created Wednesday, 2025 December 31
original at cybertiggyr.com/ve3wm1f.html
“The White People” is a short story by Arthur Machen.
I read it.
Here are some notes about it.
Arthur Machen wrote the story in the 1890s, though it was not published until 1904.
Arthur Machen died in 1947. According to Wikipedia's page about copyright in the USA, all works (except sound) published before 1930 are in the public domain (as of 2025). Therefore, “The White People” is in the public domain.
I read the version that's part of the book “The House of Souls” by Arthur Machen & which is document #25016 at Project Gutenberg.
There's an outer story in which 2 men discuss sin & sinners. One of the men gives the other a diary written by a teen-aged girl he knew.
The diary lists events that happened to its writer which include...
...Many stories told to the diary's writer by her nurse.
Ambrose & Cotgrave are two men in the outer story. To me, they sound young enough to have yet to realize they are not exceptional, but near the end, Ambrose mentions that he was an associate of the father of the diary writer, which suggests he was possibly as old as that father, maybe as many as 15 years younger. At the time of their conversation, I guess Ambrose & Cotgrave could be as young as 30 or as old as 50.
The Journaler wrote the diary. At one point in the diary, she mentions an event that occurred 8 years ago, when she was 8 years old. Therefore, the Journaler was 16 years old when she wrote the diary.
Nurse is the Journaler's nurse, which we might also call a nanny. We never learn her name. Much of the text in the diary tells us stories that Nurse told to the Journaler. Nurse is a profesion, but it's also the term the Journaler uses to identify the person, & we don't have a name or another term with which to refer to the person.
The Journaler's Father whose name we never learn.
There are multiple characters within Nanny's stories as well as some other characters the Journaler encountered directly.
For the reader's benefit, Cotgrave refers to the Journaler's diary as The Green Book. The book itself may have been created “some seventy or eighty years” before Ambrose lent it to Cotgrave to read.
These are events that happened to the Journaler. Most are from her diary, though we learned the final one from Ambrose in the outer story.
We don't know actual years, so this timeline is expressed in terms of the Journaler's age as well as relative to when the Journaler wrote in her diary.
| age | rel. to writing | what |
|---|---|---|
| cradle age | ??? | little white faces would look into Journaler's cradle & talk to her |
| 3 or 4 | -13..-12 years | Journaler would talk to herself in languages that others did not recognize much less understand. When writing about it later, Journaler says it was the Xu language. |
| 5 | -12 years | Nurse takes Journaler on a walk through field of yellow corn, to a pond. Sets Journaler down away from the pond. A man joins them; Nurse says Journaler won't be able to get to the pond. When Nurse & man aren't looking, little ivory-coloured people exit the pond to dance & sing around Journaler. The ivory-coloured people include a woman with kind dark eyes & long dark hair. Journaler thought Nurse & the long-haired ivory woman resemble each other. Later, Journaler tells Nurse who appears horrified. Nurse makes Journaler promise to tell no one lest she be thrown into a pit. |
| 5 or 6 | -12..-11 years | overhears Nurse & mother talk about how Journaler talked to herself 2 years before. See previous event. |
| 8 | -8 years | Nurse & the Journaler walk by the location of the “Dancing fairies” story & shows how to create a clay doll as done in that story. Journaler promised never to tell lest she be thrown into a pit with dead people. They hid the doll in some bushes. |
| few days later | -8 years | Nurse & the Journaler return to the doll & pay their respects. |
| ?? | (before Nurse left?) | Journaler asks father if Nurse's stories are true. Father chews-out Nurse. |
| 11 | 2 years before White Day | Nurse “went away” |
| 12 | Journaler's mother dies | |
| 13 or 14 | -2..-1 years | “White Day” in which Journaler goes on a walk so long that I have difficulty imagining it fit into a single afternoon. fixme: Detail this? If so, in its own section? |
| 16 | days before? | Journaler finds the book. It was in a bureau that contained mostly dresses. Were they the old dresses of the Journaler's deceased mother? If so, did the book belong to her mother? |
| 15..16 | Journaler spends many days & nights debating before deciding to try the magic. She does not call it magic or tell us exactly what she decided to do; magic is a guess. | |
| 16 | Journaler creates a new clay doll & visits many of the locations from White Day. (This may have been multiple events over multiple days.) | |
| 16 | Journaler visits the secret place again & realizes who the ivory lady was, the one from the pond. That realization allowed her to realize a lot of other things, including the truth in Nurse's secrets. | |
| 16 | Journaler resolves to call the nymphs. She returns to the pond to do so. The dark nymph, Alanna, arrives & turns the pond into a pool of fire. | |
| 17 | 1 year later | Journaler found dead near the stone image in a bush. Was it near the pond? |
Nurse told many stories to the Journaler. We'd call them fairy tales or unsettling bed-time stories. I won't quote them here. I'll write just the bullet-points.
fixme: Did Nurse tell the story to the Journaler while panicking or have a fit?
A young man was hunting. At dusk, he had killed nothing. He saw a white stag. He jumped off his horse & chased to stag alone. He wanted to catch the stag, not kill it.
Eventually, he was lost, didn't know where he was. He pursued the stag through the night until the sun rose again.
The stag went into a valley & slowed. Both the stag & the man were exhausted. The man put his hand on the stag, & it vanished. The man entered a doorway in the hill & saw a lady by a fountain. She became his wife. They were together for a day + a night.
The man awoke & knew it had not been a dream. For the rest of his life, he was not interested in other women. He wanted to rejoin his wife.
Did Nurse tell this? Seems she told something like this, but the Journaler's description is vague.
Nurse's great-grandmother told about a hill where people used to meet at night & play all sorts of games. Nobody remembers wehre the hill is.
In the summer, people went to the hill on hot days or nights, I'm not sure which. They would travel there via secret path. They'd dance. Theyu've give a curious sign (which Nurse said she would show to the Journaler later). They'd burn something that smelled strong & sweet & made them all laugh.
The revelers would make a noise like thunder, & people far off would hear thunder.
They'd sing a song. Nurse sang it for the Journaler, & it was strange that made the Journaler's flesh crawl.
They drank special wine & ate special bread. Sometimes, a reveler would vanish & never be seen again, & the others would wonder what had happened to them. (It wounds like they may have wondered but nobody worried much.)
They made images (dolls?) & worshipped them.
(In the days of princes & princesses?), there were 5 men who wanted to marry a lady. She made 5 wax dolls in their images. Over the course of 4 nights (maybe longer), on each night, she did something with one of the dolls, & one of the men was found dead in the same way the next day. (Hanging, drowning, stuff like that.) One of the men had infiltrated her household as a servant & had watched her. He reported it before she used a doll to make him dead. The village burned her.
The Journaler relates this story, which she learned from Nurse, after she tells of the clay doll they made, hid in the bushes, & returned to pay their respects.
A person dances & turns around until they are dizzy. Another person asks questions that the dizzy person is compelled to answer. Maybe the other person can also give commands that the dizzy person is compelled to follow.
It's also possible to remove a person's self-awareness (not how the Journaler describes it) & have a kind of zombie.
We don't know for certain when Nurse went away, but it is reasonable to speculate it's after the Journaler asked her father about Nurse's stories. In fact, it's reasonable to speculate that it's shortly after.
Did Nurse actually go away, as in move & find another job? Or did something happen to her? As a very young kid, the Journaler wouldn't know.
It sounds fairly certain that the Journaler's mother died after Nurse went away. Again, it wasn't long after, less than a year after.
If we only consider Nurse's stories, it sounds like she simply has a lot of folklore in her head, but when we consider the clay doll she made with the Journaler & also how the paid their respects, it sounds like she practices witchcraft or some similar religion that's unapproved by the official culture. In other words, Nurse is probably a witch.
In the first part of the wrapper conversation, Ambrose tells Cotgrave about his unusual ideas about sin & sinners. I guess we'd now say they are ides about evil. Ambrose's claims are vague, illustrated by examples mostly, but I gathered that one of them is that the most evil people are evil without realizing it. Without agreeing with the idea, without guessing whether Machen agrees with the idea, I can accept that for the story.
Then the story proceeds to the inner story, the text of the Green Book. Does anything in the Green Book demonstrate Ambrose's claim about sin & sinners?
Nurse's story of the Hollow Pit shows a poor girl who ends up wedded to a spirit (or maybe “the devil” woo woo so scary!) who apparently whisks her off to we'll-never-know-where. We don't know that she's harmed. We don't know that she was taken against her will. Only her rich fiance was harmed, & while heart-break hurts, people get over it. So we don't know that any evil was done, though yes, her supernatural husband would do her & everyone else a favor if he would show that she is well now & went willingly. We don't know that evil was done, much less done by someone who didn't know they were being evil. That story does not illustrate Ambrose's ideas about sin & sinners.
Nurse's story of the Hunter is about a young man pursued a stag & found a bride so wonderful that he lost interest in other romances for the rest of his life. We could say he was heart-broken. We could also say that he was a faithful married partner in an unusual situation. Again, though the man may have experienced the pain of heart-break, there's no assurance that evil was done. So that story does not illustrate Ambrose's dieas about sin & sinners.
Nurse's rambling, plot-less (& I don't mean that as an insult) story of the Dancing villagers seems to show a small society of people who willingly engage in a social event that's important to them, maybe fulfilling to them, & maybe a religious experience for them. The participants are willing. I see no sign of evil. This story does not support Ambrose's ideas about sin & sinners.
In the Nurse's story of the Lady with the wax dolls, we have a woman who uses {magci, witchcraft, voodoo, whatever} to kill 4 people from a distance. This is evil & would be a crime in a society with a legal system that recognizes the technique she used, but the woman appears to know what she's doing. So while the story shows a sinner who is sinning, it doesn't show that the worst sinner is one who doesn't know they are sinning.
The Journaler learns {magic, witchcraft, voodoo, whatever} techniques from Nurse via Nurse's stories & life examples. Later, as a 16-year-old, she uses those techniques to summon nymphs & probably to dance, since, & talk with them. After about a year of that, she must have done something wrong, taken it too far, because she turns up dead. Ambrose says that we don't know what killed her. Maybe the nymps did it. Maybe she cast a spell that backfired. Maybe a person who uses magic too often eventually dies. We aren't told anything, don't even get hints about it. The Journaler didn't harm anyone else, so no sin was done by her unless she intentionally killed herself & you subscribe to the ancient, ill-informed idea that suicide is a sin instead of a tragedy. I settle on the tragedy interpretation of suicide, & we don't know that the Journaler's death was suicide, so again, the story doesn't support Ambrose's idea about sin & sinners even though the Journaler may have been ignorant of the consequences of her choices.
The only other actor of significance in the outer or inner story is Nurse. She teaches the Journaler the {magic, witchcraft, voodoo, whatever} techniques. She may have lost her job due to that, & those techniques probably contributed to the death of the Journaler. It's unlikely that Nurse intended either of those results, so maybe Nurse is the example of Ambrose's ideas that he says is in the Green Book.
The Journaler's early encounters with the white people were on their terms: The came to her in her crib & at the pond. She didn't try to contact them; they contacted her.
Towards the end, she decides to call or summon them. That will change the relationship. We don't know who they are or how they think; they aren't human. Though the calls them the white people, the Journaler describes them as the creamy colour of aged ivory. Near the end of the wrapper story, Ambrose an ancient Roman statue that, instead of being stained dark, had become luminous white. So white is linked with age. Could it be that the ivory-coloured people are very, very old, older than humans? More powerful than humans? Have different morals than humans? How will they react to being summoned? Will they be happy to have a new human friend, or will they be very, very angry that a mere human would “summon” them?
It sounds like the Journaler spends many days & nights deciding whether to call them. Did she realize that doing so would change her relationship with them & that she couldn't predict how they'd react? Is that why she spent so much time debating with herself?
Her diary stops at the beginning of her description of summoning the nymphs. So she must have survived that event to be able to journal it. Then again, her description stops in the middle of a sentence, she never wrote again, & she died a year later.
Mostly, I'm unclear what Ambrose's claims were. Like I said earlier, it seems he was mostly saying that the worst sinner is one who doesn't realize they are sinning. Um, okay. That has me thinking of people such as Joseph McCarthy & others who want to ensure freedom by regulating it away, but I doubt that's what Ambrose or Machen were thinking.
It seems that the death of the Journaler is a tragedy, not a sin & not an evil. It happened because Nurse gave her knowledge in secret. Normally, knowledge has been vetted for safety by visibility to many people whether currently or over time; it's not secret. Because Nurse made her promise to tell noone, & the knowledge wasn't widely known in the first place, the Journaler didn't benefit from the safety of public knowledge.
What's more, to me, it sounds like Nurse had acquired partial, informal knowledge by word-of-mouth from her great-grandmother, grandmother, & probably her mother. It sounds like she was not in contact with knowledgeable witches. She had partial knowledge & probably too little practice.
Finally, once Nurse was gone, the Journaler's ideas about witchcraft (or whatever that knowledge was) were left to her alone. She had no one to help vet her own ideas. So the Journaler was thinking & acting alone.
The horror is that unvetted knowledge was passed along informally & in secret, & then someone was left to act on it alone. The combination led to a tragedy.
Society learned of it only with the discovery of the body, but by then, the tragedy has happened. What's more, the specifics of the knowledge weren't recorded, so society doesn't know exactly what knowledge led to what action that led to a death, so society can't create a preventive measure for the future.