The Room in the Dragon Volant

My eyes were often on the solemn old clock over the chimneypiece, which was my sole accomplice in keeping tryst in this iniquitous venture. The sky favored my design, and darkened all things with a sea of clouds.

                                                                                                                               Richard Beckett

We may concur with the above quote, taken from this novella, apart from the first five words of the second sentence. If it is sometimes impossible to detect from a first-person narrative whether or not the narrator is observant, awake, or even sane, a careful writer will allow him enough interaction with the world, often in dialogue with other characters, for the reader to make that assessment. In The Room in the Dragon Volant, this assessment is ultimately unkind; but the story, like its female protagonist, pulls us towards an eddy with irresistible charm.

Our time is that "eventful year, 1815," and our protagonist the aforementioned Mr. Beckett, an Englishman of twenty-three. As the tale begins he finds himself the heir to a decent fortune and elects to gallivant around France, a country whose language he speaks smoothly and correctly, and thereby to add to the "philosophical throng" of young people who hoped "to improve their minds by foreign travel" (a most admirable goal). We will learn a lot about Richard Beckett, especially about his weaknesses, the most egregious of which was supposed to have been purged from the European spirit around the year of Beckett's birth – but no matter. The first glance into his values, on the occasion of his helping a horse-drawn coach in distress, does not reassure us:

The arms that were emblazoned on the panel were peculiar; I remember especially one device – it was the figure of a stork, painted in carmine, upon what the heralds call a 'field or.' The bird was standing upon one leg, and in the other claw held a stone. This is, I believe, the emblem of vigilance. Its oddity struck me, and remained impressed upon my memory. There were supporters besides, but I forget what they were. The courtly manners of these people, the style of their servants, the elegance of their traveling carriage, and the supporters to their arms, satisfied me that they were noble. The lady, you may be sure, was not the less interesting on that account. What a fascination a title exercises upon the imagination! I do not mean on that of snobs or moral flunkies. Superiority of rank is a powerful and genuine influence in love. The idea of superior refinement is associated with it. The careless notice of the squire tells more upon the heart of the pretty milk-maid than years of honest Dobbin's manly devotion, and so on and up. It is an unjust world!

Beckett may not wish to be associated with "moral flunkies," but his subsequent actions make that comparison inevitable. The coach will turn out to belong to a certain Count de St. Alyre,  and a much younger woman, "the daughter or wife, it matters not which." That "it matters not which" to our narrator, when it should very much matter, is justified to our incredulous ears by a series of statements on the Countess's misery and the rumored wickedness of her keeper. And so it is to this "beautiful Countess, with the patience of an angel and the beauty of a Venus and the accomplishments of all the Muses," that the idealistic and ingenuous Beckett will recur – but not before he makes the acquaintance of someone he would like to forget, a ghostly soldier called Colonel Gaillarde.  

I have not mentioned the plot because the plot is so standard as to be better off left unscrutinized. Gaillarde and another fellow, a Marquis who claims to be incognito for reasons that may satisfy Beckett but should not satisfy us, hover in our hero's vicinity as he makes one bad decision after another. Le Fanu was an amazingly prolific writer who is remembered now mostly for this tale, which somehow has never done it for me. Surely, like everything he composed, Carmilla is a prolonged victory of style; yet, any story that allows supernatural elements to defeat the efforts of man must be of extraordinary interest, a point in which Le Fanu's lady vampire falls short. The real delight in a work like The Room in the Dragon Volant is how a very plain and pleasing plot whose secrets are discernible to even a callow reader can still remain so delicious. Beckett trusts the Marquis from the very beginning because of a mild confidence trick that would admittedly fool much greater minds; but after a bizarre sequence in a coach that could only spell doom for our protagonist, the Marquis inexplicably remains in his good books (perhaps this conceit is merely an attempt to record the sensations as they occurred at the time, since Beckett informs us he is now an old man reminiscing about his twenty-fourth year). Towards the middle of his adventure, Beckett is urged at a masked ball to consult an oracle on his innermost desires – as if they weren't stenciled in boldface on his sleeve, but anyway. The result is one of the novella's finest passages:

I had been trying to see the person who sat in the palanquin. I had only once an opportunity of a tolerably steady peep. What I saw was singular. The oracle was dressed, as I have said, very richly, in the Chinese fashion. He was a figure altogether on a larger scale than the interpreter, who stood outside. The features seemed to me large and heavy, and the head was carried with a downward inclination! The eyes were closed, and the chin rested on the breast of his embroidered pelisse. The face seemed fixed, and the very image of apathy. Its character and pose seemed an exaggerated repetition of the immobility of the figure who communicated with the noisy outer world. This face looked blood-red; but that was caused, I concluded, by the light entering through the red silk curtains. All this struck me almost at a glance; I had not many seconds in which to make my observation. The ground was now clear, and the Marquis said, 'Go forward, my friend.'

Go forward, indeed. Without giving much away, including what the oracle intuits regarding our gullible Englishman, we note that this scene more than any other explains Mr. Beckett's failings, although Beckett may not see it that way, despite the decades of hindsight that his narrative affords him. That leaves, I suppose, only one last thing unaccounted for, namely the airworthy lizard of our title. So if I were to tell you that the dragon were nothing more than a haunted hotel, I think you would be more than a little disappointed. Just don't ask why Beckett, even with his solid French, does not see the multifaceted humor in an individual being called Pierre de la Roche St. Amand. Or why he doesn't notice that he and the young Frenchman are precisely the same age.

Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad

The scare tales of contemporary cinema and, presumably, contemporary fiction (I am swathed in blissful ignorance with regard to the latter) have lost much of the creeping dread that makes us remember one story and discard another. The main impetus for such erosion is the lack of credence with which these stories are imbued – that is to say, we cannot believe them for a second since that time is far longer than their authors mulled the possibility of their truth. Admittedly, many modern monsters are either fantastic or the brainchild of sciences not yet available. For this reason they possess no enchantment, no hint of black lore, no glimmer of arcane and ancient wisdom: they are only there because they are abnormal, inhuman, often bloody and revolting, and all of this makes us want to stay home and count our blessings (or, nowadays, our silverware) that we are, in fact, normal and not under the spell of some sadistic fiend. That's all well and good, if more than a bit dull. True terror lurks in nightmares, hints of old evil, and shadowy landscapes where our destinies seem to be drawn ever so faintly against the night sky. All of which perfectly apply to this masterpiece of horror. 

The title of the story is a well-known poem by this Scottish bard, so it's no coincidence that the destination of our protagonist – a professor of ontography by the name of Parkins – is a fictitious seaside hamlet called Burnstow. A dull and stolid soul with no belief whatsoever in the supernatural, Parkins's aim in traveling northward is to improve his golf game; but in the curiously self-conscious prologue, Parkins is briefed by a colleague that he would do well to visit the Templars' preceptory which, with the progressing tides, "must be down quite close to the beach now." Parkins is intrigued by the opportunity of trying his hand at something new since, according to our narrator, "few people can resist the temptation to try a little amateur research in a department quite outside their own, if only for the satisfaction of showing how successful they would have been had they only taken it up seriously." Parkins then starts complaining that the only rooms untenanted at this low point of the season have two twin beds. "I don't quite fancy having an empty bed," he quips, quite unaware of the silliness of his observation, and certain facets of his mentality are elucidated through other remarks, punctuated by a comment from the author:

In repeating the above dialogue I have tried to give the impression which it made on me, that Parkins was something of an old woman – rather hen-like perhaps, in his little ways; totally destitute, alas! of the sense of humour, but at the same time dauntless and sincere in his convictions, and a man deserving of the greatest respect. Whether or not the reader has gathered so much, that was the character which Parkins had.

This small addition allows us to pity Parkins, a somewhat arrogant boor, and sympathize with what will inevitably befall him. He indeed reaches Burnstow and wanders his way to the glorious ruins of the Templars, although a Colonel, another guest at the boarding-house, warns him not to breathe in the Papist fumes too deeply. After poking about the site with unfeigned glee, he comes across an object "of man's making – a metal tube about four inches long, and evidently of some considerable age." This he takes with him as he walks back past the golf courses and jetties to his boarding house for some repose.

As he walks backs, he espies a figure, "a rather indistinct personage, who seemed to be making great efforts to catch up with him, but made little, if any, progress." He returns to his room and discovers that the tube he pilfered is bronze and, more surprisingly, a sort of whistle. He cleans it and finds the following inscriptions:

          FLA

 FUR          BIS

          FLE                                                   QUIS EST ISTE QUI VENIT

Parkins's grade-school Latin is able to render the second inscription correctly as "Who is this who comes?" (the first, which I will leave to your imagination or dictionary, should be read as "Fur – flabis, flebis!"), and decides that the easiest way to solve this conundrum is to blow the whistle:

He blew tentatively and stopped suddenly, startled and yet pleased at the note he had elicited. It had a quality of infinite distance in it, and, soft as it was, he somehow felt it must be audible for miles around. It was a sound, too, that seemed to have the power (which many scents possess) of forming pictures in the brain. He saw quite clearly for a moment a vision of a wide, dark expanse at night, with a fresh wind blowing, and in the midst a lonely figure – how employed, he could not tell. Perhaps he would have seen more had not the picture been broken by the sudden surge of a gust of wind against his casement, so sudden that it made him look up, just in time to see the white glint of a sea-bird's wing somewhere outside the dark panes.

This is just the beginning of Parkins's ghastly stay. James was not kind to those with no imagination, especially if they were resistant to considering things or phenomena that could not be accounted for by the rudiments of modern science. As such, James gives Parkins poor Latin (James was a classically trained scholar); compares him to a member of this Hebrew sect known for their unimaginative and prudish adherence to legal stipulations (which Parkins doesn't even know whether the Old Testament mentions); has the events of the story take place near the Feast day of this apostle, perhaps the first empiricist; and enjoins that, "in his unenlightened days [Parkins] had read of meetings in such places which even now would hardly bear thinking of ... particularly of one which catches most people's fancy at some time of their childhood." Yet it is the Colonel who best summarizes Parkins's plight:  "It's no use talking, I'm well aware, but I expect that with you it's a case of live and learn." At least he's got one part right.

The Devil's Spectacles

If you think ... that a clergyman will come to a man who has got the Devil's Spectacles here, under his pillow, and who has only to put those Spectacles on to see through that clergyman's clothes, flesh and whatnot, and read everything that's written in his secret mind as plain as print, fetch him, Master Alfred, fetch him!

                                                                                                                         Septimus Notman

Readers of these pages know that I have a fondness – not a weakness, mind you – for the letters of Victorian England that cannot be explained away so easily. What does that glorious period offer the reader that he cannot obtain now? It stands to reason that there has been pulp cramming every bookstore as long as there have been books in that same establishment, and the worldwide literacy boom of the last hundred years has done nothing to better that situation. But something persists about that period, the twilight of the British Empire and its global achievements of culture and learning ironically coinciding with its highest opinion of itself, which unlocks endless labyrinths in the mind. It was the age of Holmes and Watson, Jekyll and Hyde, Drood, and Scrooge; it was also the heyday of this writer, whose fame while alive has obscured an appreciation of his talents. And few stories of his are more entertaining than this bizarre tale.

Our protagonist and narrator is a young and moneyed nobleman by the name of Alfred, who cannot be expected to be capable of anything beyond his class. Since he is a blooming bachelor and very eligible, his main concern is the acquisition of a wife. He announces this somewhat obvious preoccupation to us in passing because his initial interest, as our tale unfolds, is in a fellow called Septimus Notman, "a lodge-keeper at the second of our two park gates," and "the only survivor of our head gamekeeper's family of seven children" (hence, we suppose, his name). What Notman is and, well, is not, should be clear without much reflection:

Everybody disliked Septimus Notman. He was said to be mad; to be a liar, a hypocrite, a vicious wretch, and a disagreeable brute. There were some people who even reported that he had been a pirate during the time when we lost sight of him and who declared, when they were asked for their proof, that his crimes were written on his face.

When had Alfred's family lost sight of him? Oh, that was several years ago now; but his good father, for reasons that escape us at first then become more likely as our story progresses, could not turn Notman away after the latter's prolonged and wholly inexplicable absence. Now, of course, Notman straddles his deathbed – his response to Alfred's inquiry about summoning a priest begins this review – and we know that deathbeds have a certain effect on the mind besieged as life's light wanes by prior calamities and passions. Notman wishes to confess, not for the purposes of expiation, but simply to delay his inevitable descent into a fiery pit. More specifically, to confess the crime by which Notman was bestowed the mysterious article he now conceals beneath his pillow. And where did this crime take place? The same that concludes this much ballyhooed novel, when he and a "boatswain's mate" from an unsuccessful icebreaker take it upon themselves to find the North Pole even when their captain prohibits their disembarkation. Alfred is predictably intrigued, especially when informed that the confession "will take long and ... make your flesh creep" – and that quote may have given away too much as it is. In the end, Notman will die, but not before gifting those spectacles to his master, along with brief instructions on their use.   

Here I will permit myself an aside. Although folklore and the history of fictional narratives surely welcome extraneous prefaces so as to introduce an object or character that would otherwise prove difficult to integrate, the opening pages of The Devil's Spectacles outdo themselves (somehow I recur to a film that I cannot spoil, into which a serial killer is written merely to abet a minor plot point). Doubtless, the conceit of the spectacles could have been handled much more easily, viz. with Alfred's passing a pawnbroker's shop and espying them in the window, or some chance encounter with a stranger who abandons them in a train compartment (reminiscent of the uncut version of this film). If we elect to grant Collins full credit for this arrangement, then the handoff of these glasses – which apparently allow you to read people's thoughts by peering into their hearts – has greater significance than first imagined. Given the alleged origin of the appurtenance, one may reasonably expect that the thoughts which will be 'read' will not necessarily rank among that person's happiest or most flattering. Once Alfred has the glasses in his possession he returns to his mission: choosing between Cecilia, "handsome, well-born, and poor" and the "companion and reader" of Alfred's mother, and his mother's niece and his first cousin, Zilla, "the Angel of the school." Without unfurling the numerous intrigues that ensue, we may enjoy the following gems: "If her eye had not been on me at the moment, I believe that I should have taken my Spectacles out of my pocket"; "My Spectacles informed me that she deliberately declined to face that question, even in her thoughts"; "For the first week I never even got the chance of looking at her through the Devil's Spectacles." And as Alfred no longer bothers to try to ascertain a person's true intentions through normal methods – listening, observation, and what the Germans call Menschenkenntnis, and what we can only lamely render as "a knowledge of human nature" – he becomes increasingly distrustful of everyone from his mother, to his butler, to the two young women in invisible competition for a sumptuous estate. A very sumptuous estate, in fact, as he begins to realize.

Were the name of Alfred's beloved Cordelia, not Cecilia, we might be reminded more immediately of this masterpiece, also featuring a ratiocinating, affluent nobleman with an eye for pretty women. The difference between Kierkegaard's alter ego and Alfred is that the latter does not really consider the possibility that what he discerns may not be true at all, and nothing more than the projection of his own worries. Only towards the end of his narrative does he perceive the contradiction:

I made no further use of the Spectacles that morning; my purpose was to keep them in my pocket until the interview in the shrubbery was over. Shall I own the motive? It was simply fear – fear of making further discoveries, and of losing the masterly self-control on which the whole success of my project depended.

We will not mention the shrubbery; suffice it to say that a critical conversation takes place literally sub rosa. But what then of the implication that one may know too much about one's fellow man to take effective action? That matter is addressed in the very last section of the story when Alfred – actually, it may not be Alfred at all who is telling us all this. At least not he of the sumptuous estate.

The Body Snatcher

It might be better to pretend that this story never happened, which of course it did. Graverobbers are for obvious reasons of supply some of history's most chronicled criminals, yet with the explosion of medical science in the mid-nineteenth century, it was not graves which were violated but the bodies themselves. These bodies were sold in parts to anatomists and medical students for scientific purposes and tomb after tomb went hollow. Even more morbid is the fact that demand began to get fussier and fresher bodies became all the rage, leading one particular team to pursue the freshest bodies out there, those of the still living. The actions of William Burke and his accomplice were so notorious as to be immortalized in a verb, so when we meet Fettes and Macfarlane in this small masterpiece of horror, we understand them to be his direct descendants.

The story begins with their unwanted reunion: Fettes is constantly soused and impecunious; Macfarlane, garbed in the finest boutique-bought whitewash, a successful London physician. They meet by chance and are none too pleased about it, for their consciences share crimes of diabolical scheming. It turns out both were once students of a certain K., a physician who collected cadavers for his own medical experiments, and had no qualms or questions about the work of his minions. The tale is too brief to provide much characterization of their sinister master, so we only get the following snippet:

There was at that period, a certain extramural teacher of anatomy, whom I shall designate by the letter K. His name was subsequently too well known. The man who bore it skulked through the streets of Edinburgh in disguise, while the mob that applauded at the execution of Burke called loudly for the blood of his employer. But Mr. K- was then at the top of his vogue; he enjoyed a popularity due partly to his own talent and address, partly to the incapacity of his rival, the university professor. The students, at least, swore by his name, and Fettes believed himself, and was believed by others, to have laid the foundations of success when he had acquired the favour of this meteorically famous man. 

That K. is really Stevenson’s compatriot Robert Knox is not so much a secret as a literary device to prevent the piece from becoming historical journalism. Suffice it to say that imagining two of Knox’s suppliers, with a few pale strokes of ghoulish vengeance thrown in for good measure, would make a glorious tale of horror (not unlike what would be produced half a century later in a very different setting). Stevenson’s genius does not allow him, however, to stop at the Gothic. The arc of such a story (devised and perfected by, among others, this author) is built in five acts: the re-encounter, the origin of their acquaintance, an “agenbite of inwit,” the appearance of an even greater evil, and then the destiny of all souls involved. You might think the opening section clumsy and almost unconnected to the meat of the tale, and you would not be wrong. But the story makes us wait for the integrant appearance of a man called Gray.

Gray is a marvelous sketch in the annals of literature, a being that barely defiles more than two pages and yet is etched deep in our memory. He becomes, I can say without being indiscreet, the unremovable stain. These are all evildoers, but there is something about him that outhowls the other devils:

This was a small man, very pale and dark, with coal–black eyes. The cut of his features gave a promise of intellect and refinement which was but feebly realised in his manners, for he proved, upon a nearer acquaintance, coarse, vulgar, stupid. He exercised, however, a very remarkable control over Macfarlane; issued orders like the Great Bashaw; became inflamed at the least discussion or delay, and commented rudely on the servility with which he was obeyed. This most offensive person took a fancy to Fettes on the spot, plied him with drinks, and honoured him with unusual confidences on his past career. If a tenth part of what he confessed were true, he was a very loathsome rogue; and the lad’s vanity was tickled by the attention of so experienced a man.

The end looms the moment Macfarlane is obliged to foot the bill for their long and gluttonous night, and then spend the next day “squiring the intolerable Gray from tavern to tavern.” This all culminates in a scene in a carriage that could be taken (substituting a car or train for the fly) from any contemporary horror film. If you haven’t read Stevenson, you are missing one of literature’s unheralded giants, capable of portraying both sides of human nature in equal load (as he does in a more famous work, one of the most perfect literary creations of all time). In The Body Snatcher, there is only one side, and it is remarkably vile; but its vileness wields the distinct advantage of making us cringe in fear of dark and darting shapes in the night. Endless, blackest night, that is. 

Baudelaire, "La corde"

A brief tale of horror ("The rope") by this French man of letters.  You can read the original here.

To Édouard Manet
   
"Illusions," said my friend, "are perhaps as unlimited as the connections between one person and another, or between people and things. And when the illusion disappears – that is to say, when we see its being or fact as it exists outside of us – we experience a strange feeling, a complicated mix of regret for the departed ghost and surprise in face of such novelty, in face of the real. If there is one phenomenon that is evident, trivial, always likely, and of a nature from which it would be impossible to be fooled, it is maternal love: a mother without maternal love is as difficult to imagine as a light without heat. So is it then not perfectly acceptable to attribute to maternal love all a mother's actions and words that relate to her child? This notwithstanding, listen now to a little tale in which I was singularly mystified by the most natural of illusions.  

"My profession as painter routinely obliges me to pay close attention to faces and physiognomies that appear on my routes, and you know what joy we derive from our faculty to see life in more vivid and vital colors than what others perceive. In the remote quarter where I live and where vast lawns still keep each building at a distance, I often observed a child whose ardent and mischievous physiognomy attracted me more than all the others. He posed for me more than once, and I transformed the little gypsy into both an angel and the Love of mythology. I had him carry a vagabond's violin, a Crown of Thorns, the Nails of the Passion, and the Torch of Eros. From the comic oddness of this boy I took such great pleasure that one day I beseeched his parents – rather poor folk – to let me have him, promising to dress him well, to grant him an allowance, and to give him no other task apart from cleaning my paint brushes and running my errands. Scrubbed and washed, this child became charming, and the life he led at my place seemed like a paradise in comparison to what he had been subjected in his parents' hovel. Yet I have to say that this little man would sometimes surprise me with his precocious fits of melancholy and his immoderate appetite for sweets and liqueurs. And so one day when I discovered that, despite my numerous warnings, he had committed another crime of this type, I threatened to send him back to his parents. Then I left, and business kept me from home for quite a while.  

"You can imagine my horror and astonishment when I returned home only to find the little fellow, my mischievous companion through life, hanging from the side of the armoire! His feet almost touched the floor; next to him a chair undoubtedly pushed away at the last second was toppled over; his head was leaning convulsively on one shoulder; his bloated face and his eyes, open in a frightening stare, first induced the illusion of life. Getting him down from there was not as easy as you might think: he was already quite stiff, and I was overcome by an inexplicable repugnance when I let him tumble to the floor. I had to hold him up with one arm and cut the rope with the other – but once I did this, there was still more to come. The little monster had used a cord so fine as to have wedged it deep into his flesh; and now to disengage his neck I had to look for the rope between the swelling rolls of fat with a pair of small scissors.   

"I neglected to mention that I had screamed for help, yet all my neighbors had refused to come to my aid, faithful to those habits of civilized souls who never wish – I know not why – to involve themselves in the affairs of a hanged man. At length a doctor arrived who pronounced the child dead, apparently for many hours. When we later had to undress him for the burial, the rigidity of his cadaver was such that we had to slice and cut away his clothes, so unable were we to bend his limbs.

"The commissioner to whom, needless to say, I had to give a full report of the occurrence, looked askance at me and said: 'Here's a shady business!' moved, I'm certain, by an inveterate desire to scare both the innocent and the guilty without any distinction.   

"There remained one last task to which I had to attend, and the very thought of it caused me terrific angst: I had to inform his parents. My feet refused to obey my commands. Finally I mustered the courage; but, to my great surprise, his mother was impassive – not a tear oozed from the corner of her eye. I imputed this strangeness to the horror she was experiencing, and I recalled that famous phrase: 'The most terrible pain is pain unspoken.' As for the father, he resigned himself to a certain dreamy dullness: 'It might be better this way after all; he was always going to come to a bad end!'    

"All this time his body lay upon my sofa, and assisted by a serving girl, I was seeing to the final preparations when his mother entered my small apartment. She said she wanted to see the body of her son. I could not really prevent her from drowning in her misery, or refuse her this last and somber consolation. Then she asked to be shown the place where the lad hanged himself. 'Oh no, Madame,' I replied, 'this would hurt you greatly.' And then, as my eyes involuntarily turned towards that morbid armoire, I noticed with disgust mixed with horror and anger that the nail had remained wedged in the door with a long piece of rope still dangling.  I threw myself upon it to rip out the last vestiges of misery, and as I was about to cast it out the open window the poor woman seized my arm and told me in an irresistible voice: 'Oh, sir!  Let me have this!  I beg you! I implore you!' Her despair seemed to me so unhinged, so mad, that she would now express tenderness for what had brought death upon her son and now wanted to keep it like some dear and horrible relic. And here she grabbed the nail and cord.  

"At last, at last!  It was over. There was nothing more for me to do than go back to work, now with more vigor than before – if but to chase away the little corpse that haunted the creases of my brain whose ghost tired me with his large staring eyes. Yet the next day I received a package of letters: some were from the tenants, others from neighboring buildings; one was from the first floor, another from the second, a third from the third, and so forth, some in a half-pleasant style, as if wanting to cloak with jest the sincerity of the demand; others were cheeky and filled with spelling mistakes; yet all of them veered towards the same goal, that is, to obtain from me a piece of the beatific and fateful rope. Among the signatories were, I must say, more women than men; but not one of them, believe me, belonged to the petty and vulgar class. I kept the letters.

"And then it suddenly dawned on me, and I understood why his mother so wanted to rip off that cord  and with what she intended on comforting herself."