Out of the Dark: Tales of Terror by Robert W. Chambers. Robert W. Chambers
is a long, sometimes rambling story that nevertheless guides the reader along to a most eerie conclusion. The setting – coastal Brittany – has seldom been used to such effect, and the historical tale behind the story’s events has a grotesque ring of truth. This is one of Chambers’s best stories, and its use of the traditional masked figure has never been bettered.
‘Passeur’ from the same book, is a much shorter, traditional ghost story, easily guessed by anyone familiar with the genre. But Chambers is too good to give it all away completely; relish the scenery he depicts in the closing paragraphs.
Sticking out like a sore thumb from the rest of the stories in the book, ‘The Key to Grief’ is set far away from France. Chambers might have borrowed the odd name or two from Bierce for The King in Yellow; here he all but ransacked Bierce’s living-room. This is a shameless reworking of Bierce’s ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’, which still has its own sense of the unknown, and is included here by virtue of its unusual location.
The Mystery of Choice contained a lot of what was to become the cardinal vice of Chambers’s writing as time went by: an awful tendency to be rather soppy, especially in his romantic scenes. This style probably didn’t read too well in the 1890s; nowadays it just grates alarmingly.
After 1900 Chambers moved steadily away from his roots in the fantasy genre, but still – though not often enough – popping back from time to time, as will be seen in Part Two.
Hugh Lamb
Sutton, Surrey
January 2018
‘Let the red dawn surmise
What we shall do,
When this blue starlight dies
And all is through.’
I
There are so many things which are impossible to explain! Why should certain chords in music make me think of the brown and golden tints of autumn foliage? Why should the Mass of Sainte Cécile send my thoughts wandering among caverns whose walls blaze with ragged masses of virgin silver? What was it in the roar and turmoil of Broadway at six o’clock that flashed before my eyes the picture of a still Breton forest where sunlight filtered through spring foliage and Sylvia bent, half curiously, half tenderly, over a small green lizard, murmuring: ‘To think that this also is a little ward of God’?
When I first saw the watchman his back was toward me. I looked at him indifferently until he went into the church. I paid no more attention to him than I had to any other man who lounged through Washington Square that morning, and when I shut my window and turned back into my studio I had forgotten him. Late in the afternoon, the day being warm, I raised the window again and leaned out to get a sniff of air. A man was standing in the courtyard of the church, and I noticed him again with as little interest as I had that morning. I looked across the square to where the fountain was playing and then, with my mind filled with vague impressions of trees, asphalt drives, and the moving groups of nursemaids and holiday-makers, I started to walk back to my easel. As I turned, my listless glance included the man below in the churchyard. His face was toward me now, and with a perfectly involuntary movement I bent to see it. At the same moment he raised his head and looked at me. Instantly I thought of a coffin-worm. Whatever it was about the man that repelled me I did not know, but the impression of a plump white grave-worm was so intense and nauseating that I must have shown it in my expression, for he turned his puffy face away with a movement which made me think of a disturbed grub in a chestnut.
I went back to my easel and motioned the model to resume her pose. After working awhile I was satisfied that I was spoiling what I had done as rapidly as possible, and I took up a palette knife and scraped the color out again. The flesh tones were sallow and unhealthy, and I did not understand how I could have painted such sickly color into a study which before that had glowed with healthy tones.
I looked at Tessie. She had not changed, and the clear flush of health dyed her neck and cheeks as I frowned.
‘Is it something I’ve done?’ she said.
‘No – I’ve made a mess of this arm, and for the life of me I can’t see how I came to paint such mud as that into the canvas,’ I replied.
‘Don’t I pose well?’ she insisted.
‘Of course, perfectly.’
‘Then it’s not my fault?’
‘No, it’s my own.’
‘I’m very sorry,’ she said.
I told her she could rest while I applied rag and turpentine to the plague spot on my canvas, and she went off to smoke a cigarette and look over the illustrations in the Courier Français.
I did not know whether it was something in the turpentine or a defect in the canvas, but the more I scrubbed the more that gangrene seemed to spread. I worked like a beaver to get it out, and yet the disease appeared to creep from limb to limb of the study before me. Alarmed I strove to arrest it, but now the color on the breast changed and the whole figure seemed to absorb the infection as a sponge soaks up water. Vigorously I plied palette knife, turpentine, and scraper, thinking all the time what a séance I should hold with Duval who had sold me the canvas; but soon I noticed that it was not the canvas which was defective nor yet the colors of Edward. ‘It must be the turpentine,’ I thought angrily, ‘or else my eyes have become so blurred and confused by the afternoon light that I can’t see straight.’ I called Tessie, the model. She came and leaned over my chair blowing rings of smoke into the air.
‘What have you been doing to it?’ she exclaimed.
‘Nothing,’ I growled, ‘it must be this turpentine!’
‘What a horrible color it is now,’ she continued. ‘Do you think my flesh resembles green cheese?’
‘No, I don’t,’ I said angrily, ‘did you ever know me to paint like that before?’
‘No, indeed!’
‘Well, then!’
‘It must be the turpentine, or something,’ she admitted.
She slipped on a Japanese robe and walked to the window. I scraped and rubbed until I was tired and finally picked up my brushes and hurled them through the canvas with a forcible expression, the tone alone of which reached Tessie’s ears.
Nevertheless she promptly began: ‘That’s it! Swear and act silly and ruin your brushes! You have been three weeks on that study, and now look! What’s the good of ripping the canvas? What creatures artists are!’
I felt about as much ashamed as I usually did after such an outbreak, and I turned the ruined canvas to the wall. Tessie helped me clean my brushes, and then danced away to dress. From the screen she regaled me with bits of advice concerning whole or partial loss of temper, until, thinking, perhaps, I had been tormented sufficiently, she came out to implore me to button her waist where she could not reach it on the shoulder.
‘Everything went wrong from the time you came back from the window and talked about that horrid-looking man you saw in the churchyard,’ she announced.
‘Yes, he probably bewitched the picture,’ I said yawning. I looked at my watch.
‘It’s after six, I know,’ said Tessie, adjusting her hat before the mirror.
‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘I didn’t mean to keep you so long.’ I leaned out of the window but recoiled with disgust, for the young man with the pasty face stood below in the churchyard. Tessie saw my gesture of disapproval and leaned from the window.
‘Is that the man you don’t like?’ she