The Arthur Machen Megapack: 25 Classic Works

by Arthur Machen

  “B.N.C. would have knocked all this nonsense out of him,” he thought. “He would have taken a double First like my poor father and made something of a figure in the world. However, it can’t be helped.” The poor man sighed, and lit his pipe, and walked in another part of the garden.

  But he was mistaken in his diagnosis of the symptoms. The book that Lucian had begun lay unheeded in the drawer; it was a secret work that he was engaged on, and the manuscripts that he took out of that inner pocket never left him day or night. He slept with them next to his heart, and he would kiss them when he was quite alone, and pay them such devotion as he would have paid to her whom they symbolized. He wrote on these leaves a wonderful ritual of praise and devotion; it was the liturgy of his religion. Again and again he copied and recopied this madness of a lover; dallying all days over the choice of a word, searching for more exquisite phrases. No common words, no such phrases as he might use in a tale would suffice; the sentences of worship must stir and be quickened, they must glow and burn, and be decked out as with rare work of jewelry. Every part of that holy and beautiful body must be adored; he sought for terms of extravagant praise, he bent his soul and mind low before her, licking the dust under her feet, abased and yet rejoicing as a Templar before the image of Baphomet. He exulted more especially in the knowledge that there was nothing of the conventional or common in his ecstasy; he was not the fervent, adoring lover of Tennyson’s poems, who loves with passion and yet with a proud respect, with the love always of a gentleman for a lady. Annie was not a lady; the Morgans had farmed their land for hundreds of years; they were what Miss Gervase and Miss Colley and the rest of them called common people. Tennyson’s noble gentleman thought of their ladies with something of reticence; they imagined them dressed in flowing and courtly robes, walking with slow dignity; they dreamed of them as always stately, the future mistresses of their houses, mothers of their heirs. Such lovers bowed, but not too low, remembering their own honor, before those who were to be equal companions and friends as well as wives. It was not such conceptions as these that he embodied in the amazing emblems of his ritual; he was not, he told himself, a young officer, “something in the city,” or a rising barrister engaged to a Miss Dixon or a Miss Gervase. He had not thought of looking out for a nice little house in a good residential suburb where they would have pleasant society; there were to be no consultations about wall-papers, or jocose whispers from friends as to the necessity of having a room that would do for a nursery. No glad young thing had leant on his arm while they chose the suite in white enamel, and china for “our bedroom,” the modest salesman doing his best to spare their blushes. When Edith Gervase married she would get mamma to look out for two really good servants, “as we must begin quietly,” and mamma would make sure that the drains and everything were right. Then her “girl friends” would come on a certain solemn day to see all her “lovely things.” “Two dozen of everything!” “Look, Ethel, did you ever see such ducky frills?” “And that insertion, isn’t it quite too sweet?” “My dear Edith, you are a lucky girl.” “All the underlinen specially made by Madame Lulu!” “What delicious things!” “I hope he knows what a prize he is winning.” “Oh! Do look at those lovely ribbon-bows!” “You darling, how happy you must be.” “Real Valenciennes!” Then a whisper in the lady’s ear, and her reply, “Oh, don’t, Nelly!” So they would chirp over their treasures, as in Rabelais they chirped over their cups; and every thing would be done in due order till the wedding-day, when mamma, who had strained her sinews and the commandments to bring the match about, would weep and look indignantly at the unhappy bridegroom. “I hope you’ll be kind to her, Robert.” Then in a rapid whisper to the bride: “Mind, you insist on Wyman’s flushing the drains when you come back; servants are so careless and dirty too. Don’t let him go about by himself in Paris. Men are so queer, one never knows. You have got the pills?” And aloud, after these secreta, “God bless you, my dear; good-bye! Cluck, cluck, good-bye!”

  There were stranger things written in the manuscript pages that Lucian cherished, sentences that burnt and glowed like “coals of fire which hath a most vehement flame.” There were phrases that stung and tingled as he wrote them, and sonorous words poured out in ecstasy and rapture, as in some of the old litanies. He hugged the thought that a great part of what he had invented was in the true sense of the word occult: page after page might have been read aloud to the uninitiated without betraying the inner meaning. He dreamed night and day over these symbols, he copied and recopied the manuscript nine times before he wrote it out fairly in a little book which he made himself of a skin of creamy vellum. In his mania for acquirements that should be entirely useless he had gained some skill in illumination, or limning as he preferred to call it, always choosing the obscurer word as the obscurer arts. First he set himself to the severe practice of the text; he spent many hours and days of toil in struggling to fashion the serried columns of black letter, writing and rewriting till he could shape the massive character with firm true hand. He cut his quills with the patience of a monk in the scriptorium, shaving and altering the nib, lightening and increasing the pressure and flexibility of the points, till the pen satisfied him, and gave a stroke both broad and even. Then he made experiments in inks, searching for some medium that would rival the glossy black letter of the old manuscripts; and not till he could produce a fair page of text did he turn to the more entrancing labor of the capitals and borders and ornaments. He mused long over the Lombardic letters, as glorious in their way as a cathedral, and trained his hand to execute the bold and flowing lines; and then there was the art of the border, blossoming in fretted splendor all about the page. His cousin, Miss Deacon, called it all a great waste of time, and his father thought he would have done much better in trying to improve his ordinary handwriting, which was both ugly and illegible. Indeed, there seemed but a poor demand for the limner’s art. He sent some specimens of his skill to an “artistic firm” in London; a verse of the “Maud,” curiously emblazoned, and a Latin hymn with the notes pricked on a red stave. The firm wrote civilly, telling him that his work, though good, was not what they wanted, and enclosing an illuminated text. “We have great demand for this sort of thing,” they concluded, “and if you care to attempt something in this style we should be pleased to look at it.” The said text was “Thou, God, seest me.” The letter was of a degraded form, bearing much the same relation to the true character as a “churchwarden gothic” building does to Canterbury Cathedral; the colours were varied. The initial was pale gold, the h pink, the o black, the u blue, and the first letter was somehow connected with a bird’s nest containing the young of the pigeon, who were waited on by the female bird.

  “What a pretty text,” said Miss Deacon. “I should like to nail it up in my room. Why don’t you try to do something like that, Lucian? You might make something by it.”

  “I sent them these,” said Lucian, “but they don’t like them much.”

  “My dear boy! I should think not! Like them! What were you thinking of to draw those queer stiff flowers all round the border? Roses? They don’t look like roses at all events. Where do you get such ideas from?”

  “But the design is appropriate; look at the words.”

  “My dear Lucian, I can’t read the words; it’s such a queer old-fashioned writing. Look how plain that text is; one can see what it’s about. And this other one; I can’t make it out at all.”

  “It’s a Latin hymn.”

  “A Latin hymn? Is it a Protestant hymn? I may be old-fashioned, but Hymns Ancient and Modern is quite good enough for me. This is the music, I suppose? But, my dear boy, there are only four lines, and who ever heard of notes shaped like that: you have made some square and some diamond-shape? Why didn’t you look in your poor mother’s old music? It’s in the ottoman in the drawing-room. I could have shown you how to make the notes; there are crotchets, you know, and quavers.”

  Miss Deacon laid down the illuminated Urbs Beata in despair; she felt convince
d that her cousin was “next door to an idiot.”

  And he went out into the garden and raged behind a hedge. He broke two flower-pots and hit an apple-tree very hard with his stick, and then, feeling more calm, wondered what was the use in trying to do anything. He would not have put the thought into words, but in his heart he was aggrieved that his cousin liked the pigeons and the text, and did not like his emblematical roses and the Latin hymn. He knew he had taken great pains over the work, and that it was well done, and being still a young man he expected praise. He found that in this hard world there was a lack of appreciation; a critical spirit seemed abroad. If he could have been scientifically observed as he writhed and smarted under the strictures of “the old fool,” as he rudely called his cousin, the spectacle would have been extremely diverting. Little boys sometimes enjoy a very similar entertainment; either with their tiny fingers or with mamma’s nail scissors they gradually deprive a fly of its wings and legs. The odd gyrations and queer thin buzzings of the creature as it spins comically round and round never fail to provide a fund of harmless amusement. Lucian, indeed, fancied himself a very ill-used individual; but he should have tried to imitate the nervous organization of the flies, which, as mamma says, “can’t really feel.”

  But now, as he prepared the vellum leaves, he remembered his art with joy; he had not labored to do beautiful work in vain. He read over his manuscript once more, and thought of the designing of the pages. He made sketches on furtive sheets of paper, and hunted up books in his father’s library for suggestions. There were books about architecture, and medieval iron work, and brasses which contributed hints for adornment; and not content with mere pictures he sought in the woods and hedges, scanning the strange forms of trees, and the poisonous growth of great water-plants, and the parasite twining of honeysuckle and briony. In one of these rambles he discovered a red earth which he made into a pigment, and he found in the unctuous juice of a certain fern an ingredient which he thought made his black ink still more glossy. His book was written all in symbols, and in the same spirit of symbolism he decorated it, causing wonderful foliage to creep about the text, and showing the blossom of certain mystical flowers, with emblems of strange creatures, caught and bound in rose thickets. All was dedicated to love and a lover’s madness, and there were songs in it which haunted him with their lilt and refrain. When the book was finished it replaced the loose leaves as his constant companion by day and night. Three times a day he repeated his ritual to himself, seeking out the loneliest places in the woods, or going up to his room; and from the fixed intentness and rapture of his gaze, the father thought him still severely employed in the questionable process of composition. At night he contrived to wake for his strange courtship; and he had a peculiar ceremony when he got up in the dark and lit his candle. From a steep and wild hillside, not far from the house, he had cut from time to time five large boughs of spiked and prickly gorse. He had brought them into the house, one by one, and had hidden them in the big box that stood beside his bed. Often he woke up weeping and murmuring to himself the words of one of his songs, and then when he had lit the candle, he would draw out the gorse-boughs, and place them on the floor, and taking off his nightgown, gently lay himself down on the bed of thorns and spines. Lying on his face, with the candle and the book before him, he would softly and tenderly repeat the praises of his dear, dear Annie, and as he turned over page after page, and saw the raised gold of the majuscules glow and flame in the candle-light, he pressed the thorns into his flesh. At such moments he tasted in all its acute savor the joy of physical pain; and after two or three experiences of such delights he altered his book, making a curious sign in vermilion on the margin of the passages where he was to inflict on himself this sweet torture. Never did he fail to wake at the appointed hour, a strong effort of will broke through all the heaviness of sleep, and he would rise up, joyful though weeping, and reverently set his thorny bed upon the floor, offering his pain with his praise. When he had whispered the last word, and had risen from the ground, his body would be all freckled with drops of blood; he used to view the marks with pride. Here and there a spine would be left deep in the flesh, and he would pull these out roughly, tearing through the skin. On some nights when he had pressed with more fervor on the thorns his thighs would stream with blood, red beads standing out on the flesh, and trickling down to his feet. He had some difficulty in washing away the bloodstains so as not to leave any traces to attract the attention of the servant; and after a time he returned no more to his bed when his duty had been accomplished. For a coverlet he had a dark rug, a good deal worn, and in this he would wrap his naked bleeding body, and lie down on the hard floor, well content to add an aching rest to the account of his pleasures. He was covered with scars, and those that healed during the day were torn open afresh at night; the pale olive skin was red with the angry marks of blood, and the graceful form of the young man appeared like the body of a tortured martyr. He grew thinner and thinner every day, for he ate but little; the skin was stretched on the bones of his face, and the black eyes burnt in dark purple hollows. His relations noticed that he was not looking well.

  “Now, Lucian, it’s perfect madness of you to go on like this,” said Miss Deacon, one morning at breakfast. “Look how your hand shakes; some people would say that you have been taking brandy. And all that you want is a little medicine, and yet you won’t be advised. You know it’s not my fault; I have asked you to try Dr. Jelly’s Cooling Powders again and again.”

  He remembered the forcible exhibition of the powders when he was a boy, and felt thankful that those days were over. He only grinned at his cousin and swallowed a great cup of strong tea to steady his nerves, which were shaky enough. Mrs. Dixon saw him one day in Caermaen; it was very hot, and he had been walking rather fast. The scars on his body burnt and tingled, and he tottered as he raised his hat to the vicar’s wife. She decided without further investigation that he must have been drinking in public-houses.

  “It seems a mercy that poor Mrs. Taylor was taken,” she said to her husband. “She has certainly been spared a great deal. That wretched young man passed me this afternoon; he was quite intoxicated.”

  “How very said,” said Mr. Dixon. “A little port, my dear?”

  “Thank you, Merivale, I will have another glass of sherry. Dr. Burrows is always scolding me and saying I must take something to keep up my energy, and this sherry is so weak.”

  The Dixons were not teetotalers. They regretted it deeply, and blamed the doctor, who “insisted on some stimulant.” However, there was some consolation in trying to convert the parish to total abstinence, or, as they curiously called it, temperance. Old women were warned of the sin of taking a glass of beer for supper; aged laborers were urged to try Cork-ho, the new temperance drink; an uncouth beverage, styled coffee, was dispensed at the reading-room. Mr. Dixon preached an eloquent “temperance” sermon, soon after the above conversation, taking as his text: Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees. In his discourse he showed that fermented liquor and leaven had much in common, that beer was at the present day “put away” during Passover by the strict Jews; and in a moving peroration he urged his dear brethren, “and more especially those amongst us who are poor in this world’s goods,” to beware indeed of that evil leaven which was sapping the manhood of our nation. Mrs. Dixon cried after church: