Arthur Machen’s odyssey into the strange and unusual never ceases to amuse and amaze his readers. During a year-long term as a columnist for The Observer, a weekly newspaper, Machen charted curious and queer paths in search of mystery. For our guide, mystery is, in itself, the most worthwhile of goals. Yet, while upon our Quest, he warns us not to kill that thing we desire: “Life is usually profuse in explaining away strange incidents, explaining away at the same time all their interest.” In the column, “Queer Things,” Machen guided his weekly audience, a lively and interactive one it turned out, under shadowy eaves, along precipitous ridges and through gaslit streets in search of his quarry.
Reading through these obscure and forgotten dispatches, I could almost hear the deep and rolling tones of his confident voice. As if I were seated in the goodly confines of Melina Place, Machen, the wonderful conversationalist, regaled me with tales of his own experience with a ghost, of telepathically-induced stage fright, of queer books, of fairies gathering among the hills of Ireland, and of men disappearing without a trace.
Forgive me the hyperbole. I have an imagination.
However, each installment does ring in the ear with sincerity and style. As it does in other places, Machen’s personality comes out in each turn of phrase. Essentially, his magic is an intimate one. This experience, I feel, needs to be shared. To that end, Darkly Bright Press is pleased to present What Do We Know? Observations of the Strange and Unusual by Arthur Machen. Collected together for the first time since the column’s original publication nearly century ago, this volume will be a treasure trove for Machen admirers and scholars.
Forgive me the commercial. I hope I wasn’t too distasteful.
To make up for it, please enjoy the following excerpts from the new collection. The individual installments were not titled separately, but fell under the general title of “Queer Things.” Therefore, I adopted a numbered plan corresponding with the dates of original publication.
From Number Twenty
August 15, 1926
It is interesting to find that the myth-making faculty still survives amongst us, and in a very curious and interesting form. In a way one is glad, I think, to know that it is so; the pity of it is that the latest addition to mythology is disfigured by so many ugly and foolish features.
Of course, the tale that I have in mind is the legend of Kitchener. I have been reading how the General’s body has been recovered and brought home from some lonely Norwegian shore, and so far this is the latest chapter in the fable. But the legend began very soon after the disaster of the Hampshire, and in a different form. In its earliest shape, it told how Kitchener was not dead at all, but alive and a prisoner in Germany. It was said that his own relations knew that he was alive, and I believe that the tale in this guise held the field as late as 1920-21. But already, let it be remarked, there were intimations of the blackest treachery behind the story. I am not sure, but I’m inclined to think that it was held that the Admiralty had conspired with lubbers, unspecified, and that “Salome,” a well-known dancer, and a mysterious Book kept in Germany had something to do with this black business.
Soon after this, the “spirits” took a hand in the affair. The survival of the great General was abandoned; the manner of his passing was described, and again, the blackest treasons and stratagems and spies were indicated as the means of Kitchener’s death. But this once accomplished, the tale went on to show how Mary Queen of Scots told Lord Kitchener that Queen Victoria was helping King Edward over his portrait painting, instructing him in putting in the eyes. Finally, the latest legend deals out treason and villainy with a more lavish hand than any other version, builds the Hampshire in the eclipse, and rigs it with curses dark, and describes Kitchener’s last moments on a desolate coast. Even there, if I remember, his faithful spy followed him; and now has been recovered—the Admiralty says the whole tale is a pack of lies from beginning to end. Well; it is our modern version of the Passing of Arthur, but one cannot help feeling that the telling of the older legend fell into happier hands.
From Number Twenty-seven
(October 10, 1926)
The case of Eleonore Zugun is a strange one. She is a Roumanian girl of thirteen. She was discovered in a lunatic asylum and was brought to England by the Countess Wassilko-Serecki. And the special correspondent of the “Daily News” says that while Eleonore was playing with some toys that she had brought her:
“Suddenly I noticed a small object falling seemingly from the ceiling onto Mr. Price’s shoulder and then to the ground. Mr Price picked it up off the ground and examined it.
“It was a piece of white painted metal, smaller than a postage stamp, and shaped like the letter L.”
This took place at the National Laboratory of Psychical Research, South Kensington. Eleonore was being “tested” at the top of the building. The small object was an L; it was found to be missing from a box of such letters (used for notices) kept in a cupboard on the ground floor, five stories below the room of the test.
And it only remains to be said that we have here either an ingenuously-planned piece of trickery or else an extraordinary manifestation of an extraordinary power.
Some years ago I did my best to investigate a Poltergeist, who was causing great trouble in a small house in a northern suburb of London. Coals came through windows, china was smashed, objects flew about the rooms. My investigations led me to no sure conclusion—I think the only person who could investigate the Poltergeist would have to be a member of the family with open eyes and an open mind—but it is noteworthy that, soon after the strange occurrences, one of the children of the house, a boy of eleven or twelve, became subject to epileptic fits. It may be irrelevant; but I cannot help comparing his epilepsy with Eleonore Zugun’s alleged lunacy.
It is interesting to set beside these adventures a strange circumstance related in “Pot-Pourri Mixed by Two”; the authors being the late Mrs. Earle and Miss Ethel Case. Miss Case is responsible for what follows:—
“A curious thing happened to a friend of mine living in the country. She was going to London on a visit, and packed a small brown card-case carefully in a jewel-box; this she distinctly remembered doing. On leaving the house, the butler handed her a bag which she is in the habit of using when travelling, which contained a card-case, and she thought at once that she would use that one and not the other she had packed. She was in London a few days, and my brother met her to bring her down to stay with us. At Waterloo they got out at once into a first-class carriage, as the train was already at the platform. To her amazement, on the corner seat, was the identical brown card-case containing her cards which she had packed at the bottom of her trunk before she left home, and never seen since. She had travelled up from the country in a third-class carriage.”
To me this affair is far more confounding than the L of Eleonore Zugun. It is an intolerable mystery.
From Number Thirty-eight
(January 2, 1927)
It is still Christmas, let it be remembered, and Christmas customs have not ceased to be topics of the day. And I am reminded of a curious old Welsh custom, which lingered well into my young days, which, for all I know, may still linger. Christmas in the very old days was one of the feasts on which the parish spent all they could afford on lights. There was a Holy Bush, a kind of forerunner of our Christmas Tree, with a reminiscence, perhaps, of the Burning Bush in the wilderness. This was set thick with tapers; the Rood Screen was starred with lights; all the altars and all the glowing images were ablaze with candles. And many lights burnt about the Crib; to simple village eyes accustomed to a dim tallow to get to bed by, if so much illumination as that, the church on Christmas morning must have been a place of splendour and glory, a paradise on earth.
Well, we know that all this sort of thing came to an end with Queen Mary, perhaps because that Sovereign was too much addicted to kindling certain candles of an infernal rather than a celestial nature. Queen Elizabeth, being of similar tastes to Mrs. Pardiggle, and liking her services prettily done, is said to have insisted on the altar in her private chapel being adorned with a crucifix and burning tapers; but, generally, we may say that the candles of the English Church were put out for the next three hundred years, and yet there remained in certain obstinate Welsh heads the lingering notion that at Christmas the parish church should be all ablaze with lights early on Christmas morning; and it may be conjectured that the earliness of the hour was a dim recollection of the Mass in the Night, commonly called Midnight Mass. “O God, Who hast made this most holy night to shine with the glory of the very Light,” so went the Collect, and the echo of it was still, seems, in the Welshmen’s ears. At all events, they rose very early, at three or four o’clock, from their farms and cabins on the hillside, and in the valley, and came into the dark church. And then everyone in the assembly drew out a candle and lit it, and one of them read aloud the Gospel stories of the Nativity. I do not think that the parish priest took any part in the ceremony. It was called Plygan, which means, I think, cock-crow. But I am nervous, for I know that Welsh eyes are on me.
There is another side of Christmas. Being the most joyful of seasons, it is, obviously, the time to talk of dreads and terrors, ghosts and goblins. This truism was recognized, I was glad to see by the people of East Barnes, and I congratulate the local night watchman on his spectre: a midnight figure, in a dusky cloak, through which a skeleton could be clearly seen. Here you have the genuine ghost of our forefathers, stark and simple, unspoilt by any “psychic” or literary subtleties. Dickens would have loved that phantasm. It is true that he would not have believed in the ghost, but he would have dearly hoped that other people credited every word of the tale. I think that he might have made a Christmas Book out of it, and I believe that a kindly and cheery moral would, somehow, have been found, lurking in the story.
darklybrightpress.com 
As you well say, “it is still Christmas. The Festival has just begun. The Incarnation never ends.” I love the long Christmas in the country in The Pickwick Papers – but how many other novels by Dickens I have not yet, however much I may have enjoyed dramatizations – including Bleak House, leaving me without Machen’s sharp sense of Mrs. Pardiggle. Wikipedia assures me (in Welsh as well as in English, though my Welsh is not good enough simply to read that article) that some 97 years after Machen’s article the custom does “still linger” – and notes, too, ( cautiously, as possibility) his association with “cock-crow”: “from the Latin word pullicantio, meaning ‘when the cock crows at dawn'”, adding it “is thought to have been created to replace the traditional Latin pre-Reformation Mass at Cockcrow (missa in gallicantu).”
These three installments are farther than I have read, so far, starting at the beginning, but What Do We Know? is a constantly fascinating and delightful collection: thank you for editing and publishing it!
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Thank you, David! I’m glad you are enjoying the book. It was a fun project to complete.
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