object:1f.lovecraft - Facts concerning the Late
author class:H P Lovecraft
subject class:Fiction
genre class:Horror
class:chapter
Arthur Jermyn and His Family
Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of
it peer daemoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a
thousandfold more hideous. Science, already oppressive with its
shocking revelations, will perhaps be the ultimate exterminator of our
human species—if separate species we be—for its reserve of unguessed
horrors could never be borne by mortal brains if loosed upon the world.
If we knew what we are, we should do as Sir Arthur Jermyn did; and
Arthur Jermyn soaked himself in oil and set fire to his clothing one
night. No one placed the charred fragments in an urn or set a memorial
to him who had been; for certain papers and a certain boxed object were
found, which made men wish to forget. Some who knew him do not admit
that he ever existed.
Arthur Jermyn went out on the moor and burned himself after seeing the
boxed object which had come from Africa. It was this object, and not
his peculiar personal appearance, which made him end his life. Many
would have disliked to live if possessed of the peculiar features of
Arthur Jermyn, but he had been a poet and scholar and had not minded.
Learning was in his blood, for his great-grandfather, Sir Robert
Jermyn, Bt., had been an anthropologist of note, whilst his
great-great-great-grandfather, Sir Wade Jermyn, was one of the earliest
explorers of the Congo region, and had written eruditely of its tribes,
animals, and supposed antiquities. Indeed, old Sir Wade had possessed
an intellectual zeal amounting almost to a mania; his bizarre
conjectures on a prehistoric white Congolese civilisation earning him
much ridicule when his book, Observations on the Several Parts of
Africa, was published. In 1765 this fearless explorer had been placed
in a madhouse at Huntingdon.
Madness was in all the Jermyns, and people were glad there were not
many of them. The line put forth no branches, and Arthur was the last
of it. If he had not been, one cannot say what he would have done when
the object came. The Jermyns never seemed to look quite right—something
was amiss, though Arthur was the worst, and the old family portraits in
Jermyn House shewed fine faces enough before Sir Wade’s time.
Certainly, the madness began with Sir Wade, whose wild stories of
Africa were at once the delight and terror of his few friends. It
shewed in his collection of trophies and specimens, which were not such
as a normal man would accumulate and preserve, and appeared strikingly
in the Oriental seclusion in which he kept his wife. The latter, he had
said, was the daughter of a Portuguese trader whom he had met in
Africa; and did not like English ways. She, with an infant son born in
Africa, had accompanied him back from the second and longest of his
trips, and had gone with him on the third and last, never returning. No
one had ever seen her closely, not even the servants; for her
disposition had been violent and singular. During her brief stay at
Jermyn House she occupied a remote wing, and was waited on by her
husband alone. Sir Wade was, indeed, most peculiar in his solicitude
for his family; for when he returned to Africa he would permit no one
to care for his young son save a loathsome black woman from Guinea.
Upon coming back, after the death of Lady Jermyn, he himself assumed
complete care of the boy.
But it was the talk of Sir Wade, especially when in his cups, which
chiefly led his friends to deem him mad. In a rational age like the
eighteenth century it was unwise for a man of learning to talk about
wild sights and strange scenes under a Congo moon; of the gigantic
walls and pillars of a forgotten city, crumbling and vine-grown, and of
damp, silent, stone steps leading interminably down into the darkness
of abysmal treasure-vaults and inconceivable catacombs. Especially was
it unwise to rave of the living things that might haunt such a place;
of creatures half of the jungle and half of the impiously aged
city—fabulous creatures which even a Pliny might describe with
scepticism; things that might have sprung up after the great apes had
overrun the dying city with the walls and the pillars, the vaults and
the weird carvings. Yet after he came home for the last time Sir Wade
would speak of such matters with a shudderingly uncanny zest, mostly
after his third glass at the Knight’s Head; boasting of what he had
found in the jungle and of how he had dwelt among terrible ruins known
only to him. And finally he had spoken of the living things in such a
manner that he was taken to the madhouse. He had shewn little regret
when shut into the barred room at Huntingdon, for his mind moved
curiously. Ever since his son had commenced to grow out of infancy he
had liked his home less and less, till at last he had seemed to dread
it. The Knight’s Head had been his headquarters, and when he was
confined he expressed some vague gratitude as if for protection. Three
years later he died.
Wade Jermyn’s son Philip was a highly peculiar person. Despite a strong
physical resemblance to his father, his appearance and conduct were in
many particulars so coarse that he was universally shunned. Though he
did not inherit the madness which was feared by some, he was densely
stupid and given to brief periods of uncontrollable violence. In frame
he was small, but intensely powerful, and was of incredible agility.
Twelve years after succeeding to his title he married the daughter of
his gamekeeper, a person said to be of gypsy extraction, but before his
son was born joined the navy as a common sailor, completing the general
disgust which his habits and mesalliance had begun. After the close of
the American war he was heard of as a sailor on a merchantman in the
African trade, having a kind of reputation for feats of strength and
climbing, but finally disappearing one night as his ship lay off the
Congo coast.
In the son of Sir Philip Jermyn the now accepted family peculiarity
took a strange and fatal turn. Tall and fairly handsome, with a sort of
weird Eastern grace despite certain slight oddities of proportion,
Robert Jermyn began life as a scholar and investigator. It was he who
first studied scientifically the vast collection of relics which his
mad grandfather had brought from Africa, and who made the family name
as celebrated in ethnology as in exploration. In 1815 Sir Robert
married a daughter of the seventh Viscount Brightholme and was
subsequently blessed with three children, the eldest and youngest of
whom were never publicly seen on account of deformities in mind and
body. Saddened by these family misfortunes, the scientist sought relief
in work, and made two long expeditions in the interior of Africa. In
1849 his second son, Nevil, a singularly repellent person who seemed to
combine the surliness of Philip Jermyn with the hauteur of the
Brightholmes, ran away with a vulgar dancer, but was pardoned upon his
return in the following year. He came back to Jermyn House a widower
with an infant son, Alfred, who was one day to be the father of Arthur
Jermyn.
Friends said that it was this series of griefs which unhinged the mind
of Sir Robert Jermyn, yet it was probably merely a bit of African
folklore which caused the disaster. The elderly scholar had been
collecting legends of the Onga tribes near the field of his
grandfather’s and his own explorations, hoping in some way to account
for Sir Wade’s wild tales of a lost city peopled by strange hybrid
creatures. A certain consistency in the strange papers of his ancestor
suggested that the madman’s imagination might have been stimulated by
native myths. On October 19, 1852, the explorer Samuel Seaton called at
Jermyn House with a manuscript of notes collected among the Ongas,
believing that certain legends of a grey city of white apes ruled by a
white god might prove valuable to the ethnologist. In his conversation
he probably supplied many additional details; the nature of which will
never be known, since a hideous series of tragedies suddenly burst into
being. When Sir Robert Jermyn emerged from his library he left behind
the strangled corpse of the explorer, and before he could be
restrained, had put an end to all three of his children; the two who
were never seen, and the son who had run away. Nevil Jermyn died in the
successful defence of his own two-year-old son, who had apparently been
included in the old man’s madly murderous scheme. Sir Robert himself,
after repeated attempts at suicide and a stubborn refusal to utter any
articulate sound, died of apoplexy in the second year of his
confinement.
Sir Alfred Jermyn was a baronet before his fourth birthday, but his
tastes never matched his title. At twenty he had joined a band of
music-hall performers, and at thirty-six had deserted his wife and
child to travel with an itinerant American circus. His end was very
revolting. Among the animals in the exhibition with which he travelled
was a huge bull gorilla of lighter colour than the average; a
surprisingly tractable beast of much popularity with the performers.
With this gorilla Alfred Jermyn was singularly fascinated, and on many
occasions the two would eye each other for long periods through the
intervening bars. Eventually Jermyn asked and obtained permission to
train the animal, astonishing audiences and fellow-performers alike
with his success. One morning in Chicago, as the gorilla and Alfred
Jermyn were rehearsing an exceedingly clever boxing match, the former
delivered a blow of more than usual force, hurting both the body and
dignity of the amateur trainer. Of what followed, members of “The
Greatest Show on Earth” do not like to speak. They did not expect to
hear Sir Alfred Jermyn emit a shrill, inhuman scream, or to see him
seize his clumsy antagonist with both hands, dash it to the floor of
the cage, and bite fiendishly at its hairy throat. The gorilla was off
its guard, but not for long, and before anything could be done by the
regular trainer the body which had belonged to a baronet was past
recognition.
II.
Arthur Jermyn was the son of Sir Alfred Jermyn and a music-hall singer
of unknown origin. When the husband and father deserted his family, the
mother took the child to Jermyn House; where there was none left to
object to her presence. She was not without notions of what a
nobleman’s dignity should be, and saw to it that her son received the
best education which limited money could provide. The family resources
were now sadly slender, and Jermyn House had fallen into woeful
disrepair, but young Arthur loved the old edifice and all its contents.
He was not like any other Jermyn who had ever lived, for he was a poet
and a dreamer. Some of the neighbouring families who had heard tales of
old Sir Wade Jermyn’s unseen Portuguese wife declared that her Latin
blood must be shewing itself; but most persons merely sneered at his
sensitiveness to beauty, attributing it to his music-hall mother, who
was socially unrecognised. The poetic delicacy of Arthur Jermyn was the
more remarkable because of his uncouth personal appearance. Most of the
Jermyns had possessed a subtly odd and repellent cast, but Arthur’s
case was very striking. It is hard to say just what he resembled, but
his expression, his facial angle, and the length of his arms gave a
thrill of repulsion to those who met him for the first time.
It was the mind and character of Arthur Jermyn which atoned for his
aspect. Gifted and learned, he took highest honours at Oxford and
seemed likely to redeem the intellectual fame of his family. Though of
poetic rather than scientific temperament, he planned to continue the
work of his forefathers in African ethnology and antiquities, utilising
the truly wonderful though strange collection of Sir Wade. With his
fanciful mind he thought often of the prehistoric civilisation in which
the mad explorer had so implicitly believed, and would weave tale after
tale about the silent jungle city mentioned in the latter’s wilder
notes and paragraphs. For the nebulous utterances concerning a
nameless, unsuspected race of jungle hybrids he had a peculiar feeling
of mingled terror and attraction; speculating on the possible basis of
such a fancy, and seeking to obtain light among the more recent data
gleaned by his great-grandfather and Samuel Seaton amongst the Ongas.
In 1911, after the death of his mother, Sir Arthur Jermyn determined to
pursue his investigations to the utmost extent. Selling a portion of
his estate to obtain the requisite money, he outfitted an expedition
and sailed for the Congo. Arranging with the Belgian authorities for a
party of guides, he spent a year in the Onga and Kaliri country,
finding data beyond the highest of his expectations. Among the Kaliris
was an aged chief called Mwanu, who possessed not only a highly
retentive memory, but a singular degree of intelligence and interest in
old legends. This ancient confirmed every tale which Jermyn had heard,
adding his own account of the stone city and the white apes as it had
been told to him.
According to Mwanu, the grey city and the hybrid creatures were no
more, having been annihilated by the warlike N’bangus many years ago.
This tribe, after destroying most of the edifices and killing the live
beings, had carried off the stuffed goddess which had been the object
of their quest; the white ape-goddess which the strange beings
worshipped, and which was held by Congo tradition to be the form of one
who had reigned as a princess among those beings. Just what the white
ape-like creatures could have been, Mwanu had no idea, but he thought
they were the builders of the ruined city. Jermyn could form no
conjecture, but by close questioning obtained a very picturesque legend
of the stuffed goddess.
The ape-princess, it was said, became the consort of a great white god
who had come out of the West. For a long time they had reigned over the
city together, but when they had a son all three went away. Later the
god and the princess had returned, and upon the death of the princess
her divine husband had mummified the body and enshrined it in a vast
house of stone, where it was worshipped. Then he had departed alone.
The legend here seemed to present three variants. According to one
story nothing further happened save that the stuffed goddess became a
symbol of supremacy for whatever tribe might possess it. It was for
this reason that the N’bangus carried it off. A second story told of
the god’s return and death at the feet of his enshrined wife. A third
told of the return of the son, grown to manhood—or apehood or godhood,
as the case might be—yet unconscious of his identity. Surely the
imaginative blacks had made the most of whatever events might lie
behind the extravagant legendry.
Of the reality of the jungle city described by old Sir Wade, Arthur
Jermyn had no further doubt; and was hardly astonished when early in
1912 he came upon what was left of it. Its size must have been
exaggerated, yet the stones lying about proved that it was no mere
negro village. Unfortunately no carvings could be found, and the small
size of the expedition prevented operations toward clearing the one
visible passageway that seemed to lead down into the system of vaults
which Sir Wade had mentioned. The white apes and the stuffed goddess
were discussed with all the native chiefs of the region, but it
remained for a European to improve on the data offered by old Mwanu. M.
Verhaeren, Belgian agent at a trading-post on the Congo, believed that
he could not only locate but obtain the stuffed goddess, of which he
had vaguely heard; since the once mighty N’bangus were now the
submissive servants of King Albert’s government, and with but little
persuasion could be induced to part with the gruesome deity they had
carried off. When Jermyn sailed for England, therefore, it was with the
exultant probability that he would within a few months receive a
priceless ethnological relic confirming the wildest of his
great-great-great-grandfather’s narratives—that is, the wildest which
he had ever heard. Countrymen near Jermyn House had perhaps heard
wilder tales handed down from ancestors who had listened to Sir Wade
around the tables of the Knight’s Head.
Arthur Jermyn waited very patiently for the expected box from M.
Verhaeren, meanwhile studying with increased diligence the manuscripts
left by his mad ancestor. He began to feel closely akin to Sir Wade,
and to seek relics of the latter’s personal life in England as well as
of his African exploits. Oral accounts of the mysterious and secluded
wife had been numerous, but no tangible relic of her stay at Jermyn
House remained. Jermyn wondered what circumstance had prompted or
permitted such an effacement, and decided that the husband’s insanity
was the prime cause. His great-great-great-grandmother, he recalled,
was said to have been the daughter of a Portuguese trader in Africa. No
doubt her practical heritage and superficial knowledge of the Dark
Continent had caused her to flout Sir Wade’s talk of the interior, a
thing which such a man would not be likely to forgive. She had died in
Africa, perhaps dragged thither by a husband determined to prove what
he had told. But as Jermyn indulged in these reflections he could not
but smile at their futility, a century and a half after the death of
both of his strange progenitors.
In June, 1913, a letter arrived from M. Verhaeren, telling of the
finding of the stuffed goddess. It was, the Belgian averred, a most
extraordinary object; an object quite beyond the power of a layman to
classify. Whether it was human or simian only a scientist could
determine, and the process of determination would be greatly hampered
by its imperfect condition. Time and the Congo climate are not kind to
mummies; especially when their preparation is as amateurish as seemed
to be the case here. Around the creature’s neck had been found a golden
chain bearing an empty locket on which were armorial designs; no doubt
some hapless traveller’s keepsake, taken by the N’bangus and hung upon
the goddess as a charm. In commenting on the contour of the mummy’s
face, M. Verhaeren suggested a whimsical comparison; or rather,
expressed a humorous wonder just how it would strike his correspondent,
but was too much interested scientifically to waste many words in
levity. The stuffed goddess, he wrote, would arrive duly packed about a
month after receipt of the letter.
The boxed object was delivered at Jermyn House on the afternoon of
August 3, 1913, being conveyed immediately to the large chamber which
housed the collection of African specimens as arranged by Sir Robert
and Arthur. What ensued can best be gathered from the tales of servants
and from things and papers later examined. Of the various tales that of
aged Soames, the family butler, is most ample and coherent. According
to this trustworthy man, Sir Arthur Jermyn dismissed everyone from the
room before opening the box, though the instant sound of hammer and
chisel shewed that he did not delay the operation. Nothing was heard
for some time; just how long Soames cannot exactly estimate; but it was
certainly less than a quarter of an hour later that the horrible
scream, undoubtedly in Jermyn’s voice, was heard. Immediately afterward
Jermyn emerged from the room, rushing frantically toward the front of
the house as if pursued by some hideous enemy. The expression on his
face, a face ghastly enough in repose, was beyond description. When
near the front door he seemed to think of something, and turned back in
his flight, finally disappearing down the stairs to the cellar. The
servants were utterly dumbfounded, and watched at the head of the
stairs, but their master did not return. A smell of oil was all that
came up from the regions below. After dark a rattling was heard at the
door leading from the cellar into the courtyard; and a stable-boy saw
Arthur Jermyn, glistening from head to foot with oil and redolent of
that fluid, steal furtively out and vanish on the black moor
surrounding the house. Then, in an exaltation of supreme horror,
everyone saw the end. A spark appeared on the moor, a flame arose, and
a pillar of human fire reached to the heavens. The house of Jermyn no
longer existed.
The reason why Arthur Jermyn’s charred fragments were not collected and
buried lies in what was found afterward, principally the thing in the
box. The stuffed goddess was a nauseous sight, withered and eaten away,
but it was clearly a mummified white ape of some unknown species, less
hairy than any recorded variety, and infinitely nearer mankind—quite
shockingly so. Detailed description would be rather unpleasant, but two
salient particulars must be told, for they fit in revoltingly with
certain notes of Sir Wade Jermyn’s African expeditions and with the
Congolese legends of the white god and the ape-princess. The two
particulars in question are these: the arms on the golden locket about
the creature’s neck were the Jermyn arms, and the jocose suggestion of
M. Verhaeren about a certain resemblance as connected with the
shrivelled face applied with vivid, ghastly, and unnatural horror to
none other than the sensitive Arthur Jermyn, great-great-great-grandson
of Sir Wade Jermyn and an unknown wife. Members of the Royal
Anthropological Institute burned the thing and threw the locket into a
well, and some of them do not admit that Arthur Jermyn ever existed.
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