I have gone into all this detail about "A
Fragment of Life" because I have been assured in many quarters that it
is the best thing that I have ever done, and students of the crooked
ways of literature may be interested to hear of the abominable labours
of doing it._

_"The White People" belongs to the same year as the first chapter of "A
Fragment of Life," 1899, which was also the year of "Hieroglyphics." The
fact was I was in high literary spirits, just then. I had been harassed
and worried for a whole year in the office of Literature, a weekly paper
published by The Times, and getting free again, I felt like a prisoner
released from chains; ready to dance in letters to any extent. Forthwith
I thought of "A Great Romance," a highly elaborate and elaborated piece
of work, full of the strangest and rarest things. I have forgotten how
it was that this design broke down; but I found by experiment that the
great romance was to go on that brave shelf of the unwritten books, the
shelf where all the splendid books are to be found in their golden
bindings. "The White People" is a small piece of salvage from the wreck. Oddly enough, as is insinuated in the Prologue, the mainspring of the
story is to be sought in a medical textbook. In the Prologue reference
is made to a review article by Dr. Coryn. But I have since found out
that Dr. Coryn was merely quoting from a scientific treatise that case
of the lady whose fingers became violently inflamed because she saw a
heavy window sash descend on the fingers of her child. With this
instance, of course, are to be considered all cases of stigmata, both
ancient and modern: and then the question is obvious enough: what limits
can we place to the powers of the imagination? Has not the imagination
the potentiality at least of performing any miracle, however marvelous,
however incredible, according to our ordinary standards? As to the
decoration of the story, that is a mingling which I venture to think
somewhat ingenious of odds and ends of folk lore and witch lore with
pure inventions of my own. Some years later I was amused to receive a
letter from a gentleman who was, if I remember, a schoolmaster somewhere
in Malaya. This gentleman, an earnest student of folklore, was writing
an article on some singular things he had observed amongst the Malayans,
and chiefly a kind of were-wolf state into which some of them were able
to conjure themselves. He had found, as he said, startling resemblances
between the magic ritual of Malaya and some of the ceremonies and
practices hinted at in "The White People." He presumed that all this was
not fancy but fact; that is that I was describing practices actually in
use among superstitious people on the Welsh border; he was going to
quote from me in the article for the Journal of the Folk Lore Society,
or whatever it was called, and he just wanted to let me know. I wrote in
a hurry to the folklore journal to bid them beware: for the instances
selected by the student were all fictions of my own brain!_

_"The Great God Pan" and "The Inmost Light" are tales of an earlier
date, going back to 1890, '91, '92. I have written a good deal about
them in "Far Off Things," and in a preface to an edition of "The Great
God Pan," published by Messrs. Simpkin, Marshall in 1916, I have
described at length the origins of the book. But I must quote anew some
extracts from the reviews which welcomed "The Great God Pan" to my
extraordinary entertainment, hilarity and refreshment. Here are a few of
the best:_

_"It is not Mr. Machen's fault but his misfortune, that one shakes with
laughter rather than with dread over the contemplation of his
psychological bogey." --Observer._

_"His horror, we regret to say, leaves us quite cold ... and our flesh
obstinately refuses to creep." --Chronicle._

_"His bogies don't scare." --Sketch._

_"We are afraid he only succeeds in being ridiculous." --Manchester
Guardian._

_"Gruesome, ghastly and dull." --Lady's Pictorial._

_"Incoherent nightmare of sex ... which would soon lead to insanity if
unrestrained ... innocuous from its absurdity." --Westminster Gazette._

_And so on, and so on. Several papers, I remember, declared that "The
Great God Pan" was simply a stupid and incompetent rehash of Huysmans'
"Là-Bas" and "À Rebours." I had not read these books so I got them both. Thereon, I perceived that my critics had not read them either._




A Fragment of Life


I

Edward Darnell awoke from a dream of an ancient wood, and of a clear
well rising into grey film and vapour beneath a misty, glimmering heat;
and as his eyes opened he saw the sunlight bright in the room, sparkling
on the varnish of the new furniture. He turned and found his wife's
place vacant, and with some confusion and wonder of the dream still
lingering in his mind, he rose also, and began hurriedly to set about
his dressing, for he had overslept a little, and the 'bus passed the
corner at 9.15. He was a tall, thin man, dark-haired and dark-eyed, and
in spite of the routine of the City, the counting of coupons, and all
the mechanical drudgery that had lasted for ten years, there still
remained about him the curious hint of a wild grace, as if he had been
born a creature of the antique wood, and had seen the fountain rising
from the green moss and the grey rocks. The breakfast was laid in the room on the ground floor, the back room
with the French windows looking on the garden, and before he sat down to
his fried bacon he kissed his wife seriously and dutifully. She had
brown hair and brown eyes, and though her lovely face was grave and
quiet, one would have said that she might have awaited her husband under
the old trees, and bathed in the pool hollowed out of the rocks. They had a good deal to talk over while the coffee was poured out and
the bacon eaten, and Darnell's egg brought in by the stupid, staring
servant-girl of the dusty face. They had been married for a year, and
they had got on excellently, rarely sitting silent for more than an
hour, but for the past few weeks Aunt Marian's present had afforded a
subject for conversation which seemed inexhaustible. Mrs. Darnell had
been Miss Mary Reynolds, the daughter of an auctioneer and estate agent
in Notting Hill, and Aunt Marian was her mother's sister, who was
supposed rather to have lowered herself by marrying a coal merchant, in
a small way, at Turnham Green. Marian had felt the family attitude a
good deal, and the Reynoldses were sorry for many things that had been
said, when the coal merchant saved money and took up land on building
leases in the neighbourhood of Crouch End, greatly to his advantage, as
it appeared. Nobody had thought that Nixon could ever do very much; but
he and his wife had been living for years in a beautiful house at
Barnet, with bow-windows, shrubs, and a paddock, and the two families
saw but little of each other, for Mr. Reynolds was not very prosperous.