



Produced by Suzanne Shell, Stephen Blundell and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net









                The
           House of Souls

          By Arthur Machen


 _Short Story Index Reprint Series_


   AYER COMPANY PUBLISHERS, INC.
     NORTH STRATFORD, NH 03590




 First Published 1922

 Reprint Edition, 1999
 AYER Company Publishers, Inc.
 Lower Mill Road
 North Stratford, NH 03590


 INTERNATIONAL STANDARD BOOK NUMBER:
 0-8369-3806-2

 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER:
 72-152947

 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA




Transcriber's Note:

    Minor typographical errors have been corrected without note. The
    oe ligature is shown as [oe]. Contents


 A Fragment of Life        1

 The White People        111

 The Great God Pan       167

 The Inmost Light        245




Introduction


_It was somewhere, I think, towards the autumn of the year 1889 that the
thought occurred to me that I might perhaps try to write a little in the
modern way. For, hitherto, I had been, as it were, wearing costume in
literature. The rich, figured English of the earlier part of the
seventeenth century had always had a peculiar attraction for me. I
accustomed myself to write in it, to think in it; I kept a diary in that
manner, and half-unconsciously dressed up my every day thoughts and
common experiences in the habit of the Cavalier or of the Caroline
Divine. Thus, when in 1884 I got a commission to translate the
Heptameron, I wrote quite naturally in the language of my favourite
period, and, as some critics declare, made my English version somewhat
more antique and stiff than the original. And so "The Anatomy of
Tobacco" was an exercise in the antique of a different kind; and "The
Chronicle of Clemendy" was a volume of tales that tried their hardest to
be mediæval; and the translation of the "Moyen de Parvenir" was still a
thing in the ancient mode._

_It seemed, in fine, to be settled that in literature I was to be a
hanger on of the past ages; and I don't quite know how I managed to get
away from them. I had finished translating "Casanova"--more modern, but
not thoroughly up to date--and I had nothing particular on hand, and,
somehow or other, it struck me that I might try a little writing for the
papers. I began with a "turnover" as it was called, for the old vanished
Globe, a harmless little article on old English proverbs; and I shall
never forget my pride and delight when one day, being at Dover, with a
fresh autumn wind blowing from the sea, I bought a chance copy of the
paper and saw my essay on the front page. Naturally, I was encouraged to
persevere, and I wrote more turnovers for the Globe and then tried the
St. James's Gazette and found that they paid two pounds instead of the
guinea of the Globe, and again, naturally enough, devoted most of my
attention to the St. James's Gazette. From the essay or literary paper,
I somehow got into the habit of the short story, and did a good many of
these, still for the St. James's, till in the autumn of 1890, I wrote a
tale called "The Double Return." Well, Oscar Wilde asked: "Are you the
author of that story that fluttered the dovecotes? I thought it was very
good." But: it did flutter the dovecotes, and the St. James's Gazette
and I parted._

_But I still wrote short stories, now chiefly for what were called
"society" papers, which have become extinct. And one of these appeared
in a paper, the name of which I have long forgotten. I had called the
tale "Resurrectio Mortuorum," and the editor had very sensibly rendered
the title into "The Resurrection of the Dead. "_

_I do not clearly remember how the story began. I am inclined to think
something in this way:_

_"Old Mr. Llewellyn, the Welsh antiquary, threw his copy of the morning
paper on the floor and banged the breakfast-table, exclaiming: 'Good
God! Here's the last of the Caradocs of the Garth, has been married in
a Baptist Chapel by a dissenting preacher; somewhere in Peckham.'" Or,
did I take up the tale a few years after this happy event and shew the
perfectly cheerful contented young commercial clerk running somewhat too
fast to catch the bus one morning, and feeling dazed all day long over
the office work, and going home in a sort of dimness, and then at his
very doorstep, recovering as it were, his ancestral consciousness. I
think it was the sight of his wife and the tones of her voice that
suddenly announced to him with the sound of a trumpet that he had
nothing to do with this woman with the Cockney accent, or the pastor who
was coming to supper, or the red brick villa, or Peckham or the City of
London. Though the old place on the banks of the Usk had been sold fifty
years before, still, he was Caradoc of the Garth. I forget how I ended
the story: but here was one of the sources of "A Fragment of Life. "_

_And somehow, though the tale was written and printed and paid for; it
stayed with me as a tale half told in the years from 1890 to 1899. I was
in love with the notion: this contrast between the raw London suburb and
its mean limited life and its daily journeys to the City; its utter
banality and lack of significance; between all this and the old, grey
mullioned house under the forest near the river, the armorial bearings
on the Jacobean porch, and noble old traditions: all this captivated me
and I thought of my mistold tale at intervals, while I was writing "The
Great God Pan," "The Red Hand," "The Three Impostors," "The Hill of
Dreams," "The White People," and "Hieroglyphics." It was at the back of
my head, I suppose, all the time, and at last in '99 I began to write
it all over again from a somewhat different standpoint._

_The fact was that one grey Sunday afternoon in the March of that year,
I went for a long walk with a friend. I was living in Gray's Inn in
those days, and we stravaged up Gray's Inn Road on one of those queer,
unscientific explorations of the odd corners of London in which I have
always delighted. I don't think that there was any definite scheme laid
down; but we resisted manifold temptations. For on the right of Gray's
Inn Road is one of the oddest quarters of London--to those, that is,
with the unsealed eyes. Here are streets of 1800-1820 that go down into
a valley--Flora in "Little Dorrit" lived in one of them--and then
crossing King's Cross Road climb very steeply up to heights which always
suggest to me that I am in the hinder and poorer quarter of some big
seaside place, and that there is a fine view of the sea from the attic
windows. This place was once called Spa Fields, and has very properly an
old meeting house of the Countess of Huntingdon's Connection as one of
its attractions. It is one of the parts of London which would attract me
if I wished to hide; not to escape arrest, perhaps, but rather to escape
the possibility of ever meeting anybody who had ever seen me before._

_But: my friend and I resisted it all.