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.

Mr. Justice Harbottle

There is a tinge to tales of the morbid that appeals both to the vulgarian and those of elevated sensibilities. The vulgarian, of course, will enjoy first the trepidation and the terrorizing and lust secretly for disembowelments; those of finer mind will be able to read the same pages with the same words and detect a design far more sinister than plain brutishness. Is this why I have always loved ghost stories? Is this the vulgarian in me or someone striving towards greater understanding of our realm through the prism of art? Whatever the case, those of faith know hooves when they see them dragged through the dirt. Which brings us to this horrid little gem. 

Our titular character is not a merry old soul, and never a merry old soul could he possibly have been. He is, however, a man of particular sway since his bench has wrought the most death notices of any other under the crown – well, actually, that matter may be implied but not confirmed. A description of our judge during his last living year suggests something of the Dickensian tyrant laden with terrible auspices:

The Judge was at that time a man of some sixty-seven years.  He had a great mulberry-colored face, a big, carbuncled nose, fierce eyes, and a grim and brutal mouth. My father, who was young at the time, thought it the most formidable face he had ever seen; for there were evidences of intellectual power in the formation and lines of the forehead. His voice was loud and harsh, and gave effect to the sarcasm which was his habitual weapon on the bench. This old gentleman had the reputation of being about the wickedest man in England. Even on the bench he now and then showed his scorn of opinion. He had carried cases his own way, it was said, in spite of counsel, authorities and even of juries, by a sort of cajolery, violence and bamboozling, that somehow confused and overpowered resistance. He had never actually committed himself; he was too cunning to do that. He had the character of being, however, a dangerous and unscrupulous judge; but his character did not trouble him.

The identity of the narrator is of little concern. Le Fanu used the papers of literature's first occult detective, Martin Hesselius, to achieve several degrees of separation and lend his tale what all good ghost stories need: the strength of hearsay. Hesselius lived well past the erasing of Roger Harbottle's traces from this earth, but a tenant known to a friend of his spoke of a "dark street in Westminster" and "a spacious old house" where one unforgettable night, two men emerged from a closet in a locked room and began to traipse insouciantly across his bedroom floor:

A slight dark man, particularly sinister, and somewhere about fifty, dressed in mourning of a very antique fashion, such a suit as we see in Hogarth, entered the room on tiptoe. He was followed by an elder man, stout, and blotched with scurvy, and whose features, fixed as a corpse's, were stamped with dreadful force with a character of sensuality and villainy .... this direful old man carried in his ringed and ruffled hand a coil of rope.

These specters "walked as living men do, but without any sound," and our judge, given what we learn later on, is clearly the older, scurvy-ridden of the two. And his dark, thin companion may very well be a certain Lewis Pyneweck.

Pyneweck was once a grocer in Shrewsbury, to become in the course of our narrative "prisoner in the jail of that town." His charge, perhaps ironically, is forgery. As in so many of the cases presided over by Judge Harbottle, the only questions to weigh are whether the charge is valid, and if so, whether the punishment meted out conforms to the dimensions of the crime – and here is where our narrative begins to swerve and slope. Harbottle is visited by a rickety old man, Hugh Peters, who warns him of a plot afoot against the judge by his peers. A few pointed remarks are bandied about before Harbottle has the mole followed by his footman, who will be surprised at his quarry's hidden talents. In time, it is also revealed that another mole resides in Harbottle's own home, his housekeeper Flora Carwell. Carwell is the maiden name, now reassumed, of the former Mrs. Pyneweck, and into this household she brought her only child in exchange for the silence of the Judge on what had previously occurred, what was occurring between two consenting adults, and what would occur to her husband, incarcerated and abandoned to the whims of injustice. Were Harbottle's promises just more taradiddle? Given his propensity for "jollifications," it would appear that Mrs. Carwell is at best a muted conspirator and at worst a galley slave. Imagine her horror, therefore, when she consults a Shrewsbury paper one May morning on the only Friday the 13th in 1746 to find her ex-spouse among the most recently executed.

Some may argue that Le Fanu's talents were wasted on the occult, yet I must dissent. Surely mystery and murder can be deemed a lesser genre than the pure pleasure of first-rate art; but as soon as genius decides for a more layered interpretation of reality, it may find the supernatural the most plausible of all phenomena. Harbottle is a baleful rogue, but he is not immune to logic or logic's fearful consequences. In this vein he reconsiders his guest that night and begins to doubt the senses he so loves to indulge:

I need hardly say that the venerable Hugh Peters did not appear again. The Judge never mentioned him. But oddly enough, considering how he laughed to scorn the weak invention which he had blown into dust at the very first puff, his white-wigged visitor and the conference in the dark front parlor were often in his memory. His shrewd eye told him that allowing for change of tints and such disguises as the playhouse affords every night, the features of this false old man, who had turned out too hard for his tall footman, were identical with those of Lewis Pyneweck.

A quick check with prison officials confirms what cannot be reassuring: that Pyneweck has long been accounted for and has never once been released from his murky dungeon. And if you think this would be nightmarish enough among the waking, wait until you see what godforsaken corners our judge visits when he sleeps.

The Familiar

What distinguishes us from animals if not morality?  Perhaps we are more evolved because we can kill any other species with our traps and technologies – man is the ultimate apex predator – but it is precisely our restraint that ennobles us.  When we exercise our mercy, when compassion outyells easy victory, only then are we truly human, making those who hunt animals for pleasure (not, say, for survival) all the more akin to the quadrapeds they stalk.  Yet we would be hard-pressed to exhibit the dignity that these creatures display as our quarries.  They flee or fight, but they do not cringe in terror perhaps because they do not have a sense of the beyond, or that our beyond may be simply an endless, distorted repetition of our here and now.  If we take no quarter with these beasts, how then should we presume amnesty for ourselves?  An old and delicate question, and one that brings us to this fine tale.

As is typical in stories featuring Dr. Martin Hesselius, there will obtain a narrational conceit of a few degrees of separation.  An unidentified editor presents a translation of Hesselius's German text containing the observations of a certain Reverend Herbert about yet a fourth man, Sir James Barton.  The strategy of such estrangement is twofold.  Firstly, we commence already at the fifth degree from the truth, and the second language, so what occurred in reality may differ significantly from what finally reached our inspection.  Secondly, no story of purported supernatural events is really effective first-hand: ghost stories and other tales of terror require apostles and word-of-mouth expansion (as one critic mentions in a cinematic context, heroes of ghost stories tend to revel in the personal appearance of these apparitions as a sign of their own, that is, the heroes' significance).  When we are then informed that Barton was "from the deliberate conviction of years, an utter disbeliever in what are usually termed preternatural agencies," we know we have the perfect candidate for a bit of spooking.  In his early forties but fit and able, our Barton seems a fine chap.  Yet he is also, we are warned, readily given over to the vacillations of mood found with frequency in the emotionally unripe.  A closer inspection reveals much more:

In his personal habits Mr. Barton was unexpensive.  He occupied lodgings in one of the then-fashionable streets in the south side of the town – kept but one horse and one servant – and though a reputed free-thinker, yet lived an orderly and moral life – indulging neither in gaming, drinking, nor any other vicious pursuit – living very much to himself, without forming intimacies, or choosing any companions, and appearing to mix in gay society rather for the sake of its bustle and distraction, than for any opportunities it offered of interchanging thought or feeling with its votaries.  Barton was, therefore, pronounced a saving, prudent, unsocial sort of fellow, who bid fair to maintain his celibacy alike against stratagem and assault, and was likely to live to a good old age, die rich, and leave his money to an hospital.

A free-thinker who may be a mason, or simply someone who has shunned the conventions of Christianity for easy living and easy virtues – how someone so attached to the material world can be construed as free is not ours to worry.  In the Victorian view, it is people of Barton's stripe – sane, plain and urbane – who could not possibly be afflicted by neurosis or paranoia.  Indeed, those who wish to explain the world as a creation of some divine spirit would greatly value the reflections of someone like our dandy because he would make an impeachable witness. 

Witness to what, you ask?  Well, that question may be harder to answer, despite the clearly definable moments of Barton's unease.  At some point in his careful, conventionally pleasant existence, he begins to hear footsteps.  The night on which these footsteps first emerge is described as succeeding an evening of conversation with friends which had "degenerated [into a discussion] on the supernatural and the marvelous."  Thereupon follow letters of admonishment signed, "The Watcher," and an uncomfortable encounter with a man "short in stature, [who] looked like a foreigner, and wore a kind of fur travelling-cap."  Why this wiry homunculus could so perturb our famously imperturbable captain will be explained in the way all good ghost stories are explained: by half-swallowed hints and allegations, and, for our sake, little more.  How then to ponder Barton's bedeviled query to a physician, one of the experts he consults on his ills:

Well, then, Doctor, here is the last of my questions.  You will, probably, laugh at it; but it must out nevertheless.  Is there any disease, in all the range of human maladies, which would have the effect of perceptibly contracting the stature and the whole frame – causing the man to shrink in all his proportions, and yet to preserve his exact resemblance to himself in every particular – with the one exception, his height and bulk; any disease, mark – no matter how rare – how little believed in, generally – which could possibly result in producing such an effect?     

The doctor has, of course, no answer.  Neither does the clergyman on whom Barton imposes his own vision of fire and brimstone, although it is probably important that while the father confessor boasts myriad appellations ("the divine," "the clergyman," "the man of folios," "the ecclesiastic," "the Doctor," "the churchman," "the student"), our secular seaman is referred to only by his surname.   As if he, earthbound misfit that he is, were facing a multitude of realities – and we have said more than enough. 

The accomplishments of Le Fanu have been mostly forgotten by younger generations who cannot abide older, more talented masters – and we say, too bad for them.  Le Fanu worked in similar fashion to this contemporary, that is, he combined peerless literary style with a sense for human vulnerabilities.  While Poe more than occasionally pandered to morose delectation, making a Roman holiday of far too many of his characters (I still shudder at the fate of one in particular in this tale), Le Fanu seems oddly removed from the events.  His lush prose, replete with just enough Gallicisms to draw attention to itself, cascades around the subject matter with the remove and suspicion commonly incident to parody.  Yet Le Fanu, perhaps more than any other author of the macabre, is absolutely serious.  He may not necessarily believe that the cause of the unfortunate events he depicts is supernatural, but he knows them to have happened, either in our reality or in the entrapped prism of an afflicted mind.  In either case, we should not laugh but wince.  And our captain's predicament cannot but remind us of a famous little poem:  

Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there again today;
I wish, I wish he’d go away...

When I came home last night at three,
The man was waiting there for me.
But when I looked around the hall,
I couldn’t see him there at all!
Go away, go away, don’t you come back any more!
Go away, go away, and please don’t slam the door... (slam!)

Last night I saw upon the stair,
A little man who wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there again today;
Oh, how I wish he’d go away.

We are happy to report that, in the end, that squirrelly little fellow does indeed go away.  It is to where he disappears that should concern us.  And, of course, poor Barton.

Green Tea

Our headlines have long since been saturated with the modern notion of the Devil, what we have come to call the serial killer.  The circumstances will always be gruesome and the bewilderment of the police will only match their repulsion (although, with the plethora of such events the faces and words of investigators have begun to seem jaded and unshocked), but day in and out we learn of more monstrosities.  Now surely some of these flagitious people are the victims of their own crapulence or other such addiction; perhaps they are even inherently rotten in bone and vein.  Yet others are often depicted as having been hitherto the model of average citizenship.  What compels them to their horrid deeds cannot be explained, not by psychobabble, not by the testimony of neighbors ("he was such a quiet man ..."), not even by the recapitulation of small failures in the course of one human life now construed as a mounting catastrophe.  No, there is something else that lays its hand upon your shoulder, directs your gaze and maintains your attention.  And the identity of such a being lies at the heart of this tale.

Three narrators will be refracted through one another like a hall of mirrors: an unnamed philologist and wanderer, "educated in medicine and surgery"; his master, Dr. Martin Hesselius, a Faustian polymath of sinister leanings; and finally, the Reverend Robert Lynder Jennings.  We learn almost nothing of our first speaker as he quickly diverts attention to his mentor, more than three decades his senior; yet in truth, little too of Hesselius can be derived.  It is the initial Boswellian narrator who translates from the German Hesselius's correspondence to a fourth man, a Dutch scholar by the name of Van Loo, in which his discoveries on the human soul are revealed in scientific detail.  Jennings has all the qualities of "a perfectly gentlemanlike man": he is serene but witty, bright but hardly arrogant, and, although moneyed, more interested in the pursuits of his vocation than his estate.  There is about him, however, something not lost on the keen observer – and Hesselius is far keener than most:

Mr. Jennings has a way of looking sidelong upon the carpet, as if his eye followed the movements of something there.  This, of course, is not always.  It occurs now and then.  But often enough to give a certain oddity, as I have said, to his manner, and in this glance traveling along the floor there is something both shy and anxious.

Hesselius is thankfully also a man of principles, which means that all those keen observations are not squandered.  He believes that "the entire natural world is but the ultimate expression of that spiritual world from which, and in which alone, it has its life."  Conviction in a God sublime and indefinable does not impede Hesselius's science, nor, for that matter, his compassion.  His friend Jennings is not a man in clover.  Proof of his misery comes in the form of that most literary of devices, the casually perused book replete with underlined passages.  In this case, the book turns out to be this mystical work, and the most vibrant passage reads as follows:      

The evil spirits associated with man are, indeed from the hells, but when with man they are not then in hell, but are taken out thence.  The place where they then are, is in the midst between heaven and hell, and is called the world of spirits – when the evil spirits who are with man, are in that world, they are not in any infernal torment, but in every thought and affection of man, and so, in all that the man himself enjoys.  But when they are remitted into their hell, they return to their former state.

As implications loom, so does a project to which Jennings has always wanted to devote himself: the religious metaphysics of the ancients.  Unlike most monographs that focus on symbols, totems, and rituals, Jennings is drawn to the "actual religion of educated and thinking paganism."  And when he begins his study, he finds himself for some inexplicable reason consuming a large daily amount of tea – first black, then green – at which point his life shifts in a most dramatic and terrible direction.  

What happens to Jennings will not, of course, be disclosed on these pages.  Modern readers accustomed to the narcotic rubbish of the beat or smash or crash generations will sketch large rings around Jennings's claim that all serious writers compose on a substance – be that substance caffeine, nicotine, or something more potent – but these are all cheap conceits.  Apart from the suppleness and ease of his prose, Le Fanu's strength as a writer comes from the frequent suggestions that he does not quite believe all of what he describes.  That is not to say that his works are insincere (such disingenuousness is reserved almost exclusively for the charlatans and jesters of postmodernism), but rather that two possible explanations may be provided without diminishing the supernatural effect.  In this tale it falls to Hesselius to make sense of the events and to bring them onto a plane of human understanding at once intelligible and awesome, and admittedly he wavers so elegantly as to have us doubt the dénouement.  If only poor Jennings had vacillated in the slightest.