nemor’s Disintegrator in Doyle’s entertaining Professor Challenger yarn ‘The Disintegration Machine’ (1929)? Perhaps; though ‘the electrocution chair at Sing Sing’ is alluded to. Grierson is marked as an unbeliever though he assists in the black deeds of the Mormons, disposing of any who rebel against the authority of Brigham Young and the church elders. Asenath tells how she and her parents, dwelling outside the city of Utah, are regarded with suspicion by the elders. Living in fear of their lives, they are ‘avoided as heretics and half-believers’. Brigham Young ‘that formidable tyrant, was known to look askance upon my father’s riches’, she explains.
Grierson is working on an elixir that will restore his youth, and he proposes to claim Asenath as his bride. Grierson’s experiments thus anticipate Dr Jekyll’s researches in Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde which would appear the year after The Dynamiter, in 1886. Were it not for Grierson’s elixir would we ever have had Jekyll’s potion? Drama is intermingled with farce. Grierson’s flask explodes, precipitating Asenath’s flight from the house in Chelsea, though, as we learn, this is far from being the actual case. Challoner is embarrassed to find himself sceptical of the story, with good reason, and Asenath’s response is laughter: Miss Leicester similarly reacts to Dyson’s scepticism in the ‘Novel of the White Powder’.
In ‘Somerset’s Adventure: The Superfluous Mansion’ Paul Somerset is based, like the young man with the cream tarts in ‘The Suicide Club’, on R.L.S.’s exuberant cousin the painter Bob Stevenson. Somerset embarks from the Cigar Divan on the trail of adventure: ‘In the continual stream of passers-by, on the sealed fronts of houses, on the posters that covered the hoardings, and in every lineament and throb of the great city he saw a mysterious and hopeful hieroglyph.’ This much anticipates Machen’s style. Stevenson calls London ‘our Babylon’: the great metropolis is full of exotic wonders to rival anything in an eastern tale.
Somerset hears the biography of the widow of the Honourable Henry Luxmore, and she turns out to be Clara Luxmore’s mother. The old lady has saved Prince Florizel from assassination while he is renting one of her London mansions. Her daughter Clara, we learn, has ‘Some whim about oppressed nationalities—Ireland, Poland, and the like—[that] has turned her brain. . . .’ The vagueness of the mother’s knowledge about the oppressed minority is part of the joke. The story of Mrs Luxmore as a young woman, Miss Fanshawe, wandering desolately in London after learning that her family will not support her after she has absconded to the capital, and how she encounters her future husband, surely influenced Machen’s similar scene when Miss Lally wanders through London alone and destitute, meeting her saviour in Professor Gregg.
While a tenant of the Superfluous Mansion, Somerset pursues the art of painting, and naturally his room takes on a bohemian character: ‘The mantelpiece was arrayed with saucepans and empty bottles; on the fire some chops were frying; the floor was littered from end to end with books, clothes, walking-canes, and the materials of the painter’s craft. . . .’ Machen injects a similar vein of humour when Phillipps’s primitive Indian knives are dispatched to the dustbin by his landlady.
Minding the mansion, Somerset takes in a mysterious lodger in a sealskin coat—the book’s original title was ‘The Man in the Sealskin Coat’—subsequently revealed as Zero, a Fenian bomber, who turns his room into a terrorist workshop. He relates a blackly comic story, ‘Zero’s Tale of the Explosive Bomb’, about his co-conspirator M’Guire, who finds his plan to destroy the statue of Shakespeare in Leicester Square thwarted by police. M’Guire finds himself roaming central London with a Gladstone bag timed to explode. (Stevenson despised Gladstone.) Like the ‘Destroying Angel’, this is one of the more effective episodes in the book, which is as uneven as the thriller it inspired.
M’Guire, desperate to be rid of his deadly burden, encounters a six-year-old girl (which he finds ‘a God-sent opportunity!’):
‘My dear,’ said he, ‘would you like a present of a pretty bag?’
The child cried aloud with joy and put out her hands to take it. She had looked first at the bag, like a true child; but most unfortunately, before she had yet received the fatal gift, her eyes fell directly on M’Guire; and no sooner had she seen the poor gentleman’s face, than she screamed out and leaped backward, as though she had seen the devil.
In the light of modern terrorist outrages, where children are frequently victims of lunatics with causes, Zero’s story is not quite so innocently funny as it once was, but it must be viewed within its period context. What makes Zero’s account of the hapless M’Guire amusing is the sympathy he tries to arouse for the bomber: ‘Put yourself, I beseech you, into the body of that patriot. There he was, friendless and helpless; a man in the very flower of life, for he is not yet forty; with long years of happiness before him; and now condemned, in one moment, to a cruel and revolting death by dynamite!’ M’Guire, says Zero, is ‘the most chivalrous of creatures’. Zero sees black as white and R.L.S. does not interpose authorially to show how ridiculous his beliefs are.
M’Guire takes a hansom, planning to leave the bomb inside, to the Embankment, but realises that he has no money for his fare. Mr Godall, Prince Florizel in disguise, happens to be passing—we accept the coincidence because this is a comedy—and lends M’Guire a sovereign. M’Guire throws his bag into the Thames and falls in after it. He is saved by Godall as the bomb explodes.
In the last interpolated tale, the ‘Story of the
Fair Cuban’, the beautiful Teresa Valdevia gives Harry Desborough an account of her adventurous life on an island off the coast of Cuba. ‘I am not what I seem,’ says Teresa. She is, of course, ‘the sorceress of Chelsea’, Clara Luxmore in another guise: ‘a mad woman, who jests with the most deadly interest’, as M’Guire terms her. Her father dies after entering a swamp to bury a cache of jewels; she is persecuted by the high priestess of Hoodoo, Madam Mendizabal, and witnesses a devilish ceremony in the depths of the swamp. After the worshippers are destroyed by a timely tornado, Teresa escapes to the safety of an English yacht owned by the roguish Sir George Greville. It is a rather rambling tale without the power of the ‘Destroying Angel’ but with parallels to Treasure Island (which Fanny initially found ‘tedious’) in its exotic setting, the buried jewels and a heroine replacing Jim Hawkins, with Madam Mendizabal taking Grierson’s role in persecuting the heroine. Teresa’s face is described as a ‘piquant triangle, so innocently sly, so saucily attractive’. This perhaps influenced Machen in giving Helen her ‘piquant’ face. Clara’s codename in a message to M’Guire in Glasgow is ‘Shining Eye’. Machen may have derived Helen’s eyes of ‘shining hazel’ from this tiny detail.
In the Hoodoo rite the worshippers call upon the power of evil to smite their enemies. Teresa says: ‘Death and disease were the favours usually invoked: the death or the disease of enemies or rivals; some calling down these plagues upon the nearest of their own blood, and one [her servant Cora], to whom I swear I had never been less than kind, invoking them upon myself.’ This episode possibly gave Machen the idea for the ritual in the ‘Novel of the Dark Valley’, where men pay gold to have their enemies murdered by the Black Gulf Cañon gang.
Like the ‘Destroying Angel’, Teresa’s tale concerns itself with fear and persecution in an alien, hostile land; a supposedly innocent girl is harassed by evil forces. A double masquerade arises: to get aboard Sir George’s yacht Teresa pretends to be Madam Mendizabal, leading the slaves to look upon her with awe.
When Harry seizes a book in Spanish, Teresa is momentarily disconcerted. Alas, she says, thinking rapidly, she has never learned to read. Harry comes across the report of a hurricane in Cuba and convinces himself that this is Teresa’s fortuitous tornado. She has Harry accompany a box—muffled ticking comes from within—to a railway station. Realising she is in love with Harry (‘I was never nearer Cuba than Penzance’), she has the box returned to her home in Queen Square, Bloomsbury, where it threatens to detonate. The Children’s Hospital—the Great Ormond Street Hospital—is next door; but the bomb proves a damp squib and only dense and choking fumes fill the room. The hospital is saved.
Zero’s bomb does explode after he and Paul Somerset leave the Superfluous Mansion, and Zero gloats over the atrocity that will ensure his reputation as a terrorist. Somerset plans to exile him to America, but a brick of dynamite blows Zero up at Euston Station.
At the end of the book all the surviving characters are reunited at the Bohemian Cigar Divan, and M’Guire’s death is announced in Stepney. Harry introduces his new wife to Somerset and Challoner; both recognise her but she pretends never to have met them. ‘She tells wonderful stories, too; better than a book,’ Harry informs his friends. Godall blackmails Mrs Luxmore into reconciliation with her daughter, threatening to place Clara behind his counter, ‘where I doubt not she would prove a great attraction; and your son-in-law shall have a livery and run the errands’. All ends happily, like a theatrical farce. Clara duly repents of her misguided ways: we never hear that she has actually harmed anyone, and so she is permitted a fairy-tale conclusion with her Harry.
As in the Impostors coincidence is stretched beyond breaking point—Machen borrowed Stevenson’s vices as well as his virtues —but it is all done with such jollity and verve the reader scarcely notices. Indeed, the coincidences harm the book less than in Machen’s work because it is a comic romp and not to be taken seriously. Only two of the tales in the book are fake, but Machen clearly relished the idea of spinning tales which are ultimately revealed as mere yarns. After all, is not the art of lying the craft of fiction? To get the reader to suspend his or her disbelief and accept the incredible, and then pull the rug out from under and admit all is invention: a courageous step for a fictioneer.
The flaw in logic shared by both books is why Clara, Helen and Machen’s other impostors should weave such elaborate fictions when all they require is to confuse Stevenson’s heroes and discover the bolthole of the young man with spectacles. One wonders whether they accost other strangers across London and pour out further tales. No wonder Grant Richards yearned for a sequel to the Impostors. But of course if they did not weave their tales there would be no books.
‘Do you think I should waste my time and yours by concocting fictions on a bench in Leicester Square?’ Miss Lally asks Phillipps. Yet that is precisely what she does. The ‘Adventure of the Missing Brother’ is brief enough to be extemporised but Helen has surely put much thought into the ‘Novel of the Black Seal’. The tall stranger leading her imaginary (?) brother through Leicester Square can be assumed to be Death. He has a face that seems ‘devoid of expression or salient feature. It was like a mask’. Death’s mutilated hand seems to relate to the Prologue where Helen has severed part of Walters’s hand: a finger perhaps ‘from the hand that took the Gold Tiberius’? This is her macabre souvenir for the doctor’s museum: an act that is to come. The tall figure and the brother are doubtless figments of Helen’s fervid imagination but it is she who wears a mask.
Like Dyson and Phillipps and her prototype Clara, Helen is not a fully rounded character but her combination of charm and evil make her the femme fatale without equal: a Scheherazade of the sinister. Helen is recognised by Walters as the most deadly of the unholy trinity. Some readers, though not all, may find her as a character more powerful than Dr Jekyll, for the good doctor needs his potion to locate the evil within himself: Helen holds it within her naturally. Miss Lally and Miss Leicester are what she could be: Helen is what she is. With her blend of bogus kindness and loyalty (she is presumably loyal to her master Lipsius), ruthlessness and sadism, she is the New Woman to end all New Women.
Like Helen, Clara is fanatical in her aims, presenting herself as the innocent victim in her tales. Yet Clara repents of her madness, and all is forgiven at the last. Helen disappears behind the rear of the ruined mansion in the Prologue with her bloodstained parcel and her co-impostors, and, chronologically, that is the last we hear of her. Machen declines to inform us whether Helen takes part in the orgies held in Lipsius’s house. Is she the nameless partner who sits by Walters’s side? It would be pleasant to think so. Helen certainly responds to the sensual. She saucily offers her hand, ‘soft and white and warm’, for Phillipps to check her pulse on the bench in Leicester Square: surely one of the most erotic moments in fin-de-siècle literature, though the scene must be viewed through Victorian eyes. How much more satisfying than graphic modern descriptions of who put what where.
What, one wonders, did Machen have against the name Helen? We can perhaps see why Helen in ‘The Great God Pan’ is so named—the classical Helen is the daughter of a god; but why did Machen reuse the name in his next book? Does the first syllable of the name suggest the characters’ natural habitat? One wonders if any critic would dare advance the proposition that the Helen of ‘The Great God Pan’ and the Helen of the Impostors are one and the same; just as, at least unofficially, the Hermit of Hieroglyphics and Ambrose of ‘The White People’ may be regarded as the same character. They cannot be the same, of course, if only because of Mrs Humphry Ward’s novel Robert Elsmere,3 referred to by Dyson in the ‘Incident of the Private Bar’. The book appeared in 1888, the year Helen Vaughan is forced to die by her own hand, and it is clear from Dyson’s allusion to the novel, which Machen loathed because he saw it as an attack on Christianity, that it has been available some time. However, there is no reason why if ‘The Great God Pan’ and the Impostors are ever adapted for the screen it would be
tempting to make, with the tales chronologically switched, the twin Helens the same character; just as Dyson might replace Villiers or Austin in ‘Pan’.
‘The Death of Helen Vaughan’ by R.B. Russell from Tales of Horror and the Supernatural by Arthur Machen, Tartarus Press. With an Introduction by Roger Dobson.
One lacuna in the ‘Novel of the Black Seal’ concerns Gregg’s two children. Miss Lally reveals nothing about them; their sex, ages and names are left mysteries. The children are ciphers and rarely mentioned: of course they may not exist. They are present in the plot only to enable Miss Lally and Gregg to holiday near Caermaen without offending propriety; their ménage might be thought scandalous otherwise. But this contrivance may be a happy accident. Helen’s lack of interest in her charges4 points to her being devoid of feminine feelings; she is no true woman. She feigns loyalty to Gregg but beneath her heart is stone.
And what of her pseudonyms? Miss Lally’s name presumably stems from ‘lall’ or ‘lallate’, to prattle childishly or babyishly. ‘Lallation’ from the Greek lalein (chatter, talk, babble) means to sing lalla or lullaby, as the Complete OED states. Machen would know Horace’s ode to Lalage5 (‘Chatterbox’), a name borrowed for their poetry by Hardy and Dowson. But what of Miss Leicester? The name perhaps commemorates Helen’s triumph in Leicester Square. That is, perhaps for some readers, one of the charms of Machen’s work: it defies and eludes critical analysis. We are never quite sure that any critical theory is correct. Lipsius warns Walters about scholarly pursuits: ‘I will know all things; yes, it is a device indeed. But it means this—a life of labour without end, and a desire unsatisfied at last. The scholar has to die, and die saying, “I know very little!” ’ A fine epitaph for the graves of Machen commentators.