Page:Arthur Machen, Weaver of Fantasy.djvu/86

Rh countably, regrets. The reader in the publisher’s office had been wonderfully encouraging and gloriously flattering. It was better, said Heinemann exctedly, than Stevenson's best. Even a man as modest as Machen marveled at his artistry—and marveled still more when, early in 1895, the House of Heinemann returned his manuscript with the usual regrets and the usual phrase about being unable to use the enclosed manuscript.

And so, later that year, Th Three Impostors was issued by John Lane, once again in the Keynote Series and once again with the title page decoation by Beardsley. It failed, Machen says, to set Fleet Street afire—but it is, of course, one of his best stories.

Once again, as with so many of Machen's stories, there were those who wrote to inquire whether there was not some foundation of fact, some basis of truth upon which the tale had been built. So willing are men to suspend their disbelief! People were forever asking him if his stories were not based upon some legend current in his part of the country and, of course, there were those who were willing to relate incidents and occurrences which closely paralleled the fantastic fictions of Machen’s inventions.

The Three Impostors combined a number of popular elements. There was, first of all, a portrait of America, or the American West, as rugged and rough and uncouth as any Briton could desire. It rivaled and even surpassed, in some respects, Stevenson’s Western episode in The Dynamiter. The Stevenson story had also served as a model for the Mormon episode in Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet. The resemblances here are even more marked than in