# Peter Whiffle/Chapter 10

My story rolls on. As I gaze back through the years, gathering the threads of this history together, trying to weave them into form, I am amazed to recall how very few times, comparatively speaking, Peter and I met. Yet, I suppose, I was his best friend during these years, at any rate his most sympathetic friend. If there were no other proof, his will would offer excellent evidence in this respect. But we saw each other seldom,—for a few hours, a few days, at best for a few weeks, followed by a period of vacuum. I had my own interests and, doubtless, he had his. It was characteristic that he never wrote letters to me, with the exception of the one or two brief notes I have already inserted in the text. His personality, however, was so vivid, the impression he made on me was so deep, that he always seemed to be with me, even when the ocean separated us. As I write these lines, I could fancy that he stands beside me, a sombrely joyous spectre. I could believe that he bends over my shoulder or, at any rate, that presently I will hear a knock at the door and he will enter, as he entered Martha Baker's studio on that afternoon in May so long ago.
The magic Florentine days marched to a close. I say marched, but the musical form was more exactly that of a gavotte, a pavane, or a stately Polish ​dance, imagined by Frederic Chopin. It was too perfect to last, this life which appeared to assume the shape of conscious art. One afternoon, Peter and I motored to the old Villa Bombicci, the design of which legend has attributed to the hand of Michael Angelo. Now it had become a farmhouse, and pigs and chickens, a cock and a few hens, stray dogs and cats, wandered about in the carious cortile. We had come to bathe in the swimming-pool, a marble rectangle, guarded by a single column of what had once been the peristyle. A single column, a cornered wall, and a cluster of ivy: that was the picture. We could bathe nude, for the wall concealed the pool from the farmhouse.
Peter was the first to undress and, as he stood on the parapet of the pool by the broken column, his body glowing rose-ivory in the soft light of the setting sun, his head a mass of short black curls, he seemed a part of the scene, a strange visitor from the old faun-like epoch, and I could imagine a faint playing of pipes beyond the wall, and a row of Tanagra nymphs fleeing, terrified, in basso-rilievo. Sometime, somewhere, in the interval since the days when we had pursued the exterior decorators on the Bowery and at Coney Island, he had discovered an artist, for now his chest was tattooed with a fantastic bird of rose and blue, a bird of paradise, a sirgang, or, perhaps, a phœnix or a Zhar-Ptitsa, the beak pointing towards his throat, the feathers of the tail showering towards that portion of the ​body which is the centre of umbilicular contemplation among the Buddhists. He straightened his lithe body, lifted his arms, and dived into the pool, where he swam about like a dolphin. It was Peter's nature, as I must have made evident by now, to take the keenest joy in everything he did. Almost immediately, I followed and we puffed and blew, spattering the crystal drops about in the air, so that it seemed as if showers of stones fell sharply, stinging our faces, as we lay on our backs in the warm water. Eventually, clambering up to the parapet, we sat silent for many moments and I remember that a fleecy cloud passed over the face of the sinking sun. It was very still, save for the soft lowing of cattle in the distant mountains, the cackling of the hens in the courtyard, and the sweet tolling of faraway bells.
Peter broke the silence.
I am not going back to the villa, he said.
Peter! I exclaimed. But. . . .
I didn't know until just now. I love the villa. I love Florence. I love Edith and I love you. I have never been so happy, but it couldn't last. Just now when we were spattering water I had a premonition. . . . He laughed. There was once a singer—I do not recall her name, but it was neither Patti nor Jenny Lind—who retired while she was still in the best of voice, and those who heard her in her last opera will always remember what a great singer she was. So I am going away while I am ​happy, so that I can always remember that I have been perfectly happy—once.
But you always are. . . .
There, you see, you think so! There are months and years when I am alone, when nobody sees me. Then I am struggling. I make a great deal of sport about work and, indeed, I won't work at anything that doesn't interest me, but you know, you must know by now, how much I want to write. It is coming so slowly. It is getting late . . . late. I must go away to think. I'm too happy here and I am losing time. He was very earnest now. I must write my book.
But you are coming back to the villa. Your clothes are there, and you will want to say good-bye to Edith.
No, that is just what I want to avoid and that is what you can do for me. I can't say good-bye to Edith. She would persuade me to stay. It would be so easy! You, especially, could persuade me to stay, but I know you won't, now that you understand how I feel. I shall catch the night express for Milan. Please, try to explain to Edith . . . and you can pack my bags and send them after me.
But where are you going?
I don't know, and even if I did know and told you, you might be certain that I would change my mind and go somewhere else. Dispatch my bags to the American Express Company in Paris and I will send for them.
​When shall we meet again?
Peter stood up, his nude body outlined against the crumbling, pink, vine-covered wall. Then he turned and stooped to draw on his clothing.
Chi lo sa? It will be sometime. You are going back to New York?
Yes, very soon. Perhaps next week.
Well, if we don't meet somewhere else, I will go there to see you, that much I promise. Then, almost awkwardly, he added, I want you to have my ring. He drew off the amethyst intaglio of Leda and the Swan and handed it to me.
We dressed in silence. The motor stood waiting in the road beside the decrepit farmhouse, noble even in its decay. Peter asked the chauffeur to drive him to the station, before he should take me back to the Villa Allegra, and at the station we parted.
Dinner that night seemed tasteless. Edith was furious; I have seldom seen her so angry. It was exactly what she would have done herself, had she been so inclined, but she was not at all pleased to have Peter usurp her privileges. She hardly waited for the salad, leaving me to munch my cheese and drink my coffee alone. Following dinner, I sat, a solitary figure on the loggia, smoking a cigarette and sipping my Strega. Giuseppe, the boy who brought it to me, seemed as dispirited as the rest of us. After trying in vain to interest myself in half a dozen books, I went to bed and rolled about rest​lessly during the long hot night. I was up very early and went to the garden as usual, but now lonely and miserable, to have my breakfast. The butler, more cynical than ever, brought the tray. A gardenia and a note were added touches. They were Edith's farewells. She had departed for a motor trip through the Abruzzi. She might return in three weeks. I was welcome to stay at the villa and wait or. . . . And so that summer ended.
A month later, Edith was back in New York and again I saw a good deal of her. She asked for news of Peter but I had none to give her. Other friends of mine who had heard about him from Edith, expressed a desire to meet him but, so far as I was concerned, I did not even know whether or not he was alive. In December, however, passing through Stuyvesant Square with its gaunt bare trees, the old red-brick Quaker school-houses, and the stately but ugly Saint George's, on my way to Second Avenue, where I intended to visit a shop where Hungarian music might be procured, I found him, sitting alone on a bench.
I am too happy to see you again, he greeted me, but only you. Edith must not be told that I am in New York, for at last I am working and I can afford no interruptions. Edith has a way of breaking up the rhythm of one's life and my life is very rhythmic just now. Do you remember, one night at the villa, there was some conversation about formule and black magic?
​You mean the contessa. . . .
She was speaking figuratively, perhaps, but I have taken her literally. He paused for a moment; then he continued, It is possible that you will also remember my telling you in Florence that I believed Donatello's David to be the most beautiful work of art in the world.
I remember; I still think you were right.
I haven't altered my opinion. It is the most beautiful statue I have ever seen, just as Debussy's l'Après-midi d'un Faune is the most beautiful music I have ever heard, just as The Hill of Dreams is—have you read it?
At that time, I had not, and I admitted it. I was even ignorant of the name of the author.
Now Peter, as he sat on the bench beside me, began to speak of Arthur Machen: The most wonderful man writing English today and nobody knows him! His material is handled with the most consummate art; arrangement, reserve, repose, the perfect word, are never lacking from his work and yet, at the age of fifty, he is an obscure reporter on a London newspaper. There are, of course, reasons for this neglect. It is a byword of the day that one only takes from a work of art what one brings to it, and how few readers can bring to Machen the requisite qualities; how few readers have gnosis!
Machen evokes beauty out of horror, mystery, and terror. He suggests the extremes of the terrible, the vicious, the most evil, by never describing ​them. His very reserve conveys the infinity of abomination. You know how Algernon Blackwood documents his work and stops to explain his magic orgies, so that by the time you have finished reading one of his weird stories, you completely discount it. On the other hand, although Machen writes in the simplest English concerning the most unbelievable impieties, he never lifts the crimson curtain to permit you to see the sacrifice on the Manichean altar. He leaves that to the imagination. But his expression soars so high, there is such ecstasy in his prose, that we are not meanly thrilled or revolted by his negromancy; rather, we are uplifted and exalted by his suggestion of impurity and corruption, which leads us to ponder over the mysterious connection between man's religious and sensual natures. Think, for a moment, of the life of Paul Verlaine, dragged out with punks and pimps in the dirtiest holes of Paris, and compare it with the pure simplicity of his religious poetry. Think of the Song of Songs which is Solomon's and the ancient pagan erotic rites in the holy temples. Remember the Eros of the brothels and the Eros of the sacred mysteries. Recall the Rosicrucian significance of the phallus, and its cryptic perpetuation in the cross and the church steeple. In the middle ages, do not forget, the Madonna was both the Virgin Mother of Christ and the patron of thieves, strumpets, and murderers. Far surpassing all other conceivable worldly pleasures is the boon promised ​by the gratification of the sensual appetite; faith promises a bliss that will endure for ever. In either case the mind is conscious of the enormous importance of the object to be obtained. Machen achieves the soaring ecstasy of Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn or Shelley's To a Skylark, and yet he seldom writes of cool, clean, beautiful things. Was ever a more malignantly depraved story written than The White People (which it might be profitable to compare with Henry James's The Turn of Screw), the story of a child who stumbles upon the performance of the horrid, supernatural rites of a forgotten race and the consequences of the discovery? Yet, Machen's genius burns so deep, his power is so wondrous, that the angels of Benozzo Gozzoli himself do not shine with more refulgent splendour than the outlines of this erotic tale, a tale which it would have been easy to vulgarize, which Blackwood, nay Poe himself, would have vulgarized, which Laforgue would have made grotesque or fantastic, which Baudelaire would have made poetic but obscene. But Machen's grace, his rare, ecstatic grace, is perpetual and unswerving. He creates his rhythmic circles without a break, the skies open to the reader, and the Lord, Jesus Christ, appears on a cloud, or Buddha sits placidly on his lotus. Even his name is mystic, for, according to the Arbatel of Magic, Machen is the name of the fourth heaven.
Machen does not often write of white magic; he is ​a negromancer; the baneful, the baleful, the horrendous are his subjects. With Baudelaire, he might pray, Evil be thou my good! Consider the theme of The Great God Pan, a psychic experiment, operation, if you will, on a pure young girl, and its consequences. Again a theme which another writer, any other writer, would have cheapened, filled in with sordid detail, described to the last black mass. But Machen knows better. He knows so much, indeed, that he is able to say nothing. He keeps the thaumaturgic secrets as the alchemists were bidden to do. Instead of raising the veil, he drops it. Instead of revealing, he conceals. The reader may imagine as much as he likes, or as much as he can, for nothing is said, but he rises from a reading of one of these books with a sense of exaltation, an awareness that he has tasted the waters of the Fountain of Beauty. There is, indeed, sometimes, in relation to this writer, a feeling that he is truly inspired, that he is writing automatically of the eternal mysteries, that the hand which holds the pen is that of a blind genius, and yet. . . .
More straightforward good English prose, limpid narrative, I am not yet acquainted with. What a teller of stories! This gift, tentatively displayed in The Chronicle of Clemendy, which purports to be a translation from an old manuscript—Machen has really been the translator of the Heptamaron, ​Beroalde de Verville's Moyen de Parvenir, and the Memoirs of Casanova—, flowered in The Three Imposters, nouvelles in the manner of the old Arabian authors. This work is not so well-known as The Dynamiter, which it somewhat resembles, but it deserves tobe. Through it threads the theme, that of nearly all his tales, of the disintegration of a soul through an encounter with the mysteries which we are forbidden to know, the Sabbatic revels, the two-horned goat, alchemy, devil-worship, and the eternal and indescribable symbols. The problem is always the same, that of facing the great God Pan and the danger that lurks for the man who dares the facing.
And one wonders, Peter continued, his eyes dilating with an expression which may have been either intense curiosity or horror, one wonders what price Machen himself has paid to learn his secret of how to keep the secrets! He must have encountered this horror himself and yet he lives to ask the riddle in lowing prose! What has it cost him to learn the answer? Popularity? Perhaps, for he is an obscure reporter on a London newspaper and he drinks beer! That is all any Englishman I have asked can tell me about him. Nobody reads his books; nobody has read them . . . except the few who see and feel, and John Masefield is one of these. This master of English prose, this hierophant, who knows all the secrets and keeps them, this delver in forgotten lore, this wise poet who uplifts and in ​spires us, is an humble journalist and he drinks beer!
Peter paused and looked at me, possibly for corroboration, but what could I say? I had never, until then, touched upon Machen, although I remembered that Mina Loy had included him in her catalogue of protestants in the symposium at the Villa Allegra. Later, when I sought his books, I found them more difficult to arrive at than those of any of his contemporaries and today, thanks to the fame he has achieved through his invention of the mystic story of The Bowmen, the tale of the Angels at Mons, a story which was credited as true, for returning soldiers swore that they had really seen these angels who had led them into battle, thus arousing the inventive pride of the author, who published a preface to prove that the incident had never occurred except in his own brain, his early books command fantastic prices. Eight or nine pounds is asked for The Chronicle of Clemendy and forty or fifty pounds for his translation of Casanova. But on that day I said little about the matter, because I had nothing to say.
Now we were walking and presently stopped before Peter's door, a house on the south side of Stuyvesant Square, conveniently near, Peter observed, in sardonic reference to Marinetti's millennium, the Lying-in-Hospital. He unlocked the door and we entered. The hall was painted black and was entirely devoid of furniture. A lamp, depending on an iron chain from the ceiling, shed but a feeble ​glow, for it was enclosed in a globe of prelatial purple glass. We passed on to a chamber in which purple velvet curtains were caught back by heavy silver ropes, exposing at symmetrical intervals, the black walls, on which there were several pictures: Martin Schongauer's copperplate engraving of The Temptation of Saint Anthony, in which the most obscene and foulest of fiends tear and pull and bite the patient and kindly old man; Lucas Cranach's woodcut of the same subject, more fantastic but less terrifying; two or three of Goya's Caprichos; Félicien Rops's Le Vice Suprême, in which a skeleton in evening dress, holding his head in the curve of his elbow, chapeau claque in hand, opens wide an upright coffin to permit the emergence of a female skeleton in a fashionable robe; black ravens flit across the sky; Aubrey Beardsley's Messalina; Pieter Bruegel's allegorical copperplate of Lust, crammed with loathsome details; and William Blake's picture of Plague, in which a gigantic hideous form, pale-green, with the slime of stagnant pools, reeking with vegetable decays and gangrene, the face livid with the motley tints of pallor and putrescence, strides onward with extended arms, like a sower sowing his seeds, only the germs of his rancid harvest are not cast from his hands but drip from his fusty fingers. The carpet was black and in the very centre of the room was a huge silver table, fantastically carved, the top upheld by four basilisk caryatides. On this table stood a huge egg, ​round which was coiled a serpent, the whole fashioned from malachite, and a small cornelian casket, engraved in cuneiform characters. There were no windows in the room, and apparently no doors, for even the opening through which we had entered had disappeared, but the chamber was pleasantly lighted with a lambent glow, the origin of which it was impossible to discover, for no lamps were visible. In one corner, I noted a cabinet of ebony on the top of which perched an enormous black, short-haired cat, with yellow eyes, which, at first, indeed, until the animal made a slight movement, I took to be an objet d'art. Then Peter called, Lou Matagot, and with one magnificent bound, the creature landed on the silver table and arched his glossy back. Then he sharpened his claws and stretched his joints by the aid of the casket scratched with the cuneiform symbols.
Lou Matagot, Peter explained, signifies the Cat of Dreams, the Cat of the Sorcerers, in the Provençal dialect.
There were a few chairs, strangely modern, Ballet Russe chairs, upholstered in magenta and green and orange brocades in which were woven circles and crescents and stars of gold and silver, but Peter and I seated ourselves at one end of the room on a high purple couch, a sort of throne, piled with silver and black cushions, on which was worked in green threads an emblem, which Peter explained was the character of Mersilde, a fiend who has the power ​to transport you wherever you wish to go. Now, he pulled a silver rope which hung from the ceiling, the lights flashed off and on again, and I observed that we were no longer alone. A little black page boy in a rose doublet, with baggy silver trousers, and a turban of scarlet silk, surmounted by heron's plumes, sparkling with carbuncles, stood before us. He had apparently popped out of the floor like the harlequin in an English pantomime. At a sign from Peter, he pressed a button in the wall, a little cupboard opened, and he extracted a bottle of amber crystal, half-full of a clear green liquid, and two amber crystal glasses with iridescent flanges.
I am striving to discover the secrets, said Peter, as we sipped the liqueur, the taste of which was both pungent and bitter.
Not in this room! I gasped. Unless you mean the secrets of Paul Poiret and Léon Bakst.
No, he laughed, as the cat leaped to his shoulder and began to purr loudly, not in this room. This is my reception-room where I receive nobody. You are the first person, with the exception of Hadji, to enter this house since I have remodelled it but, he continued reflectively, I have a fancy that the bright fiends of hell, the beautiful yellow and blue devils, will like this room, when I call them forth to do my bidding.
Again he warned me. Not one word to Edith, do you understand? Not one word. I must be alone. I have told you and only you. I must work in ​peace and that I cannot do if I am interrupted. This room is my relief. It amuses me to sit here, but it is not my laboratory. Come, it is time to show you. Besides, I have my reasons. . . .
We did not rise. The lights were again mysteriously extinguished and I felt that the couch on which we sat was moving. The sensation was pleasant, like taking a ride on a magic carpet or a taktrevan. In a few seconds, when light appeared again, instead of a wall behind us we sat with a wall before us. Facing about, I perceived that we were in another chamber, a chamber that would have pleased Doctor Faust, for it was obviously the laboratory of an alchemist. Nevertheless, I noted at once a certain theatrical air in the arrangement.
This, I said, seems more suitable for the performances of Herrmann the Great or Houdini than the experiments of Paracelsus.
Peter grinned. It was clear that he was taking a childish delight in the entertainment.
It is fun to do this with you. I've had no one but the black boy and the cat. There are moments when I think I would like to bring Edith here, but she would spoil it by getting tired of it, or else she would like it too much and want to come every day and bring others with her to see the show. Well, look around.
I followed his advice. It was the conventional alchemist's retreat. There were stuffed owls and mummies and astrolabes. Herbs and bones were ​suspended from the ceiling. Skulls grinned from the tops of cabinets. There were rows and rows of ancient books, many of them bound in sheepskin or vellum, in a case against one wall. A few larger volumes, with brass or iron clasps, reposed on a table. Lou Matagot, who had been carried into the room with us, presently stretched his great, black, glossy length over the top of one of these. There were cauldrons, retorts, crucibles, rows of bottles, a fire, with bellows, and a clepsydra, or water-clock, which seemed to be running. There was an Arcula Mystica, or demoniac telephone, resembling a liqueur-stand. Peter explained that possessors of this instrument might communicate with each other, over whatever distance. There were cabinets, on the shelves of which lay amulets and talismans and periapts, carved from obsidian or fashioned of blue or green faience, the surfaces of which were elaborately scratched with hermetic characters, and symplegmata with their curious confusion of the different parts of different beasts. There were aspergills, and ivory pyxes, stolen, perhaps, from some holy place, and now consecrated to evil uses. There were stuffed serpents and divining rods of hazel. There were scrolls of parchment, tied with vermilion cord. In fact, there was everything in this room, that David Belasco would provide for a similar scene on the stage.
Here, said Peter, I study the Book of the Dead, hierograms, rhabdomancy, oneiromancy, hippo​mancy, margaritomancy, parthenomancy, gyromancy, spodanomancy, ichthyomancy, kephalonomancy, lampodomancy, sycomancy, angelology, pneumatology, goety, eschatology, cartomancy, aleuromancy, alphitomancy, anthropomancy, axinomancy, which is performed by applying an agate to a red-hot ax, arithmomancy, or divination by numbers, alectoromantia, in which I lay out the letters of the alphabet and grains of wheat in spaces drawn in a circle and permit a cock to select grains corresponding to letters, belomancy, divination by arrows, ceroscopy, cleidomancy, astragalomancy, amniomancy, cleromancy, divination performed by throwing dice and observing the marks which turn up, cledonism, coscinomancy, capnomancy, divination by smoke, captoptromancy, chiromancy, dactyliomancy, performed with a ring, extispicium, or divination by entrails, gastromancy, geomancy, divination by earth, hydromancy, divination by water, and pyromancy and æromancy, divination by fire and air, onomancy, divination by the letters of a name, onychomancy, which is concerned with finger-nails, ornithomancy, which deals with birds, and chilomancy, which deals with keys, lithomancy, eychnomancy, ooscopy, keraunoscopia, bibliomancy, myomancy, pan-psychism, metempsychosis, the Martinists, the Kabbalists,the Diabolists, the Palladists, the Rosicrucians, the Luciferians, the Umbilicamini, all the nocuous, demonological, and pneumatic learning, including transcendental sen​sualism. At present, I am experimenting with white mice. I dip their feet in red ink and permit them to make scrawls on a certain curious chart.
I have dabbled in drugs, for you know that the old Greek priests, the modern seers, and the medieval pythonesses, all have resorted to drugs to assist them to see visions. The narcotic or anæsthetic fumes, rising from the tripods, lulled the old Greek hierophants and soothsayers into a sympathetic frame of mind. First, I experimented with Napellus, for I had read that Napellus caused one's mental processes to be transferred from the brain to the pit of the stomach. There exists an exact description of the effects of this drug on an adept, one Baptista Van Helmont, which I will read you.
Peter, here, went to the shelves, and after a little hesitatian, pulled out an old brown volume. He turned over the pages for a few seconds and then began to read: Once, when I had prepared the root (of Napellus) in a rough manner, I tasted it with the tongue: although I had swallowed nothing, and had spit out a good deal of the juice, yet I felt as if my skull was being compressed by a string. Several household matters suggested themselves and I went about the house and attended to them. At last, I experienced what I had never felt before. It seemed to me that I neither thought nor understood, and as if I had none of the usual ideas in my head; but I felt, with astonishment, clearly and distinctly, ​that all these functions were taking place at the pit of the stomach: I felt this clearly and perfectly, and observed with the greatest attention that, although I felt movement and sensation spreading themselves over the whole body, yet that the whole power of thought was really and unmistakably situated in the pit of the stomach, always excepting a sensation that the soul was in the brain as a governing force. The sensation was beyond the power of words to describe. I perceived that I thought with greater clearness: there was a pleasure in such an intellectual distinctness. It was not a fugitive sensation; it did not take place while I slept, dreamed, or was ill, but during perfect consciousness. I perceived clearly that the head was perfectly dormant as regarded fancy: and I felt not a little astonished at the change of position.
Well, continued Peter, closing the book and regarding me with great intensity, you will admit that would be a sensation worth experiencing. So I tried it . . . with horrible results. Will you believe it when I tell you that I became wretchedly ill in that very centre which Van Helmont locates as the seat of thought? I suffered from the most excruciating pains, which were not entirely relieved by an emetic. Indeed, I passed a week or so in bed.
My next experiment, he went on, was made with hashish, Cannabis Indica, which I prepared and took according to the directions of another adept, who had found that the drug produced a kind of ​demoniac and incessant laughter, hearty, Gargantuan laughter, and the foreshortening of time and space. He could span the distance between London and Paris in a few seconds. Furniture and statues assumed a comic attitude; they seemed to move about and become familiar with him. He was literally aware of what the Rosny have called the "semihumanité des choses." I took the drug, as I have said, exactly as he directed, but the effect on me was entirely dissimilar. Immediately, I was plunged into immoderate melancholy. The sight of any object immeasurably depressed me. I also noted that my legs and arms had apparently stretched to an abnormal length. I sobbed with despair when I discovered that I could scarcely see to the other end of my laboratory, it seemed so far away. Mounting the stairs to my bed-chamber was equivalent in my mind to climbing the Himalayas. Although Hadji afterward assured me that I had been under the influence of the drug for only fourteen hours, it was more like fourteen years to me, which I had passed without sleep. At the end of the experiment, my nerves revolted under the strain and again I was forced to take to my bed, this time for four days.
My third experiment was made with Peyote beans, whose properties are extolled by the American Indians. After eating these beans, the red men, who use them in the mysteries of their worship, suffer, I have been informed, from an excruciat​ing nausea, the duration of which is prolonged. After the nausea has passed its course, a series of visions is vouchsafed the experimenter, these visions extending in a series, on various planes, to the mystic number of seven. Under the spell of these visions, the adepts vaticinate future events. I have wondered sometimes if it were not possible that the ancient Egyptians were familiar with the properties of these beans, that William Blake was under their influence when he drew his mystic plates.
Be that as it may, I swallowed one bean, which I had been informed would be sufficient to give me the desired effect, and without interval, I was carried at once on to the plane of the visions, which concentrated themselves into one gigantic phantasm. Have you ever seen Jacques Callot's copperplate engraving of The Temptation of Saint Anthony? The hideous collection of teratological monsters, half-insect, half-microbe, of gigantic size, exposed in that picture, swarmed about me, menacing me with their horrid beaks, their talons and claws, their evil antenne. Further cohorts of malignant monstrosities without bones lounged about the room and sprawled against my body, rubbing their flabby, slimy, oozing folds against my legs. After a few more stercoraceous manœuvres, some of which I should hesitate to describe, even to you, the monsters began to breathe forth liquid fire, and the pain resulting from the touch of these tongues of flame finally awoke me. I was violently ill, and my ill​ness developed in the seven stages traditionally allotted to the visions. First, extreme nausea, which lasted for two days, second, a raging fever, third, a procession of green eruptions on my legs, fourth, terrific pains in the region of my abdomen, fifth, dizziness, sixth, inability to command any of my muscles, and seventh, a prolonged period of sleep, which lasted for forty-eight hours. Nevertheless, I came nearer to success in this experiment than in any other.
My fourth experiment was made with cocaine, which I procured from a little Italian boy, about eleven years old, who was acting in a Bowery barroom as agent for his father. Laying the white crystals on the blade of an ivory paper-cutter, I sniffed as I had observed the snow-birds themselves sniff. Immediately, my mind became clear to an extent that it had never been clear before. My intellect became as sharp as a knife, as keen as the slash of a whip, as vibrant as an E string. I seemed to have a power of understanding which I had never before approached, not only of understanding but also of hearing, for I caught the conversation of men talking in an ordinary tone of voice out in the Square. Also, I became abnormally active, nervous, and intense. I rushed from the room, without reason or purpose, with a kind of energy which seemed deathless, so strong was its power. When, however, I endeavoured to make notes, for my mind seethed with ideas, I was unable to do so. I ​scratched some characters on paper, to be sure, but I found them wholly undecipherable the next day. They were not in English or in any language known to me. Finally, I ran out of the house and, encountering, on Second Avenue, a fancy woman of the Jewish persuasion, I accompanied her to her cubicle, and permitted her to be the subsidiary hierophant in the mystic rites I then performed. That, concluded Peter, with a somewhat sorry smile, was the last of my experiments with drugs.
This story and, indeed, this whole phase, amused me enormously. An ambition which had persuaded its possessor that in order to become the American Arthur Machen, he must first become an adept in demonology seemed to me to be the culmination of Peter's fantastic life, which, indeed, it was. But I said little. As usual, I let him talk and I listened. There seemed, however, to be a period here and I took occasion to look over the books, asking him first if he had any objection to my copying off some of the titles, as I felt that it might be possible that some day I should want to make some research in this esoteric realm. He bade me do what I liked and, advancing towards the book-shelves with the small note-book which I carried with me at that period in order to set down fleeting thoughts as they came, I transferred some of the titles therein.
I stopped at last, not from lack of patience on my part, but from observing the impatience of Peter, ​who obviously had a good deal more to say. On my turning, indeed, he began at once.
I have made, he said, some tentative minor experiments but my final experiments are yet to be attempted. Nevertheless, I have found a springboard from which to leap into my romance. Let me read you a few pages of Arthur Waite's somewhat ironic summary of Dr. Bataille's Le Diable au XIX$^e$ Siecle. Naturally I shall treat the subject more seriously, but what atmosphere, what a gorgeous milieu in which to plunge the reader when he shall open my book!
Peter now took from the shelves a small black volume, lettered in red, and turned over the leaves. First, he said, I shall read you some of the Doctor's experiences in Pondicherry, and he began:
Through the greenery of a garden, the gloom of a well, and the entanglement of certain stairways, they entered a great dismantled temple, devoted to the service of Brahma, under the unimpressive diminutive of Lucif. The infernal sanctuary had a statue of Baphomet, identical with that in Ceylon, and the ill-ventilated place reeked with a horrible putrescence. Its noisome condition was mainly owing to the presence of various fakirs, who, though still alive, were in advanced stages of putrefaction. Most people are supposed to go easily and pleasantly to the devil, but these elected to do so by way of a charnel-house asceticism, and an elaborate system of self-torture. Some were suspended from the ​ceiling by a rope tied to their arms, some embedded in plaster, some stiffened in a circle, some permanently distorted into the shape of the letter S; some were head downwards, some in a cruciform position. A native Grand Master explained that they had postured for years in this manner, and one of them for a quarter of a century.
Fr∴ John Campbell proceeded to harangue the assembly in Ourdou-zaban, but the doctor comprehended completely, and reports the substance of his speech, which was violently anti-Catholic in its nature, and especially directed against missionaries. This finished, they proceeded to the evocation of Baal-Zeboub, at first by the Conjuration of the Four, but no fiend appeared. The operation was repeated ineffectually a second time, and John Campbell determined upon the Grand Rite, which began by each person spinning on his own axis, and in this manner circumambulating the temple, in procession. Whenever they passed an embedded fakir, they obtained an incantation from his lips, but still Baal-Zeboub failed. Thereupon, the native Grand Master suggested that the evocation should be performed by the holiest of all fakirs, who was produced from a cupboard more fetid than the temple itself, and proved to be in the following condition:—(a) face eaten by rats; (b) one bleeding eye hanging down by his mouth; (c) legs covered with gangrene, ulcers, and rottenness; (d) expression peaceful and happy.
​Entreated to call on Baal-Zeboub, each time he opened his mouth his eye fell into it; however, he continued the invocation, but no Baal-Zeboub manifested. A tripod of burning coals was next obtained, and a woman, summoned for this purpose, plunged her arm into the flames, inhaling with great delight the odour of her roasting flesh. Result, nil. Then a white goat was produced, placed upon the altar of Baphomet, set alight, hideously tortured, cut open, and its entrails torn out by the native Grand Master, who spread them on the steps, uttering abominable blasphemies against Adonaï. This having also failed, great stones were raised from the floor, a nameless stench ascended, and a large consignment of living fakirs, eaten to the bone by worms and falling to pieces in every direction, were dragged out from among a number of skeletons, while serpents, giant spiders, and toads swarmed from all parts. The Grand Master seized one of the fakirs and cut his throat upon the altar, chanting the satanic liturgy amidst imprecations, curses, a chaos of voices, and the last agonies of the goat. The blood spirted forth upon the assistants, and the Grand Master sprinkled the Baphomet. A final howl of invocation resulted in complete failure, whereupon it was decided that Baal-Zeboub had business elsewhere. The doctor departed from the ceremony and kept his bed for eight-and-forty hours.
Peter looked up from the book in his hand with ​an expression of ironic exultation which was very quaint.
What do you think of that? he asked.
Very pretty, I ventured.
Very strong for the beginning of my romance! he cried. You see, I shall commence with this failure and work up gradually to the final brilliant success. Let me introduce you to another passage from Waite's summary of Dr. Bataille's masterpiece: He turned a few more leaves and presently was reading again:
A select company of initiates proceeded in hired carriages through the desolation of Dappah, under the convoy of the initiated coachmen, for the operation of a great satanic solemnity. At an easy distance from the city is the Sheol of the native Indians, and hard by the latter place there is a mountain 500 feet high and 2000 long on the summit of which seven temples are erected, communicating one with another by subterranean passages in the rock. The total absence of pagodas makes it evident that these temples are devoted to the worship of Satan; they form a gigantic triangle superposed on the vast plateau, at the base of which the party descended from their conveyances, and were met by a native with an accommodating knowledge of French. Upon exchanging the Sign of Lucifer, he conducted them to a hole in the rock, which gave upon a narrow passage guarded by a line of ​Sikhs with drawn swords, prepared to massacre anybody, and leading to the vestibule of the first temple, which was filled with a miscellaneous concourse of Adepts. In the first temple, which was provided with the inevitable statue of Baphomet, but was withal bare and meagrely illuminated, the doctor was destined to pass through his promised ordeal for which he was stripped to the skin, and placed in the centre of the assembly, and at a given signal one thousand odd venomous cobra de capellos were produced from holes in the wall and encouraged to fold him in their embraces, while the music of flute-playing fakirs alone intervened to prevent his instant death. He passed through this trying encounter with a valour which amazed himself, persisted in prolonging the ceremony, and otherwise proved himself a man of such extraordinary metal that he earned universal respect. From the Sanctuary of the Serpents, the company then proceeded into the second temple or the Sanctuary of the Phœnix.
The second temple was brilliantly illuminated and ablaze with millions of precious stones wrested by the wicked English from innumerable conquered Rajahs; it had garlands of diamonds, festoons of rubies, vast images of solid silver, and a gigantic Phenix in red gold more solid than the silver. There was an altar beneath the Phœnix, and a male and female ape were composed on the altar steps, while the Grand Master proceeded to the celebra​tion of a black mass, which was followed by an amazing marriage of the two engaging animals, and the sacrifice of a lamb brought alive into the temple, bleating piteously, with nails driven through its feet.
The third temple was consecrated to the Mother of fallen women, who, in memory of the adventure of the apple, has a place in the calendar of Lucifer; the proceedings consisted of a dialogue between the Grand Master and the Vestal.
The fourth temple was a Rosicrucian Sanctuary, having an open sepulchre, from which blue flames continually emanated; there was a platform in the midst of the temple designed for the accommodation of more Indian Vestals, one of whom it was proposed should evaporate into thin air, after which a fakir would be transformed before the company into a living mummy and be interred for a space of three years. The fakir introduced his performance by suspension in mid-air.
The fifth temple was consecrated to the Pelican.
The sixth temple was that of the Future and was devoted to divinations, the oracles being given by a Vestal in a hypnotic condition, seated over a burning brazier.
The assembly now thoughtfully repaired to the seventh temple, which, being sacred to Fire, was equipped with a vast central furnace surmounted by a chimney and containing a gigantic statue of Baphomet; in spite of the intolerable heat pervading the entire chamber, this idol contrived to pre​serve its outlines and to glow without pulverizing. A ceremony of an impressive nature occurred in this apartment; a wild cat, which strayed in through the open window, was regarded as the appearance of a soul in transmigration, and in spite of its piteous protests, was passed through the fire to Baal.
And now the crowning function, the Magnum Opus of the mystery, must take place in the Sheol of Dappah; a long procession filed from the mountain temples to the charnel-house of the open plain; the night was dark, the moon had vanished in dismay, black clouds scudded across the heavens, a feverish rain fell slowly at intervals, and the ground was dimly lighted by the phosphorescence of the general putrefaction. The Adepts stumbled over dead bodies, disturbing rats and vultures, and proceeded to the formation of the magic chain, sitting in a vast circle, every Adept embracing his particular corpse.
Well? asked Peter, closing the book. Well?
Kolossal! I shouted, in German.
Isn't it, and there's ever so much more, wonderful stories, incantations and evocations in the works of Arthur Waite, Moncure Daniel Conway, Alfred Maury, J. Collin de Plancy, François Lenormant, Alphonse Gallais, the Abbé de Montfaucon de Villars, J. G. Bourgeat, and William Godwin. Have you ever heard or The Black Pullet or The Queen or The Hairy Flies?
This time, Carl; he spoke with great intensity and earnestness, I am on the right track. I am con​vinced that to give a work of this character a proper background one must know a great deal more than one tells. That, in fact, is the secret of all fine literature, the secret of all great art, that it conceals and suggests. The edges, of course, are rounded: it is not a rough and obvious concealment. You cannot begin not to tell until you know more than you are willing to impart. These books have given me a good deal, but I must go farther—as I am convinced that Machen has gone farther. I am going through with it . . . all through with it, searching out the secrets of life and death, a few of which I have discovered already, but I have yet to make the great test. And when I know what I shall find out, I shall begin to write . . . but I shall tell nothing.
Peter was flaming with enthusiasm again. It wasn't necessary for me to speak. He required an audience, not an interlocutor.
Why not now? he demanded suddenly. Why not now and here, with you?
What do you mean? I queried.
Why not make the great experiment now? I am prepared and the moon and the planets are favourable. Are you willing to go through with it? I must warn you that you will never be the same again. You may even lose your life.
What will happen? I asked.
The earth will rock. A storm will probably follow, thunder and lightning, balls of fire, thunder​bolts, showers of feathers, and then we shall dissolve into . . . into a putrid mass, the agamous mass from which we originated, neither male nor female, with only a glowing eye, a great eye, radiating intelligence out of its midst. Then Astaroth himself (I shall call Astaroth, because his inferiors in the descending hierarchy, Sargatanas and Nebiros, dwell in America) will appear, in one of his forms, perhaps refulgent and beautiful, perhaps ugly and tortured and hideously deformed, perhaps black or yellow or blue, but assuredly not white or green. He may be entirely covered with hair or entirely covered with eyes, or he may be eyeless. Mayhap, he will be lean and proud and sad, and he will probably limp, for you know he is lame. His feet will be cloven, he will wear a goat's beard, and you may distinguish him further by the cock's feather and the ox's tail. Or, perhaps, he may arrive in the shape of some monster: the fierce flying hydra called the Ouranabad, the Rakshe who eats dragons and snakes, the Soham, with the body of a scarlet griffin and the head of a four-eyed horse, the Syl, a basilisk with a human face. . . . But, however he may appear, in his presence you shall learn the last secrets of all the worlds.
And then what will happen?
Then I shall speak the magic formula and we will resume our proper shapes but from that moment on we shall hover—literally, not pathologically—between life and death. We shall know everything. ​. . . and eventually we shall pay the price. . . .
Like Faust?
Like Faust . . . that is, if we are not clever enough to outwit the demon. Those who practise devilments usually find some means to circumvent the devil.
I appeared to ponder.
I am willing to go through with it, I said at last.
Good! I knew you would be. Let's get to work at once!
He lifted the most ponderous volume in the laboratory from the floor to the top of an old walnut refectory table. The book was bound in musty yellow vellum, clasped with iron, and the foxed leaves were fashioned from parchment made from the skin of virgin camels. As he opened it, I saw that the pages were inscribed with cabalistic characters and symbols, illuminated in colours, none of which I could decipher. Lou Matagot jumped on to the table and sat on the leaves at the top of the book, forming a paper weight. He sat with his back to Peter and his long, black tail played nervously up and down the centre of the volume.
Peter now drew a circle with a radius of twelve or thirteen feet around us, inscribing within its circumference certain characters and pentacles. Then he plunged a dagger through what I recognized to be a sacred wafer, which he told me had been stolen from a church at midnight, at the same time, muttering what, from the tone of his voice, I took to be ​blasphemous imprecations, although the language he used was unfamiliar to me. Next he arranged a copper chafing-dish over a blue flame and began to stir the ingredients, esoteric powders and crystals of bright colours. Now he lovingly lifted a crystal viol, filled with a purple liquid, and poured the contents into a porcelain bowl. Instantly, there was a faint detonation and a thick cloud of violet vapour mounted spirally to the ceiling. All the time, occasionally referring to the grimoire on the table, and employing certain unmentionable symbolic objects in the manner prescribed, he muttered incantations in the unknown tongue. The room swam with odours and mists, violet clouds and opopanax fogs. So far, the invocation was pretty and amusing but it resembled the arcane rites of Paul Iribe more than those of Hermes Trismegistus.
Now Peter pulled three black hairs from the cat's tail, which Lou Matagot delivered with a yowl of rage, springing at the same time from the table to the top of the cabinet, whence he regarded us through the mists and vapours, with his evil yellow eyes. The hairs went into the chafing-dish and a new aroma filled the room. The claws of an owl, the flower of the moly, and the powder of vipers followed and then Peter opened a long flat box which nearly covered one end of the huge table, and a nest of serpents, with bellies of rich turquoise blue and backs of tawny yellow, marked with black ​zigzags, reared their wicked heads. He called them by name and they responded by waving their heads rhythmically. I began to grow alarmed and dizzy. Vade retro, Satanas! was on tip of my tongue. For a few seconds, I think, I must have fainted. When I revived, I still heard the chanting of the incantation and the sound of tinkling bells. The serpents' heads still waved in rhythm and their bodies, yellow and turquoise blue, were elongated in the air until they appeared to be balancing on the tips of their tails. The eyes of Lou Matagot glared maliciously through the thick vapours and the cat howled with rage or terror.
Now! cried Peter, for the first time in English. Now!
My nails dug holes in the palms of my perspiring hands. Peter renewed his nocuous muttering and casting the wafer, transfixed by the dagger, into the porcelain bowl containing the violet fluid, he poured the whole mixture into the copper chafing-dish.
There was a terrific explosion.