Out of the Earth

OUT OF THE EARTH
by
Arthur Machen

T. P.’s Weekly, November 27, 1915

There was some sort of confused complaint during last August¹ of the ill behaviour of the children at certain Welsh watering-places. Such reports and vague rumours are most difficult to trace to their heads and fountains; none has better reason to know that than myself. I need not go over the old ground here, but I am afraid that many people are wishing by this time that they had never heard my name; again, a considerable number of estimable persons are concerning themselves gloomily enough, from my point of view, with my everlasting welfare. They write me letters, some in kindly remonstrance, begging me not to deprive poor, sick-hearted souls of what little comfort they possess amidst their sorrows. Others send me tracts and pink leaflets with allusions to “the daughter of a well-known canon”; others again are violently and anonymously abusive. And then in open print, in fair book form, Mr. Begbie has dealt with me righteously but harshly, as I cannot but think.²

Yet, it was all so entirely innocent, nay casual, on my part. A poor linnet of prose, I did but perform my indifferent piping in the Evening News because I wanted to do so, because I felt that the story of “The Bowmen” ought to be told. An inventor of fantasies is a poor creature, heaven knows, when all the world is at war; but I thought that no harm would be done, at any rate, if I bore witness, after the fashion of the fantastic craft, to my belief in the heroic glory of the English host who went back from Mons fighting and triumphing.

And then, somehow or other, it was as if I had touched a button and set in action a terrific, complicated mechanism of rumours that pretended to be sworn truth, of gossip that posed as evidence, of wild tarradiddles that good men most firmly believed. The supposed testimony of that “daughter of a well-known canon” took parish magazines by storm, and equally enjoyed the faith of dissenting divines. The “daughter” denied all knowledge of the matter, but people still quoted her supposed sure word; and the issues were confused with tales, probably true, of painful hallucinations and deliriums of our retreating soldiers, men fatigued and shattered to the very verge of death. It all became worse than the Russian myths,³ and as in the fable of the Russians, it seemed impossible to follow the streams of delusion to their fountain-head—or heads. Who was it who said that “Miss M. knew two officers who, etc., etc.”? I suppose we shall never know his lying, deluding name.

And so, I dare say, it will be with this strange affair of the troublesome children of the Welsh seaside town, or rather of a group of small towns and villages lying within a certain section or zone, which I am not going to indicate more precisely than I can help, since I love that country, and my recent experience with “The Bowmen” have taught me that no tale is too idle to be believed. And, of course, to begin with, nobody knew how this odd and malicious piece of gossip originated. So far as I know, it was more akin to the Russian myth than to the tale of “The Angels of Mons.” That is, rumour preceded print; the thing was talked of here and there and passed from letter to letter long before the papers were aware of its existence. And— here it resembles rather the Mons affair—London and Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham were muttering vague unpleasant things while the little villages concerned basked innocently in the sunshine of an unusual prosperity. In this last circumstance, as some believe, is to be sought the root of the whole matter. It is well known that certain east coast towns suffered from the dread of air-raids, and that a good many of their usual visitors went westward for the first time. So there is a theory that the east coast was mean enough to circulate reports against the west coast out of pure malice and envy. It may be so; I do not pretend to know. But here is a personal experience, such as it is, which illustrated the way in which the rumour was circulated. I was lunching one day at my Fleet Street tavern—this was early in July—and a friend of mine, a solicitor, of Serjeants’ Inn, came in and sat at the same table. We began to talk of holidays and my friend Eddis asked me where I was going. “To the same old place,” I said. “Manavon. You know we always go there.” “Are you really?” said the lawyer; “I thought that coast had gone off a lot. My wife has a friend who’s heard that it’s not at all that it was.”

I was astonished to hear this, not seeing how a little village like Manavon could have “gone off.” I had known it for ten years as having accommodation for about twenty visitors, and I could not believe that rows of lodging houses had sprung up since the August of 1914. Still I put the question to Eddis: “Trippers?” I asked, knowing firstly that trippers hate the solitudes of the country and the sea; secondly, that there are no industrial towns within cheap and easy distance, and thirdly, that the railways were issuing no excursion tickets during the war.

“No, not exactly trippers,” the lawyer replied. “But my wife’s friend knows a clergyman who says that the beach at Tremaen is not at all pleasant now, and Tremaen’s only a few miles from Manavon, isn’t it?”

“In what way not pleasant?” I carried on my examination. “Pierrots and shows, and that sort of thing?” I felt that it could not be so, for the solemn rocks of Tremaen would have turned the liveliest Pierrot to stone. He would have frozen into a crag on the beach, and the seagulls would carry away his song and make it a lament by lonely, booming caverns that look on Avalon. Eddis said he had heard nothing about showmen; but he understood that since the war the children of the whole district had gone quite out of hand.

“Bad language, you know,” he said, “and all that sort of thing, worse than London slum children. One doesn’t want one’s wife and children to hear foul talk at any time, much less on their holiday. And they say that Castell Coch⁴ is quite impossible; no decent woman would be seen there!”

I said: “Really, that’s a great pity,” and changed the subject. But I could not make it out at all. I knew Castell Coch well—a little bay bastioned by dunes and red sandstone cliffs, rich with greenery. A stream of cold water runs down there to the sea; there is the ruined Norman Castle, the ancient church and the scattered village; it is altogether a place of peace and quiet and great beauty. The people there, children and grown-ups alike, were not merely decent but courteous folk: if one thanked a child for opening a gate, there would come the inevitable response: “And welcome kindly, sir.” I could not make it out at all. I didn’t believe the lawyer’s tales; for the life of me I could not see what he could be driving at. And, for the avoidance of all unnecessary mystery, I may as well say that my wife and child and myself went down to Manavon last August and had a most delightful holiday. At the time we were certainly conscious of no annoyance or unpleasantness of any kind. Afterwards, I confess, I heard a story that puzzled and still puzzles me, and this story, if it be received, might give its own interpretation to one or two circumstances which seemed in themselves quite insignificant.

But all through July I came upon traces of evil rumours affecting this most gracious corner of the earth. Some of these rumours were repetitions of Eddis’s gossip; others amplified his vague story and made it more definite. Of course, no first-hand evidence was available. There never is any first-hand evidence in these cases. But A knew B who had heard from C that her second cousin’s little girl had been set upon and beaten by a pack of young Welsh savages. Then people quoted “a doctor in large practice in a well-known town in the Midlands,” to the effect that Tremaen was a sink of juvenile depravity. They said that a responsible medical man’s evidence was final and convincing; but they didn’t bother to find out who the doctor was, or whether there was any doctor at all—or any doctor relevant to the issue. Then the thing began to get into the papers in a sort of oblique, by-the-way sort of manner. People cited the case of these imaginary bad children in support of their educational views. One side said that “these unfortunate little ones” would have been quite well behaved if they had had no education at all; the opposition declared that continuation schools would speedily reform them and make them into admirable citizens. Then the poor Arfonshire children seemed to become involved in quarrels about Welsh disestablishment and in the question of the miners; and all the while they were going about behaving politely and admirably as they always do behave. I knew all the time that it was all nonsense, but I couldn’t understand in the least what it meant, or who was pulling the wires of rumour, or their purpose in so pulling. I began to wonder whether the pressure and anxiety and suspense of a terrible war had unhinged the public mind, so that it was ready to believe any fable, to debate the reasons for happenings which had never happened. At last, quite incredible things began to be whispered: visitors’ children had not only been beaten, they had been tortured; a little boy had been found impaled on a stake in a lonely field near Manavon; another child had been lured to destruction over the cliffs at Castell Coch. A London paper sent a good man down quietly to Arfon to investigate. He was away for a week, and at the end of that period returned to his office and in his own phrase, “threw the whole story down.” There was not a word of truth, he said, in any of these rumours; no vestige of a foundation for the mildest forms of all this gossip. He had never seen such a beautiful country; he had never met pleasanter men, women or children; there was not a single case of anyone having been annoyed or troubled in any sort or fashion.

Yet all the while the story grew, and grew more monstrous and incredible. I was too much occupied in watching the progress of my own mythological monster to pay much attention. The town clerk of Tremaen, to which the legend had at length penetrated, wrote a brief letter to the press indignantly denying that there was the slightest foundation for “the unsavoury rumours” which, he understood, were being circulated; and about this time we went down to Manavon and, as I say, enjoyed ourselves extremely. The weather was perfect: blues of paradise in the skies, the seas all a shimmering wonder, olive greens and emeralds, rich purples, glassy sapphires changing by the rocks; far away a haze of magic lights and colours at the meeting of sea and sky.⁵ Work and anxiety had harried me; I found nothing better than to rest on the thymy banks by the shore, finding an infinite balm and refreshment in the great sea before me, in the tiny flowers beside me. Or we would rest all the summer afternoon on a “shelf” high on the grey cliffs and watch the tide creaming and surging about the rocks, and listen to it booming in the hollows and caverns below. Afterwards, as I say, there were one or two things that struck cold. But at the time those were nothing. You see a man in an odd white hat pass by and think little or nothing about it. Afterwards, when you hear that a man wearing just such a hat had committed murder in the next street five minutes before, then you find in that hat a certain interest and significance. “Funny children,” was the phrase my little boy⁶ used; and I began to think they were “funny” indeed.

If there be a key at all to this queer business, I think it is to be found in a talk I had not long ago with a friend of mine named Morgan. He is a Welshman and a dreamer, and some people say he is like a child who has grown up and yet has not grown up like other children of men. Though I did not know it, while I was at Manavon, he was spending his holiday time at Castell Coch. He was a lonely man and he liked lonely places, and when we met in the autumn he told me how, day after day, he would carry his bread and cheese and beer in a basket to a remote headland on that coast known as the Old Camp.⁷ Here, far above the waters, are solemn, mighty walls, turf-grown; circumvallations rounded and smooth with the passing of many thousand years. At one end of this most ancient place there is a tumulus,⁸ a tower of observation, perhaps, and underneath it slinks the green, deceiving ditch that seems to wind into the heart of the camp, but in reality rushes down to sheer rock and a precipice over the waters.

Here came Morgan daily, as he said, to dream of Avalon, to purge himself from the fuming corruption of the streets.

And so, as he told me, it was with singular horror that one afternoon as he dozed and dreamed and opened his eyes now and again to watch the miracle and magic of the sea, as he listened to the myriad murmurs of the waves, his meditation was broken by a sudden burst of horrible raucous cries—and the cries of children, too, but children of the lowest type. Morgan says that the very tones made him shudder—“They were to the ear what slime is to the touch,” and then the words: every foulness, every filthy abomination of speech; blasphemies that struck like blows at the sky, that sank down into the pure, shining depths, defiling them! He was amazed. He peered over the green wall of the fort, and there in the ditch he saw a swarm of noisome children, horrible little stunted creatures with old men’s faces, with bloated faces, with little sunken eyes, with leering eyes. It was worse than uncovering a brood of snakes or a nest of worms.

No; he would not describe what they were about. “Read about Belgium⁹,” said Morgan, “and think they couldn’t have been more than five or six years old.” There was no infamy, he said, that they did not perpetrate; they spared no horror of cruelty. “I saw blood running in streams, as they shrieked with laughter, but I could not find the mark of it on the grass afterwards.”

Morgan said he watched them and could not utter a word; it was as if a hand held his mouth tight. But at last he found his voice and shrieked at them, and they burst into a yell of obscene laughter and shrieked back at him, and scattered out of sight. He could not trace them; he supposes that they hid in the deep bracken behind the Old Camp.

“Sometimes I can’t understand my landlord at Castell Coch,” Morgan went on. “He’s the village postmaster and has a little farm of his own—a decent, pleasant, ordinary sort of chap. But now and again he will talk oddly. I was telling him about these beastly children and wondering who they could be when he broke into Welsh, something like ‘the battle that is for age unto ages; and the People take delight in it.’”

So far Morgan, and it was evident that he did not understand at all. But this strange tale of his brought back an odd circumstance or two that I recollected: a matter of our little boy straying away more than once, and getting lost among the sand dunes and coming back screaming, evidently frightened horribly, and babbling about “funny children.” We took no notice; did not trouble, I think, to look whether there were any children wandering about the dunes or not. We were accustomed to his small imaginations.

But after hearing Morgan’s story I was interested and I wrote an account of the matter to my friend, old Doctor Duthoit, of Hereford.¹⁰ And he:

“They were only visible, only audible to children and the childlike. Hence the explanation of what puzzled you at first; the rumours, how did they arise? They arose from nursery gossip, from scraps and odds and ends of half-articulate children’s talk of horrors that they didn’t understand, of words that shamed their nurses and their mothers.

“These little people of the earth rise up and rejoice in these times of ours. For they are glad, as the Welshman said, when they know that men follow their ways.”

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Afterword

Along with Holy Grail, the folklore of the Little People (or fairies), constitutes an area of major focus in the works of Arthur Machen. Where George MacDonald often cast fairy folk as helpers to man, and J. R. R. Tolkien created moral gradients for his folkloric entities, Machen consistently chose a dark complexion for his version of the Little People. (Interestingly, these various approaches to fairy folklore can be found throughout different periods of history and in different cultures. The approach to the material is perhaps an issue of temperament on the part of the author and reader.)

In Machen’s tales, human beings may receive bruises or slight blows from their encounters with fairyland, as is the case in Out of the Earth, but at other times, the human character will suffer an ontological crisis, even utter destruction, as a result of contact with these shadowy figures. Excellent examples of this latter scenario include The Shining Pyramid and The White People.

Furthermore, rather than situating his fairy stories in an faraway place of unknown date, or creating a construct such as Middle Earth, Machen sets these narratives in his contemporary Britain. This allowed a clash between the unknown and modernist man, who, despite scientific rationalism and technological advancement, has no answer for what he experiences. In the case of this story, Machen includes the Great War and its industrialized brutality as a contributing factor in the activity of the Little People.

In retrospect, Out of the Earth forms a thematic triptych with two other stories of this period with all three showcasing an outside response to man’s barbarity. In The Great Return, the village of Llantrisant receives a Divine gift of transformation; in The Terror, lower creation offers rebellion; and in Out of the Earth, man gains mockery from beings below nature.

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NOTES

1 Last August. This story takes place in August of 1915, the same summer in which the narratives of The Great Return (1915) and The Terror (1917) unfold.

2 Harold Begbie (1871-1929). A journalist, Begbie published On the Side of the Angels: A Reply to Arthur Machen (1915), which is a less-than-honest refutation of Machen and his position on the Mons legend. In addition to using unverified reports as evidence, it appears that Begbie may have manufactured some of the accounts. In later years, Machen, who knew his opponent, expressed the opinion that Begbie was insincere in his belief in the legend. Bleiler’s study on the Angels of Mons controversy is definitive.*

3 Russian myths… During the first months of the war, rumors spread that a great Russian host had landed in Scotland and was transported south by rail through England with the intention to assist the British and French on the Western Front. According to Hayward: “From the outset the press treated the story with a degree of caution, and so the rumour was spread mostly by word of mouth.”** Machen often made mention of the discredited Russian legend when writing on the Angel of Mons affair in order to further insist on the latter’s status as an unproven myth. Years afterward, he would comment: “But the Russian hosts faded gently away, and the British Army was left to fight its own battles at Ypres and elsewhere. And the Bowmen, who had turned into Angels, took the place of the forces of the Czar.” ***

4 Castell Coch. Castell Coch, or Red Castle, serves as a place-name in Machen’s novel The Terror. In that story, the castle is set in the fictional county of Meirion. However, for this tale, the fictional name is Arfonshire, the same nomenclature used for The Great Return. There is a real Castell Coch in South Wales, close to Machen’s birthplace.

5 This descriptive prose is similar to passages found in The Great Return. (For instance, see pages 9-10 in the Darkly Bright 2017 Edition.) Often, Machen used such language for his native land, setting it apart as a holy and mystical landscape.

6 my little boy… Arthur Hilary Blaise Machen (1912-1987)

7 Old Camp… This location and its ancient structures also appear in The Great Return: “…and saw suddenly before me the Old Camp, and beyond it the sapphire plain of waters and the mist where sea and sky met. Steep from my feet the hill fell away, a land of gorse-blossom, red-gold and mellow, of glorious purple heather. It fell into a hollow that went down, shining with rich green bracken, to the glimmering sea; and before me and beyond the hollow rose a height of turf, bastioned at the summit with the awful, age-old walls of the Old Camp; green, rounded circumvallations, wall within wall, tremendous, with their myriad years upon them.” (Page 21, Darkly Bright 2017 Edition)

8  A tumulus, also known as a barrow, is a mound of earth or stone built over an ancient burial ground. It is near such a structure that the Little People gather for their activities.

9 Read about Belgium… Although German crimes were committed in Belgium, Allied press circulated unverified, and unverifiable, accounts of hyperbolic barbarity by Germans, which were not only sensational, but sometimes verged on the pornographic. The appellation of “Hun” appeared about this time amid accusations of cannibalism, mass rape, child murder and the crucifixion of Belgian citizens, including clergy. On Belgian soil, some journalists attempted to hunt down proof of theses stories, but found none. Hayward’s study is useful.**
   Machen uses this phrasing as shorthand for readers who no doubt heard these stories. Therefore, he links the bloody actions of the Little People in the story with immediate impressions of the real-world conflict, and without the necessity of describing it in messy detail.

10 Machen first mentioned the figure of Dr. Duthoit in the short story “What the Prebendary Saw” published two months earlier in the September 6, 1915 edition of the Eventing News. This story was collected in the second edition of The Angel of Mons as “The Little Nations.” Additionally, it has also been reprinted as “Dr. Duthoit’s Vision.” For an excellent summary of this story with thoughtful commentary, see this essay by Dale Nelson.

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SOURCES

*  The Strange Case of “The Angels of Mons”: Arthur Machen’s World War I Story, the Insistent Believers, and His Refutations by Richard J. Bleiler (McFarland, 2015).

**  Page 31: Myths & Legends of the First World War by James Hayward (Sutton Publishing, 2002).

***  Page 87: The Great War—I Was There! Edited by Sir John Hammerton (Amalgamated Press, 1938).

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All original essays, artwork & supplementary material: copyright 2019 by Christopher Tompkins