The White People and Other Weird Stories (62 page)

31
The Wipers Salient is a slang reference to the Ypres Salient, the area around Ypres, in Belgium, that was the site of one of the largest battles in World War I (the Second Battle of Ypres, April 22–May 25, 1915).

32
Holme is a village in Cumbria, in northern Britain.

33
Dunwich is a small town in Suffolk, on the southeast coast of Britain. In the seventh century it was the capital of East Anglia. Much of the town has now been submerged by coastal erosion. Algernon Charles Swinburne wrote a poem about the town, “By the North Sea” (1880). Its mention here probably helped to inspire H. P. Lovecraft's use of the name in such stories as “The Dunwich Horror” (1928), set in central Massachusetts.

34
The Russian writer Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831–1891) was the inventor of the mystical philosophy or religion called theosophy, expounded in such works as
Isis Unveiled
(1877) and
The Secret Doctrine
(1888). The basic principle of theosophy is the theory of the soul's passage through seven layers of cosmic awareness to reach the Absolute.

35
Helmuth von Moltke the Younger (1848–1916), nephew of the celebrated Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke the Elder (1800–1891), was chief of the German General Staff from 1906 to 1914 and was a major figure in the development of German war plans, including a contemplated invasion of Great Britain.

36
Latin for “third [party] in delight.”

37
Latin for
On Human Villainy.
“Facinore” is Machen's coinage derived from the noun
facinus
(villainy).

38
The philosophy of German thinker Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844–1900), especially its conception of the
übermensch
(superman or overman), was commonly believed to have inspired the Germans to initiate World War I. Both the spelling and the pronunciation of his name were rendered erroneously by Anglophone speakers.

39
Herbert Kitchener, 1st Earl Kitchener (1850–1916), was a leading British military figure of the period. He had fought in the Sudan and in the Boer War, then served as commander-in-chief of the Army in India (1902–09). In 1914 he became Secretary of State for War and did important work in raising recruits for the British Army.

40
Pengareg appears to be Machen's adaptation of Pen carreg (“head of the rock”). There are locales of this name in Gwent and Carmarthenshire.

41
Bog Bean (
Menyanthes trifoliata
), or Marsh Trefoil, is a water plant commonly found in bogs or marshes in North America and northern Europe.

42
In this sense, heliography refers to the use of the heliograph, a device (chiefly consisting of a mirror) that flashes signals in Morse code by the use of sunlight.

43
Louvain (the French name for the Dutch town of Leuven), the capital of the province of Flemish Brabant, is a town in Belgium where, in late August 1914, the German Army, in its avowed plan to terrify the populace, killed the mayor and other leading officials and destroyed the university library, resulting in the loss of hundreds of thousands of rare volumes and causing worldwide outrage. The
Lusitania
was a British ocean liner that was sunk by a German U-boat on May 7, 1915, causing the deaths of 1,200 people, including 128 Americans. For a time it seemed as if the incident might lead to the United States' entry into World War I on the side of the Allies.

44
Bachgen
is Welsh for “boy” (
bach,
used earlier in the expression “doctor bach,” means “little”).

45
Llandudno is a popular seaside resort in the north of Wales. Colwyn Bay is a town and seaside resort a few miles east of Llandudno.

46
Ynys Sant (“sacred island”) is probably a reference to Caldey Island, off the coast of Pembrokshire in southwestern Wales. As a boy Machen spent his holidays in that area.

47
Cf. the Welsh boy Jervase Cradock in “Novel of the Black Seal” (p. 44).

48
William Burke and William Hare were Irish immigrants in Edinburgh who, in 1827–28, committed at least seventeen murders and sold the bodies to medical students for dissection. In most cases they killed their victims by suffocation. They were hanged on January 28, 1829.

49
Carbonic acid (H
₂
CO
₃
) is a weak acid that is not used as a weapon. Machen may be intending to refer to carbolic acid, an archaic name for phenol (C
₆
H
₅
OH), which was in fact used by the Nazis as an injection to kill victims in the concentration camps in World War II.

50
Apparently a variant spelling of Tredunnock, a village in Monmouthshire.

51
Pentoppin was a real farm near Caerleon-on-Usk known to Machen from boyhood.

52
The reference is to a celebrated passage in James Boswell's
Life of Johnson
(1791) in which Johnson claimed to have refuted the idealism of the philosopher George Berkeley, who in Johnson's view had asserted that the material world does not really exist. “I shall never forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, ‘I refute it
thus
'” (August 6, 1763).

53
Machen was also an actor for a time, serving as a bit player in Frank Benson's company (1901–10).

54
Engedi (more properly Ein Gedi) is a region in Israel, west of the Dead Sea. David hid from Samuel in the caves of Engedi (1 Samuel 23:29f.).

55
Zain (or Zayin) is the seventh letter of several Semitic alphabets, including Hebrew.

56
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions
(1884), is a work by the British writer Edwin A. Abbott (1838–1926), in which a sphere of three dimensions visits a world of two dimensions whose inhabitants fail to grasp the true nature of the sphere's existence.

57
Peterborough Cathedral (properly the Cathedral Church of St. Peter, St. Paul, and St. Andrew), in the city of Peterborough in Cambridgeshire, is an impressive early Gothic cathedral whose construction began in 1118 and was completed in 1238.

58
Cf. John Milton,
Paradise Lost
(1667): “With ruin upon ruin, rout on rout, / Confusion worse confounded” (2.995–96).

59
A not entirely accurate citation of Coleridge's remark in his
Table Talk:
“A religion, that is, a true religion, must consist of ideas and facts both; not of ideas alone without facts, for then it would be mere philosophy; nor of facts alone without ideas of which those facts are the symbols, or out of which they arise, or upon which they are grounded, for then it would be mere history” (December 3, 1831).

 

 

 

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