Out of the corner of my eye I saw the spoiled puppy Mome come bounding cheerfully alongside, oblivious of our horses’ heels. Our road swung close to the cliffs. A filthy cormorant rose from the black rocks and flapped heavily across our path. Lys’s horse reared, but she pulled him down, and pointed at the bird with her riding crop.
‘I see,’ said I; ‘it seems to be going our way. Curious to see a cormorant in a forest, isn’t it?’
‘It is a bad sign,’ said Lys. ‘You know the Morbihan proverb: “When the cormorant turns from the sea, Death laughs in the forest, and wise woodsmen build boats”.’
‘I wish,’ said I sincerely, ‘that there were fewer proverbs in Brittany.’
We were in sight of the forest now; across the gorse I could see the sparkle of the gendarmes’ trappings, and the glitter of Le Bihan’s silver-buttoned jacket. The hedge was low and we took it without difficulty, and trotted across the moor to where Le Bihan and Durand stood gesticulating.
They bowed ceremoniously to Lys as we rode up.
‘The trail is horrible – it is a river,’ said the mayor in his squeaky voice. ‘Monsieur Darrel, I think perhaps madame would scarcely care to come any nearer.’
Lys drew bridle and looked at me.
‘It is horrible!’ said Durand, walking up beside me; ‘it looks as though a bleeding regiment had passed this way. The trail winds about there in the thickets; we lose it at times, but we always find it again. I can’t understand how one man – no, nor twenty – could bleed like that!’
A halloo, answered by another, sounded from the depths of the forest.
‘It’s my men; they are following the trail,’ muttered the brigadier. ‘God alone knows what is at the end!’
‘Shall we gallop back, Lys?’ I asked.
‘No; let us ride along the western edge of the woods and dismount. The sun is so hot now, and I should like to rest for a moment,’ she said.
‘The western forest is clear of anything disagreeable,’ said Durand.
‘Very well,’ I answered; ‘call me, Le Bihan, if you find anything.’
Lys wheeled her mare, and I followed across the springy heather, Mome trotting cheerfully in the rear.
We entered the sunny woods about a quarter of a kilometre from where we left Durand. I took Lys from her horse, flung both bridles over a limb, and giving my wife my arm, aided her to a flat mossy rock which overhung a shallow brook gurgling among the beech trees. Lys sat down and drew off her gauntlets. Mome pushed his head into her lap, received an undeserved caress, and came doubtfully towards me. I was weak enough to condone his offence, but I made him lie down at my feet, greatly to his disgust.
I rested my head on Lys’s knees looking up at the sky through the crossed branches of the trees.
‘I suppose I have killed him,’ I said. ‘It shocks me terribly, Lys.’
‘You could not have known, dear. He may have been a robber, and – if – not – Dick – have you ever fired your revolver since that day four years ago, when the Red Admiral’s son tried to kill you? But I know you have not.’
‘No,’ said I, wondering. ‘It’s a fact, I have not. Why?’
‘And don’t you remember that I asked you to let me load it for you the day when Yves went away, swearing to kill you and his father?’
‘Yes, I do remember. Well?’
‘Well, I – I took the cartridges first to St Gildas chapel and dipped them in holy water. You must not laugh, Dick,’ said Lys gently, laying her cool hands on my lips.
‘Laugh, my darling!’
Overhead the October sky was pale amethyst, and the sunlight burned like orange flame through the yellow leaves of beech and oak. Gnats and midges danced and wavered overhead; a spider dropped from a twig half-way to the ground and hung suspended on the end of his gossamer thread.
‘Are you sleepy, dear?’ asked Lys, bending over me.
‘I am – a little; I scarcely slept two hours last night,’ I answered.
‘You may sleep, if you wish,’ said Lys, and touched my eyes caressingly.
‘Is my head heavy on your knees?’ I asked.
‘No, Dick.’
I was already in a half doze; still I heard the brook babbling under the beeches and the humming of forest flies overhead. Presently even these were stilled.
The next thing I knew I was sitting bolt upright, my ears ringing with a scream, and I saw Lys cowering beside me, covering her white, set face with both hands.
As I sprang to my feet she cried again and clung to my knees. I saw my dog rush growling into the thicket, then I heard him whimper, and he came backing out, whining, ears flat, tail down. I stooped and disengaged Lys’s hand.
‘Don’t go, Dick!’ she cried. ‘O God, it’s the Black Priest!’
In a moment I had leaped across the brook and pushed my way into the thicket. It was empty. I stared about me; I scanned every tree trunk, every bush. Suddenly I saw him. He was seated on a fallen log, his head resting in his hands, his rusty black robe gathered around him. For a moment my hair stirred under my cap; then I recovered my reason, and understood that the man was human and was probably wounded to death. Ay, to death; for there, at my feet, lay the wet trail of blood, over leaves and stone, down into the little hollow, across to the figure in black resting silently under the dark trees.
I saw that he could not escape even if he had the strength, for before him, almost at his very feet, lay a deep, shining swamp.
As I stepped onward my foot broke a twig.
At the sound the figure started a little, then its head fell forward again. Its face was masked. Walking up to the man, I bade him tell where he was wounded.
Durand and the others broke through the thicket at the same moment and hurried to my side.
‘Who are you who hide a masked face in a priest’s robe?’ said the gendarme loudly.
There was no answer.
‘See – see the stiff blood all over his robe!’ muttered Le Bihan to Fortin.
‘He will not speak,’ said I.
‘He may be too badly wounded,’ whispered Le Bihan.
‘I saw him raise his head,’ I said; ‘my wife saw him creep up here.’
Durand stepped forward and touched the figure.
‘Speak!’ he said.
‘Speak!’ quavered Fortin.
Durand waited a moment, then with a sudden upward movement he stripped off the mask and threw the man’s head back. We were looking into the eye sockets of a skull.
Durand stood rigid and the mayor shrieked. The skeleton burst out from its rotting robes and collapsed on the ground before us. From between the staring ribs and the grinning teeth spurted a torrent of black blood, showering and shrinking grasses; then the thing shuddered, and fell over into the black ooze of the bog. Little bubbles of iridescent air appeared from the mud; the bones were slowly engulfed, and, as the last fragments sank out of sight, up from the depths and along the bank crept a creature, shiny, shivering, quivering its wings.
It was a death’s-head moth.
PART TWO
DIVERSIONS
1900–1938
INTRODUCTION
‘They call him the most popular writer in America.’
By 1911, Robert W. Chambers had progressed to the stage where Cosmopolitan magazine could describe him in those words. Not bad for a man who had hoped to be a professional artist but who had found, almost by accident, that he could write.
And write Chambers did. He treated writing as a business, and worked at it in a very professional manner. He had his office in New York, kept secret from his family, and he worked a strict number of hours a day. No sitting waiting for inspiration for him! He had the journalist’s knack of starting to write as soon as he sat down.
Out flowed short stories, essays, verse, plays, articles and novels. He is reported to have written an opera, just for good measure. Between the publication of The Mystery of Choice (1896) and his next title in this genre, In Search of the Unknown (1904), he
published thirteen novels. In all, he would publish nearly a hundred books before his death. He must have worked like a demon: among modern authors, Stephen King comes to mind as a comparable writing machine. Like King, Chambers not only wrote a good many novels, he also wrote very long novels – most of his books are around the four hundred page mark.
All this writing industry translated into lots of money, and Chambers lived very well. Broadalbin, his estate in the Adirondacks, was kept up and improved where necessary. When not writing, he shot, fished, and hunted, and kept up his painting skills. He belonged to the National Institute of Arts and Letters and was a member of various clubs, like the Century Club, the Authors Club and the Saratoga Golf Club (yet another passion).
It is certain that the first twenty years or so of the century saw Chambers as a happy and fulfilled man, doing the job he loved, living the life he enjoyed, and being accorded vast public admiration. What demons he had stayed well hidden. But this was not to last.
There are conflicting stories about Chambers’s only son, Robert Junior. One local legend in the Broadalbin area is that in later life Robert Jr. was mentally unsound and was put in a home; another version is that he was not institutionalised but lived on in the Chambers mansion after the death of his parents, being taken roundly to the cleaners by his wife, who ended up with all his money. Whatever the truth of the matter, Robert W. Chambers had at least one cross to bear in his family; such stories do not appear from nowhere.
While he was certainly well liked in the area in the early part of the century, it does seem that for some reason Chambers grew increasingly unpopular with his neighbours towards the end of his life. He is reported to have kept to himself more and more, a situation occasioned, perhaps, by his losing a large amount of money during the 1929 Stock Market crash.
Money may have become a problem in other ways. After 1920, Chambers’s output went down to one or two books per year. There may be two reasons for this. The first one, quite possibly, is that either he did not need to write so much to keep up his finances, or that he found it harder to keep up his output as he grew older. A second, and very plausible, reason may be that Chambers had started to go out of fashion. His brand of thriller and social comedy, drama and fashion, had its roots in the 1900s, and it showed more and more as time went by. He was moving into the era of the hard-boiled detective story, with people like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett looming up on the horizon; and the market would change drastically from 1930 onwards.
The real tragedy of Chambers’s life was the fate of Broadalbin. This estate and house, which he had cherished all his life, hardly survived him. Chambers died on 16 December 1933, after a long illness. He was buried under one of his beloved oak trees on the estate, but his body was later moved to the Chambers family vault in Broadalbin Cemetery. His wife, Elsa, lived on in the house until her death in 1938. The house was abandoned (this seems to be true, casting doubt on the story of his son living there) literally overnight, with everything in it. Local children would break in and make fires of Chambers’s papers, and there are reports of the house being used as a brothel at one time. Half the estate had already gone under the encroaching waters of the Sacandaga Reservoir; the house itself, now owned by the Roman Catholic church, was remodelled to form a rectory, losing a third of its original structure. Chambers’s carefully planted trees were cut down for timber in the 1970s. It is not difficult to be glad that Chambers never saw any of this happen.
Robert W. Chambers’s fortunes were based on his ability to write what the public wanted to read, at least for the first twenty-five years of his career. He wrote and sold popular fiction, making no attempt to sell more ‘literary’ works (one wonders if he ever wrote such things). There is no shame in that: if you want to make a living as a writer, people have to buy your works. What is regrettable is that Chambers so seldom returned to the genre in which he had made his first reputation – the tale of terror. Of the seventy-five or more books he wrote from 1900 onwards, only a scant half-dozen qualify for inclusion in the genre, though one was to be his finest work.
The first such book was In Search of the Unknown (1904), a collection of magazine tales featuring Mr Smith, the expert who scours the world for strange animals on behalf of the Bronx Park Zoological Gardens. The same character was to reappear in a subsequent book, Police!!! (1915). Written with style and good humour, the stories from In Search of the Unknown are Chambers at his best, eminently readable. I have selected two from the book (both are untitled in the original, and the titles given them in this volume are mine). ‘In Search of the Great Auk’ sees our hero on the trail of the extinct bird, but finding something altogether different, while ‘In Search of the Mammoth’ speaks for itself. Chambers supplied a tongue-in-cheek introduction to the book, writing in the guise of the narrator, and hoped it would ‘inspire enthusiasm for natural and scientific research, and inculcate a passion for accurate observation among the young’. The young would be hard pressed to fail to observe Chambers’s glorious creations in these stories.
The author’s next foray into weird fiction was in a much gentler, more relaxed vein. The Tracer of Lost Persons (1906) recounts the exploits of Westrel Keen, the eponymous investigator of missing people. Keen is a mysterious figure who runs an agency ‘prepared to locate the whereabouts of anybody on earth’, as his advertising claims, and in a series of loosely-connected tales proceeds to do just that. The only other connecting character in the stories is Tommy Kerns, who introduces his friends to Westrel Keen. In the two extracts included here (again, the titles are mine), we see both Keen’s prowess with various arcane subjects and his seemingly limitless range of contacts. A man falls in love with a vision in ‘The Seal of Solomon’, who turns out to be nearer home than he thought; while Jack Burke in ‘Samaris’ falls in love with a four thousand year old woman (later in the book he marries her, which is taking a taste for the older woman a bit far). The exploits of Westrel Keen have been oddly neglected in the various revivals of Chambers’s work, though they do seem rather old-fashioned now.
The Tree of Heaven (1907) remains a very distinctive book in Robert W. Chambers’s diversions into the supernatural genre. The stories seem to be the final form of the kind of tale that Chambers first attempted in ‘A Pleasant Evening’ in Part One: low-key, well written essays into the ghost story, reminiscent of the kind of material Algernon Blackwood did so well. There is a tantalising possibility that Blackwood and Chambers met. Blackwood was in New York in the 1890s, knew Chambers’s friend Charles Dana Gibson, and sat for him. It is not over-fanciful to wonder if some of Blackwood’s style rubbed off on Chambers. Certainly, ‘Out of the Depths’ explores the same territory as Blackwood’s ‘Keeping His Promise’. The other stories are small gems, well worth reviving. There is also that touch of spirituality so characteristic of Blackwood, especially in ‘The Case of Mr Helmer’.
In Police!!! (1915; the exclamation marks are all Chambers’s), he returned to the free and easy style of In Search of the Unknown, collecting together more adventures of the man from the Bronx Park Zoological Gardens. There are two stories from the collection included here. ‘Un Peu D’Amour’ is an amusing tale of the problems an artist has with a moving landscape, while ‘The Third Eye’ has nothing to do with Eastern mysticism, but is set in the Florida everglades. They may not be the best stories Chambers ever wrote, and some of the romantic interludes are a bit toe-curling, but I find the stories from Police!!! and In Search of the Unknown to be the author at his most readable and enjoyable.
Five years after Police!!!, Chambers published his last major work in this genre, the novel The Slayer of Souls (1920). (A later novel, The Talkers (1925), is not half as good.) Originally written as a magazine serialisation (evident from the plot summaries at the start of some of the chapters), The Slayer of Souls saw Chambers returning to the vein he had explored in The Maker of Moons. This time, however, he had a new angle.
The novel tells of an unholy alliance between the Bols
heviks and the most sinister kind of Oriental magic. Aimed at the West, and particularly America, the threat seems almost unstoppable. Our gallant friends, the U.S. secret service, find their only weapon in the form of Tressa Norne, a young American girl kidnapped by the Yezidee, the oriental sect behind it all. Trained in their magic, she is rescued by the Japanese and returns to America. Only she can fight the Yezidee on their own terms, and secret service agent Victor Cleves is assigned to help her.
Chambers wrote the book in a glow of anti-Bolshevik feeling common in America at the time. The Bolsheviks are the devil incarnate in this book – ‘that sexless monster born of hell and called the Bolshevik!’ – and they join up with the Yezidee, anarchists, Germans: all the usual suspects. This was America in the 1920s, of course, and Chambers was only echoing a nationwide surge of antipathy and prejudice towards anyone, particularly foreigners, of even vaguely left-wing politics. This wave of prejudice reached its dismal peak with the disgraceful execution in 1927 of the two Italian Communists, Sacco and Vanzetti, after an unfair trial for robbery and murder in 1922. Diplomatic recognition of the USSR by America only happened when Franklin Roosevelt was elected President in 1933, not long before Chambers died.
Yet Chambers, like so many, got it wrong. He saw the Bolsheviks and the Chinese as the next enemy, while the Japanese are the ‘good guys’ in his book, rescuing Tressa Norne. The irony is that his own government, with that of Britain, were already working on the assumption that their next enemy in the Pacific would be Japan, despite their alliance with Japan in the First World War. And the Japanese in the next war behaved far worse than even Chambers could describe the Bolsheviks as acting.
The book romps along with hardly a dull page (though with a fair bit of Chambers’s customary soppiness in the love scenes). Our old friends the Xin, from The Maker of Moons, get a mention, as does Arthur Conan Doyle, called in for psychic help when things get bad. The Slayer of Souls himself is Sanang, the chief Yezidee assassin and man of magic, who fancies Tressa no end. Chambers really goes back to his roots in chapter eleven, where we find the line, ‘It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God!’ (quoted verbatim from ‘In the Court of the Dragon’ in The King in Yellow).
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