“I know,” she said, “but you returned last night.”
“Indeed not, I spent last night at Plymouth on my way back from the country,” said the husband.
Whereupon his wife accused him of being playful and showed him his cigarette case he had left behind him when he left the house this very morning. Well, the husband had lost the cigarette case in the country some days before, and he had spent the night in Plymouth on his way back to London, and so he couldn’t have returned on the previous night. There had been a man at his hotel or inn who rather resembled him and so on. The upshot of it all was that shortly thereafter the husband went to America, which seems to have been the thing to do in such cases. A rather harmless little story, not even a boudoir scene or a hint of one. But The Double Return aroused as much interest in the nineties as the most daring double entendre might today.
Oscar Wilde, no amateur at arousing the public, said to Machen, “Are you the author of that story that fluttered the dovecotes? I thought it very good.” Well, flutter the dovecotes it did, and one did not flutter the dovecotes with impunity, at least so far as the St. James Gazette was concerned. Machen no longer appeared in its august pages. This may or may not have caused Machen concern. He was also doing stories for some of the “society” papers and wrote in this same year The Lost Club, so very similar to Stevenson’s story of the Suicide Club, A Wonderful Woman and others.
The year 1890 happens to be a year of some significance generally, for it opens the decade of the delicate decadents, sometimes known as the Yellow Book Boys.
Among the many books that have been written about the Eighteen Nineties is a small and, on the whole, less pretentious volume than most. This is Bernard Muddiman’s Men of the Nineties. In it one finds this brief mention of Machen: “Arthur Machen, in those days, belonged to the short story writers with Hubert Crackanthorpe, who was the great imaginative prose writer of the group.”
Alas, poor Hubert! Who knows him today as a great imaginative prose writer? Who, for that matter, knows poor Hubert at all, save for those who may look into the bound volumes of the Yellow Book to be found occasionally in the Public Library (under the somewhat bewildering though accurate classification of “Magazines”)?
The 1890’s was perhaps the most widely and well publicized decade in history, surpassing, in this respect at least, the ’Twenties of our own century. The 1890’s spawned geniuses where the 1920’s only discovered genius. The analogy between these decades can be carried to even greater lengths and indeed it will be, in a later chapter, for the ’Twenties also rediscovered Arthur Machen.
But for all poor Muddiman’s eulogy of Hubert in his slender volume eulogizing the men of the Nineties, the late Mr. Crackanthorpe was not the great imaginative prose writer of the group. Nor was the prolific Henry Harland, whose contributions to the Yellow Book were in the New Style—with French phrases popping up half a dozen to the page and French women putting in appearance among the good English spinneys, and representative members of the New Woman being forthright and outspoken for all their “flutter of curls at the brow” and garden hats and “merry peals of laughter.” Mr. Harland sprinkled his prose with French phrases, giving them a naughty air (just as, in the Twenties, French phrases were used to give novels a sophisticated air) and his heroes were made “interesting” rather than solid or adventurous or empire building. They, the “interesting” chaps, thought of women as “handsome” or “good-looking” rather than beautiful or lovely. Such words were reserved for inanimate things—things animal, vegetable or mineral, but never the feminine. They further thought of women in terms of “what a woman she is!” Like that, with an air of invincible surprise. No, it was not Hubert, nor yet Henry, who was the great imaginative prose writer of the group—it was Arthur Machen. But then Muddiman may have been right after all, for Machen was not truly of the group of writers who practiced the purple phrase, who wrote in pastels and who composed pastiches in praise of practically nothing.
It may come as something of a surprise to many admirers of Machen to know that he was a contemporary of the Yellow Book crowd. Perhaps it will come as something of a relief to know that Machen was not a member of the group, despite the fact that his first book of stories appeared in this period, issuing from the Bodley Head with a title page by Beardsley. Machen never wrote for the Yellow Book. But for that matter, neither did Wilde. Still, yellow bookery was rampant at the time and since it is sometimes said that a man is the product of his age, it might be well to skirt along the well travelled path trod by the delicate decadents, their critics and appraisers and appreciators.