The White People and Other Weird Stories (61 page)

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” 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
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.

5
Joseph Joffre (1852–1931) was commander in chief of the French army. He participated in the victorious First Battle of the Marne, but the enormous losses his army suffered at Verdun and the Somme led to his replacement in late 1916 by General Robert Nivelle.

6
A throwster is one who twists silk fibers into raw silk or raw silk into thread.

7
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote an effective horror tale on this subject, “The Horror of the Heights” (
Strand,
November 1913).

8
The towns Towy, Merthyr Tegveth, and Meiros are apparently fictitious, but the names are based on actual Welsh names. There is a river Towy in Carmarthenshire. Merthyr Tegveth (“the place of the martyrdom of Tegveth”) is the original name of the small parish of Llandegfeth, near Cardiff. Meiros is a place-name used elsewhere in Wales for towns, but none in the locale in question.

9
Llanfihangel means “St. Michael's Church” in Welsh; there are at least eleven communities in Wales with this term in its name. Machen probably refers to Llanfihangel Aberbythych, a village in Monmouthshire.

10
The village of Llangibby is now spelled Llangybi.

11
Robert Louis Stevenson's novella
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,
a classic instance of the doppelgänger motif, first appeared in 1886. See Machen's comment in
Hieroglyphics: A Note on Ecstasy in Literature
(1902): “Let us take the strange case of R. L. Stevenson, and especially his
Jekyll and Hyde,
which, in some ways, is his most characteristic and most effective book.... Many, I have no doubt, gave it a very high place in the ranks of imaginative literature, or (as we should now say) in the ranks of literature; while many other judges set it down as an extremely clever piece of sensationalism, and nothing more. Well, I think both these opinions are wrong; and I should be inclined to say that
Jekyll and Hyde
just scrapes by the skin of its teeth, as it were, into the shelves of literature, and no more.... It is on the conception, then, alone, that I justify my inclusion of
Jekyll
amongst works of art; for it seems to me that, lurking behind the plot, we divine the presence of an idea, of an inspiration. ‘Man is not truly one, but truly two,' or, perhaps, a polity with many inhabitants, Dr. Jekyll writes in his confession, and received a vision of the mystery of human nature” (New York: Knopf, 1923, 70–72).

12
Mr. Tulkinghorn is a successful solicitor in Dickens's
Bleak House
(1852–53). By relentless investigation he discovers various secrets in the past of Lady Dedlock and is murdered for his pains.

13
Latin for “foreigner” or “stranger.”

14
The reference is to Thomas De Quincey's celebrated essay “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” (1827).

15
Porth is a town in Glamorganshire, in southeast Wales.

16
The Royal Flying Corps, founded in 1912 as a branch of the British Army.

17
The Defence of the Realm Act was passed by Parliament on August 8, 1914 and gave the government wide-ranging powers during war-time, including censorship of war reporting in the press. A second act was passed in 1915.

18
There are two locales named Plas Newydd in Wales. One is the county seat of the Marquess of Anglesey in Llanfairpwllgwyngyll, Anglesey, and the other is the residence of the Ladies of Llangollen, in Llangollen, Denbighshire. Probably the former is meant.

19
Brahma-Dorking is a crossbreed of two different types of poultry, the Brahma (originating probably in India and imported to England in 1853) and the Dorking (developed in Sussex).

20
Middle Temple is one of the four Inns of Court, professional associations to which every English barrister must belong; the others are the Inner Temple, Gray's Inn, and Lincoln's Inn.

21
Llantarnam is now a suburb of the new town of Cwmbran, in Torfaen (formerly a part of Monmouthshire), in southeast Wales. Morwen is apparently Machen's adaptation of
morwyn
(“maiden”).

22
The reference is to a proverb, “Tenterden steeple is the cause of Goodwin Sands,” meaning that any explanation is better than none.

23
The luminiferous ether (or aether) was a postulation of nineteenth-century science, in which it was assumed that particles could not pass through a void, so that light, radio waves (discovered by Guglielmo Marconi), and other particles had to pass through an infinitely fine medium, which physicists called the ether even though they could not independently demonstrate its existence. The theory collapsed with the emergence of Einstein's theory of relativity.

24
The paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise was first devised by the Presocratic philosopher Zeno of Elea (490?–430? B.C.E.): In a race, if a slow-moving tortoise was placed ahead of the fleet Achilles, Achilles could never catch it because, no matter how quickly Achilles reaches the tortoise's original position, the tortoise would have moved a bit ahead, and so on
ad infinitum.
The paradox can be resolved by pointing to the fallacy of regarding time and distance as made up of discrete units.

25
Machen takes particular aim at some of the leading thinkers of his age—the naturalists Charles Darwin (1809–1882) and Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895), and the philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820–1903)—because they were, directly or indirectly, largely responsible for the decline of religious belief among the intelligentsia.

26
Mescal button (see n. 23 to “The Great Return”).

27
X-rays were discovered by the German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen (1845–1923) in 1895.

28
Midlingham is fictitious.

29
A Lewis gun was a light machine gun invented by Colonel Isaac Newton Lewis of the U.S. Army in 1911 and widely used by the British in World War I.

30
There are several towns or parishes named Belmont in England, but only one (Belmont Rural, in Herefordshire) in the Midlands. Probably Machen intends Belmont to be fictitious.