Re: Vampyres
Re: Vampyres is an article written by Barbara Roden published in the A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (Vol. 4, 1993).
This analytical essay explores Conan Doyle's treatment of vampirism, arguing that his stories favour the concept of the "psychic vampire" rather than the traditional blood-drinking fiend, and tracing parallels with Le Fanu, Stoker, Machen, and later writers. Through close readings of John Barrington Cowles, The Parasite, The Sussex Vampire, and other tales, it situates Conan Doyle's work within the wider evolution of Gothic and supernatural fiction.
Re: Vampyres
D. H. Friston, better-known for his illustrations in Beeton's Christmas Annual, 1887, also provided this atmospheric illustration for J. Sheridan LeFanu's classic tale of vampirism, 'Carmilla', when it appeared in The Dark Blue in 1871-2.
- There lay the Count, but looking as if his youth had been half- renewed, for the white hair and moustache were changed to dark iron-grey; the cheeks were fuller, and the white skin seemed ruby-red underneath; the mouth was redder than ever, for on the lips were gouts of fresh blood, which trickled from the corners of the mouth and ran over the chin and neck. Even the deep, burning eyes seemed set amongst swollen flesh, for the lids and pouches underneath were bloated. It seemed as if the whole awful creature were simply gorged with blood; he lay like a filthy leech, exhausted with his repletion.
This traditional presentation of the vampire legend is, of course, from Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula. Countless short stories, novels, films and television adaptions have made this interpretation familiar to generations of readers and viewers. The creator of the world's first consulting detective wrote vampire stories of his own: but those who search through Conan Doyle's works looking for human leeches will search in vain. For there is little doubt that the popular and familiar image of the vampire is of a blood-sucking fiend who literally drains the life from his victims' veins during the hours of darkness, seeking the refuge of a coffin during daylight.
This was certainly the image of the vampire which became popular in early Victorian literature: or perhaps I should say early Victorian fiction, as it would be difficult to class such crude melodrama as 1845's Varney the Vampyre; or, The Feast of Blood under the heading 'literature.' J. Sheridan Le Fanu's 1870 tale 'Carmilla' is a vastly more elegant contribution to the genre, yet even he cannot resist the more gruesome trappings of the vampire tale: at the end of the story we find the evil Countess Mircalla resting in '[a] leaden coffin floated with blood, in which to a depth of seven inches, the body lay immersed.'
Yet towards the end of the Victorian age, a new, more insidious specimen of vampire began to emerge: the psychic vampire. These are creatures who do not resort to such crudities as sucking blood or turning into bats. They do not shun the daylight or sleep in coffins: instead, they appropriate the life forces of their victims by draining them of energy, willpower, and, in some cases, the will to live. While the traditional vampire tale continued to flourish, other writers began to develop the theme of psychic vampirism. Some of these vampires are unconscious of their effect on others, as in Algernon Blackwood's 1912 tale 'The Transfer':
- For this Mr Frene was a man who drooped alone, but grew vital in a crowd - because he used their vitality... He vampired, unknowingly no doubt, every one with whom he came into contact; left them exhausted, tired, listless. Others fed him, so that while in a full room he shone, alone by himself and with no life to draw upon he languished and declined. In the man's immediate neighbourhood you felt his presence draining you; he took your ideas, your strength, your very words, and later used them for his own benefit and aggrandise- ment. Not evilly, of course; the man was good enough; but you felt that he was dangerous owing to the facile way he absorbed into himself all loose vitality that was to be had. His eyes and voice and presence devitalised you. Life, it seemed, not highly organised enough to resist, must shrink from his too near approach and hide away for fear of being appropriated, for fear, that is, of death.
The majority of psychic vampires, however, are fully conscious of the powers they exert over others, and act malevolently with the full knowledge of the devastation they will cause. The great vampire authority Montague Summers said of these beings, '[They] deliberately tap the life-stream of others and feed their own vitality by preying on others. This borders on witchcraft.'
Conan Doyle's tales of vampirism are of the psychic, rather than the blood-thirsty, type. His first such story was 'John Barrington Cowles', published in 1884. It tells the story of a beautiful young woman, Kate Northcott, who exerts a malevolent influence over prospective husbands. She had been engaged to William Prescott, whose body was found floating in St Margaret's Loch: 'No one could understand it,' says the narrator, 'but of course the verdict brought it in as temporary insanity.'
She subsequently became engaged to Archibald Reeves, and whilst his death is not described in any detail, it undoubtedly followed the delirium described by the narrator, Armitage:
- 'Don't go!' he cried. 'I feel better when you are here. I am safe from her then.'
- 'From her!' I said. 'From whom?'
- 'Her! Her!' he answered peevishly. 'Ah! you don't know her. She is the devil! Beautiful - beautiful; but the devil!'
- 'You are feverish and excited,' I said. Try and get a little sleep. You will wake better.'
- 'Sleep!' he groaned. 'How am I to sleep when I see her sitting down yonder at the foot of the bed with her great eyes watching and watching hour after hour? I tell you it saps all the strength and manhood out of me. That's what makes me drink. God help me - I'm half drunk now!'
John Barrington Cowles becomes her next fiancé'. He, like the others, is summoned to a late night meeting with Kate Northcott; and, like the others, he sees a good reason for breaking off the engagement after the interview. Armitage is shocked by his friend's appearance on his return home:
- 'Cheer up! Don't get down on your luck. How was it? What was it all about?"
- 'About?' he groaned, covering his face with his hands. If I did tell you, Bob, you would not believe it. It is too dreadful too horrible - unutterably awful and incredible! Oh, Kate, Kate!' and he rocked himself to and fro in his grief: 'I pictured you an angel and I find you a-'
- 'A what?' I asked, for he had paused.
- He looked at me with a vacant stare, and then suddenly burst out waving his arms: 'A fiend!' he cried. A ghoul from the pit! A vampire soul behind a lovely face!"
We are never told what it is that Kate discloses to her prospective husbands, but the idea of Kate Northcott and her midnight interviews may well have been in Arthur Machen's mind ten years later when he wrote one of his earliest and best supernatural tales, 'The Great God Pan. The 1894 story features a beautiful and mysterious young woman who continually changes her name: Helen Vaughan, Miss Raymond, Helen Herbert, Mrs Beaumont. Her great beauty attracts all who see her, and yet there is a repulsive quality about her, too. As the beautiful Mrs Beaumont she becomes a favourite of Society, attracting many wealthy men to her entertainments. Within weeks, however, four men who have been paying court to her are found dead in mysterious circumstances which suggest suicide. No light can be thrown on their deaths: but a fifth man, Crashaw, was seen coming out of Mrs. Beaumont's house at 2:00 in the morning, only hours before he, too, committed suicide:
- 'I looked into his face for a moment, and then I will confess the truth - I set off at a good run, and kept it up till I was within my own door.'
- 'Why?'
- 'Why? Because it made my blood run cold to see that man's face... I knew I had looked into the eyes of a lost soul, Austin, the man's outward form remained, but all hell was within it. Furious lust, and hate that was like fire, and the loss of all hope and horror that seemed to shriek aloud to the night, though his teeth were shut; and the utter blackness of despair. I am sure he did not see me; he saw nothing that you or I can see, but he saw what I hope we never shall. I do not know when he died; I suppose in an hour, or perhaps two, but when I passed down Ashley Street and heard the closing door, that man no longer belonged to this world; it was a devil's face I looked upon.'
Perhaps Machen decided to elaborate on Conan Doyle's reticence: certainly 'The Great God Pan' outraged the more prudish critics of the day in a way that ACD's story would not. His own account of one of the late night encounters with Kate is much more subdued than Machen's:
- [Prescott] came to Abercrombie Place one night, and stayed very late. No one knows exactly when he left, but about one in the morning a fellow who knew him met him walking rapidly in the direction of the Queen's Park. He bade him good night, but Prescott hurried on without heeding him, and that was the last time he was ever seen alive.
If Machen did borrow ideas from 'John Barrington Cowles', then Conan Doyle can lay claim to having influenced one of the most effective supernatural works of recent years: Peter Straub's 1979 novel Ghost Story. Straub drew scenes and characters in the novel from the works of several masters of the genre, and Ghost Story's central character is a mysterious and beautiful woman who is, Straub admits, definitely based on Machen's femme fatale in 'The Great God Pan.'
It is not only men who are affected by the force of Kate Northcott's personality, however. Her companion and aunt, Mrs Merton, seems to Armitage to be drained of life:
- She was a very strange-looking old lady. What attracted attention most in her appearance was the utter want of colour which she exhibited. Her hair was snow-white, and her face extremely pale. Her lips were bloodless, and even her eyes were such a light tinge of blue that they hardly relieved the general pallor.
The obvious inference would be that Kate is literally draining Mrs Merton of blood, or at least of her life force. She certainly exerts a strong influence on the older woman, who lives in fear of Kate and is uneasy when Armitage attempts to engage her in conversation:
- [Mrs Merton] suddenly bent forward to me, with a look of intense earnestness upon her face, and said:
- 'Don't talk to me anymore, please. She does not like it, and 1 shall suffer for it afterward. Please don't do it.'
One of the most striking scenes in the story occurs when Kate, Cowles and Armitage pay a visit to a mesmerist. The hypnotist endeavours to put Cowles into a trance, but is overcome by Kate's willpower and forced to leave the stage.
Despite the fact that Cowles and Armitage leave Edinburgh to escape Kate's proximity, distance is no safeguard: she is able to project herself into the mind of Cowles, who falls to his death in pursuit of her imaginary figure. A strange, wild screech was heard from the abyss into which he fell, and the fishermen averred that it was the sound of woman's laughter.
The influence which Kate Northcott has over Miss Merton is typical of the hold that vampires have on their victims. This power is seen in Conan Doyle's 1887 story 'Uncle Jeremy's Household', in which the beautiful and mysterious half-Indian governess Miss Warrender exerts a strange influence over the secretary, Copperthorne, and the narrator, Lawrence. The idea that ACD is setting her up as a vampire is reinforced in a scene early in the tale, in which the cook and housemaid are frightened in the night by a strange figure hovering over the cook's bed. The figure glides off when the woman screams, and the episode has strong echoes of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's vampire poem 'Christabel' and Le Fanu's 'Carmilla.' It is almost a disappointment at the end to find that Miss Warrender is not, after all, a vampire: she is a Thuggee, who is already responsible for two deaths and was presumably assessing the cook as a potential victim.
Yet there is another vampiric character in the story: the secretary, Copperthorne. He exerts a powerful influence of his own over the governess, who hates and fears him even as she does his every bidding.
- I have seen him glance at her with a look so commanding, and, as it seemed to me, so menacing, that next moment I could hardly believe that his white impassive face could be capable of so intense an expression. When he looked at her in this manner she would wince and quiver as though she had been in physical pain. 'Decidedly,' I thought, 'it is fear and not love which produces such effects."
One day Lawrence sees the pair in the garden, and comments:
- 'With his tall, gaunt figure towering above her, and the spasmodic motions of his long arms, he might have been some great bat fluttering over a victim. I remember that that was the simile which rose in my mind at the time, heightened perhaps by the suggestion of shrinking and of fear which seemed to me to lie in every curve of her beautiful figure.'
On one occasion Lawrence is conversing with Miss Warrender, who suddenly goes rigid and stares at the window behind him:
- I looked round, and there peering stealthily round the corner at us was the face of the amanuensis. I confess that I was startled myself at the sight, for, with its corpse-like pallor, the head might have been one which had been severed from his shoulders. He threw open the sash when he saw that he was observed.
- 'I'm sorry to interrupt you,' he said, looking in, 'but don't you think, Miss Warrender, that it is a pity to be boxed up on such a fine day in a close room? Won't you come out and take a stroll?'
- Though his words were courteous they were uttered in a harsh and almost menacing voice, so as to sound more like a command than a request. The governess rose, and without protest or remark glided away to put on her bonnet. It was another example of Copperthorne's authority over her. As he looked in at me through the open window a mocking smile played about his thin lips, as though he would have liked to have taunted me with this display of his power. With the sun shining in behind him he might have been a demon in a halo.
The reader soon discovers that the secretary knows Miss Warrender's guilty secret, and is blackmailing her. He toys with her malevolently and preys upon her, wearing down her resistance until she agrees to kill Uncle Jeremy, who has left Copperthorne all his money. That Miss Warrender escapes at the end of the tale, while Copperthorne is hoist by his own petard, is an early example of the justice which Sherlock Holmes was to mete out several times in his career.
It is, in fact, in one of the Holmes tales that we find our next example of vampirism. 1893's 'The Cardboard Box' shows the power and evil influence that Sarah Cushing has over her sister Mary and Mary's husband, Jim Browner. Sarah is herself in love with Jim, but grows to hate him when he rejects her love. 'Sarah Cushing loved me,' says Browner, until all her love turned to poisonous hate when she knew that I thought more of my wife's footmark in the mud than I did of her whole body and soul.'
From that moment on Sarah makes Jim and Mary's life a misery. The couple have been happy together, but that changes as Sarah begins to exert an evil influence over her sister, plotting and scheming and poisoning her mind against Jim. Mary appears to be completely under her spell, unable to break free and resume normal relations with her husband. Finally Jim orders Sarah to leave their house, but she takes up residence only two streets away, and continues to influence her sister. The story ends tragically with Jim killing his wife and her lover, then sending their ears to Sarah as a sign of what her meddling has brought about.
The vampiric influence that Sarah has over Mary is developed by Conan Doyle in his 1894 novella 'The Parasite. It is interesting to note that the story is written in the form of a diary, the same format that Bram Stoker was to use in Dracula three years later. Conan Doyle was acquainted with Stoker, who was secretary and touring manager to Sir Henry Irving, and we may speculate that Stoker admired Conan Doyle's style sufficiently to borrow the idea for his own work.
'The Parasite' tells of the mesmeric hold which the evil Miss Penelosa has over the narrator, Professor Gilroy. For once, the vampiric figure is not a beautiful young woman: Miss Penelosa is more than forty years of age, small and frail, with a crippled leg and an unpleasant pair of grey-green eyes. The novella is essentially a dramatic and effective re-working of the mesmerism scene in 'John Barrington Cowles', and Conan Doyle uses the device of mind control to far greater effect in the later work. Mesmerism was a concept that was obviously of great interest to him, to such an extent that he felt the need to go back to his earlier story and re-work a theme of which he had made insufficient use.
The action of "The Parasite' takes place over a period of six weeks, during which time the Professor falls more and more under the power of Miss Penelosa, whom he has allowed to mesmerise him several times. The sessions go well at first, and the Professor is fascinated, but he receives a warning from an acquaintance, Sadler, who advises Gilroy to have nothing further to do with Miss Penelosa. Gilroy disregards the warning, but soon finds that Miss Penelosa has formed an attachment to him, and will not be dissuaded by the fact that he is engaged. He tries to break away from her then, but her influence over him is so great that he no longer has a will of his own, and must do whatever Miss Penelosa commands:
- Again, tonight, I awoke from the mesmeric trance to find my hand in hers, and to suffer that odious feeling which urges me to throw away my honour, my career, everything, for the sake of this creature who, as I can plainly see when I am away from her influence, possesses no single charm upon earth. But when I am near her, I do not feel this. She rouses something in me, something evil, some thing I had rather not think of. She paralyses my better nature, too, at the moment when she stimulates my worst.
Gilroy turns to Sadler, who indicates that he himself suffered from the attentions of Miss Gilroy, but managed to tear himself away. There is no such recourse for Gilroy, however, who is in too deep. He summons the will-power to tell Miss Penelosa of his hatred and loathing of her, and admits that while he cannot prevent himself from doing her bidding, he has at least told her how he feels. From this moment Miss Penelosa does her best to ruin Gilroy, causing him to lose his position at the University and almost having him incriminated for a bank robbery. The climax comes when Gilroy finds himself sitting in his fiancée's waiting room, clutching a bottle of sulphuric acid at 3:30 in the afternoon. He realises that Miss Penelosa has once more been exerting her influence over him, this time in an attempt to force him to disfigure his beloved. Determined to put an end to her control over him, Gilroy goes to her house, intending to kill her. When he arrives, however, he is told that Miss Penelosa has died at precisely 3:30. This accords with the traditional legend that the vampire's victims are freed when the vampire dies.
It was thirty years before Conan Doyle took up the theme of vampirism again, this time in another Holmes story. "The Sussex Vampire' begins with a look at the great detective's attitude towards vampires:
- 'Listen to this, Watson. Vampires in Hungary. And again, Vampires in Transylvania. He turned over the pages with eagerness, but after a short intent perusal he threw down the great book with a snarl of disappointment.
- 'Rubbish, Watson, rubbish! What have we to do with walking corpses who can only be held in their grave by stakes driven through their hearts? It's pure lunacy."
Fortunately for Holmes's temper, the pair do not encounter any walking corpses when they are called to Lamberley in Sussex. What appears, on the surface, to be a classic case of blood-sucking vampirism turns out to be something else entirely. As in 'Uncle Jeremy's Household', a woman is set up as the vampire: Mrs Ferguson has been seen sucking blood from the neck of her child, which would seem to condemn her. As in the earlier tale, however, it is really a man, or in this case a young boy, who is the true vampire, albeit a psychic one. Mrs Ferguson has been sucking poison, not blood, from the wound of her baby: it is young Jacky who has been preying vampirically on his brother, attempting to appropriate the baby's life force to himself. If the child dies, and the step-mother is blamed, then Jacky will once again be the sole recipient of his father's love and attention.
'The Sussex Vampire' was published in The Strand in January of 1924. But why vampires in 1924, thirty years after ACD had last tackled the theme? The answer might lie in a film that was released in 1922, only a year before he wrote "The Sussex Vampire'. The film was F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu: the word, as any student of vampire lore knows, means 'undead'. The film was loosely based on Stoker's Dracula, although the names of the characters were changed to avoid charges of copyright infringement. It was the first attempt made to film Stoker's novel, and proved to be a highly influential movie. Perhaps it was in Conan Doyle's mind, and prompted him to attempt another variation on the theme with which he had first experimented in 1884.
One more 'vampire' in the Sherlockian canon should be mentioned: Isadora Klein, the villainess of 1926's 'The Three Gables'. Isadora uses men, picking them up and toying with them until she is tired, at which point she casts them aside and looks around for fresh blood, as it were. Douglas Maberley was one of her conquests, and Isadora turned him, as his mother puts it, from a debonair and splendid man to a moody, morose, brooding creature. In a single month,' she tells Holmes, 'I seemed to see my gallant boy turn into a worn-out cynical man.' 'A love affair — a woman?' asks Holmes. 'Or a fiend,' replies his mother. Holmes refers to Isadora as 'the belle dame sans merci of fiction', while Maberley, in the fragment of autobiographical novel which the burglars leave behind, calls her a 'heartless fiend.' She did not kill him directly; but by draining him of his vitality and energy she left him prey to the pneumonia which did kill him. She is also, in many ways, a reflection of the 'vamp' character, personified by actress Theda Bara, who was a popular feature in films of the 1920's.
I have mentioned Le Fanu's 'Carmilla' and Stoker's Dracula, two cornerstones in the field of vampire literature. It is interesting to note the connections which Conan Doyle had with these authors and their works. Le Fanu's gothic novel Uncle Silas seems to have been used by ACD as the basis for his early novel The Firm of Girdlestone, although there are those who argue that Conan Doyle improved on Le Fanu's original. The artist who illustrated 'Carmilla' on its first appearance was one D. H. Friston, who, in the pages of Beeton's Christmas Annual 1887, gave readers their first picture of a detective named Sherlock Holmes. Stoker and Conan Doyle were acquaintances, and the Dracula author interviewed Sir Arthur in 1907. It would be interesting to know if their off-the-record conversation touched on vampires.
It would be a rash person who would argue that Conan Doyle's works of vampire fiction are equal to those of Le Fanu or Stoker. Yet it is difficult, if not impossible, to compare the two types of stories. ACD's tales are less concerned with the bloodthirsty, night-haunting creatures of the dark then with the dark side of the human psyche, and they explore the actions and thoughts of people who are only too human. The supernatural elements of Dracula make for thrilling reading, but the fierce little human tragedy of Jim and Mary Browner is more moving, and infinitely closer to home. We know that 'walking corpses' do not figure in our daily lives: but people such as Mr Copperthorne, Kate Northcott and Sarah Cushing do. And while traditional vampires can easily be spotted and defeated, psychic vampires live and move amongst us freely every day, unseen and unsuspected: a far more insidious threat than Count Dracula and all his dark brood.
(This article is based on a paper written by Barbara and Christopher Roden, which was presented at a meeting of The Stormy Petrels of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, on 1 December, 1992).
- Article courtesy Christopher Roden, founder of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (1989-2003).
