H.P. Lovecraft. Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family
Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written 1920
Published March 1921 in The Wolverine, No. 9, p. 3-11.
I
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, Observation 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 can not 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
showed 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 showed 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 shown 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 misalliance had begun. After the close of the American war he
was heard of as 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 gray 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 an 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 the usual force, hurting both the
body and the 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 showing 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 Kahn 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 gray 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 these beings. Just what the white apelike 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
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 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 a 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 tales 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 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 corespondent, 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 showed 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 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.