'The Three Impostors' by Arthur Machen ( Novel of the White Powder)

 Where were we with the Three Impostors?

Does it spoil the fictive aspect of the novel to know that all the stories told by the Three are pure fabrications purely designed to fool up their hapless auditors.  Dyson drawn into the world of yet another brother of Miss Leicester/ aka Leddy,  a victim of the white powder, at last suspects that he has  been wound up like a seven day clock.  Of course it just adds another layer of disbelief to the mix and embedded in their fictions is truth which we are told must come out.

Machen says somewhere near the end of the book that it is concocted out of unlikelihood and coincidence but such is the mystery of London that nothing is more improbable than what happens.  Anyway he may be exaggerating because there are connections within the novel.  Russell the egregious struggler who lives on bread and tea is a friend both of Dyson and ‘the man with the spectacles and the furtive scanning’.   Even in an impersonal city like London there are villages of artistic communities that know of each other, that meet and mingle.  All associates and the associates of associates are potential leads to the whereabouts of the hunted.   So it proves.

The gold Tiberius creates its own system of gravity.  For now  the sauntering duo, Phillipps and Dyson, who will exit the house down the drive will not cross the path of the killers who have escaped out the back.  However they have met the emissaries of Doctor Lipsius and if they report the grisly find in the abandoned manor would be wise to do so by way of anonymous tip-off.

'The Three Impostors' (novel of the Black Seal as told by Miss Lally)

 Must I remind you that it was the piquant Miss Lally that is leaving the house in the prologue with a dripping parcel?  And what that parcel contains? Her larky manner should not blind you to her thoughtful consideration of a suitable addition to the Doctor’s cabinet of horrors.  What unconscious confessions will the ‘Novel of the Black Seal’ contain?

The format of the tale follows that told by ‘Wilkins’.  Poverty stricken in London about to expire meets a benefactor and employed by him goes on a journey leading to strange and terrifying events.  In a sense this is like those elaborate phone cons run by groups of thieves.  There is a script.  They follow it closely hewing to the fears and hopes of the ‘mark’.

Why are they doing it?  Wilkins tells that when he came back from America his fortunes changed utterly.  He now was welcomed everywhere and his bona fides were accepted without question.  We may conjecture that certain forces emanating from the dark side were looking after their acolyte.  

How did Miss Lally find Phillipps in Leicester Square?  The  rational sceptic is putty in her hands.  I see the coin is like a tracking device.  It brings earnest seekers to it to continue the slaughter that it commemorates.  The Three Impostors will themselves be confounded should they get hold of it.

Miss Lally is not a good girl.

'The Three Impostors' by Arthur Machen (pub. 1895)

 There are books which you will have only read for the first time when you reread them.

You have been introduced to the impostors in the prologue which in reality is more like an epilogue to this palindromic storey.  Don’t be fooled by their insouciance, their lightness.  These are killers, after their prey whom they feel has stolen the gold Tiberius, a coin the only remaining of an issue struck to commemorate a great slaughter and thus imbued with a unique malignity.  Though gold it is magnetised with great evil and thus apposite for the aims of the doctor who had set the hounds of hell after the young man with spectacles, whose hand, right hand is in a dripping parcel.  “It comes from (the oozing) the right hand that took the gold Tiberius.”  The Doctor will appreciate this grisly token for his museum.

Bear in mind that this coin draws its seekers and its finders into a reticulation.  They must meet each unaware of the power that draws them together.

Dyson meets Wilkins:

The lies flow smoothly, glibly and with a malicious pleasure in their inner coherence.  One might say that Dyson’’s epistemic fidelity was flawless.  A liar sees only lies but might there be an occasional islet of truth in the sea of lies?

Who is Smith?  Is he the Doctor muffled in fable?  What was Smith’s mission in the Far West of the States?  It seems to draw the hostility of the natives.  “For every pound of gold upon the scales, a life.”  This sounds like an occult Murder Inc.  Who is availing of this service?

Remember that the prologue is more of an epilogue.  The young man with the spectacles has been found and despatched with extreme prejudice quite as awful as was done in the States.  That would refer to the story told by Mr. Wilkins.  Note that Phillipps and Dyson are approaching the house where the torture has taken place as the Three Impostors have just left.  They are likely to encounter them as they go on their way and thereby the spell of the gold Tiberius will be consummated.

Now read on:

'The Three Imposters' by Arthur Machen

    First of all you will have to pay attention to the prologue.  Do not regard as a long winded introduction to the main story.  It holds the key and introduces you to the imposters and their aliases.  You are  therefore primed to disbelieve everything they may say and enjoy the irony of their fabrications while seeking to discover why they go to such lengths to tell Dyson and Phillipps egregious rigmaroles.  That reason you will never discover  because it is opaque to the profane.  In this realm causality operates on another level not the normal billiard ball one which is a matter of transmission of gross force on the material plane. The imposters lie out of sheer jouissance in the activity.  To impose and rook the stranger is a goal in itself.  Its what they do and they are good at it.  But why do Dyson and Phillipps meet them to be the objects of their imposture? My intuition is that the gold Tiberius, that coin a lone survivor of coinage struck as the celebration of infamy is accursed and has brought destruction on its possessors down through the centuries, generally hidden from sight and fought for when it occasionally turns up. It has therefore become karmically magnetized and though the Three Imposters do not know that Dyson has the coin their will to evil draws them into his company and to Phillipps’s who also knows about the coin.  

The action of the energies evoked by the coin are an example of what Hindu ritualists call ‘apurva’. Why, they asked, do rituals which must fructify appear to act with a non-linear causality? Are there subtle seeds which act to  create a catenary of action or must we accept that this action is apurva or unprecedented, uncanny if you will?  Shankaracarya the great teacher demurs.  It is the will of God that makes everything happen.  

The evil will and the vile energies that surround the coin make me fear for the future of Dyson and Phillips or whoever chances to bring it into the light of day.  The novel is a masterpiece of irony and palindromic fabulism.

Phillipps is most certainly wrong:

"I certainly think," replied Phillipps, "that, if you pull out that coin and flourish it under people's noses as you are doing at the present moment, you will very probably find yourself in touch with the criminal, or a criminal. You will undoubtedly be robbed with violence. Otherwise, I see no reason why either of us should be troubled. No one saw you secure the coin, and no one knows you have it. I, for my part, shall sleep peacefully, and go about my business with a sense of security and a firm dependence on the natural order of things. The events of the evening, the adventure in the street, have been odd, I grant you, but I resolutely decline to have any more to do with the matter, and, if necessary, I shall consult the police. I will not be enslaved by a gold Tiberius, even though it swims into my ken in a manner which is somewhat melodramatic."