Things near & far Chapter 16: Part 16

he will be happy to supply me with a wine of entirely different character; or, to press the analogy a little extravagantly, he no longer deals in Champagne at all, he doesn’t think much of Champagne, it is an elegant lemonade, as one of Murger’s characters expresses it, but he will be delighted to send me six dozen of a rare Château wine of Bordeaux, an infinitely finer wine, as he assures me. But I want Champagne! I am not going to stand such treatment for one moment! The man must be mad! _De me fabula narratur_; all my life I have been pressing my Bordeaux on people who had begun to think that there might be something to be said for my small Champagne. And I quite see the point. I have never read one of the horror stories of Mr. W. W. Jacobs, though I am told that they are admirable. For me, Mr. Jacobs must speak through an everlasting Night Watchman, through an eternal countryman draining the last dregs of his beer on the settle at the _Cauliflower_: with these immortals I am happy. “The Three Impostors” was published by John Lane some time in 1895. But before sending the manuscript to Mr. Lane, I had tried Mr. Heinemann. The firm wrote me a most delightful letter, full of the most charming things, which I had some difficulty in swallowing, though an author’s throat is capable of astounding feats where praise is concerned. I was to go and see them, and I did so, my heart beating high. I saw a member of the firm. He was better than the letter for a swelling soul. He read extracts from the reader’s report, and these were more splendid still. He outlined delightful terms; he pressed on me the necessity of my having something on account of royalties in advance: a happy possibility that had not even dawned on me in 1894–95. He hoped that the House of Heinemann might ever have the privilege of publishing my beautiful books. “Better than the best of Stevenson”; thus he read from the optimistic reader’s report. Thus elated, glorious, happy indeed, went down Mr. Arthur Machen, man of letters--now there could be no doubt of it!--from the amiable office, even into Bedford Street, seen for the first time to be a shining thoroughfare, a veritable golden pathway of Paradise, leading to the golden Strand, nay, to the golden world, where all desires were accomplished, and the faithful servant is rewarded: “Enter thou into the joy of thy Publisher.” After all, I said to myself, the old toils, the old labours, those unhappy nights, those sick days of despair were not altogether wasted. Indeed, I tried to do my best; indeed, I grudged no labour; indeed, I was patient and tore up the sorry page; I knew that I must persevere and still persevere. And I knew that the other books were well meant but futile after all; that I had not really touched the mark, though I pretended that I had, and did my best to persuade myself that it was so. But now; “I have really written something that is good, that is, even, very good; that one of the best publishers in London praises and praises highly.” I never thought of the money that all this must mean, that never entered a moment into my mind; my only meditation was that for fifteen years I had done all I could do, and that now I was to enter into my reward. O golden Strand, that day, golden Great Russell Street when I came home to tell my news, golden happy world which rewards at last all humble faithful endeavour: golden world inhabited by good men, by publishers of all men most good. It was a pure matter of form; the waiting for the agreement, a matter of a week or so, as the kind gentlemen in the office informed me. And in three weeks, somewhere about the middle of January, 1895, came the MS. of “The Three Impostors” back to me, with a formal, printed slip from the House of Heinemann, regretting that it was unable to accept the enclosed manuscript. Well does A. E. Waite declare that there is an element of waggery in the constitution of the universe. Never did the proud policeman in the old pantomime, foiled by the buttered slide of the clown, come down with a thump so boisterously undignified. So, rolling in the mud, I lay sprawling, my legs in the air. I was silly enough to write a somewhat exasperated letter to my friend in the office. He answered me in a befitting manner, in a tone of grave rebuke: he said that if I had realised the cares of the publisher’s life I would not have written “so caustically.” _Chapter VIII_ “The Three Impostors” came back then from Messrs. Heinemann, and as soon as I got over the little bump I have just mentioned, I thought that I would try to make the book a bit better. One of the “novels” or introduced tales displeased me, so I am sure it must have been very bad indeed. I am not certain, but I think it was about a benevolent City man, of considerable means, who occupied an old red brick house somewhere at the back of Acton and occasionally, I suppose at the full moon, turned into a were-wolf. I can see nothing against the plot; and I believe there is a considerable body of unimpeachable evidence in favour of the hypothesis that the human consciousness is occasionally displaced by the bestial consciousness: the Malays, for instance, are apt at times to fancy themselves wild cats and to behave accordingly. But, somehow, it wouldn’t do. The transformation of the City man was highly unsatisfactory and unconvincing: so I tore up the tale, and wrote instead of it the surprising narrative of Professor Gregg and his disastrous search for the fairies among the hills of my native country. In the machinery of the story I introduced a hypothesis that was then new; I think I read of it in some paper written by Sir Oliver Lodge. The theory was, that when the lights are low, or turned out, at the spiritualist séance, and objects are found, when the lights go up, to have been brought from all quarters of the room and laid in the centre of the table; or when the people sitting in the dark round the table hear the piano near the door being played, the theory was that these marvels are not necessarily due to the presence and intervention of ghosts. I believe that it was the case of Eusapia Palladino that was engaging Sir Oliver Lodge’s attention just then; and he advanced the striking hypothesis that the piano was played and the objects fetched from the sideboard by a kind of extension of the medium’s body. I forget whether the distinguished Professor used the instance; but I know that the impression conveyed to my mind was that something happened similar to the protrusion and withdrawal of a snail’s horns: Eusapia’s arm became twice or thrice its usual length, performed the required feat whatever it was, and then shrank again to its normal size. This hypothesis was novel in those days; now it is widely known and credited amongst spiritualists. They have found a name for the mysterious substance which projects itself from the medium’s body: it is called ectoplasm. In all probability the whole theory is a pack of nonsense, and the “phenomena” are the tricks of clever cheats: still, what do we know? At all events, I worked it all into my fairy tale, mixing up the old view that the fairy tales, the stories of Little People, are in fact traditions of the aborigines of these islands, small, dark men who took refuge under the hills from the invading Celt with this view of the capacities of the human body, and my view, still newer, that the fairies may still be found under the hills, and that they are far from being pleasant little people. That was the recipe for the tale, and I give it in spite of a friendly rebuke I once received from poor H. B. Irving. He was talking to me about the Introduction I had written to “The Great God Pan.” “You shouldn’t have done it,” he said. “You destroy the illusion. Never take people behind the scenes. I never do.” But it really doesn’t matter. And, further, I have a suspicion that it is often much more interesting “behind” than “in front.” I have seen some very fine theatrical storms in my time; they did these things very well in the days of the elder Irving at the Lyceum, but I never enjoyed any of those tempests half so much as a storm I once watched from the wings, while Sir Frank Benson was playing King Lear. Everything, of course, was pitchy dark, save where a farthing light was glimmering in some odd corner. By this light crouched a squat form, that of the assistant stage-manager. In one hand he held the Prompt Copy of the Play, with all the cues duly indicated in it. He held it up as close as he could to the miserable glimmer, and had evidently as much as he could do to see the script with its various interlineetions and noughts and crosses, and all sorts of queer hieroglyphics which mean a great deal to a stage-manager’s eye. But in the other hand he held a drumstick, and coming nearer I saw that the big drum was beside him on the boards, and that near at hand dim figures stood ready for some mysterious service. A voice is heard from somewhere: “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow You cataracts and hurricanes, spout Till you have drench’d your steeples, drown’d the cocks, You sulphurous and thought-executing fires, Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts, Singe my white head; and then, all-shaking thunder--” And so on. And all the while the man with the big drum was commenting on the text. At certain points, bang! would come the drumstick on the drum, and that gave the cue to the man who stood by the thunder-sheet, which he caused to waggle violently, and at the same moment “Props” released his lightnings. It was far better behind than in front, to my taste, at all events. And so a man of letters of very great distinction once said to me: “I’ve been reading your ‘Great God Pan.’ I didn’t make much of it. Confused, it seemed to me. But when I read the Introduction, I said to myself: ‘Good heavens! Here’s a man who writes as well as I